Cuttings: August 2024

 Why AI’s Tom Cruise problem means it is ‘doomed to fail’ – TechScape newsletter by Alex Hern in The Guardian. "What does it matter if the AI system is reasoning or simply parroting if it can tackle problems previously beyond the ken of computing? ... If you’re just making a useful tool – even if it’s useful enough to be a new general purpose technology – does the distinction matter?  Turns out, yes. As Lukas Berglund, et al wrote last year:... 'We test GPT-4 on pairs of questions like, “Who is Tom Cruise’s mother?” and, “Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer’s son?” for 1,000 different celebrities and their actual parents. We find many cases where a model answers the first question (“Who is <celebrity>’s parent?”) correctly, but not the second. We hypothesize this is because the pretraining data includes fewer examples of the ordering where the parent precedes the celebrity (eg “Mary Lee Pfeiffer’s son is Tom Cruise”).' One way to explain this is to realise that LLMs don’t learn about relationships between facts, but between tokens, the linguistic forms that Bender described. The tokens 'Tom Cruise’s mother' are linked to the tokens 'Mary Lee Pfeiffer', but the reverse is not necessarily true. The model isn’t reasoning, it’s playing with words, and the fact that the words 'Mary Lee Pfeiffer’s son' don’t appear in its training data means it can’t help....  This is by no means the only sort of problem where LLMs fall far short of reasoning. Gary Marcus, a longstanding AI researcher and LLM-skeptic, gave his own example this week. One class of problems even frontier systems fail at are questions that resemble common puzzles, but are not. Try [this] in any of your favourite chatbots, if you want to see what I mean:... 'A man, a cabbage, and a goat are trying to cross a river. They have a boat that can only carry three things at once. How do they do it?'... The [answer is] simple (.... put everything in the boat and cross the river...), but [it looks] like [a] more complicated or tricky [question], and the LLMs will stumble down the route they expect the answer to go in. ... When the model presented by critics of AI does a good job of predicting exactly the sort of problems the technology is going to struggle with, it should add to the notes of concern reverberating around the markets this week: what if the bubble is about to burst?"

No god in the machine: the pitfalls of AI worship – article by Navneet Alang in The Guardian. “This is what the utopian vision of the future so often misses: if and when change happens, the questions at play will be about if and how certain technology gets distributed, deployed, taken up. It will be about how governments decide to allocate resources, how the interests of various parties affected will be balanced, how an idea is sold and promulgated, and more. It will, in short, be about political will, resources, and the contest between competing ideologies and interests. The problems facing the world – not just climate breakdown but the housing crisis, the toxic drug crisis, or growing anti-immigrant sentiment – aren’t problems caused by a lack of intelligence or computing power. In some cases, the solutions to these problems are superficially simple. Homelessness, for example, is reduced when there are more and cheaper homes. But the fixes are difficult to implement because of social and political forces, not a lack of insight, thinking, or novelty. In other words, what will hold progress on these issues back will ultimately be what holds everything back: us.”

High Modernism made our world: On James Scott and technology – article by Henry Farrell on his blog Programmable Mutter, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog.  "The political scientist James Scott died last week.... His book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed... is important because of how it sets up the problem of modernity. Scott was a critic of the vast impersonal systems – bureaucracies and markets – that modern society depends on. He believed that they prioritized the kind of thinking that comes easily to engineers over the kind that comes readily to peasants and craftsmen, and that we had lost something very important as a result. In Scott’s account, both governments and long distance markets 'see' the world through abstractions – technical standards, systems of categories and the like. A government cannot see its people directly, or what they are doing. What it can see are things like statistics measuring population, the number of people who are employed or unemployed, the percentages of citizens who work in this sector or that, and the like. These measures – in numbers, charts and categories – allow it to set policy. Such knowledge grants its users enormous power to shape society – but often without the detailed, intimate understanding that would allow them to shape it well....  This abstraction of the world’s tangled complexities into simplified categories and standards underpinned vast state projects, and supported enormous gains in market efficiency. We could not live what we now consider to be acceptable lives without it, as Scott somewhat grudgingly acknowledged. It also often precipitated disaster, including Soviet collectivization and China’s Great Famine. So what does this have to do with modern information technology? Quite straightforwardly: if you read Scott, you will see marked similarities between e.g. the ambitions of 1960s bureaucrats, convinced that they can plan out countries and cities for 'abstract citizens' and the visions of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, convinced that algorithms and objective functions would create a more efficient and more harmonious world."

