Faces

Teenagers outside the National Portrait Gallery.

Quote of the Day

”They tried to bury me, but they didn’t know I was a seed.”

• Sinéad O’Connor

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Willie Nelson & Sinéad O’Connor | Don’t Give Up

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Is Rahm Emanuel the Answer to the Democrats’ problem?

Here’s a bracing read from Tina Brown which touches on some sensitive spots for us liberals.

The culture of politics and its actors has shifted at warp speed and it’s not going back. I now feel the worst thing that happened to the Dems was Trump being re-elected in 2024 rather than 2020. There would have been no Big Lie or January 6th choir singing us into four years of conspiracy theories. There would have been no wasted efforts to put Trump behind bars that merely served to make him a vengeance-crazed hero to the MAGA faithful, no four years of him outlawed in his gilded Elba surrounded by a posse of rabid ideologues, kleptocrats, and misfits who are now at his side at the White House, schooled this time in where the levers of power lie.

Most importantly, we would not have been deluded by the Biden hallucination of Things Going Back to What They Used to Be. The notion that the country could be restored to a Cretaceous pre-Trump era of reverence for the Constitution, security treaties, and the Rooseveltian state was like imagining the Newport Folk Festival could ever be the same after Bob Dylan showed up in 1965 with his electric guitar.

The Biden interregnum just allowed the Democratic old guard to stew in their timid appeasement of the far left for another four years and keep repeating the liberal dogma that the rest of America had started to hate. Only two weeks ago, the outgoing chairman of the DNC Jaime Harrison reassured the flock, “Our rules specify that when we have a non-binary candidate or officer, the non-binary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six offices must be gender balanced with the results of the previous four elections.”

It’s worth comparing Harrison’s almost parodic communication style- and what he thinks voters are up at night about – to that of JD Vance on Face the Nation on Jan 26. When host Margaret Brennan challenged the VP with the injustice of Afghan refugees waiting to be admitted into the U.S., Vance equably replied, “I don’t really care, Margaret. I don’t want that person in my country, and I think most Americans agree with me.” The callousness was breathtaking, but the clarity was unmistakable. Surely, there is a way to communicate that is neither mothballed in virtuous euphemism nor repugnantly heartless. Faced with a choice, alas, clarity wins. Vance’s response became an instant meme with “I don’t really care, Margaret” T-shirts for sale on Amazon…

Read on.

As I said at the beginning, this touches a nerve. Part of the problem that faces those who are opposed to Trump & Co is that they are more effective communicators than Democrats or (more generally) liberals are. Why? Because we cannot bring ourselves to talk the way they do. That’s why they dominate social media and we don’t.

The difficulty, of course, is that there are good, decent reasons for our reservations. We wouldn’t be seen dead talking like they do. But we have to find ways of getting through to cheesed-off voters who are not particularly interested in politics. And we should stop virtue-signalling on how ‘pure’ we are compared to those vulgar hooligans. Otherwise the democratic game’s up. Virtue may be its own reward, but only for those who dwell in dreamland.

Books, etc.

One of the best pieces of luck I’ve had in ages was to find myself this week in a symposium on security in Europe with Richard Ned Lebow, a great historian who’s had an extraordinary life — which included a brief spell in the Carter administration. He’s spent much of his scholarly career working on international relations, and in particular on the motivations behind warfare. So the first thing I did after we parted was to go to the library to dig out this book of his.

In it he argues that four generic motives have led states to go to war — fear, interest, standing and revenge. Using an original data set, Ned examines the distribution of wars over three and a half centuries and concludes that only a minority of them were motivated by security or material interest. The majority were for ‘standing’ or revenge — an attempt to get even. And that most wars are counterproductive.

He has a new book coming out soon from Cambridge University Press. The title? Why Nations Still Fight!

My commonplace booklet

I asked ChatGPT to “Draw me a cartoon showing President Trump in a grass skirt”.

