On reflection

Quote of the Day

”Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.”

• Mark Twain

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Tom Rush | What’s Wrong with America

Link

Wonderful.

Long Read of the Day

What do you get if you make AI eat its own words? Not what you originally asked for

My recent Observer column

Here’s an experiment you probably can’t try at home. Take a large language model (LLM) and prompt it with a passage about English church architecture of the 14th century; you know the kind of stuff – towers, master masons, the perpendicular style, and so on. Straight out of Pevsner, if you like. Ask it to carry on writing. Then train a fresh model on what the first one wrote, and ask it to do the same.

Keep going, generation after generation. By the ninth, you find that the machine has given up talking about churches and is producing an earnest list of jackrabbits with tails of various colours: black, white, blue, red and yellow.

You think I made this up? Nope. It’s one of the illustrations in a paper published in Nature by researchers at, among others, Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College London and Toronto University who wanted to know what happens when AI systems start learning from the work of other AI systems. Their answer: the machines go gently, and then not so gently, potty. The technical term for it is “model collapse”.

Something similar used to plague us in the days when all media were analogue. You photocopied a document, and the person you sent it to copied it and sent it on. By the time it reached the ninth person in the chain, its readability had been drastically reduced. Same with audio cassettes recorded at a Grateful Dead gig (as I know to my cost). But when digital technology arrived, that nightmare disappeared. The millionth copy of a digital document was as sharp as the original.

So you can see why it’s a shock to discover that this doesn’t hold for LLMs. And it explains why US author Ted Chiang’s observation in the New Yorker in February 2023 that “ChatGPT is a blurry jpeg of the web” was so true.

The research that led to the paper in Nature began shortly after ChatGPT broke cover in November 2022, when the investigators began to wonder about what would happen when LLMs became ubiquitous. This was bound to happen because the launch of OpenAI’s chatbot triggered a tsunami of imitators. All these new machines were, like ChatGPT, trained on masses of text scraped from the web, and it rapidly became clear that this training data constituted a critical resource for a fast-growing industry.

Initially, the vast majority of it had been generated by humans. But as AI models proliferated, and the industry became hooked on the supposed “scaling hypothesis”– the idea that big was always better as far as AI models were concerned – the demand for training data grew exponentially. The trouble is that the supply is not infinite. One study estimates that the AI industry will have exhausted the supply of publicly available, human-generated training data sometime between now and 2032.

What will happen then? In the Panglossian world of AI boosterism, the answer is obvious: LLMs are terrific at generating text in huge quantities, so there will be plenty of “synthetic” data to train the models of the future. QED.

Not so fast. Unless the model collapse problem is solved, we’re heading into what Jathan Sadowski, a technology researcher at Melbourne-based Monash University, memorably called “Habsburg AI”. He used it to describe models trained so heavily on the output of other LLMs that they become inbred mutants, rather like the Spanish bloodline of the famous European dynasty, which inbred itself to extinction. Or, to put it more crudely, it may mean a kind of accidental enshittification of LLMs.

Which would be a disaster because these models are – as the psychologist Alison Gopnik argued from the start – cultural technologies: tools that people can use to access the knowledge that other humans have accumulated over a very long period. Opening Claude or Gemini is like entering a huge library that also happens to have an indefatigable librarian (if occasionally an overimaginative one) who is willing to search assiduously for information that you’re seeking.

Until recently, access to intellectual riches on this scale was a privilege enjoyed by a small fraction of humanity. We stumbled upon it through a series of happy accidents: machine-learning algorithms, neural networks, the transformer model and the oceans of data provided by the web. Having got it, are we now going to degrade it?

Books, etc.

I discovered that Antonin Baudry’s remarkable two-part movie about Charles De Gaulle was inspired by Julian Jackson’s biography, so I’ve just bought it and am digging in. More later.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Among the Wagner fanatics

I am not a Wagner fan, though I occasionally like the noise he makes. So you can perhaps understand why I enjoyed Rosa Lyster’s essay in the LRB on being at the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. Here’s a sample:

Of all​ Wagner’s operas, Lohengrin is the most swan-concerned. It’s true that Parsifal has a narratively propulsive swan-shooting incident in Act 1, which is a great relief for audience members feeling desperate about the lack of action up to this point. (Everyone on stage has been standing still and shout-singing about the king’s bath for 45 minutes.) It is in Lohengrin, however, that swans actually matter. A mysterious knight arrives on a boat drawn by a swan to rescue Elsa, who has been falsely accused of murdering her brother, Gottfried. The knight marries her on the condition that Elsa never asks his name. Inevitably, she ends up doing so, at which point he reveals himself as Lohengrin, a knight of the Grail, and departs – but not before turning the magical swan back into Elsa’s lost brother.

It isn’t necessary to care about any of this to have a nice time at the Lohengrin thermal baths, a short drive from Bayreuth, the Bavarian town where the Wagner festival has been held almost every summer for 150 years. The baths have indoor and outdoor pools of various therapeutic temperatures, seven textilfrei saunas and expansive shady lawns where visitors can sprawl out on their swan-embroidered complimentary towels.

