Tulip mania

My favourite flowers at this time of year.

Quote of the Day

I used to think the interesting question was whether we should have a monarchy or not. But now I think that question is rather like, should we have pandas or not?’

• Hilary Mantel

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Richard Strauss | Metamorphosen | Herbert von Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic

Link

Gosh, this is wonderful. Like Wagner without the racket, as Thomas Beecham might have said. Thanks to John Seeley for suggesting it.

Long Read of the Day

The ‘Don’t Look Up’ Thinking That Could Doom Us With AI

An essay by Max Tegmark, who thinks we should be thinking harder about the risks of AGI.

Suppose a large inbound asteroid were discovered, and we learned that half of all astronomers gave it at least 10% chance of causing human extinction, just as a similar asteroid exterminated the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago. Since we have such a long history of thinking about this threat and what to do about it, from scientific conferences to Hollywood blockbusters, you might expect humanity to shift into high gear with a deflection mission to steer it in a safer direction.

Sadly, I now feel that we’re living the movie “Don’t look up” for another existential threat: unaligned superintelligence. We may soon have to share our planet with more intelligent “minds” that care less about us than we cared about mammoths. A recent survey showed that half of AI researchers give AI at least 10% chance of causing human extinction. Since we have such a long history of thinking about this threat and what to do about it, from scientific conferences to Hollywood blockbusters, you might expect that humanity would shift into high gear with a mission to steer AI in a safer direction than out-of-control superintelligence. Think again: instead, the most influential responses have been a combination of denial, mockery, and resignation so darkly comical that it’s deserving of an Oscar…

Vividly written and interesting because Tegmark is a physicist at MIT, a cosmologist and machine learning researcher. He is president of the Future of Life Institute, an outfit whose mission is to reduce global catastrophic and existential risk from powerful technologies, and the author of Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

Books, etc.

Colin Meyer’s book was published in 2018, and I’m mortified that it has taken me this long to catch up with it. Why? Because it provides a powerful refutation of Milton Friedman’s pernicious mantra that the only purpose of a public company is to maximise profit (or shareholder value, as others put it.) This overarching corporate imperative is one of the forces that is making contemporary capitalism so pernicious and dangerous for humanity.

My Commonplace booklet

I came across this in a watch catalogue. It’s about the watch JFK was wearing when he was murdered — an Omega Ultra Thin given to him in 1960 by Senator Grant Stockdale of Florida, an early supporter of Kennedy’s presidential ambitions. When JFK was inaugurated as President on January 20, 1961, he was wearing the watch. Compared to the male jewellery which features in every edition of the Weekend Financial Times, it’s diminutive and powered by a simple hand-wound spring movement.

After Kennedy’s assassination, the watch wound up (sic) in a private collection until in 2005 it was bought by Omega for $350,000 and is now in the company’s collection of historic timepieces.

Stockdale’s gift may have been a shrewd one. JFK appointed Stockdale US ambassador to Ireland!

Interesting what you find in catalogues.

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Premium baroque

Copenhagen, 2013

Quote of the Day

”A horse race confers an equivalence upon all candidates. The only detail that matters is who is going to win — not all that might be lost. To view America through that lens today is an exercise in the absurd, a practice stuck in the insular logic of the past.

• Dan Rather

I wish more political journalists thought like this, especially those covering presidential politics in the US.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Fauré | Trois romances sans paroles op.17 n°3 | Théo Fouchenneret

Link

Long Read of the Day

AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation

Yuval Noah Harari finds something distinctive to say about ChatGPT et al. In doing so he will delight his admirers and infuriate his critics. Which, I suppose, is what a good essayist should be able to do.

Sample:

What would happen once a non-human intelligence becomes better than the average human at telling stories, composing melodies, drawing images, and writing laws and scriptures? When people think about Chatgpt and other new ai tools, they are often drawn to examples like school children using ai to write their essays. What will happen to the school system when kids do that? But this kind of question misses the big picture. Forget about school essays. Think of the next American presidential race in 2024, and try to imagine the impact of ai tools that can be made to mass-produce political content, fake-news stories and scriptures for new cults.

