Techno-Narcissism

Scott Galloway:Techno-Narcissism | No Mercy / No Malice

The tech innovator class has an Achilles tendon that runs from their heels to their necks: They believe their press.

Boris Johnson exits as he entered, with deceit and contempt

Boris Johnson exits as he entered, with deceit and contempt | Financial Times

Truly, nothing in his public life exposed him like the leaving of it.

Robert Shrimsley

Rearview mirror and all that history stuff

The Everything Blueprint — how British chip company Arm became a global powerhouse | Financial Times

Ashton concludes that trying “to create another Arm is as much folly as trying to create the next Google”. His recommendation is for the British government to focus instead on training and skills and providing a stable tax and regulatory regime.

But at a time when the US, EU and Chinese governments are pouring billions of dollars into subsidising their chip industries, this policy recipe seems thin gruel. Serendipity cannot substitute for strategy. And, as one industry executive is quoted as saying: “Without semiconductors, you’re nowheresville.”

Re: Serendipity cannot substitute for strategy, I am not so sure.It can for a while, anyway.

Martin Amis as the lurid chronicler of the UK

The Economist

These men dared to write vast superpower novels about the whole of society. His own smaller efforts were symptomatic of Britain’s decline: its aura of filthy pub carpets, its morbidly obese children, phone booths “slobberingly coated with thick red paint”, London “like the insides of an old plug”. Purpose had been lost along with the empire, and under Thatcher, that old witch, civility and civilisation had fallen apart. Nothing but weak left-liberalism remained to confront the ruins; that, and the scathing onslaught of his prose.

Getting rid of the fags helped the pub carpets. And Thatcher did Wales (see previous post).

Wales

‘We’re crap at capitalism. We need something different’: the battle for economic revival in the Welsh valleys | Economic recovery | The Guardian

The hope is that better access will reverse the decades-old brain drain and attract higher-paid workers from Cardiff and beyond. Vikki Howells, Labour member of the Senedd for Cynon Valley, says: “The main challenge is not unemployment, it’s low-paid employment. It is not a shortage of jobs: it is a shortage of jobs paying a decent wage so you don’t have to rely on food banks.”

Richest man in the world: but can he code?

Scarcity | No Mercy / No Malice

Scott Galloway writes:

The richest man in the world doesn’t make cars, rockets, or enterprise software — he makes handbags. Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH, is now worth more than Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg combined. He’s made his fortune not selling things people need, but things they want. LVMH controls the most prestigious luxury brands in the world, from Tiffany & Co. to Loro Piana to Louis Vuitton.

When you assemble artisans and create scarcity that results in a supply/demand imbalance, you generate a cash volcano that you can cap the same way you do an oil well — and turn on/off as needed. Businesses are either supply-constrained (e.g., rare earth minerals, 1945 Château Mouton wine, etc.) or demand-constrained (pretty much everything else). The companies that trade at the greatest multiples are those that are artificially supply-constrained, where the supply/demand imbalance puts a dial on the spigot the managers control. Imagine the decision to have more revenue is just a function of when you’d like more revenue (see above: Hermès).

I am amused that people are slow to realise that large language models (ChatGPT etc) do not understand what they are saying, or that they make things up — that is, they hallucinate. Performance on “surface layer” testing does not equate to competence. Anybody who has taught medical students knows that humans are quite capable of exhibiting the same behaviour. It was one of the values of the old fashioned viva. You could demonstrate the large gulf between understanding (sense)on the one hand, and rote — and fluent rote at that — simulation on the other (garbage).

The medical educationalists, obsessed as they are with statistical reliability, never realised that the viva’s main function was for the benefit of teachers rather than learners. It is called feedback.

The medical student as ChatGPT

Look up, not down

“in a mammoth bureaucracy obsessed with its own secrecy, the fault lines are best observed by those who, instead of peering down from the top, stand at the bottom and look up.“

Absolute Friends by John le Carré

True of the NHS.

The Crumbling of a World Order

The New Age of Tragedy – New Statesman

Good article, with contributions from Robert Kaplan, Helen Thompson and John Gray.

Helen Thompson

Faith that creative human agency can triumph over nature’s limits has been a central feature of most modern political projects, not least liberalism. Missing the fact that technology cannot create energy, this conviction has long proved overly sanguine. Those who assume that the political world can be reconstructed by the efforts of human will have never before had to bet so much on technology over energy as the driver of our material advancement.

We are now a long way removed from the revolutionary hopes of the 19th and 20th centuries that the transformation of collective life would mean the complete development of all natural resources and an end to scarcity

Robert D Kaplan

To keep from destroying ourselves in this Malthusian world, we will have to husband fear without being immobilised by it. We cannot assume that technology will come to the rescue of every dilemma. The Ancient Greeks argued that no man is lucky until he is dead, since catastrophe can befall any of us at any moment. To carry that over into humanity at large, we should not assume that catastrophe cannot befall us at any moment or in any historical period. That is, we will need to think tragically in order to avoid tragedy. And precisely because our civilisation is rubbing up against limits of resources and space, such tragic thinking is more vital than ever before. (Robert D Kaplan)

Yet, it is less in evidence. Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer in Britain are technocrats in spirit and background, and technocrats assume there is a solution to every problem, which leads to a certain arrogance. Meanwhile, the American political elite is more ideological than ever before, and this leads to another form of arrogance; the world’s problems will not go away if only all of humanity became democratic – as the American elite seems to believe.

I fear that the elites in both Britain and the US will have to learn about tragedy the hard way, by actually living it, due to their failures in seeing it ahead of time.

From the editorial:

Mr Kaplan’s recent book The Tragic Mind is an attempt to grapple with his past support for the Iraq War, which led him to suffer clinical depression for years afterwards. Having visited Fallujah in 2004 and found anarchy far worse than Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, he concluded: “I had failed my test as a realist… I helped promote a war in Iraq that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.”

It’s bleak out there.

The danger isn’t that AI destroys us. It’s that it drives us insane

Tech guru Jaron Lanier: ‘The danger isn’t that AI destroys us. It’s that it drives us insane’ | Jaron Lanier | The Guardian

Although many of the digital gurus started out as idealists, to Lanier there was an inevitability that the internet would screw us over. We wanted stuff for free (information, friendships, music), but capitalism doesn’t work like that. So we became the product – our data sold to third parties to sell us more things we don’t need. “I wrote something that described how what we now call bots will be turned into these agents of manipulation. I wrote that in the early 90s when the internet had barely been turned on.” He squeals with horror and giggles. “Oh my God, that’s 30 years ago!”