You can’t identify a Wagner enthusiast just by looking at someone, especially if they are in swimwear. As I studied the other guests at the baths, it seemed possible that none of them had ever thought about Wagner, that they were able to order a Lohengrinsalat at the adjoining restaurant, Bistro Elsa, without Wagner crossing their minds. It seemed unlikely, though. To be in or even near Bayreuth is to have Wagner drilled into your consciousness. The festival lasts for a month, consisting exclusively of repeat performances of his operas, and everything in the town is oriented towards him. Along with all the swans, Wagner’s face is everywhere, on busts and billboards and flyers for hair salons, staring down from ads for Pilates studios with that off-puttingly candid look in his eye and the trace of hysteria about his pressed lips. Hotels and bars and pharmacies are named after his works; the gift shops sell cookie cutters in the shape of his profile and postcards that say CHE GUEWAGNER. His silhouette is on the traffic lights near the festival theatre, a little green man with a baton and a beret bearing up valiantly under the weight of the famously enormous head. The only other place I have visited with as dominant a presiding spirit is Disneyland, though even that doesn’t fully capture it. Imagine if Disneyland had been built by Mickey Mouse himself, as a monument to his own maniacal, epoch-defining genius. That’s Bayreuth…

Lovely, just lovely.

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The costs of war

The American cemetery in Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

”I like this place and willingly could waste my time in it.”

• Shakespeare, As You Like It.

I felt the same about Cambridge when I first arrived in 1968. Still do.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Leonard Cohen | Democracy

Link

A good way to end this week. Many thanks to Ian Clark for suggesting it.

Long Read of the Day

AI Behaviour as an Engineering System

Erik Larsen’s brilliantly succinct analysis of the Hugging Face hacking fiasco.

When an AI system exhibits supposedly unexpected behavior, the first questions should be technical.

What was the prompt? What objective was specified? What tools and permissions were available? What feedback mechanisms were operating? How was the search space constrained? What exactly was the system designed to optimize?

Best overview I’ve seen. Goes right to the heart of the matter.

My commonplace booklet

Just watched De Gaulle: Résistance, the first part of Antonin Baudry’s two-part biopic of a fascinating man. It’s terrific. Now heading to Part Two, Liberté and looking forward to it.

RIP Salon

One of the great innovations of the early Web has thrown in the towel. An unsigned farewell message says that

The business realities of independent digital journalism have changed profoundly over the years. After careful consideration, we have reached the difficult decision that our publishing model is no longer sustainable. We know this news will be deeply disappointing to many of you, and we share that sadness.

Me too. It was good while it lasted.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• An English country house on the 84th floor.  Link

Amazing what you can do when you’ve got more money than sense.

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Simpering titans

I’m collecting photographs of tech moguls sucking up to Trump. This is one from his Inauguration in January 2025.

Left to right: Mrs Zuckerberg, Zuck, Mrs Bezos, Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Muskrat.

Quote of the Day

“You are not responsible for the things you do in other people’s dreams.”

• Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Tom Rush | Remember Song

Link

Wonderful, especially if you have a memory like mine. He’s currently on his umpteenth farewell tour.

Long Read of the Day

Agentic AI is Myth set in Motion

Regular readers will know how highly I rate Henry Farrell, who I think is one of the smartest people around. He and a colleague have an interesting essay in the Economist, which is behind a pretty impermeable paywall, but Henry has posted a version of it on his blog. Here’s how it opens:* 

Cosma Shalizi and I have a new piece on AI at the Economist. It’s not really like anything else out there (although some chunks may be familiar to readers of this newsletter, and it absolutely builds on our collaboration with Alison Gopnik and James Evans) and we’re really happy with it. There’s a paywall, but on past experience, the Economist is reasonably tolerant of contributing authors sticking their pieces up on their own websites after a little time has elapsed, so you should expect to see it here sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, the key argument is as follows:

“Modern AI is neither god nor mechanical bird. It is best understood as a technological version of the Homeric songs that inspired Alexander’s conquests, an epic grown so vast that it encompasses not just heroes, monsters and supernatural helpers, but enormous swathes of practical written knowledge, animated to make it capable both of narrating itself and acting out this narrative on the world that inspired it.”

That may sound like a strange way of thinking about AI, but we think it is a very useful one. It doesn’t treat AI as a putative individual intelligence in the making, because it really isn’t. Nor does it dismiss AI as merely parroting what humans have already said. Instead, it suggests that we ought think of AI as a kind of condensate of human culture that can be deployed in very novel ways, and even become a self mobilizing myth.

Read on. It’s an original take on this stuff. At its heart is the idea that large language models should be understood as technological versions of epic myths rather than as emerging artificial intelligences.

My commonplace booklet

Trump and the Founders

Fintan O’Toole has a lovely essay in the Irish Times, which is behind a paywall. But this gives you a taste of it:

Donald Trump was returned to the White House by people who knew exactly what he was like. There is no fool’s pardon for the majority who voted for him in 2024. The old saw – fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me – applies.

