Inwards and Onwards!
The new entrance to the National Portrait Gallery, one of my favourite buildings in London, yesterday.
Quote of the Day
”Within every lean, hungry, tech start-up founder, a bloated monopolist was struggling to get out.”
- Henry Farrell on Silicon Valley startups.*
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
We Banjo 3 performing live on BBC Radio Ulster’s Blas programme in 2013.
Long Read of the Day
It’s Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word
I used to think that Mark Zuckerberg was the most dangerous man in the tech industry. But that title has now passed to Sam Altman, the babyfaced mover and shaker behind OpenAI’s travails. I’m continually astonished by the way people swoon in his presence, especially when one reads his credo, “The Intelligence Age”. But they do.
Which is why they should read this magnificent blast by Dave Karpf in The Atlantic.
He declares that the AI revolution is on the verge of unleashing boundless prosperity and radically improving human life. “We’ll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI,” he writes. Altman expects that his technology will fix the climate, help humankind establish space colonies, and discover all of physics. He predicts that we may have an all-powerful superintelligence “in a few thousand days.” All we have to do is feed his technology enough energy, enough data, and enough chips.
Maybe someday Altman’s ideas about AI will prove out, but for now, his approach is textbook Silicon Valley mythmaking. In these narratives, humankind is forever on the cusp of a technological breakthrough that will transform society for the better. The hard technical problems have basically been solved—all that’s left now are the details, which will surely be worked out through market competition and old-fashioned entrepreneurship. Spend billions now; make trillions later! This was the story of the dot-com boom in the 1990s, and of nanotechnology in the 2000s. It was the story of cryptocurrency and robotics in the 2010s. The technologies never quite work out like the Altmans of the world promise, but the stories keep regulators and regular people sidelined while the entrepreneurs, engineers, and investors build empires…
Great stuff. Do read it.
Books, etc.
The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books
Rose Horowitch has some shocking news from the Ivy League. She got it first from Nicholas Dames, who has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required (and celebrated) ‘great-books’ course, since 1998. And guess what? New generations of students don’t do books.
Now of course few students read everything that was assigned to them, but something’s changed…
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to…
It must be tough teaching the Humanities these days, what with book-aversion and ChatGPT.
My commonplace booklet
What to do about corporations that maim and kill their workers
Salutary tale by Robert Reich from his time as Secretary for Labor in the Clinton Administration. And a reminder of what happens when you have liberal democracy that always prioritises the needs of corporations.
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
Joke in bad taste from The Economist about a frog on the banks of the River Jordan:
A scorpion asks for a ride across. “Why would I do that?” says the frog. “If you get on my back you will sting me.” The scorpion explains that he, too, would drown. Reassured the frog carries him, until halfway, the scorpion stings the frog. “Why?” cries the frog, “Now we are both doomed.” Because, comes back the reply, “this is the Middle East.”
Hmmmmm…..
Errata
Many thanks to the many readers who tactfully informed me that the city whose fine architecture had been extolled by Ethan Zuckerman on Wednesday was Columbus, Indiana, not Columbus, Ohio. Humble pie duly consumed, with a dash of tomato ketchup.
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