-Larry McMurtry, quoted in David Streitfeld’s Western Star

Novelists are liars. It’s nothing personal, just the job.1 They make up people and plots in the interests of exploring higher truths, like “here, then, is the human condition,” “this is the tragic psychology of desire, reverberating down the generations” or, more prosaically, “people love a really good yarn.” Sometimes they lie to reinforce cultural touchstones, like “the cowboy was a self-sufficient loner who tamed the wilderness, thereby wiping out the need for him. It’s noble and tragic.” There’s good money in that kind of reassurance, and considerably less in debunking popular illusions.

Share

The best writers are frequently professional betrayers, too, ransacking their personal history for material, revealing family secrets, even rewriting their own life stories to make them more interesting. Many others among us do these things too, but for smaller audiences (sometimes an audience of one, residing between our ears.) Novelists go big, though, and if artful enough in their betrayal they are forgiven by everyone, except their families.

I’ve been thinking about these eternal truths about lying and betrayal in new ways since reading my friend David Streitfeld’s literary biography of Larry McMurtry, Western Star.

McMurtry and Streitfeld were friends for many years before Streitfeld broached the idea of a biography. McMurtry put him off for many more years before equivocally okaying the idea. It’s fair to assume that by then McMurtry knew that Streitfeld, who I can attest is passionate about capturing facts and exposing hypocrisies, would explode many of McMurtry’s abundant personal fictions, even as he captured McMurtry’s long project of exploding the most cherished myths about Texas and the frontier. Which even from the jump shows McMurtry’s interesting allegiance to exploding personal myths, too.

To what end is tragically hard to say, for this book also depicts a time when quality fiction steered the culture, and writers competed fiercely to nail exactly what it meant to be alive in their times, debunking myths and steering people to a greater awareness of their own lives. This meant not simply reading Kesey, Mailer, Bellow, Roth, Oates, McMurtry, Lessing, Morrison, and many others, but internalizing what they had to tell us all, and following discussions of their work in the popular press.

Not long ago some 400 daily newspapers carried book reviews. That figure has fallen by 90%. All the major papers had separate sections devoted to books and ideas; the founder of Amazon.com recently closed the Books section at his Washington Post, leaving The New York Times the only high-profile paper with a notable standalone Books section.

Very quickly, life on the frontier of Literature has come to seem almost as remote as life on the frontier of the Old West. That type of (may the muses forgive me) thought leadership role for Literature is long gone. It surrendered first to movies. Now all manner of digital media has created a culture of hyper personalization that threatens any attempt at cultural consensus. Memoirs abound, meaning that betrayal of family history chugs along, but for the most part these are personal stories. We don’t look for them to explain our shared psychic realities.

I’ve written about feeling ghosted by the culture, the hazards of hyper personalization, even the new personal soundtracks in our heads. I have much sympathy for Streitfeld’s elegaic description of this bygone era.2 Even so, the most interesting thing is Streitfeld’s sustained passion for naming places in that halcyon literary past where McMurtry and others don’t have their stories straight, where they have their facts wrong, where they outright lie. As I said, McMurtry knew what he was getting when he let Streitfeld in, which is to say some part of him must have wanted his own myths demolished.

Share

Streitfeld debunks false memories the most when writing about the 1950s and 1960s, when books mattered most. McMurtry says his childhood home was bookless, and no one read to him. His father remembers otherwise. McMurtry can’t really decide if he grew up on a place called Idiot Ridge. His first literary agent was not, as McMurtry wrote, a once rich person from a castle on the Danube. He misstated her age by a decade. He says he didn’t hang out with the LSD crowd of his friend Ken Kesey, but others say he did.3 Another friend spins stories about himself, Streitfeld writes, “even less tethered to reality than Larry’s.”

Once film takes over the culture, Streitfeld becomes more forgiving of myth-making. During a long section on the filming of McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, a fictionalized take on his hometown of Archer City, Texas, there are no fact checks or corrections. Perhaps all of those Hollywood people tell their stories straight, let the chips fall where they may…oh wait, they don’t. They are from an industry best described by the title of producer Lynda Obst’s memoir, “‘Hello,’ He Lied.” It is customary in Hollywood to bullshit even more than you are aware of, since it’s a professional tic. Maybe it doesn’t matter in the same way that lying did when the world was different, and the fictional truth-tellers ruled.

After “The Last Picture Show” was a hit, McMurtry is headed to becoming largely “Lonesome Dove, Inc.”, a highly-paid storyteller who becomes wealthy off his long novel and4 miniseries about a couple of trail drivers past their prime, out for the validation of a last roundup. As McMurtry accedes to the sentiment and payoffs of Hollywood and television, Streitfeld interrogates people’s stories less frequently and finds them wanting only a handful of times, compared to the scores of “gotchas” during the literature-dominant earlier time.

His closest fact-checking the later years is for McMurtry’s work on “Brokeback Mountain,” the writer’s own last roundup, when he worked the art as he used to (and scored the big bucks and the important awards, whose ceremonies he is pleased to attend.) Even there, however, Streitfeld has a new tone of forgiveness. His final fact check, concerning the mistakes on a sign in Archer City honoring McMurtry, ends with, “it’s a start.”

Like many people who live by their wits, McMurtry presents interesting paradoxes. While he aimed for greatness on the order of a Dickens or a Fitzgerald, both of whom wrote themselves out of obscure circumstances to cosmopolitan triumph, McMurtry perversely reveled in his supposed marginality, and the obscurity of the Texas Panhandle. In fact, he was captivated by the land, or more precisely the land’s unique effect; his characters are entirely the product of their landscape and their psychology is resolutely place-specific. People in his books are consumed by memory, whether it’s a Vegas showgirl dwelling on the times when her body was best, or somebody recalling the candy bar left to bake in the Texas heat, or any number of frontier types lost in a time when they had more purpose. Yet everyone moves forward, seeking a new place to bring their memories.

On a personal level, McMurtry fled his hometown, a cultural wasteland, only to return there and build a bookstore with 600,000 volumes. Inflicting that much culture on your culturally arid roots must go down as some of the most performative capitalism ever attempted. The locals didn’t care one way or another, but he persisted. A person of recondite tastes, it’s doubtful he saw himself as nothing but the product of his pinched landscape and his grudging frontier ancestors, but he avidly chose not to escape, too. He even arranged the lie that he died in Texas.

Yet for all that, he agreed to have his own myth fact-checked, almost certainly knowing how much wouldn’t stand up. Much like the myths of Texas itself, which he tirelessly tried to explode, but ultimately profited from better than any other writer. And which, ultimately, he chose not to escape. There were in the end four books each based on “The Last Picture Show” and “Lonesome Dove,” fiction based on the landscapes of his personal and family past.

A paradox joins two things that contradict each other, yet their combination nevertheless reveals a truth. You could say the same of a novelist, that professional liar, signing up a biographer, his friend, to ferret out his lies, so people will know him for real as the fabulist he was.

4

To me, tedious and laughable. Sorry America, but that snake scene is straight out of Toho Studios.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Johnny Yuma was a rebel

He roamed through the west

Did Johnny Yuma, the rebel

He wandered alone.

I’m not interested in Johnny Yuma, a short-lived show with these lyrics in its theme song. I only wanted coffee. And yet, came a familiar imaginary audio:

He got fightin’ mad, this rebel lad

He packed no star as he wandered far

Where the only law was a hook and a draw

The rebel, Johnny Yuma.

Johnny Cash recorded the theme song to the show, and it was on some cowboy record I played enough that it still shows up in my head every now and then. It is among my oldest1 extant earworms.

I have many more ancient songs and advertising jingles in my mind, and they pop up periodically in no discernible order. I might be discussing computer network infrastructure with a client, and in the background “Build Me Up, Buttercup” is rocking away. Reminiscing with my wife about our children’s earliest days, Ace of Bass’ “The Sign,” Pharrell’s “Happy,” or maybe even “Little Willy,” by The Sweet, will intrude. Not a year goes by without an internal revival of any number of horrifying jingles for Winston cigarettes.

I saw the sign
And it opened up my eyes, I saw the sign

(Oh crap. I really wish I hadn’t mentioned that one. Now I’ll be thinking of “The Sign” while I’m trying to write. Unless I’m really unlucky and start hear “Summer of ‘69,” or worse, “New Slang.” It’s easier to shake off a tattoo than to unhear that one.)

I don’t particularly like any of these songs and ads; they are just a small part of my preposterous mental inventory. You’ve got them too. I once heard an eminent novelist of my generation confess during a talk that his prime thought just then was an earworm of Carl Douglas’ “Kung Fu Fighting.” I know a successful VC who can joyfully break into a bygone jingle praising a supermarket’s beets.

Earworms are music you don’t try to remember, or maybe even want in your head, that persist because of overexposure. The word “earworm” first appeared in English in 1978. It comes from the German Ohrwurm, which means “earworm.” They hatched this word in the nineteen-twenties, at the dawn of recorded and broadcast media.

It riffs on the superstition that earwigs burrow through human ear canals to lay eggs that hatch and consume brains. While not true, it’s an excellent analogy for an aural infection via radio, jukeboxes, the neighbor’s record player, shopping music, or any other ambient onslaught. The Germans figured out the anxiety of the technology early on, once again displaying a skill that extends to figuring out the anxiety of almost everything.

Share

Yet now this ear beast seems endangered. My inventory is aging fast, and I bet yours is too. Instead of earworms, I believe future generations are cultivating a new kind of unplanned companion.

While recovering from “Johnny Yuma,” I realized that I might silently hear 2011’s “Somebody I Used to Know,” or even “Shut Up And Dance,” from 2016. But I have basically had no unwelcome audio visitors dating from the years since then. What happened?

“You aged out, ya spavined dimbrain” is one possible reason. Arguable, but I checked with a couple of younger adults. They report a similar lack of earworm recency.

I think consumer tech is making the earworm obsolete. In 2014 the first wireless earbuds were crowdfunded. In September 2016 Apple co-opted that idea with the Airpod. Music, already becoming personalized with streaming services, rapidly became a more internal experience. It was no longer what commercial interests sprayed in every direction, the way they had

No, you didn’t have to stooooooooop so low

Have your friends collect your records

and then change your number

I guess that I don’t need that tho

Now you’re just somebody that I used to know.

(Man, that one’s savage.)

Check for yourself: Here are the billboard hits from 2014 and 2017. You probably recall a lot of them, voluntarily or not, even if you don’t like them. Some will even hatch in your mind like a ravenous nymph and start chewing.

Now try it with the songs of 2020 and 2024. Anybody unwillingly got “Blinding Lights” in the brain? I thought not. Today you are more likely to discover songs accidentally from Tik Tok, or some other source where the algorithms aim to please your taste. You probably don’t get slammed with “Johnny Yuma” moments by the ones you never liked. Which is the maddening characteristic of the earworm.

good, like a cigarette should.

(Damn! Just…stop!)

This is an interesting example of one technology, recorded music and broadcast, creating a mental state, and a successor technology, wireless earbuds and personalization, extinguishing it. But there’s more going on, since technology amplifies pre-existing parts of ourselves.

The earworm is technology leveraging our mental bias towards easy memorization. This goes back to the furthest reaches of the oral tradition, and the “music” in the metrics of The Illiad. More recently, Mark Twain wrote a story about the madness induced by a stupid rhyme. Evelyn Waugh wrote about being the last Oxbridge generation where the lads got drunk and recited memorized poetry by the armload, before records and radios and radio ads showed up and made the practice of memorization even easier.

Given enough time, people may treasure their earworms as markers of the past, even if at one time they were an annoyance. I once attended a Christmas dinner where the older generation sang the radio advertising jingles of New York hotels, 40 years after these were in the ether. Let me know if you want to hear my version of

plenty peanut stuff in the middle

that the camel praises in an ad for Gaucho candy bars.

The recession of the earworm is only part of the story. We’re at the start of a new and unknown tech-based relationship with sound. People now wear their earbuds for up to 10 hours a day, talking on the phone, listening to podcasts and music, or canceling out the world’s noise (which is its own kind of audio.) Given what I’ve learned of tech and business, if this turns out to be bad for hearing it’s more likely that earbuds will include augmentation for those turning deaf, than it is we’ll abandon the shiny product. The things are here to stay.2

Share

Behaviors are already changing to accommodate the new reality. When I see someone purposefully wearing earbuds I know that I have to catch their attention before speaking to them, a turn from how casual conversation worked just a couple of years ago. Sometimes I even weigh whether what I’ve got to say is better than “The Rest Is History” podcast.3 As it happens, a story in The Wall Street Journal today describes the new office irritation, earbudded people audibly whispering to their AI while at the desk.

This is just the start of a greater transformation. Last month researchers at The Paul Allen School showed off what they called Vuebuds, a small camera in an earbud connected to an AI. It can identify objects on command. Increasingly we will see more chatbots implanted in earbuds, so wearers can have a conversation with a make-believe intelligence whenever they want, or even review with it things that happened earlier in the day.