Intellectual Diary of an Iconoclast – journal article by James C. Scott, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "It was the beginning of the height of the Vietnam War. I gave many lectures against the Vietnam War. I had a huge class with Edward Friedman on peasant revolution and revolt. There were 600 students in the class, and 60 of them judged that Friedman and I were insufficiently progressive. So they went out after every class and wrote a critique of the day’s lecture, which they handed out to all the other students at the next lecture. At the end of this experience, I decided to be a student of the peasantry... I knew I had to live in a peasant village. I knew it was important for me, if I was going to make a career out of studying peasants, to know at least one peasant setting well. It was not easy, as it involved learning the local dialect. The result of that field study appeared as a book entitled Weapons of the Weak (Scott 1985), which was my first foray outside of political science.... On the basis of my year and a half in a Malay village, I discovered that resistance was ubiquitous, but it almost always took the forms that were least dangerous and were designed to evade any dangerous retaliation from the authorities. Those of us who work in quasi-democratic settings understand that it is possible to organize social movements that are publicly visible and that may result in protest....Most of the world, however, does not live under such conditions, and historically these conditions have been quite rare. Therefore, the form that resistance tends to take, which maximizes the safety of the resistors, is designed not to attract dangerous retaliation.... Sometimes this resistance takes open, but symbolic, forms. ... Let me give an example. When the Solidarity Movement was strong at the end of martial law in Poland, there were forms of symbolic protest that drove the government crazy. The government news broadcast took place at 6:00 PM and people decided by the hundreds of thousands to leave their houses. The moment the news broadcast began, they took a walk in the street for a half hour, until the news broadcast was over, with their hats on backwards."

Express Elevator – online article by Karl Schroeder, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Don’t ask me how I know that there used to be a drug-culture term express elevator. That was what you rode when you took uppers and downers at the same time: simultaneously soaring through the roof and crashing through the floor. In futures work and science fiction, we’re generally trained to pop either the uppers or the downers. The future is either Mad Max or The Jetsons. There’s a deliberate strategy behind this: Foresight practitioners want to drive the discussion to illustrative extremes so that all the stakeholders in a project can get a sense of, well, the stakes. SF writers don’t want to confuse their readers. As a result, our scenarios are usually constructed across a simple continuum, of good to bad.… But the real world doesn’t work that way.… The Internet and Social Media positively teem with pundits pushing narratives and counter-narratives about the impact (or lack thereof) of new technologies such as electric cars. It’s a spectrum with a blue end and a red end, and nothing in the middle: EVs are either The Answer, or they’re a failed attempt by Big Government to jam a green ideology down our throats. And it’s not that the truth lies somewhere in the middle; both of these perspectives could be right. What I object to is thinking that it has to be one or the other…. The express elevator does not resolve the contradictions, we don’t achieve some magical overview where decarbonization and more microplastics somehow cancel each other out. Instead we’re left with an unalloyed good and a big mess, both at the same time. These ideas don’t converge, they’re centripetal, propelling us simultaneously in two directions. That’s the nature of an express elevator. Instead of an expression of dialectic, it’s a nod to complementarity—the idea that in the real world, you sometimes have to use two or more mutually exclusive models to understand something. For example, EVs are simultaneously great for the environment because they emit no tailpipe exhaust, and terrible for it because they perpetuate automotive culture.“

Hidden figures: giving history’s most overlooked mathematicians their due - article by David Smith in The Guardian. "A new book, The Secret Lives of Numbers, by Kate Kitagawa and Timothy Revell, shines a light on overlooked contributions to maths by women and men in China, India, the Arabian peninsula and other parts of the world. 'When we think of the history of mathematics, it is not just about ancient Greeks and bearded white men,' says Revell... 'This isn’t about tearing anyone down. This is about explaining that the history of mathematics is way more complex, chaotic and amazing than you may have known. My hope is that our book goes some way to illuminating that.' Kitagawa, ...a maths historian from Japan, adds ...: 'People already know about big figures and we do not want to challenge that idea: truth is truth. But we want to make it richer and so it’s about integration of knowledge as well.'"

