Origins

The Industrial Revolution begins.

Coalbrookdale by Night, Philip James de Loutherbourg, 1801

The painting depicts the Madeley Wood (or Bedlam) furnaces, which belonged to the Coalbrookdale Company from 1776 to 1796. It’s come to symbolize the birth of the Revolution in the Ironbridge Gorge, Shropshire.

Quote of the Day

”Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.”

• John Updike

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Little Feat | Easy to Slip

Link

Long Read of the Day

 A masterpiece of Ryder Cup drama with a truth Donald Trump could never understand

Even if you hate golf this fine report by George Simms about the circus in New York State last weekend might cheer you up.

In his endless benevolence, Donald Trump arrived just before midday, a futile attempt to avoid inconveniencing fans, with one calling it “the most disorganised event I’ve ever been to”. And in a way he was always here, an endless shadow cast by not only the lingering prospect of his arrival but by an event seemingly designed for him, taking time out from his busy schedule of curing autism and failing to end whichever conflict has grabbed his eye this week.

In his home state, in a county which voted for him last year, playing a sport with largely right-leaning fans and overwhelmingly conservative players, this was Trump Day of the Trump Ryder Cup. As both Bryson DeChambeau and the White House Press Secretary have claimed, it would not be happening without him, having averted a minor rail strike. Even European fans now do jingoism through a Trump lens with “Make Europe Great Again” caps and T-shirts depicting Luke Donald in the Oval Office reading: “There’s a new Donald in town.”

(Note for non-golfers: Luke Donald was the captain of the European team that won the cup.)

Books, etc.

Tim Wu’s new book comes out on November 6. It’s about the way tech platforms have become the greatest machines for ‘wealth extraction’ that humanity has ever seen. He thinks that we are heading into a ‘two-class age’ where many industries become divided into two groups: the extractors and their agents on the one side; dependent businesses, consumers and employees on the other. And it’s also about the question that is rarely asked: just what happened to the broad spread of prosperity and democracy many expected to follow the Internet revolution. Instead we’ve wound up with intolerable levels of inequality and rising autocracy.

I’ve read nearly everything Wu has written. His book The Master Switch changed the way I think about digital technology.

My commonplace booklet

I have to give a talk about AI to a non-specialist audience later in the month, so I’ve been collecting examples of what LLMs can (and cannot) do. Here’s one I took from Simon Willison’s terrific blog. He gave Claude Sonnet 4.5 this picture and asked it to describe it:

The machine’s response:

This image shows a large gathering of pelicans crowded together along what appears to be a waterfront or shoreline. The birds are densely packed, creating a chaotic scene with dozens of brown pelicans visible. Their distinctive long bills and pouches are clearly visible among the mass of feathered bodies. In the background, there’s calm water and a dark tree line or forested area. The lighting suggests this was taken during early morning or late afternoon, giving the scene a golden, warm tone. The pelicans appear to be resting or congregating together, which is typical behavior for these colonial seabirds.

Not bad, eh?

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The last rose…?

Quote of the Day

” Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you quit, try.”

• Ernest Hemingway

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Rory Gallagher (&Taste) | I’m Moving On

Link

Long Read of the Day

 ’Til ChatGPT do us part: how chatbots are breaking up marriages

My latest Observer column…

My eye was caught by a vivid headline: “ChatGPT Is blowing up marriages …” it began. Below it was an intriguing piece by Maggie Harrison Dupré based on conversations with more than a dozen people who said that AI chatbots played a key role in the dissolution of their long-term relationships and marriages. “Nearly all of these now-exes,” Dupré writes, “are currently locked in divorce proceedings and often bitter custody battles.” She also reviewed AI chat logs, records of conversations between spouses, social media posts, court records and other documentation.

One of the couples she spoke to had been together for 15 years. “We’ve had ups and downs like any relationship,” said the husband, “and in 2023 we almost split. But we ended up reconciling, and we had, I thought, two very good years. Very close years.”

But then “the whole ChatGPT thing happened”…

Do read the whole piece.

Books, etc.

 Famous IVF memoir had hidden ghostwriter who spun breakthrough into emotional quest, archives reveal

I’ve just come across a fascinating account of the research that reveals how a Welsh poet turned the story of the first ‘test-tube baby’ into a moving narrative that helped draw attention to the women involved.

