Autumn bouquet

What an imaginative gardener can rustle up in a few minutes, just before dinner guests arrive.

Quote of the Day

”Democracy is not a spectator sport. It’s not what governments do. Democracy is what people do.”

• Robert Reich

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Vaughan Williams | Symphony no. 5 in D. 3rd movement | “Romanza”

Link

Sometimes, in times like this, you just need music like this to wash over you. It was premiered in 1943, in the middle of wartime, in the Albert Hall. I can imagine the impact it must have had on an audience traumatised by war.

Long Read of the Day

Elon Musk is not the only tech bro to worry about

My OpEd in the Observer of Sunday 20 October.

Way back in the 1960s “the personal is political” was a powerful slogan capturing the reality of power dynamics within marriages. Today, an equally meaningful slogan might be that “the technological is political”, to reflect the way that a small number of global corporations have acquired political clout within liberal democracies. If anyone doubted that, then the recent appearance of Elon Musk alongside Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania provided useful confirmation of how technology has moved centre-stage in American politics. Musk may be a manchild with a bad tweeting habit, but he also owns the company that is providing internet connectivity to Ukrainian troops on the battlefield; and his rocket has been chosen by Nasa to be the vehicle to land the next Americans on the moon…

Read on

Later Having seen how Musk has gone all-in for Trump, though, I now think he’s the most dangerous tech mogul in history.

Books, etc.

I’ve just finished reading Pauline Terreehörst’s riveting book on what she discovered in — and from — a vintage Gucci suitcase she bought at Sotheby’s in 2016. I’m hosting an event in my college (Wolfson) on Friday evening to celebrate the publication of the English edition, in which Pauline will be in conversation with Nicci Gerrard, the co-author of the Nicci French series of psychological thrillers. If you’re in Cambridge on Friday why not come along? To register, just click here.

My commonplace booklet

On a subject that’s of perennial interest — not just to me, but to some readers and colleagues — namely how to focus on what needs to be done when there are innumerable items clamouring for attention. I’m a fan of Dave Allen’s bible Getting Things Done — to the extent that I even bought and use a software package called Omnifocus which implements the Allen method on all my (Apple) devices.

I first heard about him from Cory Doctorow (Whom God Preserve), who is the most productive person I’ve ever met. So when I saw a recent blog post by him about a trick he has invented for keeping track of things that the Allen method doesn’t really help with, I jumped to attention. Cory calls it “Keeping a Suspense File.

While good to-do lists can take you very far in life, they have a hard limit: other people. Almost every ambitious thing you want to do involves someone else’s contribution. Even the most solitary of projects can be derailed if your tax accountant misses a key email and you end up getting audited or paying a huge penalty.

That’s where the other kind of GTD list comes in: the list of things you’re waiting for from other people. I used to be assiduous in maintaining this list, but then the pandemic struck and no one was meeting any of their commitments, and I just gave up on it, and never went back…until about a month ago. Returning to these lists (they’re sometimes called “suspense files”) made me realize how many of the problems – some hugely consequential – in my life could have been avoided if I’d just gone back to this habit earlier.

My suspense file is literally just some lines partway down a text file that lives on my desktop called todo.txt that has all my to-dos as well…

Smart idea. I’ve shamelessly copied it.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Skyscraper-high sewage plume erupts in Moscow When I saw this headline in The Register I thought it must be a spoof. But no. See the video for yourself.

Errata

Apologies for the various errors in Monday’s edition, and thanks to those who spotted them quickly.

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!

Westward Ho!

Donegal coast, Ireland.

Quote of the Day

Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.”

• Michel Foucault

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bird Song | The Wailin’ Jennys

Link

Long Read of the Day

Back to the Thirties

Way back in 2015, David Runciman and I had a small research project in Cambridge on “technology and democracy” which was about trying to figure out what the implications of digital technology might be for democracy. (Spoiler alert: the prospects were not good.) This little project was the inspiration for the Minderoo Centre for Technology that I co-founded with Steve Connor in 2020; but another major outcome was David’s book, How Democracy Ends, which came out in 2019.

In it, David argued that liberal democracy will end eventually, but when we think about how it might end we shouldn’t assume that the failure mode will be like earlier periods of failure — military coups, revolutions etc. When it fails, he argued, democracy will fail forward in novel and unexpected ways. For that reason, it was no good looking back to the past for lessons — say to Germany in the 1930s, as many people were doing after Trump won in 2016.

At the time, I found that reassuring, but now I don’t. The reason? I’ve been reading Richard Evans’s new book, Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich which is on the one hand spellbinding and on the other hand alarming because of the eerie echoes of it that one hears in what is currently going on in the US. A while back I saw the beginnings of an odious parallel between the way tech titans were starting to cosy up to Trump, and how the corporate giants of inter-war Germany started to line up behind Hitler. (I wrote an OpEd about this in the Observer on October 20.)

