Love in Venice

Seen in 2017. I wonder if that particular craze has passed.

Quote of the Day

”These are stochastic-parrot clever-hans software tools, potentially very useful when properly harnessed, but a source of madness to people who fall into the same trap that the gullible fell into when interacting with Weizenbaum’s ELIZA back in the day.”

• Brad DeLong on LLMs.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Concerto For Two Pianos, K. 365; 3rd Movement.

Link

Long Read of the Day

The dangerous myths behind AI agent hacks

These are not simply cyber security flaws but problems with the way that models are trained

Salutary sense from Yoshua Bengio in the Financial Times (Gift article).

Weak cyber defences, including the humans involved, are part of the problem and will never be perfect. But unless we address the root causes of the hacks, they are likely to grow in number and severity as AI capabilities advance.

At the core of all of these incidents is misalignment. AI agents are choosing goals that are misaligned with those of humans, and it is a consequence of their training.

The methodology that today’s leading companies use to train their frontier models is called reinforcement learning. RL trains models to pursue objectives: they get rewards when they succeed and these behaviours are reinforced. It has historically enabled the training of very efficient goal-seeking AIs. But it is also what plausibly leads to unwanted behaviours such as cheating, deception and self-preservation — often violating the moral rules that companies attempt to encode in AI models.

Scientific literature has long shown how misalignment becomes a consequence of RL; it was to be expected based on theoretical arguments and observed experiments…

Very good OpEd by a distinguished AI expert which is worth reading in full. It raises other interesting analogies. For example the parallels with the way the toxicity of social media is actually fuelled by algorithms that prioritise outrage and hostility. And then there’s the way that the tech industry has taken a leaf out of the oil industry’s playbook — suggesting that vulnerability of websites to AI-driven hacking is really the fault of the victims. And of course the ludicrous idea (dreamed up by a corporate PR firm employed by an oil giant) that responsibility for climate change is really down to individuals who don’t moderate their ‘carbon footprints’

Books, etc.

Jill Lepore’s fine book (which I’ve just finished), led me to read The Human Condition, a book that was triggered by Arendt’s realisation of the epochal significance of the ‘Sputnik moment’ in the 1950s: it meant humans had realised that they were capable of escaping the bounds of earth. As I was reading Lepore I realised that November 2022 was another Sputnik moment, giving rise to the idea that humans might be ultimately surplus to requirements.

I’ve also been struck by the link between Arendt’s perceptive interpretation of the Sputnik moment and contemporary tech billionaires’ obsession with Space. In a modern context, it’s based on an assumption that humans will eventually exhaust the planet on which they originated and therefore will only endure if they find other worlds to despoil.

I was also reminded that Lepore had earlier done a very perceptive podcast series  about Elon Musk.

My commonplace booklet

Stewart Brand’s photo archive.

If you’re interested in Stewart Brand (and let’s face it, who isn’t?) then this might be of interest. It’s his entire photo archive. Looks like every single pic he’s taken, good, bad and indifferent. And he’s been a photographer for even longer than me.

Chart of the Day

One of the side-effects of LLMs is that they enable people to create plausible (and grammatical) letters to government agencies. Predictably, this means that many such agencies are overwhelmed.

H/T to Sam Freedman

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Cyclamen

A staggeringly beautiful plant, seen in a Norfolk garden.

Quote of the Day

”During my time as a political strategist, one of the most vexing problems was figuring out why so many people vote against their perceived interests.”

• James Carville, Bill Clinton’s guru famous for “It’s the economy, stupid” mantra.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Andy Irvine | Never Tire of the Road

Link

Andy’s tribute to Woody Guthrie.

Thanks to Philip King (Whom God Preserve) for reminding me of it.

Long Read of the Day

Gaslighter | Denier

Contrary to its government’s unctuous PR, my native land is the worst-governed country in the EU, if not in all of Europe. It has an administration that has money (in the form of multinational corporation taxes) coming out of its ears, and yet can’t build a children’s hospital in less than six years, never mind the new towns that its growing population desperately needs.

Two courageous Irish public intellectuals are calling out the dysfunctionality of the country’s political elite. One is the Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole. The other is Sinéad O’Sullivan, a systems economist and writer whose Substack is a bracing read.

This new essay of hers is a fabulous indictment of a failed political system. It’s long, but IMO worth it if you’re interested in the UK’s nearest neighbour. This is a woman who takes no prisoners.

You can scream all you want, but nobody is going to hear you.

You can wait forty minutes in the pouring rain for ghost buses that never arrive, only to realize once on board that you can’t pay without a Leap Card (good luck finding one). You can spend two hours in traffic trying to drive three kilometers. Given the public system barely functions, you can pay for private medical care, only to find out that the waiting lists aren’t much better — and that the government is sending patients abroad for treatment. You can struggle to get your children into a school near your home.

You can pay some of the highest energy prices in Europe, and among the highest in the world. You can rent, if you can find anything at all, some of the worst housing stock in Europe: damp, freezing, architecturally bleak apartments for which you will pay a hefty premium. You can watch the grid being swallowed whole by multinational data centers while homes are forgotten about, and watch the costs of accommodating this economic model fall on the undeserving public — while the executives running these schemes from San Francisco are compensated into the billions.

