The silence of the grave

A photograph taken on Saturday afternoon in the beautiful old churchyard where my beloved Sue lies buried. Her death from cancer in August 2002 left me and our two young children devastated. We’ve recovered as best we can, but for us, August is still a sombre month.

Quote of the Day

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

• Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Wailin’ Jennys | Bird Song

Link

Long Read of the Day

Think before you post

An interesting blog post by Ed West, which makes for uncomfortable reading, not least because it highlights the inconsistency (and possible injustices) of sentencing policy in the British justice system, and partly because of the way that stupid or naive users of Twitter/X get fingered and punished while the Great Enabler of toxic misinformation, Elon Musk, goes scot free (and is fawned upon by a former British Prime Minister).

Julie Sweeney had spent a ‘quiet, sheltered life in Cheshire’ for most of her 53 years, living in the village of Church Lawton caring for her sick husband the past decade.

She had never been in trouble with the law before, but reading the news on July 31 about the clear-up at Southport mosque, Sweeney posted on Facebook: ‘It’s absolutely ridiculous. Don’t protect the mosque. Blow the mosque up with the adults in it.’

For this she will spend 15 months in HMP Styal, a prison notorious for its menace, violence and self-harm. She cried as she was taken down, saying only ‘thank you, your honour’.

As he jailed Sweeney, Judge Stephen Everett said: ‘You should have looked at the news with horror, like right minded people. Instead, you chose to take part in stirring up hatred. It was a truly terrible threat.’ Although she had no intention of taking part in violence, ‘so called keyboard warriors like her, have to learn to take responsibility for their inflammatory and disgusting language’. A letter from her husband did not sway the judge’s heart.

You get the drift. Read on.

Books, etc.

The Best Books on the Politics of Information

Transcript of a fabulous interview by Sophie Roell of the political scientist Henry Farrell on the five key books he would choose for building a curriculum for a course on ‘the politics of information’. In the case of each, Henry explains its significance — and outlines the main thrust of its argument — with insight and conceptual clarity.

The books are:

1. Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
2. The Market System by Charles Lindblom
3. The Sciences of the Artificial by Herbert Simon
4. Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Wehl and Posner
5. Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

Of these, I’ve read only #1 and #3.

It’s worth reading the transcript just to why Henry thinks each book is significant. For me, the most surprising thing was that he puts Uncanny Valley in the same league as Red Plenty. Which means that now I have to read the latter!

If Google’s monopoly is broken, it will be good for consumers – and the company too

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Earlier this month, a district court in Washington DC handed down a judgment in an antitrust case that has shaken up the tech industry. In a 286-page opinion, Judge Amit Mehta announced his conclusion. “After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”

Now I know that for normal, well-adjusted people, antitrust cases are an excellent antidote to insomnia, but stay tuned for a moment because this is a really big deal. Apart from anything else, it shows that an ancient legal warhorse, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, still has teeth. And to see it successfully deployed to bring an overbearing tech company to heel is a delight. After all, it was the statute that in 1911 broke up John D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil as well as American Tobacco, and AT&T in 1982. It was also used to prosecute Microsoft in 1998…

Do read the whole piece

Linkblog

OK, I know you’re busy. But if you have a spare 35 minutes and need cheering up, then can I respectfully suggest you make a coffee and watch this edition of the Daily Show on how Donald Trump can’t get over the fact that he’s not now campaigning against Joe Biden.

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Evolution

Of one thing at least we can be sure: ‘soapy Sam’ would not have approved of the graphic.

Quote of the Day

With the birth of the artist came the inevitable afterbirth… the critic.”

• Mel Brooks

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Gustav Mahler | Fifth Symphony, Adagietto | Leonard Bernstein and the Wiener Phil

Link

The symphony was performed at the BBC Proms last night, with Mark Elder conducting the Hallé orchestra.

Footnote Bernstein once gave an intriguing talk at Harvard on the subject of ambiguity in the piece, which convinced me that I wasn’t cut out to be a musician.

Long Read of the Day

Vivian Maier, the Reclusive Nanny Who Secretly Became One of the Best Street Photographers of the 20th Century 

Lovely piece by Ellen Wexler in The Smithsonian about an extraordinary photographer.

It’s a great story.

Vivian Maier took more than 150,000 photographs as she scoured the streets of New York and Chicago. She rarely looked at them; often, she didn’t even develop the negatives. Without any formal training, she created a sprawling body of work that demonstrated a wholly original way of looking at the world. Today, she is considered one of the best street photographers of the 20th century.

