Can Golf Really Change?

If golf has a superpower, it’s the ability to fill the cracks in your mind and feast on your anxieties. First-tee jitters. Overthinking a putt. New players worriedly trying to figure out where to stand, where to go, what to do. Experienced players exasperated by every mistake, seeing the score they hoped to post slip away. All the fretting over playing too slow or waiting too long.

Then there’s the scoring. An arbitrary number decided by someone you never met. You thought you played that hole well, but this little card says you took a bogey. The word is born from a Scottish term for a devil. So now your terrible play is an incarnation of a fallen angel, expelled from heaven, abusing free will with its evil. Beelzebul is playing through.

But now imagine being handed a scorecard with no criterion. Some tees at 50 and 56 yards. Others at 101 and 111. And 164. And 218. And as far back as 293. One hole that can be played from 89 or 187. And on this card, a glaring omission. No par. Just play. Have a match against a friend. Grab a couple of clubs, a few beverages, and go. Winner of each hole decides where to tee off on the next hole. You can play a six-hole loop that circles a lovely grove of oak trees. Or play a 13-hole loop. Or play all 19. Who cares?

“You know,” Ben Crenshaw, the legendary golfer-turned-course architect, recently said, “this game is allowed to be played differently.”

So why don’t we more often?

A new course opening in central Florida makes the question again hard to ignore. The Chain, a “short course” created by Crenshaw and long-time design partner Bill Coore, is opening this month at Streamsong Golf Resort. Guests can currently play 13 holes total for preview play. The hope is to open the course’s full 19 by December 1, as long as the land allows. (...)

Like The Cradle at Pinehurst and others, each of those resorts features a funky short course. Now, so too does Streamsong. The feature has become a prerequisite for resort life. For guests, playing (especially walking) 36 holes over multiple consecutive days can be easier said than done. It’s far more enjoyable to play 18, then hit the short course for a loop. For the resorts, a short course is a draw, an extra amenity for the portfolio, uses little land, and, most importantly, encourages additional nights of stay-and-play.

The Chain is a portrait of why this works. Guests at Streamsong walk over a footbridge from the hotel, stop by a new 2-acre putting course (The Bucket), grab a carry bag to tote a few clubs, and play a 3,000-yard walking layout of holes that are — here’s the key — good enough to match the quality of the property’s three primary courses. Like any good short course, its character comes from its green complexes. Some wild and huge. Others are scaled-down and delicate. A certain personality exists in the green, one born from architectural freedom.

“You can take more liberties, or risks, so to speak, to do greens and surrounds that you may not be able to do on a regulation course, where you’re trying to adapt to people of such varying degrees or both strength and skill,” Coore said.

Highlights include a bunker positioned in the middle of the 6th green, conjuring Riviera’s famed sixth, and the lengthy 11th, a hole that can stretch back to nearly 200 yards over a lake into a mammoth punchbowl green.

But the real highlight is what The Chain, like so many of these quirky short courses, gives the players. It’s different. In a sport so steep in the individual pursuit, you and some friends instead walk together, talk together, drink together. In a sport so obsessed with numbers, there’s no real scoring. In a sport that’s so time-consuming, you’re through in an hour. In a sport so dictated by strength and length, skill gaps are leveled.

It is, in many ways, a much more enjoyable version of golf. (...)

Short courses make an incredible amount of sense in metropolitan areas stuck with hyper-exclusive courses and limited public options. They just need to be built there. Chicago, Washington D.C., Boston, Philadelphia — cities that require an hour drive to the course, a five-and-a-half hour round on a packed course, and an hour drive home. One imagines such players thirsty for such an option. The densest populated areas have the most potential golfers. There’s a reason Callaway paid $2.66 billion for Top Golf in 2021 — droves of people go because hitting golf balls is fun. Anyone who wants to transition from the driving range-esque Top Golf to learning the game on the golf course, though, has to tackle the tension that comes with playing with 14 clubs on a crowded, daunting 18-hole course, navigating all the worry and embarrassment of golf’s inordinate rules and customs. Envision new players instead getting to relax and come to understand how golf courses can be experienced.

Based on Johnson’s explanation of golf course architecture top-down composition, maybe we’ll see the success of courses like The Chain finally spur local municipalities and private developers into renovating pre-existing, nondescript public courses into alternative short courses.

This, in turn, could create an entirely new access point to the game. Yes, par-3 tracks already exist, but these resort-style short courses designed by the finest architects are nothing like what the average novice has seen — short does not have to mean simple. Is an entirely different experience. One that kids and newcomers would likely be far more prone to want to revisit.