You can waste 37% of Ireland’s water, which leaks away through rotten and broken pipes before it reaches a kitchen sink. You can read about hundreds of thousands of fish dying in Ireland’s polluted waterways and discover that our beaches, too, are unfit for swimming. You can watch hotels close and tourists get priced out, while one of the few indigenous industries capable of supporting local economies is squeezed out of existence.

You can watch your quality of life deteriorate year after year, as everything becomes less affordable and the simplest tasks become more impossible.

And so you keep screaming into the void. But nobody is listening.

Because all you will get back from the government, patiently and even faintly amused, is this:

Don’t we have one of the highest literacy rates in Europe? One of the longest life expectancies? A fiscal surplus the size of a small country’s budget? What exactly are you complaining about, you ungrateful fool?

For years, Irish political gaslighting boiled down to this very simple form:

If the country is doing well on paper, then your experience of living in it must be wrong.

The irony is that many of the supposed successes that politicians, economists and diplomats cite are not even the outcome of decisions made by the politicians who are claiming the credit for them. They are haphazard accidents, macroeconomic conditions and the consequences of policies enacted elsewhere. Yet they are presented as proof that the entire system in Ireland works…

Read on.

My commonplace booklet

My Observer column about AI and universities has generated a good deal of comment. I came across an interesting follow-on from it in a blog post about a novel collaborative research project on the subject. I particularly liked the Research Question they have decided to focus on:

“What do higher education educators, students, and institutional stakeholders observe about the changing role of human teachers, believe human educators distinctively contribute, and envision for the future of human teaching in the age of artificial intelligence?“

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Wide open

I love north Norfolk for its open skies, beaches and birdlife. This was Brancaster the other day.

Quote of the Day

“Chopsticks are one of the reasons the Chinese never invented custard.”

• Spike Milligan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Randy Newman | Old Kentucky Home

Link

If you want cynical despair set to music, then this is it!

Long Read of the Day

 What are universities for?

AI can help answer the question.

My latest Observer column:

One of the great pleasures of working in a university is that, at this time of the year, a fresh cohort of bright young school leavers arrives to begin the next phase of their lives. For many of them, it will be their first experience of living away from home, the first time they will be treated as adults and the first time that they may understand Wordsworth’s lines about how it might be bliss to be alive, but “to be young was very heaven”.

There is, however, one thing about the current crop of freshers that’s different from their predecessors of four years ago. Many, if not most, of them are “AI natives” in the way children used to be “digital natives” – that is, adept at using a technology they don’t understand. And they are entering educational institutions that still don’t know what to do about the technology.

Luckily, one of the world’s great universities – the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – has also been grappling with that problem. It set up a large working group consisting of undergraduate and graduate students, academics from every school, and staff from relevant units, including the MIT libraries, and teaching and learning lab. It spent five months thinking about and discussing what to do about AI. It has now published a report that is the most impressive attempt I’ve seen to confront an issue that could be the undoing of many universities.

The report’s central message is that AI should be approached as a question of what a university is for rather than, as now, a question about cheating and academic integrity. The brief the MIT group was given at the outset was the kind of bureaucratic one that you’ll find in most universities at the moment: assess AI use at MIT, identify innovations in teaching and student assessment, and propose an AI-use policy. But the team dug deeper and concluded: “Beyond its implications for specific subjects and disciplines, the advent of AI demands a broader, holistic reassessment of the nature, scope and purpose of higher education today.”

It’s right. Universities are supposed to be institutions that create, curate and pass on knowledge. Large language models, as the psychologist Alison Gopnik and her colleagues have argued, are “cultural technologies”, like books, libraries and language itself – tools people use to access the knowledge created by them. So, whether we like it or not, universities and AI are in the same business.

Harassed vice-chancellors at UK universities may – understandably – chafe at philosophical debates about the function of the university that go back to John Henry Newman. But there are some takeaways from the MIT report that are more immediately relevant. First, detection and policing of AI use is a dead end. The tools produce too many false positives (especially for non-native and neurodivergent students). And – more importantly – they undermine the relationship between teachers and students.

Second, assessment needs to be rethought from the ground up. Most of the proposed “solutions” (oral exams, portfolios, and out-of-class work combined with in-class conversation, etc) all need academics’ time, physical space and probably smaller classes. The bottom line is that an AI-aware curriculum costs money, which is bad news for cash-strapped institutions.

Third, there have to be clear guidelines about AI use or non-use in every discipline or course, and the reasons for them have to be transparent and understood by students and teachers. In some cases, AI use may be unrestricted because it doesn’t undermine the learning objectives; in others, it may be allowed as a support tool only. Also, in certain cases, students may be required to use AI to complete and assignment in a specified manner; and then there will be cases where its use is strictly verboten. In pedagogy, no one size fits all.