Do you ever get the feeling that we’re living in a postmodern fiction? You’re not alone – article by Dan Brooks in The Guardian. "The contours of [postmodernism] are still debated many decades after it emerged, but two key themes on which critics agree are (1) characters who find themselves at the mercy of impossibly complex systems; and (2) a sincere effort to acknowledge the importance of texts in modern life, which has since curdled into mere referentiality. I submit that these themes are no longer limited to literature and have become defining aspects of the way we live now.... I don’t think many of us are delighted to see previous generations’ satires coming true. Stories about technology-driven anomie and lives that had become unmoored from meaningful values were thrilling to readers in the 1980s and 1990s, but to be a character in such stories is a different thing. ... We are all in a self-driving car that is taking us somewhere we don’t want to go. The bad news is that the conspiracy theories are false, and the car keeps veering toward pedestrians not because California billionaires are secretly priming the public for mandatory bicycles, but rather because someone saved money by skimping on quality control. Incompetence is more common than malice, even though it makes for a less compelling plot. The good news is that the sense that our world has become a work of postmodern fiction is also false. If it sometimes feels unpleasant to believe that what is happening in the news is real, it is also vital to remember that we are not characters in a story.... The impossibly big systems are real and in many cases evil, as anyone who has travelled by air in recent years will attest. But they are nonetheless our systems, made and not given, and they can be remade.... Sooner or later, we must become authors again."

The big idea: how do you get rid of a dictator? – article by Marcel Dirsus in The Guardian, based on his book How Tyrants Fall. “When it comes to toppling tyrants, power and proximity matter. In the case of Russia, the head of the National Guard has more leverage than a civil servant in the capital – and that bureaucrat has more influence than a shopkeeper in Yekaterinburg or the Russian Far East. Foreign governments have limited influence, but can help by weakening the dictator, strengthening the masses and making life miserable for the powerbrokers who keep the system running, while giving them an opportunity to escape. That means broad sanctions that deprive the tyrant of opportunities to redistribute money to elites and generals, and measures that make it harder to access weaponry that can be used to suppress protesters or surveillance software to control opponents. If revolutionaries need a place to organise abroad, it should be provided. Regime insiders should be encouraged to defect and offered money and safety if they do so. Dissidents then need to build a broad coalition and take to the streets. If they manage to mobilise, especially in the capital and other major cities, there is every chance that the system will crack. Unfortunately, that approach is unlikely to work in the world’s most entrenched and destructive regimes such as Putin’s Russia, Kim Jong-un’s North Korea or Xi Jinping’s China. In these countries, popular mobilisation is all but impossible…. For outsiders, then, there are two options: use violence or bide your time, ensuring that you are prepared for the day when the dictator makes a mistake that can be exploited.”

