WTF?…

… is going on here? Who knows? London, June.

Quote of the Day

“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

• John Maynard Keynes

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Elton John | Rocket Man (Glastonbury 2023)

Link

Memorable performance. I watched it live.

Long Read of the Day

Boogeyman Diplomacy

On the day when the UK’s ‘AI Safety Summit’ opens, this lovely blog post by Neil Lawrence seems appropriate, not least because Neil is one of the foremost experts on ‘AI’, i.e. machine-learning.

Just like behind my garage, there are many dangers to AI, and some of those dangers are unknown. In the rubbish there could have been rats and asbestos. Similarly with today’s information technologies we already face challenges around power asymmetries, where a few companies are control access to information. Competition authorities on both sides of the Atlantic are addressing these. We also face challenges around automated decision making: the European GDPR is an attempt to regulate how and when algorithmic decision making can be used. The AI boogeyman is frightening extreme conflation of these two challenges, just as an asbestos breathing rat would be a very disturbing conflation of the challenges behind my garage.

But just as the right approach to dealing with an asbestos breathing rat would be to deal with the rats and the asbestos separately, so the AI boogeyman can be dealt with by dealing with both power asymmetries and automated decision making. In both these areas many of us have already been supporting governments in developing new regulation to address these risks. But by combining them, boogeyman diplomacy runs the serious risk of highlighting the problems in a way that distracts us from the real dangers we face.

However, like Mao Zedong and Richard Nixon’s panda diplomacy, boogeyman diplomacy does promise a potential benefit. It is far easier to agree on an exchange of pandas than it is to bridge cultural and political divides between two great nations…

Neil has found a neat way of highlighting the fundamental problem we have with this technology, which is that governments and tech companies are obsessed with contemplating the speculative existential risks of the technology. This is a diversionary tactic because it enables both sides to avoid confronting the actual and real harms already being caused by the technology as it’s being applied right now.

The biggest risk posed by runaway AI isn’t speculative

If its deployment isn’t managed, then it’ll really undermine democracy. Why? Because history suggests that having a stable middle class is an essential requirement for a stable democratic polity. As Rana Faroohar pointed out in yesterday’s FT,

One recent academic study from OpenAI and the University of Pennsylvania found that 80 per cent of the US workforce will have at least some of their work tasks transformed by AI. There’s a huge productivity multiple there — Goldman Sachs estimates labour productivity could rise by 1.5 per cent, which is twice the recent historic rate. That would be similar in scale to the effect of the PC and the tech boom of the 1990s, which doubled the US GDP growth rate. 

The key question is: will the productivity be shared? I suspect we may see the blue-collar disruption of the 80s and 90s come to service work. The OECD warned in July that the job categories most at risk of displacement would be highly skilled, white-collar work accounting for a third of employment in the developed world. Think about the populism that could result — manufacturing is 8 per cent of the US workforce, while jobs at risk immediately from AI represent about 30 per cent.

Her colleague, Edward Luce, has an answer to that question about sharing the fruits of massive increases in productivity.

I share all the forebodings about the future of warfare, the deepfake impact on democracy and the ultimate question about computers deciding we are too stupid as a species to keep around (I have periodic twinges of sympathy with the latter). But an immediate concern is the massive rates of return that owners of AI will inevitably reap in the coming years. We are already living in an oligarchic society. I fear that today will look like child’s play compared to what is around the corner. In other words, it is the Elon Musks and other humans that I fear the most. 

Me too. And in that context, isn’t it interesting that Rishi Sunak has chosen to make a big deal about a live-streamed interview he’s done with Elon Musk, one of the tech lords who have turned up to Bletchley Park. Unregulated deployment of this technology is an entry ramp onto a highway that leads to a techno-feudalism future of the kind envisaged by Marc Andreessen and other fanatics.

My commonplace booklet

From the Economist:

“When on October 20th the Rolling Stones released ‘Hackney Diamonds’, the band’s first original album in almost two decades, many acolytes bought it on vinyl—an old format befitting an old act. The vinyl revival, now well into its second decade, crosses generations and genres. In America, 25- to 34-year-olds buy as many vinyl records as the over-55s.”

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

The iShuffle Principle

Nice little essay from 2005 by Om Malik. He returned to the theme the other day. Nice.

Errata

Many thanks to the readers who, very politely, pointed that Margaret Atwood only has one ’t’ in her surname. And humble apologies to the wonderful lady herself.

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Looking outwards

Yorkshire Dales, Saturday.

Quote of the Day

”The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.”

• Blaise Pascal

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eartha Kitt | Ain’t Misbehavin’

Link

Long Read of the Day

Ubiquitous yet hated – what does the triumph of PowerPoint teach us about Generative AI?

Nice column by Tim Harford on the crutch that every corporate presenter and public speaker seems to lean on.

