W.B.’s last resting place

Drumcliff Churchyard, Co Sligo. We always pay him a visit when we’re on the road to Donegal.

Quote of the Day

”I don’t know the question, but sex is definitely the answer.”

• Woody Allen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Alison Krauss, Shawn Colvin, Jerry Douglas | The Boxer | Live

Link

Long Read of the Day

Chatbots Will Change How We Talk to People

Interesting, reflective piece by Albert Fox Cahn and Bruce Schneier in The Atlantic about how familiarity with ‘AI’ systems will have effects that we haven’t yet appreciated.

Chatbots are growing only more common, and there is reason to believe they will become ever more intimate parts of our lives. The market for AI companions, ranging from friends to romantic partners, is already crowded. Several companies are working on AI assistants, akin to secretaries or butlers, that will anticipate and satisfy our needs. And other companies are working on AI therapists, mediators, and life coaches—even simulacra of our dead relatives. More generally, chatbots will likely become the interface through which we interact with all sorts of computerized processes—an AI that responds to our style of language, every nuance of emotion, even tone of voice.

Many users will be primed to think of these AIs as friends, rather than the corporate-created systems that they are…

Read on.

One of the longer-term implications may be that this new kind of faux-intimacy will affect how we converse with… other humans. Raises the question of whether it’s the next step on the road to “Re-engineering Humanity”?

Sam Altman wants $7tn to build AGI

Yesterday’s Observer column..

Once upon a time, nobody outside tech circles had heard of Sam Altman. But then his company, OpenAI, launched ChatGPT, and suddenly he was everywhere – touring the world, giving interviews to gushing journalists, granting audiences to awestruck politicians etc. Whiplash-thin, with a charmingly wide-eyed baby face, he instantly became the acceptable face of digital capitalism.

Then the OpenAI board abruptly fired him, apparently on the grounds that he had not been, er, entirely candid with them. When Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO (who had invested $13bn in OpenAI), heard about it, though, he was mightily pissed off. And in no time all, Altman was unsacked and reinstated in the OpenAI driving seat. And the world was transfixed by the drama of it all. Which only goes to show that appearances can be deceptive.

If the world had read Tad Friend’s profile of Altman, which appeared in the New Yorker in 2016, it might have been less overawed…

Read on

Remembering Andrew

Andrew Fowles, the much loved Head Porter of my College (Wolfson) died unexpectedly last week. He was a lovely, calm, cheery and approachable colleague, and his death is deeply shocking — especially as he had just arrived back from an enjoyable holiday in Australia. He will be sorely missed.

I’ve always thought that for students the most important people in their college is not its Head (Master, Mistress, Provost or President, depending on the institution), or the Fellows or even the Senior Tutor. It’s the porters who rank highest for approachability and practical help. Which is why losing a Head Porter as good as Andrew is hard. It’s especially so in Wolfson, which — with students of 99 different nationalities this term — is the most cosmopolitan in Oxbridge. For them, the Porters’ Lodge is often the first port of call.

May he rest in peace.

My commonplace booklet

I came on this extraordinary painting — “The Death of Marat” by Jacques-Louis David — the other day and was intrigued by it. It depicts the artist’s friend, the French revolutionary leader, Jean-Paul Marat, who was killed by Charlotte Corday, a political enemy who blamed him for a series of killings of prisoners and civilians that occurred in September 1792. Corday fatally stabbed Marat while he was in his bathtub, but did not attempt to flee. She was later tried and executed for the murder.

What struck me about the painting was its extraordinary realism, so of course I disappeared down an interesting online rabbit-hole (as one does). There’s a good Wikipedia page about it, and an excellent Encyclopedia Britannica account of the background to the depicted event.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Air Canada must honour refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot  Cautionary tale for any company thinking of entrusting its customer-service front end to a chatbot.

After months of resisting, Air Canada was forced to give a partial refund to a grieving passenger who was misled by an airline chatbot inaccurately explaining the airline’s bereavement travel policy.

On the day Jake Moffatt’s grandmother died, Moffat immediately visited Air Canada’s website to book a flight from Vancouver to Toronto. Unsure of how Air Canada’s bereavement rates worked, Moffatt asked Air Canada’s chatbot to explain.

The chatbot provided inaccurate information, encouraging Moffatt to book a flight immediately and then request a refund within 90 days. In reality, Air Canada’s policy explicitly stated that the airline will not provide refunds for bereavement travel after the flight is booked. Moffatt dutifully attempted to follow the chatbot’s advice and request a refund but was shocked that the request was rejected.

Moffatt tried for months to convince Air Canada that a refund was owed, sharing a screenshot from the chatbot that clearly claimed:

If you need to travel immediately or have already travelled and would like to submit your ticket for a reduced bereavement rate, kindly do so within 90 days of the date your ticket was issued by completing our Ticket Refund Application form.

Moffat filed a complaint with Canada’s Civil Resolution Tribunal.

According to Air Canada, Moffatt never should have trusted the chatbot and the airline should not be liable for the chatbot’s misleading information because Air Canada essentially argued that “the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions,” a court order said.

Don’t you love that guff about the chatbot being “a separate legal entity”. It’s a bit like “the dog ate my homework, Sir”.

Needless to say, it din’t wash with the Tribunal. And Air Canada seems to have terminated its errant bot.

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Rory

Rory Cellan-Jones has been one of my favourite journalists ever since I was the Observer’s TV critic in the 1980s and 1990s. On Wednesday afternoon he was in Cambridge at his alma mater Jesus College, and when we were going in to the event I suddenly noticed him making a last-minute phone call before going in to the auditorium for a marvellous conversation with a couple of students before an invited audience.