In recent years the qAnon cult has coalesced around anonymous online messages, known as “q drops”. Followers collected, revered and interpreted these q drops as a sacred text. While to the best of our knowledge all previous q drops were composed by humans, and bots merely helped disseminate them, in future we might see the first cults in history whose revered texts were written by a non-human intelligence. Religions throughout history have claimed a non-human source for their holy books. Soon that might be a reality…

A photographer whose subject is everyday life 

Judith Joy Ross, one of the best portrait photographers of our era, is the subject of a large retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The New York Times has a nice piece about her and her work which includes some of her more famous images.

The show was jointly organized by the Philadelphia museum and the Fundación Mapfre in Madrid, where it appeared first; it then made stops at Le Bal in Paris and Fotomuseum den Haag in the Netherlands. “She’s better known in Europe than she is here,” Mr. Barberie said.

Although she rarely works in color, calling Ms. Ross’s photographs black-and-white is not exactly right; the images occupy a place on the spectrum between gray and sepia. And except for her 1986-87 series featuring Washington politicians, Ms. Ross has taken pictures mostly of people on the street, in parks or in schools…

Like Ansel Adams, she uses a large folding 10×8 camera on a tripod, which — though fine for the landscape photography in which Adams specialised — would seem pretty clunky to the people she photographs in streets and parks. But somehow it turns out to be a feature, not a bug. “They think the circus has come to town,” she said. And its effect is that of an icebreaker, and a piece of protective armour for an essentially shy person.

If you’re interested, there’s a charming and fascinating interview with her on YouTube. It’s nearly an hour long, so brew some coffee before embarking on it.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. She reminds me of Jane Bown, the Observer’s legendary photographer, with whom I was lucky enough to work occasionally.

Books, etc.

There’s an interesting new book coming:  The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism by Sebastian Edwards. I haven’t seen it yet, but Tyler Cowen has. Here’s an excerpt from his characteristically succinct summary.

1. The Allende regime was a disaster, with for instance real wages falling by almost 40 percent (this one I knew).

2. Pinochet’s much-heralded private pension reform really did not work (I may do a whole post on this).

3. Milton Friedman’s famed visit really was quite modest, contrary to what you sometimes hear. Nonetheless he was so persuasive he really did convince Pinochet to proceed with the shock therapy version of reform. He had mixed feelings about this for the rest of his life, and did not like to talk about it: “But deep inside, Friedman was bothered by the Chilean episode.”

4. You may know that pegging the exchange rate was one of the major Chilean mistakes during the reform era. Friedman, although usually a strict advocate of floating exchange rates, did not take the opportunity to criticize that decision, and in fact made some remarks that suggested a possible willingness to tolerate a moving peg regime for the Chilean exchange rate.

5. Friedman underestimated how long Chilean unemployment would last, following shock therapy.

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The Trolley Problem

Though not as the philosophers who constantly agonise over self-driving cars imagine it.

Taken in St John’s College, Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

“It’s a funny old world — a man’s lucky if he gets out of it alive.”

• W.C.Fields

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Field | Nocturne No. 10 in E minor

Link

I love all his Nocturnes, but this one in particular.

Long Read of the Day

Stop Telling Me To Travel Like a Local, Okay? 

Lovely piece by Mari Uyehara in Bon Appétit

If you have researched a trip in, say, the past five to ten years or so, you may have noticed a recurring and aggressive directive: TRAVEL LIKE A LOCAL! You’ve probably also seen the entreaty, the shaming: How to Not Look Like a Tourist; How to Not Act Like a Tourist; How to Not Be a Tourist.

On the surface, the promise is an attractive one: You’re getting the inside scoop for the best places to eat and shop with none of the tourist traps. You know, only the spots that those truly in the know can find. But it’s all a complete farce. At best, “Travel Like a Local” is a silly paradoxical myth; at worst, it’s terrible vacation advice.

