Roll out the barrel

Rooting around in my vast photo archive what should I find but this? Taken on Boxing Day (December 26) 2008 when a large number of ostensibly sane male residents of Grantchester, a nice village near Cambridge, decided that they would compete to see which of them could roll a barrel fastest along a stretch of village road, watched by many hundreds of their dependents, spouses, neighbours and the odd puzzled visitor from abroad.

Quote of the Day

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.

• Frank Wilhoit

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Celtic Thunder | Galway Girl (Live From Ontario)

Link

The group is now to me, so thanks to Quentin for spotting them. Steve Earle’s song has been wildly popular in Ireland for years. If you doubt that, then have a look at what went on in Galway on 11 June, 2016!

Long Read of the Day

The long and the short of our confidence in AI

This is a fabulous essay by Rob Nelson which packs a lot of wisdom and perceptiveness into an extended review essay about these two important books. It’s a long read, but worth every minute of the time spent.

Here are just two samples to give you a flavour of Nelson’s insight into this stuff:

On AI Snake Oil…

The habit of confident prediction, especially when expressed probabilistically, gives a rational sheen to the most unhinged speculation. Narayanan and Kapoor don’t use the term, but one of the book’s central points is that we need more fallibilism, a recognition that when it comes to science, we know nothing with absolute confidence. Such uncertainty eases the way for con artists to make fraudulent claims, but identifying snake oil is not just about detecting bullshit; it is also about evaluating the social harms that come with genuine advances. For example, Narayanan and Kapoor write, “The biggest danger of facial recognition arises from the fact that it works really well, so it can cause great harm in the hands of the wrong people.” Many skeptics are so focused on proving AI doesn’t work that they miss it when AI works exactly as intended, sometimes with disastrous consequences for individuals or society.

And…

The advantage of generative AI is that, like actual snake oil, there really is some value there. The temptation to bottle up whatever this is and put a label on it becomes an obligation to those living on what Nate Silver calls “the river,” a gambling mindset with deep roots in American culture. The uncertain truths of this latest advance in machine capability have created an epic opportunity for the right man, a confidence man for the twenty-first century.

The AI snake oil impresario who leads OpenAI is just such a man. From his star turn in the comedy of remarriage last year as he left and came back in one madcap weekend to his slow-motion character subversion into the villain we all wanted him to be, Sam Altman understands that a good story is the key to a complicated and lucrative scam. His prognostications, along with the outrage of his critics, serve Altman’s purpose, which is to distract the public from books like AI Snake Oil or projects like François Chollet’s ARC Prize. Dave Karpf nails it: “The business model of OpenAI isn’t actually ChatGPT as a product. It’s stories about what ChatGPT might one day become.” Alternating boardroom dramatics with scripted demos of black box breakthroughs keeps the AGI currents sparking and crackling, and the eyes on him.

On The Ordinal Society

William Thomson explained an essential truth of the modern world: “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it.” Fourcade and Healy describe the social order that has emerged since this observation: “a society oriented toward, justified by, and governed through measurement.” If to measure something is to know it, then to put that measure into an algorithm is to automate our knowledge of it. Such automation, as we have learned, is powerful, especially when organized and mediated through the Internet. It is even more powerful when the “it” is our own sense of self.

Fourcade and Healy argue that we have welcomed that power into our lives for what it gives us, and especially the experiences it provides. Our human desire to rank and be ranked is now realized through an internet-created social “system of organization, evaluation, and control that is remarkably convenient, often delightful, and at times frightening.” It is not simply that giant corporations gather data and use it for their own purposes—though they certainly do. It is that, in so doing, they give people what they want. They tell individuals and institutions where they fit in the social order.

It’s terrific. Well worth your time if you want to rise above the current chaotic and often clueless discourse about AI and AGI.

The blogosphere is in full bloom. The rest of the internet has wilted

Yesterday’s Observer column:

If you log into Dave Winer’s blog, Scripting News, you’ll find a constantly updated note telling you how many years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds the blog has been running. Sometime tomorrow morning the year field will switch to 30. Which will mean that every single day for three decades Dave’s blog will have been stirring things up.