Then on Saturday morning I wake up to discover that both the Washington Post and the LA Times have decided that they will not endorse a candidate in the upcoming election. I find that really chilling; it means that two powerful and wealthy newspaper proprietors are second-guessing the outcome of the election; they think that Trump might win and don’t want to be on the wrong side of him when he does.

Like the directors of I.G. Farben and its corporate ilk in the 1930s, these folks have skin in the game. The owner of the Post, for example, is Jeff Bezos, who has a spacecraft business and hopes to suck on the teats of the federal government in that context. He is probably incensed that a rival spacecraft hustler, Elon Musk, (who has been sucking on the aforesaid teats for some years) has now gone the whole hog and is vigorously campaigning for Trump in Pennsylvania, the state that could well decide the outcome of the election. Characteristically, though, Musk currently sees Trump as a kind of useful idiot (aka Trojan horse) for his own imperial delusions — just like von Papen and others in the 1930s thought that Hitler could be their idiot.

The historian Tim Snyder, who — like Richard Evans — is an expert on Nazi Germany. On Saturday he posted a sobering short video about the newspapers’ decision on his blog. It’s four minutes long and worth watching, but if you’re stretched for time, here’s a lightly-edited transcript:

I’m thinking today about the First lesson of On Tyranny, which is: do not obey in advance. The reason why that’s the first lesson is that, for me, it’s the first thing that we should be remembering, the first thing we should be learning from the horrors of the 20th century, that each of us does have some responsibility, and perhaps the wealthy and the powerful, maybe just a tiny bit more.

The reason why this is the lesson of the 20/20 century, the reason why it’s the first lesson in On Tyranny, is this: those who work on the Nazi period, the period of the Nazi takeover, know that much of Hitler’s rise to power had to do with people making adjustments in 1933 and 1934 — people anticipating what he would want from them and then going halfway.

A very similar lesson was drawn by the anti-communist dissidents of the 1970s who realized that every little thing that we do has consequences for those around us. They counselled as well, not to obey in advance, but to instead live as if we were free.

I have all this in mind, of course, because of these decisions by newspapers owned by very wealthy Americans not to endorse a presidential candidate. I gotta say, this strikes me as ignoring the essential thing that we were supposed to have learned from the 20th century — which is, in circumstances like these, do not obey in advance. If what you do is based on your anticipation — as it so obviously is — that an authoritarian might be about to come to power, and what you are doing is making it more likely that that authoritarian will come to power, and since you have already made concessions before he came to power, you’re preparing yourself for making more concessions after he comes to power.

And what’s worse, if you’re in a position of wealth and power yourself, you’re discouraging all the other people who are less wealthy and less powerful; and aside from being politically wrong and morally outrageous this is just simply unfair, because it puts the burden on taking action to those who are less fortunate than you, puts them in the position of having to be more courageous than you. And of course, what it really means when someone who’s wealthy and powerful makes adjustments, obeys in advance, what it really means is that they think, “Well, I’m going to be fine when democracy dies in darkness, I’m going to enjoy the shadows”. That’s what it really means.

So for all these reasons, this is outrageous. I hope these decisions will be changed, and regardless of that, I hope that the rest of us will keep in mind that we ought not to be obeying in advance. What we do always matters. What we do in the next few days matters a great deal, and the fact that people are obeying in advance is just a sign of how great the threat, really is. So, let’s all do what we can again.

Tim Snyder 25 October 1024, Oklahoma City.

The aphrodisiac effect of obscene wealth

The megalomaniacs who control X and Facebook are only able to pollute the public sphere and undermine democracy because of our deference to money

Yesterday’s Observer column:

There are two kinds of aphrodisiac. The first is power. A good example was provided by the late Henry Kissinger, who could hardly be described as toothsome yet was doted upon by a host of glamorous women.

The other powerful aphrodisiac is immense wealth. This has all kinds of effects. It makes people (even journalists who should know better) deferential, presumably because they subscribe to the delusion that if someone is rich then they must be clever. But its effects on the rich person are more profound: it cuts them off from reality. When they travel, writes Jack Self in an absorbing essay: “The car takes them to the aerodrome, where the plane takes them to another aerodrome, where a car takes them to the destination (with perhaps a helicopter inserted somewhere). Every journey is bookended by identical Mercedes Vito Tourers (gloss black, tinted windows). Every flight is within the cosy confines of a Cessna Citation (or a King Air or Embraer)… The ultra-rich never wait in line at a carousel or a customs table or a passport control. There are no accidental encounters. No unwelcome, unapproved or unsanitary humans enter their sight – no souls that could espouse a foreign view. The ultra-rich do not see anything they do not want to see.”

