Figures in a cloister

Quote of the Day

“I’ve been accused of vulgarity. I say that’s bullshit.”

• Mel Brooks

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn | The Rocks Of Bawn

Link

Long Read of the Day

A World Nobody Wants

If you approach the beautiful, historic city of Cambridge from the south, travelling on the M11, what is the first thing you see? Why, a vast wall of hideous Stalinist apartment blocks of the kind that Erich Honecker might have admired, if only the GDR had been able to muster the materials to build them.

This depressing vista is what came to mind when I started on David Schaengold’s bracing essay in Compact Magazine.

Some may continue to tell themselves we live in a time of great innovation, but at least in the world of architecture, engineering, and construction, the sense of stagnation is undeniable. In 13th-century France, entire new technologies of church construction were invented, boomed, and turned into clichés in the course of 50 years. What was built during those rushes of collective mania includes some of the most beautiful and magnificent objects human hands have ever touched. America has used the same amount of time to ensure that every construction worker always wears a hard hat and a shiny vest. The only big change since 1974 is that back then, some people still believed the future might be better.

Why have we built an entire world that nobody loves? Why are the riches of the wealthiest civilization in history spent on hideous highway viaducts that crumble as soon as they are built, instead of temples, monuments, towers, boulevards, and gardens?

The world of buildings, streets, cities, and rooms is a world made by human hands. The developer thought brick veneer would sell better than something else; the architect chose a brick pattern; the bricklayer laid down the mortar and set the brick in its proper place. Someone selected the particular sink in your bathroom. Someone wrote the words of the fire code that regulates the construction of the new apartment building around the corner. And yet no one chose the whole thing, and no one likes the whole thing…

You get the idea. Do read on. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Books, etc.

After watching Timothy Garton Ash’s recent talk on “Europe at War and How the World Responds to It”, I went back to his absorbing and compulsively readable personal history of Europe. I had read it shortly after it came out and loved its combination of sharp political reporting, historical analysis and personal reflections on the continent he loves and understands.

Interestingly, it seems even better second time around. He’s such a sharp observer of recent history, and is particularly good at putting events in perspective. He views post-war history as having three phases: post-war (1945-1988); post-Wall (1989-2008); and Post-Western-World (the phase we’re now in). In that context the findings of some of his recent global polling research are sobering, especially in how they reveal the sharp divide between how Europeans view the war in Ukraine and how the rest of the world (especially the post-colonial global South) sees it.

Listening to Tiim, one begins to rethink assumptions hitherto regarded as foundational — like the notion of a bipolar world dominated by two hegemonic powers — US/‘West’ and China. He thinks we’ve moved into what he calls an “a la carte world” in which states feel free to pick and choose between the potential alliances on offer, depending on where their national interests lie. So while they may disapprove of (for example) the way China treats the Uyghurs, that doesn’t stop them buying Chinese EVs.

Re-reading this marvellous book in the light of how his thinking has evolved since its publication is a real treat.

My commonplace booklet

Carlota Perez’s ‘five surges’ model of technology evolution

Perez is one of the most profound thinkers about technology-driven cycles. We all know about the Gartner Hype Cycle, and the fact that new technology usually follows a sigmoid curve — an elongated S-shape which asymptotically flattens out at the end.

But for a while Perez has been struck by the fact that our current sigmoid seems to have broken in the middle. “With the current ICT revolution”, she muses,

we seem to be stuck in the installation period or in what I call the ‘turning point’, which is the mid-way time of recessions and uncertainty, revolts and populism that reveals the pain inflicted on society by the initial ‘creative destruction’ process. It is precisely when the system is in danger and is being questioned and attacked that politicians finally understand they must set up a win-win game between business and society. And it is the time when much of business understands it must be done.

Of course, each revolution is unique, and the pattern is not mechanical. It depends on the context and on the particularities of each set of new technologies. And yet this time, although installation has been more intense than ever, both in jobs and regional destruction and in lifting new areas and whole countries to development, post bubble crashes have not led to an institutional rethinking to unleash the better and fairer times of the Information revolution. Expectations for a golden age after the NASDAQ collapse, and again after the 2008 financial crash, have been disappointed…

She goes on to try to figure out why this time may be different.

One reason might be that

“after four revolutions replacing manual labour, the new technologies have found an enormous new territory to mechanise: mental labour!”

(Cue ‘AI’?)

Another could be that the globalisation that accompanied the digital revolution

“implies a more complex process of propagation of production and demand across many countries. The ease of internet penetration to the most hidden corners of the world, and the access to information about conditions anywhere, have made it easy to reach many more parts of the globe and much more deeply than the first globalisation from the 1870s, which was based on telegraph, railways and steamships.

It’s refreshing to encounter a thinker who manages to rise above contemporary discourse about technology, which mainly involves thinkers with short attention-spans thrashing about in the reeds.

(h/t to the incomparable Andrew Curry for reminding me about Perez. And to Bill Janeway, who first alerted me to her work.)