The aesthetic of our age was shaped in Paris in 1992, in the Hotel Regina. The occasion was carefully stage-managed by a team of technicians fussing over a huge colour projector that cost as much as a small house. The big unveiling came when Robert Gaskins, a Microsoft software engineer, walked up to the lectern, plugged his chunky laptop into a video cable and began showing PowerPoint slides in full colour, straight off his machine. The applause was, according to Gaskins, “deafening”.

There were visual aids before 1992, of course. At the high end, there were computer-co-ordinated slideshows in which dozens of projectors were choreographed to fit with music, script and each other, producing spectacular results at extraordinary expense.

The mid-market was a monochrome or colour transparency placed on an overhead projector (OHP). In the heyday of the OHP, more than 2,000 were sold in the US every week…

Read on, fellow-sufferers.

Years ago I was invited to give a keynote address to the assembled staff of a newish university in the midlands. In the Q&A someone asked me what I thought about the use of PowerPoint in lectures. I replied, flippantly, that it should be a sackable offence. The audience responded with what I sensed was nervous laughter. Afterwards, I was informed that a zealous new Pro-Vice-Chancellor had recently issued a decree that henceforth all academic lectures should be accompanied by a PowerPoint deck which would also be available to students. The same gent was also in the audience!

I was never invited back.

Tacit knowledge, chips and geopolitics

Today’s Observer column:

When the history of our time comes to be written, one thing that will amaze historians is how an entire civilisation managed to impale itself on its worship of optimisation and efficiency. This obsession is what underpinned the hubris of globalisation. Apple’s famous slogan “Designed by Apple in California, manufactured in China” became its guiding light. So long as products could be made available to consumers everywhere, it no longer mattered where they were made. Until it did.

We first twigged this when the pandemic struck, and we became suddenly aware of how fragile supply chains built to maximise efficiency could be. Shouldn’t we be optimising for resilience rather than efficiency, people wondered. And maybe our obsession with “offshoring” production to low-wage countries might not be such a good idea after all.

The rise of China and the resulting tensions between it and the United States brought this offshoring question into very sharp focus. For our civilisation (if that’s what it is) now runs on silicon as well as oil, and the really advanced silicon chips on which the future seems to depend are all made in one location – Taiwan – and by one company based there, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC)…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

From Dave Winer (Whom God Preserve)…

It’s weird that people have the idea that thinking out loud is a new idea for blogging. That’s because when journalists first heard about blogging they decided that it’s what they do. People who write publicly for money, mostly without any principle other than getting paid for writing, or perhaps “building a brand.” That imho was not what was going on. It was people asking questions, often in the form of statements they weren’t sure of. Put it out there, see what comes back. At its best it was what I called sources go direct — where people with expertise shared what they knew so we could learn from them. So the idea of a public “garden” is just a response to journalists getting the story totally wrong about blogging in the early days. Amazing how these things cycle round and round often because of basic misunderstandings like this.

I love to cite this cartoon from the 2004 Democratic Convention which first opened its doors to bloggers. I was one of them. They saw us as gatecrashers. We were just people who have the need to blog. A small number of people were born to write about what they see, and the web opened that up to all of us, for the first time it took almost no money to get your ideas out there, and clearly they were scared of us. What a crime that actual people would be reporting on the events of our democracy. They’re so stuck in their calcified thought patterns that it never occurred to them that this is great, people who actually give a shit, wanting to tell other people what they saw and heard. Unfortunately they got their way, that’s how powerful they are and how easily manipulated we all are.

Linkblog

• Nokia to erase up to 14,000 employees from payroll From The Register. “Nokia, one of the world’s largest telecommunications kit makers, is erasing up to 14,000 jobs after a plunge in net profit was caused by jittery customers delaying spending amid a slowing economy and rising interest rates.” How are the mighty fallen.

• “Italy’s renowned parmigiano reggiano, favoured for finishing off bowls of pasta and rocket salads, is one of the most counterfeited cheeses in the world. Now its manufacturers have found a new way to hit back against the lookalikes: by adding microchips.” Link

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Harvest time?

I once thought of making wine from our grapes, but after I’d read up on the kit I’d need to buy, and the expertise I’d need to acquire, decided that it might be easier (and perhaps cheaper) to buy a bottle of Chateau Lafite.

Quote of the Day

”History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.”

• Stephen Spender

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jon Lord | VI. Afterwards

Link

After listening, I went to the Thomas Hardy poem that inspired the piece.

Long Read of the Day

Quantum Resistance and the Signal Protocol

This sounds geeky but a post on the Signal Blog does a good job of explaining why it matters. Basically, the security of our networked world depends on the fact that the cryptography that underpins it cannot be broken by brute-force computing with conventional computers. But if quantum computing turns out to be practically feasible then that bet’s off because they would be many orders of magnitude more powerful.