Mr Self estimates that there are currently 2,781 of these gilded creatures in the world. He divides them into two kinds: “self-made” and “second gen”…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

From Nicholas Harris, writing in this week’s New Statesman:

”A sort of Weimar without the sex”, was how Christopher Hitchens unimprovably described joyless Britain in the late 1970s. The country has returned to a similar condition of bleak, stagnant ungovernability over the past few years. The least we might have expected is a debauched youth subculture to accompany it – even if not quite to the degeneracy of 1920s Berlin. Instead, the old dynamic has recurred, and even by English standards the nation seems locked in a condition of anti-festivity.

This week, new findings from the Night Time Industries Association found that clubbing could be “extinct” by end of the 2020s, with 37 per cent of venues having permanently shut since March 2020.”

Don’t you just love the idea of a ‘Night Time Industries Association’? It’s a bit like the Amalgamated Union of Underwater Basket-Weavers and Muff Divers, one of my favourite trade unions.

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!

Picture at an exhibition

At the terrific Paris 1924 exhibition in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

And Moussorgsky was nowhere to be seen.

Quote of the Day

“In a nutshell: companies are artificial social constructs that offload all their externalities onto the state they are embedded in.”

• Charlie Stross (Whom God Preserve)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mike Oldfield | She Moved Through the Fair

Link

Interesting take on a venerable Irish tune.

Long Read of the Day

The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think

Perceptive and thought-provoking Noema essay by Shannon Vallor.

Today’s generative AI systems like ChatGPT and Gemini are routinely described as heralding the imminent arrival of “superhuman” artificial intelligence. Far from a harmless bit of marketing spin, the headlines and quotes trumpeting our triumph or doom in an era of superhuman AI are the refrain of a fast-growing, dangerous and powerful ideology. Whether used to get us to embrace AI with unquestioning enthusiasm or to paint a picture of AI as a terrifying specter before which we must tremble, the underlying ideology of “superhuman” AI fosters the growing devaluation of human agency and autonomy and collapses the distinction between our conscious minds and the mechanical tools we’ve built to mirror them.

Today’s powerful AI systems lack even the most basic features of human minds; they do not share with humans what we call consciousness or sentience, the related capacity to feel things like pain, joy, fear and love. Nor do they have the slightest sense of their place and role in this world, much less the ability to experience it. They can answer the questions we choose to ask, paint us pretty pictures, generate deepfake videos and more. But an AI tool is dark inside…

This is a refreshing perspective on the current ballyhoo about ‘super intelligence’. Shannon is pointing out that the tech industry’s conception of a’ human’ — as in ‘superhuman’ — is basically that of a faceless operative who is currently a sub-optimal performer in the ‘efficiency’ stakes. The goal of the AGI evangelists is simply to build machines that match or outperform us on a vast array of economically valuable tasks.

Books, etc.

Further to the above… Shannon Valor has an interesting new book out — which I’m currently reading.

My commonplace booklet

Many years ago, when the only computer to which I had access was a DEC Vax (of beloved memory) I thought that I would know that ‘AI’ had really arrived when a machine could write plausible excuses. Little did I know that one of Alan Turing’s colleagues, Christopher Strachey, had long ago written a program that wrote love-letters. The code is still on Github, but you can try it out here. So I did.

Hmmm… Room for improvement, as my headmaster would have said. But apparently Turing and Strachey would print these out and leave them around the Lab just to see what would happen.

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!

L’Eau potable

Provence, 2008.

Quote of the Day

”Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.”

• Adam Przeworski

He should have added “and accept that they have lost” when they have.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Haydn | Trumpet Concerto in Eb, 1st movement (Allegro) | Alison Balsom

Link

Long Read of the Day

What Elon Musk Really Wants

Franklin Foer, writing in The Atlantic.

Basically, Trump is his Trojan horse.

In Elon Musk’s vision of human history, Donald Trump is the singularity. If Musk can propel Trump back to the White House, it will mark the moment that his own superintelligence merges with the most powerful apparatus on the planet, the American government—not to mention the business opportunity of the century.

Many other titans of Silicon Valley have tethered themselves to Trump. But Musk is the one poised to live out the ultimate techno-authoritarian fantasy. With his influence, he stands to capture the state, not just to enrich himself. His entanglement with Trump will be an Ayn Rand novel sprung to life, because Trump has explicitly invited Musk into the government to play the role of the master engineer, who redesigns the American state—and therefore American life—in his own image.

Musk’s pursuit of this dream clearly transcends billionaire hobbyism…

It does. Read on. Once upon a time, technology had nothing much to do with politics. No longer.

Books, etc.

The death of the book, again

John Quiggin ponders a hoary old question.