Here’s how it replied:

I can’t create images directly, but you can visualize a humorous cartoon of President Trump wearing a grass skirt by imagining:

• Setting: A tropical beach with palm trees, a tiki bar, and a sunset in the background.

• Trump’s Appearance: Wearing a green grass skirt, a floral Hawaiian lei, and maybe even a coconut bra for extra humor. His signature hairstyle remains intact, blowing slightly in the breeze.

• Expression: A confident, exaggerated smirk as he does a hula dance, arms outstretched.

• Speech Bubble: Something like, “Believe me, folks, no one does the hula better than me. Tremendous moves!”

If you’d like, you can hire a cartoonist or use digital drawing tools to bring this idea to life! Let me know if you’d like more details.

Now all I have to do if find someone who can draw!

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Spring is sprung

In a college garden on Monday evening.

Quote of the Day

“Faced with the bewilderment of my countrymen, by the disintegration of a government in thrall to the enemy, by the fact that the institutions of my country are incapable, at this moment, of functioning, I, General de Gaulle,. French soldier, realise that I now speak for France”

• Charles de Gaulle, London, June 1940

Hmmm… Who now speaks for the American people?

(h/t Sheila Hayman)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

David Bowie | All the Young Dudes (Live at the Isle of Wight)

Link

He was a genius. May he rest in peace.

Long Read of the Day

On February 27, the New York Times had a story about how Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, was exhorting Google employees to strain every muscle to ensure that the company won the AGI race.

On Wednesday, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, said the company could lead the industry in artificial general intelligence — when machines match or become smarter than humans — if employees worked harder.

“I recommend being in the office at least every weekday,” he wrote in a memo posted internally on Wednesday evening that was viewed by The New York Times. He added that “60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity” in the message to employees who work on Gemini, Google’s lineup of A.I. models and apps.

This gave Henry Farrell a wicked idea. Building on an insight that he and Marion Fourcade had expressed about how LLMs were very good at regurgitating the ritual or boilerplate texts that are the stuff of organisational life, he decided to ask ChatGPT to recompose Brin’s exhortations as a Stakhanovite speech by Joseph Stalin in the early 1950s. Here’s what it came up with:

Comrades! Heroes of Soviet Computing!

In this, the year 1952, as the Great Soviet Union marches ever forward, the forces of reaction and bourgeois incompetence in the decaying capitalist West tremble before the inexorable advance of Soviet science and technology. The time has come for us to seize the greatest prize of all—Artificial General Intelligence!

I call upon you, the vanguard of Soviet computing, to redouble your efforts! Let every programmer, every mathematician, every engineer commit themselves to at least 60 hours a week of unrelenting toil!

Lovely stuff. Made my day.

It might be a small consolation, but Musk is getting poorer by the day

Sunday’s Observer column:

Extreme wealth has always played a role in democracies. Money has always talked, especially in the US. Years ago, Lawrence Lessig, the great legal scholar, calculated that most of the campaign funding for members of Congress and aspiring politicians came from one-twentieth of the richest 1% of Americans – about 150,000 people. This is about the same number as those who are named “Lester” and explains the title of his book: The USA Is Lesterland.

But that particular corruption of American politics only involved billionaires like the Koch brothers playing organ-grinders to congressional monkeys. The obscene wealth generated by the tech industry has catapulted a new organ-grinder into the heart of the machine. He was able to pay his way in with a spare quarter of a billion dollars that he happened to have lying around. And now the wretched citizens of the US find themselves living in Muskland…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

An archival document from an epidemic that was scandalously hushed up at the time.

(Thanks to Ida, a former Wolfson Press Fellow, who discovered it.)

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Putin Scolds Trump: “I Got You Elected and You Haven’t Said Thank You Once”

MOSCOW (The Borowitz Report)—In a testy meeting at his Kremlin office on Tuesday, Vladimir Putin scolded Donald J. Trump for failing to show proper gratitude for getting him elected president of the United States.

For almost an hour, Trump was on the receiving end of blistering attacks from Putin and his vice president, JD Vasilevsky.

