Surreeality
Standing on Monday morning in Noordeinde in the Hague waiting for a friend I was drawn to the window of an art dealership across the street. I hadn’t realised how weird the picture would seem until I printed it.
Quote of the Day
“Said Hamlet to Ophelia, I’ll draw a sketch of thee. What kind of pencil shall I use? 2B or not 2B?”
Spike Milligan
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Peaks | The Cormorant
This was new to me, but a real gem. Peaks is a musical partnership between violinist George Smith and cellist Duncan Strachan, founder members of the Maxwell Quartet. Using both electronic and acoustic media, Peaks weaves together an eclectic range of musical strands, with much of the duo’s work focusing on aspects of Scottish traditional culture.
Long Read of the Day
Against purposeful activity and Abrahamic religion in a world of abundance
This a fabulous essay by Branko Milanovic triggered by re-reading one of my favourite essays — Keynes’s “Economic Possibilities for our grandchildren”. What I love about Branko’s essay is the way he sees something in Keynes’s that most of us had missed.
In a recent discussion regarding the “forthcoming abundance” produced by artificial intelligence and reduced need for human labor — seemingly a beautiful future— I cited, as many people do, Keynes’ somewhat enigmatic and multi-layered 1930 short essay “The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”. What is relevant from that piece in the current context are Keynes’ extremely optimistic forecasts of economic growth: four- to eight-fold increase in average per capita income in advanced countries in the next one hundred years which turned out to be right on the spot; his view that such material abundance would lead to much lower need for labor and hence a workweek of about 15 hours; and finally his dilemma on whether humanity –having finally solved “the economic problem”—will know how to use all these extra hours of freedom and leisure. In that short latter discussion, there is an unmistakable similarity between Keynes of “The Economic Possibilities..” and Marx of “The German Ideology”: both holding an optimistic view that free time will enable us to fully express our human nature, by getting rid of the stultifying and numbing division of labor and (to use Marx’s example), “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon…criticise [art] after dinner”. Keynes has a similar optimistic view that the solution of the economic problem which has, for millennia, eluded humanity will set us on a path of freedom from constraint and of flourishment of all human capabilities. Similarities in that respect between Marx and Keynes are very strong and perhaps worth exploring further. And contrasting with what we believe now—which may be far less optimistic.
What struck me however in this new reading of “The Economic Possibilities…” is something which I overlooked before and which I think, for “political” purposes, Keynes mentioned but failed to elaborate. This is Keynes’ rejection of purposeful activity as desirable for humankind once the economic problem has been solved, and doubt on whether monotheistic religions will be needed once we reach abundance…
Do read it.
Books, etc.
As attentive readers will know, I’m reading and enjoying Frank Fukuyama’s memoir. Over the years he’s taken a lot of stick (much of it unfair) for his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. But writing in the FY last weekend, Janan Ganesh had a perceptive take on it.
Even if he was wrong to assume the ultimate triumph of freedom circa 1989, he was usefully wrong. His thesis shaped and guided debate for decades. At the margins, it might also have had real-world benefits. The era of liberal hubris that he unwittingly fed probably swept people along who otherwise had illiberal instincts: who might, say, have opposed EU or Nato enlargement. People back the strong horse. He told them which one it was, accurately or not.
There are such things as great wrong ideas. The species owes much of its progress to them.
Later on, he sums up:
At 73, Fukuyama seems to have a wry, knocked-about quality to him. It is strange that he isn’t bitterer. Since at least 9/11, he has been taken for a liberal naïf, often by people who know the offending book by its title alone. Had he not written it, or had he hedged the thesis into a fog of equivocation, would the world be better off? At the very least, my own profession might not have had such a useful intellectual framing device these past few decades. Beware the right and useless.
Spot on.
My commonplace booklet
AI in Science
An interesting paper. The Abstract reads:
Scientific progress is a key driver of economic growth and prosperity. There is great excitement- but also concerns- about the impacts of AI on science, but so far little data. We provide early insights on this from three data sources: a sample of 15 million Gemini interactions, an inventory of over 2,600 specialized AI models across disciplines, and a survey of over 600 scientists. We map these data to a new taxonomy of scientific tasks to study how scientists are using AI. Four main findings emerge. First, we find broad adoption and coverage: scientists use AI more than most other occupations. Specialized AI models have broad disciplinary coverage and are highly cited. Nearly half of the scientists surveyed report using some form of AI every day. Second, we document evidence that LLMs (proxied through Gemini usage) and specialized models act as complements—LLMs are used for general analysis, coding, and manuscript preparation, while specialized models provide domain-specific predictions, data generation and classification. Third, scientists report large productivity gains from using AI: a saving of nearly 7 hours per week, time which is primarily re-invested in more research. Finally, we show that AI is already changing the scientific process. As some stages of scientific research become easier, bottlenecks shift downstream. Scientists report an increased backlog of untested hypotheses and substantial demand for output verification. Our findings suggest that AI holds significant potential to increase scientific productivity. However, as with other sectors, its ultimate impact will be governed by complex task interdependencies and investment into the elimination of emerging bottlenecks.
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