Holy Smoke!
Nice juxtaposition on a Donegal beach.
Quote of the Day
”A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.”
- Thomas Mann
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Paul Simon | Graceland
Triggered by a marvellous BBC Prom the other night
Long Read of the Day
Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same
This a fabulous, insightful essay by Lauren Leek, a great data scientist, on a question that has puzzled me for ages: why do so many females with online followings seem to look alike? Ditto for ads for upmarket apartments. Ditto for city high streets. It puzzled Lauren too, but unlike me she found a way of explaining it.
I’ve spent most of the last decade unable to answer the simplest question anyone asks: where’s home? I’ve lived in multiple countries, with a passport situation that makes border guards frown. Now I’m moving again, to The Hague, and it was house-hunting that finally made me see it. Every flat I scrolled, in a city I barely know, I already recognised: the same refinished parquet, matte-black taps, rewilded pot plant on the same windowsill. Same with the café near every place I’ve lived, flat white and exposed brick and oat milk assumed. I’m at home everywhere because everywhere is converging on the same few templates, and I’m exactly who those templates were optimised for. The recommender’s algorithm’s ideal user, basically.
Here is what puzzled me. We have never had more individual data and naive intuition says all that granular personal data should fragment us, splinter the world into a billion niches. And yet the opposite is happening. The more the machines learn about us as individuals, the more alike our worlds look. That paradox, more personalisation producing more sameness, is what this piece is about, and by the end I want to convince you this is a political economy story that needs and has an easy intervention.
The theoretical mechanism
Imagine forty options, cuisines, genres, shop types, and a standard algorithm: predict what people want, show them more of it, watch what they pick, update. Then let the loop run…
Do read it. Well worth your time. And if you find it hard going in places, Cory Doctorow (Whom God Preserve) has a masterly exegesis of it.
Books, etc.
Machines are not the enemy
Diane Coyle’s review of Sarah O’Connor’s fine book.
Readers of Sarah’s articles in the Financial Times – the only newspaper worth reading regularly any more – will be aware that she (& fellow journalist John Burn-Murdoch) keep up heroically with the vast amount of academic work on AI and labour markets, so the book is very well-informed about those debates. Combining that with reportage brings the issues to life, but also raises questions the academic literature rarely surfaces.
The one that stands out in my mind is why on earth our societies and politicians are going along with the use of AI to dehumanise the humans, to make people work to the rhythm of the machines. Truck drivers have long and unhealthy shifts because of the requirements imposed by the tachygraphs that regulate driving hours – the maximum becomes the target – and the answer to their risk of dozing off in the cab is still more machines to monitor them. In warehouse jobs, as the AI gets faster, the demands on the people serving the logistic robots become more relentless.
The thing about Diane’s crisp reviews is that they invariably get to the nub of a book’s main idea.
My commonplace booklet
We’ve had an EV for five years, and during that time I’ve observed how public discourses about these vehicles has evolved. In the beginning it was usually about ‘range’ and it took me a while to realise that it wasn’t about ‘range anxiety’ at all, but infrastructure anxiety. If you drove a conventional (ICE) car you didn’t worry about range because you knew that wherever you were, there was going to be a petrol filling station within reach. The problem with EVs at the beginning was that infrastructure of ‘filling stations’ was sparse, unless you drove a Tesla which had, from the beginning built its own infrastructure of ‘superchargers’.
Another common element in the discourse concerned the time that it took to recharge an EV — which could take up to 20 or 30 minutes, compared with an ICE which you could top up in less than five minutes. Our experience over five years — and many long trips — has been that the longer charging time turns out to a feature rather than a bug, in the sense that it gives you a restful interval — and a respite — during a longer journey.
Errata
In Friday’s edition the link to Shane McGowan’s funeral was missing. Here it is. Apologies, and thanks to Kevin Cryan for pointing it out.
David Johnson noted the connection between Friday’s Long Read — about AI being useful for proofreading — and the spelling error in the edition’s footer (“Thank yoiu for reading this far.”) My response: at least it shows that I wrote it unaided by AI!
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