We lose the earworm, and maybe gain more of what I call “the eyemoth,” or random visual snippets that recur in the eye of memory. In the movie “Citizen Kane” the aging Mr. Bernstein describes the phenomenon:

“One day back in 1896 I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out there was another ferry pulling in. And on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on, and she was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all. But I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”

I already have many eyemoths of my own: a red ribbon on a late night bus in Seattle, decades ago, still pops into my head. So does Captain Hook’s crocodile tormentor hiding among the seacoast rocks of the wallpaper in my childhood bedroom. A stilt dancer’s back flip in Singapore, but little else of his performance. A train conductor’s hat on a padded seat in Pennsylvania. A cliff face in the Sierras. They probably mean about as much as an earworm, but they stick in my visual memory, more welcome than their aural cousins.

AI buds might enable eyemoths on command. Or perhaps they’ll make eyemoths vanish like Waugh’s reciters, as life becomes even more of a movie, in entirely new ways.

A bad thing? A good one? Really, just a thing. It’s odd to prefer one consciousness over another, particularly if one is preferred only because it’s familiar. History shows we still remain human despite all the figurative and literal noise.

Still, I’ll miss earworms. Except for “The Summer of ‘69,” which I’m resigned to hearing on my deathbed.

1

This banger, a milestone in the history of technophilia. Phones are cool! Red records are cool! Everything is cool! And yes, I can sing it.

The man was Iceland’s Víkingur Ólafsson, performing a solo concert as the 2025-26 Artist In Residence at Berkeley’s Cal Performances. He played what he calls “Opus 109,” a project which consists of a Bach prelude, a Beethoven sonata, a Bach partita, a Schubert sonata, and the final Beethoven sonata (the titular opus.) He played it without a break between movements, or the standard applause for individual pieces. This new work illuminates a creative interaction spanning more than a century. He plays it entirely from memory.

I should state here that I am a musical idiot, and know little about the history of music or the technical attributes of composition. Yet I can witness beauty and admire excellence. While many of the nuances of Opus 109 were as lost on me as they may be on you,1 anyone would be astonished by a performer flawlessly executing his extended meditation on influence and relationships, inspiration and response, and recapitulating the past in order to create something new. All played in the key of E, making it easy to hear as a single journey, with the silence between each note equally critical to the outcome.

Afterward Ólafsson spoke about the recent death of Michael Tilson Thomas, musical director of the San Francisco Symphony and a giant in the world of classical music. “He did so much for the musical community,” said Ólafsson, “we don’t know what it means yet.”

That seeming aside was for me another revelation of how he saw a single human influence on the world - long and deep, with an effect not fully realized simply by the ending of a life. Like “Opus 109” itself, his comment was a statement about how our works exist both in the moment, but also in the context of our vanished past and our invisible, potential future. Living in an age of omni-directional surveillance, where everything is supposedly stored for review by our AI prediction machines, this sensibility borders on rebellion.

Share

Those words landed with me perhaps because earlier that day I’d read2 about something called Historical Language Models. Also called Vintage Language Models, or VLMs, these ingenious creations use only text from specific historical periods. Thus, the idea runs, you can query the model and get an answer that reflects the knowledge of that particular time, uncontaminated by later findings.

On my third try with it I found a pretty bad error,3 so clearly VLMs have a way to go. Improved, though, they will be interesting tools for investigation and inquiry. Particularly if optical character recognition improves in cost and capability, and more non-English sources enter their corpus.

Still, I doubt there’s anything remotely accurate in the inventors’ claim that “while we don’t have time machines yet, we can simulate this experience” of talking to someone in the past via a VLM. Or in Benjamin Breen’s intriguing idea that this is a hypothetical first step in creating a collective consciousness of past humanity.

Breen moves the question away from the technology itself and back to authentic human consciousness as a thing in time, which Ólafsson explored for us in past and present, and which his aside about Michael Tilson Thomas extended to the future.

Plainly, if there is something like a collective consciousness within any past society, it’s unlikely to exist solely within captured and analyzed text. In 1900 about 20% of the globe was literate, and in 1800 the percentage was about half that.4 Go further back, and it’s tiny. Whatever was printed was largely for people with the wealth and leisure to read. Their interests may not equal people who struggled for bread and told folktales.

Share

Adding more foreign-language texts will make for a richer corpus, but will also introduce new questions: How does the contents of, say, an Armenian newspaper in 1890 affect the consciousness of, say, a Japanese businessman of that time? The answer starts with, “Which businessman?” While there may be a collective consciousness, it still exists within individuals.

However much old text we log, it will not be coherent. Our civilization is now passionate about counting and storing everything, but what we retrieve from the past is haphazard. Just last year we learned something about Shakespeare’s relationship with his wife, thanks to a 1608 letter that survived because it was used to make the binding of a later book.5

The 14th century poet Francois Villon’s wrote, “Where are the snows of yesteryear?” to describe our vanished living past. All the LLMs in the world will not change the reality of that loss. We can guess something about what’s in other people’s minds here in the present, often with success, and with even more sympathy we can approach a past consciousness, but only with great humility. Our approach will not be dramatically improved with a language model.

Share

FWIW his third encore was recent. And equally haunting.

Like Ólafsson, we can think about influence, and how a creation in a later time both reflects the influence of the past upon us, and changes something of the character of that past work. It’s given a new meaning by the later sympathy. And in addition, human creation is an unknown gift to the future. Time is made out of the infinitely present moment, infinitely receding, as it creates the unseen future.

Even with the most powerful technology the present moment is irredeemable. That is, many would argue, the wellspring of beauty.

Then there are the physical dimensions of memory and thinking. Ólafsson developed the idea for Opus 109 after performing Bach’s Goldberg Variations over 100 times in just a couple of years. That repetition, as much as the sound, led him to hear their influence on Beethoven, a composer that he says his mother taught him must be played with a feeling in your gut. To this mix of sound and feeling, add that the pianist possesses synaesthesia, or the mingling of senses, so that he describes music in certain colors, the way you’d say a blade of grass is green. The Schubert piece was performed as a reflection on how Schubert may have been influenced by the preceding Beethoven sonata. More boundary-crossing influence.

Thinking of the highest sort can be physical as well as mental, emotional as much as reasoned, adrift in time and focused on the endless Now. LLMs are great repositories and sorters and relationship-makers, but they are human-made tools, like a monkey wrench, but with a pretense of greater meaning. They are never in time like Vikingur, or you.

Unintended Consequence of the Week: On Mt. Kenya, sheep farts now smell like roses.

According to the Financial Times, Kenya’s flower-growing industry is in a crisis brought on by the U.S.-Iran conflict. Kenya is the world’s fourth-largest flower growing economy, and its prime export destinations were Tehran, Dubai, Riyadh, and Doha. With fewer Mideast hotel guests and celebrations, however, and less-reliable air cargo services because of our global jet fuel crisis, its flower sales are down 50%. Since you can’t store roses, they are fed to the sheep. A strange footnote to the ongoing global impoverishment caused by this conflict.

Share

3

See the screenshot below.

In fact, Stevens was born in Reading, PA. That’s possibly an acceptable error, since in 1930 he was barely known. The real anachronism, in this model that supposedly stops at 1930, is that his first volume of poetry, "Harmonium," was published in 1923. He did not publish his next volume, "Ideas of Order," until 1936. Somehow this “time machine” is traveling into the future, too.

On Thursday I dropped my collected works into an AI and was told that they add up to 199,000 words, a suspiciously round number.1 Add a few lists of whale arcana, and this would amount to the length of Moby Dick. Should some readers now wonder if following me has been a good use of their time, let me say - Ahab dies, taking almost everybody on the Pequod with him. No idea what happens to the whale.2 Now you’ve got that covered, too.

Friends who write actual books assure me that this work is nothing like the daunting anguish they experience, bleeding away at the keyboard to further The Human Project. Fair enough; I view this weekly offering more like letters to friends and like-minded strangers. To the extent they reach you that way and, like a good letter, sometimes stir your mind or heart, I’m happy in the work.

Every 50 entries, I note a few personal favorites from the recent group. Here are links to lookbacks 50 and 100. As usual, the essays fall into the categories of Technology, Culture, and Personal History. As the Shop’s overall theme is “the search for meaning,” those categories are proxies for, respectively, ways we shape the world, ways we shape each other, and ways we come to terms with the people and things that shape us.3 It’s odd that understanding the self, supposedly the only thing anyone can truly know, is the most elusive. But, as they say, here we are.

Here is my list for essays 101-149:

Personal History

1. Passage Of My Mother, In parts One, Two, and Three. A story about primal grief in rising China, ending with a visit from an accidental Bhoddisatva.

2. Dad Testifies. My father describes to Congress a crisis of meaning in American life. Those concerns collapsed in decades of material excess, until that con ended badly. Dad was right.

3. Nino Shows His Painting. Reconnecting with an exuberant childhood hero, and discovering his dark and hateful side.

4. The Education Of Peter Kline. A co-written tale of Britain’s class system, set at the mad end of hippie India. We shall not see its like again.

5. Confessions of A Tooth Fairy. On being up late, creating fictional memories to be recalled decades later.

Share

Culture

1. Our 14% In Their Perilous Court. A personal favorite. Knowledge workers are the viziers, knights and scribes to our modern kings, and we feed on fear. The longest piece on The Shop, one of the most read.

2. New Tales Of Old Tools, In parts One, Two, and Three. Humans made the same tools and art for millennia. Then we evolved perpetual change. Why? Forget cultural Darwinism; our brains learned how to be dissatisfied.

3. Two Ghosts And A Chance. A halting goodbye to the literary culture I was raised in, which became over the last couple of decades as irrelevant as a dead civilization’s god.

4. Human Moments In Hell. Brutal truths on the American frontier, from the threadwork on a straitjacket in Oregon.

5. Hamlet, Post Mortem. The prince dies, and in 70 final lines his story of personal torment is distorted for PR and political spin. The eternal tragedy.

Share

Technology

1. Horseless Carriages, Digital Paint, AI. The design problem of naming and explaining new inventions. Plus, why the main AI logo is called “the butthole.”

2. Two Mirrors Of The World. How the real threat from AI is the perfection of hyper-personalization, and its role in the death of civic institutions.

3. A Dark Data Center Crisis. What a financial hiccup would mean for expensive, fast-aging semiconductors. The most-read story of the past 50.

4. Some Unintended Consequences Of AI. All computer architectures change work and society in ways impossible to foresee. This time it’s all about trust.

5. Kale Salad With Ash. An exuberant raconteur foresees extraordinary monsters emerging from the price-collapse democratization of AI and biotech.

Looking over this list, I’m pleased with the range, grateful for all the feedback I’ve received, and astonished at the momentous times we live in, as we gain and lose many structures of our world. To the extent I’ve been thought-provoking, entertaining, or otherwise useful to my readers, I’ve done my job.

My weekly letters to the world provide a small part of my income as a professional writer.4 After the Substack and Stripe fees, the take home isn’t dreadful, but it’s nothing anyone could live on. But the effect of this Substack on my work as a whole is enormous. Here I get to explore larger ideas which animate the particular work I do with my clients. Conversely, I bring to these letters ideas that come from working with people in tech and seeing what they are building. If the current wisdom is to own a niche, this kind of wide-ranging exploration is mine.

Letters to friends, of course, should have no niche.

We can’t help ourselves. We see the new thing, it looks useful, we’re almost always going to employ it, grow it, take it to the limit. Even if its use will utterly remake our world, including all kinds of unforeseen consequences. Maybe we do this for the sake of the unforeseen consequences. Nature has made us creatures who crave novelty like no other species. Even when the search for novelty is against our interest, as many of us can attest to, over 52 weekends a year.

This is one of several reasons why we’re going to keep on developing Artificial Intelligence, even while reasonable people think the current speed and scope of AI development could frustrate, enslave, and/or kill us all. They call for a big pause, until we have a better sense of what we’re getting into, or a global pro-human policy that keeps humans in charge, diffuses power, doesn’t fool or enfeeble people, and makes companies accountable.

With no snark, I note that successfully meeting the needs of understanding what we’re getting into, elevating humanity, or holding companies to account has little space in the historical record. That said, godspeed, pro-human pausers.

Share

As we consider their challenge, though, it’s useful to look at a few examples of people successfully abandoning a burgeoning new technology. Why was it done? How did it work? And we should also speculate about the possible consequences of that refusal. Choosing to do nothing is, after all, its own type of action

Boats, guns, and llamas

The best example of closing off a new technology is the Ming Dynasty’s destruction of its deep-water navy. Around 1430 the eunuch admiral Zheng He began the first of seven “treasure ship” voyages to establish trade with Southeast Asia, India, and East Africa. Following a power struggle between the Ming court’s eunuch faction and its Confucian scholar faction, China burned those ships, destroyed records of their construction, and made oceangoing voyages illegal.

Zheng’s largest ships were perhaps 300 feet long, and there were at least 60 vessels in his fleet. Compare that with the craft of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama’s 1497 trip to India, which slapped into high gear Europe’s Age of Discovery. Da Gama’s longest ship was about 85 feet, and his “fleet” was four ships, two of which made it home.

Imagine how different today’s world would look if the Europeans had encountered an established, sophisticated trade network using much better ships. The precursor to Western Imperialism would be a very different matter. Today, ironically, the West worries about controlling the new technology, AI, while China seems hellbent on its development.

A century after da Gama, under the Tokugawa Shogunate Japan mostly closed itself to the West. The rulers kept up with some developments in Western learning, but adopted little of it. In particular, they sharply curtailed the manufacture and possession of firearms. Not coincidentally, in 1616 the ruling class codified the Bushido samurai ethos, elevating swordsmanship as a spiritual practice.