Maier’s photos provide audiences with a tantalizing peek behind the curtain into a remarkable mind. But she never intended to have an audience. A nanny by trade, she rarely showed anyone her prints. In her final years, she stashed five decades of work in storage lockers, which she eventually stopped paying for. Their contents went to auction in 2007.

Many of Maier’s photos ended up with amateur historian John Maloof, who purchased 30,000 negatives for about $400. In the years that followed, he sought out other collectors who had purchased boxes from the same lockers. He didn’t learn the photographer’s identity until 2009, when he found her name scrawled on an envelope among the negatives…

My hunch is that if she knew how famous and celebrated she has become, she’d be appalled!

Google’s wrong answer to the threat of AI

Yesterday’s Observer column:

As enshittification unfolds, the experience of a platform’s hapless users steadily and inexorably deteriorates. But most of them put up with it because of inertia and the perceived absence of anything better. The result is that, even as Google steadily deteriorated, it remained the world’s dominant search engine, with a monopolistic hold in many markets across the world; “Google” became a verb as well as a noun and “Googling” is now a synonym for online searching in all contexts.

The arrival of ChatGPT and its ilk threatens to upend this profitable applecart. For one thing, it definitely disrupts search behaviour. Ask a chatbot such as Perplexity.ai a question and it gives you an answer. Search for the topic on Google and it gives you a list of websites (including ones from which it derives revenue) on which you then have to click in order to make progress. For another, if users shift to chatbots for information, they won’t be exposed (at least for now) to lucrative search ads, which account for a significant chunk of Google’s revenue. And over time, experience with chatbots will change people’s expectations about searching for information online.

Overhanging all this, though, is the fact that generative AI is already flooding the web with AI-generated content…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

As regular readers know, I have been a keen photographer for ever, and so am partial to accounts of other photo-sufferers’ successes and tribulations. So you perhaps understand why I was a sucker for Jason Koebler’s essay, “Developing and Scanning My Own Color Film: A Rewarding, Infuriating Hobby”, not least because while I used to develop and print my own black & white films, I always shirked doing the same with colour rolls.

If you read the piece, you will perhaps understand why I shirked it!

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Your Body’s Updated Terms of Service From McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

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Gehry’s tower

For the new Luna Centre in Arles. Quite a building.

Quote of the Day

“I regard not finding Lord Lucan as my most spectacular success in journalism. Of course, many of my colleagues have also been fairly successful in not finding Lord Lucan. But I have successfully not found him in more exotic spots than anybody else.”

• Garth Gibbs, a famous Daily Mirror journalist who would not have been out of place in Evelyn Waugh’s wonderful satire on journalism, Scoop. (A copy of which, incidentally, David Cameron kept on his desk before he was Prime Minister, presumably as a handbook for dealing with the British tabloids.)

For readers who do not follow the excesses of these vile rags, I should explain that Lord Lucan was an elegant and dissolute peer who disappeared after murdering his children’s nanny with a lead pipe and was never seen again, despite the efforts of many tabloid journalists — all coincidentally on lavish expenses — to locate him in foreign parts.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Ruhe Sanft, Mein Holdes Leben (Zaide) | Lucia Popp

Link

Sublime, utterly sublime.

Long Read of the Day

The AI summer

Nice essay by Benedict Evans, one of the shrewdest observers of the tech industry writing today.

Hundreds of millions of people have tried ChatGPT, but most of them haven’t been back. Every big company has done a pilot, but far fewer are in deployment. Some of this is just a matter of time. But LLMs might also be a trap: they look like products and they look magic, but they aren’t. Maybe we have to go through the slow, boring hunt for product-market fit after all.

Worth reading from start to finish. The reason we’re in an AI bubble is that while everyone and his dog is talking about how revolutionary the tech is, it’s not at all clear whether — and how — this apparent potential will actually be realised. Evans thinks that history suggests that the big payoffs might be a long time coming.

Books, etc.

Top ten of the NYT’s top 100 books of the 21st century.

1. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
2. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
3. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
4. The Known World by Edward P. Jones
5. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
6. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
7. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
8. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
9. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
10. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson The only ones I’ve read are nos. 5,8 and 9. My kids are appalled that I still haven’t read Wolf Hall, and don’t regard my protestations that I’ve seen the dramatisation as satisfactory justification. I’m pretty sure they’re right.