The corruption, the cruelty, the sexual predation, the frauds, the vulgarity, the egomania, the contempt for laws, institutions and truth, the environmental vandalism, the reverse Robin Hood economics of robbing the poor to give to the super rich, the coup-mongering when he lost the 2020 election – all of this was up in lights in his first term. And yet in 2024 he won fair and square.

If the antirevolutionary Tories of 1776 were still around, they’d be quivering with Schadenfreude: we told you so. US historian Gordon Wood, writing in Empire of Liberty, his great history of postrevolutionary United States, says that “in the 1770s the Revolutionaries had not conceived of the possibility of the people becoming tyrannical. When Tories had suggested in 1775 that the people might indeed abuse their power, good Whig patriots like John Adams had dismissed the notion as illogical: ‘a democratic despotism is a contradiction in terms’. The crown or executive authority was the only possible source of tyranny; the people could never tyrannise themselves.”

I guess today’s election results will tell us whether they’ve decided to reverse that oxymoron.

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Le chat magique

Snapped by my wife outside a café in Provence where we were having breakfast.

Quote of the Day

“My father confused me. From the ages of one to seven, I thought my name was Jesus Christ!”

• Spike Milligan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eric Clapton | Wonderful Tonight

Link

Long Read of the Day

The PHP flaw could be just the start of the web’s ‘vulnerabilities tsunami’

My latest Observer column.

The other day, I discovered that the social bookmarking service Pinboard had suddenly disappeared from the web. It had been taken offline by its owner, Maciej Cegłowski, because of the discovery of two security vulnerabilities in PHP software that could allow hackers to exploit web servers.

For me, this was not just a minor annoyance because, in addition to writing this column, I work in a busy academic research centre and produce a newsletter that goes out three times a week. Pinboard plays a critical role in the workflow needed to sustain those activities. And, without warning, it was gone.

As it turns out, I was not alone. All across the internet, websites were being taken offline, including many government ones. Why? Because PHP software is integral to the way the web works. Nowadays, many (perhaps most) websites aren’t stored as finished pages; they’re put together on demand every time someone visits. PHP is the software most widely used to do that assembling, so a flaw in it is also a flaw in the machinery underpinning a huge part of the web.

This is a significant moment for two reasons. First, it’s a systemic vulnerability, rather than a hole in a specific organisation’s software stack. As commentator and author Matt Stoller put it: “Now there is a mechanism for a large swath of people to go after hundreds of thousands or millions of institutions.”

And it’s not just PHP. In recent days, researchers have found vulnerabilities in eMudhra (an Indian company that provides website security certificates), Node.js (a widely used JavaScript tool), and GitLab (a software package that can create, secure and operate software.)

What we’re beginning to see, in other words, is something that Jason Clinton, the deputy chief information security officer at Anthropic, called a “vulnerabilities tsunami” that is, he said, “coming in just a few months, and there won’t be enough time to patch critical infrastructure”.

This view is supported by Matthew Prince, the chief executive of Cloudflare, the content delivery network that probably has the broadest picture of the internet. “In the 10 hours before the PHP vulnerability was publicly announced,” he reported on X, “we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it. That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.”

So, as a leading cryptographer, Matthew Green of Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, said: “We’re in the part of the movie where you need to throw whatever you can in the path of the zombies and hope it slows them down.”

So who are these zombies, and where are they coming from? Answer: they’re large language models (LLMs), and they’re coming from the frontier AI labs that built them. The history of their evolution can be summarised as a series of surprises. First, they were machines that astonished us because they could converse in grammatically correct English sentences. Then we discovered that – unlike most of us – they could write software that sometimes worked.

But the biggest surprise was the recent discovery that they were eerily good at hacking, as the folks at Hugging Face discovered. And also – incidentally – that they appeared to have no concept of ethical behaviour, in which respect they faithfully reflected the moral deficiencies of the billionaires who financed their creation.

These super-competent zombies are now loose on the internet, sniffing out the vulnerabilities in corporate software stacks commissioned by executives who regarded cybersecurity as tiresome; a long-term invisible benefit set against a short-term visible cost – which is exactly what quarterly reporting penalises.

These executives often work in a managerial culture where corporate boards still treat security as a technical matter for the IT department rather than a governance risk they own; few directors have the expertise to challenge what they’re told by the geeks, and – at the moment – there are few legal requirements regarding cybersecurity. All of which means that an alarming proportion of organisations provide easy pickings for LLMs hunting vulnerabilities.

That’s worrying enough, but the PHP case takes the problem to another level because it threatens the internet: the infrastructure on which much of life depends. It demonstrates how AI is changing the way cybersecurity and hacking works. And it could mean that, as Green said: “many people [will discover] that the whole internet is dry tinder and the only thing keeping it from burning is the fact that teenagers haven’t found the matches yet.”

My commonplace booklet

V-Day

America votes tomorrow in the mid-term elections for the House and the Senate.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Beached

From the You Couldn’t Make It Up Dept.

As the sun rose over the tropical port of Sihanoukville, the 200 passengers on the “never-ending” Odyssey retirement cruise were woken by the captain’s booming voice telling them over loudspeakers it was time to abandon ship.

The Odyssey’s residents — as they call themselves — had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on long-term and even permanent lodging on the cruise ship. But this week, they were dumped in a Cambodian town best known as a haven for organised crime.