Japan remained closed to outsiders for more than two centuries. When Commodore Matthew Perry forced the country’s opening in 1853, his vessels could fire explosive shells from far offshore. The samurai must have looked woefully at their few 16th century-style matchlock armaments.

Maybe if they’d kept current, Japan could have met the American incursion with its own violence against foreign shipping in nearby waters, much like Iran is now doing. On the other hand, the sudden flood of Japanese aesthetics into the West after a long hiatus played a critical role in the development of Impressionism.

These are two examples of blocking technological development to preserve the status quo. Confucians in Ming China saw that foreign trade imported new ideas and new power, in opposition to their fundamentally conservative Confucian outlook. Japanese elites elevated the violence of swordsmanship, which takes years of practice. Guns were a weapon any hick farmer could pick up and use to kill a samurai.

European powers tried to do the same thing. For example the ribbon-making loom was suppressed in Germany, and the stocking-making machine and the sawmill were curbed in England, all to preserve the livelihood of specialized workers. Geography did not work in their favor, though, the way it did for Japan and China; in Europe the tech and the goods it produced simply took hold nearby.

Share

Sometimes a revolutionary technology is beyond the purposes or imagination of the ruling powers. The Inca had the wheel, but didn’t use it for much besides children’s toys. Agriculture and transportation were geared to their vertical society in the Andes, with the uncooperative llama as the significant beast of burden.

Perhaps the lesson is we are really slaves to our geography.

More tech, more problems

Or at least, we were. Now big developments in technology are global. Before the Internet came on the scene, the great bans and discontinuations in modern times centered mostly on nuclear power. The world has fought just one nuclear war, and once another side had the weapons, governments started looking at ways to control and limit the technology (sadly, elimination has never had a chance.)

Russia does appear to have a “Dead Hand” doomsday machine, but we’ve also had test-ban treaties. As best we can tell, no one has built a hydrogen bomb salted with cobalt, which could render places uninhabitable for centuries. If nukes eventually reach places like North Korea, well, the slower the better.1

Looking at another existentially threatening technology, the 1975 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA delivered voluntary guidelines on ethical approaches to working with genetic clones. Those guidelines probably didn’t slow down the development of genetically-modified organisms, though, or of state-controlled bioweapons labs,2 but even developing a framework is a good start. It chimes with what people are now trying to do with AI.

The big difference between Asilomar and AI is that Asilomar happened well before the technology was broadly out of the lab and effective. AI is already in schools, corporations, and much of the technology you’ll encounter today. That makes its control exceptionally difficult.

One “out of control” context is an AI job apocalypse, which would represent a threat to the social order beyond anything caused by the 2008 financial collapse, or other economic depressions. Those caused financial losses, or higher unemployment; if AI takes out massive numbers of jobs it will curb what amounts to identity itself, since for the most part we are what we do.

Confucians were similarly worried about their means of identity fading away under widespread foreign influence. And to this day, people and groups in Japan navel gaze about whether the country has lots its Bushido ethos. The amount of individual empowerment with sophisticated AI is both a boon and a threat, in some ways akin to the Tokugawa strangulation of firearms.

Banning things that don’t exist: Just say now

Today we’re sometimes like the early industrial crowd trying to ban a particular technology application, so that “no sawmills” is like “no AI on the battlefield,” or “AI in journalism, only under the strictest and most controlled circumstances.” It’s probably going to pop up there in some form, and the ban will then be adjusted.

Sometimes we’re like Asilomar, talking about curbs on something that’s possible, but isn’t quite here yet. But the the AI pause/ban situation is different in that, unlike genetic work, AI is remarkably easy to develop and share, so it’s harder to control. In that sense, AI is closer to stocking looms than genetic engineering.

Additionally, there’s already a lot of money at stake in keeping things going, testing all the limits. That makes AI development a bit like leaded gasoline, carbon-emitting energy production, or smoking: People knew these things were hazards for decades before they were curbed, but there was a great deal of money in pretending otherwise.

Share

Perhaps the unique dimension of AI in the annals of turning off a technology is this: When we talk about banning some types of AI, like conscious and malevolent machines that act against our interest (by, you know, killing everybody) we are talking about banning technologies that not only show no sign of existing, but that we still don’t really understand how to build.

A total folly that is utterly worth our time. A truly unprecedented event, or a mordant comment on studying history?

IF YOU HAVE READ THIS FAR: My thanks, and please spend a little time at “The American Bystander,” America’s last great humor magazine, edited by the estimable Michael Gerber. I’ve written for them, and also support them with money. You should think about a donation, the stuff is great.

About forty years after the printing press became widespread, the abbot of a monastery argued that if his monks were freed of tedious hours and months of writing out manuscripts they’d have lots more free time to be corrupted by Satan. This complaint appeared in a printed book, which is a good reminder that, like it or not, we tend to work within the dominant technology.

Two decades later, a monk in Rome became fed up with how much the Pope was spending on artistic glories. He made good use of the new technology to print up a lot of tracts about this and other churchy ills, swamping the Catholic power with his abundant content and setting in motion the Protestant Reformation. This theological revolution killed millions of people. It also transformed our sense of the individual in the world, which over the years brought about the scientific method and democracy. Unintended consequences are a natural product of time.

Today we’re making guesses about the unintended consequences of another technology, the computer systems that power Artificial Intelligence. To do so, let’s set aside unhelpful metaphysics, such as questions about what Satan will do next, or whether scraping the Internet and searching for patterns (what the current version of AI does) will result in consciousness. There’s zero evidence that machines are conscious, even if the head of Anthropic keeps pushing his tempting but unhelpful “we don’t really know” angle. Conscious or not (again, they’re not) it doesn’t seem to affect what most people do with these computers.1

We can, however, focus on how AI will change both the computer industry and the way we’ll all think and work.

Share

There are useful guideposts for figuring this out in the patterns of previous computing transitions. The trillion-dollar spend on new AI data centers is just the latest and biggest part of a larger development of the so-called “architecture” of computing, which is to say all the chips, networks, servers, mainframes, terminals and everything else that goes into a computing system.

If you’re over 20, the repeated architectural changes in computing have already upended your life. Here’s how, in four over-simplified2 steps:

1. Until the Eighties IBM’s mainframe computers dominated computer tech. Then came an architectural shift to computer servers, networked to personal computers (so-called “clients” of the more powerful servers.) The architecture moved from a centralized model of mainframes to a distribution of computing power. Computing spread like crazy.

One unintended consequence was that networks, which had existed inside mainframes as a way of passing data and instructions from one place to another, became a huge industry on their own. Cisco got big, and IBM never saw it coming.

The other effect, the social one, was the utter decimation of middle management, thanks to electronic messaging (aka email.) It got the mid-90s management theory name of “Re-engineering the Corporation,” but really it amounted to one company department talking to another, without a human middleman conversant in the languages and cultures of both places. Top management got rich by firing thousands of mid-level lifers, and after some mutual incomprehension departments communicated directly.

2. Then the Client/Server model was re-architected into the Internet. Thanks largely to the world wide web, public networks exploded, and the browser became a client that could go anywhere. The widespread use of open source software became a central part of computing architecture. More decentralization, more people and money in the industry.

One consequence of using unbranded commodity servers and the open source Linux operating system was the decimation of server companies like Sun Microsystems, which for many years had been the big winners in Internet architecture. Google and others realized they could ship not-yet-perfect software and fix problems as they emerged. Internet as a computing platform! Move fast and break things!

On the work front, the Internet became a much bigger way to sell and ship products than anyone expected. Today I can have a new transmission for my Subaru delivered to my house tomorrow, using the low-carbon route. One unforeseen giant leap for the culture of instant gratification.

3. Smartphones were a huge technical challenge, but they have proven so addictive that it has been worth it for both businesses and consumers. A big unintended consequence was the dominance of just two companies, Apple and Google, neither of whom had any previous experience in mobile phones. Nokia and Motorola never saw it coming.

The big two ran the operating systems, the app stores drawing millions of developers, and the data collection. All that online data created today’s unexpected social consequences of a global surveillance society, in everything from targeted advertising and home doorbells, to control of the public, worldwide. The “compute from anywhere” promise of mobile architecture turned out to be “work and be seen from anywhere.”

Share

4. Cloud computing, the last big architectural transition, is why we have AI today. Architecturally it was a revolution in scale, with million-server data centers that use software-based infrastructure, microservices that break big jobs into more manageable bits, and failure-tolerant systems beyond anything Google had deployed earlier. Couple those things with all that computing power and with all of the data people posted to the Internet and created on their phones, and commercial AI became plausible.

The unintended technology consequences are still being worked out, but they include centralized outages that can knock out dozens of businesses at once, and terrifying security threats. On the plus side, cloud computing made work from home and video meetings possible, saving millions of lives in the first tech-era global pandemic.

Broadly speaking, tech’s unintended consequences break down into technical biases to speed and economy that incumbents don’t see coming, and social changes that often imitate what the new architecture is producing. The Jesuit thinker John Culkin was getting at this when he wrote that “we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” I doubt he was thinking that the workplace would imitate the computing architecture, but that development makes his observation even more profound than he knew.

Look at the workplace over the lives of many readers and their parents. First, rows of desks and stacks of paper bearing the results of mainframe punch cards, with lots of managers behind closed doors. Then cubicles and email, with the middle managers gone and everybody else picking up the slack. Next, producing and consuming endless amounts of information on web sites, with attention suddenly the scarce commodity, and the start of working late into the night from a connected home. Mobile computing made everywhere the workplace.

Now we are disaggregated piece-part workers in the cloud, with gig work, influencing, side hustles, and distributed teams on video calls. Work is often a series of microservices. For many people the contemporary world is similarly fragmented, delivering inordinate power and subservience, put together haphazardly, confusing us with the number of calls on our attention, moving fast and breaking things.

Into all this comes the AI architecture. On the tech side, right now everyone is buying Nvidia chips, to a point where that company’s CEO recently posted a model of AI computing that began with electric utilities and went on to earth moving equipment, before spending a little time on the actual computer parts of the architecture. Everything was in service of the mighty chip. With a few tweaks, one could make a similar model of the McDonald’s hamburger world, starting with growing hay for cows before including electric utilities, earth movers, and computers, all in service of the patty.

No offense to Nvidia, but IBM, Sun, and Nokia all sounded like this in their day. Something cheaper that we don’t see coming may be headed our way.

Certainly, there are already a lot of open source projects aimed at getting more out of the computing, networking, and data storage demands of the chips, probably by depositing a lot more computing intelligence at each step of the process. It will be interesting to see whether some big change happens in the chip world before that trillion-dollar data center bet, which will take years to complete, is fulfilled.

As always, the more interesting unintended consequence to consider is what the new architecture will do to the way we work, live, and think.

One big initial change of AI computing is the interface. People talk to the chatbot, and it talks back. It feels more like conversation than programming, and very quickly even smart people start giving the machine a personality.

That may ease off once the “it’s conscious!” hysteria goes away. But when you couple the conversational confusion with the reality that AI is essentially statistics-based (what’s called “probabilistic”) computing, of a depth even its designers can’t quite replicate, you start to see a bigger problem. Probabilistic computation is why you can talk with AI, why those conversations sometimes go off the rails, and why AI hallucinates. Both technically and socially, there’s an emerging crisis of trust here, abetted by things like AI’s deepfake images, which create mistrust in the real world.

Share

When Martin Luther set in train the Protestant Reformation, there had already been a century of rising individualism. Merchant wealth made it possible for rich traders to strike medallions of themselves. Painters like Da Vinci and Michelangelo were collected not just for their technical excellence, but so people could boast of having that name on their walls. Writers as diverse as Machiavelli and Castiglione3 talked about the world as a kind of theater in which the individual had to figure out and act their part.

Seen against that context, our postmodern suspicions about truth and our pervasive culture of irony seem like feeders to a colossal crisis of trust brought on by AI.

Which, almost certainly, will be met with a tech fix to the architecture of machines and society.

I am The Tooth Fairy.

Under that shimmering mantle, I have managed a telepathic parrot, a multitude of ice cream-fueled unicorns, and a dance band staffed by artistic snow monkeys. I have traveled in a globe-spanning zeppelin command center, and built an enchanted castle, the resting place for billions of children’s teeth, not far from the storied headquarters of Mr. Santa Claus. He works but one night a year; I never ceased, owing to my steady and abundant global customer base. Unlike humans, most of the critters I managed were obliging and required minimal oversight. Real estate, though, that’s a hassle even when it’s make-believe. Ask anyone possessing magical wealth. Or take my word for it, in this and all other matters.

Critically, The Tooth Fairy also had a marker pen of sparkly golden ink, which for several years I wielded for my audience of two.

I was not, like some, a Tooth Fairy manqué, casually swapping out a lost tooth for the usual quarter and calling it a night. Not that there’s anything wrong with that: The kid gets up in the morning two bits to the good, everybody is happy. Fine, if fleeting. When my initial son lost his first tooth, though, I yearned for a Tooth Fairy backstory, and some understanding of the consequences for the magical sprite’s peculiar nocturnal fetching.

