Rooms with a view

Albufeira marina, Portugal, in evening sunshine.

Quote of the Day

“Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.”

• Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (BWV 645)

Link

First time I’ve heard it played by a brass ensemble.

Long Read of the Day

In the Former Eastern Bloc, they’re terrified of a Trump Presidency

Interesting piece in The New Republic reminds us that people in the former Soviet empire know a thing or two about living under tyranny.

The view the Bulgarian minister and others expressed to me was that a Trump win would result in a redrawing of the map of Europe in ways that would enable and embolden Vladimir Putin while simultaneously weakening the NATO alliance. Indeed, a Trump win would amount to nothing less than an undoing of many of the gains that came to the West through winning the Cold War and of many of the most important achievements forged in the wake of World War II.

This view is based not only on Trump’s public statements and actions while in office and since but also on a European perception of the Russian threat that is much more sweeping and menacing than most Americans and many of our leaders in Washington seem to grasp.

Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author who has written extensively on the former Soviet Union and emerging authoritarian threats, told me, “Many Europeans are afraid that a second Trump administration would work together with the Russians and their far-right allies in Europe—both those in power in Hungary and Serbia, as well as those who lead opposition parties in France and Germany—to transform European politics, destroy the European Union, and eventually dismantle NATO as well. That would make it easier for Russia and China to divide and dominate the continent for both economic and political advantage.

“Of course this is not in America’s interest,” she went on, “but Trump does not act in America’s interest.”

Yep. I can’t understand why Europeans are apparently so relaxed (or indifferent) about the risks that lie ahead.

Look before you scan

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Here’s a familiar scenario. You’re going to a meeting in an unfamiliar part of town. You’re running late and it’s raining. And there isn’t a car park in sight. Ah, but here’s some on-street parking and you gratefully pull into the empty bay. Now all you have to do is pay for a couple of hours and then scuttle along to your meeting. But the parking meter (of course) no longer takes coins. This is the 21st century, after all.

No worries – you can pay by phone. There are notices plastered all over the meter on how to pay using an app that – of course – you have not yet downloaded. The rain is getting heavier and there’s no mobile signal. You’re getting increasingly flustered. And then you spot that there’s a Quick Response (QR) code – a nice (if incomprehensible) square with lots of funny squares and spaces – on one side of the meter. Phew! All you have to do is scan it and you’ll be through to a website in no time. So you do and you are. Job done. Relax.

Er, possibly. Or possibly not…

Read on

Books, etc.

Neil Lawrence in the middle of a mammoth book-signing after the launch of his book on Thursday evening in Cambridge.

It’s a terrific book, the best on ‘AI’ that I’ve read since Stuart Russell’s book —  Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control — way back in 2020. Judging from the reaction on Thursday evening, it’ll be the big seller that it deserves to be.

My commonplace booklet

I’m a pragmatist about tech tools. From the beginning, I saw chatbots as akin to spreadsheets. I’m old enough to remember the impact of VisiCalc in 1978. (Indeed, I still have a copy of the original disks in my office, and when ChatGPT broke cover I was immediately reminded of it, because, well…, after VisiCalc nothing was ever the same.) And so I’ve been constantly playing with/using tools like Perplexity, Claude and GPT-4 for the last six months.

Not surprisingly, then, I was intrigued by Google’s new toy NotebookLM — billed as “your personalized AI research assistant powered by Google’s most capable model, Gemini 1.5 Pro”. I had been alerted to it by Steven Johnson, who’s been involved in some way in its development, and whom I take seriously. I’ve uploaded some foundational texts relevant to something I’m writing at the moment, and — to be honest — have been a bit surprised by how immediately helpful it has been.

Of course, that just a first impression. But still…

Linkblog

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No parking

Quote of the Day

”An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.”

• Albert Camus

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sweet Home Chicago | Blues Harmonica

Link

It’s clear that I’ve been underestimating the harmonica for a long, long time.

Long Read of the Day

D-Day 80 years on – World War II and the “great acceleration”

Adam Tooze’s reflections on yesterday’s anniversary.

The rest of the world may be somewhat puzzled by this trip back in time, but for “the West” the 80th anniversary of “D-Day” is the perfect occasion for a rally. For the United States, France and the Commonwealth (the former members of the British Empire), D-Day is the decisive turning point in “our” World War II.

