Mayfly Three
That's AI for now ~ What are platform pravileges? ~ Thefty nifties ~ D for danger? ~ Brilliantov but... ~ The present hour is yours ~ Heroes & villains ~ Amusement arcade
That’s AI for now
Someone who knows, who wanted to remain anonymous, told me:
“Modern AI has a distinct interpretability problem. It is often impossible for a human to explain why a given model produces a given output. As a result it may take months of effort to re-engineer a complex algorithmic system when it is discovered to be making systematic mistakes…
AI has reached a place where innovation is slowing down significantly. The computational costs and latency implications of automatically processing streaming video and audio with full fidelity means there will almost certainly be no significant progress in handling them. In general, I don't see any meaningful change in the status quo, barring some path-breaking innovations in artifical intelligence or general computing.
This is compounded by the fact that AI models are taking longer and longer to train as they grow in size to handle more complex problems, such that, even assuming a constant rate of innovation, there is going to be slower and slower turnaround in turning those innovations into material improvements.”
I’m pleased if this stagnation is indeed the case. We all think we need a moment to get to grips with the ethics and regulation of AI, don’t we?
I’m reminded of Arthur Koestler’s brilliant novel Darkness at Noon, and its theory of history in which technical advances leap, yet it takes time for society to adjust to the new circumstances (the metaphor is a barge’s rise on a filling lock). During the period of relative 'immaturity' democracy and personal freedoms suffer, and ‘only demagogues invoke the “higher judgement of the people”’. That certainly feels like where were are now. Once the lock is filled, according to this theory, democracy and personal freedom must inevitably conquer, and then ‘it is the duty and the function of the opposition to appeal to the masses’.
What are Platform Pravileges?
One of the themes of this newsletter is Platform Pravileges. And it’s not a typo. Pravilege is actually quite a useful, if ugly, word that I would like to see revitilised. In Middle English, it meant an evil law or privilege, and was a play on words from the Latin privilegium and pravus “wrong, bad”. I use it to flag moments when platforms get an advantage that outweighs their contribution.
A platform is something that presents itself as an enabler. But never forget the aim of a platform is to become a rentier. Think Uber, JustEat, Patreon. They want to make money off other people’s work for doing nothing besides attracting people, processing payments, and slicing a percentage. The more people using their platform, the more money they make, but the less work they do per action. It’s scalable. There’s also a winner-takes-all effect. If everyone’s buying on Ebay, why would you sell on AcmeAuctions?
The platforms make a lot of money, but it’s not proportional to the work they’re doing. It’s a tax on the work of their contributors (taxi drivers, restaurants, freelance designers). And this is a tax that concentrates with the platform owners and does not distribute the things people need, like schools or hospitals, because our governments are inept at taxing platforms (and spending tax receipts wisely, but that’s another story). Platform Pravileges steal The Goose’s Common.
Thefty Nifties
Since I wrote about NFTs last week there have been quite a few reports of theft. Enterprising thieves / art provocateurs are taking images of art they did not create, tokenising them, and selling them on NFT marketplaces.
An artist called Kevin Alexander says he created this piece which he published on Behance in 2013. He says that Wu Tang Clan then took his art, minted it as an NFT, and sold it for at least 25 Ethereum on Rarible. Another artist called Corbin Rainbolt says someone has done the same with his artwork. There are plenty more examples out there too.
This whole episode is rife with questions about what ownership should be, and how copyright should work. Because, of course, Alexander was trying to make money by jumping on Wu Tang’s popularity in the first place. I wonder how existing legislation can cope with this?
What it does tell us is:
While NFT sellers claim they provide authenticity - and that’s where a lot of the value is supposed to come from - they’re no more real than a signature on a print. Provenance continues to be important.
It’s the Platform’s Pravilege not to care. They take a cut of anything sold, most likely in crypto, and can wash their hands of it afterwards. OK, if they’re in it for the long haul maybe they need to be a bit careful, but where there’s a quick buck to be made, a quick buck will be made. Whenever there’s massive hype - and rules and norms are blurred - people are going to take advantage.
The big names, with existing fanbases, will continue to win. There’s no doubt in my mind that the buyer paid more to buy this piece from Wu Tang than they would have to buy it from Alexander. I also would not be surprised if the controversy and hype increases the value of this NFT, just as it increases the impression of Wu street smarts.
FFS Taco Bell are selling NFTs of their logos. These people mint tweets. You can turn anything into a product, but that doesn’t mean there’ll always be idiot buyers.
D for danger?
I have been taking vitamin D supplements since January 2020.
I started because I had read they might help prevent the development of pre-diabetes, and because my GP had once said most people in Britain are deficient.
They have an unexpected effect. They lift my mood. They me feel brighter. It could be placebo effect, and maybe the change was cased by something else, correlation doesn’t imply causality etc.…but still, I’m pleased. I also haven’t had a cold since then - but then that could be down to social distancing.
Many have suggested Vitamin D can be useful in the prevention of covid, or for reducing covid’s effects. It seems this is probably not the case.
