London’s other East End

Gerrard Street yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whisky is barely enough.”

• Mark Twain (Especially if it’s a good single malt.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Vince Gill | Price of Regret at the Oklahoma Hall of Fame Ceremony

Link

The intro is interesting, but if you’re in a hurry he starts singing at 3:26.

Long Read of the Day

The EU AI Act and Greek Mythology

René Walter’s distinctive take on the forthcoming (and potentially powerful) EU legislation.

It’s a nice riff on a recent lecture by Stephen Fry about ‘AI’.

Fry presents us with the choice of whether we want to be the fire-giving god Prometheus, giving humans the spark of artificial intelligence, or the father of gods, Zeus, with strict regulations in the face of the upcoming, especially AI-based technological leaps that are emerging: Deep learning algorithms recently computed 2.2 million new crystal structures, “800 years’ worth of knowledge,” which can be used for novel technologies and innovations, such as in the production of solar panels. Another study confirms the abilities of large language models in the discovery of new molecules for pharmaceutical research, promising new and (possibly) cheaper drugs. A study from July on the acceleration of scientific research with AI found that artificial intelligence systems explicitly trained on human interferences in the research process — those rare Einsteins proposing completely novel theories — increased the prediction of these AI systems for future discoveries by 400%.

These things are possible today.

Walter is in favour of us playing Zeus, though he would spare Prometheus’s liver. The essay provides some relief from the cacophony about the technology. Hope you enjoy it.

Books, etc.

I’m tempted by this after listening to Burns talking about it with Tyler Cowen on an interesting podcast. It’s £45, though. Hmmm…

My commonplace booklet

(Spoiler alert: this is about golf, which I’m sure some readers regard as a way of ruining a nice country walk.)

I was an avid golfer from the age of 11 until I went to Cambridge in 1968, when I decided that it would be impossible to play regularly enough to be considered for the University team and do any academic work. One of my schoolmates, Ivan Morris, came to the sport later than me but rapidly mastered it and was a distinguished scratch golfer for decades.

Unlike many gifted players, though, he’s also been an astute commentator on it, and in recent years has become a fierce critic of the way the sport has been perverted by money and by the malign influence of equipment manufacturers. One of the consequences of this is that players like Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm now drive the ball so far that championship golf courses are having to be continually lengthened so that they do not become pitch-and-putt toys for these guys.

Now the governing bodies of the sport have decided that Something Has To Be Done. They’ve decided that by 2030 the aerodynamics of golf balls will have to be modified so that they travel less far in the air.

Ivan is not much impressed by this, as his latest column in Irish Golfer makes clear.

Elite golf is not very interesting or exciting anymore; it’s about slamming the ball as far as possible and turning the game into a putting contest. There used to be a lot more to it than that. In modern golf, the ability to hit the same shot over and over is more important than the ability to play different (types of) shots. Top players must be bored to tears with the game they are asked to play for a living, and it is no fun to watch either. There was a time when the driver was the most difficult club in the bag to control. Now, it’s so forgiving one can blaze away without hardly a care in the world. The game has been manipulated by the ball and equipment manufacturers to a state where it has become too easy for pros while remaining more or less as difficult as ever for the club golfer.

Right on.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

 Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover.

Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, free of U.S. copyright restrictions, and free of cost.

Ebook projects like Project Gutenberg transcribe ebooks and make them available for the widest number of reading devices. Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to create a new edition that takes advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.

Standard Ebooks aren’t just a beautiful addition to your digital library—they’re a high quality standard to build your own ebooks on. Looks interesting and imaginative. I’ve been thinking of them for Xmas presents.

Link

H/T Jason Kottke (Whom God Preserve).

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Wonders of nature

A large log that’s been lying on our driveway for a while has suddenly sprung a surprise in the form of picturesque clusters of funghi.

Quote of the Day

“The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.”

• H. L. Mencken

He wrote this in 1924. Nothing much has changed.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Waterboys | A Song for the Life

Link

Long Read of the Day

Maybe We Already Have Runaway Machines

Terrific review essay in the New Yorker by Gideon Lewis-Kraus on David Runciman’s new book,  The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs. It’s a book I know quite well, having read it both in draft and in published form, and so can appreciate Lewis-Kraus’s insights into it. For people who are wondering whether it might be good Christmas read, the essay might be usefully informative. In a way one could interpret the book as providing a novel perspective on the current hysteria about ‘AI’ and the (possibly-existential) risks the technology might pose for humanity (which are overblown IMO).