“You’re showing the most fun version of golf,” Johnson said. “Bold design features. Cool greens. People getting to see the ball rolling and moving.”

This isn’t implausible. Designer short sources require only small plots of real estate and can be built anywhere — flat land, undulating land, choppier land. All you need is a spot for a tee and a spot for a green. (...)

But golf, as it so often does, moves slowly. The best chance for change is the math eventually adding up to create an inevitable shift. If renovating an entire public course can range from $5-$15 million, renovating or building a high-end par-3 course can get done for probably under a couple million dollars. What makes more sense for that community?

by Brendan Quinn, The Athletic |  Read more:

Image: Illustration: Sean Reilly/The Athletic; Photos: Courtesy Streamsong Resort, Matt Hahn

[ed. See also: A History of Swing Thoughts (GD).]

Vanessa Smith — Vulture (oil and acrylic, on canvas, 2023)

via:

The Fall of My Teen-Age Self (And Time Travel: What If You Met Your Future Self?)

I've been thinking about teen-agers. I have one myself now, and of course I was one once—in a different world at a different moment—and can remember the feeling. Everything was extremity. It still is. Four waves of feminism, digital connectivity, a global wellness movement, the injunction to “be kind,” the commonplace “it gets better”—none of it seems to have put much of a dent in teen-age misery, especially not of the kind that concerns me. Watching girls gather outside the multiplexes this past summer, choosing between “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” I thought, Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. Brittle, impossible perfection on the one hand; apocalypse on the other. I have never forgotten the years I spent stretched between those two poles, and there was a time when I believed that the intensity of my girlhood memories made me somewhat unusual—even that this was what had made me a writer. I was disabused of that notion a long time ago, during the early days of social networks. Friends Reunited, Facebook. Turns out there’s a whole lot of people in this world who feel they never lived as intensely as they did that one particular summer. “If teen-age me could see me now, she’d be so disgusted! ” I said that to a shrink, a few years ago. To which the shrink replied, “Why assume your fifteen-year-old self is the arbiter of all truth?” Well, it’s a good point, but it hasn’t stopped me from carrying her around on my shoulder. I don’t suppose, at this point, I’ll ever be rid of her. (...)

Sometimes I ask myself: What would teen-age me do with her misery now? Where can a twenty-first-century girl go these days to retreat from reality? (If the answer “the Internet” comes to mind, I’m guessing you’re either over fifty or else somehow still able to imagine the Internet as separate from “reality.”) I worry that the avenues of escape have narrowed. Whatever else I used to think about time, for example, the one thing I never had to think about was whether or not there would be enough of it, existentially speaking. But now the end of time itself—apocalypse—is, for the average teen-ager, an entirely familiar and domesticated concept. I don’t remember taking Y2K seriously, but I bet I’d be a 2038 truther now. And to whom would my funeral orations be directed? My realm of potential envy would no longer be limited to just the people in my school or my neighborhood. Now it would stretch to as many people as my phone could conjure—that is, to all the people in the world. I’d like to think Prince would still be mediating my world to some degree, but I know he would be infinitely tinier than he was before, reduced to a speck in an epic web of digital mediation so huge and complex as to seem almost cosmic. I imagine I would be having a very hard time deciding if what I actually willed was what I appeared to be willing. Do I really love my lengthy skin-care regime? Do I truly want to queue all night to purchase the latest iteration of my device? Does this social network genuinely make me feel happy and connected to others? Or did some unseen commercial entity decide all that for me? I don’t think teen-age misery is so very different from what it used to be, but I do think its scope of operation is so much larger and the space for respite vanishingly small. But I would think that: I’m forty-eight.

by Zadie Smith, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Yuki Sugiura; Source photograph by Daisy Houghton
[ed. See also: Time travel: What if you met your future self? (BBC):]

"There's a classic short story by Ted Chiang in which a young merchant travels years ahead and meets his future self. Over the course of the story, the man receives warnings, promises and tips from the older, wiser version of himself. These premonitions then change the course of the merchant's life until he eventually becomes an older man, who meets his younger self and imparts the same wisdom.

Scenarios like this are wildly popular and have been explored in many other novels as well as in movies like Back to the Future, and TV shows as diverse as Family Guy, Quantum Leap, and the BBC's own Doctor Who (see "The Doctor meets The Doctor" below).

For obvious reasons, these narratives have always been relegated to the realm of science fiction. But what if – and it is a big what if – you could meet your future self? What a very strange question, but one that I believe is worth asking. (...)