We’re in another round of concern about the “death of the book”, and, in particular, the claimed inability or unwillingness of young people to read full-length books. I’m not going to push too far on the argument that this complaint is ancient, but I can’t resist mentioning the response of my younger brother, who, when asked if he wanted a book for Christmas, answered “thanks, but I already have one”). That was around 50 years ago, and he went on to a very successful legal career.

Fifty years ago, the main competitors for books were TV and radio. Critics at the time decried the passive mode of consuming these broadcast media, compared to the active engagement required by reading. Now, in many respects, the complaint is the opposite. The various services available on the Internet are interactive, and engrossing, finely tuned to keep our attention…

Maybe this is a recurrent moral panic. On the one hand, academics — especially in US universities — are raising the alarm about freshmen (and women) in Humanities courses who have trouble reading a book a week. On the other hand, the bookshops around where I live and work seem to be thriving. And the number of new books being published shows no signs of diminishing, at least judging by my email traffic.

My commonplace booklet

Fresh from a video conversation with our granddaughter and her parents in Sydney, I read this in a blog post by Henry Oliver:

”The Admiralty was shrouded in fog. The messenger arrived at one a.m. He had ridden 31 horses and post-carriages over 271 miles since landing in Falmouth two days earlier. Lieutenant Lapenotière saw the First Secretary of the Admiralty just a few minutes after his arrival. He was carrying the dispatch of Admiral Collingwood, which contained the news from the Battle of Trafalgar. It was 6th November, 1805, sixteen days after the battle.”

I’m always struck by the differences in speeds of travel and communications between now and the distant past. And by the distances that our ancestors were able to cover. A couple of years ago my wife and I visited Derrynane House in Kerry, which was the home of the great Irish statesman Daniel O’Connell. For a time, he was one of the most influential politicians in the British Parliament and as we walked around I began to reflect on the journeys he had to make regularly from Derrynane to London. First a day (or two) on horseback to reach a point where he could catch a stage-coach (changing horses every 25 miles). Then maybe two days on the road to Dublin, followed by a crossing of the Irish Sea by mailboat to Holyhead, and then several days on a coach to London.

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What — or of what — is he thinking?

Quote of the Day

“A university is a place devoted to the problem of how to make serious use of free time.”

• Agnes Callard

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Alec Finn and Mary Bergin | Two jigs

Link

Tunes are (I think) Kitty’s Rambles and Pádraig O’Keefe’s

Long Read of the Day

Lady Baker and the source of the Nile

Sarah Harkness’s Literature for the People, the story of the two Macmillan brothers who built a publishing empire (and bought Alice in Wonderland to the world), came out in May (with a paperback edition coming next March), but she is constantly digging in archives of the Victorian period and coming up with gems. This essay “Lady Baker and the source of the Nile” is the latest one.

This is how it opens…

Among the thousands and thousands of handwritten letters preserved in the British Library from the pen of the Victorian publisher Alexander Macmillan, one in particular piqued my interest: written to the heroic explorer of the sources of the Nile, Sir Samuel Baker, on 4 May 1866:

”There is a terrible defect in your summing up. You should say something about Mrs Baker. It may be as slight as you please, very little more than you most tender and delicate allusion at starting, but indeed something should be said. … It struck me as strange to a degree. Of course I understand your feeling of not wearing your heart upon your sleeve, but I do think people would wonder.”“ The book in question, still in draft at this stage, was Samuel Baker’s classic tale of adventure Albert-Nyanza: Great Basin of the Nile, a title that Alexander Macmillan had gone to great lengths, and considerable expense, to secure. The publisher was determined that nothing should be lost in the promotion of a story that was fascinating the Victorian public…

You can guess why Baker was reticent, but the explanation is fascinating.

The Internet holds up a mirror to human nature — alas.

Yesterday’s Observer column

This column comes to you as a break from listening to a riveting podcast series called ‘Kill List’. It’s about a secret website that journalist and author Carl Miller discovered on the dark web, the slimy underbelly of the internet. The site essentially runs what one might call an “assassination market” or a murder-for-hire service. Customers identify and profile someone whom they wish to have killed and pay (in bitcoin, natch) for the service they require. Hence the title of the podcast series.

The story starts in 2020 in the early days of the pandemic lockdown when a gifted IT expert and hacker, Chris Monteiro, was browsing the site and found a security vulnerability that, once exploited, gave him complete access to it. Inside, he found a “kill list”, rather like an Excel spreadsheet, of 175 people all over the world whom clients wanted murdered. For each target, there was usually lots of detailed information – address, photographs, habits, routes regularly travelled etc. It looked, I guess, superficially mundane – until you read the “instructions” attached for each one. “How much bitcoin should I pay?” “Tell me the execution time in advance – I can’t be there.” “I would just like this person to be shot and killed. Where, how and what with does not bother me at all.” You get the idea…

Read on

Books, etc.