For one thing, locals aren’t traveling. They are working. Or folding laundry or cleaning their bathrooms or packing lunches or any of the eight zillion other inane chores that somehow take up every minute of your free time when you are NOT on vacation. Locals are not spending leisurely days strolling on stunning promenades or gawking at the crank-your-neck-tall Art Deco buildings or sparkly turquoise waters lapping on fine white-sand beaches. They are making to-do lists in their heads on cramped morning commutes or scurrying between the grocery store, the dry cleaner, and the pharmacy, trying to complete enough tasks before falling into bed. The whole point of travel is to get away from the humdrum of everyday life. It is to very much not be a local.

Put it this way: You simply cannot travel like a local…

Yep. In a way, the good tourist (as the old joke has it) sends his money and stays at home.

Thank the Lords someone is worried about AI-controlled weapons systems

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The most interesting TV I’ve watched recently did not come from a conventional television channel, nor even from Netflix, but from TV coverage of parliament. It was a recording of a meeting of the AI in weapons systems select committee of the House of Lords, which was set up to inquire into “how should autonomous weapons be developed, used and regulated”. The particular session I was interested in was the one held on 20 April, during which the committee heard from four expert witnesses – Kenneth Payne, who is professor of strategy at King’s College London; Keith Dear, director of artificial intelligence innovation at the computer company Fujitsu; James Black from the defence and security research group of Rand Europe; and Courtney Bowman, global director of privacy and civil liberties engineering at Palantir UK. An interesting mix, I thought – and so it turned out to be.

Autonomous weapons systems are ones that can select and attack a target without human intervention. It is believed (and not just by their boosters) that these systems could revolutionise warfare, and may be faster, more accurate and more resilient than existing weapons systems. And that they could, conceivably, even limit the casualties of war (though I’ll believe that when I see it).

Do read the whole thing.

Brad DeLong on the Economist — the last refuge of neoliberalism.

I’ve always thought that the Economist (to which I subscribe, because I admire its journalism almost as much as I disapprove of its editorials) is where neoliberal ideas go to die. But Brad DeLong puts it better than I ever could in this essay.

As usual, the Economist delivers its reverence for neoliberal dogma with all the sanctimony and certitude of a true believer. Americans must sit down, shut up, and recite the catechism: “The market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market.” To doubt that the US economy’s current problems are caused by anything other than an interventionist, overbearing government is apostasy. But, as an economic historian, what took my breath away was the essay’s conclusion, which attributes America’s postwar prosperity to its worship of the Mammon of Unrighteousness (more commonly known as laissez-faire capitalism).

The essay cites three “fresh challenges” facing the US: the security threat posed by China, the need to rejigger the global division of labor due to China’s growing economic clout, and the fight against climate change. The climate challenge, of course, is hardly “fresh,” given that the world is at least three generations late in addressing it. Moreover, our failure to act promptly means that the economic impact of global warming will likely consume most, if not all, of the world’s anticipated technological dividends over the next two generations…

Do read it.

Books, etc.

I’m still deep in Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday and finding it wonderful. What’s really weird to this reader, though, is that his evocation of the prudishness of fin-de-siecle Viennese bourgeois attitudes remind me of the 1950s Ireland in which I grew up. Take this passage, for example:

A man was supposed to be forthright , chivalrous and aggressive , a woman shy , timid and defensive . They were not equals but hunters and prey . This unnatural tension separating them in their outward behaviour was bound to heighten the inner tension between the two poles , the factor of eroticism , and so thanks to its technique — which knew nothing of psychology , of concealing sexuality and hushing it up — the society of the time achieved exactly the opposite . In its constant prudish anxiety , it was always sniffing out immorality in all aspects of life — literature , art and fashion — with a view to preventing any stimulation , with the result that it was in fact forced to keep dwelling on the immoral . As it was always studying what might be unsuitable , it found itself constantly on the alert ; to the world of that time , ‘ decency ’ always appeared to be in deadly danger from every gesture , every word . Perhaps we can understand how it still seemed criminal , at that time , for a woman to wear any form of trousers for games or sports.