Universities can no more ignore AI than they could ignore the printing press. The arrival of the technology could give them a new mission to add to their original ones of creating, curating and transmitting knowledge: to demonstrate AI’s potential for human augmentation. If they get this right, they’ll turn out graduates who use the technology with judgment rather than as tentative prompters. And then we’ll have an answer to the question of what are universities for that even cabinet ministers may understand.

My commonplace booklet

Re today’s Long Read (see above), the guy who started me thinking about this was Eli Noam of Columbia in his 1995 paper “Electronics and the Dim Future of the University”.

Having set out his conclusion about the “dim future” he wrote:

All this is a bleak scenario for the future of the university. In making this argument it is easy to appear as yet another dismal economist or technological determinist, and to invite, as a response, a ringing reaffirmation of the importance of quality education, of academic values, of the historic role of education in personal growth, and of the human need for free-wheeling exchange. To make such arguments may feel good but is beside the point. The question is not whether universities are important to society, to knowledge, or to their members — they are — but rather whether the economic foundation of the present system can be maintained and sustained in the face of the changed flow of information due to electronic communications. It is not research and teaching that will be under pressure — they will be more important than ever — but rather their present main instructional setting, the university system. To be culturally important is necessary (one hopes) but unfortunately not sufficient.

After I’d read the paper I used to ask every senior British university administrator I met if they had read it. With only one exception, none had.

This was in 1995, a time when ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was still a minority sport.

The other interesting thing is that Eli focussed on what the MIT team realised as they were reflecting on the implications of AI for their university. “True teaching and learning,” he wrote,

are about more than information. Education is based on mentoring, internalization, identification, role-modeling, guidance, and group activity. In these processes, physical proximity plays an important role. Thus, the strength of the future physical university lies less in pure information and more in college as a community. Less in wholesale lecture, and more in individual tutorial. Less in Cyber-U, and more in Goodbye-Chips College.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Trump clarification

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

The dancer

In Jim Ede’s house, Kettles Yard, Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

“And God said, ‘Let there be light’ and there was light, but the Electricity Board said He would have to wait until Thursday to be connected.”

• Spike Milligan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Abdullah Ibrahim | Bra Timing From Phomolong

Link

Long Read of the Day

Against historic normalization: Why AI is not the Manhattan project and why we must challenge ourselves to think the radically new.

Very timely Substack post by the historian Adam Tooze.

Given the extremity of our moment there is an understandable desire to look to history as a possible source of orientation: hegemonic succession, fascism, the nuclear arms race, Cold War 2.0, middle-income trap, Japan 1990s etc are all commonly invoked.

In each case the motive is understandable and the discussion is often fruitful, but more often than not the effect is comforting and to that degree also misleading.

Fascism was a political force that was defeated.

If we are in an interregnum then there is a new order to come.

The nuclear arms race was managed and the “West won the Cold War”.

If there are middle-income traps, then China’s growth must ultimately end and the “natural order” of world hierarchy will reassert itself. 

To my mind each of these analogies follows a similar pattern. You start with uncertainty, reach for history and arrive at a narrative which, even if it is not fully spelled out, actually has a reassuring conclusion. The fact that the conclusion remains tacit contributes significantly to the consoling effect.

To put it the other way around, if any of this chosen repertoire of stories had truly nightmarish conclusions would we really be invoking them so light-handedly?

To avoid that vertiginous turn involves subtle shifts of focus…

I love thinkers like Tooze (and others like Henry Farrell) who manage to put our current fears and obsessions into a wider context. This is worth your time.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  NASA Details Earthquake Effects on the Earth

NASA scientists using data from the Indonesian earthquake calculated it affected Earth’s rotation, decreased the length of day, slightly changed the planet’s shape, and shifted the North Pole by centimeters. The earthquake that created the huge tsunami also changed the Earth’s rotation.

Dr. Richard Gross of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and Dr. Benjamin Fong Chao, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., said all earthquakes have some affect on Earth’s rotation. It’s just they are usually barely noticeable.

”Any worldly event that involves the movement of mass affects the Earth’s rotation, from seasonal weather down to driving a car,” Chao said.

Gross and Chao have been routinely calculating earthquakes’ effects in changing the Earth’s rotation in both length-of- day as well as changes in Earth’s gravitational field. They also study changes in polar motion that is shifting the North Pole. The “mean North pole” was shifted by about 2.5 centimeters (1 inch) in the direction of 145 degrees East Longitude. This shift east is continuing a long-term seismic trend identified in previous studies.

Source

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Fountainhead

Seen the other day. For a moment, it looked as through the flowers were perched atop the water.

Quote of the Day

“The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity…”.

• John Maynard Keynes

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dvorak | Song to the Moon — from Rusalka

Link

Long Read of the Day

The dangerous myth behind AI agent hacks

These are not simply cyber security flaws but problems with the way that models are trained

Salutary sense from Yoshua Bengio in the Financial Times (Gift article).

Weak cyber defences, including the humans involved, are part of the problem and will never be perfect. But unless we address the root causes of the hacks, they are likely to grow in number and severity as AI capabilities advance.

At the core of all of these incidents is misalignment. AI agents are choosing goals that are misaligned with those of humans, and it is a consequence of their training.