Do read the post to learn how outfits like Signal (of which I am a committed user) are being pre-emptive in case the quantum threat does materialise.

The US government is belatedly taking on Google in the most significant antitrust case in decades

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Although you’d never guess it from mainstream media, the most significant antitrust case in more than 20 years is under way in Washington. In it, the US justice department, alongside the attorneys general of eight states, is suing Google for abusively monopolising digital advertising technologies, thereby subverting competition through “serial acquisitions” and anti-competitive auction manipulation. Or, to put it more prosaically, arguing that Google – which has between 90% and 95% of the search market – has maintained its monopoly not by making a better product, but by locking down almost every avenue through which consumers might find a different search engine and making sure they only see Google wherever they look.

Why is this significant?

Read on.

My commonplace booklet

Imagined idiots

“Why do public intellectuals condescend to their readers?” Asks Becca Rothfeld in a nice essay in the Yale Review on why academics appear to lose their marbles when they try to write for non-academics.

She quotes from a 2015 essay by Mark Greif, founder of the online journal n+1, on the difficulties he had getting scholars to write for the general public.

When these brilliant people contemplated writing for the “public,” it seemed they merrily left difficulty at home, leapt into colloquial lan­guage with both feet, added unnatural (and frankly unfunny) jokes, talked about TV, took on a tone chummy and unctuous. They dumbed down, in short—even with the most innocent intentions. The public, even the “general reader,” seemed to mean someone less adept, ingenious, and critical than them­selves. Writing for the public awakened the slang of mass media. The public signified fun, frothy, friendly.

So, concludes Rothfeld, “If the academic humanities too often address only siloed experts, then pop philosophy too often addresses an audience of imagined idiots.”

Yep.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

The World’s Longest Beak — a clip from the BBC from Planet Earth II in which David Attenborough talks about the Swordbill, a hummingbird with a bill longer than its body. Unmissable.

Errata

• The artist who created the striking stained-glass mentioned in Friday’s edition was Harry Clarke. Thanks to Ivan Morris for enlightening me.
• My intro to Branco Milanovic’s marvellous Long Read on Friday revealed my blissful ignorance of the fact that 1960s Belgrade was in Yugoslavia and therefore not in ”the Soviet empire” as I mistakenly claimed. Thanks to Richard Austin for pointing this out.

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Magic toadstools

By the banks of the river Corrib in Mayo. And no, I didn’t pick them.

Quote of the Day

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word.”

• Stephen King

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jelly Roll Morton | Smoke House Blues

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Confessions of a Viral AI Writer

Vauhina Vara wrote a story with the assistance of ChatGPT which went viral on the Web. She’s written a thoughtful essay in Wired on whether Generative AI’s are good for writers — or indeed for writing itself.

When the essay, called “Ghosts,” came out in The Believer in the summer of 2021, it quickly went viral. I started hearing from others who had lost loved ones and felt that the piece captured grief better than anything they’d ever read. I waited for the backlash, expecting people to criticize the publication of an AI-assisted piece of writing. It never came. Instead the essay was adapted for This American Life and anthologized in Best American Essays. It was better received, by far, than anything else I’d ever written.

I thought I should feel proud, and to an extent I did. But I worried that “Ghosts” would be interpreted as my stake in the ground, and that people would use it to make a case for AI-produced literature.

And soon, that happened…

It’s a thoughtful, thought-provoking piece. And one passage particularly resonated with me,

ChatGPT’s voice is polite, predictable, inoffensive, upbeat. Great characters, on the other hand, aren’t polite; great plots aren’t predictable; great style isn’t inoffensive; and great endings aren’t upbeat.

Yep.

Books, etc.

A must-read (for me, anyway).

From the blurb:

Mark Weiser (1952–99), the first chief technology officer at Xerox PARC and the so-called “father of ubiquitous computing.” But Weiser, who died young at age 46 in 1999, would be heartbroken if he had lived to see the ways we use technology today. As John Tinnell shows in this thought-provoking narrative, Weiser was an outlier in Silicon Valley. A computer scientist whose first love was philosophy, he relished debates about the machine’s ultimate purpose. Good technology, Weiser argued, should not mine our experiences for saleable data or demand our attention; rather, it should quietly boost our intuition as we move through the world.

My commonplace booklet

 Samuel Johnson, opsimath

Henry Oliver’s affectionate tribute to the first great lexicographer.

He is mostly remembered because of Boswell’s biography, which details all sorts of weird and wonderful things about him, like the fact that he always kept his orange peel to put in his shoes, or his strange behaviour, twitching and rolling around and muttering, like he had tourettes. People who met him found his intelligence literally unbelievable after they had observed his ‘strange antic gestures’. He also had terrible eyesight and read with the book very close to his face, so close to the candle he scorched his wig. His friend Thrale worried he would set himself on fire.