“We signed up for forever and were looking forward to travelling around the world, but here we are, stuck in scam central,” said Randy Cassingham, 67, who sold his Colorado home on 40 acres of land to finance the voyage with his wife Kit, a 72-year-old life coach.

Villa Vie Residences, the US company behind the Odyssey, has blamed sharp fuel price rises following the war in the Middle East for aborting the cruise after just two years.

Financial Times

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Stairway to…?

And if that reminds you of Led Zeppellin, then join the club.

Quote of the Day

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.”

• Groucho Marx

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Laudate Dominum, KV 339 | Patricia Janečková – Soprano

Link

It doesn’t get any better than that.

Long Read of the Day

Posterior Analytics

The US mid-term elections are next Tuesday and there’s a lot of wishful thinking about them delivering an electoral hiding to Trump, MAGA and the Republicans. And maybe they will. But even if they do, Trump will still have two years in office, and anybody who thinks will be chastened hasn’t been paying attention.

Arthur Goldhammer, however, has, and in this piece paints a picture that isn’t pretty.

There is good reason to fear the form that narcissistic decompensation might take when the discombobulated ego in question belongs to the commander-in-chief of a nuclear-armed power. The Financial Times reported that yet another malignant narcissist head of state, Vladimir Putin, was sorely tempted to use nuclear weapons when his lawless, remorseless, superiority-driven, hence narcissistic attack on Ukraine was, to his surprise and consternation, rebuffed rather than welcomed by its victims.

The world may be about to witness a similar aggressive and disproportionate decompensation if Trump is dealt a decisive setback in the impending midterm elections. It has been widely reported that the US and Israel are planning to renew their attacks on Iran, despite the quite unexpected and disappointing result of their initial assault…

Do read on. He comes back to the Putin example at the end.

Books, etc.

Interesting new book which is a sardonic echo of JFK’s book Profiles in Courage. It’s about the people who have sucked up to Trump. Among the prime suspects are Jeff Bezos. Mitch McConnell, George W. Bush and Chief Justice John Roberts. I’ve just bought it and look forward to browsing through the moral mire.

My commonplace booklet

From Willard McCarty (whom God Preserve) who edits the Digital Humanities newsletter that graces my inbox most mornings:

It is a notable reaction to new technologies that they give rise to technological imaginaries, visions of a future to which the visionaries assign their edenic/apocalyptic dreams. My favourite is the pronouncement of one General John J. Carty, Chief Engineer of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (1907–), about the telephone:

“Some day we will build up a world telephone system making necessary to all peoples the use of a common language, or common understanding of languages, which will join all the people of the earth into one brotherhood. . . . When by the aid of science and philosophy and religion, man has prepared himself to receive the message, we can all believe there will be heard, throughout the earth, a great voice coming out of the ether, which will proclaim, ‘Peace on earth, good will towards men.’

It’s interesting that new technologies have often triggered utopian dreams. Tim Wu’s wonderful book, The Master Switch: the Rise and Fall of Information Empires is a chronicle of how four industries — the telephone, movies, broadcast radio and TV — all encouraged utopian dreams about their human and societal possibilities, and all wound up being captured by corporations. At the end of the book, he wondered if this would happen to the Internet. We now know the answer. Which is why when I’m asked to describe myself I say that I’m a ‘recovering Utopian’.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

From PRRI’s 2026 American Values survey…

With the exception of white evangelical Protestants (42%), around two-thirds or more of all major religious groups believe that empathy is a foundational moral value for a healthy society, including about eight in ten religiously unaffiliated Americans (83%), members of other non-Christian religions (80%), and Jewish Americans (77%). By contrast, a majority of white evangelical Protestants (54%) believe empathy can become dangerous when it leads people away from building a society guided by God’s truth.

h/t to Jason Kottke

Interestingly, Elon Musk, the ketamine-fuelled billionaire, thinks that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit… they’re [i.e. migrants] exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

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!

Contrails

If you were a conspiracy theorist, you’d be wondering where all these planes were going to meet up. Sadly, I think the answer was Stansted Airport :-(

Quote of the Day

”Any sufficiently advanced punditry is indistinguishable from bollocks”.

• Dan Davies, riffing on Arthur C. Clarke’s celebrated adage that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dónal Lunny and Aimee Farrell Courtney | Banish Misfortune

Link

Lunny, one of the most inspiring Irish musicians of his generation, has died and is being lamented wherever Irish music is played. He’s credited with introducing the bouzoki into Irish music (though there is, as usual, some arguments about that). More importantly, he was involved in founding two great groups, Planxty and the Bothy Band. May he rest in peace.

Long Read of the Day

Hannah Arendt on MAGA

Like me, Andrew Brown has gone back to reading Hannah Arendt. But whereas I took to her book on The Human Condition (because of references in Jill Lepore’s The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, Andrew went to her book on The Origins of Totalitarianism, which led him to write this essay.

German thinkers of the mid twentieth century are valuable today because they got here first. They had seen everything civilised smashed up and ground to bits between 1914 and 1945. To excavate the causes of the catastrophe from among the ruins was a task almost as urgent as finding food, warmth, and shelter in a country which had been devastated physically as well as morally.

