The Island
Thanks to Max Whitby (Whom God Preserve), we had a lovely day on Lindisfarne (aka Holy Island) off the Northumberland coast. The upturned boat in the picture belongs to a friend of his who is (he says) a connoisseur of arcane tools. I’m fascinated by islands but had never been to this one. I’ll be going back. The only problem is that many thousands of other souls feel like that every year. So this was a pretty good time to go.
Quote of the Day
”The international relations scholar John Ikenberry once described the US as a liberal leviathan. Today, the liberal leviathan has become a rogue elephant.”
- Timothy Garton Ash, writing in the Guardian last Wednesday.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Bruce Springsteen | Tougher Than the Rest
Long Read of the Day
Against optimism: the Whiggish blindness of Dario Amodei
On February 21 my Long Read of the Day was an extraordinary essay by Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, the AI company responsible for Claude, the LLM I use mostly. I chose it because it was “the best attempt I’d found of a real expert in the field setting out an honest account of the potential upsides of AI.”
This prompted Andrew Brown, one of the most thoughtful people I know, to write an elegant critique of the Amodei essay, which he describes as “a kind of Ozymandian relic of the world of yesterday”. His riposte is a model of what intellectual discourse should be like — respectful, fair, eloquent and perceptive. Which is why I enthusiastically commend it to you.
Andrew’s main point is that technology is always just part of the human story. Here’s a sample of how this plays out in his essay:
It’s not as if Amodei is a bad or callous man, who thinks that there can’t be a problem. He’s obviously someone who cares about the world, with whom it would be fascinating to talk. He knows there can be problems; he’s just confident they can be overcome:
“With advanced health interventions and especially radical increases in lifespan or cognitive enhancement drugs, there will certainly be valid worries that these technologies are ‘only for the rich’ [but] developed world political institutions are more responsive to their citizens and have greater state capacity to execute universal access programs—and I expect citizens to demand access to technologies that so radically improve quality of life.”
Apparently no one has told him about the American health care system.
Well worth your time.
Books, etc.
Screenshot
I wrote about this in the Observer yesterday.
Oscar Wilde’s quip, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life”, needs updating: replace “art” with “AI”. The Amazon page for Alexander C Karp and Nicholas W Zapiska’s new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West, also lists: a “workbook” containing “key takeaways” from the volume; a second volume on how the Karp/Zapiska tome “can help you navigate life”; and a third offering another “workbook” comprising a “Master Plan for Navigating Digital Age and the Future of Society”. It is conceivable that these parasitical works were written by humans, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Mr Karp, the lead author of the big book, is an interesting guy. He has a BA in philosophy from an American liberal arts college, a law degree from Stanford and a PhD in neoclassical social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt. So he’s not your average geek. And yet he’s an object of obsessive interest to people both inside and outside the tech industry. Why? Because in 2003 he – together with Peter Thiel and three others – founded a secretive tech company called Palantir. And some of the initial funding came from the investment arm of – wait for it – the CIA!
The name comes from palantíri, the “seeing stones” in the Tolkien fantasies. It makes sense because the USP of Palantir is its machine-learning technology – which is apparently very good at seeing patterns in, and extracting predictions from, oceans of data. The company was founded because at the time all the Silicon Valley tech companies either disapproved of government, or were staffed by engineers who were adamantly opposed to working for the US military. This created an opening that Karp and his colleagues astutely exploited to build a company which is simultaneously appears to be booming (current market capitalisation: $200bn), while also being regarded by critics of the industry as the spawn of the devil…
Linkblog
Errata
For those readers who were intrigued by the long-range (200km) hybrid car (Lynk) I mentioned on Friday, here’s a link. Apologies for not providing it.
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