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Double Helix Lacing

I like wearing boots, both for everyday use as well as long walks, but find that lacing them up can be a pain. Yesterday, my friend Quentin (Whom God Preserve) pointed me to Ian’s Shoelace Site, which in turn pointed me to this video and made my day! And maybe yours too. Sometimes, the Internet is wonderful.

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Cue Wordsworth…

Quote of the Day

”If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?'”

• Ely Devons

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Carly Simon | You’re So Vain

Link

Long Read of the Day

How Piketty discovered politics

Transcript of a fascinating interview Gavin Jacobson conducted with the celebrated French economist, Thomas Piketty. I read Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (as did 2.5 million other people) when it first came out, but not his later books. Time to fix that, methinks, starting with A Brief History of Inequality (2022), which he says is his favourite book.

Lots of interesting things in the conversation.

At the beginning, for example, Jacobson asks Piketty for his thoughts on the success of ‘Capital’ and on the ways his thinking has evolved sine its publication.

GJ: To what extent has your work since the publication of Capital in the Twenty-First Century been about taking ownership of how the book was understood? Do you feel torn between two Thomas Piketties: the one who has tried to demonstrate evidence of an iron law of capital, and the other who highlights the importance of contingent factors and the politics behind inequality? Have you become more explicitly political in your analysis?**  TP: My own thinking and writing would have evolved even without the success of Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The main impact of the debate around that book was merely that it accelerated the transition of my research to a more global, south/north approach and to give more explicit attention to political ideology. I’ve written several books since 2014, on subjects such as voting structures, and I’ve recently published another with my wife Julia Cagé [the economist] on French political conflict, as well as embarking on new research programmes on the structure of political cleavages and ideologies around the world. I think my research would have evolved in this direction in any case.

But it is true that the debate around Capital helped me to realise the book’s limitations. One of which is that I put excessive emphasis on the universal law of capital…

He did, which in a way explains why two of his later books — on ideology — were attempts to explore variations in the effectiveness of that ‘universal law’.

Interesting throughout.

TikTok may be on borrowed time in the US, but it still holds a Trump card

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Last week, the US House of Representatives, a dysfunctional body that hitherto could not agree on anything, suddenly converged on a common project: a bipartisan bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app to an owner of another nationality, or else face a ban in the US, TikTok’s largest market.

American legislators’ concerns about the social media app have been simmering for years, mostly focused on worries that the Chinese government could compel ByteDance (and therefore TikTok) to hand over data on TikTok users or manipulate content on the platform. A year ago, Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, told Congress that TikTok “is a tool that is ultimately within the control of the Chinese government – and it, to me, it screams out with national security concerns”.

These fears were amplified by the raging popularity of TikTok among US users. It has upwards of 170 million of them and their addiction to it has bothered Mark Zuckerberg and his empire for the very good reason that TikTok is the only other social media game in town. Six of the world’s 10 most downloaded apps last year were owned by Meta, Facebook’s parent. But TikTok, beat all of them except Instagram to the top spot.

TikTok is ferociously addictive, at least for people under 30. What bothers Meta most is that TikTok extracts far more granular data from its users than any other platform…

Do read on.

Books, etc.

Diane Coyle is an eminent economist with an office on the floor above where our centre is based. She’s also a member of our Advisory Board, and one of the smartest people I know. This is her latest book — an extended set of reflections on what’s wrong with economics as a discipline (of which a lack of gender and social diversity is just one shortcoming) and what could be done to improve things.

She explains the book’s title thus:

”Cogs are the self-interested individuals assumed by mainstream economics, acting as independent, calculating agents in defined contexts. The monsters are snowballing, socially-influenced, untethered phenomena of the digital economy, the uncharted territory where so much is still unknown (labelled ‘Here Be Monsters’, in medieval maps. In treating us all as cogs, economics is inadvertently creating monsters, emergent phenomena it does not have the tools to understand.”

This is a critique whose time has come. And what’s great about it is that it comes not from some yahoo like me shouting abuse from outside the tent, but from an exceedingly distinguished insider. Which is why I bought it the other day.

Her blog is also terrific, btw.

My commonplace booklet

I’ll be surprised if the US Congress’s enthusiasm for forcing TikTok to detach itself from its Chinese parent actually comes to fruition. First of all, the Senate has to get its geriatric act together. Then there would be legal challenges on First Amendment grounds. And in any event the Chinese government is adamantly opposed to the idea.

But none of these eventualities has dissuades a motley crew of American predators starting to circle TikTok much as hyenas circle a wounded gazelle. Their activities have led Robert Reich to ask a relevant question: Who do you trust more with TikTok — China, or American billionaires?

It’s a toss-up, I’d say

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• As a regular cyclist, I find this interesting:

Copilot is an AI-powered bike light that uses smart sensors to constantly watch the roadway. Cyclists will receive audible and visual feedback from Copilot to indicate driver behavior and warn cyclists of potentially dangerous situations. Audible and visual cues will also indicate to drivers that a cyclist is near in order to avoid potential crashes.