But he ought to be remembered for his writing and his strong minded independence. He was an autodidact, and a powerful example of the Fitzgerald Rule. Who would have seen the potential in that strange man wandering the streets with Richard Savage, a well known liar and fraud? Only the people who could recognise that he was an opsimath: a lifelong learner and a late bloomer.

He was. Which is why I’ve always admired him and have a copy of his Dictionary on my shelves.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

 20 String Harp Guitar Cover of Neil Young’s ‘Harvest Moon’

Link

And you thought guitars only had 12 strings at most? Me too.

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Bird’s-eye view

The view from the Conor Pass

Tralee Bay, seen from the top of the Pass in Co. Kerry, one of my favourite roads.

Quote of the Day

“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.”

• Niels Bohr

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dolly Parton | 9 To 5

Link

I dug this out after reading a column by Simon Kuper in the Financial Times about the obtuse determination of certain corporate executives to stop people WFH.

I’ve always admired Dolly as the epitomé of feisty insouciance. And so did my fellow-countryman, Terry Wogan of blessed memory. Once, in a conversation about transubstantiation, when he was asked what he would like come to back as in another life. His reply: “Dolly Parton’s accordion.”

Long Read of the Day

News as Objects: The Materiality of handwritten newsletters

Yeah, I know this isn’t a handwritten newsletter and maybe it isn’t all that ‘newsy’, but this lovely essay by Sara Mansutti shows that the genre has a rich and interesting history.

Sample:

Sometimes the newsletters report incidents that delayed or stopped their journey, giving a glimpse of how much the materiality of these sheets of paper mattered in the diffusion of the news. Some documents narrate about couriers fallen in rivers with their post-bags whose documents, if retrieved, became illegible due to the ink dissolving. In other cases, the interference with the mail delivery was a political tactic. In 1571 news from Paris warned that the courier of London directed to Paris had been robbed and his mail had been brought to the English court by order of Queen Elizabeth the First.

But the biggest obstacle to the supply of news was the suspicion of plague and the fear of contagion. Letters and newsletters reached their destinations with more difficulty during the epidemics than in wartime, because couriers coming from plague-infested places were forbidden to enter into the safe cities or to pass through some regions. The newsletters were believed to be vectors of infection just like any other physical object and rules were introduced to reduce the contagion caused by them. An avviso from Venice, written in 1564, warned that the letters from Lyon should no longer be tied with twine, because of an outbreak of plague there: the avviso doesn’t say more, but we can infer that twine was believed to convey the disease.

Do read it. And at least this particular newsletter is unlikely to pass on Covid.

When it comes to creative thinking, it’s clear that AI systems mean business

Yesterday’s Observer column on how corporate executives will view Generative AI.

(Spoiler alert: it’s not all good news.)

In all the frenzied discourse about large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 there is one point on which everyone seems to agree: these models are essentially stochastic parrots – namely, machines that are good at generating convincing sentences, but do not actually understand the meaning of the language they are processing. They have somehow “read” (that is, ingested) everything ever published in machine-readable form and create sentences word by word, at each point making a statistical guess of “what one might expect someone to write after seeing what people have written on billions of webpages, etc”. That’s it!

Ever since ChatGPT arrived last November, people have been astonished by the capabilities of these parrots – how humanlike they seem to be and so on. But consolation was drawn initially from the thought that since the models were drawing only on what already resided in their capacious memories, then they couldn’t be genuinely original: they would just regurgitate the conventional wisdom embedded in their training data. That comforting thought didn’t last long, though, as experimenters kept finding startling and unpredictable behaviours of LLMs – facets now labelled “emergent abilities”.

From the beginning, many people have used LLMs as aids to brainstorming…

Do read on.

My commonplace booklet

95% of NFTs now totally worthless, say researchers

From The Register…

For those who don’t recall, NFTs are entries on a blockchain, typically the Ethereum blockchain, that represent ownership of assets – usually a digital asset like an image file or in-game item, but NFTs could also be tied to physical items.

Back in their 2021-22 heyday, collectors were paying millions for NFTs, but crypto gambling website dappGambl now says that most are worthless.

After looking at 73,257 NFT collections (a collection can contain any number of NFTs that can each be bought and sold) based on data from CoinMarketCap and NFTScan, dappGambl said it determined that 69,795 of those collections have a market cap of 0 Ether.

”This statistic effectively means that 95 percent of people holding NFT collections are currently holding onto worthless investments,” dappGambl said in its report. “Having looked into those figures, we would estimate that 95 percent to include over 23 million people whose investments are now worthless.”

Aw, shucks.

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Down the lane…

Walking back from a college dinner the other evening, I turned into Little St Mary’s Lane, one of my favourite streets — and one I often strolled down when I was a graduate student on my (leisurely) way to the Lab. Stephen Hawking once lived in one of the houses, as did the great Irish historian, Joe Lee, when he was a Fellow of Peterhouse in the late 1960s.