I began with a simple thank you note, informing him that his lower front tooth was now part of a Castle of Eternal Smiles, a live-in grin of joy, made from the teeth of children the world over. Specifically, it capped a glittering rampart.

Admittedly, a sprawling construction made entirely of teeth sounds rather primal, even a touch grisly, to adult ears. For the most part though, kids possessing gift money are too gleefully ADD to dwell long on such things. Besides, they’ve heard worse - read your Brothers Grimm.

The letter was a big hit the next day, particularly for its loopy golden signature I’d written with a party pen that happened to be next to the keyboard. I signed it as a southpaw to throw off any youthful sleuthing.1 The boy ran around our bed waving his document, his younger sibling in tow with a vision that he too would someday enter this larger pantheon of magical beings.

What I had not counted on was the obvious, that between them there were 39 teeth to go. This presented a significant call on details and plot over the next few years.

With the next tooth, the Tooth Fairy revealed the existence of her magic parrot, who locates every tooth under every child’s pillow every night. [Note to the data-driven: our planet enjoys about 950 million people between the ages of five and 12, who lose on average 2.5 teeth a year, which works out to about one every 146 days; this amounts to 6.5 million teeth a night, or 4,519 teeth a minute. You’re goddamn right that parrot is magical.] His name was Midnight Pinkie, perhaps because he works all night, on a globe where it’s always night someplace. And yet he finds time to keep TTF fully apprised of what’s happening in the lives of two of her favorite kids.

Share

It then developed that Midnight Pinkie was assisted by a unicorn named Sparkle Bob. One spots, one transports. Then, that Sparkle Bob liked ice cream, and could they leave some out next time? The tooth after that revelation yielded further evidence in support of the myth, for the next proffered ice cream bowl was left empty by their bunk beds. Mirabile dictu!

Another unicorn, Sparkle Keith, showed up to help with the younger boy’s teeth. Another one, Sparkle Norman, worked in the greater Himalaya/Mongolia/Siberia region. The Tooth Fairy also maintained an Enamel Archive, where the history of each tooth and what it had chewed was recorded. There were the musically-inclined snow monkeys. There were skipping turtles, in charge of an Easter Egg hunt at the North Pole. There were many doings with Santa (the firstborn running into our bedroom yelling “The Tooth Fairy knows Santa!” is a cherished morning newsflash.) There was a tour in the command zeppelin to the South Seas. Iceberg races with Royal Ventana, the penguin queen of Antarctica. Snowmen they made with her, and took back to the North Pole. They heard of dances at the Cloud King’s house. They wrote back to her, asking for a ride on Sparkles Bob and Keith.

At the time I was, in my day job as a financial journalist, reading a lot of quarterly reports and shareholder letters. Which may explain why sometimes the Tooth Fairy would begin an update with “Big doings around the kingdom these days…”

As some of you have guessed, the Tooth Fairy drinks. For some reason, children’s teeth seem to come out unexpectedly during dinner. Well I remember draining a second glass of wine as I smiled at my son’s newly gap-toothed grin, and prepared for a second writing shift for the day. Mrs. Hardy would look at me lovingly across the table, mouthing something like, “your move, buster.”2

As everyone slept I was back in our cottage, raveling my shaggy dog mythology from the keyboard, sometimes abetted by a slow third glass, while raccoons padded on the roof above. It was great fun, and always a relief to make my deadline, painstakingly signing my letter in southpaw gold.

In some ways it was some of the most distinctive writing I’ve done. All effective writing has an audience in mind. It answers the question, “who is reading this, and where do I want to take them?” This is true even when the audience is oneself and the destination is “Hopefully, illumination.”

Here and elsewhere, though, one’s children are a special category, if only for the way we know them. Everyone else we know, everyone, comes to us with their history, and so much of any close relationship consists of us trying to explain ourselves to each other. Holding my firstborn, however, I knew the only connection utterly unsullied by time, and therefore possessing a unique purity. Not to mention, all the cleaning, and toting, and sometimes myth-making, thereafter.

Late into the night as TTF, I wrote for them with that connection in mind, and often in anticipation of how overjoyed they would be at the new knowledge. When I wrote for print newspapers, I’d sometimes see people on the subway smiling, even laughing, at something I’d written. That feeling was close, the way a lightning bug is close to lightning itself.

Today I might have AI do the whole thing for me, issuing a few simple prompts and seconds later possessing a far more coherent mythology I could deal out over those years.

Reader, thank Goodness I’m not looking back on how I did the whole thing with AI. Nothing like the same audience relationship.

As I write this, I have another confession. Until now I never revealed my identity to my sons. They simply ran out of teeth, and The Tooth Fairy sailed into the horizon in her airship, accompanied by all her magic friends. One of those children will soon clerk on the Federal Court, while the other manages a team of a dozen AI engineers. Most likely they have moved on to other delusions, more suited to the world of adults. As must we all.

And if by chance they have not - Boys, I made this whole thing up.

The kingdom ended a $4.7 billion contract for construction of an enormous freshwater lake. It was the crucial centerpiece of Trojena, a projected desert ski resort that was also going to contain a golf course, hotels, restaurants and (brace yourself) shopping. Compounding the tragedy, Trojena was going to host the 2029 Asian Winter Games; now they will be held in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where there are already mountains, and snow falls in the winter.

Against the loss of lives and real property in the Mideast these days, the probable end of Trojena is a minor tragedy. What makes it worthy of note is that Trojena itself was a subset of NEOM, a truly spectacular folly on which the kingdom has already spent some $50 billion, with little to show. And, by extension, the collapse signifies a generally sad forecast for the next couple decades in the Mideast. Their loss won’t be good for the rest of us, either.

For those unfamiliar with NEOM, the 2017 brainchild of Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman, the modernization project’s original centerpiece was originally conceived to include The Line, a 170-kilometer long vertical city, just 200 meters wide but 500 meters tall, sheathed in moving mirrors and housing 9 million people. Add to that and Trojena the industrial robot-based manufacturing city of Oxagon, to be built out into the ocean.

The Line’s promotional video is itself a thing of bubbly beauty. Promising an end to “dysfunctional and polluted cities that ignore nature,” it was to be “organized in three dimensions” with flying drones, “equitable views,” and a transit system that would make it possible to cross the megacity in just 20 minutes. There was to be a hidden marina, home to luxury cruise ships, which would sail under an arch bearing an inverted 30-story building that hung like a glamorous pendant. That last bit was scrapped after engineers pointed out that the force of Earth’s rotation would turn the pendant into a pendulum, which would break off and crash into the harbor.1

NEOM-related construction went on for some three years, before The Line was significantly scaled back to a couple of kilometers late last year. It was then expected to house some people and maybe a bunch of data centers. That was in January.

At the end of February, though, America and Israel attacked Iran. At this point Iran has no military forces to speak of, but has become a new, and possibly lasting, threat to most of the Gulf Economies. Since NEOM is well within drone range of both the Iranians and their allies the Houthis, condos there might be a tough sell to most foreigners.

Even if the war ends in a couple of weeks, as hoped, the new status quo is likely to lead to all kinds of recalculations in the region. Dubai, with its luxury condos of $50 million and up, will see its rich foreigners price into their purchases the risk of being a drone target. Qatar, which very quickly had become a producer of fertilizer, particularly for farmers in poor countries, has seen its exports go to zero. It was also one of several Gulf States giving billions in foreign aid2 to poorer countries, a relatively recent phenomenon that may now suffer from a cash crunch and new defense spending needs. Rory Stewart’s projection of a 10-15 year economic setback in the Gulf seems likely.

If the threat from Iran were to disappear,3 the country’s previous status as the single shadowy bogeyman that Arab countries could agree on would probably disappear with it. In that scenario these countries would rejig their security strategies, and in the absence of Iran they could well go back to antagonizing each other.

All of which makes NEOM, The Line, and all the rest of that ambitious project a relic of a bygone time, even before it’s built. Great follies are normally a beautiful thing, something we can all point to later to show how crazy the dreaming became. In this case, however, we will miss the impossible future that people once foresaw.

Earlier this month I was at the Montgomery Summit, an investor conference focused on advanced technology.2 Brace yourself: There was a lot of AI talk. Two companies in particular stood out to me for the way they are using AI to play human-type games, but on a whole new level of complexity.

One of the companies, Xyme, is focused on transforming chemistry by locating and programming new enzymes, molecules that speed up the catalytic events transforming one material into another.

We do that now, when we turn crude oil into things like gasoline, fertilizer, plastics, pesticides, and a bunch of other things we’re currently reminded3 are critical to modern life. Nature plays the same transformation game with all kinds of enzymes, using far less energy and with far less waste. Positing and creating new enzymes has been extremely difficult and time consuming, but Xyme says it can discover new materials with a combination of synthetic chemical data and AI attuned to quantum physics.

Buzzword compliant, maybe, but the week after we met they announced that they have designed a novel enzyme. You can read about it here. The potential is to produce the biofuel ethanol for half the price of gasoline.

This development shouldn’t come as too much of a shock. Eight years ago Alphabet’s DeepMind released AlphaFold, which predicts protein structures. Its creators won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Making previously nonexistent enzymes is a far tougher proposition, but the basic use of AI in understanding and manipulating the physical world is now an established reality.

Share

It’s illuminating in this context to think of science, as many scientists do, as a game of seeking understanding (I tend to think of writing that way, and “play” it in part to understand myself and the world better.) AlphaFold, and now Xyme, are programmed to play a game of discovery.

Before protein folding, DeepMind was renowned for AlphaGo, a machine that beat the world’s champion Go player. Go is considered exponentially more complex than chess. AlphaGo got so good by learning the initial rules of the game, then playing millions of games against variations of itself. In competition it made moves that were highly unlikely to be made by a human, but which were still effective.4 You could say that Xyme aims to play the chemistry game in a whole new, nonhuman, way.

The other company, Lila Biosciences, first came into the public eye a year ago with a promise to create AI that plays the ultimate game in science, the scientific method itself. This means that on its own the machine will, with enough experience, not simply point to hopeful stuff to check out, but conceive of new experiments, carry them out, and apply the new learning from the results to make broader and deeper observations about reality than we have achieved. It’s the human practice of observe-hypothesize-design-experiment-conclude, but umpteen times faster.

Today the company says it is running all sorts of experiments in diverse subjects, for example materials science and biology, around the clock, much the way AlphaGo played millions of games of Go against itself in order to achieve a new proficiency. Lila has played through over 600,000 variations of MRNA molecules, a company executive said. It has worked on advanced magnets without using rare earth minerals, and it has split water into hydrogen without the use of precious metals.

To be sure, all of these results need to be checked independently, and the economics of any new discoveries have to make sense within the marketplace. Yet if this takeover of the scientific method itself bears out, it would have big implications for how industry works and how academia operates. It would also, for some game-playing scientists at least, be similar to the shattering loss that Go champion Lee Sedol felt watching AlphaGo play at a whole new level.

As I wrote elsewhere, our civilization’s two engines of growth have been the market and the method. Uniquely among civilizations, we’ve set aside teleology, or any final fate of things, for a triumphant world of middles, where prices continuously change without a final price, happiness is pursued rather than achieved, leaders transition without ascending to heaven, theories prevail only until they’re improved. Since we didn’t have to work our ideas backward from our particular sense of God, we have manipulated the world better than anyone.5

But outsourcing the scientific method itself to an algorithm, one so enmeshed with methodologies like Deep Learning that we can’t really understand what’s going on - that might represent the final end of our method. We ourselves won’t even think up what’s next.

On the one hand, this could be the final demonstration of what AI researcher Peter Norvig pointed out in 2008, that decades spent on theories of how language works mattered less for computer translation than a year of really big computers with lots of data, just bashing through the problem.6 On the other, we would increasingly be consuming results without looking for new things ourselves through the scientific method.

And if history is any guide, we will then find something else to look for .

A decade of my life was enmeshed with Japan, first as a traveling salesman and then as a foreign correspondent. I left in 1994, when Japan’s median age was 38 years old. Today it is about 50, and aging fast. On three other visits since repatriating I worked with tech companies, so I saw many younger people. This time I got the bigger picture.

I’d heard the weird stats and chilling stories. Sales of adult diapers have outstripped sales of infant diapers in Japan for a decade. It has more pets than kids.1 In the countryside, emptying out for years, houses sell for $2,000.2 Rural villages have dummies in the playground to remind themselves of children. The number of vending machines is off 23% from its peak - these pricey outlets for busy people have lost share to cheap markets, where old people dawdle and bargain hunt.

Lived experience is always more intense than reported data. Tokyo’s population is larger than when I left, because the countryside is emptying out. But it is strangely quiet. It’s much more vertical, thanks to three decades of government-led construction to jump start a flagging economy. But there isn’t much street life, compared to when people popped in and out of two- and three-story dwellings. They don’t blast music and other noise in the streets as much. Once-cacophonous pachinko parlors, absolute onslaughts of noise, light and burning tobacco, where crowds of individuals hid from work or family to smoke and gamble on vertical pinball, are now scarce and empty.

Empty playgrounds. Vans converted to hold five wheelchairs. Schoolkids playing soccer alone, or on underpopulated teams. Places famous for being crowded, like the crosswalk in Shibuya Square, have smaller crowds.3 The “passenger pushers” who ensured that rush hour subways were loaded at over 200% capacity are now rare sightings (it’s amazing what you can miss.) When you see a baby you feel like telling someone.