Shipping soon for about $400. And it’s powered by a Raspberry-Pi!

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And the mural of the story is…

Brignoles, France.

Quote of the Day

“Raw data is an oxymoron.”

• Lisa Gitelman

Simple and profound truth that is rarely understood in contemporary discourses. All data collection is the product of human choices (what to collect, how to classify it, who’s included and excluded, etc.) It reminds me of Karl Popper’s point that “all observation is drenched in theory”: we only see (or notice) what we are looking for.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Zombie | Cranberries | Alexandr Misko (guitar), Alexander Boldachev (harp)

Link

A string duet of the somber, defiant Cranberries song “Zombie” in tribute to Alexei Navalny, whom both musicians greatly admired.

Long Read of the Day

 Something Like Fire

Will the AI revolution warm us or burn us?

Remarkable long, long essay by Michael Totten in City Journal.

The debate over whether AI will be a net positive or net negative runs along a spectrum. Google’s chief AI engineer, Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, is on the optimistic (even utopian) edge of that spectrum. A few years ago, he gave a talk about what he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns—how information technology has advanced at a double-exponential rate since the 1890s. This isn’t only because of Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years. Rather, information technology evolves exponentially because innovations build on one another in a positive feedback loop, a process that began before Gordon Moore was born and before integrated circuits even existed.

Exponential growth is radically counterintuitive. How much money do you think you’ll have after 30 years if you put $1 into an account that doubles in value every year? The answer: $1 billion. Thirty years after that, you’ll need exponents to render how much money you have. Think of exponential growth as a mathematical singularity, a value that approaches, but never quite reaches, infinity. In the function y=1/x, for example, as the value of x gets closer and closer to zero, the value of y explodes. You can plot y on a graph and watch it begin as a slowly rising horizontal line that accelerates upward before becoming a nearly vertical wall.

Our information technology is currently advancing at a double-exponential rate; but even if it were doing so only at a single-exponential rate, 30 years from now we will have the equivalent of a billion years of progress based on our current rate of speed, unless, for the first time ever, the growth curve finally—and dramatically—slows.

Nearly all forecasters fail to account for this…

Read on. It’s good.

Books, etc.

I went to a very interesting conversation last night between Diane Coyle (Whom God Preserve) and Verity Harding, author of a new book about how we might go about ensuring that AI is used for human flourishing.

The book has three big case-studies which in different ways illustrate ways of thinking about both enabling and controlling powerful technologies: the Space race and the United Nations’s Outer Space Treaty of 1967; the way the UK went about regulating the novel — and potentially dangerous — technology of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF); and the creation and evolution of the Internet in the period before 9/11. In conversation with Diane and members of the audience, Harding was very impressive. She also has had a remarkable range of experience in both AI (she was an early hire at DeepMind) and politics (she worked for Nick Clegg when he was Deputy Prime Minister — before he became Zuckerberg’s bagman).

So of course I bought the book, but didn’t wait to get her to sign it; the queue was too long and I was late for dinner. Looking forward to delving into it.

My commonplace booklet

Like me, Robert Reich is wondering why mainstream media isn’t covering Trump’s mental disintegration.

The media continues to discuss Trump’s criminal indictments, and is — finally! — noticing that Trump is becoming less and less coherent. But why isn’t it reporting on something almost every lawmaker and journalist in official Washington knows — that Trump is remarkably stupid?

I don’t mean just run-of-the-mill stupid. I mean extraordinarily, off-the-charts, stupifyingly stupid.

He recently claimed that magnets don’t work in water, that the Civil War was unnecessary because it should have been “negotiated,” and that no one would know who Lincoln was if he hadn’t gone to war.

Then there are the views of the people who worked most closely with him during his presidency. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “f—king moron?”

National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster called him a “dope?” And Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, and even Rupert Murdoch all referred to Trump as an “idiot?” (Technically, Murdoch called him a “f—king idiot.”)

Reich’s conclusion, though, is interesting. Trump may not be intelligent on any scale that we measure it. But he has high Emotional Intelligence, at least in the sense that he is good at stoking the emotions of his fans.

Hmmm…

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My TV critic

I was the Observer’s TV critic for eight years, so I’ve done my tour of duty as a couch potato. Accordingly, I now watch very little TV, and this guy stands watching me accusingly whenever I succumb. In vain did I protest that I was only watching the rugby match between Ireland and England on Saturday. (Ireland lost by a whisper.)

Quote of the Day

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”

• Arthur Ashe

Good advice from a great tennis player. But actually it’s a motto that also applies to life generally.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ennio Morricone | Man with a harmonica (Once upon a time in the West)

Link

Extraordinary piece.

Thinking Aloud

This is an experiment. As I go about my various day jobs I often find myself thinking about something I’ve read or heard on the news but don’t have the time to write it. So the other day I took out my phone and dumped my momentary stream of consciousness into it. Not sure if it works, but I thought I’d give it a try. Here’s one from yesterday.