“I got you elected and you haven’t said thank you once,” Putin shouted. “When you were running for president, you didn’t have any cards. With me, you had cards.”

Attempting to mend fences, Trump offered to let Putin run his next Cabinet meeting instead of Elon Musk.

Link

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The Island

Thanks to Max Whitby (Whom God Preserve), we had a lovely day on Lindisfarne (aka Holy Island) off the Northumberland coast. The upturned boat in the picture belongs to a friend of his who is (he says) a connoisseur of arcane tools. I’m fascinated by islands but had never been to this one. I’ll be going back. The only problem is that many thousands of other souls feel like that every year. So this was a pretty good time to go.

Quote of the Day

”The international relations scholar John Ikenberry once described the US as a liberal leviathan. Today, the liberal leviathan has become a rogue elephant.”

• Timothy Garton Ash, writing in the Guardian last Wednesday.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bruce Springsteen | Tougher Than the Rest

Link

Long Read of the Day

Against optimism: the Whiggish blindness of Dario Amodei

On February 21 my Long Read of the Day was an extraordinary essay by Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, the AI company responsible for Claude, the LLM I use mostly. I chose it because it was “the best attempt I’d found of a real expert in the field setting out an honest account of the potential upsides of AI.”

This prompted Andrew Brown, one of the most thoughtful people I know, to write an elegant critique of the Amodei essay, which he describes as “a kind of Ozymandian relic of the world of yesterday”. His riposte is a model of what intellectual discourse should be like — respectful, fair, eloquent and perceptive. Which is why I enthusiastically commend it to you.

Andrew’s main point is that technology is always just part of the human story. Here’s a sample of how this plays out in his essay:

It’s not as if Amodei is a bad or callous man, who thinks that there can’t be a problem. He’s obviously someone who cares about the world, with whom it would be fascinating to talk. He knows there can be problems; he’s just confident they can be overcome:

“With advanced health interventions and especially radical increases in lifespan or cognitive enhancement drugs, there will certainly be valid worries that these technologies are ‘only for the rich’ [but] developed world political institutions are more responsive to their citizens and have greater state capacity to execute universal access programs—and I expect citizens to demand access to technologies that so radically improve quality of life.”

Apparently no one has told him about the American health care system.

Well worth your time.

Books, etc.

Screenshot

I wrote about this in the Observer yesterday.

Oscar Wilde’s quip, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life”, needs updating: replace “art” with “AI”. The Amazon page for Alexander C Karp and Nicholas W Zapiska’s new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West, also lists: a “workbook” containing “key takeaways” from the volume; a second volume on how the Karp/Zapiska tome “can help you navigate life”; and a third offering another “workbook” comprising a “Master Plan for Navigating Digital Age and the Future of Society”. It is conceivable that these parasitical works were written by humans, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Mr Karp, the lead author of the big book, is an interesting guy. He has a BA in philosophy from an American liberal arts college, a law degree from Stanford and a PhD in neoclassical social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt. So he’s not your average geek. And yet he’s an object of obsessive interest to people both inside and outside the tech industry. Why? Because in 2003 he – together with Peter Thiel and three others – founded a secretive tech company called Palantir. And some of the initial funding came from the investment arm of – wait for it – the CIA!

The name comes from palantíri, the “seeing stones” in the Tolkien fantasies. It makes sense because the USP of Palantir is its machine-learning technology – which is apparently very good at seeing patterns in, and extracting predictions from, oceans of data. The company was founded because at the time all the Silicon Valley tech companies either disapproved of government, or were staffed by engineers who were adamantly opposed to working for the US military. This created an opening that Karp and his colleagues astutely exploited to build a company which is simultaneously appears to be booming (current market capitalisation: $200bn), while also being regarded by critics of the industry as the spawn of the devil…

Read on

Linkblog

Errata

For those readers who were intrigued by the long-range (200km) hybrid car (Lynk) I mentioned on Friday, here’s a link. Apologies for not providing it.

