Tulip mania

My favourite flowers at this time of year.

Quote of the Day

I used to think the interesting question was whether we should have a monarchy or not. But now I think that question is rather like, should we have pandas or not?’

• Hilary Mantel

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Richard Strauss | Metamorphosen | Herbert von Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic

Link

Gosh, this is wonderful. Like Wagner without the racket, as Thomas Beecham might have said. Thanks to John Seeley for suggesting it.

Long Read of the Day

The ‘Don’t Look Up’ Thinking That Could Doom Us With AI

An essay by Max Tegmark, who thinks we should be thinking harder about the risks of AGI.

Suppose a large inbound asteroid were discovered, and we learned that half of all astronomers gave it at least 10% chance of causing human extinction, just as a similar asteroid exterminated the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago. Since we have such a long history of thinking about this threat and what to do about it, from scientific conferences to Hollywood blockbusters, you might expect humanity to shift into high gear with a deflection mission to steer it in a safer direction.

Sadly, I now feel that we’re living the movie “Don’t look up” for another existential threat: unaligned superintelligence. We may soon have to share our planet with more intelligent “minds” that care less about us than we cared about mammoths. A recent survey showed that half of AI researchers give AI at least 10% chance of causing human extinction. Since we have such a long history of thinking about this threat and what to do about it, from scientific conferences to Hollywood blockbusters, you might expect that humanity would shift into high gear with a mission to steer AI in a safer direction than out-of-control superintelligence. Think again: instead, the most influential responses have been a combination of denial, mockery, and resignation so darkly comical that it’s deserving of an Oscar…

Vividly written and interesting because Tegmark is a physicist at MIT, a cosmologist and machine learning researcher. He is president of the Future of Life Institute, an outfit whose mission is to reduce global catastrophic and existential risk from powerful technologies, and the author of Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

Books, etc.

Colin Meyer’s book was published in 2018, and I’m mortified that it has taken me this long to catch up with it. Why? Because it provides a powerful refutation of Milton Friedman’s pernicious mantra that the only purpose of a public company is to maximise profit (or shareholder value, as others put it.) This overarching corporate imperative is one of the forces that is making contemporary capitalism so pernicious and dangerous for humanity.

My Commonplace booklet

I came across this in a watch catalogue. It’s about the watch JFK was wearing when he was murdered — an Omega Ultra Thin given to him in 1960 by Senator Grant Stockdale of Florida, an early supporter of Kennedy’s presidential ambitions. When JFK was inaugurated as President on January 20, 1961, he was wearing the watch. Compared to the male jewellery which features in every edition of the Weekend Financial Times, it’s diminutive and powered by a simple hand-wound spring movement.

After Kennedy’s assassination, the watch wound up (sic) in a private collection until in 2005 it was bought by Omega for $350,000 and is now in the company’s collection of historic timepieces.

Stockdale’s gift may have been a shrewd one. JFK appointed Stockdale US ambassador to Ireland!

Interesting what you find in catalogues.

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Premium baroque

Copenhagen, 2013

Quote of the Day

”A horse race confers an equivalence upon all candidates. The only detail that matters is who is going to win — not all that might be lost. To view America through that lens today is an exercise in the absurd, a practice stuck in the insular logic of the past.

• Dan Rather

I wish more political journalists thought like this, especially those covering presidential politics in the US.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Fauré | Trois romances sans paroles op.17 n°3 | Théo Fouchenneret

Link

Long Read of the Day

AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation

Yuval Noah Harari finds something distinctive to say about ChatGPT et al. In doing so he will delight his admirers and infuriate his critics. Which, I suppose, is what a good essayist should be able to do.

Sample:

What would happen once a non-human intelligence becomes better than the average human at telling stories, composing melodies, drawing images, and writing laws and scriptures? When people think about Chatgpt and other new ai tools, they are often drawn to examples like school children using ai to write their essays. What will happen to the school system when kids do that? But this kind of question misses the big picture. Forget about school essays. Think of the next American presidential race in 2024, and try to imagine the impact of ai tools that can be made to mass-produce political content, fake-news stories and scriptures for new cults.