My mother was an ultra-devout Catholic who was obsessed by the dangers of girls wearing trousers, never mind shorts. And she, and the entire priestly establishment, constantly warned of the dangers of young people of both sexes intermingling. Such gatherings, it was said, constituted that curious Catholic creation, “an occasion of sin”. Ever since, needless to say, I have been an enthusiastic sinner.

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Thornham: high tide

We go to Norfolk to watch birds, but often wind up just looking at the cloudscapes.

Quote of the Day

“Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.”

• Erich Fromm

Geoffrey Vickers, the wisest man I ever knew, once said to me that “the hardest thing in life is to know what to want. Most people never figure it out and wind up pretending that they wanted what they could get.”

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Richard Strauss | Im Abendrot from Four Last Songs | Jessye Norman

Link

I really love these songs, particularly this one.

Long Read of the Day

Sign of the times: might ChatGPT re-invigorate GPG?

Lovely post by my friend Quentin (Whom God Preserve) on his blog — status.org

It’s important to keep finding errors in LLM systems like ChatGPT, to remind us that, however eloquent they may be, they actually have very little knowledge of the real world.

A few days ago, I asked ChatGPT to describe the range of blog posts available on Status-Q. As part of the response it told me that ‘the website “statusq.org” was founded in 2017 by journalist and author Ben Hammersley.’ Now, Ben is a splendid fellow, but he’s not me. And this blog has been going a lot longer than that!

I corrected the date and the author, and it apologised. (It seems to be doing that a lot recently.) I asked if it learned when people corrected it, and it said yes. I then asked it my original question again, and it got the author right this time.

Later that afternoon, it told me that StatusQ.org was the the personal website of Neil Lawrence.

Being Quentin, he goes on adding value to this episode, involving signing things cryptographically. But you don’t need to know much about the tech to understand the point of the story.

The aspect of the story that made me laugh out loud is that Neil Lawrence (whom I also know) is the DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at Cambridge! You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Footnote The ‘GPG’ in the title of the blog post stands for ‘Gnu Privacy Guard’.

Books, etc.

I’ve been reading this for several weeks and just filed my review for the Observer (forthcoming soon).

It’s an important book, I think, not least because it challenges (and demolishes) the conventional narrative that always equates technological development with ‘progress’ — when it actually means a particularly skewed interpretation of that word. ‘Progress’ in the tech sense does not include shared prosperity that societies need but just prioritises and emphasises the benefits that accrue to elites. The book surveys a thousand years of technological change to argue not only that technical advances benefit some more than others, but also that different ways of organising production enrich and empower some people and disempower others. It’s also nice to see — as Angus Deaton has pointed out — how the authors (both world-class economists themselves) “take aim at economists’ mindless enthusiasm for technical change and their crippling neglect of power”.

My commonplace booklet

Nature’s Steadicam

Fascinating video by Paul Dinning who watches kestrels hunting in Cornwall. I’ve often wondered how they managed to stay in position. And how they can spot small movements at such a distance.

TKSST explains:

Like hummingbirds and kingfishers, kestrels have the advantage of a larger accessory optic system, a sort of superhero power that detects movement and helps keep their balance, enabling unparalleled head stabilization while hovering. By bobbing their heads periodically, kestrels can estimate distances and locate prey, sometimes by seeing urine trails with their ultraviolet-sensitive vision.

Whenever I see an avian predator hunting I’m glad I’m not a small rodent.

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AI as augmentation

Current New Yorker cover. Nice illustration for a moment when people are wondering whether digital technology provides augmentation of human capabilities, or a replacement for them.

Quote of the Day

”The easiest way to mismanage a technology is to misunderstand it.”

• Jaron Lanier, writing in the New Yorker.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Harry Belafonte | Day-O (The Banana Boat Song) (Live)

Link

He died on Tuesday at the age of 96. The NYT has a nice obituary of him.

