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.

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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.

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!

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.

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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!