I Protest
A lone demonstrator outside the old Chinese Embassy in London in the winter of 2014.
Quote of the Day
The first step in AI enterprise deployment was giving everyone Copilot, which mostly failed and is continuing to fail. The next step was pilots and trials to find and build point solutions and individual use cases. Almost all big companies are doing this, and it can work up to a point, but outside of some very specific industries (say, law), buying or building pieces of software one at a time is unlikely to move the needle for the entire company. To do that, you would need to rethink and reengineer whole workflows, processes, and, indeed, entire functions. You have to move beyond using the new thing as just doing more of the old thing.
That isn’t something that any big company does quickly – it takes time even to work out what you might want to do, and it involves a lot of work in working out what the process should be, and then going out and plugging it all together. That creates a paradox, if you like, that automation requires a lot of manual labour.
- Benedict Evans
He’s one of the best tech analysts around, with a knack for going right to the nub of the matter.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Abdullah Ibrahim & Ekaya | Water from an Ancient World
Long Read of the Day
Context-collapse and its implications
This transcript of a conversation between Derek Thompson and University of Chicago philosopher Agnes Callard made me sit up because it was about a question which has bothered me for a long time: why is there so much negativity around? There are lots of simplistic explanations for this — for example the journalistic mindset that bad news is the only kind of news that the public likes to read, see or hear. (It’s often expressed in the mantra “If it Bleeds, it Leads.”). Mostly these explanations boil down to the view that our world-views are largely shaped by the media ecosystem in which we live and breathe.
What’s interesting about this long conversation is that Callard has an overarching theory about how negativity invariably triumphs. Midway in the conversation Thompson has a go at summing up the story so far:
For most of human history, people judged norms based on local context. A home had its own rules, a cathedral its own rules, and a classroom or bar or funeral parlor had its own rules. But now it is almost like we are constantly living in universal rooms, and the universal room we occupy is assumed to have universal values and universal norms. That has specific implications. First, rather than talk about what is good, which is context-dependent, we tend to focus about universal truths, and it’s easier to talk about universal bads than goods, so people focus on negativity. Two, character is context-dependent, so we talk less about character and more about its universalist equivalent, which is identity.
There’s a third implication that we should discuss. If everyone is on the same comparable plane, the same evaluative field, then comparison itself becomes a more inextricable part of life.
It worth reading the whole piece, though. It’s also a reason why we need theories in our attempts to understand complex issues, even if — as in this case — her theory is unfalsifiable, which means Karl Popper would have given it a thumbs-down!
Books, etc.
Oddly, this might turn out to be the book of the year because of Christopher’s forthcoming movie adaptation. It’s an immensely readable translation. My copy came with nicely rough-edged pages — which gave it an antique feel.
My commonplace booklet
For me, one of the best things about the World Cup has been my Observer colleague Rory Smith’s daily dispatches on it. Here he is on Monday, thinking ahead to the semi-finals:
And then there is England against Argentina, two teams that encapsulate exactly what football is: entirely irrational, a beautiful and inexplicable chaos, defined not by strategy or tactics or even necessarily talent but driven by a self-belief so deep-seated it borders on delusion, an iron refusal even to countenance defeat, and a sense of destiny so potent that it could be used to start whole religions.
It is no good trying to work out which of these teams is favourite: an Argentina side that seems to need to stand on the edge of the abyss simply to feel alive or an England team that has played what you would call ‘well’ for precisely 75 minutes in this whole tournament and that is now held together by sticky-tape, fumes and Jude Bellingham’s bottomless Madridismo.
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