This was a visit to one very unique place, and not all positive,4 but each sight was also a vision of the developed world’s future, coming at us fast.

Share

The world fertility rate is now 2.2 births per woman, barely above the population replacement rate of 2.1 births, and falling. Japan’s birth rate of 1.2 births per woman is tied for seventh place, along with Chile, Italy, the United Arab Emirates, and Thailand. This group of countries is diverse enough to warn anybody off glib cultural reasons to account for Japan’s declining population. It’s strange that people treat this country’s dwindling population as unique, like cherry blossom viewing or kabuki theater.

What does make Japan distinctive is how long depopulation has gone on there. They stopped having lots of kids 50 years ago. The ensuing problem was foreseen earlier, too: In the economic boom of the early nineties we wrote stories about a government plan to deploy the country’s astonishing (and, it turned out, illusory) wealth to buy Northeast Australia, which they would convert into a giant old folks’ home. Japan is now the major country5 with both the highest median age and the greatest percent of population over 65. More than the estimable habits of eating fish and taking the stairs, Japan has lots of old people because there haven’t been that many kids here for a very long time.

“Japan just gets there first,” says my friend Peter Tasker, over an enormous shared donburi one night in Shibuya. Peter is a longtime resident and excellent observer of Japan. “While everyone else thought China was going to be this great partner, Japan was getting bullied by China. Now lots of countries have China leaning on them. Japan was first with a catastrophic natural disaster that destroyed essential infrastructure, with the tsunami in 2011. While Germany went nuts and shut down the nuclear power plants and went back to coal and gas, Japan upgraded its system and got people on board. Now Japan is building for an old people world ahead of everybody. Lots of things that are going to happen elsewhere have already happened here.” Peter has lived in Japan for most of five decades. He plans to stay on partly because it’s so well retooled for older people.

Share

Of course, Japan’s reality is not the global one. The populations of many countries are still growing fast. And it’s good to remember that demography is destiny.

Among the 40 countries with the highest birthrates, ranging from 3.6 to 6.1 babies per woman, all but three are in Africa.6 Many of these are small countries, but Nigeria, with 4.5 kids per woman, has 223 million people, the world’s sixth-largest population.7 Outside Africa, Pakistan, with the world’s fifth-largest population, also has a fertility rate of 3.6 kids.

What these countries have in common isn’t their location. It’s that they’re poor. And lots more than rich people, poor people need jobs.

Does this mean rich countries are about to see migrations by the billion, a scale unstoppable for even the most repressive immigration police? Possibly, but these migrants would be headed into developed economies that won’t be growing that fast, owing to aging populations.8 And, if you believe the projections, an increasing amount of physical work will be done by robots. Japan had about 358,000 migrants in 2024, but it already has 450,000 industrial robots, a high number thanks to its early concerns about an aging population. Stories about domestic robots for the elderly are now legion. Each new robot nurse is one fewer home healthcare worker.

In other words, on top of the hostility this enormous wave of migrants would face, there may not be that much for them to do when they get to the rich world. Barring climate-related catastrophes that make their home countries utterly unlivable (in which case we’re all screwed, since climate doesn’t happen in just one place) there won’t be that many reasons to leave the languages and cultures they know.

Share

Just before I went to Japan I was at a financial conference in Santa Monica, California. The final speaker, Michael Milken,9 put up some demographic slides that told much the same story - more adult than kid diapers in Japan, more dog strollers than baby carriages in South Korea, China’s unsolvable aging crisis, the burgeoning populations in Africa.

Milken then made an excellent point to the people in the room, who represented hundreds of billions of dollars in available funds.

“The world can’t take the migration of a billion people,” he said. “We are going to have to create jobs in Africa. Give people opportunities where they live.”

He was exactly right. I hope the aging money guys in that room weren’t hard of hearing.

Meet Young Bacchus, the bronze head of a Roman statue from the first half of the first century AD. He currently resides in the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, Calif. I had the good fortune to hang out with the lad/god this week while moderating some panels at the March Capital investor conference in Santa Monica. Of which more later.

One of the things I like about this statue is the way it seems to get drunk as the viewer changes position. In the photograph above his wide eyes take in the viewer, his mouth is slightly open in wonder, and the garland rests lightly on his locks. The photo was taken while I viewed the bronze directly, bending my knees to do so. Then, I looked at him again while standing up, which put me about 3 inches above his eye line.

Whoa there, son. Looking a little muddled. His eyes have a vacancy and the lips are slack. There’s too much stuff in his hair.

This Bacchus looks a few too many cups into his evening. Somebody better call the lad a chariot before things get out of hand.1

Share

He’s not the only Bacchus who drinks as you change your point of view. In the Bargello Museum of Florence there’s another, said to be Michelangelo’s second professional sculpture, made when he was about 22 years old.2

Michelangelo’s Bacchus is mostly intact, and you can see how the artist plays with the god’s posture. Approached from the left side, he’s stable, cup straight on as it heads to his mouth:

Then you circle around him, and from the back there’s a decidedly lopsided gait, and the little satyr that at first was frolicking at Baccus’ foursquare leg now seems to have both legs on the ground, supporting the boss a bit:

Then you continue around to the front, where Bacchus is definitely wobbly. He looks through the handle of his now-tilted cup to drunkenly meet the viewer’s eye. Nice!

Not bad for a 22 year old no one had ever heard of.

The following year he did this:

It had a couple of angels too, but they’ve flown off.

Word is that Michelangelo, a 23-year-old nobody, overheard someone attribute his Pietà to another sculptor, a famous craftsman. That night Michelangelo returned and carved his name on Mary’s sash. He never had to sign anything again.

1

I’d be remiss not to mention the wonderful geometry of the Getty’s cases, which do such a nice job here of framing the Bacchus with thin white lines. Check out this winged lion, a Phoenician image cast by Iberian artisans in 500 BC:

It’s bigger for being so well-encased.

War and technology have been supercharging each other for a couple of centuries. Napoleon Bonaparte offered a prize to whomever came up with a way for his citizens’ army to travel farther, and, along with the rearrangement of Europe, we got canned food. The Civil War engendered the repeating rifle, held by thousands of PTSD veterans as they soon “settled” the American West, backed by a big postwar gun industry that was doubtless pushing the army to keep buying. Radar and commercial penicillin and nukes in World War II…you get the picture.

I’ve written before about smartphones and the collapse of the cost of violence. Now tech and modern media are striking new levels in this conflict, creating many new and utterly strange developments:

-Sweaty with victory, the White House released a video that mixed Call of Duty play, videos of people and things being blown up, a Childish Gambino sample, and a voice over that announced, “We’re winning this fight.” Grrrr. It was a big hit on X.

-Elsewhere in entertainment, over $1 billion has been wagered in online betting markets since the outbreak of the war. On one level, war profiteering is the kind of betting rich people have always done, when they snap up oil cargoes or trade weapons. Now the fortunes of war have been democratized to wishful profiteers of every income level. What’s different is the diversity of these online bets (Will the attacks will start today or next week,? Will the Shah’s son will return? Will there be a Supreme Leader by March 11?) and their irrelevance to the final outcome. We are betting on the spectacle, as much as the war itself.

-Ukrainian engineers, who perfected a smartphone/microphone network of audio sensors for Iranian drones fired by Russia, are bringing this technology to the Gulf.

-Israel figured out where the Iranian head of state would be in part by hacking Tehran’s traffic cameras, then applying facial recognition technology to the drivers of every high-ranking Iranian official.1 Then they used AI to sort through zillions of images, plus intercepted phone traffic and God knows what else, to establish the meeting place and time.

Share

-Members of our transnational superclass are in a bind, according to the Financial Times. They are desperately seeking private jets that will fly them into the war zone. They have residency in the United Arab Emirates for tax purposes, but need to meet their minimum residency requirements. If they don’t put in enough time where there’s no income tax, they could be subject to, say, the high income taxes of the U.K. Die horribly in an Iranian drone strike, or pay His Majesty’s lien? No brainer.

-At the other end of the income spectrum, while war goes on so do the food delivery services in most Mideast cities. Drone attack? Sure, but where’s my pizza! The brave (or desperate) souls on their scooters have difficulty getting to their clients while the food is hot, though, since the GPS used in their map services is frequently jammed to prevent drone navigation.

Chapter One: A surveillance officer has become fixated on a particular delivery driver, and follows that driver’s progress as his scooter dodges drone shrapnel while struggling with his janky cellphone map and checking his acoustic drone-sensing app. The officer cheers the driver on, following the action by switching from one traffic camera to the next. It’s almost like a video game.

Suddenly, a private jet with a tax-dodging billionaire crash-lands on the elevated road above the driver. Seeing the identity of the billionaire and his celebrity passenger, the surveillance officer makes a bet on Polymarket in the name of the delivery driver, then uploads footage to social media…

Years ago I gave up satirical fiction for journalism, since the world (and William Gibson) was making it up faster and better than I possibly could. Now? This?

Among aggressors and victims everywhere, anytime, there is an underlying search for normality amid madness. But if normality is to be restored, it will be under entirely new terms. While conflict and killing pertain in the war zone, we who are safe (as best we know) search for more news, try to pattern a new normality. Meantime, history continues its slow grind underneath all the latest catastrophes.

War is bad for thinking, and it’s been a tough week to offer the Shop’s usual single-topic essay about tech, history, or art. There’s a war on, so that is temporarily impossible. Instead, here are a few shorter observations, inflected by the present perhaps, but at least not too dependent on the latest development, the new twist of violence.

Share

1. Literature and War

This week I saw a filmed performance of the National Theatre’s “Othello.” Seen through the lens of this week’s violence, it appeared a tragedy of people wrapped up in glory and renown, concerned with their reputation in society and history, how they will be remembered. And it was all to their ruin.

The mad jealousy that leads Othello to kill Desdemona (oh crap, spoiler, sorry) burns not just on sexual or romantic frustration, but from the fear that he, the famous general, will be seen just as a cuckold, a laughingstock. Desdemona’s father plants the first seeds of jealous doubt with Othello well before Iago digs in, and he does so because he is enraged that his daughter will marry a Moor. 1It’s public image over love, the politics of reputation versus real character.

Othello’s last speech, which by the rules of traditional drama should contain some measure of learning and self-awareness, is instead devoted to how he wishes to be remembered.2 The details excusing his uxoricide3 (“Then must you speak/Of one that loved not wisely, but too well”) are, to say the least, a very generous interpretation of his murderous foolishness. Even the final reason for his suicide (“And say besides, that in Aleppo once,4/Where a malignant and a turbanned Turk/Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,/I took by th’ throat the circumcisèd dog,/And smote him, thus”) is wrapped up with reputation, for how it will look for Venice to have a wife-killer as a general? It’s better for the city’s reputation that Othello dies, like the Turk who disrespected Venice, and maybe Othello will be remembered well because he committed suicide.

The play depicts the tragic dilemma of the self in the world. And it is a warning, through this week’s eyes, about people who take bold and violent actions for the sake of how they’ll be seen in History.

End the Moor. And more. At the play’s end Iago, whose motivations for driving Othello are never clearer than “Iago hates,” utterly refuses to give a reason for his actions. Or as I preferred, he wouldn’t give give color and reason to his evil, or embellish his reputation as a villain.

This drives his captors to fury. The penultimate lines of the play are about torturing Iago long, hard, and slow enough that he’ll explain himself. Yeah! The state needs its story, because we’re all crazy to understand the reasons why something happened. As if that knowledge could stop these tragic things from happening again.5

Share

2. War and Literature

The language of our U.S. Administration has been clear: Power and violence are the ultimate arbiters of history. It was stated clearly after U.S. forces invaded and seized the head of Venezuela. Soon after, White House advisor Stephen Miller said that “We live in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.”6

Much of what we’ve seen and heard since, both through our acts of violence and the language of our secretary of war and our president, restates that vision of the world. American leadership now revels in this vision of might.

Their interpretation of How The World Works echoes the Melian Dialogue of 416 B.C., which appears in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. The people of Melos, a small state, don’t want to bend to the will of the Athenians, who at the time had the most powerful of the Greek city states.

The Athenians are admirably clear, even sympathetic, to the Melians, even as they tell the Melians to stick their collective head in a toilet:

“For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretences—either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Mede, or are now attacking you because of wrong that you have done us—and make a long speech which would not be believed; and in return we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the Lacedaemonians, although their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

That last part was quoted by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in his Davos speech announcing that many allies of the U.S. may have to search for a new alliance structure.

Conservative historian Niall Ferguson wrote approvingly of the Athenian view, noting that the Melians were slaughtered soon after. Siva Gunitsky has written an excellent counter, pointing out that the speech also marked the apogee of Athenian arrogance; a year later, Athens overreached in Sicily. The decimation led to revolts, more losses, and a complete collapse.

Read both versions, take your pick.

Share

3. Hallucination and War

It’s striking how much the magical thinking about war shares properties with the hallucinations of a Large Language Model in Artificial Intelligence.

LLMs hallucinate because…well, they’re supposed to. AI utilizes Deep Learning, which is fundamentally a statistical process across unimaginably large data sets. By definition, statistical results are not certain, they are simply highly probable.

