Tulips and memory lane
Fresh tulips and, in the background, one of my favourite photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson. It was taken in 1954 in Rue Mouffetard in Paris. I love it because the cheery lad in the picture is the same age as me (if he’s still around). And I guess I am retrospectively jealous of him: no 8-year old growing up in in rural Ireland in the 1950s, as I did, would have been entrusted with bringing home two bottles of water, never mind Vin Rouge. Not that we ever drank wine in our house.
The sketch on the right is by one of my sons when he was a schoolboy.
Quote of the Day
”The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”
- Bertrand Russell Agreed.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Pete Seeger | This Land is Your Land
Lovely song, lovely moment. But now seems quaintly innocent..
Long Read of the Day
The Resistance Comes for OpenAI
Splendid blast by Scott Galloway on the lesson we should all learn from Anthropic’s stand against the Department of ‘War’.
Enter Dario Amodei, the Jekyll to Altman’s Hyde. During a recent contract negotiation with the Department of Defense, Anthropic refused to remove safeguards prohibiting the use of the company’s technology in autonomous weapons and the mass surveillance of Americans, believing those applications can’t be safely and reliably performed by today’s AI. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded with a shakedown: The U.S. would brand Anthropic a supply chain risk or seize their tech via the Defense Production Act. To Hegseth, the corporation isn’t an entity, subject to a fair legal system, that creates the profits that help fund the Defense Department, but an entity that is either with us, or against us. If this movie starring man-children hopped up on steroids they buy at gas stations sounds familiar, trust your instincts. Law firms, universities, and Big Tech have bent the knee, while the rest of corporate America has adopted a duck-and-cover strategy in the face of tariffs that are both illegal and stupid, i.e., hurting others while hurting ourselves.
In contrast, Amodei stood up … for humanity, safety, and the rule of law…
Do read it. And if you’ve downloaded the ChatGPT app, delete it. From now on I’ve decided that henceforth I’ll ask everyone who tells me they use it a simple question: “why?” Other, less ethically challenged, options are available, like Anthropic’a *Claude.ai. And, in my experience they’re better.
Books, etc.
AI and human augmentation
Screenshot
This might be interesting. It’s coming out soon from MIT Press. According to the blurb, it
cuts through all the hype and noise around AI by returning to a central, often overlooked question: What is intelligence actually for? Rather than aiming to build autonomous superintelligent agents, AI leaders Erik Larson and Chee-We Ng argue in this book that we should focus on systems that support and extend human judgment, understanding, and decision-making—capacities that the current AI largely ignores.
I’m in favour of all those things, and so will be interested to see what the authors make of them. Their book might go well with Ethan Mollick’s book — which I often recommend to people who ask me for a pragmatic introduction to the AI stuff.
My commonplace booklet
From Nick Carr’s Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart:
One way to think about artificially intelligent text-generation systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft’s Copilot is as clairvoyants. They are mediums that bring the words of the past into the present in a new arrangement. The large language models, or LLMs, that power the chatbots are not creating text out of nothing. They’re drawing on a vast corpus of human expression—a digitized Spiritus Mundi composed of billions of documents—and through a complex, quasi-mystical statistical procedure, they’re blending all those old words into something new, something intelligible to and requiring interpretation by a human interlocutor. When we talk to chatbots, we are, in a way, communing with the dead.
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