Snowscape
A Cambridge scene that makes me think of L.S.Lowry, even though Cambridge is the last place Lowry would have though of painting.
Quote of the Day
“When nothing is sure, everything is possible”
- Margaret Drabble
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Regina Spektor | “Better”
Long Read of the Day
Capital, AGI, and human ambition
I’ve been writing about technology and its impact on society for longer than I care to admit, and when someone once asked me what I was trying to do with my Observer column, I replied that I’m trying to break away from “the sociology of the last five minutes” (a phrase I got from the sociologist Michael Mann), which seemed to me the besetting sin of most tech journalism. Unsurprisingly, then, I’m constantly drawn to thinkers who try to take the long view of what’s happening to us — like the author of this remarkable essay who goes under the enigmatic pen-name ‘L Rudolf L’.
It’s about what could happen to us in the longer run if ‘AI’ gets a grip on society.
The key economic effect of AI is that it makes capital a more and more general substitute for labour. There’s less need to pay humans for their time to perform work, because you can replace that with capital (e.g. data centres running software replaces a human doing mental labour).
I will walk through consequences of this, and end up concluding that labour-replacing AI means:
The ability to buy results in the real world will dramatically go up
Human ability to wield power in the real world will dramatically go down (at least without money); including because:
there will be no more incentive for states, companies, or other institutions to care about humans
it will be harder for humans to achieve outlier outcomes relative to their starting resources
- Radical equalising measures are unlikely
Overall, this points to a neglected downside of transformative AI: that society might become permanently static, and that current power imbalances might be amplified and then turned immutable.
Long but interesting throughout, and worth your time IMO.
My commonplace booklet
Ever since I lived and worked in the Netherlands in the 1970s (and seen how urban design and construction can be done well) I’ve been astonished by the abysmal standards of house-building of the British construction industry. But it turns out I only knew the half of it. Here’s an example from a Guardian piece about the industry which took even me by surprise:
British domestic architecture has also been shaped by idiosyncratic rules that contribute to its poor environmental credentials. For instance, in many parts of the UK, homes that face each other at the rear are required to be built 21 metres apart. This large distance means that instead of clustering buildings together around cool courtyards or shady streets, as is common in hotter climates, many homes in new neighbourhoods are directly exposed to the sun.
The 21-metre rule is, according to the Stirling prize-winning architect Annalie Riches, a bizarre hangover from 1902, originally intended to protect the modesty of Edwardian women. The urban designers Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker walked apart in a field until they could no longer see each other’s nipples through their shirts. The two men measured the distance between them to be 70ft (21 metres), and this became the distance that is still used today, 120 years later, to dictate how far apart many British homes should be built.
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