Poppy farming
A reminder of what the garden was like before the Great Drought.
Quote of the Day
”Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”
- Groucho Marx
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
J.S. Bach | Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring | Leo Kottke
I once heard him play this at the Cambridge Folk Festival. Magical moment.
Long Read of the Day
Would even an AI disaster on the scale of Hiroshima be enough to make humankind protect itself?
Timothy Garton Ash fears not. Here’s his sombre reasoning
As a matter of fact, everyone from the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, to Pope Leo XIV has been weighing in on the opportunities and dangers of AI, and how to regulate it. Xi insists AI should be “always under human control” (and preferably that of the Chinese Communist party). Appealing explicitly to the “global south”, Beijing has inaugurated a World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation. Meanwhile, the head of the world’s oldest and largest international NGO – the Roman Catholic church – discusses the AI challenge in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity). Either we will build a new tower of Babel, the pope argues, or we will follow the example of the Jewish leader Nehemiah, who got the walls of Jerusalem rebuilt by involving the whole community in the project.
But looking around the world today, I see more Netanyahus than Nehemiahs. With salutary realism, a paper from the British thinktank Chatham House argues that it will take a major crisis to catalyse global coordination of AI governance. Unfortunately, I think even that sober prognosis is too optimistic…
Books, etc.
This is the latest book by the Harvard historian, Jill Lepore. It’s just arrived and I’m looking forward to reading it.
The NYT has an early review of it.
My commonplace booklet
My Observer column on how AIs tend to revert to the average prompted this nice anecdote from John Seeley.
A number of years ago I was given the task of arranging the painting of a large laboratory. A number of people worked in the laboratory, though I did not. Seeking consensus, I thought the researchers should have input into the paint choices.
Several colour schemes were drawn up (I recall 6 or 8) and researchers voted on their preferences. “You’ll get magnolia,” said the savvy department manager. A small number of voting systems were used to evaluate the results. (What you get in an academic environment!). Without fail, all voting systems produced the result magnolia! People lived contentedly with the new paintwork – no love was expressed but people had successfully resisted anything even modestly avant-garde.
C’est la vie artificielle.
Chart of the day
CVE stands for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. It’s basically a naming system for publicly-known computer security flaws. Note the near-vertical increase since the arrival of the Claude Mythos model on the scene.
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