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Just Trolling along

Nice satirical poster at a London bus stop.

Quote of the Day

”In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”

• Charles Mackay (in his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Beethoven | String Quartet in A Major, Menuetto | Avalon Quartet

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The Three Types of Money Behind Silicon Valley’s Rise to Dominance

Illuminating essay by Dave Karpf, who’s a very sharp observer of the tech industry.

Sample:

A company’s stock is, in theory, supposed to reflect its underlying fundamentals. There is meant to be a direct relationship between the company’s current profits, its potential for future profits, and its stock price.

Nearly 90 years ago, John Maynard Keynes raised questions about whether this was actually the case. In his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), Keynes described the stock market as more akin to a beauty contest where each judge was encouraged, instead of selecting the most beautiful contest, to pick which contest the other judges were likely to select. This concept has been referred to ever since as a “Keynesian beauty contest.”

In modern parlance, we might describe a Keynesian beauty contest as vibes-based.

Tesla stock soared after Donald Trump’s November victory, not because a Trump win presaged a surge in Tesla sales, but because LolElonJustWonThePresidency. The Elon-vibes were immaculate. Tesla’s stock, today, stands at 311.47/share. That makes it nearly a trillion dollar company, with a price-to-earnings ratio of 152.69. Tesla’s last few quarterly earnings reports have been abysmal, by the way. The company keeps missing its sales targets. And that was before Elon made the brand unbelievably toxic among the segments of the public most likely to purchase an electric car.

I really like his observation that inside every tech company there are really two businesses: the actual business of creating the product or service; and the imaginary business of “building the future”.

The entire piece is worth your time IMO.

Books, etc.

I’m reading this dutifully but without much enjoyment, perhaps because I dislike most of the people who appear in the story. But if you write about the tech industry, that’s a cross you have to bear. Sigh.

My commonplace booklet

In the February 11 edition, the picture of the day was a photograph of the portico of the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge that I had snatched one evening on my way to a college dinner. My interest had been piqued by the illuminated lines from a poem with which I was unfamiliar.

Various readers came to my aid. The first was Kevin Cryan, who wrote to explain that the poem was “Waiting for the Barbarians” by Constantine P. Cavafy.

Last Sunday, I discovered that Andrew Curry had picked up on the image and then proceeded to add more value — as he always manages to do on his terrific blog.

Cavafy was writing just as the forms of the modern European nation state were starting to harden, as the technologies of bureaucracy were being put in place, as states started to insist on travel documents such as passports to cross boundaries.

One of the things the nation state tends to do is to “other” strangers. It is a familiar political strategy. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, published in 1902, captures contemporaneously the sense of this in London.

The great point of the poem, Andrew explained, is that the barbarians never show up. Worse still, they are a completely fictional construct.

In other words, as metaphors go, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ is a poem that stalks the 20th and 21st centuries, It has had a long cultural afterlife, in particular from the later part of the 20th century, when Cavafy’s work was popularised.”

And of course Donald Trump has long traded on the fiction that he was going to build a wall that would keep them out.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Lynk hybrid with 200km electric range.

Interesting arrival. Launching in Europe at a price of Euro 52k. Should eliminate range anxiety for most drivers. Wonder if it’ll be available in the UK. And how long it will take Toyota & Co to catch up.

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Beached

Quote of the Day

”I don’t know what I’m doing, but my incompetence has never stopped my enthusiasm.”

• Woody Allen

(Me too)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan | Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right (LIVE) –

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Looking Ahead To The 19th Century

As the post-war international order dissolves, the big question now is what will replace it. The most convincing idea is that we will move to a world in which several major powers will have ‘Spheres of interest’ with an implicit understanding that each can do what it likes within its zone. I can see four such Spheres: American, Chinese, Russian and (maybe) Indian.

All of which is by way of explaining why I liked this piece in Noema.

The rules-based liberal international order, underwritten and guaranteed for decades by American might, has been consigned to the ashcan of history by the summary defection of its founding architect from its terms and premises.