Now, imagine conversing with that future version of you in the same way you might chat with a friend or loved one now. What would you ask? My own knee-jerk response – and that of other people I’ve discussed it with – is often resistance. The source of this, I think, boils down to our desire to see ourselves as unique. How, we wonder, could an algorithm make a prediction about me – me with my many-coloured feathers that make me one in eight billion?

Yet I must accept – grudgingly – that I am not as unique as I like to think, and algorithms already predict my personality, desires and choices on a regular basis. Every time I listen to a personalised Spotify playlist, or love a Netflix film recommendation, a form of AI has predicted it. As these algorithms get more powerful, with greater access to data about us and other similar people, there's no reason they couldn't go beyond surface-level details like your future self's entertainment choices. They might be able to predict how the older, wiser version of you might feel about the decisions in your life.

Eight questions to ask "future you"

So, to return to my original question: if you could time-travel to meet your future self, what aspects of your life would you want to know more about? Which ones would you prefer to be shrouded in secrecy? And if you’d pass up on the meeting, why?

I've been thinking a lot about what I would do. My first instinct would be to ask my future self things like… are you happy? Are your family members happy and healthy? Is the environment safe for your grandkids and great-grandkids?

The more I considered these initial questions, the more I realised just how much I was concerned with what the future holds. A very informal survey of my wife and a few friends suggests I may not be alone in this tendency.

But reflecting on it further, I realised that the most powerful questions would be ones that helped me make better choices today. With that as the goal, I might generate several queries meant to kick off a dialogue between my two selves, such as:

• What have you been most proud of and why?

• In what ways – both positive and negative – have you changed over time?

• What's something that you miss most from earlier in your life?

• What actions have you regretted?

• What actions did you not take that you regret?

• What’s a time period you'd most want to repeat?

• What things should I be paying more attention to now?

• Which things should I stress about a little less?

Imagine if you were to put these eight questions to your future self. What might you find out that would modify how you live now? It’d probably be the most important conversation of your life." 

~ Time travel: What if you met your future self?  (BBC/Hal Hershfield)

What If Money Expired?

In 995, paper money was introduced in Sichuan, China, when a merchant in Chengdu gave people fancy receipts in exchange for their iron coins. Paper bills spared people the physical burden of their wealth, which helped facilitate trade over longer distances.

As it evolved, money became increasingly symbolic. Early paper money acted as an IOU and could always be exchanged for metallic coins of various values. In the late 13th century, however, the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan invented paper money that was not backed by anything. It was money because the emperor said it was money. People agreed. In the intervening centuries, money has conjured more fantastic leaps of faith with the invention of the stock market, centralized banking and, recently, cryptocurrencies.

Today, there is about $2.34 trillion of physical U.S. currency in circulation, and as much as half of it is held abroad. That accounts for just 10% of the country’s gross domestic product (the total monetary value of all the goods and services produced). Total U.S. bank deposits are around $17 trillion. Meanwhile, total wealth in this country, including nonmonetary assets, is around $149 trillion, more than 63 times the total available cash. The gaps between these numbers are like dark matter in the universe — we don’t have a way to empirically account for it, and yet without it our understanding of the universe, or the economy, would collapse.

For most people in the developed world, money is lines of data on a bank’s computer. Money is abstract, absurd. It’s a belief system, a language, a social contract. Money is trust. But the rules aren’t fixed in stone.

“Here’s a thing that always happens with money,” Goldstein wrote. “Whatever money is at a given moment comes to seem like the natural form money should take, and everything else seems like irresponsible craziness.”

The Problem, As One German Saw It

More than a century ago, a wild-eyed, vegetarian, free love-promoting German entrepreneur and self-taught economist named Silvio Gesell proposed a radical reformation of the monetary system as we know it. He wanted to make money that decays over time. Our present money, he explained, is an insufficient means of exchange. A man with a pocketful of money does not possess equivalent wealth as a man with a sack of produce, even if the market agrees the produce is worth the money.

“Only money that goes out of date like a newspaper, rots like potatoes, rusts like iron, evaporates like ether,” Gesell wrote in his seminal work, “The Natural Economic Order,” published in 1915, “is capable of standing the test as an instrument for the exchange of potatoes, newspapers, iron and ether.” (...)

In 1898, the Argentine government embarked on a deflationary policy to try to treat its economic ills. As a result, unemployment rose and uncertainty made people hoard their money. The economy ground to a halt. There was plenty of money to go around, Gesell realized. The problem was, it wasn’t going around. He argued that the properties of money — its durability and hoardability — impede its circulation: “When confidence exists, there is money in the market; when confidence is wanting, money withdraws.”