Long Read of the Day

Sharing the Tech Wealth

Terrific essay by my colleague, Diane Coyle.

TL;DR summary is: Big Tech firms flagrantly disregard the implicit social contract that enables capitalist economies to thrive. The time has come to curb their market power and establish the institutional mechanisms necessary to prevent the benefits of technological innovation from being monopolised by a privileged few.

But that’s just the summary. Do read the whole thing.

It’s hard to over-estimate the important of her argument. Democracy depends on a social contract with capitalism. Since the 1970s, that contract has been weakened and then broken (Martin Wolf link) by neoliberal ruling elites. And the tech companies, with their colossal profit margins, have been generating wealth at a rate — and on a scale — that John D. Rockefeller and his peers couldn’t even imagine. But none of this wealth is currently being shared. If this isn’t fixed, societal breakdown lies ahead, with predictable and ultimately catastrophic consequences for democracies.

Books, etc.

Martin Wolf and democracy’s ‘doom loop’

I’ve had this book for a while, but had only dipped into it. I’m now embarked on a proper reading because it covers territory of something I’m working on. The book is about the fragile, rocky marriage between liberal democracy and capitalism. Wolf’s fear is that capitalism is now undermining, perhaps destroying, the democracy that has in the past saved it from itself (just think of the way the banks were rescued in 2008). As Bill Emmott points out in his review of the book, “there is nothing new in worrying about democracy, nor about capitalism. But, to borrow a phrase from the 2011-12 euro sovereign debt crisis, Wolf’s fear is that this once productive pairing might now have trapped itself in a kind of doom loop”.

Wolf is a deeply serious man, who owes his existence to the fact that some of his Jewish ancestors were insightfully pessimistic and made their escape from the Continent before Hitler got to them. If he sees trouble ahead, then it’d be foolish not to pay attention to what’s happening all around us.

My commonplace booklet

The “Aha!” Moment

From Seth Godin:

The most effective persuasion happens when we persuade ourselves.

The purpose of the memo or the table or the graph or the presentation is to create the conditions for someone to make up their own minds. Because it’s almost impossible to make up their mind for them.

The aha is actually a chemical reaction, a rewiring of our brain, the moment when we see what we hadn’t seen before and make a new decision based on what we believe to be new information.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Back to the bog

The conventional idea about offsetting carbon emissions involves planting trees. But a fascinating item in Andrew Curry’s unmissable blog makes the point that regenerating peat bogs is a much more efficient — and cheaper — alternative.

Errata

Tom Roper was prompted to write by my (mis)attribution of a quotation in Monday’s edition:

May I point out, though, that the expression ‘optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect’, though used by Gramsci, was originally the formulation of Romain Rolland? See Francesca Antonini. (2022) Gramsci on Bureaucracy. Italian Culture 40:1, pages 16-26. for a discussion of this point.

Which nicely confirms my belief about the delights of being a blogger: often, your readers know more than you do :-)

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Guess which way the wind blows

North Norfolk

Quote of the Day

“ Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naïvete.”

• Maria Popova

Reminds me of Gramsci’s adage — that what we need is “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will”. Except that I would substitute ‘realism’ for ‘pessimism’.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bruce Springsteen | No Surrender (Live at Meadowlands Arena, E. Rutherford, NJ – August 1984)

Link

I love this recording of the song.

Long Read of the Day

Viewing the Ob-scene: On Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest”

I’ve been putting off going to see the film, largely because I dread the prospect. But having read David Hering’s striking essay about it by in The LA Review of Books I have to see it.

Here’s how Hering’s piece opens.

A MAN IS being murdered outside a child’s window. A prisoner of Auschwitz, he was caught fighting with another captive. As punishment, he’s being drowned in a river. We can’t see the incident, but the child can. He moves over to the window and looks out beyond our field of vision. Almost immediately, he withdraws back into the room, and utters a gnomic phrase: “Don’t do that again.”

To viewers watching this scene, it’s unclear to whom this is directed: to the prisoners, to the toy soldiers with which the boy has been playing, or to himself. If it’s the prisoners, he has inculcated the values of the murderers who live in his house; he is the son of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, whose home lies on the other side of the camp wall. If it’s the toys, his revulsion at the murder has been redirected to miniature avatars of those outside his window. Most likely, he is talking to himself, and the thing he must not do again is look at what’s happening next door. Better to stay indoors, on the other side of the wall, and withdraw into the make-believe narrative of his toys. The window, as so often occurs in The Zone of Interest (2023), the film from which this scene is taken, is a blinding white square covered by a gauzy curtain. Something awful we cannot see is happening, just out of sight.

