Trump in a nutshell
Lovely New Yorker cover.
Quote of the Day
“While generative AI can do amazing things, it is also perhaps the most wasteful use of a computer ever devised. If you do 1+1 on a calculator, that’s one calculation. If you do 1+1 in generative AI, that is potentially a trillion calculations to get an answer. That consumes a huge amount of chip capacity and electricity.”
- Andy Wu
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Still, Still, Still | Bryn Terfel
A lovely folk song (and lullaby) from Salzburg circa 1865.
Long Read of the Day
Stop Thinking
Interesting little essay by Karl Schroeder.
Sample:
There’s a certain kind of person who only thinks by understanding. You probably know one or two. This is also how Large Language Models such as ChatGPT reason. They may seem creative, but are always drawing on already-established links between ideas (tokens, actually, in their giant lookup table). Spectacular though they may be, they only respond to prompts with connections that somebody already made; they are engines of understanding, not of what George considered the superior mode: reason.
Reason is not “thinking harder.” It is a fundamentally different mode of cognition, that recognizes and works through contradictions rather than trying to avoid or suppress them.
Where understanding sees fixed categories, reason uses systems thinking and sees problems holistically. It’s aware that issues arise from interdependent, evolutionary processes…
Which suggests that is the idea of ‘reasoning’ by LLMs might be a bit, er, problematic.
Books, etc.
I started reading Ian McEwen’s latest novel last night and am blown away by it. It provides a dystopian but riveting picture of what the world might be like when the catastrophic futures that we are currently piling up for ourselves come to pass, and the few future historians look back at our era. Here’s excerpt from a rave review in the New York Times:
Civilization as we know it ends. A pair of scholars in 2120, risking death from roving predatory gangs, travel across what’s left of England in search of a long-lost, epoch-making poem titled “A Corona for Vivien.” They are the last, it seems, historians alive.
This can sound like a bit much, and perhaps it is. But below and beyond these (mostly sly) surface machinations is a different sort of novel, a quite careful one. It’s about what biographers owe their subjects. It’s about the nature of history. It’s about letters, journals, emails and the other things we leave behind…
My commonplace booklet
Simon Kuper has a thoughtful and disturbing column in the weekend edition of the FT about the implications of democracies’ response to the way right-wing populists are astutely fanning the flames of anti-immigration rhetoric.
The thought was triggered by his observations of the kafala system in which migrant workers are treated in the Gulf states — as second-class citizens with few, if any, human rights. He sees an analogous system emerging in an ageing Europe that needs immigrants to staff sectors from cleaners to care but doesn’t want them.
”The new trend, as seen for instance in the UK, is to give immigrants time-limited visas for specific sectors, reduce their right to bring family members and make wait longer, decades, in some cases, before they can get permanent settlement.”
This internal contradiction — of ageing societies desperately needing immigrants while their governments (which must understand the contradiction, and presumably worry about it) — are nevertheless terrified of taking openly about it in public.
Feedback
The O Sole Mio trope is a gift that keeps giving. As in this from Andrew Brown (Whom God Preserve):
I too have heard O Sole Mio sung in a fake Venetian canal but by a Chinese fake gondolier in the Macau Venetian Casino. The whole place was a ghastly prefigurement of hell, or, if you like, being trapped inside a 3D model of a conversation with ChatGPT. (The gondolas have electric motors and move inside a tiny L shaped canal. In the adjoining room, the walls are painted with trompe l’oeuil shopfronts, and on the ceiling are projected scudding clouds.)
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