Author: Mathew Ingram

I’ve used this analogy before in other contexts, but the way we respond to or think about artificial intelligence reminds me of the old parable – first recorded in a Buddhist text from about 500 BCE – about the blind men who encountered an elephant for the first time. The man near the trunk thought it was a kind of snake, and the one near its legs thought it was a kind of tree; the man near the tusks thought it was a kind of spear, and so on. Casual users of OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude or Google’s Gemini probably have one vision of what AI is or can do – it can answer simple questions. University students probably see it as a way to write term papers more quickly. Others who use tools like OpenAI’s Sora video-generation engine have a different idea: they might see it as a tool much like Adobe’s Photoshop or Apple’s iMovie, but one that can create things that don’t exist. And those using AI tools in the lab might see it as a kind of supercomputer that can detect cancers or fold complex proteins.

All of these things are applications of current AI engines – so-called large-language models, or generative pre-trained transformers (which is what the GPT in ChatGPT stands for). In a sense, they are just tools, like a slide rule or a personal computer, or a steam-powered locomotive. But in the aggregate, all of these tools – and newer ones that are still being developed – look a lot like a tidal wave of disruption that could sweep through virtually every industry. In other words, AI looks a lot more like the Industrial Revolution, where mechanical processes took over a host of different industries, leading to the extinction of some jobs and the creation of others – new tasks that no one had even thought of before the machines came. In economic terms, it’s a classic example of what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” in which new innovations replace and make obsolete older innovations. So electricity replaces fire, cars replace horse-drawn carriages, and refrigeration replaces ice harvesting.

In their book AI Snake Oil, Princeton computer scientist Arvind Narayanan and PhD student Sayash Kapoor argue (among other things) that the blanket term AI covers a wide range of different technologies and methods, some reliable and others not. It’s as if we didn’t have terms for different forms of transportation, they write – all we have is the word “vehicle.” In such a world, they say, there would be “furious debates about whether or not vehicles are environmentally friendly, even though no one realizes that one side of the debate is talking about bikes and the other side is talking about trucks.” Someone who only uses ChatGPT to generate grocery lists or recipes probably thinks all the talk of an AI-powered apocalypse is nonsensical, because they may be unaware that modern LLMs have been shown to fabricate lies about both their behavior and their motivation, especially if they have been given an incentive, which we know because Anthropic continues to do research in an attempt to understand why Claude does what it does.

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Is AI like the slide rule or is it the Industrial Revolution?”

A computer game-style drone attack system has gone viral among Ukrainian military units and is being extended to reconnaissance, artillery and logistics operations, the nation’s first deputy prime minister has told the Guardian. Drone teams competing for points under the Army of Drones Bonus System killed or wounded 18,000 Russian soldiers in September, with 400 drone units now taking part in the competition, up from 95 in August, Ukrainian officials said. The system, which launched more than a year ago, rewards soldiers who achieve strikes with points that can be exchanged to buy more weapons in an “Amazon-for-war” online store called Brave1 filled with more than 100 different drones, autonomous vehicles and other drone war material. It has a leaderboard topped by teams with names such as Achilles and Phoenix. (via The Guardian)

This restaurant serves excellent food but there’s one catch: It’s in a prison

Prison food and high cuisine simply don’t belong in the same sentence. Unless you’re going to the Clink. The Clink is a restaurant group based in the UK, not a prison. Their restaurants serve high-end fare — the one in Brixton, London, features a £48.50 gourmet menu (about $63) that features an amuse bouche, a choice of salads, a soup of the day, and entrees ranging from a chargrilled pork chop to a BBQ jerk monkfish. Reservations are hard to come by but if you land one, the experience is generally worth the wait; in 2024, a reporter for Business Insider described it as “delicious and reasonably priced for London.” It has more than a thousand reviews on TripAdvisor, averaging 4.8 stars, which puts it in the top 100 of all London restaurants. But there’s a catch: The Clink is situated inside a prison. And the people making your food, serving you your meal, and bussing your dishes? They’re all prisoners. (via Now I Know)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Ukrainian drone operators win points they can use for weapons”