Errata

Apologies to Belinda Kitchin for getting her surname wrong — as ‘kitchen’. Of course I’d like to blame it on Apple autocorrect, but careless proofreading is a more plausible explanation.

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Brief encounter

Quote of the Day

“We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

• Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | Wachet auf from Cantata No 140 | Sonny Landreth

Link

I love this Cantata (who doesn’t?), but I’ve never heard it played like this before.

Long Read of the Day

AI as Self-Erasure

A really thoughtful (and thought-provoking) essay by Matthew Crawford in The Hedgehog Review.

I was at a small dinner a few weeks ago in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Seated next to me was a man who related that his daughter had just gotten married. As the day approached, he had wanted to say some words at the reception, as is fitting for the father of the bride. It can be hard to come up with the right words for such an occasion, and he wanted to make a good showing. He said he gave a few prompts to ChatGPT, facts about her life, and sure enough it came back with a pretty good wedding toast. Maybe better than what he would have written. But in the end, he didn’t use it, and composed his own. This strikes me as telling, and the intuition that stopped him from deferring to AI is worth bringing to the surface.

To use the machine-generated speech would have been to absent himself from this significant moment in the life of his daughter, and in his own life. It would have been to not show up for her wedding, in some sense. I am reminded of a passage in Tocqueville where he noticed that America seemed to be on a trajectory that would have it erecting “an immense tutelary power” that wants only what is best for us, and is keen to “save us the trouble of living.”

LLMs, Crawford argues (perceptively, IMHO), won’t return us to a pre-linguistic state, but they do point to a post-human one. This is because words have significance for us, but they don’t have for a machine (or a parrot for that matter).

Do read on. I was often reminded as I read it of my feeling that the subliminal thrust of this technology is what Brett Frischman and Evan Selinger described in their  perceptive book as the re-engineering of humanity in order to make it more amenable to the needs of machines.

I was also reminded of an observation what I used to attribute — wrongly — to Martin Heidegger, but which in fact came from Max Frisch in his book Homo Faber:

“Technology is the art of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.”

Thanks to Kevin Cryan for alerting me to Crawford’s essay.

Chart of the Day

From Azeem Azhar’s newsletter.

Traffic to traditional news outlets in the US is collapsing and it’s not just them – only 22% of people globally now rely on publisher websites as their main source of news, down 10 percentage points since 2018. The long-awaited platform shift is happening, but to what? The picture isn’t clear. Social and video platforms are on the rise, but the landscape is fragmented. The gatekeepers of control have also changed. Where media moguls like Rupert Murdoch once controlled content, now it’s a mishmash of tech platforms, in a more dislocated ecosystem than we’ve seen in the past decade.

These platforms, which prioritise engaging content, have led to the rise of news influencers. 66% of people worldwide watch short news videos on a weekly basis. At the same time, news avoidance is at an all-time high.

The focus on the individual has mixed effects. The journalistic model isn’t necessarily dead, it’s changing.

Yep. But to what?

My commonplace booklet

Every year the highlight of our Summer is a slow drive down through La France Profonde until we reach Provence: small roads, rural villages, small hotels. This year we noticed something unusual: at the entrance to many rural villages the village sign had been neatly turned upside down. The care with which the operation had been carried out meant that vandalism could be ruled out as an explanation. So eventually I resorted to search engines, and found this useful BBC report, which explained all.

The name-bearing roadside plaques have been unscrewed, flipped, then meticulously screwed back on.

It’s a campaign by farmers to draw attention to what they say is their increasingly precarious way of life.

Starting with a protest in the southern Tarn department in November, it has now spread all over the country.

”We were trying to think of a way of denouncing all the contradictory instructions we keep getting,” said Philippe Bardy, head of the FNSEA farmers’ union in the Tarn.

”Where we come from, if someone tells us to do one thing one day and then the opposite the next, we say we’re walking on our heads. That’s where the idea came from.”

Farmers cite specific grievances such as the increasing cost of farm diesel, late payment of EU subsidies, burgeoning bureaucracy and competition from imports.

But Philippe Bardy adds: “There is no other profession that suffers such a mental load.

”On one side, the minister asks us to change our practices, to make them more ecological. On the other, he tells us to produce as much as possible so France can achieve food sovereignty…

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• From Quartz Daily Brief

”People who live in the U.S. are just too swamped to take a holiday — or so they say.

