Business lunch?

Quote of the Day

“Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect . . .”

• Jonathan Swift

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn, Seán Keane, Paddy Glackin, Arty McGlynn & Paul Brady | Gradam Ceoil TG4 2007

Link

I still remember vividly the first time I heard Liam play — in a crowded room in an hotel on the coast of Galway Bay one Summer evening. I was mesmerised then, and am still whenever I come on a recording of him and his peers in action. There’s something about his calm, still impassivity and his absolute mastery of his instrument.

Long Read of the Day

An interview with Dan Wang

For years, one of the great treats in following the geopolitical aspects of technology was Dan Wang’s Annual Letter from China. But now he has left China and returned to the US, taking up a position at the Yale Law school. So Noah Smith (who had advised him years ago to make the move to China) booked a long interview with him, of which this is an edited transcript.

It’s fascinating. Here’s a sample:

Smith: What’s different about semiconductors and advanced aviation? Why has China not been as successful in catching up in those sectors?

Noah: I think there has been a consistent pattern of Chinese successes and failures. Any technology that demands the complex integration of different scientific areas is challenging for Chinese firms. Semiconductors bring together electrical engineering, chemistry, computer science, and more; aviation is the integration of aerodynamics, materials science, mechanical engineering, etc. China’s scientific capabilities have steadily risen, but I would say it’s still fairly weak. No surprise, perhaps, that Chinese firms weren’t able to produce mRNA vaccines, since its scientific establishment is unused to puttering around the fringes of new fields.

On the other hand, for any technology where the science is mature, and the complexity lies more with the manufacturing process, China tends to be strong. Take renewable technologies like solar photovoltaics or EV batteries. The science of turning light into electricity and power storage are pretty well understood. But Chinese firms have been able to outbuild their foreign competition (with plenty help from government support) in creating high-performing products. Putting together a battery, for example, involves around ten steps—from cell filling to final sealing—that demand perfect handoff at each stage. Chinese firms are really good at this, which they learned from the highly-demanding electronics supply chain.

And here the US tends to be weak. American manufacturers aren’t good at making products of high intricacy at high volume. And it sometimes trips over simple products too. It’s puzzling to me that American factories weren’t able to quickly retool to turn out masks and other personal protective equipment in the early days of 2020. There’s something quite strange about the US where it is able to make super-advanced products like AI, jet engines, semiconductor production equipment, but can’t build basic infrastructure or simple products…

Do read it. I think he should now start doing a Letter from America every year, aimed at Chinese audiences.

Books, etc.

Diane Coyle has been reading Ian Dunt’s book. Her brisk review of it is characteristically concise — as is the headling over it: “Competent government? Read and weep”.

It’s an excellent book, forensic in its analysis of the operations of the UK’s central government – and that is exactly why it’s so deeply depressing and angry-making. The chapters cover both the political processes – selection of MPs, role of special advisers, the imbalance of power between the Executive and Parliament, lobby journalism – and the official aspects – an amateur-by-design civil service that’s becoming ever-less capable, increasing tensions between ministers and officials, the dire impact of the Treasury. The book is even handed, pointing out that many of the trends that make for ineffective government today started in the 1990s or before, and were accelerated significantly by New Labour, before being turbo-charged by the succession of Conservative governments that have followed.

The key takeaways, she writes are:

• It would actually be a bad idea to reform the House of Lords as it’s the only part that semi-functions

• None of the actors in UK national politics have any incentive to change anything – for instance, proportional representation would be excellent but neither Tories nor Labour want it

• I already thought more devolution to sub-national levels is desirable, and now think it’s the only hope of introducing any competence into UK government (although many people in Whitehall and Westminster have the cheek to talk about a lack of capacity at local level).

And, she adds,

If you really want to get angry about the pervasive incompetence of the government, just read the chapter on Afghanistan. Shameful.

Welcome to ‘global Britain’.

I might just have to buy the book, even though I suspect that Dominic Cummings loves it.

My commonplace booklet

War criminal turns 100 this week

From Mother Jones:

In early 1969, shortly after Nixon moved into the White House and inherited the Vietnam War, he, Kissinger, and others cooked up a plan to secretly bomb Cambodia, in pursuit of enemy camps. With the perversely-named “Operation Breakfast” launched, White House chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman wrote in his diary, Kissinger and Nixon were “really excited.” The action, though, was of dubious legality; the United States was not at war with Cambodia and Congress had not authorized the carpet-bombing, which Nixon tried to keep a secret. The US military dropped 540,000 tons of bombs. They didn’t just hit enemy outposts. The estimates of Cambodian civilians killed range between 150,000 and 500,000.

I often think of Tom Lehrer’s crack that “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize”.

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Orchids

Passed this in a corridor yesterday and was struck by it. Extraordinary plants, orchids.

Quote of the Day

“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.”