I’ve used this analogy before in other contexts, but the way we respond to or think about artificial intelligence reminds me of the old parable – first recorded in a Buddhist text from about 500 BCE – about the blind men who encountered an elephant for the first time. The man near the trunk thought it was a kind of snake, and the one near its legs thought it was a kind of tree; the man near the tusks thought it was a kind of spear, and so on. Casual users of OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude or Google’s Gemini probably have one vision of what AI is or can do – it can answer simple questions. University students probably see it as a way to write term papers more quickly. Others who use tools like OpenAI’s Sora video-generation engine have a different idea: they might see it as a tool much like Adobe’s Photoshop or Apple’s iMovie, but one that can create things that don’t exist. And those using AI tools in the lab might see it as a kind of supercomputer that can detect cancers or fold complex proteins.

All of these things are applications of current AI engines – so-called large-language models, or generative pre-trained transformers (which is what the GPT in ChatGPT stands for). In a sense, they are just tools, like a slide rule or a personal computer, or a steam-powered locomotive. But in the aggregate, all of these tools – and newer ones that are still being developed – look a lot like a tidal wave of disruption that could sweep through virtually every industry. In other words, AI looks a lot more like the Industrial Revolution, where mechanical processes took over a host of different industries, leading to the extinction of some jobs and the creation of others – new tasks that no one had even thought of before the machines came. In economic terms, it’s a classic example of what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” in which new innovations replace and make obsolete older innovations. So electricity replaces fire, cars replace horse-drawn carriages, and refrigeration replaces ice harvesting.

In their book AI Snake Oil, Princeton computer scientist Arvind Narayanan and PhD student Sayash Kapoor argue (among other things) that the blanket term AI covers a wide range of different technologies and methods, some reliable and others not. It’s as if we didn’t have terms for different forms of transportation, they write – all we have is the word “vehicle.” In such a world, they say, there would be “furious debates about whether or not vehicles are environmentally friendly, even though no one realizes that one side of the debate is talking about bikes and the other side is talking about trucks.” Someone who only uses ChatGPT to generate grocery lists or recipes probably thinks all the talk of an AI-powered apocalypse is nonsensical, because they may be unaware that modern LLMs have been shown to fabricate lies about both their behavior and their motivation, especially if they have been given an incentive, which we know because Anthropic continues to do research in an attempt to understand why Claude does what it does.

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Is AI like the slide rule or is it the Industrial Revolution?”

MaryBeth was 25 when she married a pilot named Bob Lewis. The couple had five daughters. When the girls neared adulthood and empty-nest syndrome kicked in, MaryBeth wanted more children. In her late 40s, she used in vitro fertilization to give birth to twin girls. And she wasn’t done. Despite medical mishaps, miscarriages and raised eyebrows from friends, she kept going, and going, eventually giving birth to her 13th child at the remarkable age of 62. But to bring this last set of twins into the world, MaryBeth went further — she tricked an I.V.F. clinic, a judge and even her own husband. These deceptions left MaryBeth, who is now 68, potentially facing a yearslong prison sentence. She has lost her job and is barred from her children’s school. She has dropped nearly 70 pounds from the stress and cries herself to sleep at night. Over two years, MaryBeth has spent more than $500,000 fighting for her freedom and for custody of the twins who she maintains are her 14th and 15th children. (via NYT)

There’s an orchestra in Boston that consists of people typing on manual typewriters