At a time when segregation was still widespread and Black faces were still a rarity on screens large and small, Mr. Belafonte’s ascent to the upper echelon of show business was historic. He was not the first Black entertainer to transcend racial boundaries; Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and others had achieved stardom before him. But none had made as much of a splash as he did, and for a while no one in music, Black or white, was bigger.

Born in Harlem to West Indian immigrants, he almost single-handedly ignited a craze for Caribbean music with hit records like “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jamaica Farewell.” His album “Calypso,” which included both those songs, reached the top of the Billboard album chart shortly after its release in 1956 and stayed there for 31 weeks. Coming just before the breakthrough of Elvis Presley, it was said to be the first album by a single artist to sell more than a million copies.

May he rest in peace.

Long Read of the Day

Large Language Models as a Cultural Technology

Not a long read today but a long-ish (15-minute) listen because I don’t have a transcript for Alison Gopnik’s strikingly original view about what LLMs (Large Language Models) are, really. She argues that instead of regarding them as quasi-intelligent agents we should think of them as cultural transmission technologies, by which accumulated information from other humans is passed on in a compact form. This is, IMO, an original and interesting take on the phenomenon — from a remarkable thinker who, among other things, changed the way I think about how young children learn.

My commonplace booklet

 Parrots taught to video call each other become less lonely

From The Guardian.

An American study got owners to train their pets to contact other birds using a touchscreen tablet.

The study, which involved giving the birds a tablet that they could use to make video calls, found that they began to engage in more social behaviour including preening, singing and play. The birds were given a choice of which “friend” to call on a touchscreen tablet and the study revealed that the parrots that called other birds most often were the most popular choices.

Doesn’t work with cats, alas.

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Same-day repairs

Cambridge Market.

Quote of the Day

“I am a Ford, not a Lincoln.”

• Gerald Ford, on becoming President on 6 December, 1973 after Nixon’s resignation. Rings a nice bell for petrolheads who remember the Lincoln Continental (especially, as Ry Cooder once put it when introducing She Runs Hot For Me with David Lindley, the white one with the red upholstery. Or was it the other way round?)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | Jesus bleibet meine Freude from Cantata BWV 147 | Netherlands Bach Society

Link

This beautiful cantata was sung at the Memorial Service for Duncan Robinson last Saturday in Great St Mary’s church in Cambridge. He was a great art historian, museum director, teacher and a thoroughly nice, generous man. May he rest in peace.

Long Read of the Day

Adolf Eichmann Was Ready for His Close-Up. My Father Gave It to Him

Fascinating essay in The New York Times by Tom Hurwitz.

I was 14 the first time I saw Adolf Eichmann in person. He wore an ill-fitting suit and had tortoise shell glasses, with the bearing of a nervous accountant. He did not seem at all like someone who had engineered the deaths of millions of people, except of course that I was at his trial for genocide.

My father, Leo Hurwitz, directed the television coverage of the Eichmann trial, which was held in Jerusalem and broadcast all over the world in 1961. My dad was chosen for the position after the producer convinced both Capital Cities Broadcasting, then a small network that organized the pool coverage, and David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister of Israel, that the trial needed to be seen live. In the 1930s, my father had been one of the pioneers of the American social documentary film. In later years, he had directed two films on the Holocaust and had helped to invent many of the techniques of live television while director of production in the early days of the CBS network. Also, as a Socialist, he had been blacklisted from all work in television for the previous decade, so he came cheap…

Really interesting, not least because it reveals things about the trial that I, at least, hadn’t known, even though I read Hannah Arendt’s New Yorker reports.

Nothing is ever what it seems.

Rupert Murdoch was ever a master strategist, but he’s beginning to lose his grip

My OpEd in Sunday’s Observer:

There are, as F Scott Fitzgerald famously observed – and as Rupert Murdoch is now belatedly discovering, “no second acts in American lives”. Last week, just as the trial of the $1.6bn defamation action brought by Dominion against Fox News was about to start, a “settlement” was reached between the two parties. Fox, of which Murdoch is CEO, paid nearly $800m to stop the proceedings.

