After the rain

Donegal, September.

Quote of the Day

”If you want to read a perfect book there is only one way: write it.”

• Ambrose Bierce

Tried that. Didn’t work.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Little Walter | Blues With a Feeling

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Blank Page Revolution –

Really nice essay by by Steven Johnson about the history of notebooks, a subject so dear to his heart that he led the project at Google that created NotebookLM (which IMHO is the most useful use of LLMs yet invented). He’s long been an advocate for the intellectual rewards of jotting things down, and is always worth reading.

Here’s a sample from the essay:

A few years ago, in my book Wonderland, I wrote about the astonishing flourishing of intellectual and commercial life in Baghdad during the Abbasid Caliphate, starting around the year 800 CE. The city was arguably the greatest single innovation hub on the planet at the time, a place where you could find magically lifelike automatons, oil-based streetlights, and state-of-the-art aqueducts. In Wonderland, I’d written about the legendary House of Wisdom, which was a strange hybrid of library, translation bureau, and Bell Labs-style R&D lab, where classic works from the Greco-Roman age were translated and stored in what was almost certainly the most comprehensive library in the world at that time.

This explosion of intellectual energy didn’t just appear out of thin air. The new ideas, I argued, were themselves flowing through the city along with silks and spices from the East, because Baghdad sat at the nexus of the global trade routes of the age. But I’d missed one of the key technological platforms that made all that creativity possible: the arrival of relatively cheap, mass-produced paper, an invention that had made its way west along the Silk Road from China.

The Abbasids embraced paper with an astonishing fervor, with their vast libraries and entire streets filled with booksellers, a good six centuries before Gutenberg. But these weren’t “books” in the way we think of them today. The Abbasids had mastered the codex format—binding individual sheets of paper together, just like a modern paperback, which was a massive improvement over traditional scrolls. But they didn’t have movable type. There was no way to mass-produce these texts. Every single copy had to be transcribed by hand, a painstaking process that made each volume a significant investment, even with the cheaper paper.

But there’s another branching path on that evolutionary tree: paper made casual, personal notetaking far easier and far cheaper. And that casual notetaking didn’t just stay in Baghdad…

Books, etc.

In thinking about what will be left after the AI bubble bursts, one of the images that came to mind were huge, abandoned aluminium sheds (aka data centres) filled with obsolete GPUs, which led me down an entertaining rabbit-hole about analogous obsolescent hulks in contemporary landscapes. In no time I alighted upon the story of the rise and fall of the shopping mall as told by Andrea Lange — and then to interesting conversations with colleagues about the social functions that shopping malls inadvertently played in teenage culture for quite a while. Which is how I stumbled on “Meet Me by the Blogroll”, a thoughtful meditation by an esteemed former colleague, Martin Weller, on whether the blogosphere might also have an analogous lifecycle to the mall.

Which only goes to show that T.S. Eliot was right:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

(“Little Gidding”, Four Quartets, 1943)

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Formal setting

A lobby in a favourite hotel.

Quote of the Day

”Once, when a British Prime Minister sneezed, men half a world away would blow their noses. Now when a British Prime Minister sneezes nobody else will even say ‘Bless You’.”

• Bernard Levin

Came to mind while watching the Trump-in-London circus last week.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jerry Garcia | Deal

Link

Long Read of the Day

  are you high-agency or an NPC?

Fabulous piece of onsite anthropology by Jasmine Sun in San Francisco on how Silicon Valley’s AI boom has created a new social hierarchy based on perceived human agency and adaptability, sparking both swagger and anxiety among tech workers.

As Meghan O’Gieblyn writes in God, Human, Animal, Machine, human exceptionalism is a stubborn beast. We prize ourselves not on a fixed set of traits but on having whatever other beings don’t. For ages, smarts were what separated man from his fellow mammal. Cheetahs may have speed and chimpanzees strength, but inventing fire and writing was what put humans on top.

