Dolmen
Poolnabrone burial ground in the Burren in Co. Clare.
Quote of the Day
” Success is having to worry about every damn thing in the world, except money.”
- Johnny Cash*
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Beethoven| Violin Sonata No. 5 in F Major, Op. 24 “Spring”: IV. Rondo. Allegro ma non troppo | Itzhak Perlman and Vladimir Ashkenazy
Long Read of the Day
A.I. May Be Just Kind of Ordinary
Nice NYT essay by David Wallace-Wells on the way public sentiment about AI is subtly changing.
In 2023 — just as ChatGPT was hitting 100 million monthly users, with a large minority of them freaking out about living inside the movie “Her” — the artificial intelligence researcher Katja Grace published an intuitively disturbing industry survey that found that one-third to one-half of top A.I. researchers thought there was at least a 10 percent chance the technology could lead to human extinction or some equally bad outcome.
A couple of years later, the vibes are pretty different. Yes, there are those still predicting rapid intelligence takeoff, along both quasi-utopian and quasi-dystopian paths. But as A.I. has begun to settle like sediment into the corners of our lives, A.I. hype has evolved, too, passing out of its prophetic phase into something more quotidian — a pattern familiar from our experience with nuclear proliferation, climate change and pandemic risk, among other charismatic megatraumas…
An interesting piece throughout. He’s a perceptive writer and I wonder if he’s picking up intimations that the AI bubble is beginning to leak air. Anyway, worth a read.
My commonplace booklet
The U.S. government is forcing citizens to spend up to $10 billion by 2030—not on clean energy, but on keeping uneconomic coal plants alive. Utilities had already planned to close them. Now, the Department of Energy is blocking retirements, locking in higher bills and more pollution.
At the same time, the administration is trying to strip $7 billion from Solar for All—a program designed to bring rooftop solar to millions of low-income families.
This isn’t about “energy security.” It’s corruption: public money moved from the future to the past, from health to harm, from science to denial.
Feedback
Thanks to John Darch and Hugh Taylor for spotting that the car with all the bicycles in Monday’s edition couldn’t have been on the M5. It was in fact on the A14.
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