Maria Tippett RIP

I was dismayed to learn on Thursday last that Maria Tippett had passed away in August — and even more dejected that I hadn’t known of her death. She was a great cultural critic and a formidable writer (see the list of her books on her Wikipedia page). But she was also a warm and sympathetic friend over many years. She lived for part of the year in a wonderful house on an island off Vancouver, but also regularly spent a few months every year in Cambridge (where she was a Fellow of Churchill College). She — and her husband, the historian Peter Clarke — were wonderfully supportive of me and my young children after my wife Sue died in 2002.

Maria wrote a fine biography of Yousuf Karsh, the celebrated portrait photographer.

As a photographer, I remember feeling jealous when she told me about the project. But the book of hers that I really loved was her memoir, Becoming Myself, a copy of which she gave to Sue and me in 1996.

May she rest in peace.

My commonplace booklet

In response to my complaint in Friday’s edition that “I spend too much time doing email and too little time doing the things I ought to be doing”, Joe Dunne emailed to say that he tries to follow Carl Jung’s advice: “Quietly do the next and most necessary thing.”

But…

The challenge is this: For example, if the next most important thing will take a day to complete, the 2nd most important thing an hour and the 3rd most important 5 minutes, the temptation is to work them in reverse order. There’s great satisfaction to be had by completing tasks in the most important order and this can become a habit!

I’ve come to the conclusion that the best/only source of wisdom in this ‘personal productivity’ lark is Dave Allen, whose Getting Things Done is a sacred text for some of my most productive friends. Time to re-launch Omnifocus maybe.

Errata

Apologies for the typos in Friday’s edition, the product (as usual) of rushed proofreading at the end of a busy day.

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!

Where am I?

Trying to navigate London using Google maps?

Quote of the Day

”We cannot say that innovation is necessarily good simply because there is a market for it.”

• Simon Johnson, who shared this year’s Nobel prize for economics, writing in 2009 about the complex financial derivatives that caused the 2008 banking crisis.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Keith Jarrett plays Händel | Suite in D minor, HWV 447

Link

Long Read of the Day

 My biggest productivity mistake

Lovely blog post by Tim Hartford, which speaks volumes to those of who are multi-takers equipped with buggy algorithms.

And a final challenge to anyone trying to get everything done: that goal is simply beyond us all. As Oliver Burkeman explains in his new book Meditations for Mortals, “the incoming supply of things that feel as though they genuinely need doing isn’t merely large, but to all intents and purposes infinite. So getting through them all isn’t just very difficult. It’s impossible.” Delude yourself about this, as most of us do every morning, and stress and disappointment will inevitably follow. No wonder so many of us beat ourselves up at our failure to live up to our own impossible productivity aspirations.

This week, then, let’s change the script. Instead of handing down yet more tablets of stone, let me reflect on my own productivity mistakes. My biggest problem is that I always have too many projects on the go…

Me too (see below).

Trump the Kamikaze

At last, someone (in this case Timothy Burke) gets to the root of the matter.

If there’s any failure of education worth talking about, it’s squarely in the precincts of the political mainstream, not out there in MAGA-land. No matter how many times they see the reality of things staring them in the face, they retreat into their tropes like a child sucking their thumb and clutching a blanket after accidentally watching most of a horror movie because of a parental lapse.

Many of Trump’s voters know exactly what he is. They know he’s going to blow the status quo to smithereens and they want him to. They want him to be incompetent, they want him to be senile, they want him to be cruel. They want him to violate every one of the Ten Commandments in public view. They’re rooting for him to emulate Cody Jarrett and detonate himself up on top of the vast infrastructure of the 21st Century American nation-state, taking as much of it with him as he can.

In other words, Trump is the suicide bomber millenarians have been waiting for.

My commonplace booklet

My email inbox is an ongoing disaster. Why? Because I get too many messages. This is partly a consequence of being a newspaper columnist with a wide readership. (My Observer column goes out on the Guardian website, so it can sometimes reach an awful lot of people across the world.) And, being a fox rather than a hedgehog (to use Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated metaphor), I have a finger in too many pies.

As a result I spend too much time doing email and too little time doing the things I ought to be doing. It’s maddening. What I really need is a machine-learning ‘assistant’ which will drink from the firehose every morning and triage the torrent into: messages that are really important; ones that are potentially interesting but not urgent; and ones that can either be trashed or given an AI-generated reply. In principle I suppose I could build such a system myself using existing ‘AI’ tools, and indeed maybe I should enlist an LLM to write the code for it. Hmmm…

In the meantime, though, I have come up with the same simple but useful idea that Tim Harford mentions in his Long Read above. It is this: Never sit down at a computer without having a handwritten to-do list next to the mouse. It has the effect of making me feel guilty whenever I’m teetering on the brink of yet another email-driven rabbit-hole! It’s free — and the battery never runs out.

