The Year of the Tiger

Quite so.

Quote of the Day

”My imagination functions much better when I don’t have to speak to people”

• Patricia Highsmith

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Arethra Franklin | Bridge over Troubled Water

Link

Long Read of the Day

On Swapping Gear For Watches

Lovely piece by Conrad Anker which will resonate with any reader who is cursed (or blessed) with a collecting gene.

Tech Predictions (contd.)

Further to yesterday’s sceptical piece about the foolishness of trying to predict the future, Simon Roberts reminded me of Rodney Brooks, one of the most distinguished thinkers about AI and robotics — and also one of the field’s most valuable sceptics.

Way back on January 1st, 2018, Brooks made predictions about self driving cars, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and robotics, and about progress in the space industry. Those predictions had dates attached to them for 32 years up through January 1st, 2050. And every January 1st since, he has been evaluating how his predictions (and their attached dates) are faring.

“I made my predictions,” he writes in his latest assessment,

because at the time I saw an immense amount of hype about these three topics, and the general press and public drawing conclusions about all sorts of things they feared (e.g., truck driving jobs about to disappear, all manual labor of humans about to disappear) or desired (e.g., safe roads about to come into existence, a safe haven for humans on Mars about to start developing) being imminent. My predictions, with dates attached to them, were meant to slow down those expectations, and inject some reality into what I saw as irrational exuberance.

I was accused of being a pessimist, but I viewed what I was saying as being a realist. Today, I am starting to think that I too, reacted to all the hype, and was overly optimistic in some of my predictions. My current belief is that things will go, overall, even slower than I thought four years ago today. That is not to say that there has not been great progress in all three fields, but it has not been as overwhelmingly inevitable as the tech zeitgeist thought on January 1st, 2018.

His assessment is long and absorbing — and worth your extended attention, but a few things stand o out for me.

• Self-driving cars: oodles of hype (including a lot of nonsense from Elon Musk) but “very little movement in deployment of actual, for real, self driving cars”. He recommends Peter Norton’s  Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving as an antidote — as do I. It’s out in the UK at the end of the month, but the Kindle version is available now.
• Recently someone used the fact that Brooks’s predicted date for when electric vehicles would account for 30% of automobile sales in the US was “no earlier than the year 2027” as proof that he is a pessimist whose predictions about autonomous vehicles could not be trusted. Brooks points out that “EV sales in the US were 1.7% of the total market in 2020 (up from 1.4% in 2019). We’ll need four doublings of that in seven years to get to 30%. It may happen. It may happen sooner than 2027. But not by much. It would be a tremendous sustained growth rate that we have not yet seen”.
• Back in 2018 Brooks predicted that “the next big thing” to replace Deep Learning as the hot topic in AI would arrive somewhere between 2023 and 2027. “I was convinced of this,” he writes, “as there has always been a next big thing in AI. Neural networks have been the next big thing three times already. But others have had their shot at that title too, including (in no particular order) Bayesian inference, reinforcement learning, the primal sketch, shape from shading, frames, constraint programming, heuristic search, etc. We are starting to get close to my window for the next big thing. Are there any candidates? I must admit that so far they all seem to be derivatives of deep learning in one way or another. If that is all we get I will be terribly disappointed, and probably have to give myself a bad grade on this prediction”.
• He’s (rightly) very critical of the ludicrous hype around big natural language models. “Overall”, he writes, “the will to believe in the innate superiority of a computer model is astounding to me, just as it was to others back in 1966 when Joseph Weizenbaum showed off his Eliza program which occupied a just a few kilobytes of computer memory. Joe, too, was astounded at the reaction and spent the rest of his career sounding the alarm bells. We need more push back this time around”.

We do, and some of us are doing our best. And it’s great to see someone willing to put his own guesses to the critical test.

Meanwhile, the venerable Gartner Hype Cycle still remains the best source of common sense about the Next Big Things in tech.

Commonplace Booklet

• “The worst checking error is calling people dead who are not dead. In the words of Joshua Hersh, “It really annoys them.” Sara remembers a reader in a nursing home who read in The New Yorker that he was “the late” reader in the nursing home. He wrote demanding a correction. The New Yorker, in its next issue, of course complied, inadvertently doubling the error, because the reader died over the weekend while the magazine was being printed.” (From Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee.)
• Direct action works — ask this elderly Berlin resident who found a swan on the pavement. Well, it was a cygnet (i.e. a teenage swan) really. But still…

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Lightness visible

The UK countryside is a bleak place for a photographer at the moment — various shades of brown predominate, and everything is unbelievably muddy. (You should see our boots after a long riverside walk the other day.) Still, sometimes one gets a break, as with this shot taken yesterday morning on a cycle ride.

Quote of the Day

”The Times’s Kat Lay and Henry Zeffman reveal, almost unbelievably, that the sole distributor of tests to pharmacies took delivery of 2.5 million tests before Christmas then shut for four days before they could be distributed.”