As we passed the window I snatched this picture which I think captures the essence of a lovely, generous man.

Quote of the Day

”Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.”

• John Updike

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn and Mark Knopfler | An Droichead

Link

Two of my favourite musicians. An Droichead is Irish for ‘the bridge’.

Long Read of the Day

A Tech Overlord’s Horrifying, Silly Vision for Who Should Rule the World

Terrific blast by Elizabeth Spiers on Marc Andreessen’s “manifesto”, which has, she says, “the pathos of the Unabomber manifesto but lacks the ideological coherency”.

It takes a certain kind of person to write grandiose manifestoes for public consumption, unafflicted by self-doubt or denuded of self-interest. The latest example is Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of the top-tier venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and best known, to those of us who came of age before TikTok, as a co-founder of the pioneering internet browser Netscape. In “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, a recent 5,000-plus-word post on the Andreessen Horowitz website, Mr. Andreessen outlines a vision of technologists as the authors of a future in which the “techno-capital machine” produces everything that is good in the world.

In this vision, wealthy technologists are not just leaders of their business but keepers of the social order, unencumbered by what Mr. Andreessen labels “enemies”: social responsibility, trust and safety, tech ethics, to name a few. As for the rest of us — the unwashed masses, people who have either “unskilled” jobs or useless liberal arts degrees or both — we exist mostly as automatons whose entire value is measured in productivity…

When I first read the ‘manifesto’, my first thought was that it must be a spoof; my second thought was that Andreessen was losing what might loosely be called his mind. And then it dawned on me that “the guy really believes this horseshit.”

Spiers nails the essence of this accelerating madness. Which is why it’s worth a read.

Books, etc.

• Neal Stephenson has a new book coming — but not till October. (Growl)
• Books are sharks. Ian Gaiman on something that Douglas Adams once said:

“We were talking about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was something which resembled an iPad, long before it appeared. And I said when something like that happens, it’s going to be the death of the book. Douglas said no. Books are sharks,” Gaiman told a packed audience at the Royal Geographical Society in London.

“I must have looked baffled because he he looked very pleased with himself. And he carried on with his metaphor. Books are sharks … because sharks have been around for a very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.”

Thanks to Simon for remembering it.

Robert Reich’s big picture

Robert Reich is an acute commentator on what’s been happening to the US over the last half-century, which is why his Substack blog is a must-read. He was Bill Clinton’s Labor Secretary, and then a professor at Berkeley (from which he recently retired). He’s also a talented cartoonist. Recently, he had a great idea: Put a huge piece of paper on a wall, and then draw on it a graphic account of what has happened to the US (and many Western democracies) over the last half-century or so.

With a team of collaborators, he made a stop-frame video of the picture’s construction which is informed, striking and insightful. (I can say that because he covers much of the stuff I’ve been thinking about for something I’m writing. Working title is How We Got Here.)

The video is here. It’s well worth your time if you think about this stuff. And it is a really Big Picture.

Politics, USA-style

From the current issue of Private Eye.

Errata

Joan Pla wrote to point out “a lapsus in [Wednesday’s] post: the name of the photographer is Sebastião Salgado. Juliano (Ribeiro) Salgado is co-directing with Wim Wenders”.`

Large portion of humble pie duly ordered.

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!

On the beach

One of my grandsons on a Kerry beach on an Easter Sunday morning.

Quote of the Day

”Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.”

• Karl Popper

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ennio Moricone | Lady Caliph | YoYo Ma and the Roma Sinfonietta

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Rise of Techno-authoritarianism

Terrific essay by Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic on the underpinning ideology of Silicon Valley.

Here’s how it opens:

If you had to capture Silicon Valley’s dominant ideology in a single anecdote, you might look first to Mark Zuckerberg, sitting in the blue glow of his computer some 20 years ago, chatting with a friend about how his new website, TheFacebook, had given him access to reams of personal information about his fellow students:

zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard zuckerberg: Just ask.
zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
friend: What? How’d you manage that one?
zuckerberg: People just submitted it.
zuckerberg: I don’t know why.
zuckerberg: They “trust me”
zuckerberg: Dumb fucks.

That conversation—later revealed through leaked chat records—was soon followed by another that was just as telling, if better mannered. At a now-famous Christmas party in 2007, Zuckerberg first met Sheryl Sandberg, his eventual chief operating officer, who with Zuckerberg would transform the platform into a digital imperialist superpower. There, Zuckerberg, who in Facebook’s early days had adopted the mantra “Company over country,” explained to Sandberg that he wanted every American with an internet connection to have a Facebook account. For Sandberg, who once told a colleague that she’d been “put on this planet to scale organizations,” that turned out to be the perfect mission…

It’s spot on. Worth your time.

The Salt of the Earth

This I gotta see: Wim Wenders’s film about the great photographer Juliano Salgado

The trailer is here.

My commonplace booklet

And while we’re on the subject of Karl Popper, how about ”The Open Society and its AI” by my Cambridge colleague Neil Lawrence, who has an interesting book on AI coming out in May.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

“Annotated version of Andreas Vesalius’s masterwork on human anatomy up for auction” 

When the Renaissance physician Andreas Vesalius wrote his magnum opus on human anatomy in 1543, he transformed the study of medicine and revolutionised the way scientists investigate the world.

A “mind-blowing” edition of his De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem, estimated to be worth up to £1m, is to be sold at auction for the first time since scholars discovered it was annotated by Vesalius himself.