The goal of AI is to minimize the frequency and magnitude of hallucinations. Over time, though, it’s inevitable that something will happen way out of the norm (in normal statistical terms, beyond two standard deviations.) It may happen due to a weird bit of data, a false correlation, or who knows, a momentary surge in the heat around a semiconductor doing the calculation. As a result, you get a picture of a person holding up four disembodied fingers, or a legal brief that confidently cites nonexistent cases.

In the case of war, the two standard deviations are crossed when something wildly unexpected happens, and certainty becomes best guesses. The path forward is pure conjecture. Veterans say that can happen within the first few shots of a battle.

The U.S. unexpectedly assassinating the leadership of Iran with no concrete plan for what will happen next is definitely extraordinary. Since then, we’ve been given a wealth of positive signals about power and victory. These may be true, or maybe the data is selected in service of our Athenian bias towards victory because of superior force. In other words, we could be hallucinating.

No one appears to be offering the balance of nay-saying or negative data, and there’s little incentive to run the data again, this time from an adversarial viewpoint. Victory is just too seductive. Like most AI hallucinations, the real danger comes from not checking the work, or interrogating the method of decision making.

A frequent consequence of human hallucinations like this is the assumption that everything else will behave as we hope:

-We’ll still have a normal Olympics in Los Angeles, home to the largest expatriate Iranian community. Maybe so, particularly if the war has been concluded by then in a way that works out for the U.S.

-Europe, recently criticized by J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio for taking in too many refugees, will not face a wave of millions of Iranians fleeing a collapsing state.

-Arab nations, generally at peace with each other when Iran was a common enemy, won’t start regional wars.

Then there’s the Kurds, the Russians, the Chinese, the importance of Iran’s fresh water to the region, restless Baluchis on the border of restive Pakistan, the Strait of Hormuz…lots of data there, most of it of uncertain quality, on which new decisions will be made.

A human hallucination of this sort is only over when a new reality stabilizes, and information is again diverse and reliable. Until then, thinking well is difficult.

You can still find the testimony online, in a Congressional report called “Stagflation,” that strange coupling of productivity decline and inflation that gripped much of the seventies. The scope of the hearings was considerably greater than economics, though. Two years earlier Republicans and Democrats had come together for a 3 ½ year study to figure out why people and markets didn’t seem to respond to policies the way they had before.

“The underlying thesis,” said Richard Bolling, a Congressman from Missouri, “is that economic, social, political, international, and technical conditions have changed, and are still changing markedly. This suggests that conventional wisdom and established economic tools may not be equal to the challenge of making sound policies.”

“What we want to discuss today is where will the typical American family be in the next decade,” he continued. “How long before continuing inflation corrodes the basic institutions of our free society and market economy?”

From our current vantage this borders on optimistic fantasy: Our two parties joined in a bipartisan effort to figure out why the world wasn't working the way it used to, why people everywhere were freaking out, and what as a body of lawmakers they might do about it.1 The underlying state, however, is also strangely contemporary: People today also doubt the future will be better than the past, and they sense that forces out of their control have made the structures of their ordinary life not simply ineffective, but ridiculous to continue.

Dad sat alongside Arthur Okun, a Yale economist who’d served on the President’s Council of Economic Advisors;2 Otto Eckstein, a Harvard economist who’d developed the theory of core inflation, and who’d also built the first broadly-used computer timeshare service for economic data; and Martin Feldstein, also of Harvard and president of the National Bureau of Economic Research.3

My father had an indifferent Business degree from the University of Maryland,4 and had been a poet before discovering his true genius in sales. He rose to become publisher of LIFE magazine and then president of The Dreyfus Corporation, a large Wall Street mutual fund. He was to testify last, presumably as the voice of business.

Okun said the solution to stagflation was cost reduction and tax reform. Feldstein thought particular sectors needed tinkering and wanted higher productivity though tax policies, Eckstein said core inflation could be addressed by lower demand, and suggested raising corporate R&D.

Then it was Dad’s turn. “Your invitation to appear here this morning is, like all compliments, hugely gratifying and mildly mystifying,” he said before qualifying himself. “I have, however, spent a number of years reading and talking and thinking about the nature, the pace, and the effects of change, and simultaneously figuring out what motivates people to behave in certain ways in spending or hanging on to their money.”

Then he went big. “Changes in the U.S. and world economies have been companion to changes now occurring in attitudes, goals, and even in deep beliefs within our society and others,” he said. We may be at the start of “a basic change from the rational, secular, scientific, and technological period which began eight to ten centuries ago.” This may lead to a fundamental change in the beliefs that permit common consent about the nature of the world, he said, hence the politics that manage it.

This, he suspected, was one reason for the alienation people felt from work and each other, and from “rigid institutions with their cynical stake in perpetual continuity.” He added, “we have focused on curing disease, not on holistic health, on economic productivity as if it were somehow indifferently related to the passions of the worker.”

“I believe that we are near a change,” he said, “that will no longer permit us to base our economic planning on the assumption that people work almost entirely to acquire things and that their appetite for material goods and services is insatiable…We should try to find out what is happening to the social organization that will change our perception of good work, useful work, interesting and rewarding work.”

Share

In the face of what would soon happen in America, when the sunshine of Ronald Reagan combined with the brutal interest rates of Paul Volcker5 and the technology-led financialization of everything to create the apotheosis of the consumer society, this was an exceptionally poor prediction.

From today’s perspective, however, when social alienation and political cynicism seem intractable, when much of the country is addicted to painkillers and other noxious methods of escape from their lives, when it’s commonplace to think our technology will (a) take our jobs then (b) kill us, and when we’re so bereft of new ideas that we’re stuck in a terminal nostalgia loop, unable to conceive of a new world, I can’t help but wonder if he had an excellent point.

Later in the hearing, Dad was asked where the country’s leaders should focus their energy. “I would do those things which would reassure people that the whole thing is going to stick together. There is a growing conviction that something is very wrong out there, a growing conviction, I think I said earlier, that somebody is betraying the promises of a lifetime.”

That reassurance of unity in the face of radical change did not happen in any successful manner.6 In 2016 and 2020, however, a presidential candidate did notice a national conviction that the promises of a lifetime had been betrayed. Instead of telling them the whole thing would stick together, though, he built a nostalgia-first campaign of revenge and retribution, with little positive vision for the future.

It proved a very successful approach, at least in the short term.

• “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”

• “For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe. But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting…Against that backdrop, then, as now, many came to believe that the West’s age of dominance had come to an end and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past. But together, our predecessors recognized that decline was a choice, and it was a choice they refused to make. This is what we did together once before, and this is what President Trump and the United States want to do again now, together with you.”1

Rubio was inviting the audience to join the US in reversing what he sees as the current decline of western power, which began with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. Soon after, in his view, the West was grievously weakened by globalization, increased migration, and an international rules-based order that disadvantages the West.

What struck me deeply, though, was how much Rubio’s speech was wrapped up in the past, and how incapable he was of articulating a new vision for this century, now into its second quarter. When he did suggest solutions, they amounted to doing what we’re doing now, only doing it better.

This administration is hardly alone in its terminal nostalgia. For all the supposed world-changing technologies around us, we’re in a dangling time, waiting for an authentically new view of how the world works

By comparison, consider the sensibility in 1926, which by then had been through the First World War, had seen the development of Modernism and the term “the lost generation,” and was coping with the discoveries of relativity and the new physics. No one was talking about how to continue the nineteenth century, the way Rubio talked of renewing the spirit of 1945.

Or consider 1826, which by that time had seen the cultural consequences of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna, Industrialization, the Monroe Doctrine and the increasing European Imperialism. People understood they were in a very different place from the previous century; they weren’t thinking about new ways of continuing the world of Voltaire.

Share

It could be that we’re closer to 1726, when people and nations were still internalizing the effects of the social upheaval, war, and natural disasters of the previous century, now known to historians as The General Crisis. While no one then was talking about renewal by restoring the 1648 spirit of the Peace of Westphalia, there was as yet no vision of the future. There was no intimation that the century would come to be known as The Age of Reason and The Enlightenment, or that it would face the turmoil of the Seven Years’ War and the consequent revolutions in the U.S. and France.

So it may be that the twentieth century, “our worst century so far”, as Elizabeth Bishop put it, was the kind of trauma that takes a lot of processing. The path we took towards the post-1945 recovery that Rubio talked about provided a respite from horrors so great that perhaps we’re all quietly afraid to stray too far from it. If we do, we fear, the terrors will resume. And, deep down, we wonder whether there is some new turmoil to come, one that will truly reset everything, turning nostalgia into a nostrum.

MAGA is, of course, a mixture of nostalgia and retribution for a supposedly stolen birthright, a rearward-looking movement. Its politics are frequently that familiar mix of sentimentality and state violence. But the MAGA faithful are hardly the only ones who can’t move out of the past. The speech of Canada’s leader at Davos amounted to, “America can’t be relied on, let’s figure out how to sustain the alliance without it.” China seems content to try and grow enough to deal with a grim demography, with no meaningful restatement of world ambition (they’ve had a claim on Nationalist Taiwan since the formation of modern China) while Russia does unspeakable violence in the name of recovering some of the empire and respect it had back in the Twentieth Century. Militant Islam wants to restore the Ummah, a supposedly lost universal brotherhood.

Traumas like the World Wars and Napoleon’s devastation remade the world. Our twenty-first-century troubles, in the forms of 9/11 and the Forever Wars, or the 2008 financial meltdown, have not been sufficient to propel a truly new view of the world. Perhaps we should be grateful. Even today’s oligarchs, who run much of the American show, don’t seem to have anything that new in mind (at least, not in public.) Our stasis remains strange, though, when you consider that we’re almost 20 years into smartphones, and eight since the head of Google said Artificial Intelligence is “more profound than fire or electricity.” You’d think that would come with new conceptions of the world, and changed social and political sensibilities.

At second glance, though, even the seemingly world-changing technology of our time, the Large Language Model of AI, is a tool that endlessly scrapes old information, in the form of stored data, reconfiguring it into something supposedly new. Once again, culture advances technology, every bit as much as technology advances culture.2

It’s been 15 years since Kurt Andersen wrote about stagnation in popular culture, and how you could wear fashions 20 years old without remark. And yet, in Saturday’s Financial Times I read about New York’s Fashion Week, and the continuing influence of Carolyn Bessette, “the former Calvin Klein publicist turned Camelot bride,” an impressive location of nostalgia for 1999 inside that time’s nostalgia for 1963.

At the core of Rubio’s speech was the idea that “decline is a choice.” So is a ceaseless nostalgia for a time now vanishing in the rear view.

This isn’t a cause to panic about how fast things are changing, though an essay that went viral last week suggests we should. The essay, one of many in the “yikes!” vein, compared the new automation to the February 2020 onset of COVID, as if a worldwide plague is just ahead.

This trope was one of many indications that there’s still demand for good human editors. When something big is happening, and it affects work, it usually means people need to figure out new ways of working, and think about new systems of reward. More precisely, they need to abstract some of what they already know, think about it within a larger system, and change what they do next.

What I hear from the computing people who feel energized by the changes, and want to engage with them, the new challenges involve these elements:

• Not lines of code, but experiences. In all markets, there is commodity value, which consists of extracting, refining, and distributing something. Exxon does it with oil, Cargill does it with grain, McDonald’s does it with french fries, Google does it with Internet pages. To say, “it’s been commodified” is usually an insult about profitability, yet some of the world’s biggest and most important companies deal in commodities. Now, a few AI giants will do it with their data centers. Others may figure out new commodities to extract, refine, and distribute.

  For everyone else, the value comes from delivering something distinctive, either distinctive about yourself (like being a fine chef or a great novelist) or distinctive about your customer (back to our high-end shirt maker.) Those who deal in particulars instead of commodities deliver human experiences, and even in a highly automated world that will be true.

• Managing time is almost a new skill. Over at the site The Pragmatic Engineer there is an interesting conversation with the person who built an open source AI agent builder called OpenClaw (it’s a play on Anthropic’s Claude) that has been an overnight sensation.1 About 55 minutes in he talks about how exhausting it is to keep all his agents and production straight. It’s akin to being a chess master, and playing a dozen games at once. Sam and I also talked about being Warren Buffet, and focusing. Buffet develops great managers who can run a business for him while he focuses on the next thing. The great managers, in this context, will be agents, that keep you up on what “business” they’re running.

• Accountability, and the terms of work, may be “interesting” for a while. Particularly if you’re in a job where your contribution can be easily measured by a machine. One of the most trivially easy agents to produce seems to be the kind that can look at your contribution, and weigh it against the standards set by a manager (note to managers: be careful about the standards you’re setting; they’re akin to the architecture of your company.)

  Part of the problem here is that the old system of measurement is coming against a new system of work. This will chang.More than usual, for both employees and managers, defining what the group does and why will be a big deal.

• You can be cutting edge, and still be behind the times. Even the supposedly rule-breaking heroes of tech initially treat big shifts in the way they have to think about the world as COVID-level catastrophes. Change is hard, bro.

  More likely there will be dislocations, as the old complexity adapts to the new. That’s one reason why many of the people most engaged with AI are the most exhausted, something an article in the Harvard Business Review last week dealt with very well.