• From Politico’s daily newsletter, yesterday

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Chris Rea | Stainsby Girls

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Haunted California Idyll of German Writers in Exile

Alex Ross’s marvellously erudite and perceptive New Yorker essay on ‘Weimar on the Pacific’ and the “excruciating dissonance” that German intellectual and artistic émigrés in L.A. felt between their circumstances and the horrors unfolding in Europe.

It’s particularly good on Thomas Mann, a difficult character whose publisher Alfred Knopf projected as the “Greatest Living Man of Letters” — which enabled Mann to take on a new public role as spokesman for the anti-Nazi cause.

“Because he so manifestly stood above the partisan fray, Mann was able to speak out against Hitler and be perceived as a voice of reason rather than be dismissed as an agitator.”

Essays like “The Coming Victory of Democracy” and “War and Democracy” remain dismayingly relevant in the era of Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and Donald Trump. In 1938, Mann stated, “Even America feels today that democracy is not an assured possession, that it has enemies, that it is threatened from within and from without, that it has once more become a problem.” At such moments, he said, the division between the political and the nonpolitical disappears. Politics is “no longer a game, played according to certain, generally acknowledged rules. . . . It’s a matter of ultimate values.” Mann also challenged the xenophobia of America’s strict immigration laws: “It is not human, not democratic, and it means to show a moral Achilles’ heel to the fascist enemies of mankind if one clings with bureaucratic coldness to these laws.”

It didn’t last, of course.

Those exiles who remained in America felt mounting insecurity as the Cold War took hold. McCarthyism made no exceptions for leftist writers who had been persecuted by the Nazis. Brecht left in 1947, the day after he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and later settled in East Germany. Feuchtwanger longed to return to Europe but, having never been granted U.S. citizenship, chose not to risk leaving.

Thomas Mann, who had become an American citizen in 1944, felt the dread of déjà vu. The likes of McCarthy, Hoover, and Nixon had crossed his line of sight before. In 1947, after the blacklisting of the Hollywood Ten, he recorded a broadcast in which he warned of incipient Fascist tendencies: “Spiritual intolerance, political inquisition, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency’: that is how it started in Germany.”

I learned a lot from this piece. Hope you do too.

Crystal Balls

It’s that time when everyone and his dog sets about making predictions for the coming year.

Not this blogger, though. As Scott Galloway says:

Making predictions is a shitty business. The events leading up to the realization of any prediction make it seem less extraordinary. And when you get it wrong, you’re an insufferable numbskull. The value of a prediction is in the act of making it, not the prediction itself. Contemplating what may happen encourages us to take responsibility for decisions we make in the present. Also, revisiting a prediction and asking why it did/didn’t come to fruition provides insight into the machinations of our world and whether we are progressing or regressing.

Politico’s London Playbook (an essential daily newsletter, IMHO) had an interview with Tom Standage, the Deputy Editor of the Economist, in which he said some interesting things. For example:

• His paper was “more worried” about Russian troops building up on the borders of Ukraine than about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in 2022.
• Taiwan, though, is “the country to watch this year”. At the “sharp end between the two great political groupings,” it is also a place that “matters to business in a way that it never did before,” Standage explains. It has chip supremacy — the Taiwanese chip company TSMC makes the chips that go into the iPhone and that power Google and Tesla’s AI systems.
• Re Taiwan, there will be Chinese saber-rattling, but that won’t translate into military conflict. But if that prediction turns out to be wrong, the implications could be huge. “Fragile” chip factories could very easily be sabotaged. “You could take all of the engineers out that run them in a single airplane,” he says. “If that were to happen, there would be consequences beyond the geopolitical consequences. It would have a big impact on lots and lots of big tech companies,” Standage warns. “That would affect China itself because the tech supply chains are so intertwined,” he says.
• U.S. President Joe Biden is “likely to do very badly” in the U.S., and the prospect of former U.S. President Donald Trump coming back “may take a big step closer.”
• Future of Ireland. Next year will mark the centenary of the foundation of the Irish Free State — it marked the end of the three-year Irish War of Independence. While Standage doubts anything will change next year, the Irish nationalist Sinn Féin party is expected to do well in next year’s Northern Ireland Assembly election. Standage says Irish unification is no longer in the “realms of science fiction,” adding: “I think it was Star Trek that predicted Irish unification in 2024 in one of its episodes in the 1980s. At the time that was so outlandish that it wasn’t shown in Britain. But actually, you know, that timeline is looking more plausible.”

My commonplace booklet

Source

Note: Lucid (of which most people I know have never heard) is a manufacturer of an all-electric, high-performance, very expensive luxury EVs. According to this source it expected to deliver “fewer than 1,000 cars in 2021”. Note the market capitalisation and then check the definition of irrational exuberance.

Errata

Yesterday’s edition was a proof-reader’s nightmare.

• First of all, on January 2, 2022, it wished readers a ‘Happy 2021’.
• Secondly the Long Read (Zadie Smith’s wonderful piece on Joan Didion) repeated one of the excerpts.
• And Duke University’s celebration of Public Domain Day 2022 was re-dated to 2021!