The fragile, 800-page book was last sold in 2007 for about £8,500 to Dr Gerard Vogrincic, a retired Canadian pathologist and medical history buff who collects old annotated medical books.

Vogrincic’s copy was heavily annotated in Latin — which experts eventually decided were by Vesalius himself. So it’s now worth a lot more than he paid for it.

Errata

Max Whitby was struck by something I wrote in last Sunday’s edition of my Observer column:

Whenever people learn that I have an electric vehicle (EV) the conversation invariably turns to whether I suffer from “range anxiety” – the fear of running out of charge. The answer is that generally I don’t, though I might if I were contemplating a drive across the Highlands of Scotland to Aviemore, say. But otherwise, no. Why? Because I am able to charge the car overnight at home, and most of my trips are much much shorter than the vehicle’s 300-mile range.

Max wrote to say:

Perhaps you unfairly malign Scotland’s fast-charging infrastructure, which in my experience is impressive. 14 charging stations on the 200 miles journey from here to Aviemore.

He also included a map, which made the point forcefully. Triggered my mantra that The great consolation about being a blogger is that your readers often know more than you do.

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Everything and the kitchen sink

Seen on the way back from a restaurant one night recently.

Quote of the Day

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

• Bertrand Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Berlioz |Symphonie Fantastique | First Movement | Leonard Bernstein

Link

The music is lovely, but watching Bernstein conduct it is mesmerising.

The day I got my first pair of big HiFi speakers I went out and bought a vinyl recording of this. And turned the volume up. My neighbours never forgave me.

Long Read of the Day

Thirteen Years On

Robert Hutton’s Swiftian take in The Critic magazine on the latest outbreak of fantasising by Britain’s Zombie Conservatives.

Sample:

Imagine for a moment that in early 2009, crossing Westminster Bridge, you had been hit by Gordon Brown’s motorcade and put into a coma. Waking 15 years later in St Thomas’ Hospital, you wandered out and, seeing a crowd of people in tweed jackets and mustard trousers, followed them into a hall for what turned out to be the launch of the Popular Conservatives movement.

Who, you might have thought, are these dynamic politicians? There was a comedy turn from a chap called Rees-Mogg — looks like double-breasted suits have made a comeback — and a punchy speech from someone called Liz Truss. There is an MP with a big future ahead of her, you might have told yourself.

And they certainly had a compelling story to tell. Why, it seems that, while you were unconscious, some bunch of complete chancers had been running Britain into the ground! As speaker after speaker explained, you’d woken up in a country in which nothing worked, where taxes were too high, the government intervened in every aspect of people’s lives, and where no one could afford to pay their bills. Thank goodness, you would have thought to yourself, there was a general election around the corner, so that this rotten government could be chucked out and replaced by somebody halfway competent. You wouldn’t be surprised if that Truss got a big job.

For those of us who arrived at the Popular Conservatives launch with the doubtful advantage of having been awake for much of the past decade, things were a little more confusing…

Lovely and viciously funny. Do read it.

Forget range anxiety: we should worry more about China’s global dominance in the electric car market

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The longer-term effects of a switch to EVs are only now beginning to dawn on us. The internal combustion engine spawned a huge ecosystem of auxiliary industries – garages, service centres, refineries, tankers, filling stations and so on – supply chains created to cater to the needs of a 19th-century technology based on heavy machinery, oil, gasoline and exhaust fumes. EVs, by comparison, are relatively simple machines – basically big skateboards with wheels driven by electric motors and controlled by software. They need less maintenance and different skills to minister to them.

There’s also an unexpected geopolitical aspect to the transition from ICEs that is beginning to play out in Europe. Basically a trade war is brewing between the EU and China. How come? Well, China is flooding Europe with EVs. Over the past two years, the country has become the world’s biggest car exporter. EVs are a huge chunk of those exports, and most of China’s EV sales go to Europe.

The European Commission says that China’s share of EVs sold in Europe has grown to 8% and could hit 15% in 2025, on the basis of prices that are often 20% below EU-made models. To Europeans this looks suspiciously like dumping, and may require imposing punitive tariffs “to protect European Union producers against cheaper Chinese electric vehicle (EV) imports that are benefiting from state subsidies”…

Do read the whole thing

Books, etc.

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

• Carl Sagan

My commonplace booklet

From Henry Farrell (Whom God Preserve) whose Substack is (IMO) consistently interesting and thoughtful.

This newsletter is currently hosted by Substack, an aspirationally for-profit entity with a business model. That business model is to get writers to (a) grow an audience, and (b) monetize that audience by charging a subscription fee, from which Substack can rake off its 10% cut. I’m not at all sure that it is going to work out for Substack, but it’s a reasonable set of trade offs for the author. The platform is clean and easy to use. There aren’t any obtrusive ads, though there are features designed to ‘encourage’ writers to go into pay-mode, and readers into pre-committing that they will pay up. I’m grateful (and mildly embarrassed) that enough people have said that they would pay for this newsletter, that I could turn it into a modest little sideline if I wanted to.

But – and again I’m enormously grateful for people’s generous pre-commitments – I don’t want to. I’m lucky enough to have a great academic job, which comes with an expectation that I’ll engage in public dialogue. This is one way that I can talk to people outside the academy. I can imagine radically changed life circumstances in which I might turn to a paid newsletter (I certainly don’t see anything immoral in paid side-gigs that don’t interfere with your ordinary responsibilities, and sometimes do them). But I’m much happier doing this for free.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Stinge Watching Is the Opposite of Binge Watching. New idea from Jason Kottke. Since I don’t do binge watching (can’t understand people who have the time to do it) I initially thought that the idea of ‘stinge’ watching might be for me. Sadly, it isn’t.

