Manuel
Manuel Castells, the first great sociologist of cyberspace, photographed in 2011 on one of his visits to Cambridge.
Quote of the Day
”The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won’t get much sleep.”
- Woody Allen
I thought of this when watching J.D. Vance speaking last Friday at the Munich Security Conference.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Bob Dylan | It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue (Live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1965)
We went to Complete Unknown last night. I was blown away by it. The only problem is that I knew most of the songs and had to be discouraged by my companions from singing along!
This is the nicest version of ‘Baby Blue’ I’ve ever heard.
Long Read of the Day
Machines of Loving Grace
An extraordinary essay by Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, the AI company responsible for Claude, the LLM I use mostly. The essay is the best attempt I’ve found of a real expert in the field setting out an honest account of the potential upsides of the technology. If he’s a booster he’s the most credible one I’ve encountered.
Here’s how he sets out his pitch:
I think and talk a lot about the risks of powerful AI. The company I’m the CEO of, Anthropic, does a lot of research on how to reduce these risks. Because of this, people sometimes draw the conclusion that I’m a pessimist or “doomer” who thinks AI will be mostly bad or dangerous. I don’t think that at all. In fact, one of my main reasons for focusing on risks is that they’re the only thing standing between us and what I see as a fundamentally positive future. I think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be, just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be.
In this essay I try to sketch out what that upside might look like—what a world with powerful AI might look like if everything goes right. Of course no one can know the future with any certainty or precision, and the effects of powerful AI are likely to be even more unpredictable than past technological changes, so all of this is unavoidably going to consist of guesses. But I am aiming for at least educated and useful guesses, which capture the flavor of what will happen even if most details end up being wrong. I’m including lots of details mainly because I think a concrete vision does more to advance discussion than a highly hedged and abstract one…
Read on. And thanks to Seb Schmoller for reminding me of it.
Books, etc.
This is by an outstanding academic who is currently a visiting associate at our Centre. It puts a bomb under the Promethean myth that AI is here to liberate humankind from dull, dirty and dangerous work. It’s an admirable, sobering, thoroughly-researched account of how AI depends on precarious human labour in the Global South. In that sense, it continues the assault on the ‘immateriality’ of AI that was launched years ago by Kate Crawford in her wonderful Atlas of AI.
My commonplace booklet
Very interesting study of what people use LLMs for.
Here’s a snatch from the Abstract:
We leverage a recent privacy-preserving system … to analyze over four million Claude.ai conversations through the lens of tasks and occupations in the U.S. Department of Labor’s O*NET Database. Our analysis reveals that AI usage primarily concentrates in software development and writing tasks, which together account for nearly half of all total usage. However, usage of AI extends more broadly across the economy, with ∼ 36% of occupations using AI for at least a quarter of their associated tasks. We also analyze how AI is being used for tasks, finding 57% of usage suggests augmentation of human capabilities (e.g., learning or iterating on an output) while 43% suggests automation (e.g., fulfilling a request with minimal human involvement).
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