Jack Frost
Seen during a chilly walk on Saturday morning. As I typed the heading, I fell to wondering who was Jack Frost? Cue Wikipedia:
Jack Frost is a personification of frost, ice, snow, sleet, winter, and freezing cold. He is a variant of Old Man Winter who is held responsible for frosty weather, nipping the fingers and toes in such weather, coloring the foliage in autumn, and leaving fern-like patterns on cold windows in winter.
Starting in late 19th century literature, more developed characterizations of Jack Frost depict him as a sprite-like character, sometimes appearing as a sinister mischief-maker or as a hero.
Quote of the Day
“When nothing is sure, everything is possible”
- Margaret Drabble
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Regina Spektor | “Better”
Long Read of the Day
Capital, AGI, and human ambition
I’ve been writing about technology and its impact on society for longer than I care to admit, and when someone once asked me what I was trying to do with my Observer column, I replied that I’m trying to break away from “the sociology of the last five minutes” (a phrase I got from the sociologist Michael Mann), which seemed to me the besetting sin of most tech journalism. Unsurprisingly, then, I’m constantly drawn to thinkers who try to take the long view of what’s happening to us — like the author of this remarkable essay who goes under the enigmatic pen-name ‘L Rudolf L’.
It’s about what could happen to us in the longer run if ‘AI’ gets a grip on society.
The key economic effect of AI is that it makes capital a more and more general substitute for labour. There’s less need to pay humans for their time to perform work, because you can replace that with capital (e.g. data centres running software replaces a human doing mental labour).
I will walk through consequences of this, and end up concluding that labour-replacing AI means:
The ability to buy results in the real world will dramatically go up
Human ability to wield power in the real world will dramatically go down (at least without money); including because:
there will be no more incentive for states, companies, or other institutions to care about humans
it will be harder for humans to achieve outlier outcomes relative to their starting resources
- Radical equalising measures are unlikely
Overall, this points to a neglected downside of transformative AI: that society might become permanently static, and that current power imbalances might be amplified and then turned immutable.
Long but interesting throughout. Worth your time IMO.
Memo to Trump: US telecoms are vulnerable to hackers. Hang up and try again
Yesterday’s Observer column:
You know the drill. You’re logging into your bank or another service (Gmail, to name just one) that you use regularly. You enter your username and password and then the service says that it will send you an SMS message with a code in it which you can use to confirm that it is indeed you who’s logged in. It’s called “two factor authentication” (2FA) and it passes for best practice in our networked world, given that passwords and login details can easily be cracked.
Sadly, our world is wicked as well as networked, and that SMS message can be redirected to someone else’s phone – that of the criminal who has logged in using your phished personal details – and who is now busily emptying your current account.
This kind of skulduggery has been possible for years. I’ve just come across an account of it happening to bank customers in Germany in 2017, but security experts were warning about it long before that…
Books, etc.
Q: What was the bestselling Penguin Classic title of 2024 in the UK? Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice? George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four? Or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby?
A: None of the above. It was Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1848 novella White Nights, which — according to the Financial Times — has shifted more than 50,000 copies since last January.
How come? TikTok has a lot to do with it — via the BookTok community on the platform, where people share brief (and apparently persuasive) book recommendations.
My commonplace booklet
Ever since I lived in the Netherlands in the 1970s (when I saw how urban design and construction could be done well) I’ve been astonished by the abysmal standards of the British construction industry. But it turns out I only knew the half of it. Here’s an example from a Guardian piece about the industry which took even me by surprise:
British domestic architecture has also been shaped by idiosyncratic rules that contribute to its poor environmental credentials. For instance, in many parts of the UK, homes that face each other at the rear are required to be built 21 metres apart. This large distance means that instead of clustering buildings together around cool courtyards or shady streets, as is common in hotter climates, many homes in new neighbourhoods are directly exposed to the sun.
The 21-metre rule is, according to the Stirling prize-winning architect Annalie Riches, a bizarre hangover from 1902, originally intended to protect the modesty of Edwardian women. The urban designers Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker walked apart in a field until they could no longer see each other’s nipples through their shirts. The two men measured the distance between them to be 70ft (21 metres), and this became the distance that is still used today, 120 years later, to dictate how far apart many British homes should be built.
Linkblog
Things I spotted while drinking from the Internet firehose.
Why are fewer young adults having casual sex these days?
Who knows? But here’s the Abstract of an academic study of the question:
Fewer young adults are engaging in casual sexual intercourse now than in the past, but the reasons for this decline are unknown. The authors use data from the 2007 through 2017 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Transition into Adulthood Supplement to quantify some of the proximate sources of the decline in the likelihood that unpartnered young adults ages 18 to 23 have recently had sexual intercourse. Among young women, the decline in the frequency of drinking alcohol explains about one quarter of the drop in the propensity to have casual sex. Among young men, declines in drinking frequency, an increase in computer gaming, and the growing percentage who co-reside with their parents all contribute significantly to the decline in casual sex. The authors find no evidence that trends in young adults’ economic circumstances, internet use, or television watching explain the recent decline in casual sexual activity.
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