Street scene: Venice
Quote of the Day
“Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.”
- John Updike
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Nina Simone | The Last Rose Of Summer | 1964 in New York
Long Read of the Day
What Will Remain After the AI and Crypto Bubbles?
An interesting Project Syndicate essay by William H. Janeway,
Science advances, Max Planck famously observed, “one funeral at a time”. By the same token, as Carlota Perez shrewdly observed many years ago, economies advance, one technology bubble at a time. So the key question to ask about every bubble is: what will be left after it bursts? The railway bubble of the late 19th century left, not just a trail of bankrupt companies, but also a physical infrastructure that turned the continental United States into a single market (and enabled a mail order industry. Likewise, when the 1995-2000 dot-com bubble burst it left behind it lots of dark fibre-optic cable in its wake — an infrastructure that enabled the ubiquitous connectivity that enabled the cloud-computing and smartphone explosions post 2007.
Which explains why the title of Bill’s latest essay made me sit up. He usefully points out that we are currently enmeshed in not one but two speculative bubbles: the cryptocurrency market, which mirrors historical bubbles like the Dutch tulip mania; and the AI sector, which is a more traditional technology-driven bubble.
The first law of financial bubbles is this: it is easy to know when you are in one, but difficult to know when it will pop. Still, those who study the issue have identified three signals that tend to mark the beginning of the end. The first is when the demand curve inverts, meaning that demand increases as prices rise. …The second signal is when the exponential increase in price calls forth new supplies as many others try to get in on the action. Even in the digital world, it takes longer to generate a new asset than it does for the price to move. In the case of crypto, price moves are instantaneous; similarly, private equity markets move much faster than anyone hoping to build a new large language model (LLM) can. Finally, in the terminal stages of a bubble, demand is increasingly fed by uninformed, amateur investors.
All three signals, he says, “appear to be flashing red in the crypto and AI markets”.
Yep.
Range-anxiety is really about infrastructure
Yesterday’s Observer column…
By now, every electric vehicle [EV] owner knows the drill. The moment you mention your car, the interrogation begins: “What’s the range?” Any reply north of 250 miles is greeted with amused incredulity. In vain you point out that the average car in the UK travels only 15 to 19 miles a day – depending on which survey you rely on – and that, in any event, cars spend most of their lives parked. But range anxiety persists: the primal (largely male) fear of being stranded after your battery runs out of juice.
Most of us are unimpressed by any cited statistics, which are, after all, only averages, and we’ve all heard cautionary tales of people who drowned in rivers that were on average only 6in deep.
What, for example, asked one interrogator, “if I suddenly had to drive to Edinburgh to pick up my mother-in-law?” Well, I explained patiently (as you do), then you’d have to charge the car en route at a charging station. “Yeah,” came the response, “and where do you find one of those?”
Which is a reflection of the fact that, although more than a fifth of new cars sold in the UK this year were EVs, many internal combustion engine (ICE) drivers have never seen – or at any rate noticed – an EV charging station.
So maybe range anxiety is the wrong term; it’s infrastructure anxiety that we should be talking about. That’s why ICE drivers don’t worry about the range of their vehicles: in the end, wherever they are, there’s always a petrol station within reach, even in rural areas…
My commonplace booklet
Geoff Hinton on how humans should relate to AIs
Interesting throughout. And in an odd way reminds me of the way Alison Gopnik thinks about the relationship between AI and humans.
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