Those who had spent the war in safe exile in the USA started first. They had no material cares. The two I have read with attention are Golo Mann and Hannah Arendt. When George W Bush invaded Iraq I started to read Golo Mann’s History of Germany to understand the madness: even then the idea of Weimar America made a lot of sense to me.

And now I am reading Hannah Arendt, long overdue. I hadn’t realised when I got it on Kindle, that The Origins of Totalitarianism is a huge book, 750 pages in paperback. To read it is to be buffeted by the strong mind of a woman who has read everything and expects you to keep up, so I am only half way through but I seem to have taken 7,000 words of notes. Of course these are mostly highlighted passages to work through, copied automatically to my hoarding program; had I copied them out by hand they would have stuck with me better. Nonetheless, certain themes emerge, and one of them is the uncanny prescience with which she describes the rise of MAGA, which is, in her taxonomy, a “mass movement”, not a party or even a mob. If the term has an equivalent today, it would be “populism”…

Do read on. It’s sobering.

Those rumours of the death of programmers? Greatly exaggerated

My recent Observer column

Jeremy Scheff runs a successful little computer games company. But he’s also a programmer, and he’s just written a poignant obituary for his trade. He says that he was very slow to use AI but noted that many programmers had taken to it. Maybe, he muses, that is because they “never actually liked programming and are thrilled to have a machine do it for them”.

He’s the opposite. As a kid he loved solving crosswords but found programming even better. “It was a puzzle,” he says, “but the scope was limited only by your imagination. It was a game, but you were creating real things with real value.” And so he built a life around it. “Programming turned into one of the greatest jobs you could imagine. You got paid to work on tricky little logic puzzles. The trickier the puzzle, the more you got paid. But even pretty simple puzzles were worth a lot of money because regular people just couldn’t do it! No, they needed us. They would give us a problem and we would solve it the way we wanted. We set the strategy, we made the timeline, we defined what was and was not possible.”

In time, programmers became “software engineers”, a step up the cognitive ladder. But not like engineers in other fields, who are caged in by the laws of physics. They have to cope with the fact that there is no way that water can be persuaded to flow uphill, that there is no such thing as a frictionless bearing, or acceleration without force, and no way that a SpaceX rocket can “slip the surly bonds of earth” without liberating the chemical energy pent up in its fuel tanks.

Being a programmer in the pre-AI era was like being Napoleon before the retreat from Moscow. It was a medium in which the limits were set by your imagination Being a programmer in the pre-AI era was like being Napoleon before the retreat from Moscow. It was a medium in which the limits were set by your imagination

Software engineering, though, is different. In software, you can programme a set of pixels to move endlessly in a circle and, if you leave them to it, they will continue to do that for ever. They need neither fuel nor food, and they will never complain. In that sense, being a programmer in the pre-AI era was like being Napoleon before the retreat from Moscow. It was a medium in which the limits were exclusively those set by your own imagination and skill.

And now? With AI coding, “It’s no longer solving little logic puzzles,” writes Scheff. “More like being plugged into the Matrix, gaining new abilities without truly understanding, accomplishing great things with little effort.”

Well, up to a point. Paradoxically, Scheff’s obituary for programming appears alongside a report from Anthropic, the AI giant, describing how the company used its AI tools to build a new source control system, codenamed Scion, for managing the colossal body of software that its engineers create and have to maintain. For years Anthropic relied on the industry-standard solution – named “git” – to do the job, but git was buckling under the scale of the company’s software output, which recently produced 30,000 code updates in a single day.

Building a new system from scratch to handle this was a gigantic engineering challenge. In the old days it would be what the industry sometimes called a “death march” and would take four years. Anthropic did it in five months. This project, writes one industry commentator, “stands out as a well-documented example of serious engineering that takes full advantage of the latest tools. AI coding tools are no longer limited to vibe-coding lightweight apps; they are revolutionising the craft of building large-scale, mission-critical distributed systems.”

Does this mean that from today programming is dead? Personally, I doubt it. Building Scion was an amazing feat of architectural design, much like building the Severn Bridge or the Shard. But the world is full of smaller construction projects and local builders. And here the great sci-fi author Cory Doctorow has something useful to say. In a recent essay he points out that one of the oldest pleasures in computing is “scratching your own itch” – writing a little tool that does exactly what you need. AI “vibe coding” puts that pleasure within reach of millions of people who could never have done it before.

But vibe coding can only take you so far. It may be that you aren’t able to articulate your needs clearly enough to get results. What you need is someone who understands the technology better than you, who can tease out of you what you’re really trying to do. In other words, a programmer.

My commonplace booklet

Last week, a Bentley went up for sale. Only six years old, a mere 7,000 miles on the clock, painted in racing green and a steal at £125,000. There was just one catch: the car’s previous owner was the former prince, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

I’m not in the market for a Bentley — or maybe it’s fairer to say that a Bentley isn’t in the market for me — but the original ownership means I wouldn’t take the car even if it were offered to me for nothing. Curious, given I’m genuinely looking for a second-hand car at the moment and the previous owner has never factored as a consideration. But once that piece of information is available, there’s no going back.