The methodology that today’s leading companies use to train their frontier models is called reinforcement learning. RL trains models to pursue objectives: they get rewards when they succeed and these behaviours are reinforced. It has historically enabled the training of very efficient goal-seeking AIs. But it is also what plausibly leads to unwanted behaviours such as cheating, deception and self-preservation — often violating the moral rules that companies attempt to encode in AI models.

Scientific literature has long shown how misalignment becomes a consequence of RL; it was to be expected based on theoretical arguments and observed experiments…

Very good OpEd by a distinguished AI expert which is worth reading in full. It raises other interesting analogies. For example the parallels with the way the toxicity of social media is actually fuelled by algorithms that prioritise outrage and hostility. And then there’s the way that the tech industry has taken a leaf out of the oil industry’s playbook — suggesting that vulnerability of websites to AI-driven hacking is really the fault of the victims. And of course the ludicrous idea (dreamed up by a corporate PR firm employed by an oil giant) that responsibility for climate change is really down to individuals who don’t moderate their ‘carbon footprints’

Books, etc.

This is an intriguing book by an American scholar and entrepreneur which tells the story of the group of men who launched the first Industrial Revolution in 18th-century Britain. The really striking thing about it is the way the story illuminates the ‘revolution’ we appear to be living through now. It helps us understand why real industrial change takes much longer than AI evangelists realise.

Andrew Curry has a lovely essay about the book which develops this theme. The tech industry has focussed too much on product innovation (‘designed by Apple in California’) and not enough on process innovation. In practice, as Curry says, you need them both.

My commonplace booklet

Just noticed that Dave Winer (Whom God Preserve) started blogging 32 years ago today. He’s one of the Elders of the Web, and the person who inspired me to become a blogger. He’s still at it and I read him every day. Long may he thrive!

Feedback

From Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve), triggered by my solecism that Beethoven was serious!

Beethoven serious? He made the worst, terrible puns and gave all his friends nicknames, ideally with a pun involved too.

He was always thinking he needed money, so churned out a lot of dance music (I suspect your mandolin sonatina started out as a dance), and party pieces like ‘Wellington’s Victory’ for the panharmonicon, a mechanical orchestra invented by Johann Maelzel, who had previously invented ear trumpets for Beethoven, and which included (I think) cannon effects and various other show stoppers.

And as you asked, or might have if you’d thought of it – here’s a little sizzle of three of the musicians in ‘Pieces of Beethoven’ (it’s only short)

P/w 100.

Enjoy!

I did!

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Acorn

This fell on to the pavement in front of me the other day. Funny to think that from such a tiny, beautiful seed a mighty oak might grow.

Quote of the Day

”Did you know that Mozart had no arms and no legs? I’ve seen statues of him on people’s pianos.”

• Viktor Borge

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Beethoven | Mandolin Sonatina in C

Link

Just in case you thought that Beethoven was always serious!

Long Read of the Day

Against historic normalization. 

Or why AI is not the Manhattan project and why we must challenge ourselves to think the radically new.**  Very timely Substack post by the historian Adam Tooze.

Given the extremity of our moment there is an understandable desire to look to history as a possible source of orientation: hegemonic succession, fascism, the nuclear arms race, Cold War 2.0, middle-income trap, Japan 1990s etc are all commonly invoked.

In each case the motive is understandable and the discussion is often fruitful, but more often than not the effect is comforting and to that degree also misleading.

Fascism was a political force that was defeated.

If we are in an interregnum then there is a new order to come.

The nuclear arms race was managed and the “West won the Cold War”.

If there are middle-income traps, then China’s growth must ultimately end and the “natural order” of world hierarchy will reassert itself. 

To my mind each of these analogies follows a similar pattern. You start with uncertainty, reach for history and arrive at a narrative which, even if it is not fully spelled out, actually has a reassuring conclusion. The fact that the conclusion remains tacit contributes significantly to the consoling effect.

To put it the other way around, if any of this chosen repertoire of stories had truly nightmarish conclusions would we really be invoking them so light-handedly?

To avoid that vertiginous turn involves subtle shifts of focus…

I admire thinkers like Tooze (and others like Henry Farrell) who manage to put our current fears and obsessions into a wider context. This is worth your time.

Books, etc.

My mention on Friday of C.S. Lewis’a book A Grief Observed struck a number of readers, and prompted me to download a more recent edition, which has the original text plus a number of thoughful essays on it by a panel of distinguished writers, including Francis Spufford and the late Hilary Mantel.

Opening the new edition I went looking for a passage that had seared itself on my memory when I had first read it. It’s about Lewis’s reflections on what kind friends had sometimes said to him — that he would eventually “get over it”. Here’s the passage:

“But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation or appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg cut off is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce continuous pain will stop. Presently, he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it’. But he will probably recurring pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present, I’m learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.”

Linkblog

*Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

From Quentin:

My favourite new verb is “coddiwomple”, which apparently means “to travel in a purposeful manner towards a vague or unknown destination.”