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!

Writing by candlelight

In memory of E.P. Thompson.

Quote of the Day

I loathe writing. On the other hand I’m a great believer in money.

• S. J. Perelman

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel | Violin Sonata, Op.1 No.13 | Henryk Szeryng with Huguette Dreyfus on harpsichord

Link

!2 minutes, but — hey! — it’s Friday!

Long Read of the Day

The Vicious Spiral of Political and Economic Inequality

Terrific essay by Valentino Larcinese of the LSE and Alberto Parmigiani of the Free University of Bolzano, who are both participants in the impressive Law and Political Economy project.

Their basic argument is that the increasing intrusion of private wealth into political campaigning in liberal democracies (to a pathological extent in the US, but in Britain also in recent times) leads to a vicious cycle.

Summed up in a neat diagram”

Books, etc.

Chris Dixon’s Read Write Own

Molly White’s scarifying takedown of the latest BS screed to emerge from the Andreessen-Horowitz (aka A16Z) fantasy factory. Here’s a couple of samples. Footnotes (at the end of this edition) are Molly’s.

Exhibit A

It’s profoundly weird to read RSS’s obituary as a person who checks her very-much-still-alive feed reader several times a day to get everything from cryptocurrency news to dinner ideas, and who rarely encounters a website that doesn’t provide a functional feed.¹ And does Dixon somehow not know that much of the thriving podcasting industry is built on RSS, or that many other apps and websites build features on top of RSS without their users ever even knowing it?²

Anyway, fear not, says Dixon, because he has found the solution to the internet’s Big Tech sickness: blockchains. “While plenty of people recognize their potential—including me—much of the establishment disregards them,” complains a general partner at one of the most powerful venture capital firms in the web space. Now, if we would all just be so kind as to ignore the last fifteen years since blockchains’ inception — during which innumerable companies have flailed around trying to find any possible use case beyond the manic speculation that has enriched a few at the expense of many — he’s got an idea to sell us.

And I mean “sell” quite literally: the book is peppered with glowing references to companies a16z has backed, but is completely devoid of any disclosures.

Exhibit B

After three chapters in which Dixon provides a (rather revisionist³) history of the web to date, explains the mechanics of blockchains, and goes over the types of things one might theoretically be able to do with a blockchain, we are left with “Part Four: Here and Now”, then the final “Part Five: What’s Next”. The name of Part Four suggests that he will perhaps lay out a list of blockchain projects that are currently successfully solving real problems.

This may be why Part Four is precisely four and a half pages long. And rather than name any successful projects, Dixon instead spends his few pages excoriating the “casino” projects that he says have given crypto a bad rap,⁴ prompting regulatory scrutiny that is making “ethical entrepreneurs … afraid to build products” in the United States.⁵

You get the idea. Molly White is not a woman to tangle with if you’re a tech fantasist.

My commonplace booklet

 A quote from A Project of One’s Own by Paul Graham.

The team that made the original Macintosh were a great example of this phenomenon. People like Burrell Smith and Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson and Susan Kare were not just following orders. They were not tennis balls hit by Steve Jobs, but rockets let loose by Steve Jobs. There was a lot of collaboration between them, but they all seem to have individually felt the excitement of working on a project of one’s own.

In Andy Hertzfeld’s book on the Macintosh, he describes how they’d come back into the office after dinner and work late into the night. People who’ve never experienced the thrill of working on a project they’re excited about can’t distinguish this kind of working long hours from the kind that happens in sweatshops and boiler rooms, but they’re at opposite ends of the spectrum. That’s why it’s a mistake to insist dogmatically on “work/life balance.” Indeed, the mere expression “work/life” embodies a mistake: it assumes work and life are distinct. For those to whom the word “work” automatically implies the dutiful plodding kind, they are. But for the skaters, the relationship between work and life would be better represented by a dash than a slash. I wouldn’t want to work on anything that I didn’t want to take over my life.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• As my friend, the novelist Isle McElroy, so aptly put it, “so weird when people read a novel looking for answers. novels are questions. question after question after question.” Reading does not guarantee moral certitude, nor will any individual book be able to undo systemic problems. But being able to sit with nuance and contradiction and complexity can make readers become more discerning consumers of media, and coming up on the 2024 election that could only be a good thing.

Maris Kreizman, “Against Disruption: On the Bulletpointization of Books”, Literary Hub, 1 February, 2024.

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!

The Barbican in Winter

For a special friend who happens to live there.

Quote of the Day

“We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

• Louis Brandeis

Which is why I fear that the days of our ‘liberal’ democracy may be numbered.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Paul Desmond | “Take Five” | arranged for solo guitar by Lucas Brar.

Link

Interesting comparison with the Dave Brubeck version.

Thanks to Brian for the suggestion.

Long Read of the Day

 The Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence

A fabulous Daedalus essay by Erik Brynjolfssen on the looming decision that AI poses for democracy: automation or augmentation: doing away with workers, or making them more productive by augmenting them with technology. This is the best and most readable exposition of the problem/challenge that I’ve seen.

Here’s the overview:

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed an “imitation game” as the ultimate test of whether a machine was intelligent: could a machine imitate a human so well that its answers to questions are indistinguishable from those of a human.1 Ever since, creating intelligence that matches human intelligence has implicitly or explicitly been the goal of thousands of researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs. The benefits of human-like artificial intelligence (HLAI) include soaring productivity, increased leisure, and perhaps most profoundly, a better understanding of our own minds.