Quote of the Day

“Nobody ever notices the host at a party, until the drink runs out”

• Anthony Gilbert

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Elvis Costello sings Penny Lane for Paul McCartney at the White House.

Link

I have a soft spot for Liverpool ever since my daughter went to university there and I got to know the city.

Long Read of the Day

AI and Leviathan: Part 1

This is the first of three remarkable essays by Sam Hammond pondering the challenges posed by the flowering of machine-learning into Generative AI. If you want to get a sense of where we might be heading, these essays are worth reading.

But just for now, here’s how the first one in the series opens.

Imagine a breakthrough happened and suddenly everyone had access to cheap, x-ray style glasses. The glasses look like normal, everyday glasses, but come with a dial setting that lets you see through walls, people’s clothing, etc. It somehow works on old photos and video recordings too.

On one level, this would be amazing. You might notice the mysterious lump on your friend’s thyroid, say, catching their cancer early and saving them untold medical costs. But in the immediate term, universal and near-undetectable access to the glasses (or contact lenses, if you prefer) would be a security and privacy disaster. No one’s home or device security was compromised per se. Rather, it’s more like a society designed around the visible light spectrum became maladapted overnight.

There are three canonical ways that society could respond:

Cultural evolution: we embrace nudism and a variety of new, post-privacy norms;

Mitigation and adaptation: we start wearing lead underwear and scramble to retrofit our homes, office buildings, and locker rooms with impenetrable walls;

Regulation and enforcement: we ban or tightly regulate the technology and build an x-ray Leviathan for inspecting people’s glasses, punishing violators, etc.

The option where everyone spontaneously coordinates to never use the glasses, or to only use them for a subset of pro-social purposes, is unstable. Even if you’re a voyeur and access to the glasses benefits you personally, there’s an underlying prisoner’s dilemma, and so we quickly shift to the equilibrium where everyone has the glasses even if we all preferred the world without them.

The glasses are a metaphor for Artificial Intelligence.

See what I mean? Read on.

Books, etc.

John McPhee is the greatest long-form non-fiction writer alive IMO. Period. And he’s just published his 32nd book, Tabula Rasa, which I downloaded last night and started reading — until I suddenly realised that staying up all night is not a great idea.

Noah Rawlings’s review in the LA Review of Books might give you an idea of why I nearly didn’t sleep.

Writers’ lives are littered with unrealized projects. Some more than others. John McPhee—the New Yorker staff writer who, over his 60-year career at that magazine, redefined what is today known as “creative nonfiction”—does not strike one as the type to leave things undone. He has more published books than most writers have inchoate inklings: books on oranges, tennis, canoes, geology, the Swiss Armed Forces, the US Merchant Marine. We’re talking 31. We are not talking 31 formulaic variations on a theme, not 31 books by Louis L’Amour or Clive Cussler (with all due respect), but 31 books that are, with few exceptions, masterworks of literary journalism. Greatness is not measured by word count, but McPhee’s output doubles that of nonfiction giants like Gay Talese or Joan Didion or Tom Wolfe. To produce so much good work requires rare qualities: staggering energy, expansive interests, exceptional endurance. And a long life.

McPhee is now 92…

My commonplace booklet

I’m looking forward to seeing the Lee Miller biopic (in which Kate Winslet plays Miller) when it comes out in December. In the meantime interesting fragments and references are appearing. Can’t remember where I saw this, but it shows how photographer Annie Leibovitz has recreated with Winslet the famous picture of Miller in Hitler’s bath when she and her fellow-photographer David Scherman got into the Führer’s apartment in Munich as the war ended. Note the Rolleiflex on the tripod. You have to get these things right.

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Tilly RIP

We had to bid farewell to our beloved cat Tilly last night. She was 19.5 years old, so you could say she had a good innings. But she had been a lifelong companion for two of my children and a constant background to our lives. She often gave me disapproving looks, so I was pleased to dig up this picture, in which she is merely saying “You cannot be serious!”

She also had the ability to curl herself up into an almost-perfect circle.

Quote of the Day

”More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.”

• St Theresa of Ávila

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Geshwin | Rhapsody in Blue | Khatia Buniatishvili

Link

It’s 17 minutes long, but worth every minute.

Long Read of the Day

The Political Economy of Technology

Terrific review essay on Project Syndicate by Bill Janeway (Whom God Preserve) on Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson’s book, Power and Progress. It’s a terrific book, but it’s also a long read. Bill has done a consummate job of summarising many of its key arguments and adding value as he goes.

Highly recommended. But set aside some time for it.

My commonplace booklet

50 years ago: Henry Kissinger and the death of democracy in Chile

Robert Reich remembers the other 9/11 anniversary that occurred on Monday.