A good Lindyman article made me reevaluate my decision to take vitamin D. To paraphrase: Evolution is an amazing engineer and we’re actually pretty optimised. Our biochemistry is complex with many feedback processes maintaining systems in homeostasis. Mess around too much, with high doses of micronutrients and the like, and we’ll screw things up. “In the best studies, and over and over again, long term micronutrient megadosing *fails* to improve health outcomes, and sometimes makes them worse.”
(This reminded me of the amazing interactive biochemical pathways map. The complexity is staggering. Again it seems incredible that this has all evolved by the incremental action of natural selection even over geologic time. EvolutionWTF?)
Anyway it’s worth thinking about. All those Silicon Valley guys trying to become immortal with the power of their brains, supplementing themselves up, are really just chasing the elixir of youth. A tale as old as time. But ultimately, with a decent lifestle, our optimised bodies extract all the nutrients they need. There are rarely any real short cuts.
Even so I’ll continue to take my Vit. D.
Brilliantov but…
Unintended Consequinces
Everyone loves a murmuration. A new simulation of self-propelling particles showed they acted in unexpected ways, which the researchers called swirlonic. Most notably they do not accelerate when force is applied, violating Newton’s second law. As the research by Nikolai Brilliantov continues, they hope to be able to create self-assembling materials by imbuing them with some form of active propulsion.
The worry, as always, is that this kind of thinking will just end up being used to make more awful killing machines. I can certainly see this research being applied to improving the deadly effectiveness of drone swarms.
The present hour is yours
“The city's leading cleric went out to bury his friend;
Do you not see he brought no lesson from the grave?
The present hour is yours; the past, a babble of a dream;
And what remains has nothing sweet in store for you.”
Al-Ma'arri, d.1057
Heroes & villains
Andy Kirkpatrick
I enjoy reading the prolific Andy Kirkpatrick on Insta @psychovertical. He’s a climber, but interesting to me for his thoughtfulness and honesty, even when I don’t agree with him. For example,
“I’m very susceptible to new ideas – but not in a good way – with every book or podcast renovating my thinking, every new big idea a mental regime change. I’m not the kind of person who starts a cult; I’m the kind of person who joins a cult…To steal a line from Ginger Baker, I see the dawn breaking and think I know the day and will run off to tell the world of its wonder without even seeing the sun…The thing to remember is not to take anything I write seriously or imagine it’s some sort of mini manifesto or position or statement, or even well (or badly) thought out (it’s just written out). Any conclusions I seem to be drawing are only transitory”.
It reminds me of the philosopher John Gray, in The Soul of the Marionette, advising readers to let meaning come and go rather than trying to impose sense on life. I will ignore this advice and write more about John Gray I’m sure. He’s another hero.
This one from Psychovertical is good too.
Amusement arcade
I consume, therefore I am…
Visual
I have watched the first three of Adam Curtis’s new films on iPlayer. They very much appear to be more of the same (Hypernormalisation, Bitter Lake), even down to the repeated snippets of Aphex Twin Ambient Works Vol. II. The archive footage is amazing. Interesting as they are, however, there’s a defect at their heart. Curtis tries to seed a monolithic view of now in a series of interesting ideas and biographies that he has selected; he’s emplotting a narrative, deciding what to put in and what to leave out, and painting it as causal. It’s a kind of teleology with hindsight, doubly flawed. An attempt to put complexity in a box and tie it up with a bow. And while it exposes conspiracy theorists’ tricks, it uses them incessantly too. It slips unsupported assertions next to common knowledge, there’s the neverending hint that something sinister is going on, and it jumps around between ideas, never quite finishing them, leaving the viewer hanging with a feeling of disquiet rather than clarity.
Studio Ghibli’s Kiki’s Delivery Service is charming, beautifully illustrated, and welcomingly slow. It does seem a little keen on flashing underage knickers though.
Audio
Aphex Twin! Mulatu Astatke & the Heliocentrics, Mr. Fingers. Deacon Blue - Real Gone Girl 30 times, Kirsty McColl, Squeeze. Stanley Cowell. Stark Reality. Steve Spacek.
Reasons to be Cheerful podcast on the Bevington Report. In Our Time podcast on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Clubhouse just seems like talk radio to me, but if you want an invite HMU.
Food
Cheese on toast. And you know what? I waited for it to cool down and didn’t burn the roof of my mouth. There’s a first time for everything. Vegetarian toad-in-the-hole. Persian Tah-Cheen made by my friend’s mum. Puff pastry filled with spinach, parsley, toasted sunflower seeds, pepper and nutmeg. Domino’s.
Links
This Scott Alexander book review of Fussell on Class is hilarious. Do you recognise yourself? You can do the quiz too and decide if you think it’s still relevant.
If you have been, or know anyone affected by breast cancer, I think this old article by Ann Boyer in the New Yorker is fantastic writing, cutting through so much sentimental bullcrap.
More on nifities from an artist experimenting with making them.