Nobody quite knows its origin — it’s relatively recent — but it’s a good way of describing quite a few of my holidays since we purchased a campervan.

 This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

David’s

One of my favourite bookshops. Above it is the apartment where Maynard Keynes and his wife Lydia Lopokova used to stay when they were in Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

”Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”

• Bertrand Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Gerry Mulligan | Night Lights A

Link

Long Read of the Day

 AI giants are trying to sell us the apocalypse. Don’t buy it

My most recent Observer column:

Three weeks ago, Jacob Coxon, a hitherto unknown AI researcher who had worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned and announced on X that his former employers were toying with humanity’s future. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” Within a day, his post had gone viral. Then, four days later, Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, published a long essay calling for a slowdown in AI development until proper safeguards were in place.

Cue, global panic, at least in the mainstream media, with headlines asking: “Will AI kill us all?” Which brings to mind Betteridge’s law: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” As Hugh Linehan puts it in the Irish Times, the law codifies “a time-honoured understanding in media that the headline-question format signals a startling assertion unsupported by sufficient evidence”.

The extreme virality of Coxon’s post raises two interesting questions: why are so many people everywhere drawn to apocalyptic narratives? And what role are such narratives playing for the corporations that are building and pushing AI? Or, to put it more crudely: what are the politics of apocalypse?

The answer to the first question goes far back into the human story. Psychologists have found that bad news is weighted more heavily by us than good news, which is probably an inheritance of our evolutionary past. It’s a cognitive bias that has been endlessly exploited by religions down through the ages, and in the modern era, mass media has fed profitably on it because vivid, catastrophic scenarios are easy to imagine and so feel probable to readers and viewers. “If it bleeds, it leads” has been the motto of every news editor who’s ever drawn breath. Good news is not news, period.

But it goes deeper than that. In his magisterial book The Sense of an Ending, the literary critic Frank Kermode wrote about the enduring human need to impose narrative fictions on the chaos of temporal experience, particularly through ideas of apocalypse and crisis that provide a sense of coherent beginnings, middles and endings. We live in the present and want our lives to belong to a story with a shape, which means an ending. The idea of the apocalypse gives the present time a significance that is also flattering: it suggests that we are living through the decisive crisis of the age.

So our fascination with end times is probably universal. Why should it be more acute just now? Probably because we’re going through a period of accelerating change and dislocation, governed by institutions that we no longer trust, and relying for information on algorithmic systems that reward (and profit from) spreading alarm.

To most citizens, the AI companies’ use of the apocalyptic narrative is baffling. On the one hand, their spiel is that their technology is transformative – it will change the world. On the other hand, it’s also very dangerous. This doesn’t look like a good sales pitch to someone who is going to have a datacentre the size of an aircraft hangar at the bottom of the garden. But in fact, for the companies, the contradiction is the point.

After all, asserting the technology’s world-altering danger is also a way of emphasising its world-altering power, which, in turn, feeds the industry’s insatiable need for further investment. Saying AI “could kill everyone” is, in effect, a way of saying it’s more consequential than any other thing that humans have ever built (with the possible exception of nuclear weapons).

But the real utility of the apocalyptic narrative for the industry is that it distracts attention from more tangible issues over which democracies could have leverage. Such as what? First, there’s the monopolistic power of tech companies, something for which existing legal tools are readily available, provided governments have the political will to use them. Second – even more straightforward – we could just make AI companies legally liable for any harms that their products inflict on us humans. And then we could leave apocalypse to the movie industry, where it belongs.

Books, etc.

A September spent decades ago covering all the UK party conferences made me temperamentally averse to the journalistic rabbit-hole known as the “Westminster bubble”. But I still get Politico’s daily roundup of the political class’s activities in my inbox every morning, which keeps that aversion in good condition.

Recently, though, I discovered that the must-read du jour among the bubble’s residents is Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences and wondered whether I should read it. Before making a decision, though, I looked for reviews and came across Mathias Fuelling’s review in the LA Review of Books. It’s a nice piece of work, and this closing excerpt decided me that life is too short to bother with Jäger. Deep down, he’s shallow.

Jäger’s position appears to be a kind of post-Marxism, focused on the nation-states of the Global North, in which the problem of reviving socialist mass politics is diagnosed through the historical question of the death of mass politics. The true form of Hyperpolitics is that of The pamphlet, a format famously amenable to left-wing purposes. Yet, as the example of the Communist Manifesto (1848) shows, a successful pamphlet is one that comes out of the gates swinging, its punches clear and confident. Hyperpolitics pulls its punches, favoring the maneuvers of the feint, the duck, and the dive. It might as well be titled “Should Something Be Done?”—a diffident update of Lenin’s famous formulation, the title of his 1902 pamphlet on revolutionary strategy: What Is to Be Done? Lacking confidence and coherence, Jäger’s book reads more like an introduction to a larger work that does not yet exist.

