A reminder of Summer…
… on a dark, rainy, November morning.
## Quote of the Day
“As one watches the inexorable consequences of the new organisational design, as to which many guarantees have of course been given, it quickly becomes obvious that some luckless individual – despite his position of privilege and despite the guarantees – was born with a silver knife in his back”.
- Stafford Beer (in The Heart of Enterprise)
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Mozart | Horn Concerto No.2, I. Allegro maestoso | Mito Chamber Orchestra | Radek Baborák & Seiji Ozawa
Long Read of the Day
AI Could Be the Railroad of the 21st Century. Brace Yourself.
Nice long read by Derek Thompson, casting a useful historical eye on current proceedings.
Ours is a remarkable moment in world history. A transformative technology is ascending, and its supporters claim it will forever change the world. To build it requires companies to invest a sum of money unlike anything in living memory. News reports are filled with widespread fears that America’s biggest corporations are propping up a bubble that will soon pop. Behind the scenes, a political backlash is fomenting, as the forces of anti-oligarchy and anti-monopoly are rising.
Is this the artificial intelligence boom of the 2020s? Or the transcontinental railroad construction of the late 1800s?
Between the 1860s and the 1900, the transcontinentals transformed America. They populated the west, birthed the modern corporation, turned the U.S. into a coast-to-coast dual-ocean superpower, and revolutionized modern finance. As the historian Richard White wrote in his epic history of the transcontinentals, Railroaded, “they created modernity as much by their failure as their success,” leaving behind “a legacy of bankruptcies, two depressions, environmental harm, financial crises, and social upheaval.”
In the 2020s, AI is already transforming America in a similar fashion…
Read on. You hit a paywall eventually, but by that stage you’ll have got the picture.
My commonplace booklet
Kyp Kyprianou was struck by the Commonplace booklet entry on Wednesday, in which I quoted a nice rant from Dave Winer about the infuriating tendency of chatbots to pretend that they’re your friend. “Can we have a rule,” Dave wrote, “that AI bots must by default behave like a computer?” Kyp has been thinking along similar lines, and had the interesting idea of programming a browser extension so that whenever he embarks on a chat with an LLM it “benignly administers an injection of custom instructions at the head of any query I make”.
This had the effect of cutting out most of the “machine’s boilerplate chat”.
This is interesting (to me, anyway) because I’ve found that writing browser extensions can be very helpful in making LLMs perform tasks that speed up my workflow. Good to see that others have similar ideas.
This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!