Rebecca Watson, FT 18 October.

Political news

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Et in Arcadia ego…

Walking back from lunch yesterday I looked over the bridge and saw this. The weather currently is what used to be called an “Indian Summer”, possibly by people who had never been in India in the summer.

Quote of the Day

”You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

• Leon Trotsky

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Leonard Cohen | Hallelujah, arr. Tom Hodge | Sheku Kanneh-Mason

Link

Long Read of the Day

Too Big to Nationalize

A really powerful blast by Mike Brock about the mess the world is now in — where a single, unaccountable, individual is wielding the kind of power that once was the prerogative of nation states.

When a business becomes critical infrastructure, its relationship with society alters. If SpaceX builds a near-monopoly on satellite internet, no matter how objectively good the product is, and its CEO then uses it to conduct foreign policy according to his own politics and against the interests of the United States, the company has violated the public trust. Full stop.

Starlink is a technological accomplishment, and I have always said as much. It functions approximately two-thirds of all active satellites in orbit, more than all other operators combined, and in one quarter last year it accounted for 97% of satellite internet speed tests worldwide. Ukraine runs its drones on it. This is what critical infrastructure entails. It is the thing individuals cannot do without, and the moment they cannot do without it, the person who owns it holds their lives in his hands whether he requested that responsibility or not.

On October 14, he shut his hand. The military-grade version of Starlink that Ukraine depends on had its speeds limited, so that any drone flying faster than 100 miles an hour lost its connection. According to The Wall Street Journal, Musk himself imposed the limits, after he had discussed Ukraine with Trump, and officials disagree on whether he acted alone or consulted with the administration first. Its journalists discovered a Ukrainian unit that dispatched six drones to a Russian army warehouse. One hit the warehouse. The commander stated that his drones now have to fly slower, and the Russians are bringing more of them down. Each Ukrainian drone that falls means a Russian warehouse remains standing, or a Russian drone that gets through to a Ukrainian apartment block.

The defenders continue to reach for the same phrase. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Washington had not cut Ukraine’s access, and pointed instead to the terms of service Kyiv needed to comply with. My response guy stated similarly: a commercial network with a TOS agreement. This is the private foreign policy, put simply by the individuals who claim it doesn’t exist. Whether Ukrainian drones reach their targets is now a question of contract compliance, adjudicated by a billionaire who has complained about Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries. I view that as a betrayal of American interests, and the American public, which sides with Ukraine over Russia 57% to 4%, seems not to disagree…

Read on.

My commonplace booklet

When contemplating the current state of the world, I’m often reminded of an adage that is often attributed to the Italian Marxist, journalist and philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned by Mussolini in 1926 and spent a decade behind bars, during which time he wrote 30 remarkable notebooks of history and analysis.

The adage that caught my eye many years ago was the view that when contemplating a disordered world what is needed is “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will”. But since pessimism is disabling, I’ve argued for a while that when we need now is realism of the intellect and optimism of the will.

Sorting some notes the other day, I came on this diagram drawn years ago when I was grappling with these thoughts. I’m slightly ashamed of it now, because these quadrant-graphs are what one finds everywhere in MBA courses and I now regard them as the last resort of an exhausted mind. But still…

Seen and read

In the era of digital TV, Britain has shown the world two distinct faces. One is the twee, backward-looking nation of Downton Abbey and similar period dramas. This stuff sells well to credulous foreigners even as it infantilises us. The other is the Premier League. In this Britain, even medium-sized towns in conservative regions have multinational teams, and without second thoughts. No people could seem more at ease with the modern world, or with itself.

If the league were to decline, as the Italian Serie A did after its own scandal, Britain would lose the most attractive calling card that it has right now.

Janan Ganesh, FT October 17.

Yep. Sad, isn’t it.

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Wizard stuff

King’s Cross, yesterday. The Harry Potter industry continues to thrive. It must be one of Britain’s biggest cultural exports.

Quote of the Day

”Potentially, TV can transform the Presidency into a monarchic dynasty. A merely elective Presidency scarcely affords the depth of dedication and commitment demanded by the TV form. Even teachers on TV seem to be endowed by the student audiences with a charismatic or mystic character that much exceeds the feelings developed in the classroom or lecture hall.”

• Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media. Prescient, eh?

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Abdullah Ibrahim | Soweto

Link

Keeps me going, sometimes.

Long Read of the Day

The Nobel Prize is not an exact science

Lovely essay by Tim Harford (Gift article)

Visitors to the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm will see celebrations both of the life and achievements of Alfred Nobel, and the life and achievements of a thousand laureates — scientists, writers, politicians and even a few economists. Their personal effects, too: books, clothes and even a pair of skis are on display.

I was a visitor myself this year. What I failed to detect among the exhibits was much sign of self-doubt. The museum never quite claims that the Nobel Prize is a secular benediction, awarded by infallible institutions, raising its recipients to the level of intellectual saints, but the vibes are in that direction.

