Megalithic Sunrise
Sunrise at Stonehenge on Friday, 20th.
I wasn’t there but my friend, Keryn Jalli, was, and took the photograph.
Quote of the Day
”Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”
- John Kenneth Galbraith
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
John Field | Nocturne No. 5 in B-flat major | Rafael Gómez-Ruiz
Field was an Irish composer, pianist and teacher, born in 1782 to a musical family in Dublin and widely credited with inventing the Nocturne as a musical genre.
Long Read of the Day
Love Actually? Washington’s current relationship with Britain is more like Contempt Actually
As an Irishman I’ve always been puzzled by the so-called “special relationship” of the UK with the US. It seemed to me more like the relationship between a billionaire and his butler. The amazing thing, in a way, was that the delusion persisted even after the brusque lesson delivered by Eisenhower to Anthony Eden at Suez, and it persisted right through the Blair era and into Starmer’s. All of which explains why I liked this latest post by Timothy Garton Ash.
Asked about the British government’s subtle distinction between defensive strikes in the Gulf, which it now supports, and offensive ones, which it doesn’t, Maga ideologue Steve Bannon tells the New Statesman’s Freddie Hayward: “That’s diplomatic bullshit. Fuck you. You’re either an ally or you’re not. Fuck you. The special relationship is over.” Ah, the “special relationship”! It must be 40 years since I first heard former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt say: “The special relationship is so special only one side knows it exists.”
An American critic of Trump recently asked me the obvious follow-up question: “Why does your government keep grovelling?” More fundamentally, we must ask why so much of official Britain, and especially its security establishment, keeps clinging for dear life to the United States, behaving for all the world like someone stuck in an abusive personal relationship…
Good question. And how might the UK cast off this servile cringe?
Make AI more like a human? It’s far too clever for that
My Observer column of 6 March…*
The difference between genius and stupidity, observed Albert Einstein, “is that genius has its limits”. Cue the vapourings about AI from some of Silicon Valley’s prodigies. Think of Sam Altman of OpenAI, for example, burbling that the technology will bring “unimaginable prosperity”, help to fix the climate crisis and even “figure out how to cure cancer”. And, of course, it will make work optional, as Elon Musk explained to then UK prime minister Rishi Sunak in a toe-curling interview at the AI safety summit held at Bletchley Park in 2023.
How do smart people come to talk such nonsense? It’s mostly because spectacular success in their chosen, limited, domains makes them overconfident. After all, they’ve built huge companies and solved hard problems and assume that all problems are presumably similar to ones they’ve solved before. They live in a world where intelligence and information processing are what make things happen and assume that those are the key variables everywhere.
Alas, they’re not. The problem we have in addressing the climate crisis is not shortage of ideas – or a lack of real (or artificial) intelligence – but that we live in a political system driven by five-year electoral cycles that make it impossible to take the necessary remedial measures in time…
Books, etc.
In an email exchange about C.P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’, John Seeley mentioned a book I hadn’t heard of — Michael Gelb’s How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci. So like the conscientious autodidact I am, I dug it out.
Here are the seven ‘Da Vinci principles’
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Curiosità – an insatiably curious approach to life and an unrelenting quest for continuous learning.
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Dimonstrazione – A commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence and a willingness to learn from mistakes.
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Sensatzione – The continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to enliven experience.
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Sfumato (literally, “Going up in Smoke”) – A willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox and uncertainty.
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Arte/Scienza — The development of the balance between science and art, logic and imagination. “Whole-brain” thinking.
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Corporalita — The cultivation of grace, ambidexterity, fitness and poise.
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Connessione — A recognition of and appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena. Systems thinking, in other words.
At a rough count I think I could tick only 1, 5 and 7. I make a lot of mistakes, and sometimes learn from them, so maybe I get a quarter-tick for #2!
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
- Autonomy needs humans
From Azeem Azahr:
Waymo’s entire remote guidance operation runs on just 70 human operators — a 43:1 car-to-human ratio. GM’s robotaxi service Cruise had 1.5 staff per car.
And btw, AIs need humans too, to create the ‘guidelines’ that sanitise LLMs before they are unleashed on the unsuspecting public. It’s called ‘Reinforcement Learning by Human Feedback’ (RLHF).
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