One night in 2004, Boston-area artist Tim Devin was presented with the gift of a child’s typewriter at a bar. His typing eventually annoyed the waitress who asked him to stop, whereupon he responded “It’s OK, ma’am. I’m the conductor of the Boston Typewriter Orchestra.” Thinking there was something to the idea, he assembled a group of interested performers on the night of October 20th, 2004 in Somerville, Massachusetts. An office setting was quickly decided upon as an overarching theme for live performances. The members (usually numbering between four and eight people) perform wearing white shirts and neckties, engage in typical workplace banter and write office-themed lyrics to satirical or comedic effect. The typewriters are utilized in a rhythmic fashion while melodic elements are supplied by the vocalists. The group uses several varieties of manual typewriters from such manufacturers as Underwood, Smith Corona, Hermes, Remington and Royal. (via Wikipedia)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “She wanted a 15th child and then came the felony charges”

MaryBeth was 25 when she married a pilot named Bob Lewis. The couple had five daughters. When the girls neared adulthood and empty-nest syndrome kicked in, MaryBeth wanted more children. In her late 40s, she used in vitro fertilization to give birth to twin girls. And she wasn’t done. Despite medical mishaps, miscarriages and raised eyebrows from friends, she kept going, and going, eventually giving birth to her 13th child at the remarkable age of 62. But to bring this last set of twins into the world, MaryBeth went further — she tricked an I.V.F. clinic, a judge and even her own husband. These deceptions left MaryBeth, who is now 68, potentially facing a yearslong prison sentence. She has lost her job and is barred from her children’s school. She has dropped nearly 70 pounds from the stress and cries herself to sleep at night. Over two years, MaryBeth has spent more than $500,000 fighting for her freedom and for custody of the twins who she maintains are her 14th and 15th children. (via NYT)

There’s an orchestra in Boston that consists of people typing on manual typewriters

One night in 2004, Boston-area artist Tim Devin was presented with the gift of a child’s typewriter at a bar. His typing eventually annoyed the waitress who asked him to stop, whereupon he responded “It’s OK, ma’am. I’m the conductor of the Boston Typewriter Orchestra.” Thinking there was something to the idea, he assembled a group of interested performers on the night of October 20th, 2004 in Somerville, Massachusetts. An office setting was quickly decided upon as an overarching theme for live performances. The members (usually numbering between four and eight people) perform wearing white shirts and neckties, engage in typical workplace banter and write office-themed lyrics to satirical or comedic effect. The typewriters are utilized in a rhythmic fashion while melodic elements are supplied by the vocalists. The group uses several varieties of manual typewriters from such manufacturers as Underwood, Smith Corona, Hermes, Remington and Royal. (via Wikipedia)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “She wanted a 15th child and then came the felony charges”

A once in a century discovery of a cache of long-lost letters has revealed how the English poet WH Auden developed a deep and lasting friendship with a Viennese sex worker and car mechanic after the latter burgled the Funeral Blues author’s home and was put on trial. Auden, a prominent member of a generation of 1930s writers that also included Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender, described his unconventional arrangement with the man he affectionally called Hugerl in the posthumously published poem Glad. “Our life-paths crossed,” it reads, “At a moment when / You were in need of money / And I wanted sex”. But little was known about the life and full criminal history of Hugo Kurka until Auden scholar Helmut Neundlinger mentioned his name in an Austrian TV programme occasioned by the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death in 2023. The next morning, Neundlinger received an email from a woman who had grown close to Kurka and his wife after they settled in the Austrian countryside in the 1990s and inherited their belongings after they died of cancer. (via The Guardian)

A 77-year-old cyclist survived for three days after a crash by drinking red wine

A French cyclist survived for three days after a horrendous 130-foot fall into a ravine, kept alive by the bottles of red wine he had in his shopping bag, police said. The 77-year-old missed a bend on his bike on his way home from the supermarket on a lonely road in the mountainous Cevennes region, careening down a rocky slope and into the ravine near Saint-Julien-des-Points. Unable to climb out, the man tried to shout every time a vehicle passed. But no one heard his cries. As the hours turned into days, he was sustained by the bottles of wine he was taking home to his caravan, rescuers said. Finally, passing roadworkers heard him yelling and spotted the twisted frame of his bicycle. A helicopter airlifted him to hospital, with rescue doctor calling his survival “a miracle … given the cold and the rain, with almost nothing to eat or drink” other than the wine. (via CBS News)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Poet W.H. Auden’s lover was a sex worker who stole from him”