I’ve always admired Sam Johnson’s candid reply to the lady who asked him, indignantly, how he could have mistakenly defined ‘pastern’ as ‘the knee of a horse’ in his great dictionary. “Ignorance, Madam”, he said, “pure ignorance.”

In my case, the corresponding reply to a question about how it was possible to make three such glaring errors in a single edition would be: incompetence, Madam, pure incompetence.

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Evening in Venice

Quote of the Day

“An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.”

• Laurence Peter

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn | Newfoundland | From Shaun Davey’s The Brendan Voyage

Link

Since we are all embarking on a voyage through unknown waters in 2022 I thought it might be appropriate to find music that celebrates a successful voyage into similarly unknown waters. This piece is the tenth movement of a landmark work composed by Shawn Davey in 1980 — the first musical meeting between two musical traditions — one represented by an Irish uilleann piper; the other — the classical tradition — represented by a symphony orchestra.

Davey composed the work to mark explorer Tim Severin’s epic voyage across the Atlantic in a leather boat, a replica medieval voyage which set out to prove that it was possible that the 6th century Irish Saint, Brendan, may have reached America before Columbus or the Norsemen. The voice of the medieval boat is represented by the uilleann pipes of Liam O’Flynn, the greatest piper of my lifetime, while the orchestra represents the Atlantic. And the piece marks the culmination of the voyage — the landing in Newfoundland.

Long Read of the Day

Zadie Smith on Joan Didion

Predictably, there have been lots and lots of articles, essays and obits of her, but the very best I’ve found so far is Zadie Smith’s piece in the New Yorker. A few samples:

Magical thinking is a disorder of thought. It sees causality where there is none, confuses private emotion with general reality, imposes—as Didion has it, perfectly, in “The White Album”—“a narrative line upon disparate images.” But the extremity of mourning aside, it was not a condition from which she generally suffered. Didion’s watchword was watchword. She was exceptionally alert to the words or phrases we use to express our core aims or beliefs. Alert in the sense of suspicious. Radically upgrading Hemingway’s “bullshit detector,” she probed the public discourse, the better to determine how much truth was in it and how much delusion. She did that with her own sentences, too.

Or

Whether writing about the invention of “women as a ‘class,’ ” Haight-Ashbury, John Wayne, the death of her family, or her own mental breakdown, Didion’s target was the “psychic hardpan.” This she located just beneath the seemingly rational or ideological topsoil, which she found to be “dense with superstitions and little sophistries, wish fulfillment, self-loathing and bitter fancies.” That she is considered a personal essayist is another one of those literary ironies: even when the subject was Didion, she was still reporting, and no more likely to be sympathetic to her own feelings than to those of Joan Baez, Nancy Reagan, or a kid on acid. She was just another subject among many, prone to the petty delusions of all humans but—crucially—genuinely interested in drilling down into that hardpan, no matter what she might find down there. She wasn’t looking for approval.

Whatever about magical thinking, this is magical writing. Do read it.

How history repeats itself in tech

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The tech companies saw this coming, of course, and it was eerie to see how their responses echoed the playbooks of the tobacco and energy companies of an earlier period, as chronicled, for example, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. The other day, Andrew Bosworth, the incoming chief technology officer of Meta (neé Facebook) was asked whether he thought “vaccine hesitancy would be the same with or without social media”. His reply, verbatim, reads: “I think Facebook ran probably the biggest Covid vaccine campaign in the world. What more can you do if some people who can get that real information from a real source choose not to get it? That’s their choice. They’re allowed to do that. You have an issue with those people. You don’t have an issue with Facebook. You can’t put that on me.”

Sounds familiar? It’s what oil companies came up with when they invented the idea of the “carbon footprint” – ie your footprint on the biosphere, not theirs. It’s the displacement of responsibility strategy: since it’s a free country, nobody’s forcing you to do the thing that’s bad for you. Childhood obesity is the responsibility of the child or of his or her parents. Alcoholism happens because you don’t “drink responsibly”. Radicalisation of the mass shooter is not YouTube’s responsibility. It’s always your fault, not that of the manufacturer of the addictive product.

Do read the whole thing.

Saturday was Public Domain Day, 2022

The annual post from the wonderful Duke Centre for the Study of the Public Domain reminded us that,

On January 1, 2022, copyrighted works from 1926 enter the US public domain,   where they will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. The line-up this year is stunning. It includes books such as A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, Felix Salten’s Bambi, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Langston Hughes’ The Weary Blues, and Dorothy Parker’s Enough Rope. There are scores of silent films—including titles featuring Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Greta Garbo, famous Broadway songs, and well-known jazz standards. But that’s not all. In 2022 we get a bonus: an estimated 400,000 sound recordings from before 1923 2  will be entering the public domain too!

Given that Winnie the Pooh is a multi-billion dollar franchise, imagine the conference-room full of expensive IP lawyers in Disney HQ wondering how to stop what happens next.

And of course, Xi Jinping’s legal retainers will also be busy, given that images of Pooh Bear are banned in China since (for some unknown reason) they remind people of the great leader.

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