Despite only receiving an average of 12 vacation days a year, more than half of Americans said they didn’t use all of their vacation time last year. The top reason? “Life is too busy to plan or go on vacation.”

Twelve paid holiday days a year! I had a friend who was a talented but underpaid researcher in Cambridge. He had a growing family (4 energetic boys) and needed to earn more, so he went to work for a big pharmaceutical company in the U.S. where he rose quickly to become a VP for R&D. Despite that seniority, he had only 14 days holiday allowance, and told me that on the first of these fortnight-long breaks his American colleagues were pissed off that he never once opened his laptop.

(In the end he decided he’d be better working for a big pharma outfit in Switzerland, where they take proper holidays.)

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Airport, interior

Faro, Thursday afternoon.

Quote of the Day

“We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish.”

• Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Amanda Ventura | The Way (Harmonica Blues Solo)

Link

Wonderful.

Long Read of the Day

Poland’s Zone of Interest

I’d been meaning to see Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning movie, but before booking a ticket started hunting for reviews and came on this striking essay by Daniel Kipnis, which provides a different perspective on the film — and some interesting contemporary context.

In The Zone of Interest, the Hösses employ Polish housekeepers. They are barely seen and mostly silent: scurrying about, nervously balancing drinks on trays, covetously eyeing Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) as she tries on a luxurious fur coat looted from the possessions of a Jewish woman. In one scene, upset with her maid Aniela for putting out two place settings for breakfast after Rudolf has been sent away from Auschwitz, Höss calmly tells her: “I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice.” The Poles of Babice, a small village near Auschwitz, were expelled in 1941 to make room for the camps.

The film ends with depictions of Polish women. Only here, we see them as the present-day employees of Auschwitz-Birkenau, no longer a camp but now a state museum. They tend to displays of shoes, bags, hair: the remaining effects of the slaughtered Jews. The Poles, then, are first depicted as victims, then as guardians of memory. But in the middle, they are also depicted as something more. In a particularly striking scene, shown for the first time about one-third of the way through the film and then repeated after an equivalent interval, the Poles become heroes.

On the scene’s first appearance, the viewer is stunned by the camera’s sudden shift to monochrome thermal imaging. It follows one of the Polish maids, gathering apples in the dark of night to smuggle across a ditch for the Jews in Auschwitz. The apparently inconsistent subplot, appearing nowhere in the 2014 Martin Amis novel upon which the film is based, arrives like a rift in its moral valence. What place does this all-too-not-banal display of bravery and righteousness have in the chronicle of amorality through which Glazer seeks to “demystify” the Nazis? His inversion of color is a cinematographic exception, in the same way that this righteous woman, traveling between her camps, subverts the normalized exception she inhabits…

Interesting, ne c’est pas?. Yep.

Video of the Day

Ken Burns’s Commencement Address at Brandeis.

Listen, I know you’re busy — that you don’t have the time to listen to anyone — even a great film-maker — making a speech to the graduating class of 2024 at a significant American university. But if you’re interested in democracy and concerned about what might happen on November 4, can I respectfully suggest that you find time (21 minutes to be precise) for this unforgettable speech?

Sure, Google’s AI overviews could be useful – if you like eating rocks

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Once upon a time, Google was great. For those who were online in 1998, history’s timeline bifurcated into two eras: BG (Before Google), and AG. It was elegant and clean: elegant because it was driven by a semi-objective algorithm called PageRank, which ranked websites according to how many other websites linked to them; and clean because it had no advertising, which of course also meant that it had no business model and accordingly was burning its way through its investors’ money.

It was too good to last, and of course it didn’t. Two of its biggest investors showed up one day, demanding a return on their investments…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

The London Evening Standard is no more — at least as a printed newspaper. Simon Jenkins was once its Editor, and he’s written a striking piece about it — and about the way the withering of local journalism is one of the reasons our democracies are failing, because local power is not being held to account, or even being monitored.

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Maybe there will be a Summer after all

In a college garden the other day.

Quote of the Day

“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.”

• Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Franz Schubert | Im Abendrot, D.799 | Anne Sofie von Otter

Link

Gosh! — this is sooo beautiful!

Long Read of the Day

The Rise of Large-Language-Model Optimization

Typically perceptive blog post by Bruce Schneier on what’s coming to supplant SEO (Search-Engine Optimisation) — LLMO. SEO was/is bad enough. LLMO will be even more damaging.