Given how highly Murdoch values his image as a swaggering media giant, it was probably money well spent. Otherwise he would have had to testify under oath and the world would see not the robust titan of popular legend but an elderly mogul who is physically frail and, more importantly, who could not stop his TV station pandering to Donald Trump for fear of alienating the audience that had turned Fox News into such a profitable cash cow.

All of a sudden, it’s beginning to look as though the titan’s career may be ending with a whimper rather than a bang. Indeed, there have been times recently when one wonders whether Murdoch is losing the plot. Last June, for example, he suddenly dumped his fourth wife, the supermodel Jerry Hall – who, as far as outsiders can tell, had been an exemplary spouse and cared for him during several bouts of serious illness. Then, a few weeks ago, he announced his engagement to Ann Lesley Smith, a former model and conservative radio host. Two weeks later, the engagement was off.

Whatever else it is, this doesn’t look like the behaviour of a strategic genius. And yet Murdoch’s success in building a global media empire indicates great strategic acumen, with the odd dash of military-style bravado…

Do read the whole thing.

Thanks to Wendy Grossman and other readers who reminded me that Murdoch’s strategic acumen was entirely absent when it came to the Internet. Witness his disastrous acquisition of Delphi, a text-based conferencing system in 1994 and MySpace in 2005.

My commonplace booklet

How to use a dial telephone

Complicated stuff. See here.

Thanks to The Browser for spotting it.

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The Captain

One of the clues on the cryptic crossword we were doing the other day sent me to Wikipedia looking for the name of Captain Smollett’s ship in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. I was struck by N.C.Wyeth’s painting of him raising the flag in defiance of the pirates, which is why it’s my pic of the day.

The ship was, as everybody except yours truly knew, the Hispaniola.

Quote of the Day

“On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia”.

• W.C. Fields’s preferred epitaph.

(Sadly,possibly apocryphal)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Cream – White Room (Royal Albert Hall 2005)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Guardrails

Blistering blog post by Scott Galloway on the catastrophic failure of democratic states to regulate tech companies, especially the social-media operators.

The NHTSA is one of the many boring state and federal agencies critical to a healthy society. Before the Food and Drug Administration, the sale and distribution of food and pharmaceuticals was a free-for-all. The Federal Aviation Administration is the reason your chances of dying in a plane crash are 1 in 3.37 billion. Next time someone tells you they don’t trust government, ask them if they trust cars, food, pain killers, buildings, or airplanes.

The limits on innovation imposed by these agencies — their red tape — are real, and worth it. Millions of us are alive and prospering because we had the foresight and discipline to blunt the sharp end of industrial progress with the guardrails of democratic oversight. Until you open your phone …

Exempt

The greatest anomaly in the history of U.S. regulation is the place more and more of us spend most of our time: online. A lethal cocktail of complexity, lobbying, cultural worship of tech leaders, and anti-government libertarian screed has rendered tech immune to the basic standards of safety and protection. Lethal is the correct term. Tech comes into the purview of other agencies on occasion. (Though it’s always bitching it’s special and shouldn’t be restrained by the olds at the FTC and DOJ.) And the industry’s blocking efforts have been effective. There is no FDA or SEC for tech, which is America’s largest sector by market capitalization and growing.

He goes on to predict that the advent of Generative AI is now going to slip under democratic guardrails, with consequences possibly even worse than we’ve seen with Meta & Co.

He’s also spot on about the current bleating on the ‘risks’ of the technology.

What won’t work is fake regulation — when the government issues broad, vague statements about what companies should generally do. That’s what Biden did with crypto, and he’s doing it again with AI. Specifically, his “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights,” which is filled with truisms, platitudes, and no laws. Similarly, the NIST published its “AI Risk Management Framework.” Again, not laws.