The Zone of Interest focuses on the everyday lives of the Höss family. We never see what happens inside Auschwitz, which appears only as a backdrop. Its towers loom above the concrete garden wall, the smoke from its chimneys spreads upwards into the sky, and human bones are washed downstream into the nearby river. We hear sounds of gunfire, screams, barked orders, and machinery, all of which play out over the Höss family’s domestic lives. Each day, Rudolf Höss leaves his house, murders countless prisoners, and comes home to read his children a bedtime story…

It’s a really compelling essay. Criticism at its best.

EU finally sinks its regulatory teeth into tech giants

Yesterday’s Observer column

Last Wednesday was a landmark moment for the tech industry, or at any rate for that part of it that aspires to do business in the EU. It was the day when six of the biggest companies in the world had to start complying with the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) – the most sweeping law thus far aimed at regulating their activities in one of the world’s biggest marketplaces.

The act – which aims to promote fair competition and limit the market power of the largest tech companies (“gatekeepers”) – has been long in gestation, and was vigorously opposed by them from the outset. So the fact that it emerged from the Brussels lawmaking process with some of its teeth still intact is itself a small miracle. But what is even more delicious is to see these behemoths grudgingly announcing how they are going to comply with what they see as an infuriating infringement of their freedom to do whatever they please.

Read on

Books, etc.

Córy Doctorow’s review alerted me to this.

Engineering professor and materials scientist Deb Chachra’s new book How Infrastructure Works is a hopeful, lyrical – even beautiful – hymn to the systems of mutual aid we embed in our material world, from sewers to roads to the power grid. It’s a book that will make you see the world in a different way – forever:

Chachra structures the book as a kind of travelogue, in which she visits power plants, sewers, water treatment plants and other “charismatic megaprojects,” connecting these to science, history, and her own memoir. In so doing, she doesn’t merely surface the normally invisible stuff that sustains us all, but also surfaces its normally invisible meaning…

Infrastructure underpins our world, and yet we pay little attention to it. And — at least in the case of the UK’s public water infrastructure — we turn it over to private-equity and other monopolistic rent-seekers who let sewage pollute rivers while they pay grotesque dividends to directors

My commonplace booklet

How Pseudo-Intellectualism Ruined Journalism

William Deresiewicz provides an original lens through which to view the decay of mainstream American journalism.

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Wisteria

Magdalene College yesterday morning. I’m always astonished what skilled gardeners can do with headstrong plants.

Quote of the Day

“I don’t want to be immortal through my works, I want to be immortal through not dying.”

• Woody Allen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | Cantata BWV 147 | Daniil Trifonov

Link

Long Read of the Day

Of top-notch algorithms and zoned-out humans

Sobering essay by the FT columnist Tim Harford on what can happen when we become accustomed to relying on smart machines.

This is how it opens:

On June 1 2009, Air France Flight 447 vanished on a routine transatlantic flight. The circumstances were mysterious until the black box flight recorder was recovered nearly two years later, and the awful truth became apparent: three highly trained pilots had crashed a fully functional aircraft into the ocean, killing all 288 people on board, because they had become confused by what their Airbus 330’s automated systems had been telling them.

I’ve recently found myself returning to the final moments of Flight 447, vividly described by articles in Popular Mechanics and Vanity Fair. I cannot shake the feeling that the accident has something important to teach us about both the risks and the enormous rewards of artificial intelligence.

The latest generative AI can produce poetry and art, while decision-making AI systems have the power to find useful patterns in a confusing mess of data. These new technologies have no obvious precursors, but they do have parallels. Not for nothing is Microsoft’s suite of AI tools now branded “Copilot”. “Autopilot” might be more accurate, but either way, it is an analogy worth examining.

Back to Flight 447. The A330 is renowned for being smooth and easy to fly, thanks to a sophisticated flight automation system called assistive fly-by-wire. Traditionally the pilot has direct control of the aircraft’s flaps, but an assistive fly-by-wire system translates the pilot’s jerky movements into smooth instructions. This makes it hard to crash an A330, and the plane had a superb safety record before the Air France tragedy. But, paradoxically, there is a risk to building a plane that protects pilots so assiduously from error. It means that when a challenge does occur, the pilots will have very little experience to draw on as they try to meet that challenge…

And of course such a challenge did arise.

Books, etc.

This came out in 2022 and I missed it. Now rectifying that mistake.

My commonplace booklet

The Pen, Mightier

As someone who collects fountain pens (and tries never to write with anything else) I’m a sucker for essay about pens and the writing process. This is the latest I’ve come across. If you suffer from the same affliction you might enjoy it.

Errata

There was a glaring typo in Wednesday’s edition, when I was writing about “an experience that one never forgets” and it came out as “never gorgets”. Thanks to the readers who tactfully drew this to my attention.

Max Whitby (Whom God Preserve) though, took matters a stage further. “Thanks to your typo,” he wrote, “we can now discover the fascinating history of the neck croissant — via a YouTube video: The 18th Century Gorget: A Vestigial Authority Symbol.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

In the beginning…

This is Gougane Barra, one of the most magical places in Ireland. It’s where the river Lee starts its journey to the sea on the South coast beyond the city of Cork. My first summer job involved walking the upper reaches of the river in 1965 as part of a government survey of potential salmon spawning grounds. It was a wonderful summer, and my first paid employment. One of those experiences one never forgets.