In June 1944 the landings had been a long time coming. After a series of crushing defeats between 1939 and 1942, the comeback of the British Empire and the USA in World War II began in North Africa in 1942 and continued in Italy 1943. But, it was the landing in Normandy in June 1944 that were the decisive breakthrough. The destruction of the German forces in Northern France opened the door to the liberation of Paris and to the eventual meeting with the Red Army in Central Germany in May 1945.

Many evenings, growing up in West Germany in the 1970s, my parents, who were children of wartime Britain, would tune in to the BBC World Service. The broadcast began then with a radio call sign that the BBC had used in World War II: “This is London” followed by an orchestral rendition of the 17th century tune Lillibullero (or Lilliburlero). Translated into morse code the opening bars sound out the “Victory V” – dit-dit-dit-dah. As a child, I imagined people across occupied Europe huddled around their radio sets listening for that tune, waiting for the moment of D-day to come. …

What troubles me now is how this “legendary” history of World War II continues to operate at the heart of Western political ideology. How it is used, 80 years later to frame and shape our understanding of a radically different world. What I struggle with is how to frame a historical understanding of the war that wrenches it out of this framing, that is not saccharine, that is not nostalgic that is not atavistic, but speaks in more challenging and eye-opening ways to the present…

Characteristically thoughtful. Worth a read.

Books, etc.

Six non-fiction books you can read in a day (according to the Economist anyway.)

Poolside reading for busy executives?

1. Six Records of a Floating Life. By Shen Fu. Translated by Leonard Pratt and Chiang Su-Hui. Penguin Classics; 144 pages; $16 and £9.99
2. Oranges. By John McPhee. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 149 pages; $16. Daunt; £9.99
3. A Room of One’s Own.  By Virginia Woolf. Mariner; 128 pages; $16.99. Penguin Modern Classics; £5.99
4. Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial. By Janet Malcolm. Yale University Press; 155 pages; $13.95 and £9.99
5. Ways of Seeing. By John Berger. Penguin Modern Classics; 155 pages; $11 and £9.99
6. A Man’s Place. By Annie Ernaux. Translated by Tanya Leslie. Seven Stories Press; 96 pages; $13.95. Fitzcarraldo Editions; £7.99

I’ve only read #3 and #5 but can recommend both.

My commonplace booklet

LLMs are weird

Well, we knew that. But we didn’t how weird. Some Harvard evolutionary biologists have been finding out. Here’s the Abstract for their paper.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently made vast advances in both generating and analyzing textual data. Technical reports often compare LLMs’ outputs with “human” performance on various tests. Here, we ask, “Which humans?” Much of the existing literature largely ignores the fact that humans are a cultural species with substantial psychological diversity around the globe that is not fully captured by the textual data on which current LLMs have been trained. We show that LLMs’ responses to psychological measures are an outlier compared with large-scale cross-cultural data, and that their performance on cognitive psychological tasks most resembles that of people from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies but declines rapidly as we move away from these populations (r=-.70). Ignoring cross-cultural diversity in both human and machine psychology raises numerous scientific and ethical issues. We close by discussing ways to mitigate the WEIRD bias in future generations of generative language models.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• What happens when you ban cars from city centres? Ask Paris. Changes designed to encourage people to take other forms of transportation have contributed to a 40% decline in air pollution, according to city officials.

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First rose of Summer?

Quote of the Day

”The New York Times now generates more time on-site and profit from word games than they do from news. You wouldn’t know that from their staffing or the conversations they have.”

• Seth Godin

He’s right. Times have changed. And not just the NYT.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Gluck | Dance of the Blessed Spirits for Flute and Orchestra | Patrick Gallois (Flute) | Orchestre Du Festival De Musique De Chambre De Paris | Versailles concert 1986

Link

I think the arrangement is by Christoph Willibald. I first heard this on a wet November afternoon when I was living on my own in the Netherlands. The Dutch Broadcasting Company had discovered — and was broadcasting — a long-lost recording of the opera in which Kathleen Ferrier sang Orpheo, and I stopped work and listened, entranced. The audio quality was terrible but there was something about the recording that was compelling. Here is a clip of Ferrier singing  Che faro senza Euridice.

Long Read of the Day

If You’re Z, Here’s What You See

A remarkably perceptive essay by Timothy Burke.

My college’s commencement this year was different, to say the least. We moved to a location far from campus to avoid having to break up a Gaza-related encampment, and then a very large proportion of the graduating seniors strenuously protested against the college’s administration, with some faculty on stage endorsing their protest.