The arrival of generative-AI tools has introduced a voracious new consumer of writing. Large language models, or LLMs, are trained on massive troves of material—nearly the entire internet in some cases. They digest these data into an immeasurably complex network of probabilities, which enables them to synthesize seemingly new and intelligently created material; to write code, summarize documents, and answer direct questions in ways that can appear human.

These LLMs have begun to disrupt the traditional relationship between writer and reader. Type how to fix broken headlight into a search engine, and it returns a list of links to websites and videos that explain the process. Ask an LLM the same thing and it will just tell you how to do it. Some consumers may see this as an improvement: Why wade through the process of following multiple links to find the answer you seek, when an LLM will neatly summarize the various relevant answers to your query? Tech companies have proposed that these conversational, personalized answers are the future of information-seeking. But this supposed convenience will ultimately come at a huge cost for all of us web users…

It will.

Bruce describes himself as a “public-interest technologist”. We need more like him.

Books, etc.

This looks interesting. Tyler Cohen — often a good judge of books — found it “wonderful, one of the best popular science books I’ve read in a long time”. He thought it “a very good introduction to debunking Richard Dawkins-like primacy of the gene stories, rather seeing genes as part of a broader, fairly flexible biological ecosystem”, and also good at “explaining just how much computation goes on in biological systems”.

Now on this autodidact’s reading list.

My commonplace booklet

If you think Marc Andreessen is Silicon Valley’s prime crackpot, then you ain’t seen anything yet. Don’t believe me? Well, try The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco in The New Republic for size.

It’s about Balaji Srinivasan, a flake of Cadbury proportions whom Andreessen has recently endorsed.

“Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met,” wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the V.C. firm Andreessen-Horowitz, in a blurb for Balaji’s 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country. The book outlines a plan for tech plutocrats to exit democracy and establish new sovereign territories.

He proposes to start small — with a tech-funded campaign to capture San Francisco’s government.

He envisages

a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.”

The Grays’ shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman’s banquets” to win them over.

And at least some of the Silicon Valley crowd reportedly regard this fruitcake as a genius. Go figure.

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Waiting for Hockney

The queue for his 2012 Exhibition at the Royal Academy.

Quote of the Day

“Genius creates, and taste preserves”

• Alexander Pope

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Van Morrison | This Loving Light Of Mine

Link

Bruch Springsteen did a footstomping version version in Dublin.

Long Read of the Day

The Mythical people-life

This is a wonderful riff by Timothy Burke on an idea first articulated by Fred Brooks in his Meisterwerk, The Mythical Man Month, a much-thumbed copy of which sits on my bookshelves as I write.

It took a long time for me to see the pattern that is now in hindsight clear to almost everybody my age, and to younger generations as well. As the advantages gained by the early adopters became clear, more people pushed voluntarily into those spaces. And then as the productivity increases jolted down the line, everybody else was pushed involuntarily. The advantage suddenly vanished. The noise was up, the signal was down. Everything was suddenly being done in email, and suddenly the speed of email dramatically increased the amount of information and communication you were expected to produce and conduct. You were suddenly answering questions from all over all day long. We were all working more and it stopped being magic.

If you’re as old as I am, you’ve now seen this cycle repeated multiple times. We are all in some sense the extra workers being added to a long-delayed project with the expectation that we will make it go faster and instead it gets slower and slower all the time. We are all bugs on the windshield in the race to get to full frictionless efficiency, splattering over and over again as that fictional, inhuman El Dorado shimmers in the distance, calling to those who dream of a world where they no longer have to hire human beings at all but who in the meantime are happy to make the people they pay do more and more work while pretending that in fact they are making it easier for us all.

In academia, this drive to nowhere takes on familiar shapes across campuses. We imitate one another, which provides a ready answer any time you ask “Why are we adopting this new system, this new process?” Answer: because it has become an industry-wide standard! Why did the first adopters do it, then? As well ask which came first, the chicken or the egg…

It’s long, but interesting, thoughtful and insightful throughout. Burke has been around long enough (as have I) to see how digital technology seeps into, and then pervades, an organisation. And, as he says,

In practice what happens is that the job formerly done by a person gets divided in a thousand tiny jobs and distributed to the entire workforce. In this act, it does not magically become less work. The sum remains the same. The hope is just that each person will be able to add it to their workflow and barely notice because it is just that one…tiny…wafer. The problem is that we are all the character from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life, being fed a mountain of tiny wafers until we are engorged to the breaking point.