He’s a truly remarkable figure, a gifted hacker and software developer who embodies the spirit of the early internet. In the 1980s he created ThinkTank, a new kind of software called an “outliner”, which computerised the hierarchical lists we all use when planning an article or a presentation, but which were up to then scribbled on paper. Like Dan Bricklin’s spreadsheet, it was a novel idea at the time, but now you find outliners built into almost every kind of software for writing. There’s even one in Microsoft Word, for God’s sake!

In 1983, Winer founded a company, Living Videotext, to develop and commercialise the outlining idea, and six years later sold it to Symantec for enough money to enable him to do his own thing for the rest of his life…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

The historian Jill Lepore has been in conversation with ChatGPT in its ‘Advanced Voice Mode’ and has a lovely essay in the New Yorker about her experience (and lots more besides) which is, alas, behind the paywall. But here’s a bit that made me laugh out loud:

Advanced Voice Mode also told me that thing about Alan Turing presenting a paper at Teddington in 1958, and, because its personality is wide-eyed and wonderstruck, it added some musings. (Unlike standard Voice Mode—which involves recording your question and then uploading it, in a process that feels sluggish and, sweet Jesus forgive me, old-timey—Advanced Voice Mode talks with you in real time and inexhaustibly, like a college roommate all het up about Heidegger whispering to you in the dark from the top bunk at three in the morning.) “It’s fascinating to think how forward-thinking Turing was, considering how integral learning algorithms have become in modern A.I.,” it said, dormitorially. But Turing had died in 1954, so he wasn’t at the conference, either.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Largest brain map ever reveals fruit fly’s neurons in exquisite detail

From Nature…

A fruit fly might not be the smartest organism, but scientists can still learn a lot from its brain. Researchers are hoping to do that now that they have a new map — the most complete for any organism so far — of the brain of a single fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). The wiring diagram, or ‘connectome’, includes nearly 140,000 neurons and captures more than 54.5 million synapses, which are the connections between nerve cells.

“This is a huge deal,” says Clay Reid, a neurobiologist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, who was not involved in the project but has worked with one of the team members who was. “It’s something that the world has been anxiously waiting for, for a long time.”

The map is described in a package of nine papers about the data published in Nature today. Its creators are part of a consortium known as FlyWire, co-led by neuroscientists Mala Murthy and Sebastian Seung at Princeton University in New Jersey.

This is truly amazing. 139,255 cells

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Ireland’s Lake District

The view from Aghadoe Heights over Killarney.

Quote of the Day

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”

• Albert Einstein.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

‘Fairytale of New York’ played at Shane MacGowan’s funeral

Link

Shane McGowan’s funeral in Dublin was never going to be a staid affair, and so it proved.

Long Read of the Day

The American historian Heather Cox Richardson was one of the first big stars on Substack. Her Letter from an American remains a must-read for anyone interested in the madness going on over there, because she writes calmly and brings to bear her wide knowledge and historical perspective on every subject she touches. Tuesday’s edition of her blog was particularly gripping and revelatory. It starts with J.D. Vance’s persistent lying in the vice-presidential debate and then goes back to a gripping account of what went on in the run-up to the ‘insurrection’ on January 6, 2021.

Here’s an extended sample that gives a flavour of the essay.

By late November, neither the legal challenges nor the threats had worked. So in early December the conspirators decided to get the people who would have been the electors if Trump had won to sign certifications saying that they were the legitimate electors and were casting their electoral votes for Trump. The lawyer who came up with the plan, Ken Chesebro, admitted that “the votes aren’t legal” but thought Congress could use them to challenge the real votes.

Many of the electors were wary of the plan, but Trump and his conspirators managed to get the slates of fake electors on December 14, the appointed day for real electors to meet. The plan was for Vice President Mike Pence, who as president of the Senate would preside over the counting of the electoral votes, to use the fake electors to say there were competing slates of electors and thus to “negotiate a solution to defeat Biden.” On December 19, Trump posted: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6. Be there, will be wild!”

But the plan hit a snag. Pence maintained he did not have the power to do any such thing. The more Pence refused, the more insistent Trump became. After another argument on January 1, 2021, Trump told Pence that “hundreds of thousands of people are going to hate your guts,” “people are gonna think you’re stupid,” and, finally, “You’re too honest.”