I don’t want to focus on the immediate issue behind this protest, or even the protest as such. I’ve talked a lot about Gaza, Palestine and Israel in the past few months. Instead, I’m thinking about why this generation of young people in general seem to be weighing whether they will vote in large numbers this November despite the fact that many of them seem committed to social and political views that ought to lead them to strongly oppose Donald Trump and the GOP. (As indeed they did in 2022, 2020 and 2018.) Some observers believe that this generation’s sympathies for Palestinian statehood are leading them into a completely irrational opposition to Biden’s re-election or a fallacious view that both parties are the same, that at the very least, the issue of Israel-Palestine is only one “special interest” that a rational voter should be able to put into perspective.

I quite agree that they should do so. I actually think many people in their early 20s and late teens already have done so. I think disquiet with American policy on Israel is only a kind of visible indicator of a much vaster, more diffuse sort of generational disaffection with formal politics that the older leadership of the Democratic Party and their older generational supporters are fundamentally incapable of speaking to or grasping…

Do read the whole thing. And see below for why I chose it.

Books, etc.

Daniel Rodgers’s The Age of Fracture is one of the most perceptive books I’ve ever read. It’s an intellectual history of late 20th-century America and of how the public sphere changed from an emphasis on institutions and social relations to a focus on the rise of individualism. (For a good summary see Diane Coyle’s short review.) Essentially, it’s an account of the transition from the post-war Keynesian ‘political order’ (as Gary Gerstle would call it) to the neoliberal one embodied by the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to power.

The book came out in 2011 and is a good illustration of the adage that we “live life forwards but understand it backwards”. With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, Rodgers makes sense of a period — the 1970s — through which I lived but hadn’t really understood. All I had was a vague unease that seismic societal shifts were under way, but I had no informed sense of where they were heading. Now — partly as a result of reading Rodgers, but also from reading up on the transition of neoliberalism from a fringe idea to a dominant ideology (thanks to Gary Gerstle for that) — I came to view that decade as a key inflection point in the evolution of liberal democracies. Which has been helpful in my current project — a book with the working title HWGH (for How We Got Here).

I have an eerie sense of deja vu about the moment we’re living in now. Something’s up. One sees it everywhere: in the way old reflexive support for Israel hasn’t materialised, for example, and been replaced by concern for Palestinians — much to the astonishment of political establishments everywhere in the West. So perhaps you can see why I was so impressed by Timothy Burke’s Long Read (see above). He seems to have an intuitive sense of the evolving Zeitgeist and accordingly is worth tuning into.

My commonplace booklet

Georgia: the Putin playbook in full view

A sobering Economist podcast about what’s happening in Georgia right now. The same playbook is being rolled out in Hungary, and perhaps also in Slovakia. Anyone who thinks that Putin would stop after Ukraine has been defeated is engaged in magical thinking. Europe’s holiday from history is over.

(Disclosure: my son Pete was the producer on this particular podcast)

Linkblog

Some things I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone. Each time you use AI to generate an image, write an email, or ask a chatbot a question, it comes at a cost to the planet. Source

• Summing up the UN’s ‘AI for Good’ summit

But honestly, I didn’t leave the conference feeling confident AI was going to play a meaningful role in advancing any of the UN goals. In fact, the most interesting speeches were about how AI is doing the opposite. Sage Lenier, a climate activist, talked about how we must not let AI accelerate environmental destruction. Tristan Harris, the cofounder of the Center for Humane Technology, gave a compelling talk connecting the dots between our addiction to social media, the tech sector’s financial incentives, and our failure to learn from previous tech booms. And there are still deeply ingrained gender biases in tech, Mia Shah-Dand, the founder of Women in AI Ethics, reminded us. 

 Melissa Heikkilä in MIT Technology Review

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Up the garden path

Quote of the Day

”Being short never bothered me for three seconds. The rest of the time I wanted to commit suicide.

• Mel Brooks

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Michel Legrand | “The Windmills of Your Mind” (from The Thomas Crown Affair) | Renaud Capuçon

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Bubble This Time

Scott Galloway writing about the here and now.

