Conkers, anyone?
Picked up on a walk yesterday. When I was a kid, all these would have been rejected as possible contestants in a game.
Quote of the Day
“AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations.”
- Cory Doctorow
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Bob Dylan | Gotta Serve Somebody
Extraordinary lyrics with a contemporary relevance.
Long Read of the Day
Trump bagging TikTok for his investor pals
My latest Observer column…
So fervid was the atmosphere that a bipartisan bill waltzed through the US Congress at a time of increasingly rancid polarisation. It was called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act and passed in April 2024. One of its provisions was that TikTok must either divest from ByteDance by 19 January 2025 or be banned in the US.
Note the date: the day before Trump 2.0 took office. With his customary cunning, he spotted a risk – and maybe also an opportunity. Instead of having 150 million enraged addicts on his inauguration day, he could harvest their plaudits as the knight in shining armour. He declared that the next day he would issue an executive order to delay enforcement of Congress’s edict. And in return, TikTok responded that, because of this assurance, it would keep the servers running. The only question about these cosy arrangements being: who was playing whom?
Who indeed?…
Books, etc.
This is a really interesting book by a distinguished Spanish philosopher which tries to answer a critical question that’s relevant to humanity’s current predicament: why don’t we listen to warnings?
One of the key distinctions he makes is that of between predictions and warnings.
Predictions call out what will take place regardless of our actions, a future as the only possible continuation of the present. Warnings, instead, point towards what’s to come and are meant to involve us in the possibility of a radical break, a discontinuity with the present signalled by alarming signs that we are asked to confront.
This distinction is illuminating for anyone struggling to interpret our response to climate change or (in my case) to AI. Which is why I was delighted when the book arrived last week.
My commonplace booklet
On Friday, we went to my friend Conor’s funeral in a packed London church and then returned home to find the current issue of the London Review of Books on the doormat, and in it his final essay for the magazine.
It’s a clinical examination of how the UK Supreme Court is systematically diminishing the influence of human rights law through various legal mechanisms and case decisions, particularly in relation to trans rights and privacy cases. In it, he fingers Lord Reed, the Supreme Court’s president, as a key figure in this shift and points out that other judges are increasingly following suit.
The essay is a poignant reminder of what a great scholar he was — and also of the extent of our loss. May he rest in peace.
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