Important and worth your time if you’re as concerned about this stuff as I am.

Can China keep generative AI under its control? Well, it contained the internet

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Something happened last week that suggests we are in for another outbreak of hubristic western cant about the supposed naivety of Chinese rulers. On 11 April, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the country’s internet regulator, proposed new rules for governing generative AI in mainland China. The consultation period for comments on the proposals ends on 10 May…

Read on

Books, etc.

I’ve just bought Timothy Garton Ash’s new book, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, partly because I know him and admire his work, but also because I’ve just been listening to a remarkable conversation about it between him and Yascha Mounk. I really recommend the podcast, especially if, like me, you’re a devout European.

My commonplace booklet

The joys of autocomplete

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The visitor

In Kettle’s Yard, a lovely little art gallery.

Quote of the Day

”For white-collar workers, the rise of Large Language Models, or LLMs, has created a very nerdy version of the opening of Alec Baldwin’s speech in Glengarry Glen Ross. The bad news is, you’re probably fired. The good news is, you’re on a temporary probationary period in which you’ve gotten a nice promotion and now have a direct report with an unlimited attention span, a wide range of somewhat superficial knowledge, and a frustrating tendency to make elementary mistakes that require close supervision. You might be frustrated to work with such a subordinate, but at $20/month they’re not asking for much.

• Byrne Hobart, in “Working with a Copilot”.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Cowboy Junkies | Sweet Jane

Link

Long Read of the Day

I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory

Great reportage by Virginia Heffernan, from Taiwan.

I ARRIVE IN Taiwan brooding morbidly on the fate of democracy. My luggage is lost. This is my pilgrimage to the Sacred Mountain of Protection. The Sacred Mountain is reckoned to protect the whole island of Taiwan—and even, by the supremely pious, to protect democracy itself, the sprawling experiment in governance that has held moral and actual sway over the would-be free world for the better part of a century. The mountain is in fact an industrial park in Hsinchu, a coastal city southwest of Taipei. Its shrine bears an unassuming name: the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

By revenue, TSMC is the largest semiconductor company in the world. In 2020 it quietly joined the world’s 10 most valuable companies. It’s now bigger than Meta and Exxon. The company also has the world’s biggest logic chip manufacturing capacity and produces, by one analysis, a staggering 92 percent of the world’s most avant-garde chips—the ones inside the nuclear weapons, planes, submarines, and hypersonic missiles on which the international balance of hard power is predicated…

Keep reading. It’s terrific

So the camera never lies? Except when it does.

Boris Eldagsen, the creator of a ‘photograph’, has refused to accept the prize awarded him by the Sony World Photograph Awards after revealing that the winning photo he submitted was created using an artificial intelligence image-generator.

It’s a striking image which I can’t reproduce because it belongs to Mr Eldagsen — but you can see it if you follow the link above.

By entering a computer-generated image to a traditional photography prize, and then subsequently refusing to accept the ensuing award, Eldagsen claims he hopes to “drive debate” about a technology that is poised to dramatically alter how we define and understand photorealist imagery.

Eldagsen’s winning image, Pseudomnesia: The Electrician, was created using DALL-E 2, an image generator developed by OpenAI, the San Francisco-based company that also created the AI chatbot ChatGPT.

In his submission, Eldagsen described the image as “a haunting black-and-white portrait of two women from different generations, reminiscent of the visual language of 1940s family portraits”.

The Sony Awards people, needless to say, didn’t see the joke and have accused the photographer of acting in bad faith.

How chatbots learn

Well, well…

The Washington Post ($) looked inside the training data set used for LLMs from Facebook and Google and found Russian propaganda sites, white supremacist sites, extremist Christian sites, anti-trans sites, etc.

That’s what you get when you scrape the Web.

Thanks to Jason Kottke for spotting it.

My commonplace booklet

Photograph of a notice affixed to the rear of a Tesla Model S.

I feel this driver’s pain. One of the drawbacks of having a Tesla is that people hold one responsible for Elon Musk.

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