But not all types of AI are human-like—in fact, many of the most powerful systems are very different from humans —and an excessive focus on developing and deploying HLAI can lead us into a trap. As machines become better substitutes for human labor, workers lose economic and political bargaining power and become increasingly dependent on those who control the technology. In contrast, when AI is focused on augmenting humans rather than mimicking them, then humans retain the power to insist on a share of the value created. What’s more, augmentation creates new capabilities and new products and services, ultimately generating far more value than merely human-like AI. While both types of AI can be enormously beneficial, there are currently excess incentives for automation rather than augmentation among technologists, business executives, and policymakers…

Do read it.

Books, etc.

What a legendary historian tells us about the contempt for today’s working class

Nice tribute to the late E.P. Thompson by Kenan Malik in Sunday’s Observer.

It is not often that, as a teenager, you get captured by a 900-page tome (unless it has “Harry Potter” in the title). Even less when it is a dense book of history, telling in meticulous detail stories of 18th-century weavers and colliers, shoemakers and shipwrights.

Yet I can even now picture myself first stumbling across EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class in a bookshop. I had no idea about its cultural significance or its place in historiographic debates. I would not have known what “historiography” meant, or even that such a thing existed. But I can still sense the thrill in opening the book and reading in the first paragraph: “The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.” I did not know it was possible to write about history in that way.

I still have that old, battered, pencil-marked Pelican edition with George Walker’s engraving of a Yorkshire miner on the cover; a book into which I continue to dip, for the sheer pleasure of Thompson’s prose and because every reading provides a fresh insight.

Were Thompson still alive, he would have been 100 on Saturday…

It’s a lovely piece, which rang lots of bells for me. Like Malik, as a teenager I first encountered Thompson’s book in the Pelican edition. For years my dog-eared copy followed me through various house moves, until tragically, it fell by the wayside somewhere.

Another book of his — Writing by Candlelight — was also a consolation as well as a delight to anyone living in the UK in the 1970s. It was a collection of incendiary essays written during that period, a miserable era in British history. Those essays, he wrote in the prologue,

generally arose unbidden and without premeditation, because ‘events’ seemed to say that something should be said. This something was generally intended to controvert, and if possible to discomfort the purveyors of received wisdom, and to contest the official descriptions of reality presented in the media.

As far as The Making of the English Working Class is concerned, Malik observes that its most celebrated line is Thompson’s avowal

“to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan” from the “enormous condescension of posterity”. What he meant was that from our vantage point, a movement such as the Luddites, textile workers who, in the early 19th century, opposed the introduction of new machinery, and destroyed them, might seem backward and irrational, their very name a byword for senseless opposition to technological innovation. Yet theirs was not, in Thompson’s eyes, “blind opposition to machinery,” but rather a fight against the “‘freedom’ of the capitalist to destroy the customs of the trade, whether by new machinery, by the factory-system, or by… beating-down wages”.

Oddly enough, as we ponder our current anxieties about the possible impact of ‘AI’ on work and on society, this acquires a contemporary resonance.

Thompson’s parents, Wikipedia reminds us, were Methodist missionaries and his father was an admirer of the great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. Thompson’s childhood home seems to have been like Waterloo station for visiting Indian radicals, so much so that he grew up thinking that “nobody could be thought of as a serious person unless he had been incarcerated by the British”.

My commonplace booklet

Finance worker pays out $25 million after video call with deepfake ‘chief financial officer’

From CNN:

A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company’s chief financial officer in a video conference call, according to Hong Kong police.

The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations, Hong Kong police said at a briefing on Friday.

“(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone he saw was fake,” senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching told the city’s public broadcaster RTHK.

Chan said the worker had grown suspicious after he received a message that was purportedly from the company’s UK-based chief financial officer. Initially, the worker suspected it was a phishing email, as it talked of the need for a secret transaction to be carried out.

However, the worker put aside his early doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized, Chan said.

Which makes it strange that some people still believe that the dangers of deepfakes are over-exaggerated.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Quentin’s photo of a Sanderling on Holkham beach. This is both beautiful and annoying, because I have been trying — and failing — for years to photograph these energetic little creatures, who move so quickly along edges of the incoming tide that they appear to be on wheels rather than on legs. So congrats to Quentin.

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Beached?

The Law Faculty building at Cambridge. Always reminds me of a beached cruise liner. It’s named after my late friend and mentor, David Williams and was designed by — yes, you guessed it! — Norman Foster.

Quote of the Day

”It’s starting to feel like the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions.”

• Dan Wang

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Van Morrison | Shake Rattle and Roll

Link

Nobody sleeps at the back when this is on.

Long Read of the Day

Dan Wang’s 2023 Long Letter

Dan is the most perceptive China-watcher I’ve read, and every January he produces a ‘Long Letter’ in which he reflects on the year just past. I’ve been reading them for some years, and they have always been informative, interesting and beautifully written.

This, the latest one is no exception.

Sample:

The most important story of China in 2023 might be that the expected good news of economic recovery didn’t materialize, when the end of zero-Covid should have lifted consumer spirits; and that the unexpected bad news of political uncertainty kept cropping up, though the previous year’s party congress should have consolidated regime stability. China may have hit its GDP growth target of 5 percent this year, but its main stock index has fallen -17% since the start of 2023. More perplexing were the politics. 2023 was a year of disappearing ministers, disappearing generals, disappearing entrepreneurs, disappearing economic data, and disappearing business for the firms that have counted on blistering economic growth.