• Jonathan Swift, 1704.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Green Day | I Fought The Law

Link

One of my favourite songs. Lots of other venerable recordings of it — by The Clash, for example, The Grateful Dead and, first of all (I think), Buddy Holly.

Long Read of the Day

Just calm down about GPT-4 and stop confusing performance with competence.

IEEE Spectrum, an entirely sensible publication, has a great interview with Rodney Brooks on the current feeding frenzy about ‘AI’.

It’s a 13-minute read and worth it.

Sample:

You wrote a famous article in 2017, “The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Prediction.“ You said then that you wanted an artificial general intelligence to exist—in fact, you said it had always been your personal motivation for working in robotics and AI. But you also said that AGI research wasn’t doing very well at that time at solving the basic problems that had remained intractable for 50 years. My impression now is that you do not think the emergence of GPT-4 and other large language models means that an AGI will be possible within a decade or so.

Rodney Brooks: You’re exactly right. And by the way, GPT-3.5 guessed right—I asked it about me, and it said I was a skeptic about it. But that doesn’t make it an AGI.

The large language models are a little surprising. I’ll give you that. And I think what they say, interestingly, is how much of our language is very much rote, R-O-T-E, rather than generated directly, because it can be collapsed down to this set of parameters. But in that “Seven Deadly Sins” article, I said that one of the deadly sins was how we humans mistake performance for competence.

If I can just expand on that a little. When we see a person with some level performance at some intellectual thing, like describing what’s in a picture, for instance, from that performance, we can generalize about their competence in the area they’re talking about. And we’re really good at that. Evolutionarily, it’s something that we ought to be able to do. We see a person do something, and we know what else they can do, and we can make a judgement quickly. But our models for generalizing from a performance to a competence don’t apply to AI systems.

The example I used at the time was, I think it was a Google program labeling an image of people playing Frisbee in the park. And if a person says, “Oh, that’s a person playing Frisbee in the park,” you would assume you could ask him a question, like, “Can you eat a Frisbee?” And they would know, of course not; it’s made of plastic. You’d just expect they’d have that competence. That they would know the answer to the question, “Can you play Frisbee in a snowstorm? Or, how far can a person throw a Frisbee? Can they throw it 10 miles? Can they only throw it 10 centimeters?” You’d expect all that competence from that one piece of performance: a person saying, “That’s a picture of people playing Frisbee in the park.”

We don’t get that same level of competence from the performance of a large language model. When you poke it, you find that it doesn’t have the logical inference that it may have seemed to have in its first answer…

Do read it. Well-informed common sense from a real expert. And a good antidote to some of the current nonsense about ‘AIs’ that lack intelligence.

Books, etc.

What we’ve just lost

Martin Amis has passed away, and the literary world is busy trying to assess his worth. There are already tons of obits and tributes — like a particularly good one by Lisa Allardice in the Guardian.

But I think the best way of understanding what we’ve list is to read him when he’s on song. Like in this 1998 essay on the genius of Jane Austen (and what the movie and TV adaptations get wrong).

Here’s how it begins…

Jane Austen, as they might say in Los Angeles, is suddenly hotter than Quentin Tarantino. But before we try to establish what the Austen phenomenon is, let us first establish what it is not.

About 18 months ago (in the summer of 1996) I went to see Four Weddings and a Funeral at a North London cineplex. Very soon I was filled with a yearning to be doing something else (for example, standing at a bus stop in the rain); and under normal circumstances I would have walked out after ten or fifteen minutes. But these weren’t normal circumstances. Beside me sat Salman Rushdie. For various reasons—various security reasons—we had to stay. Thus Ayatollah Khomeini had condemned me to sit through Four Weddings and a Funeral; and no Iranian torturer could have elicited a greater variety of winces and inches, of pleadings and whimperings. So one was obliged to submit, and to absorb a few social lessons.

It felt like a reversal of the Charles Addams cartoon: I sat there, thoroughly aghast, while everyone around me (save the author of The Satanic Verses) giggled and gurgled, positively hugging themselves with the deliciousness of it all. The only good bit came when you realized that the titular funeral would be dedicated to Simon Callow. I clenched my fist and said yes. No particular disrespect to Simon Callow—but at least one of them was going to die.

“Well,” I said, when it was over, “that was bottomlessly horrible. Why is it so popular?”

“Because,” said Salman, “the world has bad taste. Didn’t you know that?”

Still, “bad taste,” all by itself, won’t quite answer. I can see that the upper classes might enjoy watching the upper classes portrayed with such whimsical fondness. But why should it appeal to 400 plebs from Hendon? In any postwar decade other than the present one, Four Weddings would have provoked nothing but incredulous disgust. A 1960s audience would have wrecked the cinema. Yet now it seems that the old grievances have evaporated, and “the million,” as Hamlet called them, feel free to root for the (congenital) millionaires. They can lapse into a forgetful toadyism, and abase themselves before their historical oppressors…

Blissful. All that talent wrapped up in a diminutive person. May he rest in peace.

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So long, San Francisco?