  
  One reason not touched on in the HBR piece: People are working with something new, but still using the old habits of work. This is similar to the measurement problem, above. Of course things are exhausting - imagine trying to weave and sew a shirt at a pace that kept up with the Spinning Jenny. Like all unsustainable things, this can’t go on forever.

What will be the source of pay? The less analytically measurable the final experience, the more valuable it may be. That takes us back to the value of delivering a human-centered experience.

How we measure and pay for work may change again, just as it did with shirts. That changed when we moved from piecework to factories, and again as the factories improved. The machine-destroying Luddites weren’t anti-tech; they were skilled machinists who hated the new machines that were easier to train on. Sort of like somebody who learned to code looking at Opus 4.5.

For most of this piece I’ve been writing about the ways new technologies become mainstream through encounters with existing economic and social practices. AI is guaranteed once again to change the perpetually changing structures of life. Which all humans, through the incredibly diverse history of civilizations and societies, seem continually to think are permanent, so that all big changes are a catastrophe.

Want to bet on the future that isn’t here yet? Bet on the persistence of human ingenuity, and the continual struggle of our species to find meaning in life, whatever system they live in. That’s probably the only meaningful tie you can make between “Medieval people feared God” and “in modern capitalism, the greatest good is to be an entrepreneur.” Give meaning to existence.

Wherever we go, that’s where we’ll be.

(This is the last of three parts. Part One is here. Part Two is here.)

The single worst tech advice of our age may have been “Learn to code!” Often cynically aimed at Humanities types, particularly laid-off journalists, this “tough guy” stance embraces the idea that writing software guarantees unlimited work. Learn some facts and explain them well, in human language, to promote understanding or argue a point, for a general audience?1 That’s was lazy work, for doomed slackers. Learn to code!

Oops. On November 24 the AI company Anthropic released its Claude Opus 4.5, a dramatically advanced AI model which creates software, builds intelligent agents, and otherwise manipulates computation. Friends of mine who work in software at a very high level are still processing how dramatically it has changed the speed at which they can write decent software.

Share

Last week I had coffee with Sam Schillace, who is Deputy Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft, and author of the invaluable Sunday Letters newsletter on the craft and meaning of writing software. We first met when he was building Google Docs. Today he manages a team working with advanced AI applications, including Microsoft’s new automated coding tools and methods. I mentioned that another friend, also a seasoned vet in the industry, produced 100,000 lines of usable code over the New Year holidays. A couple of years ago that would have been an almost unaccountable level of productivity.

“Yeah?” he said. “Sounds like a slow week.” He was kidding - sort of. Thanks to the newest coding models, the writing of software, as conceived of as traditional lines of code, is inflating at a rate few people can get their heads around. Name what you want written, and five minutes later you might have a thousand lines of code.

Whether in money or in lines of code, inflation diminishes underlying value. That’s terrible news for people who took the “learn to code!” advice, can bang out a bunch of lines, but never really cared for the job on its deeper levels. Sam recently did a piece on this crowd, and he wasn’t pretty about their prospects.

AI is inflating the number of words out there, too, something I’ve written about before. Doomish punditry in general is also inflating. Anthropic’s CEO writes compelling 30,000-word essays (according to the AI chatbots at Google Gemini and Anthopic’s Claude, probably without using AI) about the dangers of AI. He talks about massive job losses. In interviews, he says a huge amount of Anthropic’s software is written by AI.

And yet, there are no signs of layoffs at Anthropic, which last week raised another $30 billion in investment. Whatever they’re selling, it isn’t software on its own, and whatever Anthropic’s 3000 people are doing, they aren’t simply writing code.

Sam and other people I know seem more energized than worried by the Opus 4.5 shock. The value they see now lies in understanding complex architectures, orchestrating agents to work together (and likewise, to check other agents’ work), and knowing their way around the “primitives,” or fundamental building blocks, of complex software systems, as they relate to what your agents are building for you. In other words, this new AI enables engineers to think about the larger system, and what experiences they are trying to create.

That’s good work for imaginative and seasoned vets. But the code writing aspect of the job is undergoing the kind of productivity shift the cloth industry experienced when the weaving of thread became mechanized. Manipulating the larger structure of code is closer to being able to put together the machinery of the Spinning Jenny and coordinating several machines in production, or maybe designing fine tailoring for a high-paying client.

Or, turning to today’s inflation of words, it’s about understanding the overall structure and cadence of good writing, and the effect the writer is seeking to have on a particular audience.

It’s also a great opportunity for Computer Science departments, which appear to be losing enrollment, to thoroughly revamp their curricula to include early engagement with AI and training in architectural understanding. To borrow from the Humanities, they might learn by studying the classics, and thinking about the big forces at play.

Or, to borrow from the history of shirts, they should learn to accept big changes, and think about how we’ll turn the new excess into something novel, like the retail industry.

(This is the second of three parts. Part One is here. Part Three is here.)

There are a few issues with her idea,2 which is as much a comment about the rise of paid work as it is a statement about the benefits of the Industrial Revolution. Either way, it’s a crazy number, and a reminder that, as…peculiar…as our current events may seem, pretty much anyone in history would kill to be us. Today the finest handmade shirt costs $650, one-fifteenth Prof. Fisher’s imputed cost. Over at Uniqlo or Charles Tyrwhitt, a passable dress shirt is about $50. Which is to say, a super custom job is about one-tenth her price of pre-industrial work wear, while the mass-market stuff is cheaper by 98.9% You can buy it online in one minute, or 1/28,740th the time it took to make one by hand.

Of course, none of that means that the things we know, about shirts and much else in work and the economy, will stay the same from here on.

There are some remarkable elements to how industrial manufacturing changed work. For one, people now get paid to do work that before they did without pay. And the work each person does is radically simpler than before (see the illustration above, showing all the steps in making a linen shirt, just one of many jobs in a person’s day.)

Among the non-obvious changes, geography now has an inverse relationship to cost. While the pre-modern shirt was mostly made in one place, today’s high-cost bespoke job is sewn in Paris, from the finest Belgian linen. The cheap shirts use Egyptian cotton, get sewn in Vietnam or Malaysia, then shipped to the U.K. for further distribution.

Now consider effects away from the shirt itself. Eventually the cumulative productivity gains became a key part of the rise of retail stores, another astonishing creation of the Industrial era.3 With all this extra stuff, houses needed these things called “closets,” which were kind of like food pantries, but for clothes.

Share

All this speaks to the impossibility of predicting what will guide value after a big technology shift. Just above the most primitive level, there are simply too many interactions, too much complexity.

We can also see on a broad basis how some of these changes relate to the AI revolution, and how difficult it is to figure out the particulars. Today’s Artificial Intelligence advocates might say that efficiencies will rise by 100 times. Maybe so. In the case of clothing, though, there was a lot of variance in the particulars. Spinning became 500 times more productive. Weaving cloth improved by 40 times, and processing cotton had a 50 times increase in productivity. These changes happened over the course of 30 years, during which people kept adjusting the overall process of manufacturing shirts.

Eventually things settled down into a larger industrial process, but that hardly made it easier to say where wages would go. Machine work previously done by humans got much cheaper, but over the long haul human labor in many areas became much more expensive, in part because of the laws originally created to protect factory workers. A housemaid who in 1750 commanded about five shillings a week ($40 in today’s money) now gets $1000, and a trained butler three times that. Machines replaced human work, and people often got more expensive.

Share

Today, AI looks like creating a major break in the way we live and earn. New factories of information and computing, aka data centers, are spreading across the world fast, with over $600 billion scheduled to be spent, by just a handful of companies, this year alone.

Does that mean, as many of our leaders fear (or hope), that wages will plummet and jobs will go away? Keep your shirt on. The world is far more complex than it was at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and there are simply too many factors to say for sure what the changes will be. Odds are, they’ll be complicated, and not the simple “all the jobs are going.”

A couple of recent advances in AI already seem to be changing work, and quite possibly wages, in the software industry itself, with illustrative implications for the rest of us.

Short version: Even in these early days, it isn’t going how they thought.

(This is the first of three parts. Part Two is here.)

Is subscribing too much of a commitment, but you still got value here? Try my delightful tip jar, AKA Buy Me A Coffee.

Nino del Basilicata was my boyhood’s coolest adult. At summertime cocktail parties he’d sit on the wall of our suburban patio, playing his guitar and singing love songs with an openness, magic and energy that transformed the grownups. He sang the songs of his youth’s native region, in those fascist times a hard-bit land that yielded its farmers little for their backbreaking effort. Yet his voice conveyed a dreamland of transforming passion. Terrible places may yield the most engaging dreams. And he was kind to us kids, singing for us while the grownups freshened their cocktails, and encouraging my brother when he banged through a few basic chords.

Cool adults are special to a child. They’ve somehow escaped the tedium that history and obligation have hardened in other grownups. They’ve seemingly done it simply by being themselves, in their natural lightness and freedom, sharing what they convey unbidden from their hearts. Despite their adulthood, they still live in places of youth and summer and happiness, and we hope their fate might be ours.

Of course, children are idiots about the world. It’s almost a design defect of humans that we build our chief means of understanding the world during childhood. As children we have no reference, and without experience we believe that everything we think is true. But Nino had a similar effect on adults. He sang at New York hotels like the Sherry Netherland and nightclubs like the Copacabana. A slim man with beautiful fingers and perfect lips, so kind and friendly that the audiences, in their secret childhood hearts, hoped that they still might truly be young. The perfect complement to a cocktail’s promise of escape, for the postwar moms and dads of my childhood.

He came to our house as a guest, not a performer, though of course he would always sing. Mom was his original American champion. They met when he was playing hotels in the Bahamas, and she’d encouraged him to take his act to the big time. When he landed at Idlewild1 he called his only contact in America and she picked him up at the airport, and later connected him to hotels where he might take his act. Dad thought he was a bit of a phony, trying too hard, but he could see how much his kids adored Nino, how much he moved Mom to a place of innocent dreams.

Nino eventually became caught up in success and disappeared from our lives. I’d sometimes hear news of him from the seasonal cards he sent Mom. She’d grown somewhat judgmental and dismissive of his life, but I think even she was impressed by his metamorphosis from rural Italian crooner to American business success. There was a restaurant on Long Island, then a wine importing business in Virginia. These snippets to me remained anecdotes of a life separate from the unchanging, big-hearted, youthful singer, forever seated on a long-vanished porch terrace.

Share

Five decades later, in June of 2016, I rode a small regional train through Italy’s Veneto region. Nino had resettled in this prosperous part of Italy, far north of his native soil. Through the magic of social media I had found that he was still alive, and I sought to reconnect. He’d returned to his home country in triumph, it seemed, the baron of a substantial prosecco vineyard and winery, complete with a hilltop mansion, and he invited me to visit if I ever happened to be out that way.

The slow local train originated at the far Western side of Venice’s Santa Maria station, and passed through many placid stations and sun-baked villages on its way to a small town in the foothills of the Dolomites. The countryside seemed warm and deservedly calm. After Napoleon destroyed Venice’s 1000-year republic, the Veneto had been thrust into the ruinous playground of imperial swagger. There followed peasant revolts, Austro-Hungarian capture, French possession, Italian inclusion, savage battles in World War I, and World War II bombings of Mussolini’s German-backed republic, headquartered in nearby Salò, and remembered for its campaign of torture and terror.

Two centuries of burning and killing, mostly for countries and causes no one could even remember - what place would not wish to settle for a slumber after such history? Even if such a history leaves a land and people wary about history’s next turn. I’d landed in Italy a few days before, waking on the tarmac to the news that Brexit had passed. Candidate Donald Trump said this was a sign of a global movement just getting started, that he would soon ride to victory in the U.S. Though Italy’s Lega Nord claimed part of this recrudescence, it was good to feel temporarily far from all that.

I disembarked at one small station much like the others, with a coffee bar and a magazine stand, and people passing time. A car soon pulled up. Nino’s wife, an American 15 years his junior, picked me up at the station, and we rode 20 minutes into the hills, to a business, a home and a refuge, part Italian, part American.

The house, I’d guess 4,000 square feet with its surrounding terraces and patios, overlooked hillsides of grapes, olive trees and estate homes in every direction. In the unlit cool of an inside room sat Nino, now 87 years old, resting in an outsized plush chair of fine leather.

Everything that I remembered from the patio in New Canaan now belonged to an old man. The hair was mostly lost to baldness, the perfect lips sagged, the sparkling eyes were now dim behind thick glasses, and the nimble step was slow, inside the kind of puffy sneakers that old people wear for comfort. And yet, somehow, he was unchanged, and the sight of him brought back the joy of my childhood, almost unbidden. Truly, we remain ourselves, I thought. Like Dad said to me long ago, the world gets old around us.

I wanted to talk about his times with my parents, but as many old people will, he answered the questions he wanted to answer. Mom and Dad were just a small part of his overall story, and hardly the part about which he was most interested. He’d gone so far as to write his biography in both Italian and English, and had much to remember and relive.

Share

We sat out under an enormous mulberry tree next to his patio, with a sweeping view of undulating hills. I had never seen a berry tree so large and in full fruit, and it unnerved me. So many bush-like berries under its enormous wooden canopy seemed freakish. It made good jam, he said, though not enough to sell.