Trump, Bannon, and Trump’s lawyers all continued to pressure Pence, and Bannon normalized the plan on his podcast. Trump continued to talk publicly of fighting to make sure his opponents didn’t take the White House and continued to pressure Pence. On January 5—the day before the election certification proceeding—he talked to Bannon, and less than two hours later, on his podcast, Bannon told his listeners: “All Hell is going to break loose tomorrow” in Washington, D.C.

Concerned at Trump’s escalating fury at Pence, Pence’s chief of staff Mark Short alerted Pence’s secret service detail…

You get the point. Do read it.

Books, etc.

This arrived yesterday. I knew that Kissinger had been thinking about AI for a while, but not that he was working on a book with the former CEO of Google and a former senior Microsoft executive. It’s now on my list. Strange title, though.

My commonplace booklet

How Hurricane Helene became a monster storm.

Great report in The Verge. I particularly liked a quote from Karthik Balaguru, a climate scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who “likens the effect of climate change to the world having a weakened immune system. ‘It doesn’t mean that you will become sick. It just increases your tendency to become sick’”.

In a British tabloid the headline would have been “A Perfect Storm”.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• London saw a surprising benefit to fining high-polluting cars: More active kids Link

  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!

Colour

Sometimes, B&W just doesn’t cut it!

Quote of the Day

“I’m very careful to only predict things which have already happened.”

• Marshall McLuhan

Great advice for anyone covering the tech industry.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Band | I Shall Be Released (The Last Waltz)

Link

Wonderful album.

Long Read of the Day

Jimmy Carter’s First Century.

He was 100 yesterday. James Fallows — a great journalist who had once been Carter’s speechwriter — had a nice essay on his blog looking back on his life, times and fate.

On October 1, 1924, James Earl Carter Jr. was born in the small southwestern Georgia town of Plains. It was a different world. Calvin Coolidge was in office, as the 30th US president. Electricity had not yet come to the rural South, which was still officially segregated and the scene of lynchings. Radio broadcasts were in their infancy. TV did not exist. The most popular US car was the Ford Model T.

Today, October 1, 2024, the 39th US president, Jimmy Carter, turns 100. He is by far the longest-tenured former president, having spent nearly 44 years in that role. In distant second place is Herbert Hoover, who lived for 31 years after he left office. Five others former presidents—John Adams, Hoover, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and the first George Bush—survived into their early 90s. Only Carter has made it this far.

Early last year, when Carter announced that he was entering hospice care, I wrote an appreciation of his time in and out of public office, for The Atlantic. I had worked for Carter as a speechwriter during his 1976 campaign and then as chief speechwriter for his first two years in office. With the magazine’s permission I quoted the story on this site when it first came out. Nineteen months later, on the occasion of Carter’s centennial, I do so again. I have updated two or three date references but otherwise have left this unchanged. I think it stands up…

It does. Carter — like Joe Biden — played a bad hand well. But the Iranian hostage crisis did for him, largely I think because an ambitious rescue effort failed when one of the helicopters crashed. He later used to say that he came within one broken helicopter of re-election!

Books, etc.

John Steinbeck’s tips on writing

1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it — bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

From Steinbeck: A Life in Letters.

My commonplace booklet

I love fountain pens and whenever possible write with one. (I also collect them.) One day, some years ago, Victoria Smith, a talented artist friend, looked at my open notebook, became fascinated by the sheet of blotting paper lying in it and asked if she could have it. She later asked for some more blotter sheets, and I readily but (puzzedly) complied. And then, one day, she sent me a note to say they had featured in an exhibition of her work! This was one of them.

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Mellow fruitfulness

Our small vineyard is coming along nicely.

Quote of the Day

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: Its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”

• Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Fredrik Pacius | Studentsång

Link

It’s in Finnish (obviously), but I think it’s a student song for Mayday.

Long Read of the Day

Asking the wrong questions

Lovely essay by Benedict Evans arguing that “with fundamental technology change, we don’t so much get our predictions wrong as make predictions about the wrong things”.

The essay opens with a story about his grandfather, Will Jenkins.

In 1946, by which time he’d become a notable writer of science fiction, he published a story called ‘A Logic named Joe’, which described a global computer network with servers and terminals, that starts giving people the information that it thinks they ought to know as opposed to waiting for them to search for it – the Singularity, if you like, or maybe just Alexa. He also, as I recall, predicted reality TV somewhere.