In recent years the qAnon cult has coalesced around anonymous online messages, known as “q drops”. Followers collected, revered and interpreted these q drops as a sacred text. While to the best of our knowledge all previous q drops were composed by humans, and bots merely helped disseminate them, in future we might see the first cults in history whose revered texts were written by a non-human intelligence. Religions throughout history have claimed a non-human source for their holy books. Soon that might be a reality…

A photographer whose subject is everyday life 

Judith Joy Ross, one of the best portrait photographers of our era, is the subject of a large retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The New York Times has a nice piece about her and her work which includes some of her more famous images.

The show was jointly organized by the Philadelphia museum and the Fundación Mapfre in Madrid, where it appeared first; it then made stops at Le Bal in Paris and Fotomuseum den Haag in the Netherlands. “She’s better known in Europe than she is here,” Mr. Barberie said.

Although she rarely works in color, calling Ms. Ross’s photographs black-and-white is not exactly right; the images occupy a place on the spectrum between gray and sepia. And except for her 1986-87 series featuring Washington politicians, Ms. Ross has taken pictures mostly of people on the street, in parks or in schools…

Like Ansel Adams, she uses a large folding 10×8 camera on a tripod, which — though fine for the landscape photography in which Adams specialised — would seem pretty clunky to the people she photographs in streets and parks. But somehow it turns out to be a feature, not a bug. “They think the circus has come to town,” she said. And its effect is that of an icebreaker, and a piece of protective armour for an essentially shy person.

If you’re interested, there’s a charming and fascinating interview with her on YouTube. It’s nearly an hour long, so brew some coffee before embarking on it.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. She reminds me of Jane Bown, the Observer’s legendary photographer, with whom I was lucky enough to work occasionally.

Books, etc.

There’s an interesting new book coming:  The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism by Sebastian Edwards. I haven’t seen it yet, but Tyler Cowen has. Here’s an excerpt from his characteristically succinct summary.

1. The Allende regime was a disaster, with for instance real wages falling by almost 40 percent (this one I knew).

2. Pinochet’s much-heralded private pension reform really did not work (I may do a whole post on this).

3. Milton Friedman’s famed visit really was quite modest, contrary to what you sometimes hear. Nonetheless he was so persuasive he really did convince Pinochet to proceed with the shock therapy version of reform. He had mixed feelings about this for the rest of his life, and did not like to talk about it: “But deep inside, Friedman was bothered by the Chilean episode.”

4. You may know that pegging the exchange rate was one of the major Chilean mistakes during the reform era. Friedman, although usually a strict advocate of floating exchange rates, did not take the opportunity to criticize that decision, and in fact made some remarks that suggested a possible willingness to tolerate a moving peg regime for the Chilean exchange rate.

5. Friedman underestimated how long Chilean unemployment would last, following shock therapy.

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The Trolley Problem

Though not as the philosophers who constantly agonise over self-driving cars imagine it.

Taken in St John’s College, Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

“It’s a funny old world — a man’s lucky if he gets out of it alive.”

• W.C.Fields

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Field | Nocturne No. 10 in E minor

Link

I love all his Nocturnes, but this one in particular.

Long Read of the Day

Stop Telling Me To Travel Like a Local, Okay? 

Lovely piece by Mari Uyehara in Bon Appétit

If you have researched a trip in, say, the past five to ten years or so, you may have noticed a recurring and aggressive directive: TRAVEL LIKE A LOCAL! You’ve probably also seen the entreaty, the shaming: How to Not Look Like a Tourist; How to Not Act Like a Tourist; How to Not Be a Tourist.

On the surface, the promise is an attractive one: You’re getting the inside scoop for the best places to eat and shop with none of the tourist traps. You know, only the spots that those truly in the know can find. But it’s all a complete farce. At best, “Travel Like a Local” is a silly paradoxical myth; at worst, it’s terrible vacation advice.