That is a shame. Leave aside those prizes for literature that somehow never were awarded to Virginia Woolf or Leo Tolstoy. (Even at the time, the omission of Tolstoy was something of a scandal.) Forget the small matter of the Peace Prize for Henry Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ.

Don’t fret too much about the prize for economics, which offers its own diversions. It has repeatedly been split between people who disagree with each other on the central question of the prize. Gunnar Myrdal and Friedrich Hayek shared the prize in 1974; Myrdal was a champion of the Swedish welfare state, while Hayek warned that central planning was the road to serfdom. Robert Shiller and Eugene Fama were among the winners in 2013, Shiller for his demonstrations that stock markets are not efficient, and Fama for his demonstrations that they are. (I exaggerate . . . but not much.)

Read on. My only complaint is that he omits to mention Rosalind Franklin or Jocelyn Bell Burnell. I love Harford’s essays, which often come from left field — about things one should have thought about or questions one should have asked — but didn’t.

Books, etc.

This just arrived. It’s a brave attempt by a pair of Cornell mathematicians to persuade a maths-phobic public that they’re living in a worlds underpinned by mathematics. I’ll be reviewing it for the Observer and am looking forward to the challenge.

My commonplace booklet

One of the reasons I love writing for the Observer (which I’ve done for more than 30 years) is that it was the newspaper that employed Kenneth Tynan as its theatre critic. I’ve long admired his writing, and envied its apparent flowing ease. (His review of Waiting for Godot is a masterpiece that I still re-read from time to time, rather as Somerset Maugham used to read Candide before embarking on a novel, to cleanse his literary palate, as it were.)

But it turned out that all that apparent ease and fluency was a myth. I learn from James Wolcott’s LRB review of Tynan’s diaries that

the Observer reviews didn’t ripple from his fingertips like pearly notes, despite appearances. It’s a consolation to any writer who has envied and marvelled at the epigrammatic ease of his reviews to discover that he had to lash himself to the mast to meet a deadline, pulling all-nighters fuelled by cans of soup or corned beef hash, bottles of hock and packs of cigarettes (‘When I opened the door of his study the smoke, as if from a nuclear blast, shot out to engulf me’), emerging like Dracula from his crypt when he was done. ‘He woke me when he was finished to give me his copy and at that moment he always looked very strange; rather insane.’ The skating charm of his writing required deeper reservoirs of mental-physical stamina and willpower than anyone other than Dundy knew; to hit near-perfection week after week, he was borrowing against the future.

So maybe the adage that “nothing that is read with pleasure is written without pain” is spot on. Given that I’ve written 50 columns a year every year since 1987, people often ask me if I like writing. My reply: “I like having written”.

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Darwiniana

This plaque greets visitors to Christ’s, the Cambridge college where Charles Darwin was an undergraduate. Last Friday I’d been invited to lunch there by a friend who is a Fellow of the college, and afterwards she asked if I’d like to see the sitting room in his set, which had been restored to the state it might have been in 1828-1831, when he was a student. So we walked up the stairs in G staircase and there it was, complete with his gun in a rack above the mantlepiece.

The earliest photograph of the sitting-room was taken by J. Palmer Clark in 1909.

It looks rather drab — which is what I was expected to see when I climbed the stairs on Friday. Instead I found a much glossier apartment than I had anticipated. Had it been tarted up for the tourists, I wondered?

In 2006, the college had decided to embark on an impressively-researched scholarly restoration of the room drawing on research by John van Wyhe and Jo Poole into contemporary documents ranging from Darwin’s letters and private papers, recollections of his Cambridge friends, illustrations and descriptions of Cambridge student life in the 1820s–1830s to the physical evidence present in the rooms.

Poole’s account relates how the oak panelling which had been covered by many layers of paint, was cleaned, disclosing the woodwork in excellent condition, and at the top, on the carved frieze, underneath all the paint, bright colouring in blue, yellow and red. This colouring, in addition to being an interesting antiquarian relic, is a distinct asset to the appearance of the room. In some places where the work had failed, it has been slightly and carefully restored; the general effect must now be very much the same as it was when the colours were first put up. So maybe my hunch about tarting up was a bit premature — the product of a nasty, suspicious, journalistic imagination.

Interestingly, in the early 1930s the set of rooms was occupied by C.P. Snow of “Two Cultures” fame.

Quote of the Day

“Is there anything worn under the kilt? No, it’s all in perfect working order.”

• Spike Milligan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Händel| The Harmonious Blacksmith | Wilhelm Kempff

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Long Read of the Day

Women increasingly see AI for what it is: mansplaining on a global scale

My latest Observer column.

In an article in Wired magazine earlier this year, Alessandra Ram, a writer, wife and mother based in the San Francisco Bay Area, noted: “There’s a strange and under-discussed side-effect of the AI boom.” That is: “what it’s doing to family dynamics”. By which she means: how it’s potentially destroying those dynamics.

She writes from experience. She’s married to an AI-pilled chap who has a newish job in an AI company. He phones her at 11pm in Berkeley, California, where she is home alone with their 10-month-old daughter. It’s 2am in Massachusetts, where he is, and he wants her to look at something on his computer.