A once in a century discovery of a cache of long-lost letters has revealed how the English poet WH Auden developed a deep and lasting friendship with a Viennese sex worker and car mechanic after the latter burgled the Funeral Blues author’s home and was put on trial. Auden, a prominent member of a generation of 1930s writers that also included Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender, described his unconventional arrangement with the man he affectionally called Hugerl in the posthumously published poem Glad. “Our life-paths crossed,” it reads, “At a moment when / You were in need of money / And I wanted sex”. But little was known about the life and full criminal history of Hugo Kurka until Auden scholar Helmut Neundlinger mentioned his name in an Austrian TV programme occasioned by the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death in 2023. The next morning, Neundlinger received an email from a woman who had grown close to Kurka and his wife after they settled in the Austrian countryside in the 1990s and inherited their belongings after they died of cancer. (via The Guardian)

A 77-year-old cyclist survived for three days after a crash by drinking red wine

A French cyclist survived for three days after a horrendous 130-foot fall into a ravine, kept alive by the bottles of red wine he had in his shopping bag, police said. The 77-year-old missed a bend on his bike on his way home from the supermarket on a lonely road in the mountainous Cevennes region, careening down a rocky slope and into the ravine near Saint-Julien-des-Points. Unable to climb out, the man tried to shout every time a vehicle passed. But no one heard his cries. As the hours turned into days, he was sustained by the bottles of wine he was taking home to his caravan, rescuers said. Finally, passing roadworkers heard him yelling and spotted the twisted frame of his bicycle. A helicopter airlifted him to hospital, with rescue doctor calling his survival “a miracle … given the cold and the rain, with almost nothing to eat or drink” other than the wine. (via CBS News)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Poet W.H. Auden’s lover was a sex worker who stole from him”

The second time I met Rodney Alcala was on March 23, 2013. We were inside one of the North Infirmary Command buildings on Rikers Island, two months after he’d been sentenced for raping and murdering Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Jane Hover, both women in their early 20s and living in New York City, in the 1970s. He was trailed by a prison guard, his baggy dove-gray jumpsuit hung loosely around his bony frame. His once black hair had turned the color of steel wool, still in greasy ringlets streaming past his shoulders. He was so much shorter than I remembered. Glasses that had been round wires were now rectangular. As he stiffly shuffled toward me, I felt stage fright — then a surge of real fright when I realized he wasn’t handcuffed. The first time was in April 1969, on a wet day on St. Marks Place in the East Village. He introduced himself as Jon Burger; I was 14 years old and he was 25. Four-decades-plus later, I learned his real name when it flashed across a television screen beneath his face: “Rodney Alcala, The Dating Game Serial Killer, Sentenced to Death.”(via The Cut)

Japan’s new prime minister is an Iron Maiden fan and former heavy metal drummer

Speaking on Japanese radio station Tokyo FM’s “BABYMETAL” podcast in August, Sanae Takaichi confirmed a longtime affinity for the iconic British heavy metal band Iron Maiden, but said her favorite artist was Japanese drummer Yoshiki, of the X JAPAN rock band from Chiba. Yoshiki is one of the founding members of the group, which has been around since the early 1980s, and Takaichi said she admired both his drumming and his piano playing, which she called “absolutely wonderful — technically brilliant and beautiful.” She also told Tokyo FM that she still listens to the heavy metal band Iron Maiden regularly. Takaichi’s passion for guitar-driven loud music doesn’t stop at fandom. She rocks. Since her days as a student she’s played both the drums and guitar, and says it’s that parallel that makes her such a fan of Yoshiki. (via CBS News)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “She survived an encounter with the Dating Game serial killer”