Sample:

Airplanes follow flight patterns, calculated to maximize safety and passenger comfort while minimizing fuel use. Atmosphere is not a static medium, however, and sometimes planes encounter localized areas of rapid air movement, aka turbulence. A sudden downdraft can cause a plane to drop hundreds or thousands of feet in seconds, an event known as hitting an air pocket. Most are harmless, but strong downdrafts can be terrifying and dangerous. Just this week, a Singapore Air 777 dropped so sharply that one passenger was killed and six more sent to the hospital.

Modern airplanes recover from hitting an air pocket in seconds, but frothy markets take longer to find their footing. Here’s one scenario: A major non-tech company (e.g., Walmart, JPM, Procter & Gamble) will announce it is paring back on its AI initiatives. Shuttering its AI team, calling off a joint venture, etc. “We remain optimistic about the long-term impact of AI on our business, but we are not seeing the ROI initially projected and are scaling back our level of capital investment in this technology.” The same cycle that drove prices up will pare them, only faster: Analysts will identify which AI players were selling to the company, and every CEO on every earnings call that week will be asked if they’re cutting back their AI spend. Trend reversals travel through earnings calls like cold viruses through kindergartens, and by the end of the month, no CEO will want to be on the last helicopter out of AI Saigon. AI stocks will decline, and once they do, speculators will begin selling, creating a stampede for the exits. Trillions of dollars in market cap erased in weeks. Someone will time it perfectly. Most won’t.

A cautionary read. I particularly liked this: “Trend reversals travel through earnings calls like cold viruses through kindergartens.”

Books, etc.

Hari Kunzru: The Books of my Life

A terrific novelist on rereading the classics, his teenage love of outsiders, and discovering the brilliance of Anita Brookner.

Link

My commonplace booklet

Why did satirical genius Tom Lehrer swap worldwide fame for obscurity? 

Lovely essay about him by playwright Francis Beckett, whose play, “Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You” is on at Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate Village, London, from 28 May to 9 June.

What I loved most about Lehrer (apart from his songs) was that he didn’t seem to care about money.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• The trailer for  Idea Man, Ron Howard’s biography of Jim Henson. A must-watch.

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!

Horse bolted, door still open

Jesus College, Cambridge

Quote of the Day

”Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.”

• Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

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

Link

Loveliest set or reels I can think of: The Humours of Carrigaholt (0:00), Mayor Harrison’s Fedora (1:13) & Tommy Peoples’ (2:26).

Long Read of the Day

Ukraine on the ropes

A characteristically insightful recent report from Kiev by Timothy Garton Ash (whose book Homelands I’ve been re-reading and heartily recommend).

As I contemplate a forest of small Ukrainian flags on the Maidan in central Kyiv, placed there by bereaved relatives as a memorial to the war dead, I’m accosted by a burly Ukrainian soldier in combat uniform. He’s with the elite 95th Air Assault Brigade and he has been fighting Russian aggression for more than a decade. “At the moment of victory,” he tells me, “please pour the first glass on to the ground for those who have fallen.”

Gesturing to the seemingly normal life around us in the Ukrainian capital, with young people drinking at nice cafes, almost as though this were Paris or Vienna, he says, “Every peaceful day here costs a lot of lives at the front.” But he chokes up on the last words and his eyes fill with tears. “Sorry, sorry!” he exclaims, embarrassed by this moment of weakness. Then he grips my hand one more time, grasps the straps of his khaki rucksack, and marches off through the civilian crowd like a ghost from the trenches of the first world war…

Europe’s been on a holiday from history since 1945. When Putin invaded Ukraine the video reports looked eerily similar to WW2 footage, except they were now in colour, and I assumed that most Europeans would get the message. They still haven’t, which is why Tim’s perspective is so salutary.

Books, etc.

Martin Rees’s new book.

Blurb:

There has never been a time when ‘following the science’ has been more important for humanity. At no other point in history have we had such advanced knowledge and technology at our fingertips, nor had such astonishing capacity to determine the future of our planet.

But the decisions we must make on how science is applied belong outside the lab and should be the outcome of wide public debate. For that to happen, science needs to become part of our common culture. Science is not just for scientists: if it were, it could never save us from the multiple crises we face. For science can save us, if its innovations mesh carefully into society and its applications are channelled for the common good.

Hmmm… Martin is one of the nicest and smartest people I know, but I can’t see science (or an understanding of it) becoming ‘part of our common culture’ any time soon, especially given our current media ecosystem. I wish it were otherwise.