And yet, despite predicting half of our world, as a father in the 1950s he could not imagine why his daughter – my mother – wanted to work.

This isn’t an uncommon observation – plenty of people have pointed out that vintage scifi is full of rocketships but all the pilots are men. 1950s scifi shows 1950s society, but with robots. Meanwhile, the interstellar liners have paper tickets, that you queue up to buy. With fundamental technology change, we don’t so much get our predictions wrong as make predictions about the wrong things. (And, of course, we now have neither trolleys nor personal gliders.)

I was reminded of this photo recently when I came across a RAND ‘long-range forecasting’ study, from 1964…

Do read on. Evans is an elegant, thoughtful writer, and one of the most acute observers of the tech industry.

It’s useful that Strawberry can ‘think’, but we need to know its reasoning

Yesterday’s Observer column

It’s nearly two years since OpenAI released ChatGPT on an unsuspecting world, and the world, closely followed by the stock market, lost its mind. All over the place, people were wringing their hands wondering: What This Will Mean For [enter occupation, industry, business, institution].

Within academia, for example, humanities professors agonised about how they would henceforth be able to grade essays if students were using ChatGPT or similar technology to help write them. The answer, of course, is to come up with better ways of grading, because students will use these tools for the simple reason that it would be idiotic not to – just as it would be daft to do budgeting without spreadsheets. But universities are slow-moving beasts and even as I write, there are committees in many ivory towers solemnly trying to formulate “policies on AI use”.

As they deliberate, though, the callous spoilsports at OpenAI have unleashed another conundrum for academia – a new type of large language model (LLM) that can – allegedly – do “reasoning”. They’ve christened it OpenAI o1, but since internally it was known as Strawberry we will stick with that…

Read on

Books, etc.

From the blurb:

In The Tech Coup, Marietje Schaake offers a behind-the-scenes account of how technology companies crept into nearly every corner of our lives and our governments. She takes us beyond the headlines to high-stakes meetings with human rights defenders, business leaders, computer scientists, and politicians to show how technologies—from social media to artificial intelligence—have gone from being heralded as utopian to undermining the pillars of our democracies. To reverse this existential power imbalance, Schaake outlines game-changing solutions to empower elected officials and citizens alike.

Link

Schaake — formerly a Dutch MEP — is one of the few politicians who understood the tech industry and was sceptical of, and watchful of, Zuckerberg & Co. In recent years, she’s been a Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. Her book is a must-read for those who, like me, are condemned to watch this industry.

My commonplace booklet

As long-term readers will know I’ve always been fascinated by John Maynard Keynes. (In a way, if you live and work in Cambridge it’s hard not to be.) But Adam Tooze (who used to be an academic here and is now in Columbia) has a fascinating item on Keynes in his Substack. It’s about an essay that Keynes contributed in 1909 as a young man to the Cambridge Apostles with the intriguing title: “Can We Consume Our Surplus? or The Influence of Furniture on Love”. The post goes on to give the full text of the paper.

“Does it really make a great difference to us,” Keynes asks at one point,

in what rooms we live, whether we clothe them with chintz or with velvet, whether they are hard or padded? That it makes a difference in some ways, is obvious. These things affect our pleasure and our convenience. But do they do more than this? Do they suggest to us thoughts and feelings and occupations?

The effect on us of their external architecture is, I believe, much slighter than their internal proportions. I myself have spent most of my life inside buildings which are as pompous as possible. But what effect has a flitting between Eton, King’s, and Whitehall had? People who live in the Great Court at Trinity are very different beings from those who live in the Fellows’ Buildings at King’s. But I put it down to the inside shapes of the rooms, much more than to the different look outs. And it is consistent with this that those who live in the little rooms in Neville’s Court are not so very different from themselves in the Great Court.

The essay also has that lovely cartoon by Low of Keynes lounging in a well-upholstered armchair. It comes after this observation:

Our furniture is, after all, very unimportant, and leaves us very much where we should be without it. But I don’t think it is quite true. Our furniture may be the best we can do, and yet we may deserve something much better.

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Always on(line)

Provence, Summer 2023

Quote of the Day

”Profit models are not philosophies, and should not be gussied up as such, festooned with purloined intellectual gew-gaws and other pirate fineries. Serious thinkers should not be pressed into service merely as propagandists for the cause.”