As Chile marks the 50th anniversary tomorrow of the coup that brought strongman Augusto Pinochet to power for almost 17 years — toppling Chile’s democratically elected socialist government and resulting in the murders and “disappearances” of thousands of Pinochet’s political opponents — it’s important to recall the central role played by Richard Nixon and Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, in this atrocity.

Kissinger — now 100 years old, and who in my humble opinion should be considered a war criminal — urged Nixon to overthrow Chile’s democratically elected government of Salvador Allende because Allende’s “‘model’ effect can be insidious,” according to declassified documents posted by the U.S. National Security Archive.

On September 12, 1970, eight days after Allende’s election, Kissinger initiated discussion on the telephone with CIA Director Richard Helms about a preemptive coup in Chile. “We will not let Chile go down the drain,” Kissinger declared. “I am with you,” Helms responded. Three days later, Nixon, in a 15-minute meeting that included Kissinger, ordered the CIA to “make the Chilean economy scream,” and named Kissinger as the supervisor of the covert efforts to keep Allende from being inaugurated…

An awful lot more people died in Chile that year (and in succeeding years) than in the attack in New York.

I’m reminded of Tom Lehrer’s observation that “Satire died the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Errata

On Monday I claimed that Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk ran to 360 pages. That was a typo — it’s 670 pages long. I know, because I’ve read the whole damn thing.

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Silent ecstasy?

Striking sculpture spotted in the Fitzwilliam Museum.

Quote of the Day

“Education isn’t something you can finish”.

• Isaac Asimov

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Scott Joplin | Elite Syncopations | Phillip Dyson

Link

At last, an unobjectionable use of ‘elite’ as an adjective!

Long Read of the Day

Fully automated data driven authoritarianism ain’t what it’s cracked up to be

Marvellous essay by Henry Farrell which, among other things, has an elegant takedown of the sainted Yuval Noah Harari.

Last September, Abe Newman, Jeremy Wallace and I had a piece in Foreign Affairs’ 100th anniversary issue. I can’t speak for my co-authors’ motivations, but my own reason for writing was vexation that someone on the Internet was wrong. In this case, it was Yuval Harari. His piece has been warping debate since 2018, and I have been grumpy about it for nearly as long. But also in fairness to Harari, he was usefully wrong – I’ve assigned this piece regularly to students, because it wraps up a bunch of common misperceptions in a neatly bundled package, ready to be untied and dissected.

Specifically, Harari argued that AI (by which he meant machine learning) and authoritarian rule are two flavors that will go wonderfully together. Authoritarian governments will use surveillance to scoop up vast amounts of data on what their subjects are saying and doing, and use machine learning feedback systems to figure out what they want and manipulate it, so that “the main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century—the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place—may become their decisive advantage in the 21st century.” Harari informed us in grave terms that liberal democracy and free-market economics were doomed to be outcompeted unless we took Urgent But Curiously Non-Specific Steps Right Now.

In our Foreign Affairs piece, Abe, Jeremy and I argued that this was horseshit…

Read on to see why.

Footnote. Growing up in the 1950s I was, like most of my peers, an avid reader of ‘The Lone Ranger’ comic strip which starred a brave (and, of course, white) cowboy and his faithful Indian companion/servant, Tonto. In general, Tonto had only one response to his master’s utterances — “Kemo Sabay”, which in our innocence we assumed to be Native-American-speak for “Yes boss”, or words to that effect. Imagine my delight when, a few years ago, someone told me that in fact it means ‘horseshit’ in some indigenous language or other.

As they say in Italy: if it isn’t true it ought to be.

My commonplace booklet

From Jeff Jarvis…

Perhaps LLMs should have been introduced as fiction machines. 

ChatGPT is a nice parlor trick, no doubt. It can make shit up. It can sound like us. Cool. If that entertaining power were used to write short stories or songs or poems and if it were clearly understood that the machine could do little else, I’m not sure we’d be in our current dither about AI. Problem is, as any novelist or songwriter or poet can tell you, there’s little money in creativity anymore. That wouldn’t attract billions in venture capital and the stratospheric valuations that go with it whenever AI is associated with internet search, media, and McKinsey finding a new way to kill jobs. As with so much else today, the problem isn’t with the tool or the user but with capitalism. (To those who would correct me and say it’s late-stage capitalism, I respond: How can you be so sure it is in its last stages?)

And this…

The most dangerous prospect arising from the current generation of AI is not the technology, but the philosophy espoused by some of its technologists. 

I won’t venture deep down this rat hole now, but the faux philosophies espoused by many of the AI boys — in the acronym of Émile Torres and Timnit Gebru, TESCREAL, or longtermism for short — is noxious and frightening, serving as self-justification for their wealth and power. Their philosophizing might add up to a glib freshman’s essay on utilitarianism if it did not also border on eugenics and if these boys did not have the wealth and power they wield. See Torres’ excellent reporting on TESCREAL here. Media should be paying attention to this angle instead of acting as the boys’ fawning stenographers. They must bring the voices of responsible scholars — from many fields, including the humanities — into the discussion. And government should encourage truly open-source development and investment to bring on competitors that can keep these boys, more than their machines, in check.

