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.

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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.

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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)

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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.

  This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

The 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.

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!

Help?

For one awful moment, it looked like a human arm.

Quote of the Day

”The mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought.”

• Rebecca Solnit

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jerry Garcia & Bob Weir | “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Traveling At The Speed Of The Soul

Lovely meditation in Noema on walking by Nick Hunt, who once walked from Hook van Holland to Istanbul, in the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor, who completed his great walk on New Year’s Day 1935 and wrote a couple of entrancing books about it.

I slept on couches, in the ruins of castles and abandoned hunting hides. I got lost in graffitied city streets and in snowbound forests. I spent the vast majority of those months alone, talking to myself with a lack of self-consciousness that at times alarmed me. Birdsong, the roar of cars, church bells, cowbells, outraged dogs, the rush of rivers and the patter of rain kept me steady company. The sound I heard more than anything else was the crunch, crunch, crunch of my boots on the road.

By the time I got to Istanbul, those boots were full of holes…

Not for the faint-hearted, that kind of walking.

Books, etc.

Nabokov, writing. Not a keyboard in sight.

My commonplace booklet

AI’s Next Big Step: Detecting Human Emotion and Expression

Link

Alan Cowen, CEO of Hume AI, is a former Meta and Google researcher who’s built AI technology that can read the tune, timber, and rhythm of your voice, as well as your facial expressions, to discern your emotions.

As you speak with Hume’s bot, EVI, it processes the emotions you’re showing — like excitement, surprise, joy, anger, and awkwardness — and expresses its responses with ’emotions’ of its own. Yell at it, for instance, and it will get sheepish and try to diffuse the situation. It will display its calculations on screen, indicating what it’s reading in your voice and what it’s giving back. And it’s quite sticky. Across 100,000 unique conversations, the average interaction between humans and EVI is ten minutes long, a company spokesperson said.

Hmmm…. I tried it (via Hume.ai). I pretended to be an Apple user infuriated by its autocorrect feature. (Not difficult: I loathe that particular ‘feature’.) It figured that I was cross and tried to be emollient. Asked me if I’d tried the settings, and after that suggested that I get in contact with Apple Support, who might be able to make some helpful suggestions. “Yeah”, I replied, “and pigs might fly in close formation”. It then went quiet for a while, obviously trying to process whether this was a joke or not. Conclusion: it’s better than Siri. But then that’s not exactly a high bar.

En passant: wonder why they called it ‘Hume’.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Arlo Guthrie, riffing on Amazing Grace. Wonderful folksy mastery of an audience. Link

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!

Drakes!

You can tell what they’re thinking: where did those dratted females go?

Quote of the Day

”There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.

• Ernest Hemingway 

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Smetana | Vltava (The Moldau)

Link

I love the way this tone-poem creeps up on one. According to Wikipedia Smetana explained it thus:

The composition describes the course of the Vltava, starting from the two small springs, the Studená and Teplá Vltava, to the unification of both streams into a single current, the course of the Vltava through woods and meadows, through landscapes where a farmer’s wedding is celebrated, the round dance of the mermaids in the night’s moonshine: on the nearby rocks loom proud castles, palaces and ruins aloft. The Vltava swirls into the St John’s Rapids; then it widens and flows toward Prague, past the Vyšehrad, and then majestically vanishes into the distance, ending at the Elbe.

I couldn’t spot the mermaids, alas. But that’s a mere detail as the music sweeps one along.

Long Read of the Day

Helen Lewis on Writing

Lovely blog post by a formidable journalist, with some great advice for the rest of us on the process of writing and reporting at length.

I particularly like her closing paragraph:

Park downhill. At the end of every day, finish your writing by stopping halfway through a thought—maybe even halfway through a sentence. That way, there is a small task to complete the next day, helping you navigate the hardest movement in a writer’s life: sitting down at your desk.

I learned that trick a long time ago, and it never fails.

Books, etc.

A new book by Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healey looks interesting. The blurb reads:

We now live in an “ordinal society.” Nearly every aspect of our lives is measured, ranked, and processed into discrete, standardized units of digital information. Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy argue that technologies of information management, fueled by the abundance of personal data and the infrastructure of the internet, transform how we relate to ourselves and to each other through the market, the public sphere, and the state.

The personal data we give in exchange for convenient tools like Gmail and Instagram provides the raw material for predictions about everything from our purchasing power to our character. The Ordinal Society shows how these algorithmic predictions influence people’s life chances and generate new forms of capital and social expectation: nobody wants to ride with an unrated cab driver anymore or rent to a tenant without a risk score. As members of this society embrace ranking and measurement in their daily lives, new forms of social competition and moral judgment arise. Familiar structures of social advantage are recycled into measures of merit that produce insidious kinds of social inequality.

While we obsess over order and difference―and the logic of ordinality digs deeper into our behaviors, bodies, and minds―what will hold us together? Fourcade and Healy warn that, even though algorithms and systems of rationalized calculation have inspired backlash, they are also appealing in ways that make them hard to relinquish.

Henry Farrell has an interesting essay about it already.

LLMs could free up programmers to do more interesting stuff

Yesterday’s Observer column:

I once wrote when writing a history of this technology, “being a programmer is like being Napoleon before the retreat from Moscow. Software is the only medium in which the limits are exclusively those set by your imagination.”

This is why, when large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT emerged, many people were flabbergasted to discover that not only could these machines compose coherent English sentences, but they could also write computer programs! Instead of having to master the byzantine intricacies of C++ or Python in order to converse with the machine, you could explain what you wanted it to do and it would spit out the necessary code. You could program the machine in plain English!