Now, LLMs are toppling traditional intelligence benchmarks one by one: the Turing Test, then the LSAT, then the IMO Gold. They can answer PhD-level economics questions and creative writing prompts. But today’s computer-use agents can barely share a Google Doc without human intervention. LLMs can draft an essay pitch but not come up with the concept, give you a recipe for a bioweapon but not the savvy to acquire the ingredients. If agency combines autonomy (“the capacity to formulate goals in life”) plus efficacy (“the ability and willingness to pursue those goals”), AI in 2025 is sorely lacking in both.2

It turns out the secret of human civilization was not any particular cognitive creation but our unending flexibility. To hit a wall and build a ladder to climb it, to design cars instead of faster horses, to come up with new levels of Maslow’s hierarchy to summit once we’ve satisfied the first.

For now, agency is still a human moat.

Do read it for a riveting picture of a segment of society that has become untethered from reality.

The ‘three-sickbag spectacle’: tech bros at the court of Trump 2.0

My latest Observer column…

If you’re as puzzled as I am by what’s going on at the moment, then Antonio Gramsci, the great Italian Marxist philosopher and political theorist, is your man. He spent 11 years in jail at Mussolini’s pleasure, during which time he wrote a remarkable series of “prison notebooks” containing his reflections on Italian politics, culture and history, as well as broader considerations of ideology, hegemony and revolutionary strategy.

There’s a passage in Notebook 3 that seems particularly relevant now. It’s about what Gramsci called an “interregnum” – a period of crisis “which consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”.

Eight months into Trump 2.0, it’s pretty clear that we in the west are deep into an interregnum of our own, and morbid symptoms are everywhere on view. Here are a few, in no particular order, for your leisurely contemplation.

Exhibit A is the dinner Donald Trump hosted at the White House for the tech titans of Silicon Valley. The assembled masters of the universe (Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai, Bill Gates, Greg Brockman, Sergey Brin, Safra Catz, Tim Cook and sundry others) were there for obvious purposes: to pay homage to the supreme leader, to laud his wisdom and to boast about how much money they were preparing to invest to Make (His) America Great Again. The deeper message was that the most powerful corporations in the world are signed up to Trump 2.0. It made for a three-sickbag spectacle of which the only redeeming defect was that Elon Musk was nowhere to be seen…

Read on

Linkblog

How an old newspaper in Hiroshima is keeping the memory of survivors alive Link

Hiroshima 11:00 on 6 August 1945. Photographer: Yoshito Shigematsu

A reminder that journalism is sometimes the first draft of history. The full archive is here.

Feedback

My recent Observer column about AI and the em-dash controversy, prompted Steven Leighton to point me to an intriguing essay on the subject by a former proofreader, Nitsuh Abebe, in the New York Times Magazine.

Large language models are trained on whole mountains of human-generated prose, including far more old printed matter than you or I will ever absorb. We humans ask them to mimic our writing, but we do not always specify — may not even realize — that what we mean by “writing” now includes the practically oral communication we lob through our screens all day. Then we scan the results, find telltale traces of books and magazines, and begin to fixate on those artifacts as faintly robotic. The machines are vacuously reflecting our own traditions back at us. What we may not realize yet is that we are sliding toward new ones.

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Here comes everybody!

On a stall in a Provencal market.

Quote of the Day

”The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

• Dorothy Parker* 

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Waterboys | A Song for the Life

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Quiet Triumph of King Charles III

Lovely New York Times OpEd (Gift article) by Tina Brown on the day the Trump circus reached the House of Windsor.

Windsor is also in many ways a more apt venue to host the bellicose second-term Mr. Trump. It’s a fortress as well as a royal home, originally erected by William the Conqueror to repel invaders in the 11th century. The president will proceed past dour displays of medieval pikes, eye-gouging lances and the thrusting spears of lethal halberds.