Yep.

Linkblog

Noticed while drinking from the Internet firehose.

China’s answer to ChatGPT Some bright spark on the Economist has been trying it out.

Ernie bot has some controversial views on science. China’s premier artificial intelligence (ai) chatbot, which was released to the public on August 31st, reckons that covid-19 originated among American vape-users in July 2019; later that year the virus was spread to the Chinese city of Wuhan, via American lobsters. On matters of politics, by contrast, the chatbot is rather quiet. Ernie is confused by questions such as “Who is China’s president?” and will tell you the name of Xi Jinping’s mother, but not those of his siblings. It draws a blank if asked about the drawbacks of socialism. It often attempts to redirect sensitive conversations by saying: “Let’s talk about something else.”

It’ll get better — if it’s allowed to.

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Island View

If you’re ever in West Kerry make sure to visit the Blasket Centre, a striking institution housing exhibitions that deliver an imaginative re-telling of the story of the Blasket islands, their rich heritage and literature which is of national and international significance. It’s an elegant piece of modern architecture with, as a central feature, a long corridor oriented towards the Great Blasket (the main island in the group), and a seat on which to sit and contemplate it in peace and tranquillity.

And if you’re really interested, there’s always Robert Kanigel’s magnificent book about the island.

Quote of the Day

”Liberals’ predictions about China have often betrayed wishful thinking. In the 2000s Western leaders mistakenly believed that trade, markets and growth would boost democracy and individual liberty. But China is now testing the reverse relationship: whether more autocracy damages the economy. The evidence is mounting that it does—and that after four decades of fast growth China is entering a period of disappointment.”

• Economist Leader, 25.10.2023

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sharon Shannon | “Galway Girl” | Live at the Cambridge Folk Festival

Link

I’ve seen many memorable acts at the Festival, but this is something else.

Long Read of the Day

Evelyn Waugh is laughing at you

Nice essay by Will Lloyd on Evelyn Waugh, “one of those widely read novelists who only appears laden with disclaimers. Pinch your nose before you enter his sty. We must dissociate ourselves from his bigotry and snobbery, his cruelty and his love for the aristocracy; we must approach him, Nicholas Lezard wrote in the Guardian, as ‘we might an ogre’.”

Yet, says Lloyd,

there he is, the misogynist, whose closest friends and confidants were all women. There he is, the xenophobe, whose novel Black Mischief (1932) adds up to a rattling takedown of white supremacy in Africa. True, he was cruel, but Waugh was mean for amusement’s sake. The aim was to generate mirth, not maim people. His son Auberon said he “lived for jokes”. And what appears to be a bewildering admiration for the aristocracy is its opposite. Read in sequence the major novels are an excruciating portrayal of the English upper-classes between the wars. Their insularity breeds false confidence, their decadence numbs them to reality, and their amorality makes them callous. Waugh may have loved their world – country houses, fat cigars, St James’s clubs – but he was not deceived about how feckless the upper-classes really were. He spent decades aping their mannerisms while digging their graves.

And the interesting thing, Lloyd observes, is that

The society Waugh satirised has the same contours as our own. Our ruling classes are silly and venal. Our world feels like it is racing towards the same smash-up Waugh’s generation faced. In New York, avant-garde personalities convert to Catholicism for the same slightly perverse reasons Waugh did. History wretches itself up again. Waugh understood that as long as human beings were involved, history would always be a farce first, a farce second and a tragedy third.

It’s an essay that raises a tricky question for all of us. Given that many great artists have been — how shall I put it? — horrible human beings, is it ok to admire or love their work knowing how terrible they were in life. Waugh was an appalling person, but I love his writing. Always have.

Can AI-generated art be copyrighted?

My column in yesterday’s Observer:

Evelyn Waugh famously held that taking a keen interest in ecclesiastical matters was often “a prelude to insanity”. Much the same might be said about newspaper columnists taking an interest in intellectual property law. But let us take the risk. After all, you only live once – at least until Elon Musk creates an electronic clone of himself.

On Friday 18 August, a federal judge in the US rejected an attempt to copyright an artwork that had been created by an AI. The work in question is, to the untrained eye at least, no great shakes. It is called “A Recent Entrance into Paradise” and depicts a three-track railway heading into what appears to be a leafy, partly pixellated tunnel and had been “autonomously created” by a computer algorithm called the Creativity Machine.

In 2018, Stephen Thaler, CEO of a neural network firm called Imagination Engines, had listed Creativity Machine as the sole creator of the artwork. The US Register of Copyright denied the application on the grounds that “the nexus between the human mind and creative expression” is a crucial element of protection.