For one thing, locals aren’t traveling. They are working. Or folding laundry or cleaning their bathrooms or packing lunches or any of the eight zillion other inane chores that somehow take up every minute of your free time when you are NOT on vacation. Locals are not spending leisurely days strolling on stunning promenades or gawking at the crank-your-neck-tall Art Deco buildings or sparkly turquoise waters lapping on fine white-sand beaches. They are making to-do lists in their heads on cramped morning commutes or scurrying between the grocery store, the dry cleaner, and the pharmacy, trying to complete enough tasks before falling into bed. The whole point of travel is to get away from the humdrum of everyday life. It is to very much not be a local.

Put it this way: You simply cannot travel like a local…

Yep. In a way, the good tourist (as the old joke has it) sends his money and stays at home.

Thank the Lords someone is worried about AI-controlled weapons systems

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The most interesting TV I’ve watched recently did not come from a conventional television channel, nor even from Netflix, but from TV coverage of parliament. It was a recording of a meeting of the AI in weapons systems select committee of the House of Lords, which was set up to inquire into “how should autonomous weapons be developed, used and regulated”. The particular session I was interested in was the one held on 20 April, during which the committee heard from four expert witnesses – Kenneth Payne, who is professor of strategy at King’s College London; Keith Dear, director of artificial intelligence innovation at the computer company Fujitsu; James Black from the defence and security research group of Rand Europe; and Courtney Bowman, global director of privacy and civil liberties engineering at Palantir UK. An interesting mix, I thought – and so it turned out to be.

Autonomous weapons systems are ones that can select and attack a target without human intervention. It is believed (and not just by their boosters) that these systems could revolutionise warfare, and may be faster, more accurate and more resilient than existing weapons systems. And that they could, conceivably, even limit the casualties of war (though I’ll believe that when I see it).

Do read the whole thing.

Brad DeLong on the Economist — the last refuge of neoliberalism.

I’ve always thought that the Economist (to which I subscribe, because I admire its journalism almost as much as I disapprove of its editorials) is where neoliberal ideas go to die. But Brad DeLong puts it better than I ever could in this essay.

As usual, the Economist delivers its reverence for neoliberal dogma with all the sanctimony and certitude of a true believer. Americans must sit down, shut up, and recite the catechism: “The market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market.” To doubt that the US economy’s current problems are caused by anything other than an interventionist, overbearing government is apostasy. But, as an economic historian, what took my breath away was the essay’s conclusion, which attributes America’s postwar prosperity to its worship of the Mammon of Unrighteousness (more commonly known as laissez-faire capitalism).

The essay cites three “fresh challenges” facing the US: the security threat posed by China, the need to rejigger the global division of labor due to China’s growing economic clout, and the fight against climate change. The climate challenge, of course, is hardly “fresh,” given that the world is at least three generations late in addressing it. Moreover, our failure to act promptly means that the economic impact of global warming will likely consume most, if not all, of the world’s anticipated technological dividends over the next two generations…

Do read it.

Books, etc.

I’m still deep in Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday and finding it wonderful. What’s really weird to this reader, though, is that his evocation of the prudishness of fin-de-siecle Viennese bourgeois attitudes remind me of the 1950s Ireland in which I grew up. Take this passage, for example:

A man was supposed to be forthright , chivalrous and aggressive , a woman shy , timid and defensive . They were not equals but hunters and prey . This unnatural tension separating them in their outward behaviour was bound to heighten the inner tension between the two poles , the factor of eroticism , and so thanks to its technique — which knew nothing of psychology , of concealing sexuality and hushing it up — the society of the time achieved exactly the opposite . In its constant prudish anxiety , it was always sniffing out immorality in all aspects of life — literature , art and fashion — with a view to preventing any stimulation , with the result that it was in fact forced to keep dwelling on the immoral . As it was always studying what might be unsuitable , it found itself constantly on the alert ; to the world of that time , ‘ decency ’ always appeared to be in deadly danger from every gesture , every word . Perhaps we can understand how it still seemed criminal , at that time , for a woman to wear any form of trousers for games or sports.

My mother was an ultra-devout Catholic who was obsessed by the dangers of girls wearing trousers, never mind shorts. And she, and the entire priestly establishment, constantly warned of the dangers of young people of both sexes intermingling. Such gatherings, it was said, constituted that curious Catholic creation, “an occasion of sin”. Ever since, needless to say, I have been an enthusiastic sinner.

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