No wonder that so many Chinese are now talking about rùn. Chinese youths have in recent years appropriated this word in its English meaning to express a desire to flee. For a while, rùn was a way to avoid the work culture of the big cities or the family expectations that are especially hard for Chinese women. Over the three years of zero-Covid, after the state enforced protracted lockdowns, rùn evolved to mean emigrating from China altogether.

One of the most incredible trends I’ve been watching this year is that rising numbers of Chinese nationals are being apprehended at the US-Mexico border. In January, US officers encountered around 1000 Chinese at the southwest border; the numbers kept rising, and by November they encountered nearly 5000.

Many Chinese are flying to Ecuador, where they have visa-free access, so that they can take the perilous road through the Darién Gap…

It’s the kind of stuff you don’t find in the Economist or Foreign Affairs. Worth your time.

Books, etc.

Very Ordinary Men 

Sam Kriss in The Point gives a masterclass in how to take a biographer apart. In this case the specimen on the slab is Walter Isaacson, whose most recent project was a biography of Musk.

Walter Isaacson is the perfect writer for the biographies of our times because he appears to be a born sycophant, and fate decreed that he would be in the right position, at the right moment, to spread as much propagandistic bullshit as possible. After stints at Harvard, Oxford, the Sunday Times and Time magazine—Christopher Hitchens called him “one of the best magazine journalists in America” — Isaacson was appointed CEO at CNN in July 2001. During the first phase of the war in Afghanistan, he sent his staff a memo, warning them not “to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” Every mention of people being vaporized in their homes by U.S. bombers had to be “balanced” with reminders that these were the people responsible for 9/11. “You want to make sure people understand that when they see civilian suffering there, it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.” Later, he told PBS that he wasn’t really so jingoistic: CNN initially tried reporting on the casualties in Afghanistan, but then they received some pushback. “You would get phone calls,” he said. “Big people in corporations were calling up and saying, you’re being anti-American here.” So he caved. What else was he supposed to do? Follow the demands of human dignity even in the face of mild, non-life-threatening opposition? Don’t be ridiculous…

And he hasn’t got to the Musk book yet.

My commonplace booklet

No, multimodal ChatGPT is not going to “trivially” solve Generative AI’s copyright problems

Gary Marcus is having none of Arvind Narayanan’s and Sayash Kapoor’s argument that “output similarity” —the inconvenient fact that Generative AIs sometimes produce near-exact copies of copyrighted material (whether they be graphics or stories in the New York Times) — is “easily fixable”. I’m with him on that. Interesting because Narayanan and Kapoor run a pretty sceptical and well-informed commentary on this stuff. But then, even Homer nodded sometimes.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• As you may have gathered, I don’t much like the elite gabfest that is the World Economic Forum held every January in Davos. So it’s annoying to have to report the that this video of a conversation between a number of tech experts on “The Expanding Universe of Generative Models” is rather good. So good in fact that it warranted 45 minutes of my attention. What’s particularly interesting is what Jann LeCunn said about the learning capacities of young children. If you’re pushed for time, his remarks on that topic start at 7.50.

Feedback

John Seeley thinks I’ve been a bit hard on the selfie-obsessed rats.

A word on behalf of the rats …

Though I liked your linkage of people, Skinner boxes and Meta etc, I want to indicate that the rats were involved in the life-serious food-and-survival quest. Why waste rat time gnawing through a plastic tower, a camera or cables when some guy is providing sugar for very little effort?

Touché. On the other hand, the ‘sugar’ in the human case is dopamine!

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Not a post office scandal

Merely a New Year knitted top for a postbox in Ely!

Quote of the Day

”Life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”

• Søren Kierkegaard

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Richard Strauss | Four Last Songs, TrV 296 – 4. Im Abendrot | Jessye Norman

Link

I love this. The songs were composed in 1948, when Strauss was 84, and premiered at the Albert Hall in London on 22 May 1950 by soprano Kirsten Flagstad and the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Furtwängler.

Long Read of the Day

AI rights and human harms

Terrifically sharp essay by Helen Beetham (Whom God Preserve), a writer who takes no prisoners.

A possible captive in this context is Jeff Jarvis, a distinguished journalist and academic (and author of an interesting book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis, which I’ve read and enjoyed). When generative AI arrived on the scene, Jeff was excited about its possibilities for journalism and penned an essay cautioning us against imposing unreasonable restrictions on the training of LLMs (Large Language Models) like CPT-4 et al.

His piece included the following stirring paragraph:

To this day, journalists — whether on radio or at The New York Times — read, learn from, and repurpose facts and knowledge gained from the work of fellow journalists. Without that assured freedom, newspapers and news on television and radio and online could not function. The real question at hand is whether artificial intelligence should have the same right that journalists and we all have: the right to read, the right to learn, the right to use information once known. If it is deprived of such rights, what might we lose?

That last, rhetorical, question is what irked Helen. “Whose rights are really at risk?” she asks

Who or what is being ‘deprived’ of development? If we read closely, it is not the models at all, but ‘we’ who will ‘lose out’ if AI is not allowed to ‘learn’. This is not a coherent moral position. If models have rights, it can only be on their own behalf: their rights must relate to their own needs and purposes and vulnerability to ‘loss’, not to anyone else’s.

So what passes for moral philosophy in Silicon Valley really amounts to this: let big tech get on with doing big tech, without annoyances like legal frameworks and workers rights. The very last thing these corporations want is a new class of entities with rights they might have to worry about. They don’t want to give up valuable server space to failed or defunct models just because they ‘learned’ or once passed some spurious test of ‘sentience’: they want to decommission the heck out of them and make way for something more profitable. That is hardly a rights-respecting relationship. No, the models that big tech really cares about are business models and the thing they want to be accorded more rights, power and agency is the business itself.