After only one month in power, Team Trump has fundamentally broken ranks with the long-standing orthodoxy of the Washington establishment on almost every front. Where free trade was once gospel, now it is tariffs. Europeans are considered valuable allies only if they can pay for their own defense, share the ideological disposition of the administration and open their over-regulated markets to make way for the digital dominance of American Big Tech.

Instead of expressing outrage at China’s plans to take Taiwan, Russia’s bloody attempt to seize Ukraine or Israel’s vision of annexing the West Bank, Team Trump is openly considering its own Anschluss of other people’s territory in Greenland, the Panama Canal and even Canada. From what we can tell so far, the president’s idea of any peaceful settlement to these conflicts entails giving the stronger power what it wants.

That the U.S. has now joined the other revisionist powers of China and Russia by baldly asserting sovereigntist self-interest unencumbered by the rules of others portends a world not unlike the 19th century when the great powers carved out exclusive domains of influence.

This is the prospect ahead envisaged by both historian Niall Ferguson and political theorist Francis Fukuyama in conversations last week…

Do read on.

Books, etc.

Screenshot

I read this book by the co-founder of Palantir over last weekend and have written a piece about it that will come out in next Sunday’s Observer. All I’ll say here is that I found it absorbing — and timely, given what’s going on just now.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Waymo is building genuinely autonomous cars (robotaxis) at scale. See this drone footage.

  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 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Les Misérables?

Surely not.

Quote of the Day

”Not all who wander are lost.”

• J.R.R Tolkien

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Humours of Ballyloughlin | Paul Brady & Arty McGlynn

Link

Traditional tune, usually played on Uileann pipes, beautifully rendered on guitars.

Long Read of the Day

 How Europe must respond

If you want a sobering read, then this leading article from the current issue of the Economist is it.

The past week has been the bleakest in Europe since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Ukraine is being sold out, Russia is being rehabilitated and, under Donald Trump, America can no longer be counted on to come to Europe’s aid in wartime. The implications for Europe’s security are grave, but they have yet to sink in to the continent’s leaders and people. The old world needs a crash course on how to wield hard power in a lawless era, or it will fall victim to the new world disorder.

Speaking in Munich last week, America’s vice-president, J.D. Vance, offered a taste of how the home of fine wines, classical architecture and welfare cheques faces humiliation, when he ridiculed Europe as decadent and undemocratic. Its leaders have been excluded from peace talks between the White House and the Kremlin, which began officially in Riyadh on February 18th. However, the unfolding crisis goes far beyond insults and diplomatic niceties.

Mr Trump appears ready to walk away from Ukraine which he falsely blames for the war. Calling its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a “dictator”, Mr Trump warned him that he had “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left”…

I’m a long-time subscriber to the Economist, despite its general penchant for neoliberal ideas, because its reporting is excellent. It’s not often that I agree with its editorial line, but I think it’s spot on about this.

I don’t think it’s behind the magazine’s paywall, but in case I’m wrong you can find a pdf here.

AI and IP theft

Yesterday’s Observer column…

There are decades when nothing happens (as Lenin is – wrongly – supposed to have said) and weeks when decades happen. We’ve just lived through a few weeks like that. We’ve known for decades that some American tech companies were problematic for democracy because they were fragmenting the public sphere and fostering polarisation. They were a worrying nuisance, to be sure, but not central to the polity.

And then, suddenly, those corporations were inextricably bound into government, and their narrow sectional interests became the national interest of the US. Which means that any foreign government with ideas about regulating, say, hate speech on X, may have to deal with the intemperate wrath of Donald Trump or the more coherent abuse of JD Vance.

The panic that this has induced in Europe is a sight to behold. Everywhere you look, political leaders are frantically trying to find ways of “aligning” with the new regime in Washington. Here in the UK, the Starmer team has been dutifully doing its obeisance bit. First off, it decided to rename Rishi Sunak’s AI Safety Institute as the AI Security Institute, thereby “shifting the UK’s focus on artificial intelligence towards security cooperation rather than a ‘woke’ emphasis on safety concerns”, as the Financial Times put it.

