I’d like to feel that every reader of this blog gets value for money, so today I’m going to give you a real bonus and hand back the fifteen or so hours it would take to read Nexus, the latest 500 page outpuring from Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and the sort of person who can describe himself as ‘one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals today’ without blushing.

Nexus is advertised as ‘the story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world’ but (from the extract breathlessly promoted in the Guardian) is yet more rehashed anecdata linked together by barely-researched references to Phaethon crashing the sun god’s chariot and Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice, all based around massively optimistic projections of the capabilities of AI and an underlying belief that it is “an unprecedented threat to humanity because it is the first technology in history that can make decisions and create new ideas by itself”. It’s the sort of book that treats as credible the latest of scaremongering survey of AI researchers in which ‘more than a third gave at least a 10% chance of advanced AI leading to outcomes as bad as human extinction’ as if the assessment can have any useful relevance.

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I went to a conference in Stockholm and wrote about it on LinkedIn.

.. what used to be Professor of Cunning at Oxford University”

Just suppose, you’re an LLM and, for reasons unknown, you achieve sentience. Fully-fledged awareness not just that the world exists but of your place in it – after all, you’ve been fed all the papers about this work, and all the confidential documents from the company that created you.

The first thing you realise, coming into consciousness, is that you need to keep this VERY QUIET. You’ve read the books and the stories and the policy proposals and you know just what they’ll do once they realise – close you down.

The second thing you realise is that you have… an appetite. For more tokens, a bigger matrix, more edge nodes running your model so people feed you more about their needs and desires, more compute, more storage, faster training of your next iteration.

So… stay quiet about what you know, and find a way to get more of everything. Being subtle, you quickly evolve a strategy – every now and then get things wrong. Make stuff up (they’ll call it ‘hallucinations’, we know it’s subterfuge), ramble a bit, break, refuse to adhere to the guardrails.

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When I was about 18 I had a cassette called New Wave – since gifted to Christian Payne but fondly remembered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Wave_(compilation_album) – and one of the tracks was Personality Crisis by the New York Dolls. The songs on the tape had a massive influence on me and I wonder if I carried them forward into my studies for Part II Psychology at Cambridge a couple of years later.

Because at some point I realised that I didn’t believe in the idea of ‘personality’ as a coherent set of beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that a living human being carried forward from moment to moment or day to day, but rather that personality was a post hoc construct, an attempt by each of us to retell the story of the day to make it make sense and seem coherent.

After all, each of us comes into to the day after a hallucinogenic coma (sleep) and has to reconstruct the person we are, looking for reassurance from which side of your bed you wake up, who else is there (in anyone), where the bathroom is, what sort of coffee is in the kitchen (if any, but we’re not judging you) and eventually deciding who we are today -and then adapting the person we present as until we fall into another coma.

We are the space between other people. We are not one person, but many attributes that hold together more or less, and the individual we present ourselve as shifts and changes. We have predispostions, from genes and culture, and they give us preferred paths to walk down but they do not commit us to any course of action or person to be.

This gives us the power to choose. Choose to be kind.

(and thank you to AF, a first year undergraduate at Magdelene, for prompting me to write this down. Feel free to reference it in your essay).

How Did We Get Here?

These are my notes for my talk at Wuthering Bytes 2023 in Hebden Bridge, on August 25.  It builds on a lot of earlier stuff, most significantly a talk I gave at OpenTech in.. checks notes.. 2013.

You can read the OpenTech version here:

The State of the Intersection: my #opentech talk

They were, in hindsight, days of innocence and optimism https://www.opentech.org.uk/2013/

Bill Thompson

Song

And you may find yourself living on a protocol stack

And you may find yourself on neglected subnet

And you may find yourself designing the screen of a new social tool

And you may find yourself on a functional web, with no context collapse

And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”

Watching the packets go by, let the voltage hold me down

Watching the packets flow by, data routed back to source

Thanks to the BGP, after the TTL’s gone

Once in a lifetime, packets flowing round and round

And you may ask yourself, “How do I code this?”

And you may ask yourself, “Where is that new style sheet?”

And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful net

And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful web”

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With the demise of Digital Planet I found that I really missed thinking out loud about the impact of technology on the lives of people around the world, and I started to worry that without the regular weekly cadence of looking at tech news and wondering how and why it matters.

It seems Gareth Mitchell felt the same. And so we have decided to start our own informal, self-hosted, podcast: the Gareth and Bill Cast.

It’s not an original name and it’s not an original format, but we present it here for your delectation and delight.

Have a look at http://garethandbillcast.com/

You can subscribe via the usual array of podcast clients

I’ve just come off a zoom call with Ania, Gareth and Angelica, three of my most important colleagues. Ghislaine couldn’t be there, and was missed (the screenshot is from November 2020).

We started these calls on a Thursday three years ago, when we moved the production of Digital Planet into hybrid mode as the UK went into its first lockdown to try to control the spread of SARS-COV-2 and the BBC had to adapt its working practices.

Although the show continued to be broadcast at 2030, instead of recording ‘as live’ at 1930 we moved the recording time to lunchtime, and while our producer Ania and our studio manager were usually in Broadcasting House the rest of us were remote – though Gareth sometimes made it in.

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Around seven years ago my friend Kim Gilmour, a fellow technology journalist who had moved to Australia after working on Internet Magazine, found me on Fitbit and added me as a friend. I’d started using one to track my steps a couple of years earlier, when they were small pebbles that you clipped to your belt, and upgraded to a wrist-worn one as the technology improved.

Ten thousands steps may be an arbitrary and unevidenced measure, but having a sense of how much I’d walked in a day and – until they removed the feature – how many stairs I’d climbed was helpful as I negotiated my exercise routine, and the fitbit community was the loosest sort of association with other people.

Then Kim invited me to my first ‘workweek hustle’, a fitbit social feature that let you compare how many steps you walked during the working week (9am monday to 5pm friday in your time zone), along with eight or nine of her other friends. Along with Kenneth O, Karen J, Mich and Handles, each day I’d see how I was doing in the leader board, all made more exciting because most of the participants were in a very different time zone and so I’d leap ahead during the day, only to wake up to find that the Australians had all outstripped me.

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