How was this possible?

Read on

Apropos… Bill Janeway (Whom God Preserve) pointed me to an interesting 2023 NBER article by Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li & Lindsey R. Raymond, the Abstract for which reads:

New AI tools have the potential to change the way workers perform and learn, but little is known about their impacts on the job. In this paper, we study the staggered introduction of a generative AI-based conversational assistant using data from 5,179 customer support agents. Access to the tool increases productivity, as measured by issues resolved per hour, by 14% on average, including a 34% improvement for novice and low-skilled workers but with minimal impact on experienced and highly skilled workers. We provide suggestive evidence that the AI model disseminates the best practices of more able workers and helps newer workers move down the experience curve. In addition, we find that AI assistance improves customer sentiment, increases employee retention, and may lead to worker learning. Our results suggest that access to generative AI can increase productivity, with large heterogeneity in effects across workers.

Chart of the Day

h/t Brad DeLong

My commonplace booklet

Study reveals how much carbon damage would cost corporations if they paid for their emissions.

Really interesting finding. Basically, their profits would be halved — at best.

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The Sea, the Sea

From the cafe at Inch beach, Co Kerry, one Sunday morning.

Quote of the Day

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no-one was listening, everything must be said again.”

• Andre Gide

(Useful quote for those of us who write for a living. Thanks to Andrew Curry for reminding me of it.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Beethoven | Ecossaises in E-Flat Major, WoO 83

Link

Lovely, and hitherto unknown to me.

Long Read of the Day

What Elon Musk’s favorite game tells us about him

Terrific critique by Dave Karpf of Musk’s biographer.

This is how it begins…

Elon Musk really likes the game Polytopia. He has skipped birthday parties and international business meetings to play the game. He has effused that it is “the best game ever.” He has posited that it is more complicated than chess.

Walter Isaacson treats Polytopia as a window into Musk’s unique, brilliant mind. He devotes nearly as many pages to the game as he does to the Boring Company. (Which is, y’know, one of his actual companies. It has a multi-billion dollar valuation.) He even prints eight “life lessons” that Musk and his hangers-on think you can distill from the game.

It’s… a bit much.

I left Polytopia out of my original review of the book. It seemed like a bit of a strange personality tick. The parallel to SBF’s mobile gaming habit was a little interesting. But I had never heard of the game. I’d never played it. And I already had more than enough material to work with.

A few months later, while visiting some family on the west coast, I noticed my brother-in-law playing Polytopia on his phone. “Y’know, Elon Musk says that’s the greatest game of all time,” I said to him. My brother-in-law gave me a quizzical look. He’s a pretty well-adjusted fellow, neither addicted to Musk nor Polytopia. He just thought the game was reasonably fun.

So I tried it out…

Read on to find out what he concluded. (Spoiler alert: Isaacson doesn’t come out of it well.)

Books, etc.

Screenshot

Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy have an interesting new book out.

Here’s the blurb:

We now live in an “ordinal society.” Nearly every aspect of our lives is measured, ranked, and processed into discrete, standardized units of digital information. Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy argue that technologies of information management, fueled by the abundance of personal data and the infrastructure of the internet, transform how we relate to ourselves and to each other through the market, the public sphere, and the state.

The personal data we give in exchange for convenient tools like Gmail and Instagram provides the raw material for predictions about everything from our purchasing power to our character. The Ordinal Society shows how these algorithmic predictions influence people’s life chances and generate new forms of capital and social expectation: nobody wants to ride with an unrated cab driver anymore or rent to a tenant without a risk score. As members of this society embrace ranking and measurement in their daily lives, new forms of social competition and moral judgment arise. Familiar structures of social advantage are recycled into measures of merit that produce insidious kinds of social inequality. While we obsess over order and difference—and the logic of ordinality digs deeper into our behaviors, bodies, and minds—what will hold us together? Fourcade and Healy warn that, even though algorithms and systems of rationalized calculation have inspired backlash, they are also appealing in ways that make them hard to relinquish.

Diane Coyle admired the book in her review. And Henry Farrell has a thoughtful essay about it. Which are two powerful arguments for buying and reading it.

My commonplace booklet

The Sam Altman Playbook

Gary Marcus’s insights into Sam “Babyface’ Altman’s modus operandi.

A sample:

Undergirding all is this often a sense that without AI, we are screwed. As Geoffrey Miller put it on X, “[Altman’s] implicit message is usually ‘We need AGI to solve aging & discover longevity treatments, so if you don’t support us, you’ll die.” Longevity is the carrot; death is the stick.

In order to make it all plausible, Sam uses a unique combination of charm, soft-spoken personal humility and absolute confidence in outlandish claims.

He seems like such a nice guy, yet he implies, unrealistically, that the solution to AGI is within his grasp; he presents no evidence that is so, and rarely considers the many critiques of current approaches that have been raised. (Better to pretend they don’t exist.) Because he seems so nice, pushback somehow seems like bad form.

Absurd, hubristic claims, often verging on the messianic, presented kindly, gently, and quietly — but never considered skeptically. That’s his M.O.

Good piece, worth reading. I’ve always been sceptical about Altman. A few months ago I wrote about his plan to raise $7 trillion to build AGI.

He is deeply conscious of the responsibility he carries. “Democracy only works in a growing economy,” he told Friend in 2016. “Without a return to economic growth, the democratic experiment will fail.” If it does, though, Altman will be ready. In a discussion about aggressive AI and nations fighting with nuclear weapons over scarce resources, he said: “I try not to think about it too much. But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israel Defense Forces, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”

Such a nice, innocent lad.

  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!