This shocking photograph on the cover of the FT’s weekend magazine heralded an extraordinary report (which may be behind a paywall, thought I hope not) about the catastrophic decline of San Francisco. It seems to be in the grip of the same kind of downward spiral that hollowed out Detroit in the 1970s — when it became the urban area on which Jay Forrester’s famous modelling study Urban Dynamics was effectively based.

Of course I knew that the city was having problems, despite (or perhaps because of) being just up the road from Silicon Valley, the greatest wealth-creating machine in the history of the world. But I had no idea things were as bad as the article reports. When my late wife Sue and I were there in the 1990s we both felt that, if we had to live permanently in the US, SF was where we would want to be.

Quote of the Day

“One day while Mr. Edison and I were calling on Luther Burbank in California, he asked us to register in his guest book. The book had a column for signature, another for home address, another for occupation and a final one entitled ‘Interested in’. Mr. Edison signed in a few quick but unhurried motions… In the final column he wrote without an instant’s hesitation: ‘Everything'”.

• Henry Ford on Thomas Edison.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Haydn | String Quartet No. 62, Op. 76 No. 3 “Emperor” (2nd movement) | Veridis Quartet (Live performance)

Link

Long Read of the Day

The rise of pluto-populism — and its consequences

Long — and very sobering — review by Jonathan Kirshner of Martin Wolf’s recent book on the fraught relationship between capitalism and liberal democracy.

It is hard not to be in agreement—even deeply moved agreement—with Wolf’s diagnoses. And the middle third of this book, “What Went Wrong,” should be required reading for anyone who might underestimate the present danger faced by even long-standing “consolidated democracies.” When it comes to solutions, unfortunately, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism comes up short. Wolf, ever measured, is convincing in making the case for reform over revolution. Although it is tempting to think that deeply ingrained problems require tearing things down, revolutionary movements almost invariably spiral out of control, fall into the hands of ever more radical extremists, and devolve into bloodbaths. Yet it is disheartening that the sensible, reformist agenda of reasonable, practical measures that Wolf outlines already seems beyond the capacity of our politics.

This admirable review-essay provides pretty good support for my feeling that we now need a ‘Theory of Incompetent Systems’ — i.e. ones that cannot fix themselves. If democracies are to survive in any meaningful sense, then radical changes are needed — many of them proposed and argues for by Wolf. But…

Books, etc.

My Observer review of Scott Shapiro’s book:

As we head towards 2030, a terrible realisation is dawning on us – that we have built a world that is critically dependent on a set of technologies that almost nobody understands, and which are also extremely fragile and insecure. Fancy Bear Goes Phishing seeks to tackle both sides of this dilemma: our collective ignorance, on the one hand, and our insecurity on the other. Its author says that he embarked on the project seeking an understanding of just three things. Why is the internet so insecure? How (and why) do the hackers who exploit its vulnerabilities do what they do? And what can be done about it?

In ornithological terms, Scott Shapiro is a pretty rare bird – an eminent legal scholar who is also a geek…

Read on

How extreme heat kills

Andrew Dessler explains how, and in doing so answers a question that for me first came up when I was reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.

When ambient temperatures are in the 80s, sweating supplements sensible heat loss, so we don’t have to sweat much to keep our bodies at the right temperature.

But as temperatures rise and the environmental temperature approaches our body temperature, sensible heat transport becomes less effective and we rely more and more on latent heat transport to get rid of heat. This means we need to sweat more to keep thermoregulated.

As the environmental temperature rises above your body temperature, the direction of the temperature gradient reverses and sensible heat transport begins heating your body. At this point, you need to sweat even more so that the sweat can remove your body’s 100 W plus the heat absorbed from the environment.

“It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity”: Sweating by itself doesn’t cool you — the sweat has to evaporate. One of the factors that controls this is humidity of the environment…

When the air temperature is high, the body cannot cool itself with sensible heat transfer. And when the humidity is high, the body also cannot cool itself with latent heat transfer (sweating). Under those conditions, people’s core temperatures will rise and even young, healthy people will experience heat-related illnesses such as heat exhaustion, heat stroke, or even death. Even if they’re sitting still in the shade, with a fan on them.

My commonplace booklet

The Problem With Counterfeit People

The philosopher Dan Dennett thinks that, with so-called ‘AI’ and chatbots, the tech industry is forging humans.

Which is why we really must stop anthropomorphising chatbots.

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Jesus on the Mainline

Quote of the Day

“I met Curzon in Downing Street, from whom I got the sort of greeting a corpse would give to an undertaker.”

• Stanley Baldwin, 1933, after Baldwin became Prime Minister, a job that Lord Curzon had always wanted.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bon Dylan | Bob Dylan – Visions of Johanna (Official Audio)

Link

Wow!