  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!

A reformed character

I was a guest at lunch in the Reform Club a couple of weeks ago, and who should I see on emerging from the Coffee Room (as the dining room is perversely called) but old Tom Macaulay himself. Given that the requirement for admission to the Club is that one supports the 1832 Reform Bill, and that he was a great supporter of same, I should have guessed that his portrait would be here. The Club first opened its doors in May 1836, and is probably best known because it figured in Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days.

Quote of the Day

”I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn’t irascible.”

• Ezra Pound (who was definitely worth a damn)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bell Harbour Reel and Maids of Mount Cisco | Mary Bergin (tin whistle) & Garry O’Briain (mandocello)

Link

The thing that has always astonished me about Mary Bergin is how she can make wonderful music on such a simple instrument.

Long Read of the Day

Vigil

This is an extraordinary essay by Erik Hoel which has recently appeared in a collection of notable essays. Once I’d embarked on it I couldn’t stop reading.

Here’s how it begins…

I open the door while holding my son in my arms and outside there is the rabbit. It is on my lawn essentially cartwheeling, but each time it cannot move farther than a few inches. It’s too late for my son not to see it, and he’s smart enough now that if I put him back inside he’ll know something is wrong. And there’s nothing to hide from him, as there’s no blood anyway, nor any sound, just a few frantic flops across the ground before it is still.

A platonic rabbit, incredibly cute, except it’s lying on its side with one leg held suspended at an awkward angle. This is the only evidence of injury.

“Hop! Hop! Hop!” says my son, just learning to associate sounds with his favorite animals. He is smiling, and does not know how terrible it is to see a rabbit who cannot hop at all.

I approach carefully. Looking up from where it lies on the lawn its brown eye is mammalian, almost human in its wetness and soulfulness. But it’s not looking at me. The eye fixates on me momentarily, but then flits away again to resume looking beyond me. Looking up, at the sky above. It is a beautiful day out, and the sky is very blue. A few spotted clouds move slowly. One of the first days of nice weather after a long winter, with the air hinting of spring. Which is why the rabbit was out, and why it was slow and stupid and careless in these early warmer days, and why Minerva, my German Shepherd, had in the morning caught it and bowled it over, probably breaking its leg. All unbeknownst to me. She was just supposed to be going to the bathroom. And it’s not her fault. I should have watched her more closely out the window. Minerva did not savage it, she likely merely chased it, and in the chase the rabbit received a possibly mortal break…

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Books, etc.

This is a proof copy of a remarkable book by my friend (and former Wolfson Press Fellow), Pauline Terreehörst. Some years ago she successfully made a bid for a vintage Gucci suitcase at Sotheby’s Amsterdam with no idea what was inside. It turned out to be full of fine dresses, furs and lace together with boxes of postcards showing castles and churches in Austria, France, England and Scotland. The owner had been an Austrian countess, Margarethe Szapáry, and Pauline — being an accomplished journalist — went digging. The suitcase turned out to be a gateway into a lost world: the social, cultural and political life that vanished in Central Europe’s great 20th century upheavals. Her book was published in Dutch in 2020 and on October 31 comes out in English.

I’m hosting a launch event for it in Cambridge at 17:30 on November 1, when Pauline will be in conversation with Nicci Gerrard (of Nicci French thriller fame). If you happen to be in Cambridge that day, why not come? Sign up here.

My commonplace booklet

The new Nobelity

The Nobel committees in Stockholm have really been stirring things up this year. First of all they have highlighted how AI is influencing (and perhaps turbocharging) some kinds of scientific research (which will annoy a lot of people who believe that ‘AI’ is much overrated). And then on Monday they gave the economics prize to three economists who have never succumbed to the ‘physics envy’ that has deformed so much theoretical thinking in the field — Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson.

The Committee praised the trio for explaining why “societies with a poor rule of law and institutions that exploit the population do not generate growth or change for the better.”

“When Europeans colonized large parts of the globe, the institutions in those societies changed,” the committee said, citing the economists’ work. While in many places this was aimed at exploiting the indigenous population, in other places it laid the foundations for inclusive political and economic systems.”

Two books by members of the trio — Acemoglu and Johnson’s Power and Progress and Acemoglu and Robinson’s The Narrow Corridor have had a particular impact on me as I ponder the impact of technology on democratic societies in our research centre and so I feel I have an intellectual debt to them and am delighted that they have been recognised in this way.

Way back in 2019 Yascha Mounk recorded a conversation with James Robinson. The transcript makes for interesting reading in the light of the award.

As an antidote, Noah Smith, who is not a fan of the economics Nobel award (and writes a blog post ever year when they come out) has pushed back on some of the work the prizewinners have done over the years.