Certainly, for anyone wondering what it might be like for humans to live with (or under) super-intelligent machines, then Runciman’s answer is that we already know what it’ll be like: we’ve been living under two kinds of such machines for at least a century and a half! One is the modern sovereign state; the other is the contemporary mega-corporation.

Anyway, the essay is worth your time. As is the book itself.

ChatGPT’s disruptive year

Yesterday’s Observer column:

If a week is a long time in politics, a year is an eternity in tech. Just over 12 months ago, the industry was humming along in its usual way. The big platforms were deep into what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification” – the process in which platforms go from being initially good to their users, to abusing them to make things better for their business customers and finally to abusing those customers in order to claw back all the value for themselves. Elon Musk was ramping up his efforts to alienate advertisers on Twitter/X and accelerate the death spiral of his expensive toy. TikTok was monopolising every waking hour of teenagers. FTX had just gone bankrupt and at least $1bn of investors’ money had gone awol. Here in the UK, the bedraggled online safety bill was wending its way through parliament. And nobody outside the tech world had ever heard of Geoffrey Hinton or Sam Altman.

And then one day – 30 November 2022, to be precise – everything changed. OpenAI, an upstart tech company headed by Altman that had been building so-called large language models (LLMs) for some years, released ChatGPT. The strange thing, though, was that, even weeks earlier, ChatGPT wasn’t a product…

Do read the whole piece.

Books, etc.

I’ve known and liked Melvyn Bragg ever since the days when I was the Observer’s TV critic, and so have been feeling that it’s about time that I read his autobiography. So I downloaded the Kindle version and started reading. Turns out to have been a good decision. It’s an interesting and affecting memoir.

My commonplace booklet

Sisyphus and the volcano of content

Charles Arthur ponders the impact of AI on our information ecosystem. The tsunami of AI-generated content will mean, he thinks that

content creation by humans will increasingly be pushed into spaces where the human touch makes a difference. And what are we good at? It isn’t articles saying that volleyball is difficult without a ball. It’s going to be stuff that gets people wound up, and also makes you money.

Great Substack post.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Sultans of Swing solo, as if it were written by Jimi Hendrix Link

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Avian harvesters

Norfolk, on a winter’s morning

Quote of the Day

“I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”

• F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Advent Calendar 2023 – Day 4 | Niel Gow’s Lament arranged by Seonaid Aitken

Link

Fenella Humphreys is a gifted violinist who’s had the idea of doing a musical Advent Day calendar. Thanks to Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) for the suggestion.

Long Read of the Day

Ben Thompson and ‘Regretful Accelerationism’

Really interesting reflective essay on the implications of what has happened to our culture by one of the sharpest observers of our networked world. Might be behind a paywall (I’m a subscriber to his newsletter), but here’s hoping it isn’t. If it is, see below.

Thompson’s conclusion:

To put it more bluntly, despite the fact my personal and professional life are centered on — and blessed by — the Internet, I’m increasingly skeptical that it can be, as it was in Ready Player One, portrayed as a distinct development from a world increasingly in turmoil. Correlation may not be causation, but sometimes it absolutely is.

In this I do, with reluctance, adopt an accelerationist view of progress; call it r/acc: regretful accelerationism. I suspect we humans do better with constraints; the Internet stripped away the constraint of physical distribution, and now AI is removing the constraint of needing to actually produce content. That this is spoiling the Internet is perhaps the best hope for finding our way back to what is real. Let the virtual world be one of customized content for every individual, with the assumption it is all made-up; some may lose themselves to the algorithm and AI friends, but perhaps more will realize that the only way to survive online is to pay it increasingly little heed.