But, in a way, that’s just a rebranding exercise – sending a virtue signal to Washington. Coming down the line, though, is something much more consequential…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Tyler Cowen has an interesting blog post setting out his views on the likely adoption rate of AI technology. I asked Claude to summarise his views in a single 300-word paragraph.

Here’s what it produced:

Cowen argues that despite AI’s potential, several structural factors will slow its economic impact. He points to the Baumol-Bowen effect, where less productive sectors become a larger share of the economy over time, meaning many inefficient sectors (especially government-related ones) will adopt AI slowly. Human bottlenecks, particularly regulatory ones like FDA approval processes, will constrain AI’s benefits in areas like drug discovery. The “O-Ring model” suggests that in collaborative settings, the least capable participant (likely humans) will limit overall productivity, meaning AI’s superior capabilities won’t be fully utilized. Additionally, the historically modest correlation between IQ and wages suggests that adding more intelligence to systems may not dramatically boost productivity. Cowen notes that historical technology adoption, like electricity, typically takes longer than experts predict, and GDP growth has remained remarkably stable around 2% despite massive technological changes. Rather than viewing AI through traditional economic models of increased labor, capital, or productivity, Cowen sees it as an alien technology that society must gradually learn to integrate. While remaining optimistic about AI’s technical capabilities, he predicts it will only add about half a percentage point to annual economic growth rates, leading to significant cumulative changes over decades but not dramatic year-to-year transformations.

The key takeaway is that much of the current breathless hype about the transformative potential of the technology is overblown. Like any General-Purpose Technology it has great potential for the long term. Somebody should tell Starmer & Co that it won’t make all that much difference within in a single electoral cycle.

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Manuel

Manuel Castells, the first great sociologist of cyberspace, photographed in 2011 on one of his visits to Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

”The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won’t get much sleep.”

• Woody Allen

I thought of this when watching J.D. Vance speaking last Friday at the Munich Security Conference.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue (Live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1965)

Link

We went to Complete Unknown last night. I was blown away by it. The only problem is that I knew most of the songs and had to be discouraged by my companions from singing along!

This is the nicest version of ‘Baby Blue’ I’ve ever heard.

Long Read of the Day

 Machines of Loving Grace

An extraordinary essay by Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, the AI company responsible for Claude, the LLM I use mostly. The essay is the best attempt I’ve found of a real expert in the field setting out an honest account of the potential upsides of the technology. If he’s a booster he’s the most credible one I’ve encountered.

Here’s how he sets out his pitch:

I think and talk a lot about the risks of powerful AI. The company I’m the CEO of, Anthropic, does a lot of research on how to reduce these risks. Because of this, people sometimes draw the conclusion that I’m a pessimist or “doomer” who thinks AI will be mostly bad or dangerous. I don’t think that at all. In fact, one of my main reasons for focusing on risks is that they’re the only thing standing between us and what I see as a fundamentally positive future. I think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be, just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be.

In this essay I try to sketch out what that upside might look like—what a world with powerful AI might look like if everything goes right. Of course no one can know the future with any certainty or precision, and the effects of powerful AI are likely to be even more unpredictable than past technological changes, so all of this is unavoidably going to consist of guesses. But I am aiming for at least educated and useful guesses, which capture the flavor of what will happen even if most details end up being wrong. I’m including lots of details mainly because I think a concrete vision does more to advance discussion than a highly hedged and abstract one…

Read on. And thanks to Seb Schmoller for reminding me of it.

Books, etc.

This is by an outstanding academic who is currently a visiting associate at our Centre. It puts a bomb under the Promethean myth that AI is here to liberate humankind from dull, dirty and dangerous work. It’s an admirable, sobering, thoroughly-researched account of how AI depends on precarious human labour in the Global South. In that sense, it continues the assault on the ‘immateriality’ of AI that was launched years ago by Kate Crawford in her wonderful Atlas of AI.