My commonplace booklet

How news coverage, often uncritical, helps build up the AI hype

Useful piece by Rasmus Nielsen on how journalism is still doing a poor job in covering ‘AI’ (aka machine-learning).

So, perhaps, as Timit Gebru, founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), has written on X: “The same news orgs hype stuff up during ‘AI summers’ without even looking into their archives to see what they wrote decades ago?”

There are some really good reporters doing important work to help people understand AI—as well as plenty of sensationalist coverage focused on killer robots and wild claims about possible future existential risks.

But, more than anything, research on how news media cover AI overall suggests that Gebru is largely right – the coverage tends to be led by industry sources, and often takes claims about what the technology can and can’t do, and might be able to do in the future, at face value in ways that contributes to the hype cycle.

Growl. In one sense it’s comforting to have one’s own view confirmed, but it’s depressing because it means that journalism isn’t doing its job properly.

 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!

Punting, anyone?

Quote of the Day

” I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I’m old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

• Evelyn Waugh

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Keith Richards | “Cocaine Blues”

Link

So effortless.

Long Read of the Day

There’s an article I shouldn’t tell you about – is contempt law in a losing battle with reality?

Really thoughtful piece by Archie Bland, Editor of the paper’s First Edition newsletter.

Background: Coming back on the train from London last Thursday afternoon I read a long, long article by Rachel Aviv in the New Yorker about Lucy Letby, “the most notorious nurse in Britain, who was found guilty of killing seven babies”, and asking whether she was really guilty of those crimes. It’s a classic New Yorker investigative piece — 15 pages long. It makes a pretty good argument for the view that Letby’s conviction was unsound.

Since my current Press Fellows were due to have a talk by Richard Danbury on the implications for journalism of the UK contempt-of-court law the following day, I thought I would send them the New Yorker link. And then discovered that I couldn’t — the article had been ‘geoblocked. But I could have photocopied the pages in the magazine and handed them out — which I did.

Now, over to Archie:

An article has been published in the New Yorker about the trial of Lucy Letby. It has been geoblocked in the UK, but it can still be accessed by some, or read in print copies of the US magazine. It has been raised in parliament, written up by news providers and discussed on social media. I shouldn’t link to it, describe its contents or tell you anything else about it.

By the letter of the law, I also shouldn’t give you more specific detail about why I shouldn’t give you more specific detail, except to say that Letby has a retrial on one charge of attempted murder scheduled for June. But I can at least tell you about the law in England and Wales that has created this surreal situation: the Contempt of Court Act 1981.

You will be familiar with the laudable concept behind this law, which exists to stop anything that will prejudice a court case and prevent a fair trial…

Later. The Court of Appeal on Thursday rejected Letby’s application for permission to appeal against her convictions in September. She will face a retrial at the same court in June on a single count that she attempted to murder a baby girl, known as Child K, in February 2016.

My commonplace booklet

Are LLMs moral hypocrites?

Yes, according to the most abstruse paper I’ve read in a while.

As a case study, we submitted the Moral Foundation Questionnaire and the Moral Foundation Vignettes to four state-of-the-art LLMs: GPT-4, Claude 2.1, Gemini Pro, and LLAMA-2-Chat-70b. Of those, only GPT-4 and Claude 2.1 generated valid outputs for our stimuli.

We found that, within each instrument, both models were capable of presenting moral values with consistency com- parable to human respondents. However, our results utterly lacked any coherence in the values between abstraction levels. We characterise these models as moral hypocrites, failing to apply declared abstract values to concrete situations.

If LLMs are to play a role in morally relevant situations (as they are already being used), we ought to require them not to be hypocrites, and this should be an important aspect of alignment evaluation for future models. This is also relevant for anyone considering replacing human participants with LLMs. Finally, our results are compatible with mimicry instead of conceptual mastery.

Note last sentence and remember that these machines are all trained on everything humans have written that is machine readable. And humans are, well, masterful at hypocrisy.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Crows’ feat. From Nature…

Carrion crows (Corvus corone) can reliably caw a number of times from one to four on command — a skill that had only been seen in people. Over several months, birds were trained with treats to associate a screen showing the digits, or a related sound, with the right number of calls. The crows were not displaying a ‘true’ counting ability, which requires a symbolic understanding of numbers, say researchers. But they are nevertheless able to produce a deliberate number of vocalizations on cue, which is “a very impressive achievement”, says neuroscientist Giorgio Vallortigara.