A Matter of Life, co-authored in 1980 by geneticist Robert Edwards – who spent much of his career at Cambridge and went on to win the Nobel Prize – and gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe, tells how their research led to in vitro fertilisation (IVF). The book is the basis for last year’s Netflix film Joy.

A study of Dannie Abse’s archive in the National Library of Wales by Prof Nick Hopwood from the University of Cambridge reveals how Abse overhauled reams of rough and underwhelming text submitted by the duo to a publisher that had bought the doctors’ story of the “baby of the century” in the hope of a quick bestseller…

Over the weekend we watched Joy, the 2024 movie which was based on the book and shows what a great storyteller can do with the tale of how a momentous scientific advance gets made. We watched it on Netflix. It’s a fabulous movie — fascinating, close to the bone at times and deeply moving. Highly recommended.

My commonplace booklet

One of the eerie things about our current moment is the way many (most?) people in Britain seem to think that what’s going on the US has nothing to do with us. Which is why this report of a speech by Chris Hewett, CEO of the Solar Trade Association, to the Solar & Storage Live trade show in Birmingham the other day, struck a chord.

Having condemned the “malicious lies” spouted against renewables by Donald Trump, Hewett turned his attention to Reform Party.

“Nigel Farage wants to subsidise fracking in Lincolnshire. He wants to send the Welsh working class back down in the coal mines. His sidekick, Richard Tice, has been sending threatening letters to investors in solar and battery sector, saying if Reform were to win power at the national level, it would cancel CfD contracts. He’s actively saying he wants to stop billions of pounds of investment into the UK economy in the energy sector, and the consequence of that would be that Britain remains hooked on expensive oil and gas from petrol states like Russia, like the Middle East, like the US.”

Reform councils are not simply opposing solar farms, Hewett noted. “They are now cancelling solar rooftop projects on public buildings. So again, that means they would rather see schools have high energy bills paid for by the taxpayer, rather than reaping rewards of investments and renewables, which will mean they can employ more teachers. Make no mistake, if Reform get their hands on national in the power national level, they will want to threaten all your jobs,”

Now of course he’s a spokesman for the solar industry preaching to the converted, but still…

Feedback

Thanks to Paul Pearn who, in response to my puzzlement at this year’s fruitfulness of our crab-apple tree, wrote:

John, it’s a simple answer. If the tree is producing fruit then there is not enough energy to grow fruiting spurs for the next year.

So it was a sign of drought-induced stress.

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Red Plenty

Last year our crab-apple tree produced almost no fruit. This year it’s exactly the opposite. We’ve been wondering why. Last year we had a dry Spring and a wet Summer. This year’s been the exact opposite, with many trees being clearly stressed by the drought.

Quote of the Day

”Every day, Computers are making people easier to use”

• Dave Karpf

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Sharon Shannon, Donal Lunny | Goodbye

Link

Quite an assembly of talent on that stage in Washington.

Long Read of the Day

Argentina on two steaks a day

Nice piece of travel writing by the inimitable Maciej Ceglowski.

Here’s a sample.

The classic beginner’s mistake in Argentina is to neglect the first steak of the day. You will be tempted to just peck at it or even skip it altogether, rationalizing that you need to save yourself for the much larger steak later that night. But this is a false economy, like refusing to drink water in the early parts of a marathon. That first steak has to get you through the afternoon and half the night, until the restaurants begin to open at ten; the first steak is what primes your system to digest large quantities of animal protein, and it’s the first steak that buffers the sudden sugar rush of your afternoon ice cream cone. The midnight second steak might be more the glamorous one, standing as it does a good three inches off the plate, but all it has to do is get you up and out of the restaurant and into bed (for the love of God, don’t forget to drink water).

The afternoon steak is the workhorse steak, the backbone of the day…

Read on. He’s a really interesting guy — an uber-geek who’s also a gifted writer. And he’s the creator of an essential tool for my workflow — Pinboard.in — one of those rare online services that has an honest business model.

Books, etc.

I’ve been reading Dan Wang’s book about China and the US, in which — of course — there’s a lot about Apple. This whetted my appetite for Patrick McGee’s deep dive into how exactly Apple managed to achieve what most Western companies couldn’t — to have a major manufacturing operation in China without having to enter into a joint partnership with a local company. If you want to get a feeling for the interesting complexity of this, then Nicholas Colin’s podcasted conversation with McGee is a great place to start.

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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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