• Henry Farrell, commenting on tech industry moguls who aspire to be public intellectuals.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | Shelter from the Storm

Link

Long Read of the Day

A Killer App for Large Language Models

Lovely essay by Henry Farrell about a piece that he and Marion Fourcade had published in the Economist arguing that LLMs’ most straightforward application is as “engines of organisational ritual”.

ARTHUR C. CLARKE wrote a story in which the entire universe was created so that monks could ritually write out the nine billion names of God. The monks buy a computer to do this faster and better, with unfortunate consequences for the rest of us. … Rituals aren’t just about God, but about people’s relations with each other. Everyday life depends on ritual performances such as being polite, dressing appropriately, following proper procedure and observing the law. … Organisations couldn’t work without rituals. When you write a reference letter for a former colleague or give or get a tchotchke on Employee Appreciation Day, you are enacting a ceremony, reinforcing the foundations of a world in which everyone knows the rules and expects them to be observed …

My bits of the article were inspired by two reinforcing pieces of information. One was a conversation with a friend, who works for an organization that requires Diversity, Equity and Inclusion statements. The friend described how they had spent hours writing a thoughtful serious statement; and then spun up ChatGPT to generate one. The friend ended up submitting their own handcrafted statement, but couldn’t help feeling that their organization would have preferred the bland inanity of what ChatGPT had put out, which more perfectly combined the organization’s expectations and the general form of the thing.

The second was an observation from playing around with ChatGPT, which [is that] ChatGPT is very good at generating Schelling Points…

Read on. It’s quirky and insightful.

Books, etc.

I’ve just listened to a fabulous conversation between Ezra Klein and Zadie Smith, which made me realise that I need to read her essays. What clinched it was that, like me, she’s a great admirer of Neil Postman.

My commonplace booklet

I love September. For me, it’s always been the first month of the year, which is why I don’t care much for January 1st. It’s a consequence of working for many years in universities, I suppose, but also of the rhythms of primary and secondary school. Cycling in to College the other day at 8am I suddenly remembered that it was 60 years ago — to the day — since I had walked up the drive of University College Cork for my first day as an engineering student. And what came flooding back were memories of what had been going through my mind that day.

Context: I was the first member of my family to go to university, and when I was growing up in a book-free household in small towns on the West coast of Ireland (what is now grandly called ’The Wild Atlantic Way’) the possibility of being able to get there had seemed exceedingly remote. But then, in 1964, a combination of luck, location and scholarships made possible what had once seemed unattainable, and there I was on my way into the ivory tower! It was, as PG Wodehouse put it in another context, “like dying and going to heaven without the trouble and expense”. And what I remember most vividly was the intense pleasure of finally getting into a place where ideas were taken seriously.

Which explains why I was so looking forward the other morning to breakfast in college with a dear friend who had just arrived from the US, and whose new book I had read and enjoyed.

Wodehouse nailed it — as usual.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• The Amazing Recording History of Here Comes the Sun. Want to see what consummate musical geniuses the Beatles were? See this fascinating account of how that beautiful recording of George Harrison’s song was made.

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!

Summer house

Lovely little arbour in the gardens of Muckross House, Killarney.

Quote of the Day

”Where error is irreparable, repentance is useless.”

• Edward Gibbon

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Billy Strayhorn | Lotus Blossom | Duke Ellington

Link

There’s a story behind this. In a studio at the end of a recording session, as most of the musicians were packing and getting ready to leave (and you can hear them in the background), the Duke sat down at a piano and started to play. Someone pressed the record button and here’s the result. Magical!

Long Read of the Day

 Why is Britain poor?

This essay by Ed West is a really long read, but a salutary one if, like me, you are puzzled by how a large country stuffed with smart people has been sliding inexorably into absolute as well as relative decline. It’s really a kind of informal executive summary of Foundations, a remarkable online pamphlet by Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes and Sam Bowman on why Britain has stagnated.

Here’s a sample that captures the flavour of the piece:

France is the most natural comparison point to Britain, a country ‘notoriously heavily regulated and dominated by labour unions.’ This is sometimes comical to British sensibilities, so that ‘French workers have been known to strike by kidnapping their chief executives – a practice that the public there reportedly supports – and strikes are so common that French unions have designed special barbecues that fit in tram tracks so they can grill sausages while they march.’ Only in France.