When became a university lecturer way back in 1972 in the Open University, I was assigned a secretary, Viv, and she did much of the typing of draft course units. Sometimes, this led to charming errors. Once, in a text on economic modelling, for example, my scribbled reference to “exogenous” variables emerged as erogenous, to the great amusement of some of my colleagues.

And now? We’re all typists, and secretaries have become ‘Executive Assistants’ who are assigned only to senior executives.

From boom to bust, the AI bubble is only heading in one direction

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Are we really in an AI bubble,” asked a reader of last month’s column about the apparently unstoppable rise of Nvidia, “and how would we know?” Good question, so I asked an AI about it and was pointed to Investopedia, which is written by humans who know about this stuff. It told me that a bubble goes through five stages – rather as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross said people do with grief. For investment bubbles, the five stages are displacement, boom, euphoria, profit-taking and panic. So let’s see how this maps on to our experience so far with AI.

First, displacement. That’s easy: it was ChatGPT wot dunnit. When it appeared on 30 November 2022, the world went, well, apeshit…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Think Slow

Lovely blog post by Scott Galloway on Daniel Kahneman who passed away the other day. I was pondering writing something about him, but Scott has done it much better than I could have.

Kahneman studied how humans make decisions, and the shortcuts our minds take, unbeknownst to us. These shortcuts are efficient; they foster a key skill for survival, the ability to make rapid decisions with incomplete information. We have to make thousands of decisions every day, and we couldn’t leave the house if we had to objectively analyze every choice: breakfast, outfit, route, music, etc.

Our efficiency comes at the cost of accuracy: Many instinctual decisions will be poorly calibrated (i.e., wrong). To facilitate the requisite speed, our brain buttresses our decisions with artificial confidence. Kahneman’s body of work demonstrates that we are often wrong but frequently confident. These shortcuts and mistakes are present in the structure of our brains, and impossible to avoid, but recognizing them helps us discern between trivial and important decisions and invest the appropriate intellectual capital. Put another way, take a beat and you increase the likelihood of making a better decision.

Though he was a psychologist by training, Kahneman got his Nobel Prize for economics. Before him, economists “relied on the assumption of a ‘homo œconomicus,’” as the prize committee wrote, a self-interested being capable of rational decision-making. But Kahneman “demonstrated how human decisions may systematically depart from those predicted by standard economic theory.” That dry language obscures an intellectual nuclear detonation. Expectations about human decisions — whether to work at a certain job, how much to pay for a specific good — are the foundation of economic theory. Kahneman showed those expectations were incorrect…

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In the sticks…

In the wilds of Donegal. What estate agents, those masters of euphemism, would call “a development opportunity”.

Quote of the Day

”I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.”

• James Thurber

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | Ahead Of The Game

Link

Long Read of the Day

Trump’s 5-Step Fascist Plan

Robert Reich in sombre mood. His question: how could Trump actually turn America into a fascist state?

His answer: In five steps, which he’s already signalled he intends to take.

The steps, in a nutshell:

1. Use threats of violence to gain power.
2. Consolidate power after taking office.
3. Demonize a group of people and establish a police state to round them up into detention camps.
4. Jail the opposition.
5. Undermine the free press.

If you haven’t been following what’s going on in the US, you probably think this is scare-mongering. If so, maybe you should have a look at Project 2025: Building now for a conservative victory through policy, personnel, and training. It’s a detailed plan for a comprehensive takeover.

When Trump came to power in 2016, he hadn’t expected to win, and so had no plan for governing. Hence the chaos of his first administration. If he wins this year, though, he would come into office with a plan. And, as Robert Reich points out on his blog (and in this video, it all looks remarkably like a plan that someone else adopted in Germany in the mid- to late-1930s.

In his remarkable book, How Democracy Ends, my friend David Runciman argued that democracies never fail backwards but forwards (i.e. in some new way). The implication was that looking for models in Europe’s decline into fascism is misguided. I’m beginning to wonder if that was too complacent a judgement.

Books, etc.

This arrived today. I’ve been looking forward to it. Neil is the DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning in the Cambridge Computer Lab and one of the most thoughtful experts on ‘AI’ I know. It comes out in the UK on June 6.