Warming to her task, she exhumes an essay in a special issue of Robotics and AI about whether robots should have moral standing. “The essay,” she writes,

uses the examples of ‘servants’, ‘slaves’ and ‘animals’ to argue that what matters is how ‘virtuously’ the ‘owner’ behaves towards those in his power. The lived experience of slavery does briefly appear – so props to the author for realising that there might be an issue here – but in the end only to lament that the robot-slave metaphor is ‘limited’ by the unhappy particulars. Not that the ‘virtuous slave owner’ is a problematic moral guide. Not that human slavery should conscientiously be avoided as a metaphor for something else, such as the rights of non-human machines.

You are free to use the metaphors you choose, guys, but your choices betray your perspective. And in all these cases, the perspective is from someone with power. The power to choose, the power to behave nicely, or not so nicely, towards other people, women, servants, slaves, animals, chatbots, substrates. What these choices give away is a complete lack of understanding of the agency, the consciousness, the realities and perspectives and struggles of other people. The puzzle you can see lurking behind these examples is: where did all these rights of non-white non-guys come from? And the answer: it can only have been from the enlightened virtue of the white guys in charge. They decided that women deserved the vote, that slaves should be free. And in exactly the same way, they can decide to endow rights, privileges, consciousness even, to things they have created from their own incredible brains.

There’s lots more in that vein, which makes for a striking, exhilarating read.

My commonplace booklet

 Our Rodent Selfies, Ourselves

From the New York Times…

A photographer trained two rats to take photographs of themselves. Guess what: They didn’t want to stop.

(Instagram and TikTok users, look away now.)

Augustine Lignier, a professional photographer, began to wonder why so many humans feel compelled to photograph their lives and share those images online.

So he built his own version of a Skinner box — a tall, transparent tower with an attached camera — and released two pet-store rats inside. Whenever the rats pressed the button inside the box, they got a small dose of sugar and the camera snapped their photo. The resulting images were immediately displayed on a screen, where the rats could see them. (“But honestly I don’t think they understood it,” Mr. Lignier said.)

Do read it. And reflect. We are the rats in the Skinner boxes devised by Meta, ByteDance, Google & Co. But at least Mr Lignier’s rodents, unlike us, didn’t have better things to do with their lives. We, on the other hand, do. Go figure.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Machine-learning (‘AI’) is coming for your signature. Link

Just as well we’ve stopped writing cheques.

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Days like this

Just an ordinary picture, taken on an ordinary winter Saturday afternoon. I was sitting after lunch brooding on the Financial Times’s coverage of the Post Office scandal (about which I had written the next day’s Observer column), and listening to Van Morrison singing ‘Days Like This’, when suddenly the light changed and I saw the table — cluttered with (among other things) newspapers, a copy of Seamus Heaney’s letters that I’d been reading, a vase of tulips, a significant number of pots of newly-made marmalade — in a different light. And because one of the great things about smartphones is that one always has a camera to hand, I snapped it. And then thought that we rarely take such pictures. Generally we take photographs because something (or someone) is going on. But at this particular moment, nothing was happening. And yet it was a special moment.

Quote of the Day

”Somebody’s boring me. I think it’s me”

• Dylan Thomas

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Van Morrison | Days Like This

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Inside Story of Josef Koudelka’s Career

Josef Koudelka is IMO the greatest living photographer, so it’s great to learn that Aperture has published a ‘visual biography’ of him, written by Melissa Harris with his full cooperation.

This is the transcript of a terrific interview of Harris that Lesley A. Martin has done.

Here’s how it starts:

Martin: How do you prepare to take a project like this, in which you have to understand the entirety of a life—or at least try to? What is the process of research?

Harris: We just started talking. I wasn’t really sure where to start with him, and so I thought I would start personally. He really did not know what he’d gotten himself into. It was brutal, our first meeting: Nobody was unpleasant or anything, but it was just really hard for him to talk about his parents or to talk about certain things about his childhood. Not because he had bad relationships or had been unhappy, but because he is very private, and in his own way, quite shy. At the start, it was mostly about figuring out the pacing and just going slowly, letting him formulate responses to questions he hadn’t been asked before or that he had stealthily evaded…

It’s fascinating from beginning to end. And it has a few of his most famous images strewn through it.

I’ve been thinking about his work for a while recently, because I’ve gone back to black-and-white photography, and discovered that, after years of shooting in colour, one has to re-learn how to do it. Photographers like Koudelka are inspiring because they demonstrate how powerful monochrome can be. It’s a completely different medium.

And I’ve ordered the book.

If the Horizon Post Office story is treated as a scandal, nothing will change

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The key question raised by the Horizon story is whether it’s a scandal or a crisis. Why is that important? Simply this: although scandals generate controversy, shock, anguish and anger, they don’t result in significant change. After a while, the public becomes bored, the media caravan moves on – to the next story, the next scandal; politicians piously declare that “lessons have been learned” (though heads rarely roll), and so on. Crises, on the other hand, do lead to systemic change, at least in working democracies. Laws change, institutions are closed or radically reformed, culprits go to jail… life does not go on as before.

There’s no question that the Post Office’s inhumane treatment of sub-postmasters constituted an egregious scandal. And initially there were indications that it might actually have become a crisis. Just a week after Mr Bates vs the Post Office aired on ITV, for example, the prime minister announced that the government would be introducing a new law to quickly exonerate and compensate the victims of “one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in our nation’s history”.