My commonplace booklet

Very interesting study of what people use LLMs for.

Here’s a snatch from the Abstract:

We leverage a recent privacy-preserving system … to analyze over four million Claude.ai conversations through the lens of tasks and occupations in the U.S. Department of Labor’s O*NET Database. Our analysis reveals that AI usage primarily concentrates in software development and writing tasks, which together account for nearly half of all total usage. However, usage of AI extends more broadly across the economy, with ∼ 36% of occupations using AI for at least a quarter of their associated tasks. We also analyze how AI is being used for tasks, finding 57% of usage suggests augmentation of human capabilities (e.g., learning or iterating on an output) while 43% suggests automation (e.g., fulfilling a request with minimal human involvement).

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 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Cycle path

London, May 2024

Quote of the Day

”In my next life I want to live backwards. Start out dead and finish off as an orgasm.”

• Woody Allen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Vaughan Williams | The Lark Ascending

Link

I’ve always loved this piece. Just scanning through the comments below the YouTube recording I came on this:

The first time I heard this exquisite piece of music, I was driving a lorry through the Berkshire countryside and it came on Classic FM, and it was requested by a mother who had just buried her four year old son. They used to listen to it together through his illness and he loved it… she said it was now how she imagined him, a beautiful free spirit flying up to heaven. Despite being a big burly trucker, I had to pull over and I sobbed my heart out for ten minutes. I just couldn’t hold it together. Even recounting the story now, sets me off! How can a world that produces such beautiful music be so cruel to such an innocent! Needless to say I have had a soft spot for this piece of music ever since. I can’t listen to it without thinking of that poor bereaved mother and the poor poor child!

Music reaches parts of us that nothing else can touch.

Long Read of the Day

The Great Social Media Diaspora

If you want to understand what has happened to the public sphere of our democracies, then this long, long essay by Renée Diresta is a good place to start. (Busyness alert: you need to give it time.) It’s the best exposition I know of how digital technology — and social media in particular — has irretrievably fragmented the public sphere. And it’s also a sobering explanation of why users fleeing from a particular platform they have come to detest to join another, apparently nicer, platform doesn’t solve the underlying problem of discourse fragmentation. Democracies no longer have any meaningful collective public opinion. They have innumerable publics, each with their own opinions. The social construction of ‘public opinion’ by Gallup — the first polling organisation — in 1935 no longer applies.

For the past two decades, most online discourse has occurred on a handful of social media platforms. Their dominion seemed unshakeable. The question wasn’t when a challenger to Twitter or Facebook might arrive but if one could ever do so successfully. Could a killer new app, or perhaps the cudgel of antitrust, make a difference?

Today, those same platforms still enjoy the largest user bases; massive breakout successes like TikTok are the rare exception, not the rule. However, user exodus to smaller platforms has become increasingly common — especially from X, the once-undisputed home of The Discourse. X refugees have scattered and settled again and again: to Gab and Truth Social, to Mastodon and Bluesky.

What ultimately splintered social media wasn’t a killer app or the Federal Trade Commission — it was content moderation. Partisan users clashed with “referees” tasked with defining and enforcing rules like no hate speech, or making calls about how to handle Covid-19 content. Principles like “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach” — which proposed that “borderline” content (posts that fell into grey areas around hate speech, for example) remain visible but unamplified — attempted to articulate a middle ground. However, even nuanced efforts were reframed as unreasonable suppression by ideologues who recognized the power of dominating online discourse. Efforts to moderate became flashpoints, fueling a feedback loop where online norms fed offline polarization — and vice versa.

And so, in successive waves, users departed for alternatives: platforms where the referees were lax (Truth Social), nearly nonexistent (Telegram) or self-appointed (Mastodon). Much of this fracturing occurred along political lines. Today the Great Decentralization is accelerating, with newspapers of record, Luke Skywalker and others as the latest high-profile refugees to lead fresh retreats…

If you’re pressed for time, Nathan Garedels’s essay, “How Disinformation Deforms Democracy” provides an overview of Diresta’s argument.