He was a policeman’s son, he told me, proud now to live not five kilometers from where his conscript father, an infantryman of the Kingdom of Italy, had suffered the cold and killing while fighting against the Austro-Hungarian empire. He’d grown up in small-town poverty in a rural area little affected by the second great war - at least, for a policeman’s kid. As a teenager he’d created a minor sensation with a song praising the new pope, which got him to the hotels of Rome, and from there to the Bahamas.

“She drove over when I called, and took me into New York,” he said, recalling Mom’s fateful service. “She found me a hotel. She asked me how much money I had; I told her, ‘Five thousand dollars.’ “Shit,” she said, “‘that’s more than we have.”’” He smiled at the memory. “I have always been a miser.”

I asked him for some more specifics, eager to understand some part of my own story from another point of view. “It’s all in my book,” he repeated. Indeed, I later found our family there, occupying a paragraph within his journey of success, and his own tangles of family.

His American wife had been a cocktail waitress at one of the hotels, with some money from her own exotic backstory. Together they opened a restaurant on the North Shore of Long Island, but decided to relocate after one of her relatives was murdered in a botched burglary. He took a lot of her family with them to Newport News, where he had an uncle and a cousin. They arrived to discover his uncle had suffered a head wound while defending Mussolini’s Italy on a French battlefield. He didn’t know who Nino was, and Nino’s cousin was uncertain if he was French or Italian. Nino had another brother who’d gone to Rochester, then Youngstown, but they hadn’t spoken in years, because of an undying feud.

Nino wanted me to see his study, where he, a brother writer, continued to work on the story of his life. He paused sometimes in his personal story to talk about my mother’s kindness, and how much it meant to him. It was harder in Newport News, he said, a redneck town with no need for an Italian crooner. The place was a port, though, and he slowly built up a wine importing business, eventually moving inventory steadily through a 12,000 square-foot warehouse. Those years had been rich, full of risk and reward, and there was so much to say about this long journey, much to remember.

Then the temperature changed. Prominent in his studio was a calendar celebrating the life of Benito Mussolini. “The Communists took away all of the memories of the good things he did,” said Nino. He was a fan and a defender, like many in the Lega. His policeman father had quietly remained a supporter long after the war. “He tried to change things in this country,” Nino said of Il Duce, “to make things better.”

Over his desk was a painting he had made 30 years before, of a shaggy wolf with a vulgar red erection (“that is Islam, all the migrants,” he said) climbing stairs colored like an Italian flag, on its way to rape Europe. It was unspeakable, and yet he couldn’t stop talking about how proud he was of his prophetic art.

He took me out on the balcony and showed me his hectares of prosecco grapes, the fruit for an inexpensive champagne alternative that’s said to be bad for the teeth if drunk in excess. He grew olives too, and was making oil that I should try. He still had plans, and much to develop, but the locals, even here they stand in a man’s way…

It was hot, and he needed a nap. Like most people who’ve been caught up in their memories for awhile, he felt like there was still more to say. But the heat fatigued him. “Everything I did…” he began, and after a moment, “...things happened.” Like many fascists, he was at heart an unthinking sentimentalist, with a life story infused with magic and dreams.

I returned downstairs, where his wife offered me some of their olive oil and told me the story of her inheritance, which seemed to include this vineyard. Many years before, her grandfather had done someone a favor, she told me, and he was given exclusive rights to import an important piece of German machinery to the U.S. He moved to Berlin in 1938, where he married her German grandmother.

Wonderful days of love and success, she said. In fact, her grandfather stayed there for the entirety of World War II, an American protected by elite German industrialists and her grandmother’s network of hereditary officers. People don’t realize that every story has two sides, she said. Until the last months of the war, it had been a very fine time, and when the war ended they had no difficulty relocating to America. In fact, he had kept his rights to import the German machinery, and had been able to buy this vineyard.

After a while she drove me to the train station and gave me a saint’s medal. It was blessed, she told me, by an influential priest. I rode slowly back to Venice, that place of distant splendor, where centuries of art and love and conflict possess every alley.

Share

This is the point in a story like this where the author tells the reader not to inspect their childhood memories too closely, and don’t ever interrogate your heroes close up. Not a chance. In fact, I was not saddened, but rather intrigued and even enriched by my encounter. It was a shocking day, certainly, but also revealing - of how little I’d actually known, and of the many ways people pass through their lives, of the ways love and sentiment, dreams and escape are both weightless and leaden.

Keep your childhood memories for what they were, but be prepared to see them in full, too. As my memories of how things had seemed in childhood merged with what I had seen in the present, I saw that Nino was always both things, a dreamer and a vendor of dreams, someone who’d captured love and nurtured the worst sort of hatred with his sentimental promises. No one has a single story, troubles begin when we think they do.

Don’t care for those choices? You can always tip the waiter at Buy Me A Coffee.

Across from my salad and his sandwich, Ashlee sweeps his arm in a big arc across Long Bridge Street, towards all the residential and mixed-use buildings.

“There’s dozens of tiny labs up there,” he says, “somebody’s got a mouse, they’re doing something - growing organs, playing with neurons, injecting them with a virus to change their genetics. All kinds of weird shit. It’s wild, man.”

”“All kinds of weird shit” and Ashlee have been intimates for years. They have been good to each other. We met around the time computers started moving from the closet to the cloud, and we both wrote about dirt-cheap satellites, and how cell phone guts were ending up in strange places, changing our world with cheap drones and voluminous data. Back when everything really started changing.

I went to Google to write about how those really big data sets and massive amounts of cloud computation were enabling Artificial Intelligence. Ashlee wrote the first biography of Elon Musk, which took him into Musk’s interests in non-governmental rocketry and neural implants. For many years Bloomberg paid him to do a show called Hello World, where he covered Doomsday preppers, fake meat, Nigerian hackers, and all kinds of strange things. All the creative journalists were jealous of him, not least because they couldn’t touch his talent for finding and admiring this abundance of exotic invention.

He now has his own show, Core Memory, which has unsurpassed reporting on all sorts of cutting-edge robotics, life reprogrammers, amateur space stations, body hackers, and new materials manufacturers. Highly recommended.

Back to his current interests. “I know this guy who’s harvesting rat neurons,” he says, “he talks about using them to power data centers.”

“So, like, there will be like a million rats in there, with wires coming out of their heads?” I say. ‘At least the engineers won’t have to change their language. They’ve already got their servers in cages and racks.”

“I don’t know, man. He’s pretty serious.”

We start talking about biohacking and self-medication, all the people shooting up peptides, and the places around town where the kids are mixing their AI with their biohacking, and all the quasi-legal stuff people are doing, growing new human and animal parts.

On one level, they’re just following the “lots of data, lots of compute” model, only into the infinitely more complex wet world. Just as enough people posted tagged photos online to enable Fei Fei Li to make and exploit ImageNet, a major milestone in the creation of image-recognition AI, so these new hackers hope to tag, track, remix and scan enough biological data to remake biological understanding. And capability.

I’ve got my kale and he’s got his meat, partly liberated from the bread. Some of the fun in hanging out with Ashlee is the way we can free-associate over years of covering this kind of stuff, knowing that some things blow up and some things don’t work out, good ideas go down while the mad and the lucky are proclaimed geniuses. In other words, we get to bullshit about the weird shit.

“Maybe it’s going to turn into some kind of ghost gun thing, where people take drugs and perform genetic procedures that are legal on their own and turn it into some kind of illegal treatment,” I say. “You’ll go on a luxury cruise into international waters to get your genetic makeup altered, or blend two different animals into a third. Like ‘The Floating Offshore Platform of Dr. Moreau,’” after the H.G. Wells’ story about a mad scientist making human-animal hybrids.

“Actually, I did something like that in Honduras a couple of years ago,” he says. “This guy was taking a bunch of biology-altering drugs you can’t have in the U.S. But good idea about the platform - I’m surprised the Seasteading guys haven’t gone there yet. I do know a guy who says he’ll have monkeys playing chess in two years.”

Share

But we’re also talking about Biology, that most intimate and complex of sciences, being colonized by a trend we’ve seen elsewhere in tech for years: Prices fall far enough to change the rules of access, newcomers hack the system in defiance of the old standards and business models. Oceans of new data turn up, changing the entire process of understanding.

We’ve seen it happen in enough places to know the pattern. Open source Linux, cheap and attractive enough for all kinds of people to improve it for free, wiped out the old computer server industry. WiFi was open source too, so the price was right and interest surged.

The tech doesn’t have to be open source, or free, either. Economic cycles play a part. When the Internet bubble burst, space companies like Iridium and Globalstar, Rotary Rocket and Kistler, crashed. Lots of cheap talent and parts hit the market, which enabled Elon to do Space X. I once did a story about how entertainment in Africa changed after the price of satellite dishes fell below $200, and the tech moved from expatriate compounds to local bars.

The cost of biological experimentation is on a far crazier decline, giving Ashlee a lot of material. Twenty-three years after the first human genome was sequenced at a cost of $2.7 billion, a “complete genetic engineering home lab,” with a refurbished DNA sequencing machine and a “Bioengineering 101 Course” can be yours for $2500. Neurotechnology tools are available for sale or rent, so you can try neural implants at home. China is spinning up dozens of brain-computer interface startups.

“They’ve got a city in China that’s just doing brain technology stuff,” says Ashlee. When I lived in Asia 30 years ago, cities in China were famous for specializing in things like athletic socks and bras, wiping out the competition worldwide by cranking out more stuff more cheaply than anyone else. Now that the abundance of data and the cheapness of commute have kicked off the AI revolution, they have turned to brain tech. I pick at my kale.

Of course, just because the prices are a fraction of what they used to be, and these new hackers are descending on San Francisco, Cambridge, Miami, and who knows where else, it doesn’t mean breakthroughs are at hand. Biology is a lot more complex than electronics - a lot. Perhaps even more important, the new AI technology that people hope will enable all kinds of bio breakthroughs requires enormous amounts of data. The data set has to be huge, it has to be gathered in a single place the AI can access, and perhaps most critically of all, it has to be standardized to the highest quality.

Share

The people who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for using AI to gain a new understanding of proteins were working with an enormous global database, recorded from good machines on common standards that everyone recognized. Waymo, currently the biggest self-driving car venture, started driving in cities in 2009, and didn’t fully open to the public until 2024. It’s now logged over 130 million miles, 10,000 years of average American driving.

There aren’t a lot of applications where AI can draw off this much relevant data. Least of all in the new technologies. It’s one reason I don’t expect to see humanoid robots anywhere but in the most constrained environments for years. There’s no substitute for experience, and the difference between my house and five other random houses is greater than anything you’ll find in a grid of city streets Waymo navigates. Even one factory is different from another, and Optimus robots just don’t have much field experience. Ashlee, he talks to more of these people though, maybe he feels different.

The biohackers face a big quality issue too. The Nobel Prize-winning protein information made use of some of the cleanest data possible, and Waymo came out of Alphabet’s cutting-edge sensor- and data-analysis labs. The guy in some converted Apartment 3G doing the thing with the iguana liver, the woman in the co-working space with the rat pituitary, they’re probably not going to bring the same magic.

Share

“Yeah, but they’re not the only ones doing this,” says Ashlee. “I just had on Jennifer Doudna.” Doudna, who won a Nobel prize for her work on gene editing, now runs the Innovative Genomics Institute, a place rigorously pursuing this knowledge following traditional standards. She makes a couple of excellent points in Ashlee’s interview. She thinks a lot of the gunslinger biohackers will find biology much more complex and problematic than they think. At the same time, she expects a lot of the regulatory hurdles to new ways of doing things will become familiar over time, lowering the steps and costs of bringing out new drugs and treatments.

These lower costs will make more things possible, and attract more innovation. This will drive crazy a health and insurance industry built around high costs. If history is any guide, the incumbents won’t surrender their high-cost businesses without a fight. That may be one reason why Doudna thinks that big genetic alterations will show up in agriculture first.

“She’s got billions behind her. Something like 30 startups have come out of there.” On Core Memory there are interviews with similarly serious people who are figuring out ways for magnets to target cancer drugs and doing personalized genetic disease treatment,

Which, apparently, at this point isn’t weird enough. “I’ve got to catch up with this university researcher I met at a party,” he says, pushing away his plate. “She’s working on transplanting the personality of one animal, like a dolphin, to another, like a cow.”

“You mean, like you get a cow that wants to body surf in the wake of a tourist boat?”

He nods. “I know. Weird shit, right?”

I barely know what to do with this one, but I’m still in my “Dr. Moreau” zone.

“So maybe someday, instead of capital punishment, a convicted murderer will receive the personality of a Labrador Retriever?”

“Could be,” he says. “Who knows what people do with this stuff.”

“Has there ever been a time when people were creating a future this weird, when people were going to live in ways they couldn’t even recognize?”

“I dunno,” he says. “Explorer times?”

“I mean yeah, maybe for the Aztecs at first, when they saw the Conquistadors on their horses and thought it was some new kind of hybrid god/animal. But pretty soon the Spanish guys got off their horses and just started messing up the city and killing people. Pretty much like the Aztecs had been doing for a couple of generations. Business as usual.”

“I feel you,” he says. “Hey, I got to go. There’s some guys in Argentina who have this satellite and space tug that went off course. It’s like 50 million kilometers from Earth, but they think they can bring it back.” Weird stuff.