It is also heavily taxed, especially in the realm of employment, and yet despite this, French workers are significantly more productive. The reason is that France ‘does a good job building the things that Britain blocks: housing, infrastructure and energy supply.’

With a slightly smaller population, France has 37 million homes compared to our 30 million. ‘Those homes are newer, and are more concentrated in the places people want to live: its prosperous cities and holiday regions. The overall geographic extent of Paris’s metropolitan area roughly tripled between 1945 and today, whereas London’s has grown only a few percent.’ One quality-of-life indicator is that ‘800,000 British families have second homes compared to 3.4 million French families.’

They also do transport far better, with 29 tram networks compared to seven in Britain, and six underground metro systems against our three. ‘Since 1980, France has opened 1,740 miles of high speed rail, compared to just 67 miles in Britain. France has nearly 12,000 kilometres of motorways versus around 4,000 kilometres here… In the last 25 years alone, the French built more miles of motorway than the entire UK motorway network. They are even allowed to drive around 10 miles per hour faster on them.’

Footnote Worth noting also that the Foundations paper covers some of the same ground as the Resolution Foundation’s remarkable study, Ending Stagnation. Both carry the same message: decline isn’t inevitable; the problems are soluble — provided some things that Britons hold sacred are changed. The worrying thing is that the new Labour administration doesn’t seem interested in tackling these.

How Apple was able to get into the hearing-aid business

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Like many professional scribblers, I sometimes have to write not in a hushed study or library, but in noisy environments. So years ago I bought a set of Apple AirPods Pro, neat little gadgets that have a limited degree of noise-cancelling ability. They’re not as effective as the clunky (and pricey) headphones that seasoned transcontinental airline passengers need, but they’re much lighter and less obtrusive. And they have a button that enables you to switch off the noise cancellation and hear what’s going on around you.

I remember wondering once if a version of them could also function as hearing aids, given the right software. But then dismissed the thought: after all, hearing aids are expensive, specialised devices that are often prescribed by audiologists – and also signal to the world at large that you are hard of hearing.

But guess what? On 12 September, I open my laptop, click on the Verge website and find the headline: “Apple gets FDA authorisation to turn the AirPods Pro into hearing aids.”

Read on

Books, etc.

As promised, my review from yesterday’s Observer.

My commonplace booklet

From Seth Godin’s daily newsletter:

Professional woodworkers rarely have to be reminded to sharpen their tools. Of course they know this.

The rest of us, on the other hand, regularly use digital tools we don’t understand, don’t maintain and haven’t optimized.

Sometimes, our lack of care in the choice and use of tools only wastes our time. Often, it actually degrades the quality of what we’re seeking to create.

If you’re not regularly getting better at your digital toolbox, you’re actually getting worse.

Hmmm… uncomfortable thought for a blogger who is trying to figure out how to integrate LLMs into his workflow.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Physicist Murray Gell-Mann on Einstein Entertaining snippet from an interview with the great physicist. Ends with a great story.
• Your Phone Is Not a Bomb Ian Boghost, writing in The Atlantic about exploding pagers in Lebanon and related matters.
• What is the Most Valuable Benefit You Got from Becoming a Mathematician? Lovely essay by Keith Devlin (Whom God Preserve).

Errata

The lake in Friday’s photograph taken from the grounds of Glenveagh Castle is Lough Veagh, not — as I said — Lough Gartan, which is in the next valley.

Thanks to John Darch for spotting the error.

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!

Lakeview

Lough Veagh seen from the grounds of Glenveagh Castle, Co. Donegal

Quote of the Day

”There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy; it is not the bad taste of a country which knows no better; it has not the nervous vulgarity of England, or the blinded vulgarity of Germany. It observes beauty, and chooses to pass it by. But it attains to beauty’s confidence.”

• E.M. Forster, writing in Where Angels Fear to Tread about an indifferent performance of Lucia di Lammermoor.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder & David Lindley | Sí Bheag, Sí Mhór

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Unexpected gem: Cooder and Lindley playing a lovely little Irish tune composed by Turlough Ó’Carolan, (1670 – 1738), a famous blind Irish harper, composer and singer.