As an experiment, I asked Claude, the LLM in which I have most confidence, to summarise the essay. Here’s what it came up with:

1. The portrayal of virtual reality as an oasis in dystopian science fiction books and movies is a cliché. The idea that the online world is a place of escape and freedom while the physical world falls apart seems implausible.
2. In reality, the physical world has a natural “benevolent monopoly” of interoperability and shared resources, while online worlds are more fragmented into walled gardens and proprietary ecosystems.
3. The dominance of platforms like Google and Facebook in the 2000s was based on their superior ability to aggregate demand and marshal users’ attention. This gave them outsized power over other players in the digital economy.
4. The rise of AI-generated content with near-zero marginal costs threatens to overwhelm platforms’ ability to maintain integrity and trust. Spam networks are already using AI tools at scale to game systems optimized for scarcity not abundance.
5. Social media strips away constraints on anti-social behaviors, resulting in dynamics unlike anything in the real world. Taking social media seriously seems increasingly untenable.
6. Thompson suggests the demise of the ad-supported model may restore healthier incentives and business models less prone to chasing virality. People may also learn to tune out the excesses of social media and online discourse.
7. In conclusion, Thompson proposes that removing constraints like distribution costs and content creation costs may spoil the online world but also spur people to value the physical world and real human connections more. Less faith in virtual escapism could be a net positive.

If you’ve had a chance to read the essay you’ll be in a good position to assess how accurate this summary is.

My commonplace booklet

Digital nostalgia

Link

Let’s just state the obvious here: Ayaneo says it’s “paying homage” to the Macintosh, which is a kind way of saying, “We copied the thing pretty much exactly.” This device is the spitting image of Apple’s ’80s-era computer, right down to the floppy drive and the rainbow sticker. (Ayaneo made the sticker a flag shape instead of an apple, though — there’s paying homage and then there’s paying lawyer fees, you know what I mean?) It’s smaller than a Macintosh, but it’s beige and rectangular and even has a black space where the old screen would have gone.

On the other hand…

This thing has five USB ports (one USB-C and four USB-A), plus HDMI, DisplayPort, a headphone jack, ethernet, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi. You can get it with Windows 11 or buy the “bare” version and install Linux or SteamOS or whatever else your heart desires.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

The Political Ideologies of Silicon Valley

Terrific series of seminar papers from a seminar hosted by Johns Hopkins’ Center for Economy and Society and Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

The ‘alignment’ problem

Nice cover of the New Yorker’s special issue on AI.

Quote of the Day

”We are here on Earth to help others. What on earth the others are here for I do not know”

• W. H. Auden

I wonder who the ’we’ were in this context.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bert Jansch | Crimson Moon

Link

Thanks to Andrew Curry for alerting me to it.

Long Read of the Day

 Hitler, the Hotel Guest

Nice counterpoint to the dilemma that faced the ‘altruistic’ Board of OpenAI as they contemplated the question of whether to continue to provide accommodation for their own, er, challenging resident.

In February 1931, two years before he became chancellor, Adolf Hitler checked in to Berlin’s Hotel Kaiserhof and made it his headquarters in the capital. The building soon swarmed with Nazis, who transformed the clientele overnight. Jewish custom evaporated. Business suffered. A year and a half later, with revenues in freefall, the hotel’s parent company needed to act. Its board, majority Jewish, took up the issue at a meeting on September 15, 1932. The question facing them: What are we going to do about Hitler?

And in this case Hitler didn’t stand in for Nazism more generally. No, these Jewish Germans were discussing what to do with the physical, living, embodied Hitler. Should they kick him out and face the consequences? Should they let him stay and face the consequences?

Books, etc.

Daniel Miller is a distinguished anthropologist who has written very insightfully about technology and its place in our lives. His new book, which arrived on my doorstep yesterday afternoon, looks interesting. It’s a kind of ongoing dialogue between, on the one hand, the thinking of philosophers about ‘the good life’ and, on the other, an enthnography of a small Irish town (named ‘Cuan’, but I guess that everyone in Ireland will already have cracked that code) in which people are living ‘the good enough life’. I’m looking forward to chairing an Ireland’s Edge event next weekend in my favourite Irish town — Dingle — and am bringing the book as a way of tuning in.

My commonplace booklet

From Monday’s Washington Post

For years, it seems, we’ve talked about the erosion of the “cordon sanitaire” in Western politics. Far-right parties have been making steady inroads into parliaments across Europe. Some factions descended from explicitly neofascist movements. Others embraced a set of extremist views once considered beyond the pale on a continent still largely defined by a 20th-century liberal-democratic consensus, born out of the traumas of World War II. Even as the far right’s vote shares and ranks of elected lawmakers grew, more mainstream parties vowed to never form alliances with them or enable their entry into government.

