Non-musical chairs
I keep thinking that I must do something about these aged chairs, which have stood outside through wind, hail and rain for many years. There’s something touching about their quiet endurance, and now I need to make amends. Sanding them down and a coat or two of paint or preservative is the least I can do.
Quote of the Day
”The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.”
- Erich Fromm
## Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Sharon Shannon | Blackbird | Live at Dolans
She’s a charismatic musician who lights up every room she enters.
Long Read of the Day
Sketching the new dysto-utopian world with massive presence of artificial intelligence
If you want to know what the world might be like if the techlords of Silicon Valley get their way, then this essay by the economist Branko Milanovic is just the ticket.
(Spoiler alert: there’s no good news here. And yet democracies could stop it happening if they got their acts together.)
Sample:
The third issue is whether AI would create a significant surplus population. I prefer to use the term surplus population to a more neutral term of higher unemployment because it reflects better what may be the effects of a general purpose technology. It might create people who are basically unemployable and whose skills belong to a revolved era. These may be skills and knowledge that are entirely made redundant by the deployment of the AI; or people whose skills require a “retooling” for the needs of a new economy that would take five or more years. In either case, such people are over a medium- to long-term a surplus population. If the surplus population becomes large, for example reaching 15 or 20 percent of the labor force it would create political problems. The issue will then be how to solve this political problem. It may be dealt within the existing system of unemployment benefits with the proviso that in the case of the surplus population unemployment benefits might run for years rather than for six or nine months as they do nowadays. Or through, as many people argue, universal guaranteed income. Both would require a change in the way the welfare system is organized and funded. We would have to accept the possibility of people who would never work during their lifetime or might work for very little time in some subaltern occupations.
Money transfers however do not eliminate the political issue of a large surplus population. It would be naïve to believe that simply giving people money to survive would make them happy. Surplus population could create a permanent pool of malcontents who would be politically difficult to handle, a malleable population who would be there to be exploited and used by political operators. The very presence of a large group of people who have nothing to do and lots of free time to plot rebellions would by itself be politically destabilizing.
“Surplus population” is an interesting euphemism. It basically means people who have little or no economic value
Books, etc.
I was blown away by the Economist’s Tocqueville Road Trippodcast, and particularly by some of the excerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville’s own account of his journey through the New World, that I felt ashamed that I’d never read it. So, guess what, when I opened my eyes on the morning of my birthday, there it was — all 722 pages of it! And, rather to my astonishment, it’s an entrancing read. He was such a perceptive observer of the country to which he had been dispatched to see what all this democracy stuff was about.
My commonplace booklet
From the Borowitz Report…
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report). Seeking relief from the latest tariffs slapped on his nation’s goods, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told Donald J. Trump on Tuesday that the orange air blanketing regions of the United States was intended as a “spectacular tribute” to the US president.
“We Canadians were thinking of something special we could give you for your birthday, and this is what we came up with,” Carney said.
“We thought that turning the skies above Washington orange would be a spectacular tribute to you, much as the Reflecting Pool is an amazing tribute to Greenland,” he added.
After Trump agreed to drop the tariffs, Carney thanked him, adding, “I would urge you to go outside and breathe in as much of that beautiful orange air as you can.”
Linkblog
We do the Irish Times cryptic crossword every morning and are often puzzled by the expressions that come as solutions to clues. Yesterday, the solution to the clue “Man will hide outside unfinished fort as quickly as possible” (4,3,7) was “Hell for leather”. It’s an expression I knew from my childhood onwards, but how did it originate?
Answer:
Screenshot
So that snippet has now been added to the warehouse of useless information known as my brain.
Errata
In my piece about Rory Smith’s essay on the England-Argentina match, I mistyped Rory’s point about England inviting Argentina to spend the match camped “20 years from their goal”. So many hanks to Niall O’Sullivan for pointing out that the distance was measured in yards, not years.
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