If you’re interested, here is a lovely traditional rendition of the piece by Camerata Kilkenny and the Uileann piper David Power.

Long Read of the Day

 The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think

Fabulous essay by Shannon Vallor in Noema magazine on the glib and sinister barbarism of a tech industry that talks of its creations as being “superhuman”. This kind of rhetoric, she argues, “implicitly erases what’s most important about being human.”

She’s right, which is why this essay is worth your time. Here’s how she kicks it off:

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…

The tech crowd who use this rhetoric have a crude, ludicrously skewed, inhumane view of what it means to be human. Vallor is their most articulate critic. She’s just published a splendid book, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking which is on next week’s reading list.

My commonplace booklet

The dangers of ‘phishing’ scams have been radically increased by the advent of Generative AI, so this advice from Seth Godin is timely:

Please be on the alert for:

Spam that includes your name, address, phone number and other personal details.

Phone calls that are from human-sounding bots that pretend to be from friends or trusted brands.

Job offers.

Video mashups that include AI-generated people that seem to be made just for you.

Security alerts that are actually precisely the opposite.

Links that sure look trustworthy, but go somewhere you don’t expect.

It makes me sad that people with skills spend their time building ever-more ornate scams. It also bums me out that the emails from this blog often end up in the spam folder, but spam somehow manages to make it to my inbox.

Linkblog

• Our Research Centre has an interesting online event next Wednesday on the micro-sociology of polarisation in two American towns. Click here to sign up for it.

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The Lighthouse

This is not my photograph, but I wish it was, because it’s perfect. It’s by John Darch, a gifted landscape photographer who also happens to be my brother-in-law. The lighthouse is on St John’s Point in Co Donegal and I’ve often tried to photograph it. But John got it one day when it was reflected in a small pond, and the symmetry was, well, perfect. A real decisive moment.

Quote of the Day

”The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

• H.P. Lovecraft

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Field | Nocturne No. 5 in B flat major

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Long Read of the Day

I was wrong about E.M. Forster

Lovely essay by Julian Barnes.

Sometimes, when our tastes become more defined, they become narrower. But this doesn’t have to be the case. I want to address a rarer changing of the mind, which is altogether more enriching: when a writer you had previously been indifferent to, indeed actively despised, suddenly makes sense to you, and you realise – with, yes, a kind of joy – that at last you see the point of them.

I first read EM Forster when an English master handed out a list of Great Books to be read one summer holiday. A Passage to India was on that list. I still have the Penguin edition – a reprint of 1960, costing three shillings and sixpence – in which I read the novel. There are no notes in the margin, not a single cry of “Irony!” It clearly made little impression on me. Later, of my own volition, when I was about 20, I read A Room With a View, and actively began to take against Forster. It seemed to me a fusty, musty, dusty read, with rather antique prose and a storyline and characters which failed to engage me. The English novelists of the next generation – Huxley, Waugh, Greene – spoke to me with much more clarity.

Read on to find out what changed. It’s compelling IMHO.

My commonplace booklet

”Demand for High-End Cameras is Soaring”. So says the Economist in an interesting snippet.

Buying a Leica feels like buying a piece of art. Made in Germany, the cameras are sold in the swankiest neighbourhoods, sometimes in shops which double as galleries. The current models pack the latest imaging technology into sleek all-metal bodies. For decades they have been the chosen cameras of masters of photography such as Henri Cartier-Bresson (pictured) and Annie Leibovitz. Their price is extravagant. Leica’s latest compact model, the Q3, costs around $6,000 (an accompanying thumb rest is available for an extra $245). Opt for a flagship M-series camera with a couple of lenses and the bill can easily run into five figures.

Today few see the need for a dedicated camera. High-quality pictures can be snapped, edited and uploaded onto social media all with your smartphone. When in 2011 an interviewer asked Ms Leibovitz to recommend a camera, she responded by taking out her iPhone 4s, calling it “the snapshot camera of today”. The camera on Apple’s flagship device has improved with each new version, including the one released this week. Since Ms Leibovitz’s remarks, the share of photos taken on smartphones has grown from 25% to over 90%. Digital camera sales, meanwhile, have fallen by 93%. Entry-level models are steadily disappearing from the market.