Long Read of the Day

An Anthropologist of Filth

A wonderful review essay by Ian Penman on R.J. Smith’s new biography of Chuck Berry. Hard to believe that Berry died in 2017. I had assumed that he hadn’t outlived the 1960s. And reading Penman’s closing para…

Nothing that Berry did and was mocked and punished for down the years—the underage girls, the tax fraud, “My Ding-A-Ling,” the lawsuit, his own sex tapes—has ultimately interfered with his place in history. The request from the venerable Museum of African American History and Culture came in 2011, long after all the scandals had been unveiled. His niche in the pantheon just seems to keep expanding. “Johnny B. Goode” was one of the twenty-seven songs included on the two golden phonograph records stashed on board the Voyager spacecraft in 1977. Quite a journey: from fruit truck to Cadillac to jet plane to spaceship. He will outlive us all…

I guess that in our current age of ‘cancel culture’ none of his songs would be dispatched on an interplanetary mission to other hypothetical civilisations.

When the tech boys start asking for new regulations, you know something’s up

My column in yesterday’s Observer.

Watching the opening day of the US Senate hearings on AI brought to mind Marx’s quip about history repeating itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce”. Except this time it’s the other way round. Some time ago we had the farce of the boss of Meta (neé Facebook) explaining to a senator that his company made money from advertising. This week we had the tragedy of seeing senators quizzing Sam Altman, the new acceptable face of the tech industry.

Why tragedy? Well, as one of my kids, looking up from revising O-level classics, once explained to me: “It’s when you can see the disaster coming but you can’t do anything to stop it.” The trigger moment was when Altman declared: “We think that regulatory interventions by government will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models.” Warming to the theme, he said that the US government “might consider a combination of licensing and testing requirements for development and release of AI models above a threshold of capabilities”. He believed that companies like his can “partner with governments, including ensuring that the most powerful AI models adhere to a set of safety requirements, facilitating processes that develop and update safety measures and examining opportunities for global coordination.”

To some observers, Altman’s testimony looked like big news: wow, a tech boss actually saying that his industry needs regulation! Less charitable observers (like this columnist) see two alternative interpretations…

Do read the whole thing.

And see also Steven Sinofsky on When a Business Pleads to be Regulated.

Books, etc.

We’ve been reading this for the last week or so, and it’s even better than I remember it.

Here’s an excerpt that had us hooting with laughter the other night — about his first visit to a church on his travels across the US.

Link

My commonplace booklet

The Langley Files

From a recent edition of the CIA’s Podcast series: precautionary advice (for Americans, I guess) on travelling abroad, culled from what its agents are taught.

Errata

The letter from Keynes to Duncan Grant quoted in Friday’s edition was dated 1917, and not 2017 as I inadvertently stated.

Thanks to the tactful readers who pointed this out, including a couple who were regretful that Keynes is not around today to give us his views on the economic policies of the current UK government.

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They’ve arrived!

Our cornflowers are out! Maybe Summer is on the way after all.

Quote of the Day

“Lying wastes more time than anything else in the modern world”

• Margery Allingham

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Schumann | Piano Quartet in E Flat Major, Op. 47 | 3. Andante cantabile (Live) | Janine Jansen · Julian Rachlin · Mischa Maisky · Martha Argerich

Link

Long Read of the Day

Thomas Kuhn: the man who changed the way the world looked at science

An essay I wrote in 2012 to mark the 50th anniversary of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book that changed the way we look at science, and certainly shaped the way I’ve thought ever since about academic disciplines.

Fifty years ago this month, one of the most influential books of the 20th century was published by the University of Chicago Press. Many if not most lay people have probably never heard of its author, Thomas Kuhn, or of his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but their thinking has almost certainly been influenced by his ideas. The litmus test is whether you’ve ever heard or used the term “paradigm shift”, which is probably the most used – and abused – term in contemporary discussions of organisational change and intellectual progress. A Google search for it returns more than 10 million hits, for example. And it currently turns up inside no fewer than 18,300 of the books marketed by Amazon. It is also one of the most cited academic books of all time. So if ever a big idea went viral, this is it.

The real measure of Kuhn’s importance, however, lies not in the infectiousness of one of his concepts but in the fact that he singlehandedly changed the way we think about mankind’s most organised attempt to understand the world. Before Kuhn, our view of science was dominated by philosophical ideas about how it ought to develop (“the scientific method”), together with a heroic narrative of scientific progress as “the addition of new truths to the stock of old truths, or the increasing approximation of theories to the truth, and in the odd case, the correction of past errors”, as the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy puts it. Before Kuhn, in other words, we had what amounted to the Whig interpretation of scientific history, in which past researchers, theorists and experimenters had engaged in a long march, if not towards “truth”, then at least towards greater and greater understanding of the natural world.

Kuhn’s version of how science develops differed dramatically from the Whig version…

Hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

My commonplace booklet

You studied computer science but Big Tech no longer wants you. Now what?

Nice essay by Charlie McCann in the Economist’s 1983 Magazine which I hope is outside the paywall.