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Messages for Ludwig

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is buried in Ascension Churchyard in Cambridge, a lovely peaceful cemetery where my late wife Carol is buried. So I often go there, and when I do I sometimes stop by Wittgenstein’s grave, because visitors often leave mementoes and sometimes messages. As on this day over a decade ago.

Quote of the Day

”Capitalism eats quality and shits quantity.”

• William S. Burroughs

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major | Olga Jekunova

Link

Thirteen blissful minutes long.

Long Read of the Day

Increasing Returns and the New World of Business

This is a truly seminal essay from the Harvard Business Review of August 1996. Its author, W. Brian Arthur, is a distinguished Stanford economist. (He’s also an Irishman, and a living refutation of JK Galbraith’s snide observation that while my native land might be good at producing great writers, it had never produced a great economist!)

I was thunderstruck when I first read the essay, because it explained in the clearest terms how and why digital capitalism was radically different from what went before — and therefore explained how tech companies would behave.

(Arthur’s book, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, first published in 2010, is a little masterpiece.)

Nobel winner Geoffrey Hinton is the ‘godfather of AI’. Here’s an offer he shouldn’t refuse…

Yesterday’s Observer column

Way back in 2011 Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist with aspirations to be a public intellectual, published an essay entitled “Why Software Is Eating the World”, predicting that computer code would take over large swaths of the economy. Thirteen years on, software now seems to be chomping its way through academia as well. This, at any rate, is one possible conclusion to be drawn from the fact that the computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton shares the 2024 Nobel prize in physics with John Hopfield, and that the computer scientist Demis Hassabis shares half of the Nobel prize in chemistry with one of his DeepMind colleagues, John Jumper.

The award to Hassabis and Jumper was, in a way, predictable, for they built a machine – AlphaFold2 – that enables researchers to solve one of the toughest problems in biochemistry: predicting the structure of proteins, the building blocks of biological life. Their machine has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200m proteins that researchers have identified. So it’s a big deal – for chemistry.

But Hinton is not a physicist. Indeed, he was once introduced at an academic conference as someone who had “failed at physics, dropped out of psychology and then joined a field with no standards at all: artificial intelligence”…

Read on

Books, etc.

I’m reading Richard Evans’s massive new book about Hitler and his entourage and am having trouble putting it down. You’d have thought that we’d know everything there is to know about that sinister crew by now. Well, we — or at least I — didn’t.

There’s a sombre side to it too: In Richard’s account of the way Hitler attracted thugs like a magnet attracts iron filings, there are strange echoes of Trump and his entourage.

My commonplace booklet

That Leaked Schmidt video

The former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, did a live interview recently at Stanford on the subject of generative AI with (I think) Bryn Joholfssen (?sp) in front of a group of students, and the video mysteriously disappeared from the Web. But now it’s back, and if you are interested in this stuff you’ll find it interesting.

I played host to Schmidt when he came on a four-day visit to Cambridge in 2012 and it’s fascinating to see what he’s like now compared to then. He looks younger. Is that because the video quality is poor? Or…? Hm…

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• A remarkable auction of vintage photographs Link in Vienna (and online).

Errata

At one point in last Monday’s ‘Long Read’ I mistakenly referred to Narayanan’s and Kapoor’s fine book AI Snake Oil as ‘Silicon Snake Oil’, which was Clifford Stoll’s equally fine book, published in 1995. Many thanks to Dale Carstensen for spotting the error.

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Inwards and Onwards!

The new entrance to the National Portrait Gallery, one of my favourite buildings in London, yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”Within every lean, hungry, tech start-up founder, a bloated monopolist was struggling to get out.”

• Henry Farrell on Silicon Valley startups.*

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

We Banjo 3 performing live on BBC Radio Ulster’s Blas programme in 2013.

Link

Long Read of the Day

It’s Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

I used to think that Mark Zuckerberg was the most dangerous man in the tech industry. But that title has now passed to Sam Altman, the babyfaced mover and shaker behind OpenAI’s travails. I’m continually astonished by the way people swoon in his presence, especially when one reads his credo, “The Intelligence Age”. But they do.

Which is why they should read this magnificent blast  by Dave Karpf in The Atlantic.

He declares that the AI revolution is on the verge of unleashing boundless prosperity and radically improving human life. “We’ll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI,” he writes. Altman expects that his technology will fix the climate, help humankind establish space colonies, and discover all of physics. He predicts that we may have an all-powerful superintelligence “in a few thousand days.” All we have to do is feed his technology enough energy, enough data, and enough chips.