But in the 21st century, Europe’s far right is firmly ensconced in the mainstream, and reflects political attitudes no longer harbored simply by a fringe minority. The Dutch parliamentary election last week offered the clearest evidence yet of the new status quo…

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

“User read the manual, still couldn’t make ‘Excel’ work”. Lovely story in The Register by a guy who used to work in IT support (which IMO is one of the most demanding jobs one can do.)

Postscript

From George Brooke:

Further to your recent piece which mentions scanning of books, I came across a reference to this in George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral. At a visit which Dyson made to Google headquarters in California, Dyson asked an engineer whether the scanning of the books was for them to be read by people. The answer came that the scanning was not for people, but for them to be read by an AI. This was in October 2005!

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Ce n’est pas une fenêtre

Intriguing feature on an internal wall of St Mary’s Church, Cong, Co Mayo.

With apologies to René Magritte.

Quote of the Day

“A guy walks into a pub with a lump of asphalt on his shoulder and says to the barman, give us a pint and one for the road.”

• Tommy Cooper

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | Motet Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied BWV 225 – MacLeod | Netherlands Bach Society

Link

From the notes accompanying the recording:

“A complete orchestra should be added to this”, wrote Mozart on his copy of Bach’s motet ‘Singet dem Herrn’, performed here by the Netherlands Bach Society for All of Bach. He was very enthusiastic about the piece, which was performed as a surprise when he visited the Thomasschule in Leipzig, in 1789. At his request, Mozart was given a copy of it. In his account of the event ten years later, Johann Friedrich Rochlitz says that Mozart even shouted “Now there’s something you can learn from!

Recorded for the project All of Bach on May 14th 2016 at the Grote Kerk, Naarden.

Long Read of the Day

Meet the curator of the human future

Many moons ago, the New Yorker ran a prescient profile of Sam Altman, the guy Microsoft has now installed as the force of nature who will get us to AGI — superintelligent machines — while all the while bleating about their dangers. After the recent chaotic upheavals at OpenAI it makes for interesting reading. And it ain’t reassuring.

Sample:

“Well, I like racing cars,” Altman said. “I have five, including two McLarens and an old Tesla. I like flying rented planes all over California. Oh, and one odd one — I prep for survival.” Seeing their bewilderment, he explained, “My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end. After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird-flu virus, five years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next twenty years became, well, nonzero. The other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks us and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources.” The Shypmates looked grave. “I try not to think about it too much,” Altman said. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”

Altman’s mother, a dermatologist named Connie Gibstine, told me, “Sam does keep an awful lot tied up inside. He’ll call and say he has a headache—and he’ll have Googled it, so there’s some cyber-chondria in there, too. I have to reassure him that he doesn’t have meningitis or lymphoma, that it’s just stress.” If the pandemic does come, Altman’s backup plan is to fly with his friend Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, to Thiel’s house in New Zealand. Thiel told me, “Sam is not particularly religious, but he is culturally very Jewish—an optimist yet a survivalist, with a sense that things can always go deeply wrong, and that there’s no single place in the world where you’re deeply at home.”

You get the point. Read on.

(Paul Graham, a shrewd observer of people — who promoted Altman to run his YC “accelerator” — once observed that “You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in five years and he’d be the king.”)

Preserving our digital content won’t come cheap

Yesterday’s Observer column

Way back in 2004 the two founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, thought that it would be a cool idea to scan all the printed books in the world and make them available online. This was at the time when their company’s motto (apart from the guff about not being evil) was to “organise all the world’s information”. Given that the obvious places to look for large collections of books are university libraries, they decided to start there, so they set out to persuade university librarians to let them scan their holdings.

One of the first institutions they approached was a very large American university: they went to visit its librarian and found him very supportive of their ambitious project. Accordingly, the deal was easily sealed. Afterwards, though, the boys noticed that their librarian friend seemed pensive, and so asked him what was wrong. “Nothing’s wrong,” he replied. “I’m just wondering how we can ensure that these scans will be available to readers in 400 years’ time when Google is no longer around. Because it won’t be.” When the librarian told me the story, he remarked that the two lads looked astonished: the thought that Google might be mortal seemed never to have occurred to them. But of course he was right: the lives of most corporations are short…

Read on

Books, etc.