Quote of the Day

”Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”

• Truman Capote

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Randy Newman, Mark Knopfler and friends | It’s Money That Matters, Splendid Isolation and Dirty Boulevard

Link

Video concludes abruptly. Sorry about that.

Long Read of the Day

The Science Fiction of the 1900s

An extraordinary essay by Karl Schroeder that stopped me in my tracks.

Here’s how it begins:

The future is terrifying. It wasn’t supposed to be.

I grew up during the cold war and I remember sitting around with friends in high school talking about what we would each do in the 10 to 20 minutes we’d have left after the nuclear attack sirens went off. I remember the sound of those sirens when they were tested; it wasn’t a theoretical discussion. We seriously expected that moment to come, and soon. If it didn’t, we thought humanity would burst through the horror into a new era of peace and prosperity for all.

We’re still terrified today. We can all list the uncertainties and threats that circle our fragile society like wolves in the night. Our fear isn’t greater now than when I grew up; still, it’s different. The despair of helplessness in the face of climate change, of fascism rising like Dracula from its coffin; of resource overshoot and political decay, all feel different to me than the instant nuclear annihilation I was promised as a kid. Part of that difference, I think, is that nuclear war was a binary thing: it would happen, or it wouldn’t. And if it didn’t, then science fiction laid out a future we could look forward to.

Now I’m going to make a terrible accusation…

Do read on. It’s worth it. Among other things, it makes you see Elon Musk in an interesting light.

Books, etc.

My review of an interesting and worthwhile book.

Marianna Spring is the BBC’s first disinformation and social media correspondent, a post best described as prolonged recumbence on a bed of very sharp nails. She is also a plucky and dogged investigative reporter who has repeatedly dived into the cesspit of online hatred and misinformation with the aim of trying to understand, rather than merely ridicule or condemn it. For her pains, Spring has already received – and deserved – some professional awards. But she has also been the target of some of the most vicious targeted attacks that any journalist has had to face: of the 14,488 social media posts targeting staff that the BBC logged between January and June 2023, for example, 11,771 related to her. Any journalist who can endure such an onslaught and remain sane deserves respect.

Among the Trolls is her compelling account of what the dark underbelly of contemporary liberal democracies looks like now. Much of it involves conspiracy theories – those who believe them and those who profit from them. But Spring’s gaze widens into an exploration of the collateral damage such theories cause, not only to individual believers and their families but in the way they undermine the deliberative capacity of democracies. She looks at the way technology has created a world in which, as Jonathan Swift famously put it, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it” – but one in which even blatant falsehoods endure long past their sell-by date because the internet never forgets. And she recounts, in graphic and depressing detail, the unspeakable things that people do and say online. But she also makes some heroic attempts to contact the trolls behind the slurs, sometimes with really interesting results…

My commonplace booklet

 How heavy is a neutrino? Race to weigh mysterious particle heats up

Years ago I read an interesting short story, the title of which is lost in the mists of memory. It was about a writer who comes up with a really implausible plot for a novel. He checks it out with a literary friend who says that it’s so crazy that nobody would take it seriously — except perhaps a particle physicist. Why? “Because those guys believe in the neutrino, a subatomic particle that can pass right through the earth without pausing.”

I filed that away and never found a use for it until yesterday when I came on this article in Nature about serious physicists combining to find how much this weird piece of subatomic dust weighs.

“Observations of cosmic structure at the largest scales suggest that neutrinos are extremely light, with masses of, at most, 0.12 electronvolts — four million times smaller than the mass of an electron.”

Sometimes, science is wonderful. And expensive.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• A German digital nomad who — legally — lives all the time on trains. Hard to believe but, it seems, true. Wonder how long he’ll keep it up. Link

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Democracy?

Quote of the Day

I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity.

• Tom Lehrer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Linda Ronstadt and Dolly Parton ! I Never Will Marry

Link

Long Read of the Day

Marshall McLuhan: Prophet

The crowd who run the Free Press Substack has had an idea for a new series. Every Saturday for the next several weeks, they will have an essay on “an activist, scientist, writer, or thinker who somehow knew what would happen years or decades after their deaths”. Their opening ‘prophet’ is Marshall McLuhan.

Here’s how Benjamin Carlson kicks off:

You are reading this essay because Marshall McLuhan, in some sense, planned for it.

In the mid-1960s, when he exploded onto the American pop-cultural scene—which was also planned; more about this in a moment—he decided to embrace television.

This was not because he was born for TV. He was too “hot” for the medium (in the McLuhanesque sense of being uptight), as he famously said of Richard Nixon about his presidential debate loss to the “cool” John F. Kennedy.