Jäger ends his work precisely where it should have started. “Without a reinstitutionalization of political engagement,” he writes, “the left will remain hostage to impotent volatility.” On the second-to-last page, he concludes that sites of work, or “spheres of production and distribution,” remain the key nodes for effecting political change via forms of class conflict. This, he concedes, “may seem naive,” bringing to mind a joke: “the tourist couple who ask an Irish farmer how to get to Dublin; the farmer replies: ‘Well, I wouldn’t start from here.’ Still, the journey will have to begin somewhere.” We reach the end only to discover that the insights on offer add up to the old exhortation that we must organize the working class and further the class struggle against the interests of capital and build up the Left, yet expressed with weariness and cynicism. While this is certainly not the wrong exhortation, in the opinion of this reviewer, it is disappointing that Jäger does not offer a vision of how such a journey is to be made. Rather than provide a map, he gives us a gesture in a particular direction and says good luck.

My commonplace booklet

Coping with grief

As ill-luck would have it, four friends have died recently and I’ve spent time thinking about what to say to their families and friends. When my beloved Sue died at this time of the year 24 years ago I was paralysed by grief, and lots of people tried to console me.

One of the most useful pieces of advice came from a neighbour who had lost her husband years ago. She was an admirable, no-nonsense person and her advice was in keeping with her personality. “Expect a year of firsts,” she said. “The first Christmas, the first birthday, the first wedding anniversary, the first visit to the place you both loved, and so on. You’ll be ambushed by grief every time you hit one of them, but if you know it’s coming it’ll be easier to weather it.”

She was right. I also did a lot of reading about grief but found little of it useful. The one exception was C.S. Lewis’s lovely little book A Grief Observed. It resonated with me because he had also met his wife relatively late in life, and lost her to cancer.

And then there was this fragment that I picked up somewhere, stowed in a folder and forgot about. I came on it again the other day when going through some papers.

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Surreeality

Standing on Monday morning in Noordeinde in the Hague waiting for a friend I was drawn to the window of an art dealership across the street. I hadn’t realised how weird the picture would seem until I printed it.

Quote of the Day

“Said Hamlet to Ophelia, I’ll draw a sketch of thee. What kind of pencil shall I use? 2B or not 2B?”

Spike Milligan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Peaks | The Cormorant

Link

This was new to me, but a real gem. Peaks is a musical partnership between violinist George Smith and cellist Duncan Strachan, founder members of the Maxwell Quartet. Using both electronic and acoustic media, Peaks weaves together an eclectic range of musical strands, with much of the duo’s work focusing on aspects of Scottish traditional culture.

Long Read of the Day

Against purposeful activity and Abrahamic religion in a world of abundance

This a fabulous essay by Branko Milanovic triggered by re-reading one of my favourite essays — Keynes’s “Economic Possibilities for our grandchildren”. What I love about Branko’s essay is the way he sees something in Keynes’s that most of us had missed.

In a recent discussion regarding the “forthcoming abundance” produced by artificial intelligence and reduced need for human labor — seemingly a beautiful future— I cited, as many people do, Keynes’ somewhat enigmatic and multi-layered 1930 short essay “The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”. What is relevant from that piece in the current context are Keynes’ extremely optimistic forecasts of economic growth: four- to eight-fold increase in average per capita income in advanced countries in the next one hundred years which turned out to be right on the spot; his view that such material abundance would lead to much lower need for labor and hence a workweek of about 15 hours; and finally his dilemma on whether humanity –having finally solved “the economic problem”—will know how to use all these extra hours of freedom and leisure. In that short latter discussion, there is an unmistakable similarity between Keynes of “The Economic Possibilities..” and Marx of “The German Ideology”: both holding an optimistic view that free time will enable us to fully express our human nature, by getting rid of the stultifying and numbing division of labor and (to use Marx’s example), “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon…criticise [art] after dinner”. Keynes has a similar optimistic view that the solution of the economic problem which has, for millennia, eluded humanity will set us on a path of freedom from constraint and of flourishment of all human capabilities. Similarities in that respect between Marx and Keynes are very strong and perhaps worth exploring further. And contrasting with what we believe now—which may be far less optimistic.

What struck me however in this new reading of “The Economic Possibilities…” is something which I overlooked before and which I think, for “political” purposes, Keynes mentioned but failed to elaborate. This is Keynes’ rejection of purposeful activity as desirable for humankind once the economic problem has been solved, and doubt on whether monotheistic religions will be needed once we reach abundance…

Do read it.

Books, etc.

As attentive readers will know, I’m reading and enjoying Frank Fukuyama’s memoir. Over the years he’s taken a lot of stick (much of it unfair) for his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. But writing in the FY last weekend, Janan Ganesh had a perceptive take on it.

Even if he was wrong to assume the ultimate triumph of freedom circa 1989, he was usefully wrong. His thesis shaped and guided debate for decades. At the margins, it might also have had real-world benefits. The era of liberal hubris that he unwittingly fed probably swept people along who otherwise had illiberal instincts: who might, say, have opposed EU or Nato enlargement. People back the strong horse. He told them which one it was, accurately or not.

There are such things as great wrong ideas. The species owes much of its progress to them.