Mr. Trump, who just rebranded the Defense Department as the Department of War, might get a kick out of the shining spectacle of King Henry VIII’s massive suit of armor, which lacks only the obese Tudor king’s monumental metal codpiece. (It’s a pity Mr. Trump can’t try the armor on; he and the despotic Henry have in common a deep affinity for gold, profound germophobia and a fondness for the plunderous disruption of sacred institutions.)

Do read it. Brown has always been a sharp observer of the British Royals, and has published two interesting books about them — The Palace Papers and The Diana Chronicles.

Books, etc.

I’m reading a proof copy of a remarkable forthcoming book about AI by a young Oxford economist, Maximilian Kasy. What’s refreshing about it is that instead of getting entangled in the weeds of AI technology it goes to the root of two existential problems that AI poses for democratic societies: (1) who reaps the benefits of its deployment? And (2) who decides how it should be deployed?

Kasy’s title is a neat play on a venerable left-wing principle. Karl Marx (and radical socialist movements across the globe — including for many decades the British Labour Party) were (rightly) obsessed with the question of who owns the means of production — the mines, mills, factories, shipbuilding yards, etc. that constituted the physical infrastructure of an industrialised society. But AIs don’t produce anything tangible; they’re basically machines for making predictions and their potential power stems largely from that capacity. So a good contemporary Marxist question is: who will own (and control) these means of prediction?

The book comes out next month.

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Rock solid

Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) once observed that “The inhabitants of Crete have more history than they can consume locally”. Whenever we go to Donegal, I feel that its lucky inhabitants likewise have a surplus of interesting geology.

Quote of the Day

How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up.”

• Philip Larkin

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Van Morrison | Purple Heather

Link

Long Read of the Day

America’s Coming Plutocracy

Compelling essay by Francis Fukuyama triggered by the news that on September 5, Tesla’s board had announced an incentive package for Elon Musk that offered him a trillion dollars if he met some very ambitious goals for Tesla’s stock.

Tesla’s trillion-dollar pay package to Elon Musk was ostensibly intended to keep Musk focused on improving Tesla’s performance without being distracted by politics, his other businesses, or his relentless postings on X. The offer has already been criticized on business grounds. It seems very unlikely that Tesla’s stock can actually hit the price targets set in the deal, given the damage that Musk has already done to the brand with his political activities, and the increasing competition from China as well as legacy car makers who are moving into the electric vehicle space. Future growth will depend on untested technologies like robotaxis and humanoid robots, where there will be competition, technological setbacks, and uncertain demand.

But what is offensive about this offer to anyone concerned about the future of democracy is its sheer size. The U.S. federal budget deficit for this year is expected to come in at $1.9 trillion, and the Republicans’ Big Beautiful Bill is expected by the Congressional Budget Office to add another $3-4 trillion over the next decade. So if Musk wins this payout, he could single-handedly close a significant part of the national deficit, and personally fund all the Medicare, early childhood education, foreign aid, and other programs being cut as part of the BBB’s effort to minimize the deficit. Given that U.S. GDP last year was about $28 trillion, the payout implies that one man contributed more than 3.5 percent of the nation’s total output, while the other 340 million of us produced the remaining 96.5 percent.

Underlying the Tesla board’s offer is the view that a single individual can create a trillion dollars of new wealth. This feeds into the Ayn Randian narrative that progress is made by individual geniuses who spring up out of the earth like gods and bring benefits to the rest of us…

The personal wealth that the tech industry has produced for a small number of individuals sets our era apart from the era of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, Vanderbilt et al. They were, of course, fabulously rich and powerful. But none of them had wealth than rivalled the GNP of nation states. This won’t end well.

My commonplace booklet

Striking quote by Nick Carr:

”One way to think about AI-based text-generation tools like OpenAI’s GPT-3 is as clairvoyants. They are mediums that bring the words of the past into the present in a new arrangement. GPT-3 is not creating text out of nothing, after all. It is drawing on a vast corpus of human expression and, through a quasi-mystical statistical procedure (no one can explain exactly what it is doing), synthesizing all those old words into something new, something intelligible to and requiring interpretation by a living interlocutor. When we talk to GPT-3, we are, in a very real way, communing with the dead.”