Rather, McLuhan used TV because he, more than anyone of his time, understood how electric technology was transforming society and, even then, had already transformed it.

He knew that whether he liked it or not, TV was where he had to be. His mission was to wake people up—to “needle the somnambulists,” as he put it…

It’s an interesting essay. I’ve long thought that some of McLuhan’s ideas were relevant to our digital age (and in fact once gave a keynote talk about him) and his famous aphorism that “the medium is the message”. I still think that every time I see people taking to Twitter/X.

AI’s insatiable need for water and energy

Yesterday’s Observer column:

One of the most pernicious myths about digital technology is that it is somehow weightless or immaterial. Remember all that early talk about the “paperless” office and “frictionless” transactions? And of course, while our personal electronic devices do use some electricity, compared with the washing machine or the dishwasher, it’s trivial.

Belief in this comforting story, however, might not survive an encounter with Kate Crawford’s seminal book, Atlas of AI, or the striking Anatomy of an AI System graphic she composed with Vladan Joler. And it certainly wouldn’t survive a visit to a datacentre – one of those enormous metallic sheds housing tens or even hundreds of thousands of servers humming away, consuming massive amounts of electricity and needing lots of water for their cooling systems.

On the energy front, consider Ireland, a small country with an awful lot of datacentres. Its Central Statistics Office reports that in 2022 those sheds consumed more electricity (18%) than all the rural dwellings in the country, and as much as all Ireland’s urban dwellings…

Read on

Films, etc.

We went to see Tran Anh Hung’s film The Taste of Things the other day and loved it. Set in 1899, it’s about the romance between a passionate gourmet Dodin (played by Benoit Magimel) and his cook Eugenie (played by Juliette Binoche). But really it’s a film about fin-de-siecle rural France, the importance of cooking and food, love and loss. As someone who loves rural France, and goes there every Summer, I was of course a sucker for it. And the next day I set to and cooked a Coq au Vin which — even though my countrymen often ridicule it as “chicken in a lorry” — was (IMHO) delicious, though alas not up to Dodin’s standards. Still…

The trailer is here. Guardian review here.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Electric bikes actually give more exercise than pedal bikes

Eh? That’s what this piece claims. On the other hand, it’s from an outfit that sells electric stuff. Caveat lector.

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Things to come

It is, after all, the 1st of March.

Quote of the Day

When you make motion pictures, each picture is a life unto itself. When you finish and the picture is over, there’s an understanding, a realisation that we’ll never be assembled this way again. That these relationships are severed forever and ever. And each of these films is a little life.

• John Huston

I thought of this as the credits rolled at my first viewing of his beautiful film, The Dead. It was his last movie, and he directed it from a wheelchair.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Erik Satie | Gymnopédie No.1

Link

Long Read of the Day

Developing AI Like Raising Kids

This is a transcript of a remarkable conversation between two remarkable people — Alison Gopnik and Ted Chiang. It’s the most insightful thing I’ve read on the craziness of the current conviction of the AI crowd (Altman & Co) that extrapolation of machine-learning technology will one day get us to human-level intelligence.

Here’s a snatch of one part of the conversation that gives a flavour of the interaction;

Chiang: One of the guiding questions for me when I was writing Lifecycle of Software Objects was “How do you make a person?” At some level, it seems like a simple thing, but the more you think about it, you realize that it is the hardest job in the world. It is maybe the job that requires the most wrestling with difficult ethical questions, but the fact that so many people raise children makes it very easy to devalue it. We tend to congratulate people who have written a novel or something like that, because relatively few people write novels. A lot of people have children! A lot of people raise children to adulthood! And what they have accomplished is something incredible.

Gopnik: Just in terms of the cognitive difficulty level, it’s an amazing accomplishment. One of the things that we’ve been thinking about in the context of the Social Science Group is that the very structure of what it means to raise a person is so different from the structure of almost everything else that we do. So usually what we do is we have some set of goals, we produce a bunch of actions, insofar as our actions lead to our goals, we think that we’ve been successful. Insofar as they don’t, we don’t. But of course, if you’re trying to create a person, the point is that you’re not trying to achieve your goals, you’re trying to give them autonomy and resources that will let them achieve their own goals, and even let them formulate their own goals.

If you are puzzled by the current ‘AI’ madness, do read this transcript.

Having read it, I bought Exhalation the collection of Ted Chiang’s stories which includes the novella, Lifecycle of Software Objects, that he mentions in the conversation.

I’ve been reading his non-fiction essays on AI for a while — e.g.”Silicon Valley is Turning into its Own Worst Fear and ”Will AI Become the New McKinsey?”. Like Gopnik, he’s one of the most perceptive thinkers about this stuff.

Books, etc.