Armed with a stack of cvs still warm from the printer, Ayara (a pseudonym) plunged into the career fair. The room was already packed with job-seekers. The second-year student wasn’t expecting much. In past years, a computer-science student at the University of California, Berkeley, could hope to emerge from this campus ritual with an interesting summer internship, possibly at a “faang” company – the acronym for Facebook (now Meta), Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google. Ayara’s best friend had snagged an internship at Apple at a fair like this one.

But none of the faang firms was here this time. Neither were Spotify, Salesforce, Uber or Microsoft. In any case most of those companies and almost 50 others – “all the famous ones” – had already rejected her internship applications a few months earlier. And that was before the latest round of job lay-offs…

Aw shucks. That’s what happens when the laws of economic gravity begin to apply to the parallel universe known as Silicon Valley.

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Agribusiness 2.0

A beet factory in Norfolk.

Quote of the Day

“Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.”

• Erich Fromm

Geoffrey Vickers, the wisest man I ever knew, once said to me that “the hardest thing in life is to know what to want. Most people never figure it out and wind up pretending that they wanted what they could get.”

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Diana Krall | Just The Way You Are

Link

Long Read of the Day

On Generative AI and Satisficing

Useful insights from Dave Karpf.

I’ve been thinking recently about how generative AI tools might fit into our lives. The best framework I can come up with revolves around Herbert Simon’s concept of “satisficing.”

Satisfice is a portmaneau of “satisfy” and “suffice.” Simon won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on the topic. He disputed the then-common assumption that people approximately behaved like perfect economically-rational agents, gathering unlimited information to make optimal decisions. In fact, as he showed that doing so would be irrational, because of the opportunity cost of limitless information-gathering.

In layman’s terms, we satisfice by (1) figuring out what conditions must be met/ what information must be gained in order to reach a good enough (satisfactory) decision, (2) researching until we reach that threshold, and then (3) settling on what you have found. Simon argued that this type of bounded rationality was a better model of actual human decision-making than the rational actor models that the economists of his day trafficked in.

Satisficing can seem identical to laziness. When I plan a vacation or purchase a new appliance, I resist the urge to spend countless hours researching the perfect hotel or trying to find the perfect dishwasher. I do enough research to find an option that suits my needs, then I stop looking. For example, I bought a grill a couple years ago. I looked on Wirecutter. I decided which of their recommendations most fit my needs (gas or charcoal? Do I need a smart grill? How big?). I checked one other website to see if the recommendations lined up. And then I confirmed it was available at the nearby hardware store.Done. It is possible that a few hours of research would’ve yielded a better grill or a slightly cheaper grill. But not so much better or cheaper as to be worth the effort. Boom. Satisficed…

Read on to find what he does with this idea. It’s really interesting.

Books, etc.

William Harris has a perceptive review essay in Jacobin on Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors, a kaleidoscopic study of the late West German filmmaker.

If you read NME in its heyday, this is for you.

The late ’70s and early ’80s blew new winds into the music press. Punk gave way to post-punk; regional styles proliferated, often outside the mainstream gaze; and a renewed sense of oppositional political commitment suffused the air, as Labour Party socialists took over London’s municipal government while Margaret Thatcher rose to power on the national stage.

The NME, the magazine that invented the weekly pop charts, transformed itself into a magazine of regional dispatches on the DIY scenes in Manchester and Belfast, attacks against apartheid and Thatcher, and long-form essays on pop culture that sought not just to apply poststructuralist theory to pop music and movies, but to see pop music and movies as themselves coursing with ideas and novel ways of seeing.

Notoriously, these theory-minded pop reviews were authored by two writers, Ian Penman and Paul Morley, though in the years following they would spawn many imitators, both at NME and in other music magazines like Melody Maker…

My commonplace booklet

The Lord of the Rings by Wes Anderson

Link

Don’t forget to un-mute the video.

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Bibliophilia

Cambridge Market in 2012.

Quote of the Day

“We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment from a contrast and very little from a state of things.”

• Sigmund Freud (in Civilisation and its Discontents)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Schubert | Impromptu n°3 | Horowitz

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Fifth Horseperson of the Tory Apocalypse

David Aaronovitch used to be one of the few columnists on the London Times that I ever bothered to read. That’s because he is trenchant, smart and very good at calling spades spades. But then, for reasons that are not too difficult to guess, he seems to have fallen out with the management and now has his own Substack newsletter, to which I have subscribed. This essay, posted on May 13, gives a flavour of what he’s good at. It also vividly illustrates the nature of the jerks now in high office in the UK, of which the current ‘Secretary of State for Business’ is a prime example.

The nub of the story is that the Tory government has had to climb down on its original plan to have a bonfire of all the 4,000 EU regulations which Brexiteers claimed to be crippling ‘Global Britain’. But she couldn’t bear to admit the extent of the humiliating retreat implied by the climbdown. For her and the rest of the Brexiteers, reality is an optional extra.