Chart of the Day

‘MMLU’ stands for Massive Multitask Language Understanding. It’s defined as

”a new benchmark designed to measure knowledge acquired during pretraining by evaluating models exclusively in zero-shot and few-shot settings. This makes the benchmark more challenging and more similar to how we evaluate humans. The benchmark covers 57 subjects across STEM, the humanities, the social sciences, and more. It ranges in difficulty from an elementary level to an advanced professional level, and it tests both world knowledge and problem solving ability. Subjects range from traditional areas, such as mathematics and history, to more specialized areas like law and ethics. The granularity and breadth of the subjects makes the benchmark ideal for identifying a model’s blind spots”.

What the chart suggests is that powerful LLMs are proliferating — and that CO2 emissions and water consumption are increasing proportionately.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Willie Nelson and Kermit the Frog sing Rainbow Connection!

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Gardener’s world

Quote of the Day

”A clothes rack in search of a war zone.”

• Gavin Jacobson on the faux intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Samuel Barber | Adagio for Strings, Op.11 | Vienna Philharmonic | (Summer Night Concert 2019)

Link

Nice piece now that Spring is — allegedly – here.

Long Read of the Day

How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI

Terrific essay by Bruce Schneier about the pernicious power of metaphors.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration will drive the next era of growth, wealth, and human flourishing. It’s a scary metaphor. Throughout American history, the drive for expansion and the very concept of terrain up for grabs—land grabs, gold rushes, new frontiers—have provided a permission structure for imperialism and exploitation. This could easily hold true for AI.

This isn’t the first time the concept of a frontier has been used as a metaphor for AI, or technology in general. As early as 2018, the powerful foundation models powering cutting-edge applications like chatbots have been called “frontier AI.” In previous decades, the internet itself was considered an electronic frontier. Early cyberspace pioneer John Perry Barlow wrote “Unlike previous frontiers, this one has no end.” When he and others founded the internet’s most important civil liberties organization, they called it the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

America’s experience with frontiers is fraught, to say the least. Expansion into the Western frontier and beyond has been a driving force in our country’s history and identity—and has led to some of the darkest chapters of our past. The tireless drive to conquer the frontier has directly motivated some of this nation’s most extreme episodes of racism, imperialism, violence, and exploitation.

That history has something to teach us about the material consequences we can expect from the promotion of AI today…

This is a long essay but worth your time because it looks at what’s going on through an insightful lens. The narrative about ‘unstoppable’ all-conquering ‘AI’ is actually the latest version of a colonial imperative — rather as “Go West, Young Man” was one for the 1890s in America.

Books, etc.

Analog nostalgia?

A funny thing happened on the way to digital utopia: people are deciding that they rather like the non-digital alternatives. My kids, though obsessed with music, are buying vinyl LPs and digging out old turntables from the family attic. And their kids are discovering the special qualities of 35mm celluloid film. In his book David Sax examines the people and companies at the forefront of analog’s new growth and argues for the enduring value of real things, even while embracing constant change.

I kept my turntable and my LPs, but they’re in storage. And I still have my film cameras, but haven’t used them much in the last few years. I bought this book a few weeks ago and the big test is whether it’ll change my behaviour.

My commonplace booklet

A laugh a minute

Nice sharp piece by Jonty Bloom on the activities of what is loosely called the UK’s ‘government’. Apparently he’s been reading the Daily Telegraph and its Sunday stablemate.

At the moment the government and its commentariat supporters are desperately trying to whip up a storm of indignation about those who are too ill to work, with the obvious solution that their benefits should be cut further. Because the way to get the ill back to work is to increase their levels of malnutrition.

Nowhere in the articles I read was there any acknowledgement that if you run down the NHS so that millions are waiting years for treatment, it shows up in the jobless figures. Nor, that if you don’t give people enough benefits to feed themselves or their children then they will develop long term health problems. Nor that if you force down wages and protections at work you end up with an underclass of people with severe anxiety and depression and other mental problems.

No, apparently they are all just lazy shirkers, enabled by woke doctors who sign them off work at the drop of a hat.

Oh, and the obvious solution is a “real” Tory government, unlike the last 14 years which have apparently been nothing but a left wing farce with policies that Labour would support.

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Vernacular architecture, English style

Somewhere in Cambridgeshire

Quote of the Day

”One afternoon, when I was four years old, my father came home, and he found me in the living room in front of a roaring fire, which made him very angry. Because we didn’t have a fireplace.”