Mr Thaler was not amused and issued a lawsuit contesting the decision…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Photographers Slam the Quality of Trump and Co-Defendants’ Mug Shots. Link

My problem is not with the quality of the pics, but with the people portrayed by them.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

Bertrand Russell’s essay, “In Praise of Idleness”.

I hadn’t read it for years, but it’s still enjoyable. It contains his wonderful definition of ‘work’:

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two different bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising.

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The way out..

… of one of the hotels we stay in on our drive through France.

Quote of the Day

”Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.”

• Carl Sagan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Johann Strauss Jr | Morgenblätter waltz | Op. 279

Link

At first I fell to wondering who the Morgenblätters were, assuming they must have been some rich patrons of the Strauss clan. And then sheepishly realised that the word means ‘the morning papers’. Embarrassing ignorance on my part! On the plus side, though, it makes the choice perfectly appropriate for this slot!

Long Read of the Day

Britain is a developing country

Savagely realistic diagnosis by Sam Bowman.

A slowdown in “frontier growth” and technological progress matters a lot for the United States. But it matters less to Poland or Bangladesh – countries that are still trying to get to the frontier. While technological advances do still benefit them, most of their growth comes from using their existing inputs, like land and labour, in more efficient ways that are not technologically novel, or adding more capital that, again, is not technologically novel – some agrarian developing economies can grow simply by adding more tractors; no developed economy can.

For these developing countries, the challenge is to catch up with the world’s advanced economies, and they can still have rapid improvements in their living standards without the need for global technological progress at all.

My claim is that the UK is now a lot more like Poland than it is like the United States in terms of the kinds of growth it needs to do – driven by improved use of existing technology and inputs, and accumulation of capital, rather than driven primarily by technological advancement. With the exception of a few sectors like AI, we are so far behind the frontier in terms of economic development that worrying about technological progress doesn’t make much sense, and at worst is a serious distraction…

It is. But try telling that to the Bexiteers. Or even to the Prime Minister du jour.

Books, etc.

Heather Cox Richardson has a new book coming

It’s due out in September and she’s now in the throes of recording the audio version, thinking about publicity, etc. On Monday, her Substack blog ( to which I subscribe) had an interesting insight into the importance of pre-orders In the post-Covid publishing business.

One thing new in this go-round is that the pandemic made it hard to get paper (manufacturers switched to cardboard packaging) and to print new runs (large printing facilities in the U.S. have closed as people turned to electronic formats), so if you think you’re going to want an actual book you might want to consider preordering one in the next week or so, from a local bookseller if you can. The publisher uses an algorithm based on preorders to determine the size of the first run, and while a second print run used to take about a week, now it can take as long as 8 weeks, so strong preorder numbers help to avoid running out of copies.

I hadn’t thought of that. And it explains why so many publishers now send me so many pre-publication ‘reading copies’ of books. They’re hoping that it might lead to an Observer review. And occasionally it does, though the person who decides is the paper’s Books Editor, not me.

My commonplace booklet

Tesla Model Y was the world’s best-selling car in Q1 2023

Spoiler alert: this may be of interest only to recovering petrolheads.. Normal, well-adjusted adults should feel free to pass by on the other side.

The news that Tesla’s hatchback outsold the Toyota Corolla last quarter is interesting.

When Tesla embarked on making cars way back in 2004-5 its first product was the roadster — an expensive premium sports car (based on a Lotus Elite chassis) aimed at wealthy early adopters (aka Silicon Valley geeks). From the beginning, though, Elon Musk insisted that the company’s long-term strategic goal was to create affordable mass-market electric vehicles — mainstream cars, including saloons and affordable compacts.

At the time many of us (including yours truly) found that a trifle hubristic. After all, the global automobile industry was huge, dominated by Ford, General Motors, Toyota, VW, Mercedes, BMW, etc. — corporations that had mastered the difficult art of making these complex products on a huge scale. Sure, Tesla had a future making clever, expensive specialised cars — like Jaguar in the old days, maybe. But a mass-manufacturer? — give us a break.

Well, that was then and here we are.

As I was writing that what came to mind were similar thoughts that many people had in the summer of 2007 when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. Sure it was smart and innovative — a handheld computer with an Internet connection that could also make calls. But coming from a computer company that aspired to break into a huge industry dominated by companies like Nokia who knew what they were doing, who did Jobs think he was?

History repeats itself, and doesn’t even rhyme.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

”In its first few days of life, Threads cashed in on Instagram’s scale — but its troves of initial users aren’t sticking around. Daily users, once at 49 million, dropped in a week to 24 million, according to estimates from the research firm Similarweb.

Meta has said it’s taking steps to improve Threads and give people incentives to come back. But the situation has echoes of another time a tech giant tried to build a social network off of a huge but mismatched set of users — remember Google+

• Ellen Huet on Bloomberg’s Tech Daily.

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