A whole new law, eh? Maybe this scandal is a crisis after all. Not so fast. Although we don’t know the detail yet, it will just be a piece of legislation to right a specific wrong – a bit like the Dangerous Dogs Act of 1991, say. But it will do nothing about the systemic problems that led to the mistakes and injustices in the first place…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

An interesting question

Willard McCarty is one of the most thoughtful and scholarly people I know. He’s also annoying (for me) because he seems to have read everything . He’s the Editor of the Humanist daily newsletter (to which I’m a devoted subscriber), and he has a nice habit of lobbing hard questions into the community which often trigger interesting epistolary debates.

On Friday last, this is what he asked:

For the purposes of argument, let’s put aside whether Sigmund Freud’s theories of mind are correct or the latest word on the psyche. Let’s ask instead whether the great influence they have had and continue to have tells us something important about how we construe mind. For some of the world’s inhabitants (e.g. at least some indigenous Amazonians) the idea of ‘the unconscious’ (a black-box mind) makes no sense whatever. To paraphrase a forthcoming paper, everyone in a specific tribe knows what’s going on in another person’s mind; what they have no access to is what this person’s unknowable relations with other humans and with non-human others will lead him or her to do.

The question I want to ask is this: what do we do on discovering people who think in radically different ways than we do? Would not the best response be to question our possibly quite provincial assumptions about mind?

Why is this significant for those interested in computing? For one thing, taking radical diversity in the exercise of intelligence just might sensitise us to the anomalies of the artificial kind, and suggest that its failures to perform as expected just might open a window on emergent radical diversity in smart machines.

Needless to say, this has led me (and no doubt others) into exploring numerous rabbit-holes. Two I’ve been down already are Samuel Hammond’s essay “Where is all this heading? and Sam Altman’s “The Merge”. What I’ve learned so far is that I’m out of my depth.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

UK parcel firm disables AI after poetic bot goes rogue

From Reuters…

A dissatisfied customer of DPD tricked its ‘customer service’ chatbot into writing a poem about how bad it was. This is how it went…

There once was a chatbot named DPD,
Who was useless at providing help.
It could not track parcels,
Or give information on delivery dates, And it could not even tell you when your driver would arrive.

DPD was a waste of time,
And a customer’s worst nightmare.
It was so bad,
That people would rather call the depot directly,
Than deal with the useless chatbot…

You get the idea. Not a promising poet. But DPD pulled its plug nevertheless.

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Cobwebbed

Well, it is cold around here just now.

Quote of the Day

”The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.”

• André Gide

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sony Terry & Brownie McGee | Bring it on home to me

Link

Decades ago, I heard them play in the Cambridge Guildhall. The kind of evening one never forgets.

Long Read of the Day

 Davos duplicity

This is the week of the nauseating annual gabfest in Switzerland, in which powerful elites gather to smooch and do virtue-signalling. It’s mostly pass-the-sickbag stuff, but this year’s edition is really OTT: the ‘theme’ is “Rebuilding Trust”, which is beyond satire, given that most of the big US corporations are there.

Robert Reich’s blog post nails it. These titans have been confessing, apparently, how worried they are that Trump will be re-elected.

“Yet”, observes Reich,

”many of them are fueling Trump and political upheaval in America by continuing to bankroll the 147 members of Congress who refused to certify Joe Biden’s victory on January 6, 2021.

Recall that after the certification vote and storming of the Capitol, a cavalcade of big corporations announced with great fanfare that they had stopped making political contributions to these 147.

Since then, most have resumed campaign donations to them — thereby helping the deniers get reelected and threatening the stability of American democracy.

All told, at least 228 of America’s biggest (Fortune 500) corporations — representing more than two-thirds of some 300 companies with political action committees — have given $26.3 million to election deniers during the 2021-2024 election cycles…

Do read it. But check your blood-pressure first.

My commonplace booklet

Invisible Ink: At the CIA’s Creative Writing Group

What, you didn’t know the CIA had a creative writing group? Me neither. Not the propaganda department, either; ‘Real’ creative writing. But first you have to negotiate the parking problems at Langley.

Fabulous essay by Johannes Lichtman in The Paris Review.

On the agreed-upon morning a few weeks later, I left my apartment in D.C. and drove into the haze of Canadian wildfire smoke that was floating over the city. By the time I turned off the George Washington Parkway at the George Bush Center for Intelligence exit, and on to a restricted usage road, I was already nervous. I’m the kind of person who weighs and measures my suitcases before flying, lest I be scolded at the airport, and I do not like driving down roads with signs like EMPLOYEES ONLY and WILL BE ARRESTED.

At the gate intercom, I gave my name and social security number—Vivian had gathered this information and more ahead of time, over a series of phone calls, each from a different phone number—and a police officer gave me a visitor’s badge that was to be displayed on my person at all times. He warned me that I was to be escorted at all times.

I met Vivian in a lot between the first gate and the second gate, where her car was the only one parked. She gave me another badge that appeared identical to the first. I left my phone in my car as instructed, and we got into Vivian’s car and drove to the second gate. That was when things started not going as planned.

Four agitated police officers blocked our way.

“He can’t leave his car here!” they yelled when Vivian rolled down her window.

“But I cleared this ahead of time,” Vivian said.

“He can’t leave his car here. It’s a security risk.”

“But how am I supposed to escort him if we can’t drive together?”

“Ma’am,” one of them said, “I just do parking.” Read on.

It gets better. Nice to know that the fate of Western civilisation is in the hands of these guys.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  How is AI education going to work?. In two different ways, according to Tyler Cowen.

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