For family reasons I need to know more about Australia and so happened on Bill Bryson’s book, thinking that it might be a jocular romp around a faraway country about which I knew little. In fact it turns out to be a pretty readable and serious exploration of a unique continent-cum-country. On my first flight to it I remember looking out of the aircraft window and spotting the coast of northern Australia and thinking “oh good, we’re nearly there” (Sydney, our destination). I then spent four hours staring out of the window at brown featureless wastes. Bryson drove to and through many of these wastes in an automobile, and his record of what he discovered and learned was an eye-opener, at least for me.

My commonplace booklet

The best introduction to LLMs (Large Language Models).

Terrific one-hour video by Andrej Karpathy of OpenAI. His slides are also available as a PDF file.

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The Handover

David Runciman, discussing his new book with Helen Lewis in the Cambridge Union last Sunday. See below for a transcript of their conversation.

Quote of the Day

”Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”

• Slogan on a bookshop’s tote bag

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Van Morrison | Brown Eyed Girl

Link

I’d forgotten how nice this is.

Long Read of the Day

Transcript of the conversation between Helen Lewis and DR on Sunday last.

Helen Lewis

Silicon Valley, which is about building systems and algorithms, is also struggling still with the Great Man theory of history. And I think that’s fascinating. What is the worth of OpenAI without Sam Altman? Is the product the thing or is actually the evangelism of him and what he represents? Which is the same question I think we’re having about “What is Tesla or SpaceX or Twitter/X without Elon Musk?” or “What is Meta without Mark Zuckerberg?”

You touched on this in the book, that we want these things to have agency. So we often find it convenient to assign that all to a person. We want Mark Zuckerberg to be sitting there with a big dial marked racism, turning it up and down on Facebook, rather than it being a chaotic outcome of very complicated systems that have gone beyond the human brain to understand.

David Runciman

One of the themes of my book is that in a mysterious world of all sorts of complicated kinds of agents, we look for the human decision-makers because we’re more comfortable with that. But that does also feed into this creation myth in Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley would like us to believe that the most successful companies are successful because the people who came up with the idea are the smartest people: Mark Zuckerberg in his dorm room, a man in a shed who has an idea. And it’s such a brilliant idea that it takes over the world. And that is just not true. You can have the most brilliant idea, and if you’re just one person, you will not take over anything but your shed. What takes over the world is the corporate structure that’s built around it….

For ease of reading here’s a pdf of the transcript.

Sam Altman was the trusted face of AI. OpenAI though, is much more complex

My OpEd in last Sunday’s Observer about the strange goings-on at OpenAI, written at a moment where it was entirely unclear what had happened, but seeking an explanation in the convoluted structure of the company. Even with the 20-20 vision of hindsight, it seems that I got to the heart of the matter: if there’s a conflict between ethical concerns and the profit motive, in neoliberal capitalism the latter always wins.

Given that ever since ChatGPT took the world by storm last December, Altman has been the photogenic poster-boy for generative AI – the darling of the mainstream media and an honoured invitee to the corridors of western power – news of his sudden fall from grace launched a torrent of excited speculation in the tech commentariat. Nobody, it seems, actually knew anything, but there was a consensus that Something Was Up.

No doubt we will get to the bottom of the mystery in due course, but for now a more productive line of inquiry might be into the corporate history of OpenAI. For if one wanted to design an ownership structure with conflicts of interest and of responsibility built into it, its byzantine arrangements would be hard to beat….

Books, etc.

Tyler Cowen’s list of the best non-fiction books of 2023.

Hmmm… 28 books and I’ve only read two of them. Sigh.

My commonplace booklet

Cass Sunstein: Why I Am A Liberal

(Or, “34 Theses about my beliefs”.)

NYT column by Samathha Power’s husband arguing that there’s an urgent need for a clear understanding of liberalism — “of its core commitments, of its breadth, of its internal debates, of its evolving character, of its promise, of what it is and what it can be”. I agree about the need. Am not so sure about some of his propositions. Still, the column is an interesting attempt at an explanation, in the form of 34 sets of claims about liberalism.

The final one reads:

Liberals look forward as well as backward. They like to think that the arc of history bends toward justice. William F. Buckley Jr. said that his preferred form of conservatism “stands athwart history, yelling, Stop.” Liberals ask history to explain its plans, and they are prepared to whisper, “Go.”

John Cochrane writes a friendly, if somewhat detached, counterpoint to the essay.

Linkblog

Dolly Parton (Whom God Preserve) has a new album out. It includes this lovely version of Prince’s song, Purple Rain.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!