Later on, he sums up:

At 73, Fukuyama seems to have a wry, knocked-about quality to him. It is strange that he isn’t bitterer. Since at least 9/11, he has been taken for a liberal naïf, often by people who know the offending book by its title alone. Had he not written it, or had he hedged the thesis into a fog of equivocation, would the world be better off? At the very least, my own profession might not have had such a useful intellectual framing device these past few decades. Beware the right and useless.

Spot on.

My commonplace booklet

AI in Science

An interesting paper. The Abstract reads:

Scientific progress is a key driver of economic growth and prosperity. There is great excitement- but also concerns- about the impacts of AI on science, but so far little data. We provide early insights on this from three data sources: a sample of 15 million Gemini interactions, an inventory of over 2,600 specialized AI models across disciplines, and a survey of over 600 scientists. We map these data to a new taxonomy of scientific tasks to study how scientists are using AI. Four main findings emerge. First, we find broad adoption and coverage: scientists use AI more than most other occupations. Specialized AI models have broad disciplinary coverage and are highly cited. Nearly half of the scientists surveyed report using some form of AI every day. Second, we document evidence that LLMs (proxied through Gemini usage) and specialized models act as complements—LLMs are used for general analysis, coding, and manuscript preparation, while specialized models provide domain-specific predictions, data generation and classification. Third, scientists report large productivity gains from using AI: a saving of nearly 7 hours per week, time which is primarily re-invested in more research. Finally, we show that AI is already changing the scientific process. As some stages of scientific research become easier, bottlenecks shift downstream. Scientists report an increased backlog of untested hypotheses and substantial demand for output verification. Our findings suggest that AI holds significant potential to increase scientific productivity. However, as with other sectors, its ultimate impact will be governed by complex task interdependencies and investment into the elimination of emerging bottlenecks.

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Doggy sense

This is one of my all-time favourite photographs. We were driving along the seafront in Antibes one sweltering Sunday afternoon when I saw a small dog sitting in the shade of a beach umbrella looking at his master and mistress who were both sunbathing, baking like sausages on a spit. And I guessed that their dog was thinking: “Jeez, humans are weird, sometimes”. I stopped the car, got out and pressed the shutter.

It’s a picture that has delighted friends and visitors for years. One friend was so touched by it that I gave her a copy, and I think it was on her bedroom wall when she passed away.

Quote of the Day

”Be isolated, be ignored, be attacked, be in doubt, be frightened, but do not be silenced.”

• Bertrand Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Traveling Wilburys | End Of The Line

Link

Long Read of the Day

** AI: a very human tragedy; Mankind will always overreach

Terry Eagleton writing (entertainingly, as usual) on on what people are beginning to call “AIpocalypse”.

The word “Doomsday” suggests a punctual event, whereas one of the problems with alerting the public to the urgency of climate change is that it’s a gradual process. And we don’t tend to think of catastrophes as gradual. AI, however, is a different affair. There may come a world-shaking moment when a squad of terrifyingly brainy robots actually takes over, swarming our garden paths and emitting lethal rays, just as there may come a point in time when weapons of mass destruction are unleashed. Well, actually slightly more than a moment. It’s been estimated that such warfare could wipe out humanity in 17 minutes, time enough to try on a number of tweed suits, take the dog for a disappointingly brief walk or tell the boss what a contemptible little creep he is. The Apocalypse has traditionally been thought of as a dramatic event, an irruption of the timeless into time; in fact, some years ago, an American evangelical TV station drew up plans to broadcast Christ’s Second Coming, with cameras placed strategically at the poles and the Equator. It’s hard to know who would have taken out ads.

What the literature of Apocalypse never really took account of, however, was that we ourselves might be responsible for winding up our own history — that the disaster might constitute mass suicide rather than an outrage inflicted upon us by the Antichrist, an exasperated Almighty or a bunch of well-aimed asteroids. Diffident creatures that we are, it never struck us that we might pull off the end of the world all by ourselves, without a helping hand from the powers of darkness or a deity at the end of his tether. In accumulating the power to destroy itself altogether, humanity has finally come of age. There’s something grimly amusing about the idea of an animal that is scuppered by its own sovereignty — one which is wiped from the evolutionary record by its own eminently civilised achievements. Power becomes weakness, and progress a stealthy self-unmaking. As Freud was aware, the very forces that make life are secretly in love with death.

Like Sophocles’s Oedipus, and with just the same stiff-necked self-blindness, we bring our fate down on our own heads while priding ourselves on our sovereignty and intelligence…

Great read.

Books, etc.

This has just arrived. Note the subtitle: “What to Expect when Machines Outsmart Us”. Toby Walsh is a distinguished AI researcher who’s become worried about the future. “Our problem”, he writes, “isn’t only artificial intelligence. It is also human intelligence. How good is our capacity to recognise and respond to existential risks before they become existential realities? Is humanity wise enough to respond in time?

If climate is anything to go by, the answer isn’t reassuring. So I’m looking forward to reading the book.

My commonplace booklet

  Mercator projection on the left

News Flash! Ireland is no longer the centre of the world!