• Victor Borge

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Morten Lauridsen | O Magnum Mysterium | Nordic Chamber Choir

Link

Amazingly serene.

Long Read of the Day

Davos: high altitude, low impact

Lovely sardonic essay  by Elise Labott on the ludicrous gabfest in Davos.

In the frost-kissed town of Davos, where the world’s glitterati converged this week for the 54th annual World Economic Forum under the guise of shaping the world’s future, something sounded thinner than the altitude: It was the air of relevance, of touch with the terra firma where the rest of us reside.

The forum has always been a curious blend of intellectual masturbation and disconnect from ground truths. We’ve all heard the long-running jokes pointing out how billionaires and politicians arrive in private jets to discuss carbon footprints. Now they speak of AI’s societal impacts while their companies quietly lobby against regulations that could curb their techno-empires…

Great stuff and an entertaining read. I’ve only been to Davos once — in the Summer of 1978, when I was on a walking holiday in Switzerland. I remember it as a sleepy and rather dull town in which I bought a Swiss army penknife (which I still possess) and a walking stick. I’ve never understood the lure that the gabfest has for journalists who should know better.

What’s in store if the IPA (Amendment) Bill becomes law

Yesterday’s Observer column

Which brings us to the investigatory powers (amendment) bill, which is now before their lordships in Westminster. “The world has changed,” says the blurb. “Technology has rapidly advanced, and the type of threats the UK faces continues to evolve.” The new bill will “enable the security and intelligence agencies to keep pace with a range of evolving threats, against a backdrop of accelerating technological advancements that provide new opportunities for terrorists, hostile state actors, child abusers and criminal gangs”. And, of course, for this is global Britain, “the world-leading safeguards within the IPA will be maintained and strengthened”.

Quite so. But upon closer inspection, the proposed means to those laudable ends do not exactly inspire confidence. For example, the bill proposes that the security services should have much more latitude in building and exploiting so-called “bulk datasets of personal information”, ie data about individuals who “have a low or no expectation of privacy”. This could allow the collection and use of CCTV footage, or the 20bn facial images scraped from the internet by Clearview, on the grounds that those of us who appear in such datasets have “no expectation of privacy”…

Do read the whole thing .

Books, etc.

I’m reading Melissa Harris’s intriguing ‘visual biography’ of the great photographer Josef Koudelka and am entranced by it.

Here’s a typical passage describing how Markéta Luskakova first met him at a dinner hosted by a mutual friend, Jirí Chlíbec.

Luskacova’s first impression of Koudelka was of a “very high-spirited young man”. Later, as they were drinking wine, Chlíbec mentioned that his friend was not only an aeronautical engineer, but also a photographer. Luskacova told me: “Meeting Josef in January 1963, felt like a godsend. She turned to him: “‘Listen, you should teach me photography.’ He said: ‘Nobody can teach you photography. You either see or you don’t see.’ I said: ‘Josef, I don’t want you to teach me to see, I want you to teach me where to press what.'” Koudelka laughed, and agreed.

They met the next day. Along with a camera, Koudelka brought a small piece of paper for Luskacova, on which he had written directions for various photographic opportunities, and their optimum exposures, depending upon the sunlight, cloud, coverage, and so on (she still has this slip of paper). Luskacova pointed out that he had not written any instructions for full sun. He responded: “When there is full sun, lie in it, enjoy it – and don’t take pictures.” Apparently there was, she began to understand, a rule for everything.

Luskakova went on to become a distinguished photographer herself.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Megan McArdle’s ’12 Rules for Life’ Link

I particularly liked #2:

Politics is not the most important thing in the world. It’s just the one people talk about the most. That’s because everyone shares the government; only you are married to your spouse, and can knowledgeably expound on their habit of mashing up soft-boiled egg and ketchup into a disgusting paste; this makes it hard to have much of a dialogue with your friends on the subject.

But your spouse and others around you matter more to your happiness than the government does. You will notice, as you go about your day, that many, many important things are riding on your spouse, things that will have immediate costs and benefits to you. Very few of the things that irritate you or bring you joy have anything to do with the government. So keep some perspective about politics. It doesn’t matter as much as the real people around you, and the real things you can do in the world. If you have to choose between politics and a friendship, choose the friendship every time.

Reminds me of E.M. Forster’s memorable dictum (in What I Believe and Other Essays): “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

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