Summertime, when…
It’s that time of year, when everything is muddy, brown and skies are grey. So it was nice while sorting through photos to stumble on a reminder of how the garden looked six months ago.
Quote of the Day
”They tried to bury me but they didn’t know I was a seed.”
- Sinéad O’Connor (1966-2023)
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Lightnin’ Hopkins | Live 1964
Mesmerising.
Long Read of the Day
The phoney comforts of AI skepticism
This is an interesting essay by Casey Newton. It was prompted by attending a conference in Berkeley that brought together engineers at big tech companies, independent safety researchers, academics, nonprofit leaders, and people who have worked in government to discuss whether AI poses an existential threat, how the risks and benefits should be weighed, whether it should be regulated (and, if so, how) and when might we expect AGI.
Casey’s takeaway from the event is that there are two intellectual ‘camps’ here: one (mostly external to the tech industry) holds that AI is fake and sucks; the other (mostly internal) believes that AI is real and dangerous. Casey is in the latter camp.
One way you can demonstrate that AI is real is by looking at how many people use it. ChatGPT, the most popular generative AI product on the market, said this week that it has 300 million weekly users, already making it one of the largest consumer products on the internet.
Another way you can demonstrate that AI is real is by looking at where tech giants are spending their money. It’s true that tech companies (and the venture capitalists that back them) often make mistakes; VCs expect to have more failures than they have successes. Occasionally, they get an entire sector wrong — see the excess of enthusiasm for cleantech in the 2000s, or the crypto blow-up of the past few years.
In aggregate, though, and on average, they’re usually right. It’s not impossible that the tech industry’s planned quarter-trillion dollars of spending on infrastructure to support AI next year will never pay off. But it is a signal that they have already seen something real.
The most persuasive way you can demonstrate the reality of AI, though, is to describe how it is already being used today. Not in speculative sci-fi scenarios, but in everyday offices and laboratories and schoolrooms. And not in the ways that you already know — cheating on homework, drawing bad art, polluting the web — but in ones that feel surprising and new.
With that in mind, here are some things that AI has done in 2024…
Read on.
There’s already been lots of interesting (and sometimes predictable) pushback against Casey’s analysis. I liked Dave Karpf’s contribution in particular.
“If you combed through everything I’ve posted or reskeeted on Bluesky”, he writes,
“you could surely find me saying some version of ‘AI is fake and it sucks, probably in the midst of cackling about some headline. I say a lot of things online. Much of what I say is glib.
But the reason why labeling the entire AI skeptic camp according to our most-glib retorts doesn’t sit right is that people in this camp (myself included) have written plenty of more thorough and serious critiques. We, broadly speaking, think that generative AI is very real and very dangerous, specifically because it does not work as-advertised. (Or, as Brian Merchant once wrote, “I’m not saying don’t be nervous about the onslaught of AI services — but I am saying be nervous for the right reasons.”)
Books, etc.
’Tis the season of ‘Books of the Year’ features. The Financial Times’s journalists came up with an autodidact’s nightmare — a list of 173 tomes! The Observer New Review (for which I write) devoted most of Sunday’s edition to the subject. In thinking about a personal list I came up with a different idea — books I read in 2024 from which I had learned something useful or had changed the way I thought about things.
Here’s the list:
- Dan Davies: The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – and How The World Lost its Mind
- Neil Lawrence: The Atomic Human
- Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy Weinstein: System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
- Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson: Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity Abe Newman and Henry Farrell: Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy
- Ethan Mollick: Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI
- Tony Judt: *Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
- Martin Wolf: The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
- Francis Spufford: Red Plenty
- Adam Kirsch: The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us
- Richard J. Evans: Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich
- Virginia Woolf: Collected Essays
- Claire Keegan: Small Things Like These
- Parmy Olson: AI, ChatGPT and the race that will change the world
I’ll write some notes on why I chose these in the next week or so.
My commonplace booklet
The Economist on Assad’s torturę centres
Link (gift article)
Among all the symbols of Mr Assad’s brutality, none was as potent as Saidnaya prison. Many of the tens of thousands of people taken over decades to what Syrians called al-Maslakh al-Basharia, the human slaughterhouse, never came out. Human-rights groups estimate that between 13,000 and 30,000 people have been murdered in Saidnaya alone since the beginning of the Syrian uprising in 2011. And there are many other jails as well.
What people found when they got to Saidnaya was even worse than they had imagined. The regime had dug hidden cells into the ground beneath the jail, packing men by the dozen into the pitch-black chambers. Screams echoed into the night air around the prison, both of agony at the prisoners’ suffering and of ecstasy about their liberation. The emptied cells reeked of urine contained in plastic bottles; sodden blankets were piled in corners. In one corridor lay a prosthetic leg, its owner nowhere to be found. On the walls of an abandoned cell someone had scribbled “take me, already” in Arabic. A group of fighters discovered an iron press, which they claimed was used to crush the remains of executed prisoners…
And now Assad has been granted asylum in Russia by his pal Vladimir.
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
- “Teen creates memecoin, dumps it, earns $50,000 in a few hours!” Ars Technica. The site that enabled him to do this — Pump.fun — is (sadly, or perhaps fortunately) not accessible in the UK.
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!