Maybe someday Altman’s ideas about AI will prove out, but for now, his approach is textbook Silicon Valley mythmaking. In these narratives, humankind is forever on the cusp of a technological breakthrough that will transform society for the better. The hard technical problems have basically been solved—all that’s left now are the details, which will surely be worked out through market competition and old-fashioned entrepreneurship. Spend billions now; make trillions later! This was the story of the dot-com boom in the 1990s, and of nanotechnology in the 2000s. It was the story of cryptocurrency and robotics in the 2010s. The technologies never quite work out like the Altmans of the world promise, but the stories keep regulators and regular people sidelined while the entrepreneurs, engineers, and investors build empires…

Great stuff. Do read it.

Books, etc.

The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

Rose Horowitch has some shocking news from the Ivy League. She got it first from Nicholas Dames, who has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required (and celebrated) ‘great-books’ course, since 1998. And guess what? New generations of students don’t do books.

Now of course few students read everything that was assigned to them, but something’s changed…

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to…

It must be tough teaching the Humanities these days, what with book-aversion and ChatGPT.

My commonplace booklet

What to do about corporations that maim and kill their workers

Salutary tale by Robert Reich from his time as Secretary for Labor in the Clinton Administration. And a reminder of what happens when you have liberal democracy that always prioritises the needs of corporations.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Joke in bad taste from The Economist about a frog on the banks of the River Jordan:

A scorpion asks for a ride across. “Why would I do that?” says the frog. “If you get on my back you will sting me.” The scorpion explains that he, too, would drown. Reassured the frog carries him, until halfway, the scorpion stings the frog. “Why?” cries the frog, “Now we are both doomed.” Because, comes back the reply, “this is the Middle East.”

Hmmmmm…..

Errata

Many thanks to the many readers who tactfully informed me that the city whose fine architecture had been extolled by Ethan Zuckerman on Wednesday was Columbus, Indiana, not Columbus, Ohio. Humble pie duly consumed, with a dash of tomato ketchup.

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Coffee morning

In one of my favourite cafés.

Quote of the Day

”Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you quit, try.”

• Ernest Hemingway

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Double Violin Concerto in D minor, second Movement, Largo Ma Non Tanto (BWV 1043)

Link

Driving under time pressure the other day I got caught in an irritating tailback. And then this came on the radio and I relaxed. Just as the movement came an end the road blockage cleared and I was on the move again, feeling peaceful. Music really does reach the parts that even Carlsberg can’t.

Long Read of the Day

The announcement yesterday that Geoff Hinton had won the Nobel prize for physics (together with John Hopfield) made my day. I’ve been following his work for years and a few months ago mutual friends invited me to a long and memorable lunch with him before he returned to the US. What I admire about him in not just how smart and thoughtful he is (and the resolution he showed in sticking with neural networks when the rest of the world had written them off), but also how he handled the tragic death of his wife from cancer, leaving him with two young children (an experience that mirrored my own). He’s the exact opposite of a noxious, bumptious tech bro: an exceptional human being.

After he left Google in 2023 I wrote this piece about him in the Observer.

He is a truly remarkable figure. If there is such a thing as an intellectual pedigree, then Hinton is a thoroughbred.

His father, an entomologist, was a fellow of the Royal Society. His great-great-grandfather was George Boole, the 19th-century mathematician who invented the logic that underpins all digital computing.

His great-grandfather was Charles Howard Hinton, the mathematician and writer whose idea of a “fourth dimension” became a staple of science fiction and wound up in the Marvel superhero movies of the 2010s. And his cousin, the nuclear physicist Joan Hinton, was one of the few women to work on the wartime Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, which produced the first atomic bomb.

Hinton has been obsessed with artificial intelligence for all his adult life, and particularly in the problem of how to build machines that can learn…

Do read the whole piece.

Books, etc.

“Unleashed” is less an autobiography than a nearly 800-page staircase argument. It is a testy and frequently tedious defence in which Mr Johnson rambles on about the many and varied villains who have dared to doubt, slight or fight him — ranging from journalists to socialists, Remainers, Vladimir Putin and a rather laudable-sounding girl called Tracy who punched him in primary school. After a few hundred pages, the book starts to feel less “Unleashed” than unhinged and, worse, uninteresting.

The Economist, reviewing Boris Johnson’s recently-published memoir.

I won’t be buying it: we already have a sufficient supply of loo paper.

My commonplace booklet

Ethan Zuckerman Whom God Preserve) is on a road trip across the US, and he stopped in Columbus, Ohio, which I had always assumed to be a mundane place. How wrong can you be? He’s written a lovely meditation on a city that has more architecturally significant buildings in the span of a few blocks than most major US cities do within their entire footprint. How come? Cummins, the manufacturer of diesel engines and generators that power trucks, buses, boats and buildings around the world, is based there, and it seems to have had a sense of social responsibility that would make most stock-optioning MBAs choke on their muesli. Heartwarming.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• It’s hard not to like this story…

My friend Quentin (himself an experienced sailor) writing about the development of sail-powered commercial ships. Back to the future stuff.

  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!