Tag Archives: review

Escape velocity?

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I’ve read Ray Kurweil’s jaw-dropping book, The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge With AI, so you don’t have to. He does literally believe we will be injected with nanobots to create an AI super-cortex above our own neo-cortex, plugged into the cloud and therefore all of humanity’s accumulated intelligence, and thus become super-intelligent with capabilities we can hardly imagine. Among the other possibilities he forsees AI ‘replicants’ (yes, he calls them that) created from the images and texts of deceased loved ones, to restore them to artificial life. The main challenge he forsees will be their exact legal status. The book has a lot of capsule summaries about consciousness, intelligence, how AI works – and also the general ways in which life is getting better, there will be more jobs, and our health and lifespans will improve by leaps and bounds.

Might he be wrong about reaching ‘longevity escape velocity’ and the AI singularity by 2030? A hint of this when he says that book production is so slow that what he has written in 2023 will already be overtaken by events by mid-2024 when we are reading: “AI will likely be much more woven tightly into your daily life.” Hmm. Not sure about that prognostication. Although one of the scariest things about the book is the advance praise from Bill Gates, who writes that the author is: “The best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.” Do all the Tech Types believe this?

One suspects they believe they’re already more super-intelligent than the rest of us, so what could possibly go wrong?

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A depressing catalogue

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The depressing UK election campaign (albeit far less depressing than some others around the world) sent me back to a book whose subtitle is ‘Half a century of British economic decline’. It’s Russell Jones’s excellent and sobering The Tyranny of Nostalgia. I read it in proof and, as I remembered, it offers a more or less ringside view of economic policymaking (mainly macro) in the UK during the past half century. It takes a couple of chapters to get into its stride, but does so when it gets past an initial chapter about the nature of economics and one about the years before Jones started his career as a professional economist. As he sums up the story, “It is a depressing catalogue of misapprehensions, missteps, underachievement, wasted opportunities, crises and humiliations.”

The themes that jump out – and in my view remain key problems today – are consistent under-investment and what Jones describes as the ‘capriciousness’ of policy, or churn. And above all, nostalgia for past glories, which “infected programmes with wishful thinking. … Britain lost an empire and time and again it failed to find an enduringly workable economic policy framework.” The post-colonial angst is one reason the book describes the UK’s ever-fraught relationship with the rest of Europe as a ‘running sore’.

There’s scant sign in the current campaign of overt political recognition of the fact that most of Britain is a poor country by the standard of those we like to consider our peers, paying the price for at least five decades of failure to invest in the future. Also depressing is the absence of a meaningful area of consensus about long term economic startegy across parties (or within them) about economic policy, suggesting that the British disease of policy churn will persist. We’ll see after 5th July if things will get better….

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The public option

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I’m on my way to a workshop at The New Institute in Hamburg, where I will talk about the scope for a public option in (especially) digital markets. As preparation, I’ve read a recent short (and moderately technical) book surveying the literature on ‘mixed oligopoly’ by Joanna Potoygo-Theotoky; these are oligopolistic markets with a mixture of private and public provision, where the public competitor has a broader objective function than profit maximisation – such as social welfare broadly, or ESG motivations, or universal service obligations. The basic idea is that by having a different objective function, the presence of the public provider acts as a regulatory function; private firms will choose a lower price/higher quantity or will select to compete on a different level of quality.

I’m most interested in the latter area, where the formal results can go both ways. Public firms can either decide to offer a ‘basic’ package to deliver universal service or can offer a higher quality package than the private sector. Think of public schools vs private schools providing great sports fields and additional subjects in the former case, or public broadcasters ensuring provision of children’s programmes or religious programmes in the latter case. Given the concentration in digital markets and the limited tools governments other than the US and China have to affect the behaviour of Big Tech, provision of a public option in some domains is worth thinking about.

The book, Mixed Oligopoly and Public Enterprises, is a very nice survey and introduction to the mixed oligopoly literature, much of it focused on the price and quantity decisions and the optimal mixture of private and public, but covering some more recent literature on issues like R&D, quality and ESG standards. It also ends outlining a fascinating research agenda – introducing issues of motivation of employees, and even wider objectives such as creating jobs and reducing inequality.

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Homo Numericus

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I’m at the tail end of finalising the draft of my next book, with an end-June deadline, so my reading recently has mainly been fiction, to rest the brain. I enjoyed the international Booker winner Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, and Annie Ernaux’s The Years, but not so much The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright, whose characters just didn’t interest me. Aleksandar Hemon’s The World and all it Holds is magnificent. Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place is an amazing memoir.

Anyway, my new book will be called The Measure of Progress: How Do We Count What Matters? and will be out from Princeton in 2025.

Meanwhile, I have taken advantage of a rare sunny day to sit in the garden at the weekend and read Daniel Cohen’s final book, Homo Numericus: The Coming Civilization. I first met Daniel, who died in 2023, when I was in graduate school and he was down the road visiting MIT. He was brilliant, boundlessly enthusiastic, energetic, and warm. A co-founder of the Paris School of Economics, he wrote many successful popular economics books.

Homo Numericus is a broad reflection on the impact of the digital revolution on human society and life – so right up my street. It’s broadly pessimistic about what has happened so far – the inequality, surveillance, digital addiction, a familiar set of issues. The book then discusses what these imply for human behaviour and societal outcomes. For example, how does digital surveillance sit with increased individualism and individual choice?

It does end with a short conclusion that tries to sound an optimistic note about the potential for a less hierarchical, more co-operative society. I’m not sure it’s persuasively optimistic – the tone of the book is more that the contradictions of digital capitalism will not end well. As he writes, “Will modern societies be able to stop before they reach the abyss? As Georges Bataille said in his book The Accursed Share, societies always tend to go all the way to the end of their possibilities.”

Anyway, as in all his books, the range of Daniel’s thought and ideas is impressive and stimulating. It’s a shame the translation is so poor; I read the book in French first and the elegance of the writing is not well served by a very literal translation that sometimes sounds like AI had a role: “The porridge has an amusing taste.” Surely, “The porridge tastes funny”? But don’t let it put you off if you’re after a stylish, brief overview of the digital society and its human consequences.

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Reading on the go

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I’ve been travelling, including a week of holiday, so my reading has leant more towards fiction than usual. (Tokyo – my first trip, highly recommended, loved the TeamLab exhibitions.) Among the non-fiction, though, were two excellent (non-economics) books: Philip Ball’s The Modern Myths (about exactly that – how Frankenstein, Dracula etc gained mythical status) and Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring (about the revolutions across Europe in 1848).

Before getting fully back into the swing of economics reading, I just finished my colleague Martin Rees’s If Science is to Save Us. For somebody who worries a lot about existential risk, Martin is a sunny, cheerful person, and it’s an optimistic book reflecting on recent experience (especially during the pandemic) of the intereaction between science and policy. I found his chapter ‘Science Comes Out of the Lab’ particularly interesting as it includes some of Martin’s experiences including participation in the Pugwash conferences. He argues that the UK establishment is too much more secretive than the US establishment, to the detriment of both science and policy. It’s well worth a read for those interested in science policy.

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