What she was really saying, writes Aaronovitch, is this:

“I and this government have just wasted another eight months of civil service and parliamentary time in pursuing a doctrinaire approach to a deeply consequential matter, mostly to appease forces on the right of our own party. We have used every rhetorical trick in the book to justify this approach, but have reluctantly come to the view that it just isn’t practical. Now we will blame everyone but ourselves for its failure and do it with a simple arrogance which, if you think about it for five seconds, is simply breathtaking. So don’t think about it for five seconds. And here are some pictures of prison barges for refugees to take your minds off it.”

But read the whole thing if you want a useful insight into the state the UK is in.

Ireland is failing to police big tech. Now I wonder why that might be?

The Irish Council for Civil Liberties has just released a damning indictment of the country’s data protection authority.

Five years after the GDPR, Europe remains unable to police how Big Tech uses our data. Ireland continues to be the bottleneck of enforcement: it delivers few draft decisions on major cross-border cases. When it does eventually do so, other European enforcers then routinely vote by majority to force it to take tougher enforcement action.

Lack of funding does not appear to be the primary cause of this problem. Data protection authorities across the EU now have a combined budget of 1/3 billion Euro. The Irish budget now ranks among the top five EU countries.

The Irish Government resists calls for an independent review of the DPC that could determine how to strengthen and reform it. The European Commission is acquiescent.

The GDPR provides strong investigation and enforcement powers to protect people from the misuse of data that enables much of the digital world’s problems. It should be our shield against the digital era’s problems: discrimination, manipulation, media distortion, and invasive AI.

But that shield has yet to be taken up.

The key point is that because the big US tech corporations have their European HQs in Dublin, the Irish Data Protection Commissioner is lumbered with the job of policing them. The zoological analogy is putting a mouse in charge of a group of angry panthers.

Cory Doctorow (Whom God Preserve) has a scarifying commentary on this.

The report’s headline figure really tells the story: the European Data Protection Board – which oversees Ireland’s DPC – overturns the Irish regulator’s judgments 75% of the time. It’s actually worse than it appears: that figure only includes appeals of the DPC’s enforcement actions, where the DPC bestirred itself to put on trousers and show up for work to investigate a privacy claim, only to find that the corporation was utterly blameless.

But the DPC almost never takes enforcement actions. Instead, the regulator remains in its pajamas, watching cartoons and eating breakfast cereal, and offers an “amicable resolution” (that is, a settlement) to the accused company. 83% of the cases brought before the DPC are settled with an “amicable resolution.”

The backstory to this goes back to 1958, when the incoming Taoiseach (Prime Minister) and the country’s most powerful civil servant, Ken Whitaker, sat in an office in Dublin confronting the thought that the Republic was on the verge of becoming a failed state. Its economy was in ruins and its main exports were live cattle and young people.

Whitaker came up with a strategy for survival. Since Ireland had very few natural advantages besides sovereignty, it should recast itself as a country that was uniquely welcoming to foreign capital, especially US-based corporations. And this it proceeded to do with verve and imagination. The strategy worked, and economic development was then massively boosted by entry into the EEC in 1973.

Many of the incoming multinational companies turned out to be relatively good corporate citizens. But then came the Internet and the growth of tech giants for whom a relaxed taxation policy and a location in the EU were just what the doctor ordered. The result is that this tiny country is now dominated by the needs of these monsters, several of which have become positively toxic. But the tax revenues they bring in give the illusion of a booming economy in a country where inequality is rife, many are homeless and there’s a housing crisis worse even than that of the UK.

All of which may help to explain why the government in Dublin might be, er, reluctant to examine why the country’s Data Protection Commission apparently takes such a relaxed view of tech giants’ behaviour in Europe.

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The Graveyard Crow

Quote of the Day

“AI represents, among other things, a profound tech-exec fantasy: an endless supply of cheap and obedient labor and a chance to take ownership of the means, of, well, everything.”

• John Herman, writing in New York Magazine’s ‘Intelligencer’.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Three Tenors | My Way | Moon River | Because | Singin’ in the Rain

Link

Pure schmaltz, but entertaining. And better than Nissan Dorma (as one of my kids used to call it). Interesting also, that they sang ‘I Did It My Way’ to Sinatra.

Long Read of the Day

Will AI become the New McKinsey?

This New Yorker essay by Ted Chiang is the best thing I’ve read so far about Generative AI and its implications for most of us.

I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and A.I. systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey—a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100—and A.I. are also clear. Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.

A former McKinsey employee has described the company as “capital’s willing executioners”: if you want something done but don’t want to get your hands dirty, McKinsey will do it for you. That escape from accountability is one of the most valuable services that management consultancies provide. Bosses have certain goals, but don’t want to be blamed for doing what’s necessary to achieve those goals; by hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice. Even in its current rudimentary form, A.I. has become a way for a company to evade responsibility by saying that it’s just doing what “the algorithm” says, even though it was the company that commissioned the algorithm in the first place.

