Window art

What a window-blind! Spotted on a walk through town after dusk the other night. Made my day.

Quote of the Day

”It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

• Frederic Jameson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

William Kroll | Banjo and Fiddle | Jennifer Pike with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales | BBC Proms, 2014

Link

Long Read of the Day

”Students who use AI as a crutch don’t learn anything” 

Transcript of an interesting El Pais interview with Ethan Mollick who is one of the most interesting and insightful writers on ‘AI’. He teaches at the Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania, and from the outset has viewed the technology as an augmentation of human capabilities. His book, Co-Intelligence is one of the books I recommend to teachers who ask me how they can get up to speed on the technology.

Here’s a sample:

Q. You say that the best experts of the future will be those who make the most use of AI. Are people who are waiting to use AI making a mistake?

A. I get it, it’s an unnerving technology. People are freaking out. They’re getting a sense of three sleepless nights and running away screaming. It feels like an essential threat to a lot of careers. I think if you’re a good journalist, the first time you think, “oh no.” But then you start to see how this could help you do things better than before. And at least for the next few generations, it’s not going to replace you, even though the technologists say it is. We need to separate from the Silicon Valley noise. On one hand they’re completely right: this is a miraculous incredible technology that emulates thinking, but the other is it doesn’t understand our jobs….

Books, etc.

Diane Coyle’s Books of the Year

My colleague Diane Coyle has a terrific blog, The Enlightened Economist, which is one of the wonders of the world. It consists entirely of Diane’s reviews of the books she’s been reading. That may sound dull, but, believe me, it’s the opposite. As well as being a distinguished economist she’s also a voracious and perceptive reader. Her reviews are succinct and insightful, and often lead me to buying (or borrowing) books I wouldn’t have known about otherwise.

Every year, Diane publishes a shortlist of candidates for the ‘Book of the Year’ prize. The shortlist for the 2024 candidates is here. The 2024 prize (a free lunch, on Diane) has gone to the author(s) of two winning tomes: The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies; and The Ordinal Society by Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy.

Diane’s reviews of the books are here and here. And she herself has a new book coming in April.

My commonplace booklet

When he retired to Edinburgh in 1769, David Hume wrote to a friend:

I live still, and must for a twelvemonth, in my old House in James’s Court, which is very chearful and even elegant, but too small to display my great Talent for Cookery, the Science to which I intend to addict the remaining Years of my Life; I have just now lying on the Table before me a Receipt for making Soupe à la Reine, copy’d with my own hand. For Beef and Cabbage (a charming Dish), and old Mutton and old Claret, no body excels me. I make also Sheep head Broth in a manner that Mr Keith speaks of it for eight days…

From Kieran Setiya.

A big deal in an age when everyone of Hume’s status employed a cook and did no cooking.

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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”

Link

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:

1. The ability to buy results in the real world will dramatically go up

2. 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

1. 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.

 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!

New beginnings

Quote of the Day

”The more machines start to ’reason’ the more unpredictable they will become.”

• Ilya Sutskever (in his NuIPS 2024 Keynote)

Just like humans, really.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn | Newfoundland | at the Ateneul Roman, Bucharest

Link

Wonderful performance by the greatest piper of my lifetime, of the final movement of Shaun Davey’s orchestral suite, The Brendan Voyage.

Seems appropriate as we embark on our own hazardous voyage into a Trumpian future.

Long Read of the Day

 Jimmy Carter: An unlucky President and a Lucky Man

A nice memoir in The Atlantic by the distinguished journalist, James Fallows, who worked for Carter.

Americans generally know Jimmy Carter as the gray-haired retiree who came into the news when building houses or fighting diseases or monitoring elections, and whose political past became shorthand for the threadbare America of the 1970s. Most of today’s Americans had not been born by the time Carter left office in 1981. Only about one-fifth are old enough to have voted when he won and then lost the presidency. It is hard for Americans to imagine Jimmy Carter as young—almost as hard as it is to imagine John F. Kennedy as old.

But there are consistent accounts of Carter’s personality throughout his long life: as a Depression-era child in rural Georgia, as a hotshot Naval Academy graduate working in Hyman Rickover’s then-futuristic-seeming nuclear-powered submarine force, as a small businessman who entered politics but eventually was forced out of it, as the inventor of the modern post-presidency.

What these accounts all stress is that, old or young, powerful or diminished, Jimmy Carter has always been the same person…

What Hunter Thompson saw in Carter

That he was much shrewder and tougher than people realised. Thompson spotted this way before anyone else. His epiphany came when covering a speech that Carter gave to the assembled worthies of the Georgia and Atlanta Bar in which he excoriated the legal profession in terms no normal politician would use. Thompson wrote it up in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, the book that some people think won Carter the presidency.

Here’s a fascinating video about that epiphany.

As it happens, I once got into trouble because of Jimmy Carter. I told the story on my audio ‘Lockdown Diary’ for March 30, 2020.

If you’re interested, you can listen to it here.

My commonplace booklet

Why social media have an inordinate impact on contemporary politics

Insightful observation by Yascha Mounk. Basically, politicians and mainstream media forget that the people who inhabit Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky et al are a weird and unrepresentative sample of the electorate.

People spend an enormous amount of time and attention on social media today. But the real reason some platforms now influence everything including the contours of public discourse and the American presidential election is not that your cousin is addicted to Instagram; it is that key decision makers mistake the opinions of a small number of politically engaged—and ideologically extreme—people on social media for the views of the general public.

In decades past, newspaper editors knew that cranks and extremists were more likely to submit letters than average readers; they therefore took their opinions with a large grain of salt. Today, decision makers are obsessed with the modern-day descendants of those cranks. The recognition that Twitter and similar platforms do not represent the real world, however, might lessen the political influence of social media.

Feedback

My choice of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll (composed as a birthday gift to Cosima) for Monday’s music slot prompted Tom Parkhill to send a link to an account of whom the Wagners had invited for Christmas that year — none other than Herr Friedrich Nietzsche who, it seems, had been in love with Cosima but Wagner had married her while the philosopher was on military service. Hmmm…

Cosima was … delighted with her Christmas gift from Nietzsche: the manuscript of The Birth of the Tragic Concept, an early draft of the philosopher’s own The Birth of Tragedy. In the evenings, Wagner read passages aloud. Wagner and Cosima praised it as being “of the greatest value and excellence.” Nietzsche purred…

He was the only guest and stayed eight days. I’m just thinking what a playwright like Tom Stoppard or Michael Frayn could do with this account of Christmas Day in a villa on Lake Lucerne.

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!