(Apologies for the terrible pun)

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!

Travelling light

King’s Cross the other day.

Quote of the Day

”It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.”

• Oscar Wilde* 

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bruce Springsteen | You Never Can Tell (Leipzig 7/7/13)

Link

A good illustration of what the Springseen experience is like. And what a great backing band.

Long Read of the Day

Academia: The Heroic Prompt Engineers of Tomorrow

Nice sharp essay by Timothy Burke on the latest hype-cycle in ed-tech.

I’m of the same mind as people who think generative AI is grossly over-hyped by people who see it as their meal ticket. It is in many respects a big con, a solution desperately in search of problems, a product that was made and sold without a use case for it. Unfortunately, as many people have observed, the money being made off the hype is going to be used to destroy institutions, jobs and practices before the whole thing ebbs back to being whatever modestly or possibly useful thing it might turn out to be.

I hope that higher education withstands AI hype as much it (mostly) successfully held off the worst of the previous assaults by ed-tech speculators who insisted that massively-online courses were inevitably going to replace all brick-and-mortar education and usher in an era of cheap, plentiful, high-quality education available to everyone.

One thing that briefly produced a respite in the ed-tech assault was that for two years, we experienced a live demo of their best products and the results were bad for the most part…

Do read on. It’s good.

I worked happily at the Open University for many years, which was a real centre of excellence in this stuff, and so we had a ringside view of successive waves of hype, inflated expectations, undelivered promises and poor critical evaluation by an industry that knew nothing about education, or indeed about how people learn. One of my colleagues, Tim O’Shea, who was a leading expert on Ed-tech — and a frequent keynote speaker at conferences on the subject — had a wicked way of annoying his audience by saying that “the only piece of educational technology that is known for sure to work is the school bus”!

My commonplace booklet

There’s a really interesting NBER paper on how the market for ‘AI’ technology might evolve.

Here’s the Abstract:

Drawing insights from the field of innovation economics, we discuss the likely competitive environment shaping generative AI advances. Central to our analysis are the concepts of appropriability—whether firms in the industry are able to control the knowledge generated by their innovations—and complementary assets—whether effective entry requires access to specialized infrastructure and capabilities to which incumbent firms can ration access. While the rapid improvements in AI foundation models promise transformative impacts across broad sectors of the economy, we argue that tight control over complementary assets will likely result in a concentrated market structure, as in past episodes of technological upheaval. We suggest the likely paths through which incumbent firms may restrict entry, confining newcomers to subordinate roles and stifling broad sectoral innovation. We conclude with speculations regarding how this oligopolistic future might be averted. Policy interventions aimed at fractionalizing or facilitating shared access to complementary assets might help preserve competition and incentives for extending the generative AI frontier. Ironically, the best hopes for a vibrant open source AI ecosystem might rest on the presence of a “rogue” technology giant, who might choose openness and engagement with smaller firms as a strategic weapon wielded against other incumbents.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Why Tesla FSD is not safe

From Dave Winer (Whom God Preserve):

Here’s what I’ve learned from owing a Tesla Model Y with Full Self Driving. I don’t believe it’s safe. It absolutely does require your full attention at all times. You are still driving the car. I’ve seen it do crazy stuff in simple situations. I’ve seen it panic, basically throw its hands in the air and say Dave this is your problem. That’s why you always have to be ready, as if you were driving the car yourself because at any moment you could be. You never know when it’s going to happen. Now focus on that moment. Your car has given up and turned the driving over to you. How much experience do you have with that? Do you know where to look? Do you hit the brakes or veer to the left or right? If you’re an experienced driver, a lot of these reactions are completely programmed into the lower levels of the brain. You don’t have to think at all. When the car panics, I tend to panic. If I had 10 or 20 years experience with this connection, then I guess it’s probably safe. But not the way it is. #

I’m amazed there aren’t more terrible accidents with FSD, and that Tesla still promotes this as “self-driving,” which it is not.

Yep. It’s the aircraft industry’s “auto-pilot problem” on steroids.

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The edge of Europe

The Cliffs of Moher in County Clare last Sunday.

Quote of the Day

”Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.”

• Ernest Hemingway

Guilty as charged, m’lud.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Violin Concerto No. 3 in G Major, K. 216 – II. Adagio | Anne-Sophie Mutter

Link

The whole concerto is gorgeous, but this movement is sublime — and breakfast-length.