“The medium is the Medium”

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Street scene: Venice

Quote of the Day

“Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.”

• John Updike

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Nina Simone | The Last Rose Of Summer | 1964 in New York

Link

Long Read of the Day

 What Will Remain After the AI and Crypto Bubbles?

An interesting Project Syndicate essay by William H. Janeway,

Science advances, Max Planck famously observed, “one funeral at a time”. By the same token, as Carlota Perez shrewdly observed many years ago, economies advance, one technology bubble at a time. So the key question to ask about every bubble is: what will be left after it bursts? The railway bubble of the late 19th century left, not just a trail of bankrupt companies, but also a physical infrastructure that turned the continental United States into a single market (and enabled a mail order industry. Likewise, when the 1995-2000 dot-com bubble burst it left behind it lots of dark fibre-optic cable in its wake — an infrastructure that enabled the ubiquitous connectivity that enabled the cloud-computing and smartphone explosions post 2007.

Which explains why the title of Bill’s latest essay made me sit up. He usefully points out that we are currently enmeshed in not one but two speculative bubbles: the cryptocurrency market, which mirrors historical bubbles like the Dutch tulip mania; and the AI sector, which is a more traditional technology-driven bubble.

The first law of financial bubbles is this: it is easy to know when you are in one, but difficult to know when it will pop. Still, those who study the issue have identified three signals that tend to mark the beginning of the end. The first is when the demand curve inverts, meaning that demand increases as prices rise. …The second signal is when the exponential increase in price calls forth new supplies as many others try to get in on the action. Even in the digital world, it takes longer to generate a new asset than it does for the price to move. In the case of crypto, price moves are instantaneous; similarly, private equity markets move much faster than anyone hoping to build a new large language model (LLM) can. Finally, in the terminal stages of a bubble, demand is increasingly fed by uninformed, amateur investors.

All three signals, he says, “appear to be flashing red in the crypto and AI markets”.

Yep.

Range-anxiety is really about infrastructure

Yesterday’s Observer column…

By now, every electric vehicle [EV] owner knows the drill. The moment you mention your car, the interrogation begins: “What’s the range?” Any reply north of 250 miles is greeted with amused incredulity. In vain you point out that the average car in the UK travels only 15 to 19 miles a day – depending on which survey you rely on – and that, in any event, cars spend most of their lives parked. But range anxiety persists: the primal (largely male) fear of being stranded after your battery runs out of juice.

Most of us are unimpressed by any cited statistics, which are, after all, only averages, and we’ve all heard cautionary tales of people who drowned in rivers that were on average only 6in deep.

What, for example, asked one interrogator, “if I suddenly had to drive to Edinburgh to pick up my mother-in-law?” Well, I explained patiently (as you do), then you’d have to charge the car en route at a charging station. “Yeah,” came the response, “and where do you find one of those?”

Which is a reflection of the fact that, although more than a fifth of new cars sold in the UK this year were EVs, many internal combustion engine (ICE) drivers have never seen – or at any rate noticed – an EV charging station.

So maybe range anxiety is the wrong term; it’s infrastructure anxiety that we should be talking about. That’s why ICE drivers don’t worry about the range of their vehicles: in the end, wherever they are, there’s always a petrol station within reach, even in rural areas…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Geoff Hinton on how humans should relate to AIs

Link

Interesting throughout. And in an odd way reminds me of the way Alison Gopnik thinks about the relationship between AI and humans.

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Beach no uitable

Sign on the dunes of a lovely Donegal beach.

Quote of the Day

“I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.”

• John Updike

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Randy Newman | Political Science

Link

The ultimate satirical take on nuclear superiority.

Long Read of the Day

Process knowledge is crucial to economic development

Henry Farrell’s review of Dan Wang’s book is a great read (as is the book itself, as I’m discovering). Here’s how Henry’s piece concludes, but the entire review is worth your time.