The question we should be asking is: as A.I. becomes more powerful and flexible, is there any way to keep it from being another version of McKinsey?

And the answer to that question, IMHO, is ’No’.

Read the whole piece. It’s unmissable. And if you need a primer on McKinsey, see here.

A moment’s silence, please, for the death of Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to remember the metaverse, which was quietly laid to rest a few weeks ago by its grieving adoptive parent, one Mark Zuckerberg. Those of you with long memories will remember how, in October 2021, Zuck (as he is known to his friends) excitedly announced the arrival of his new adoptee, to which he had playfully assigned the nickname “The Future”.

So delighted was he that he had even renamed his family home in her honour. Henceforth, what was formerly called “Facebook” would be known as “Meta”. In a presentation at the company’s annual conference, Zuckerberg announced the name change and detailed how his child would grow up to be a new version of cyberspace. She “will be the successor to the mobile internet”, he told a stunned audience of credulous hacks and cynical Wall Street analysts. “We’ll be able to feel present – like we’re right there with people no matter how far apart we actually are.” And no expense would be spared in ensuring that his child would fulfil her destiny.

On that last matter, at least, Zuck was as good as his word…

Do read the whole thing.

My commonplace booklet

A letter from the Editor…

…of the Irish Times, to which I subscribe. It arrived yesterday afternoon…

It opens with a reference to the paper’s ‘founding principles’ which,

describe a view of the world that is open-minded, tolerant, curious, respectful of divergent views and always attentive to the needs of minorities.

We work hard at this. As in any 24/7 news operation, some days we do better than others. But last Thursday we got it badly wrong. That day, we published online an opinion column under the headline ‘Irish women’s obsession with fake tan is problematic’, written by someone purporting to be a young immigrant woman in Ireland. It made an argument that has been aired in other countries but related it to the Irish context.

Over the course of several days, the author engaged with the relevant editorial desk – taking suggestions for edits on board, offering personal anecdotes and supplying links to relevant research. All of this was taken in good faith, and the article was published online on Thursday morning.

Less than 24 hours after publication on our digital platforms, The Irish Times became aware that the column may not have been genuine. That prompted us to remove it from the site and to initiate a review, which is ongoing. It now appears that the article and the accompanying byline photo may have been produced, at least in part, using generative AI technology. It was a hoax; the person we were corresponding with was not who they claimed to be. We had fallen victim to a deliberate and coordinated deception.

We don’t take this lightly. It was a breach of the trust between The Irish Times and its readers, and we are genuinely sorry. The incident has highlighted a gap in our pre-publication procedures. We need to make them more robust – and we will. It has also underlined one of the challenges raised by generative AI for news organisations. We, like others, will learn and adapt.

A lot of editors are going to be writing letters like this soon.

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Still Life: tulips with pics

The photographs in the background are (left to right):

• Henri Cartier-Bresson: Rue Mouffetard, Paris, 1954
• Brett Weston: Canal, Netherlands, 1971.
• Ansel Adams: Dogwood Blossoms, Yosemite, 1938.

I like them all, but the HCB is special because the cheeky young boy in it was the same age as me that year. I’ve often wondered if he’s still around.

Quote of the Day

”Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.”

• David Lodge, in The British Museum is Falling Down.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Spinners – In My Liverpool Home

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Cult of the Founders

Fabulous essay by Henry Farrell on Crooked Timber:

Since I’m on the topic of Max Weber, religion and technology already, here’s a half-developed theory of Elon Musk that I’ve been nurturing for a while. I’ve trotted it out informally at a couple of meetings, and I’m not completely convinced it is right, but it’s prima facie plausible, and I’ve gotten some entertainment from it. My argument is that Musk is doing such a terrible job as Twitter CEO because he is a cult leader trying to manage a church hierarchy. Relatedly – one of SV’s culture problems right now is that it has a lot of cult leaders who hate the dull routinization of everyday life, and desperately want to return to the age of charisma.

The underlying idea is straightforward, and is stolen directly from Max Weber – see this handy Weber on religion listicle for the background. Weber thinks that many of the stresses and strains of religion come from the vexed relationship between the prophet and the priest.

Prophets look to found religions, or radically reform them, root and branch. They rely on charismatic authority. They inspire the belief that they have a divine mandate. Prophets are something more than human, so that some spiritual quality infuses every word and every action. To judge them as you judge ordinary human beings is to commit a category error. Prophets inspire cults – groups of zealous followers who commit themselves, body and soul to the cause. Prophets who are good, lucky, or both can reshape the world.

The problem with prophecy is that ecstatic cults don’t scale…

Most perceptive piece on Musk I’ve ever seen. Do read it.

My commonplace booklet

Another Internet anniversary

Doc Searls (Whom God Protect) wrote to remind me that,

April 30 is also important for another reason: it was the day in 1995 that NSFNET, the only backbone within the Internet that forbade commercial traffic (effectively making the whole Internet noncommercial up to that point), was decommissioned, opening the floodgates to Amazon, eBay and the rest.