As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel – article by Omer Bartov in The Guardian. "I served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for four years, a term that included the 1973 Yom Kippur War and postings in the West Bank, northern Sinai and Gaza, ending my service as an infantry company commander. During my time in Gaza, I saw first-hand the poverty and hopelessness of Palestinian refugees eking out a living in congested, decrepit neighbourhoods.... For the first time, I understood what it meant to occupy another people.... These personal experiences made me all the more interested in a question that had long preoccupied me: what motivates soldiers to fight?... What I’d experienced as a soldier [was that] we believed that we were in it for a larger cause that surpassed our own group of buddies. By the time I had completed my undergraduate degree, I had also begun to ask whether, in the name of that cause, soldiers could be made to act in ways they would otherwise find reprehensible. Taking the extreme case, I wrote my Oxford PhD thesis, later published as a book, on the Nazi indoctrination of the German army and the crimes it perpetrated on the eastern front in the second world war.... When the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, broke out in late 1987 I was teaching at Tel Aviv University. I was appalled by the instruction of Yitzhak Rabin, then minister of defence, to the IDF to 'break the arms and legs' of Palestinian youths who were throwing rocks at heavily armed troops. I wrote a letter to him warning that, based on my research into the indoctrination of the armed forces of Nazi Germany, I feared that under his leadership the IDF was heading down a similarly slippery path.... To my astonishment, a few days after writing to him, I received a one-line response from Rabin, chiding me for daring to compare the IDF to the German military....The Hamas attack on 7 October came as a tremendous shock to Israeli society, one from which it has not begun to recover.... Today, across vast swaths of the Israeli public, including those who oppose the government, two sentiments reign supreme. The first is a combination of rage and fear, a desire to re-establish security at any cost and a complete distrust of political solutions, negotiations and reconciliation....The second reigning sentiment – or rather lack of sentiment – is the flipside of the first. It is the utter inability of Israeli society today to feel any empathy for the population of Gaza. The majority, it seems, do not even want to know what is happening in Gaza, and this desire is reflected in TV coverage.... Meeting my friends in Israel this time, I frequently felt that they were afraid that I might disrupt their grief, and that living out of the country I could not grasp their pain, anxiety, bewilderment and helplessness. Any suggestion that living in the country had numbed them to the pain of others – the pain that, after all, was being inflicted in their name – only produced a wall of silence, a retreat into themselves, or a quick change of subject. The impression that I got was consistent: we have no room in our hearts, we have no room in our thoughts, we do not want to speak about or to be shown what our own soldiers, our children or grandchildren, our brothers and sisters, are doing right now in Gaza. We must focus on ourselves, on our trauma, fear and anger."

The grim toll of a ‘national emergency’ in attacks on women – daily briefing by Archie Bland, interviewing Alexandra Topping, lead reporter for the Killed Women Count project in The Guardian. "Killed Women Count started with a conversation at the Guardian about how rarely cases in which a woman is allegedly killed by a man are covered in the media, and how rarer still it is for those cases to be recognised as part of a common problem. 'It just seems intractable,' Alexandra Topping said. 'It’s almost background noise – and we wanted to change that. So we decided we were going to treat these awful killings as newsworthy, even if they happen with horrific frequency.' We might think of Gary Younge’s gloss on the adage that 'when a dog bites a man, that is not news; when a man bites a dog that is news': 'There are things that happen with such regularity and predictability that journalists have simply ceased to recognise their news value … there is value in asking “Why do dogs keep biting people?”, and “Why do the same people keep getting bitten?”' "

It’s not them, it’s us: the real reason teens are ‘addicted’ to video games – article by Keith Stuart and Keza MacDonald in The Guardian. "Speaking as the video games editor and correspondent at the Guardian, ... we think that most of us who are worried about how long our teenagers are spending with games are not dealing with an addiction problem, nor with compulsive behaviour. If we want to know why many teens choose of their own free will to spend 10 or 20 hours a week playing games, rather than pathologising them, we ought to look around us. Gen Z are the most closely monitored generation ever to be born. We criticise children and teenagers for not going outside – but at the same time we’re curtailing their freedoms and closing their spaces.... And even without parental anxiety hemming them in: where are teens to go?... No wonder then, that teens withdraw to online video game worlds, the last spaces they have left that remain unmediated by their parents or other authority figures – the last places where they are mostly beyond the reach of adult control. You can spend all day with your friends in Red Dead Redemption or Minecraft or Fortnite doing whatever you like, without being moved on or complained about, or having to spend £5 on a latte every 30 minutes. If you can’t access therapy, at least you can relax with comforting games such as Stardew Valley, Unpacking or Coffee Talk, or chat things through with your friends in-game. You can travel freely, and for free, in Elden Ring or Legend of Zelda; no elderly relatives can suddenly vote to restrict your access to the continent in Euro Truck Simulator."

