Les Misérables?
Surely not.
Quote of the Day
”Not all who wander are lost.”
- J.R.R Tolkien
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
The Humours of Ballyloughlin | Paul Brady & Arty McGlynn
Traditional tune, usually played on Uileann pipes, beautifully rendered on guitars.
Long Read of the Day
How Europe must respond
If you want a sobering read, then this leading article from the current issue of the Economist is it.
The past week has been the bleakest in Europe since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Ukraine is being sold out, Russia is being rehabilitated and, under Donald Trump, America can no longer be counted on to come to Europe’s aid in wartime. The implications for Europe’s security are grave, but they have yet to sink in to the continent’s leaders and people. The old world needs a crash course on how to wield hard power in a lawless era, or it will fall victim to the new world disorder.
Speaking in Munich last week, America’s vice-president, J.D. Vance, offered a taste of how the home of fine wines, classical architecture and welfare cheques faces humiliation, when he ridiculed Europe as decadent and undemocratic. Its leaders have been excluded from peace talks between the White House and the Kremlin, which began officially in Riyadh on February 18th. However, the unfolding crisis goes far beyond insults and diplomatic niceties.
Mr Trump appears ready to walk away from Ukraine which he falsely blames for the war. Calling its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a “dictator”, Mr Trump warned him that he had “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left”…
I’m a long-time subscriber to the Economist, despite its general penchant for neoliberal ideas, because its reporting is excellent. It’s not often that I agree with its editorial line, but I think it’s spot on about this.
I don’t think it’s behind the magazine’s paywall, but in case I’m wrong you can find a pdf here.
AI and IP theft
Yesterday’s Observer column…
There are decades when nothing happens (as Lenin is – wrongly – supposed to have said) and weeks when decades happen. We’ve just lived through a few weeks like that. We’ve known for decades that some American tech companies were problematic for democracy because they were fragmenting the public sphere and fostering polarisation. They were a worrying nuisance, to be sure, but not central to the polity.
And then, suddenly, those corporations were inextricably bound into government, and their narrow sectional interests became the national interest of the US. Which means that any foreign government with ideas about regulating, say, hate speech on X, may have to deal with the intemperate wrath of Donald Trump or the more coherent abuse of JD Vance.
The panic that this has induced in Europe is a sight to behold. Everywhere you look, political leaders are frantically trying to find ways of “aligning” with the new regime in Washington. Here in the UK, the Starmer team has been dutifully doing its obeisance bit. First off, it decided to rename Rishi Sunak’s AI Safety Institute as the AI Security Institute, thereby “shifting the UK’s focus on artificial intelligence towards security cooperation rather than a ‘woke’ emphasis on safety concerns”, as the Financial Times put it.
But, in a way, that’s just a rebranding exercise – sending a virtue signal to Washington. Coming down the line, though, is something much more consequential…
My commonplace booklet
Tyler Cowen has an interesting blog post setting out his views on the likely adoption rate of AI technology. I asked Claude to summarise his views in a single 300-word paragraph.
Here’s what it produced:
Cowen argues that despite AI’s potential, several structural factors will slow its economic impact. He points to the Baumol-Bowen effect, where less productive sectors become a larger share of the economy over time, meaning many inefficient sectors (especially government-related ones) will adopt AI slowly. Human bottlenecks, particularly regulatory ones like FDA approval processes, will constrain AI’s benefits in areas like drug discovery. The “O-Ring model” suggests that in collaborative settings, the least capable participant (likely humans) will limit overall productivity, meaning AI’s superior capabilities won’t be fully utilized. Additionally, the historically modest correlation between IQ and wages suggests that adding more intelligence to systems may not dramatically boost productivity. Cowen notes that historical technology adoption, like electricity, typically takes longer than experts predict, and GDP growth has remained remarkably stable around 2% despite massive technological changes. Rather than viewing AI through traditional economic models of increased labor, capital, or productivity, Cowen sees it as an alien technology that society must gradually learn to integrate. While remaining optimistic about AI’s technical capabilities, he predicts it will only add about half a percentage point to annual economic growth rates, leading to significant cumulative changes over decades but not dramatic year-to-year transformations.
The key takeaway is that much of the current breathless hype about the transformative potential of the technology is overblown. Like any General-Purpose Technology it has great potential for the long term. Somebody should tell Starmer & Co that it won’t make all that much difference within in a single electoral cycle.
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