If Dan is right, we need to understand how to build up and maintain process knowledge, as an essential element of economic development, and even the good society. China has done pretty well at this, without necessarily planning to, but as Dan suggests in passing, it is less certain in its capacity to maintain it. The United States used to have it, but has shifted its focus to other things. Both societies are organized around large scale abstractions – the Leninist engineering state, and the formalizations of administrative law. Creating and maintaining process knowledge requires us to foster different kinds of institutions and interactions, which we’ve barely begun to think about in the changed context of the mid-21st century.

My commonplace booklet

Woz: ‘I Am the Happiest Person Ever’

Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, has just turned 75. He’s one of my heroes, partly because he’s. always seemed uncorrupted by wealth. Which is why I liked this excerpt from Jon Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog:

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.

After which Gruber commented:

Apple never would have existed without Woz, and Woz personified “insanely great” engineering. He never contributed anything technical to Apple after the Apple II in the early 1980s, but, man, so much of his spirit and personality is infused in Apple’s DNA. He’s a hero to so many people who went on to work at Apple, and to so many of us on the outside too. The two Steves were so very different in so many ways, yet at heart, both exemplified that intersection between technology and the liberal arts.

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

David’s

Along with Shakespeare and Company in Paris, and Paludan in Copenhagen, David’s in Cambridge is one of the world’s loveliest bookshops. The apartment above it is where John Maynard Keynes and his wife Lydia lived when they were in Cambridge. (As a married couple, I guess they couldn’t live in his college, King’s), though I guess the college owned the apartment (and probably the entire city block.). Anyway, it’s a delightful place if you’re a bookish type.

Quote of the Day

”Whom the mad would destroy, first they make gods.”

• Bernard Levin

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jerry Garcia | Don’t You Let Deal Go Down

Link

Long Read of the Day

 america against china against america

Fascinating essay by Jasmine Sun, a smart blogger who describes herself as doing anthropology in the tech industry centred on Silicon Valley. This is an account of a visit she and some colleagues recently made to China hoping “to see China’s technological achievements firsthand”.

Here’s a sample:

Chinese engineers also seem more practical than their American counterparts. They’re here to build tech and make money; risk management is for bureaucrats; policy is only relevant insofar as it helps or hurts your work. This is something I think Westerners often get wrong. If you live in a single-party state, you are, on average, less ideological yourself. The politics have already been decided—no point wasting extra cycles coming up with something new.

Overall, I left my conversations with Chinese technologists feeling real admiration: they faced unimaginable uphill battles from US restrictions and a competitive domestic market. Low margins and a thin capital environment don’t stop people from shipping high-quality work. Sure, such rhetoric could be performative chest-puffing. But their mindset was locked in. One could argue that Chinese are trained their whole lives for this—competition only makes them stronger. As Charles put it: They had the fucking juice.

It’s a long read, but consistently interesting because she’s such a sharp observer That’s the anthropologist for you, I guess. I liked many of her small insights. Example for conversations with Chinese people who came back from the US “For some I spoke with,” she writes, “I sensed that the quality of life gap made them more skeptical of liberal democracy. The Chinese system does stupid things, but so does America, they implied. At least the trains work.”

It was also interesting to read it alongside Dan Wang’s new book.

My commonplace booklet

Tilting at Windmills

There is one respect (and one only) in which Trump reminds me of Cervantes’s hero, Don Quixote: both are hostile to windmills. Don Q saw them as giants rather than machines. Trump has a deep and irrational hatred of them because they threaten the fossil fuel industries to which he is viscerally attached. But the really funny thing about his tweet, according to Paul Krugman, is that New Jersey has no windmills. After taking office, he promised to halve electricity prices. Currently they’re going up, partly because of the demands of tech companies and AI — and possibly also because of the stress placed on the grid by crypto, in which Trump has a massive stake. Truly, you couldn’t make this stuff up.

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!