The second time I met Rodney Alcala was on March 23, 2013. We were inside one of the North Infirmary Command buildings on Rikers Island, two months after he’d been sentenced for raping and murdering Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Jane Hover, both women in their early 20s and living in New York City, in the 1970s. He was trailed by a prison guard, his baggy dove-gray jumpsuit hung loosely around his bony frame. His once black hair had turned the color of steel wool, still in greasy ringlets streaming past his shoulders. He was so much shorter than I remembered. Glasses that had been round wires were now rectangular. As he stiffly shuffled toward me, I felt stage fright — then a surge of real fright when I realized he wasn’t handcuffed. The first time was in April 1969, on a wet day on St. Marks Place in the East Village. He introduced himself as Jon Burger; I was 14 years old and he was 25. Four-decades-plus later, I learned his real name when it flashed across a television screen beneath his face: “Rodney Alcala, The Dating Game Serial Killer, Sentenced to Death.”(via The Cut)

Japan’s new prime minister is an Iron Maiden fan and former heavy metal drummer

Speaking on Japanese radio station Tokyo FM’s “BABYMETAL” podcast in August, Sanae Takaichi confirmed a longtime affinity for the iconic British heavy metal band Iron Maiden, but said her favorite artist was Japanese drummer Yoshiki, of the X JAPAN rock band from Chiba. Yoshiki is one of the founding members of the group, which has been around since the early 1980s, and Takaichi said she admired both his drumming and his piano playing, which she called “absolutely wonderful — technically brilliant and beautiful.” She also told Tokyo FM that she still listens to the heavy metal band Iron Maiden regularly. Takaichi’s passion for guitar-driven loud music doesn’t stop at fandom. She rocks. Since her days as a student she’s played both the drums and guitar, and says it’s that parallel that makes her such a fan of Yoshiki. (via CBS News)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “She survived an encounter with the Dating Game serial killer”

James Joyce would rise late, after an inebriated evening spent belting out songs at the local boozer, and get his writing done in the early afternoon. Cheever did much the same, but got out of bed earlier.  Hemingway would stay up boozing but be at his typewriter by six the following morning. He famously wrote standing up because his leg had been injured in the war, he said, but also to stop himself drifting off. Francis Bacon used to paint hungover, though not because his mind was sufficiently numb to be able to concentrate, but because it was revved up: ‘I often like working with a hangover,’ he said, ‘because my mind is crackling with energy and I can think very clearly.’ Patricia Highsmith would hit the vodka before starting work, not to perk her up but to reduce her energy levels, which veered toward the manic. She also surrounded herself with pet snails, in the hope that some of the slowness would rub off. (via LitHub)

These 7,000-year-old mummies don’t share any DNA with modern homo sapiens

Between 14,800 and 5,500 years ago, during what is known as the African Humid Period, the Sahara Desert – known for being one of the driest places on Earth – actually had enough water to support life. Back then, it was a savannah that early human populations settled in to take advantage of the favorable conditions. Among them was a mysterious people who lived in what is now southwestern Libya and should have been genetically Sub-Saharan — except, upon a modern analysis, their genes didn’t reflect that. Led by archaeogeneticist Nada Salem from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, a team of researchers analyzed the genes of two 7,000-year-old naturally preserved mummies of Neolithic female herders from the Takarkori rock shelter. Though genetic material does not preserve well in arid climates, which is why much about ancient human populations in the Sahara remains a mystery, there was enough fragmented  DNA to give insights into their past. (via Popular Mechanics)

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Continue reading “These authors liked to write while they were hungover”

I know what many of you are thinking as you read the headline on this post: The best thing ever? But what about Twitch Plays Pokemon, in which millions of people simultaneously played the game by posting commands in a chat room? Or the Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group, the website that indexes every size and shape of plastic bread-bag closure? What about the legendary video of a whale being blown up by dynamite on a beach in Oregon? What about Strawberry Pop-Tart Blowtorches or Bert Is Evil? I agree that those things are amazing, and I thank Zeus for the internet every day because of them (I used to collect this kind of thing on an old website of mine, which is archived here). But I think when we put aside the things that we personally enjoy about the internet, there is no question that the creation — and ongoing maintenance — of Wikipedia is a shining example of everything the internet was supposed to do, but in the vast majority of cases has failed to do. Collaborative effort on that kind of scale is vanishingly rare, and even more rare is the ability to keep that kind of work going for years, let alone for the more than two decades that Wikipedia has been around.