Premium cameras, however, are bucking the trend. Waiting lists for Leica’s Q3, released in 2023, were initially six-months long. Its success contributed to record sales at the 110-year-old firm last year. The latest version of the premium x100 camera made by Fujifilm has been sold out since its launch in February. The cameras are being flogged online for multiples of their original price of $1,600. Rivals such as Nikon have also begun to prioritise higher-end models. As a result, the average price of a camera has tripled in the past six years, according to the Camera and Imaging Products Association (CIPA), a trade group.

One reason (mentioned in the piece) is that while modern smartphone cameras (like the one in the iPhone 15 Pro) are really pretty good, wedding photographers who showed up just with a smartphone might not impress the client.

I’ve used Leicas for aeons and only once bought a brand new one. It’s still going strong. Also, Leica has revived its M6 film camera, which apparently is selling well. Perhaps this is an echo of what’s happening with analog Hi-Fi amplifiers and turntables with the revival of vinyl?

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Smart Goose Deterrent System Link. Not a problem we have, but I like the combination of ingenuity and humaneness. Thanks to Tyler Cowen for the link.

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!

Picasso’s guitar

Amazing what you can do with a distorting lens.

An experiment from 2007, which explains why it’s not a high-definition print.

Quote of the Day

”I’m smart enough to know I’m dumb.”

• Richard Feynman

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Peter Knight | The Water is Wide

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Long Read of the Day

The Third Framing

A useful (and readable) dissection by a distinguished economist of the neoliberal international order (the so-called “Washington Consensus”) that is now falling apart.

In practice the neoliberal international regime that debuted in the 1980s is dead. The major countries that defined its rules have ceased to abide by them. We are thus facing a strange situation where the main architects and the founders of the neoliberal international order no longer believe in it and do not apply it, but somehow the system should be still apparently adhered to by the rest of the world. This is an untenable situation. There is no way in which a World Bank mission to an African, Latin American or Asian country can seriously complain about government subsidies, trade discrimination, seizure of assets of political opponents, trade bloc trading, or industrial policy while the very same policies are prosecuted by the framers of the international economic system. The contradiction can be papered over for a while, but cannot be ignored forever. If the international neoliberal rules are no longer considered the appropriate rules for the United States and Europe, should they be considered as the right rules for the rest of the world?

There is simply no current answer to this question. The new rules have to be invented and introduced or the entire system will become incoherent and internally contradictory so much that eventually no “system” at all will exist. The world will be back to individual country optimization under the rules of the jungle.

By showing Musk’s X the red card, has Brazil scored a goal for all democracies?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

At 10 minutes past midnight on 31 August, Elon Musk’s X (nee Twitter) went dark in Brazil, a country of more than 200 million souls, many of them enthusiastic users of online services. The day before, a supreme court justice, Alexandre de Moraes, had done something hitherto unthinkable: ordered the country’s ISPs to block access to the platform, threatened a daily fine of 50,000 Brazilian reis (just under £6,800) for users who bypassed the ban by using virtual private networks (VPNs) and froze the finances of Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service provider in the country. The order would remain in force until the platform complied with the decisions of the supreme federal court, paid fines totalling 18.3m reis (nearly £2.5m) and appointed a representative in Brazil, a legal requirement for foreign companies operating there. Moraes had also instructed Apple and Google to remove the X app and VPN software from their stores, but later reversed that decision, citing concerns about potential “unnecessary” disruptions.

Cue shock, horror, incredulity, outrage and all the reactions in between. Musk – who has been sparring with Moraes for quite a while – tweeted: “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes.” The animosity between the two goes back to 8 January 2023, after the defeat of Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, when a mob of his supporters attacked federal government buildings in the capital, Brasília. The mob invaded and caused deliberate damage to the supreme federal court, the national congress and the Planalto presidential palace in an abortive attempt to overthrow the democratically elected president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva…

Read on

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

“There are no AI-shaped holes lying around”

This is how I reconcile the facts that (a) AI is already powerful and (b) it’s having relatively little impact so far

Making AI work today requires ripping up workflows and rebuilding for AI. This is hard and painful to do…

From a tweet by Matt Clifford, a UK AI enthusiast and Chair of ARIA.

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!