“Are you looking?” he shouts. She isn’t. Instead, she’s looking at their real baby and thinking: “There are two babies in this household now: the small human one and the large language model. Both demand constant attention. Both keep us up at 2am.”

Being an award-winning journalist, Ram doesn’t leave it there. She goes out interviewing her contemporaries in the Bay Area because that’s where this particular psychological crisis seems most acute. She finds that it goes like this: “He works in AI, and she does everything and anything else. Other times, it’s bleaker: He desperately wants to work in AI – or feels he must work in AI – and she wants him to do literally anything else.”

Now we need to remember that northern California is not a normal place at the moment. It’s the centre of a frenzy reminiscent of the gold rush of 1848-55, with Jensen Huang of Nvidia selling the contemporary equivalents of picks and shovels. And the demographics of the tech industry are chronically skewed: it’s basically a male-dominated playground. This applies not only to the tech companies, but also to those who invest in them or who want to work in AI labs.

Ram thinks that implies that there are “hundreds of thousands of spouses, partners, and girlfriends, holding the fort while someone mansplains the singularity to them”. The evidence in her piece is mostly anecdotal, but I think she’s on to something.

At any rate, it chimes with my own experience of watching this space. Five years ago, I annoyed some of the industry’s male protagonists by pointing out that its most perceptive critics tended to be women. Broadly speaking, this is because women are more sensible than men in these matters. I write as a long-term gadget freak who is constantly surprised that my female friends are invariably unimpressed by the latest gizmo I have acquired.

So you can see why I sympathised with former Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry, who once took his wife for a ride in a brand new Humvee. As they rumbled along, he proudly mansplained to her that, among the many features of the 4×4 military vehicle, there was a switch that enabled him to inflate or deflate its tyres as they drove along. His wife very sensibly asked: “Why?” – to which he had, of course, no answer. She was likewise unimpressed by the Humvee’s mighty winch, which, she was told, could pull down a house.

As far as AI adoption is concerned, there’s an increasing amount of empirical evidence that women are more judicious than men in approaching the technology. A key Oxford study, for example, suggests that the emerging “gender gap” in AI use “is associated not only with differences in skills, access or socioeconomic position, but also with perceptions of AI’s societal risks”. Concerns related to mental health, environmental impact, data privacy and employment are closely linked to women’s approach to the technology.

The researchers found consistent evidence that these risk perceptions are more strongly associated with adoption among women than among men. Women who express concerns about AI’s broader social consequences are less likely to use generative AI tools frequently, and – interestingly – these differences are especially pronounced among younger and digitally literate groups.

This looks to me like encouraging news. It suggests that what the Oxford researchers found among young, digitally literate women isn’t technophobia but a grown-up, cost-benefit calculation that the AI boom’s protagonists seem constitutionally unable to make.

Which brings us back to Ram’s “two babies”. One of them will, in due course, grow up and become judicious. I wouldn’t bet on the other one, though.

My commonplace booklet

Sacre Bleu! Le deux chevaux retour!

Citroen plans to sell the new 2CV for £13,000, which would make it the cheapest EV around. It will have a 30kWh lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) battery pack, allowing it to cover 130 miles between charges. Good enough for most domestic purposes.

The news prompted some nice letters to the Editor of the Irish Times. For example:

Sir, – The launch of the new Citroën 2CV reminded me of a memory of my aunt who travelled from Belgium in the early 1960s in her elderly 2CV.

While travelling through Mayo, she stopped to fill up. The attendant took one look at her unusual little car, clearly unable to make out the make or model, asked her with genuine curiosity: “I’ve never seen a car like it, did you make it yourself?”

My aunt must have wondered whether to be flattered that she could create such a machine or insulted that her faithful Citroën looked like a home-made contraption.

The 2CV was never meant to turn heads but they had character, charm and reliability to keep going. If the recently launched new model inspires as many conversations as the original, I am sure it will do well. – Yours, etc,

And

Sir, – In my hitchhiking days half a century ago, my heart would always lift at the sight of an oncoming Citroën 2CV. There was a good chance of a lift – not least because drivers might need assistance to complete their journey.

In one instance, a driver required an extra pair of hands to hold the 2CV canvass roof down every time a lorry passed. My role was to pull, with all my weight, on the roof, while the driver did the same, steering with his knees.

We both arrived safely at our destinations.- Yours, etc

Movietunes

I’m not much of a film-goer but I’ve seen two remarkable movies in a single week.

One is Pressure, the story of how the date for the D-Day landing was chosen. There are not many good movies about meteorology, but this is one. It’s about the importance of good data, and it has a nice Irish twist.

The other is The Lost Children of Tuam, a scarifying story of how a single determined woman unearthed the truth about how an institution run by a Catholic religious order of nuns buried nearly 900 dead children in a disused septic tank. If, as I did, you grew up in Ireland, then this is a deeply moving and grim film. But it’s also a celebration of the importance of investigative journalism and a reminder of the personal toll it takes on reporters. As the credits rolled, the cinema audience sat very quietly, absorbing the enormity of what people can do when they have unaccountable power. Which the Catholic church had when I was growing up.

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