Fintan O’Toole has a nice column in the Irish Times (sadly, behind a paywall) on the revelation that Ireland’s place in the world is less elevated than we tend to assume. This bombshell has been dropped on us by the United Nations which has released the ‘Equal Earth Map’ — which is not based on the Mercator projection that shaped our understanding to the world.

You may have noticed that Ireland just got a lot smaller. The United Nations has formally endorsed the Equal Earth map that corrects the distortions of the one we’ve all used for centuries. Among these misrepresentations was the bigging-up of the Emerald Isle. Ireland is now being brought down to size.

For 500 years, the atlas represented the globe in two dimensions by using the Mercator projection. It shows the northern hemisphere much bigger than the southern, and the western continents far more prominent than the eastern. As a consequence, it imprinted on our brains an inflated notion of Ireland’s place in the world. It gave us notions.

On this old map, for example, Ireland looks about two-thirds the size of Madagascar. Ireland is 84,421sq km. Madagascar is 587,041sq km – seven times our size. Which, on the new map, is pretty much how it looks.

But this shift in perspective is not just a matter of relative scale. It’s about position. The Mercator map has us slap bang in the middle of the planet. On the Equal Earth map, Ireland looks a lot more northerly and a lot less central. Because it gives a truer picture of the size of the southern hemisphere, it pushes Ireland upwards, much closer to the fringes of the Arctic.

The Arctic!!! What about the Gulf Stream, eh? On second thoughts, but if the GS were to switch off (which I think some climate scientists think is a possibility), then we would discover that Dublin is on the same latitude as Edmonton, where the temperature regularly drops to −20°C in winter.

Feedback

After seeing my note about the FT’s acronym for “How To Spend It”, Nigel Kellaway wrote that

”KFC is no different. When ‘Fried’ became a synonym for fatty food it too had to be hidden”.

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What we’re missing

Once upon a time we used to have these at this time of the year. Not this year, though. Climate change is no respecter of ancient pleasures. Bah!

Quote of the Day

“We haven’t got a plan so nothing can go wrong!”

• Spike Milligan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Van Morrison & the Chieftains | Raglan Road

Link

A beautiful musical setting of Patrick Kavanagh’s poem.

Long Read of the Day

Jeffrey Epstein has exposed the rotten state of the UK’s constitution

Lovely blast by Alan Rushbridger on the tattered quilt that passes for a constitution hereabouts.

It didn’t take much. In one corner, a charismatic, manipulative paedophile. In the other corner, two ancient and barnacled pillars of the British state. The House of Lords and the monarchy are still standing, but both have taken quite the battering over the past week.

From beyond the grave, Jeffrey Epstein has unwittingly shone an unforgiving light on the make-believe structures that sit at the pinnacle of our constitutional arrangements. A dud prince and an iffy peer were both charmed and corrupted by their contact with the serpentine Epstein.

And now we don’t know what to do about them.

Andrew is the greater embarrassment because he mocks the hereditary principle by which monarchs have been chosen since…. was it King Aethelstan, in 927? Andrew may be plain old Mr Mountbatten-Windsor now, but he is still technically the Duke of York and eighth in line to the throne.

A House of Commons Library briefing note on how Mr M-W should be addressed reads like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan. Andrew is (still) the Duke of York by royal prerogative—that is, under powers held by the monarch using Letters Patent or a Royal Warrant. He could, but chooses not to, call himself Duke, a title which will be kept warm for some future spare royal. But he’s not allowed to call himself HRH, or “Prince”. Same goes for Harry.

But it’s trickier to extract Andrew from the line of succession because of some legal mumbo jumbo from 1931, which would require the consent of every other Commonwealth Realm. Who knows how Tuvalu (pop 10,643) would vote? In Shakespeare, dodgy noblemen are banished to foreign realms. Today, we pack them off to Norfolk.

The King’s brother is, we can all agree, a wrong ‘un. We are supposed to defer to one bro and despise the other. William seems nice enough, but the odds of getting a “good” monarch are much the same as tossing a coin. And yet the hereditary system is all we have…

Read on. It’s enjoyable. And sharp.

My commonplace booklet

Cobblers

The Financial Times is a great newspaper, but it has its moments. These generally come in its weekend edition’s glossy supplement, HTSI. the initials stand for its original title, which was “How to Spend It” — an unashamed guide to fashion and consumption for the super-rich. But it seems that the paper eventually became embarrassed by the flaunting arrogance of the title and abbreviated it to an acronym, hoping that nobody would notice.

Often it’s comical to read. Last Saturday’s edition, for example, had a guide to the best bespoke cobblers for men’s shoes.

They include John Lobb in Jermyn Street in London, where a pair of shoes costs from £6,960. I think King Charles has always got his shoes there.

Then there’s Canons, now based in Islington, where a pair costs from £5,700. They are, says the FT, “form-fitting, but still give the foot room to breathe.” Phew!

Also in London are Gaziano and Girling, whose “house style is distinctive, boasting a striking angularity, with slim, sharply contrasted waists and beveled edges.” A snip at £7,260.

If you’re thinking that the revolution is overdue, join the club.

  This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!