Why am I writing a paean to Wikipedia? I expect that some of you probably know of one reason already, but for anyone who doesn’t, Elon Musk just launched something called Grokipedia, which he describes as an “open source” alternative to Wikipedia. It is allegedly powered by the AI he built for X, which is known as Grok (as more than one person has pointed out, his Wikipedia alternative doesn’t really qualify as open source, because open-source projects are required to make all of their underlying codebase publicly accessible and shareable, and Grokipedia hasn’t done that). But this isn’t just about another Wikipedia competitor — there have been of plenty of them over the years, and there will undoubtedly be more. Even Google, which noticed how often Wikipedia showed up in its search results, tried at one point to launch a competitor, which it called Knol (something even Google staffers later admitted was a terrible name). Knol was supposed to aggregate crowd-sourced knowledge from experts and regular Google users, but it was barely even alive in the world before it suddenly vanished without a trace.

Musk claims that Grokipedia is intended to be an unbiased knowledge source that will be edited by his AI (and then laser-etched on tiny stones that will be placed throughout the solar system apparently, to “protect against civilizational regression”), but it is also a fairly transparent attack on what Musk and the American right say is Wikipedia’s “woke” bias. The decision to create a Wikipedia alternative appears to have sprung from comments by David Sacks, a friend of Musk’s who is a venture investor in technology as well as the AI and crypto czar for the White House. Sacks said on X that Wikipedia is “hopelessly biased” and is run by an “army of left-wing activists” who “fight reasonable corrections,” then said there was a market opportunity for AI to rewrite Wikipedia and take into account what he called “all the banned sources.” Musk responded that xAI, his artificial intelligence company, was doing exactly that for “all of human knowledge.”

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Wikipedia is the best thing the internet has ever made”

It’s the fall of 1864. The war is going very badly for the Confederates. John Wilkes Booth is kind of the Brad Pitt of North America. He was a famous, dashing young actor, a committed supporter of the Southern Confederacy. A man who despised Lincoln. He begins to plot to kidnap Lincoln, in order to bargain Lincoln’s life for the exchange of the tens of thousands of Confederate prisoners who are in prisons all along the Canadian border. So he has this plot and where does he go? He goes to Montreal. He knows this is where some of the leading Confederate agents are. He knows this is where they’re getting their money and their support. He checks in at the St. Lawrence Hall. The owner who admires Booth, makes sure he gets one of the best rooms. Booth settles in. He’s playing cards with some of the leading Confederate agents and spies. (via CBC)

For 25 years this dolphin guided ships through a dangerous channel near New Zealand

Pelorus Jack was a Risso’s dolphin that was famous for meeting and escorting ships through a stretch of water in Cook Strait, New Zealand. The animal was reported over a 24 year period, from 1888 until his disappearance after 1912. Pelorus Jack was usually spotted in Admiralty Bay  near French Pass, a notoriously dangerous channel used by ships travelling between Wellington and Nelson. Pelorus Jack was once shot at from a passing ship, and was later protected by a 1904 New Zealand law. The dolphin guided the ships by swimming alongside a water craft for 20 minutes at a time. If the crew could not see Jack at first, they often waited for him to appear. He was first seen around 1888 when he appeared in front of the schooner Brindle. When the members of the crew saw the dolphin bobbing up and down in front of the ship, they wanted to kill him, but the captain’s wife talked them out of it. (via Wikipedia)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Lincoln’s assassin planned the shooting while in Montreal”