Long Read of the Day

 Roy Jenkins’ unfinished revolution

Lovely New Statesman profile by Simon Jenkins of the claret-drinker’s friend (and formidable political reformer).

When Keir Starmer looks back over past Labour prime ministers, the one said to catch his eye is Harold Wilson. We can only reply, each to his own. But we might ask which Wilson was it? In 1965, a year into Wilson’s first term of office, the Liberal leader Jo Grimond savaged him in a Guardian article as a failed reformer. He called him competent but not radical, and certainly no liberal.

The ever-sensitive Wilson was deeply wounded. He duly summoned his 44-year-old junior minister at aviation, Roy Jenkins, and promoted him to be home secretary. Jenkins was a writer and member of Labour’s sociable Frognal (or Hampstead) set and not altogether to Wilson’s liking. But as a backbencher in 1959 he had sponsored a private members’ bill liberalising “obscene publications”. He seemed the right man to see off Grimond and the Guardian.

At the time, Britain’s attitude to social and sexual behaviour, crime and punishment, had barely changed since the 19th century. Homosexuals were in jail, abortion was illegal and the last hanging had taken place as recently as 1964. Labour’s manifesto had made no commitment to reform any of these areas. With other things on his mind, Wilson was disinclined to engage in controversy.

When Jenkins arrived at his new post he found his office grimly decorated with a picture of Charles I and the names of prisoners previously awaiting execution. As he outlined his reform agenda, his austere permanent secretary, Charles Cunningham, flatly objected and did everything to obstruct him. At one point he even broke down in tears. Jenkins pushed him into retirement and brought in a new permanent secretary, Philip Allen, from the Treasury. He restaffed his private office from outside the department under his personal aide, John Harris. Allen recalled his own first instruction, “There was work to be done, and to be done at once.”

Do read on. It’s an interesting reminder of what an imaginative politician used to be able to achieve in a functioning democracy.

Books, etc.

Neil Lawrence’s book is (nearly) out. I’ve read it in proof, and my guess is that it’ll be big. It’s a refreshing change from most of the stuff currently being published about ‘AI’. This is partly because it’s been a decade in gestation, but largely because its author embodies a rare combination of academic distinction (he’s the DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning in Cambridge) and industrial experience (he was Amazon’s Head of machine-learning for three years).

The title comes from a celebrated thought-experiment by the Greek philosopher Democritus.

He imagined cutting physical matter into pieces in a repeated process: cutting a piece, then taking one of the cut pieces and cutting it again so that each time it becomes smaller and smaller. Democritus believed this process had to stop somewhere, that we would be left with an indivisible piece. The Greek word for indivisible is atom, and so this series was called atomism. This book considers this question but in a different domain, asking: As the machine slices away portions of human capabilities, are we left with a kernel of humanity, and indivisible piece that can no longer be divided into parts? Or does the human disappear altogether? If we are left with something, then that uncuttable piece, a form of atomic human, would tell us something about our human spirit.

What does Neil think will be left after the machines have done their worst? That would be telling! This is a journey where the destination matters.

My commonplace booklet

While we were driving along the westernmost edge of Europe last weekend, Bruce Springsteen was wowing 80,000 of his most devoted fans in Croke Park, Dublin. And of course they were singing No Surrender along with him — as one does.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Apple’s muddled thinking about its iPad.  Steven Sinofsky has a shrewd piece about this on (of all places) Twitter/X.

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On Heaney’s ‘flaggy shore’

We were in Galway on Friday for lunch, and afterwards decided to drive south along the glorious coast road from Ballyvaughan to the cliffs of Moher. We stopped at this point, where the limestone pavement of the Burren enters the Atlantic before resurfacing a few miles out to sea as the three Aran Islands — rendered invisible by the sea-haze in the distance.

Not surprisingly, what came to mind was Seamus Heaney’s poem, Postscript:

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Quote of the Day

“No coffee is ever quite as good as it smells”

• Ngaio Marsh

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Dowland | Come Again | Morgan Manifacier, tenor & Daniel Keene, lute

Link

Who said Dowland was stuffy? Lovely performance. And h/t to The Browser for spotting it.

Long Read of the Day

HenryFarrellBot: LLMs as Cultural Technologies

The other day, Henry Farrell gave a terrific talk to the Harvard Kennedy School about (among other things) Alison Gopnik’s idea that we should regard LLMs as ‘cultural technologies” — like libraries, books and maybe even language itself.