Kara Swisher’s new book

The New York Times’s reviewer is not impressed. Here’s how he sums it up:

Her forthrightness goes some way in helping us believe that “Burn Book” doesn’t merely represent a convenient pivot, as they say, from Tech royalty to Tech heretic at a time when strident industry criticism is trending hard. But “Burn Book”’s fatal flaw, the reason it can never fully dispel the whiff of opportunism that dooms any memoir, is that Swisher never shows in any convincing detail how her entanglement with Silicon Valley clouded her judgment. The story of her change of heart is thus undercut by the self-aggrandizing portrait that rests stubbornly at its core. “At least now we know the problems,” Swisher writes of Silicon Valley at the end of “Burn Book.” Do we?

My commonplace booklet

From John Thornhill in the FT of 3 February:

The tendency of generative artificial intelligence systems to “hallucinate” — or simply make stuff up — can be zany and sometimes scary, as one New Zealand supermarket chain found to its cost. After Pak’nSave released a chatbot last year offering recipe suggestions to thrifty shoppers using leftover ingredients, its Savey Meal-bot recommended one customer make an “aromatic water mix” that would have produced chlorine gas.

Lawyers have also learnt to be wary of the output of generative AI models, given their ability to invent wholly fictitious cases. A recent Stanford University study of the responses generated by three state of the art generative AI models to 200,000 legal queries found hallucinations were “pervasive and disturbing”. When asked specific, verifiable questions about random federal court cases, OpenAI’s ChatGPT 3.5 hallucinated 69 per cent of the time while Meta’s Llama 2 model hit 88 per cent.

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Bathtime, London

Spotted while walking to a meeting.

Quote of the Day

”A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.”

• John Updike

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The KPIG Fine Swine Orchestra | Ripple

Link

I had such nice feedback about the Grateful Dead’s performance of Ripple that I dug out this alternative version of the song that went viral during the pandemic. The technical skill that goes into producing something as good as this is remarkable. It’s also a reminder of a very strange time in all our lives.

Long Read of the Day

Things don’t only get better

Another firecracker from Helen Beetham.

Sample:

In my post on AI rights and human harms I said that general models (such as ChatGPT) may not keep getting better and better, despite all the claims of ‘exponential’ improvement and ‘artificial general intelligence’ being only a few upgrades away. I based this thought partly on reading experts in cognitive science, like Iris van Rooij and her colleagues, who find the idea of an ‘artificial general intelligence’ ‘intrinsically computationally intractable’ and conclude that currently existing AI systems are ‘at best decoys’. I based it partly on reading experts in general modelling (see my post on Sora). But mainly I based it on the business behaviour of our silicon chiefs, who are clearly more interested in pimping chatbot interfaces and distracting us with new products than improving the underlying models. Which they would do if it was easy.

As it turns out, fifteen months on from ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are a bit better than GPT4 for some things. GPT4 actually seems to be getting worse. Just in the last week, Gemini had to send suspend its text-to-image generation capabilities and go back to the drawing board with its guardrails, and ChatGPT underwent a complete meltdown into gibberish. Both events show that the behaviour of models can be transformed by the tweak of a parameter over at Google/OpenAI HQ. Let’s hope the people in charge of all this continue to be regular, well-adjusted, public-spirited citizens. And both events show something else: nobody actually knows how to deal with the bias, the nonsense, and the hate. Guardrails are a guessing game. It’s black boxes all the way down…

Yep.

Books, etc.

Chris Dixon, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist and crypto/Web3 enthusiast, recently published a preposterous book, (Read, Write, Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet), which critics have been queueing up to demolish. First, the redoubtable Molly White took it apart. Now Dave Karpf has had a go. Under normal circumstances, it would be a case for referring them to the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Authors, but in this case, having inspected a copy of the offending tome, I will make an exception.

My commonplace booklet

Analog Nostalgia goes Digital

From Techcrunch:

It can cost a fortune in 2024 to find an analogue camera, buy film (and maybe special batteries) for it and take pictures that then need to be paid for to be developed. Yet the experience had a charm and a simplicity to it. For those longing for those old days, a startup called Lapse has been giving smartphone users an alternative — you take pictures that you have to wait to see “developed,” with no chance of editing and retaking, before sharing them with a select group of friends if you choose.

Lapse has been been gaining some traction in the market — claiming millions of users, 100 million photos captured each month and a coveted, consistent top-10 ranking in the U.S. app store for photographic apps. Now it’s announcing a new round of funding of $30 million to take its ambitions to the next level.

Whatever next – vinyl records? Oh, wait, we’ve got those already.

Feedback

Kevin Horgan thinks that Tanner Greer was a bit unfair to Thomas Friedman in his essay on the decline of public intellectuals on Monday.

He cites a couple of columns by Friedman in support of that view. One was a column he wrote a few months before 9/11 illustrating how dismissive the George W. Bush Administration was of Osama Bin Laden. The other was a jusdicious and sober column he wrote after the Hamas outrage.

I remember reading and admiring the latter column at the time. Greer’s criticism of Friedman was largely based on his views on globalisation which haven’t aged well. But then lots of people smarter that Friedman have been wrong about globalisation too. Including a lot of ‘Panglossian’ economists.

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