Books, etc.

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Just arrived!

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

From Kevin Kelly’s 50 years of travel tips:

Here in brief is the method I’ve honed to optimize a two-week vacation: When you arrive in a new country, immediately proceed to the farthest, most remote, most distant place you intend to reach during the trip. If there is a small village, remote spa, a friend’s farm, or a wild place you plan on seeing on the trip, go there immediately. Do not stop near the airport. Do not rest overnight in the arrival city. Do not pause to acclimate. If at all possible proceed by plane, bus, jeep, car directly to the furthest point without interruption. Make it an overnight journey if you have to. Then once you reach your furthest point, unpack, explore, and work your way slowly back to the big city, wherever your international departure airport is.

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Anyone for music?

One of the joys of living in Cambridge is the amount of live music on offer every week.

Quote of the Day

”Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.”

• Schopenhauer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn and Arty McGlynn | Water under the keel

Link

Long Read of the Day

Trump As Sovereign Decisionist

This is a perceptive summary by Nathan Gardels of how the world has changed as a result of Trump’s re-election.

The impact of this dramatic departure of the United States from being the leading promoter and defender of a liberal internationalist order to the chief architect of its demolition is only just beginning to register worldwide. By definition, if the guarantor of that order is out only to defend and promote its own interests by severing all ties of interdependence, everyone else must follow suit or foolishly expose themselves to vulnerability.

Worth reading because it hammers home that we need to adjust to new realities. If you have any doubt about that need, take a few minutes to read the transcript of J.D. Vance’s speech to the Munich Security Conference last week.

Europe’s long holiday from history is over.

AI Roundheads vs. Tech royalty

Yesterday’s Observer column…

An interesting fault line has opened up in the field of artificial intelligence. Felix Martin, a perceptive Reuters columnist, sees it as a forthcoming civil war. “On one side,” he writes, “are those who strive for artificial general intelligence (AGI), the point where machines match or surpass human capabilities. Let’s call them AI Cavaliers. Facing them are AI Roundheads who are focused on the more mundane goal of solving specific problems as efficiently as possible. Deciding which side to back in this AI civil war will be a defining decision for investors in the world’s hottest technology.”

It’s a colourful metaphor with more than a grain of truth.

Do read the whole article

Books, etc.

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I loved Lyndal Roper’s book on Martin Luther, and so sat up when her new book came out, especially after reading Thomas Meaney’s review in the New York Times.

Here’s an excerpt that struck me:

For Roper, who lived in Berlin in the years after the wall fell, the history of the German Peasants’ War became, if anything, only more urgent in the wake of the revolutions of 1989, when the communist system of Eastern Europe collapsed. Whether “the people” of those revolutions ended up as beneficiaries, and were even the revolution’s prime movers, or whether the gains redounded to a new set of modern princes — in the form of oligarchs — depends on whom you ask.

In the 21st century, however, one thing remains clear: The legacy of the Peasants’ War is still being co-opted for opposite ends. Some of the most recent invocations of the Peasants’ War in Germany have appeared at rallies for the far-right political party, the Alternative for Germany…

Funny thing about history, it keeps coming back to bite us. Just like Trump’s mercantilism.

My commonplace booklet

 How to teach people how to work with AI

Tyler Cowen has had an idea.

Given them some topics to investigate, and have them run a variety of questions, exercises, programming, paper-writing tasks — whatever — through the second or third-best model, or some combination of slightly lesser models.

Have the students grade and correct the outputs of those models. The key is to figure out where the AIs are going wrong.

Then have the best model grade the grading of the students. The professor occasionally may be asked to contribute here as well, depending on how good the models are in absolute terms.

In essence, the students are learning how to grade and correct AI models…

If I were still teaching, I’d be doing something like this. And maybe reading Ethan Mollick’s book first. Oh, and listening to Alison Gopnik on LLMs.

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 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!