This gave Brad DeLong the wicked idea of asking an LLM — OpenAI’s ChatGPT4o — about Henry’s talk. He fed the machine the transcript with the prompt “Please summarize and rewrite the transcript text below into five coherent three-paragraph chunks”.

The result is interesting — and rather good. Definitely worth a read.

And — in a nice academic twist, the machine reformatted Henry’s references into Chicago bibliography format!

What would Steve Jobs think of Apple’s culture-crushing advert?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

I’s a tale of two advertisements. And about the company that made them – Apple Inc.

Read on to see what the ads signified.

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The late arrival

Dingle peninsula, Ireland.

Quote of the Day

“There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.”

• Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Samuel Barber | Agnus Dei | Voces8

Link

A hauntingly beautiful adaptation of Barber’s Adagio. Thanks to Joanna Mulvey for suggesting it.

Long Read of the Day

Big Energy

Scott Galloway on the way that tech firms are beginning to look suspiciously like energy companies.

Big Tech isn’t just similar to the energy business, it is the new energy business. AI’s growing power requirements make this concrete. AI compute requirements are doubling every 100 days, dramatically countervailing the gains in efficiency that every AI evangelist boasts about after vomiting that it will save/destroy humanity. Training the trillion-plus-parameter models being stewed in a medium-size city (San Francisco) requires the energy consumption of a small country. One ChatGPT request requires 10 times the energy of a Google search. In five years, the incremental energy demand of AI will be equivalent to 40 million homes — more than California, Texas, Florida, and New York combined. Data centers make up 3% of total U.S. power demand, but that’s projected to triple by 2030. BTW, 2030 is the same distance into the future as the finale of Game of Thrones is in the past (2019).

To feed their data centers, tech companies are investing billions in energy production and storage. The WSJ reports Big Tech execs descended on this year’s annual oil and gas conference, hunting for energy. Bill Gates was the featured speaker. Amazon, the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy, has over 500 projects operating or in development. Announcements of new data centers are accompanied by commitments to develop new wind and solar farms to provide the power…

Not as easy a read as most of his stuff (keeps being interrupted by graphs). But I think he’s right about what’s happening — and isn’t being talked about enough.

Books, etc.

Screenshot

I tuned into the launch event for this at LSE on Tuesday evening largely because I’m looking for different lenses through which to view what’s happening to democracies as they are increasingly dominated by tech companies. The lens offered by Mejias and Couldry is colonialism. Their argument is that colonialism has not disappeared; it has just taken on a new form — data colonialism.

Colonialism 1.0 was about appropriating land; data colonialism is about creating virtual territories (silos) in which the data produced by people as they go about their lives can be appropriated and exploited for profit.

In a striking turn, the authors took an analytical tool from computer games with colonial themes like ColonySim.io — the 4X (‘four exes’) model — a way of categorising the stages in the colonialisation process:

1. Explore
2. Expand
3. Exploit
4. Exterminate

The book uses this model to analyse how the tech industry has been operating since 2000.

There was a nice moment when Mejias compared Google’s Terms and Conditions with the document that Spanish Conquistadors used to read to the inhabitants of territories they had arrived to appropriate.

Anyway, it’s now on my reading list.

My commonplace booklet

The end of the sedan?

FastCompany has an interesting piece on how US automobile manufacturers are abandoning what they call ‘sedans’ and we call ‘saloon cars’ (an odd term, when you come to think of it) — in favour of SUVs.

I’m not sure that this is the case for European and Asian manufacturers. Oddly enough, Tesla currently stands out in opposition to this US trend: its Model 3 and Model S cars are both saloons. The Tesla Model X is a big SUV, and the Model Y is a hatchback. And the Cybertruck is, well, just weird.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Climbing Everest is just routine for some.  From bbc.com:

Mount Everest saw two record-breaking climbs on Sunday with a Nepali sherpa making the most ever summits and a British climber setting the record for a foreigner.

Kami Rita Sherpa, 54, scaled the world’s tallest mountain for a 29th time while British man Kenton Cool marked his 18th peak.

Sherpa, already the world-record holder, beat his own landmark in setting the new standard.

A guide for over two decades, he first climbed the summit in 1994 and has made the peak almost every year since.

Good for him. For me, I like looking at moountains.

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