There are many sources on this. Here’s one.

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Jaron Lanier

Photographed after I’d interviewed him in 2013. He’s a lovely, clever, decent human being.

Quote of the Day

”Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.”

• Sinclair Lewis in his Nobel Prize address, 12 December, 1930.

Did you know that he was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature? I didn’t.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn and Paddy Moloney | Dueling Chanters

Link

Two great Uileann pipers, now sadly no longer with us.

Long Read of the Day

The dark underbelly… or perhaps the dark floorpan?

My column in last Sunday’s Observer on the downsides of EVs sparked a good many emails from annoyed EV-owners. But it also provoked my friend Quentin into writing a thoughtful commentary on the question.

Electric vehicles have a greater carbon footprint in their manufacturing process than fossil-burners, and it takes a while for the environmental benefits after you drive it off the forecourt to make up for this. In countries like the UK, where it’s relatively easy to get your electricity from renewable or nuclear sources, that’ll probably take about 6-12 months. In countries like the US where you’re probably getting a lot more of your ‘fuel’ from coal, it could take several years, and it’ll probably be the second or third owners of an EV who really have a more carbon-neutral vehicle!

In the intervening period, though, we can feel a little bit more virtuous because — and I do appreciate that any pro-EV points I make in this post might definitely be classified as self-justification! — at least we have moved a lot of pollution away from highly populated areas. (This is distinct from carbon footprint, which can happen anywhere and has a much greater area of impact.) When it comes to human health, though, we’re only starting to get to grips with, for example, the damaging effects of the tiny particulates emitted from exhaust pipes — Tim Smedley’s book Clearing the Air is an excellent explanation — and the key thing about them is that they don’t travel very far. You are more at risk in a cycle lane next to traffic than are the pedestrians a few meters away… especially if they walk on the further side of the pavement.

I’m often annoyed by people who sit stationary with the engine running, while waiting for their kids to come out of school or their spouse to come out of the supermarket… and then I have to remember that the poor things are in such primitive vehicles that they can’t even keep themselves warm in their cars without polluting the local area…

Read on. Quentin had an EV long before I had.

King Charles’s Absurd, Awe-Inspiring Coronation

If you missed the Coronation on Saturday, then Helen Lewis’s account provides ample compensation. Among other things, she wants to know where does Britain keep all these horses and bishops the rest of the time. Me too.

Sometimes the scriptwriters of reality are a little too on the nose. The British throne, the centerpiece of today’s coronation of Charles III, not only houses a sacred artifact forcibly removed from its owners—the Stone of Destiny, taken from the Scots by Edward I in 1296—but is covered in schoolboy graffiti. According to one scrawl from 1800, someone named “P. Abbott” once slept in it. The Coronation Chair, as it’s officially known, also has damage from a 1914 bomb attack attributed to militant suffragettes.

It’s almost too much, isn’t it? The British monarchy is at once a symbol of colonialist plunder, a tradition that many Britons profess to love while cheerfully disrespecting, and an institution that has been dented but not defeated by the forces of social change. I bet the chair even creaks in a manner reminiscent of imperial decline. Britain might now seem like a fading power, but we are a world-beating exporter of metaphors about the state of our nation. At one point today, a gold coach drove under an arch that read happy & glorious, in the pouring rain.

That default miserabilism isn’t really fair—if the coronation proved anything, it’s that a great number of people in Britain are incredibly talented, albeit at skills that were last useful in the 18th century. Did you know, for example, that there are such things as “drum horses,” which the riders steer with reins attached to their feet? We’ve also got heraldic trumpeters, master embroiderers, and someone who can fix the suspension on a gold coach. If you need a “unicorn pursuivant” at short notice, Britain has you covered…

It goes on like this. Magical.

Books, etc.

Power and Progress review – why the tech-equals-progress narrative must be challenged

My review of the book from Sunday’s Observer.

Those who cannot remember the past,” wrote the American philosopher George Santayana in 1905, “are condemned to repeat it.” And now, 118 years later, here come two American economists with the same message, only with added salience, for they are addressing a world in which a small number of giant corporations are busy peddling a narrative that says, basically, that what is good for them is also good for the world.

That this narrative is self-serving is obvious, as is its implied message: that they should be allowed to get on with their habits of “creative destruction” (to use Joseph Schumpeter’s famous phrase) without being troubled by regulation. Accordingly, any government that flirts with the idea of reining in corporate power should remember that it would then be standing in the way of “progress”: for it is technology that drives history and anything that obstructs it is doomed to be roadkill.

One of the many useful things about this formidable (560-page) tome is its demolition of the tech narrative’s comforting equation of technology with “progress”…

Do read the whole thing.

My commonplace booklet

Cow Parsley

Apropos yesterday’s photograph, Hugh Taylor (Whom God Preserve) writes to say that “my Leics/Notts childhood taught me that what I now know as cow parsley was actually ‘keck’”.

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