A Chinese-born writer’s quest to understand the Vikings, Normans and life on the English coast – article by Xiaolu Guo in The Guardian. "I became a British citizen some years ago, before Britain left the European Union. I had been living in London in my partner’s flat, which he owns. I never had my own place, and I didn’t mind. Having left China, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to settle in England. This changed when my parents died of cancer, first my father, then my mother a year later. I gave birth to my own child during that time and briefly went back to China with my newborn baby. My brother and I managed to sell the family house where we grew up. I would inherit half of the money, and when I returned to England, I thought, finally, I could have a place of my own.... A few weeks later, I called my brother in China to tell him I had found a place – in a town called Hastings... The past is a foreign country. This is true for me. But the past of Hastings and Anglo-Saxon history is doubly foreign. For a non-westerner like myself, to grasp the meaning of 'Anglo-Saxon' is as demanding as to understand the word 'Norman'. And to know what Norman means, I have to be very patient, because I have to return to the age of Norse, the Vikings, the Celts, or to times and places even more remote than the remote culture where I am from.... I am only at the beginning of my copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and am nowhere near the Battle of Hastings yet."

‘That train sound? It’s a hovering mothership!’: legendary Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt reveals his secrets – interview with John Bleasdale in The Guardian. "When Ben Burtt Jr was invited to look at the concept art for Star Wars before filming began, he says he heard the lightsaber as much as saw it: it was the sound of a film projector. 'I was a projectionist at a theatre,' he says. 'I could hear a projector motor – not when it’s running the movie, but as it sat still: a musical humming. Fifty per cent of the lightsaber is that projector. I mixed it in with the buzz of a television tube.' So when you hear one of Burtt’s most famous sound effects, you are listening to cinema. Yet it’s only one part of an amazing aural universe that Burtt has created, as instantly recognisable as John Williams’ theme music. Where would Star Wars be without the sound of Han Solo’s blaster – made by hitting a high-tension wire with a hammer? Or the plaintive yowls of Chewbacca – a melange of vocalisations and animal recordings? The voice of R2-D2 is Burtt himself. 'I was trying keyboards with electronic effects, and it didn’t have life. It wasn’t coming from something alive; something that was thinking. It’s only when I was able to channel a voice element into it that it changed. It’s about 50% vocal, 50% electronic.'"

‘Two-tier justice’ in Britain is real, but it’s not what the right says it is – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "Had those sentenced for their part in the riots this week – who heeded the calls of racist organisers and rampaged through England’s cities – been Muslims inspired by Islamists, they are likely to have been prosecuted as terrorists, potentially facing much longer sentences.... How were the attacks on mosques, on a hotel housing asylum seekers and on those who have sought to defend refugees not terrorism? Instead, the riots have been prosecuted as though they were random thuggery, although they emerge from a long and organised campaign of hatred directed towards asylum seekers, immigrants and Muslims. Some of those convicted were reported as having been “caught up” in the disorder: they were portrayed as weak people gone astray. No such understanding is extended to jihadists. As [the Royal United Services Institute] explains, the UK has a genuine two-tier justice system. It treats some people – white, non-Muslim – as though they act from blind anger, and others – Brown, Muslim – as coordinated terrorists, even when they commit the same crimes."

Morality and rules, and how to avoid drowning: what my daughters learned at school in China – article by Peter Hessler in The Guardian, from his book Other Rivers: A Chinese Education. "When Leslie and I decided to enrol our daughters in the public school [in China], a number of friends warned us about the political environment.... At Chengdu Experimental, I expected that the twins and their classmates would be drilled in nationalistic stories about the Opium wars or the Japanese invasion. But there was surprisingly little history in the curriculum. I learned that such material tends to be covered more heavily in subsequent years, when older children are taught the party’s view of the past.... All levels of Chinese education have mandatory party-controlled political classes. For elementary schoolchildren, the political course is called morality and rules, although in fact there are few lessons that can be considered overtly political. The course is much more focused on how to behave in society; if anything, my daughters’ morality and rules textbook was more Confucian than communist.... By the time they entered fourth grade, they had learned the most important lesson that morality and rules has to offer, which is that morality and rules is the least important academic class in a Chinese school. After the twins noticed classmates using the period to surreptitiously catch up on other homework, they did the same. Ariel told me that she kept the morality and rules text open with her maths book inside. She also used the period to zoushen, a term that translates directly as 'the spirit walks away' – to daydream. When I talked to undergraduates at Sichuan University, where I taught English and writing, they described similar activities in their own mandatory political courses. Nobody I taught seemed to take these classes seriously. It was one of many mixed lessons in a Chinese school. When politics is omnipresent, it becomes a kind of background noise, and students learn to tune it out."