Those who live by their labor suffer from this imbalance. If I go to the market to sell a bushel of cucumbers when the cost of food is falling, a shopper may not buy them, preferring to buy them next week at a lower price. My cucumbers will not last the week, so I am forced to drop my price. A deflationary spiral may ensue.

The French economist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon put it this way: “Money, you imagine, is the key that opens the gates of the market. That is not true — money is the bolt that bars them.”

The faults of money go further, Gesell wrote. When small businesses take out loans from banks, they must pay the banks interest on those loans, which means they must raise prices or cut wages. Thus, interest is a private gain at a public cost. In practice, those with money grow richer and those without grow poorer. Our economy is full of examples of this, where those with money make more ($100,000 minimum investments in high-yield hedge funds, for example) and those without pay higher costs (like high-interest predatory lending).

“The merchant, the workman, the stockbroker have the same aim, namely to exploit the state of the market, that is, the public at large,” Gesell wrote. “Perhaps the sole difference between usury and commerce is that the professional usurer directs his exploitation more against specific persons.”

Gesell believed that the most-rewarded impulse in our present economy is to give as little as possible and to receive as much as possible, in every transaction. In doing so, he thought, we grow materially, morally and socially poorer. “The exploitation of our neighbor’s need, mutual plundering conducted with all the wiles of salesmanship, is the foundation of our economic life,” he lamented.

To correct these economic and social ills, Gesell recommended we change the nature of money so it better reflects the goods for which it is exchanged. “We must make money worse as a commodity if we wish to make it better as a medium of exchange,” he wrote.

To achieve this, he invented a form of expiring money called Freigeld, or Free Money. (Free because it would be freed from hoarding and interest.) The theory worked like this: A $100 bill of Freigeld would have 52 dated boxes on the back, where the holder must affix a 10-cent stamp every week for the bill to still be worth $100. If you kept the bill for an entire year, you would have to affix 52 stamps to the back of it — at a cost of $5.20 — for the bill to still be worth $100. Thus, the bill would depreciate 5.2% annually at the expense of its holder(s). (The value of and rate at which to apply the stamps could be fine-tuned if necessary.)

This system would work the opposite way ours does today, where money held over time increases in value as it gathers interest. In Gesell’s system, the stamps would be an individual cost and the revenue they created would be a public gain, reducing the amount of additional taxes a government would need to collect and enabling it to support those unable to work.

Money could be deposited in a bank, whereby it would retain its value because the bank would be responsible for the stamps. To avoid paying for the stamps, the bank would be incentivized to loan the money, passing on the holding expense to others. In Gesell’s vision, banks would loan so freely that their interest rates would eventually fall to zero, and they would collect only a small risk premium and an administration fee.

With the use of this stamp scrip currency, the full productive power of the economy would be unleashed. Capital would be accessible to everyone. A Currency Office, meanwhile, would maintain price stability by monitoring the amount of money in circulation. If prices go up, the office would destroy money. When prices fall, it would print more.

In this economy, money would circulate with all the velocity of a game of hot potato. There would be no more “unearned income” of money lenders getting rich on interest. Instead, an individual’s economic success would be tied directly to the quality of their work and the strength of their ideas. Gesell imagined this would create a Darwinian natural selection in the economy: “Free competition would favor the efficient and lead to their increased propagation.” (...)

Although many dismissed Gesell as an anarchistic heretic, his ideas were embraced by major economists of the day. In his book “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,” John Maynard Keynes devoted five pages to Gesell, calling him a “strange and unduly neglected prophet.” He argued the idea behind a stamp scrip was sound. “I believe that the future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell than from that of Marx,” Keynes wrote. (...)

What It Means Today

Gesell’s idea for depreciating money “runs counter to anything we’ve ever learned about the desirable properties of money,” David Andolfatto, a former senior vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the chair of the economics department at the University of Miami, told me recently. “Why on Earth would you ever want money to have that property?”

But during the economic downturn that followed the Covid pandemic, Andolfatto recognized the potential value of an expiring money in times of crisis. The relief checks that the government sent out to U.S. households didn’t immediately have their desired effect of stimulating the economy because many people saved the money rather than spend it. This is the paradox of thrift, Andolfatto explained. What’s good for the individual is bad for the whole.

“Well, what if we gave them the money with a time fuse?” Andolfatto remembers wondering. “You’re giving them the money and saying look, if you don’t spend it in a period of time, it’s going to evaporate.”

by Jacob Baynham, Noema |  Read more:

Image: wa sei

[ed. See also: A record number of $50 bills were printed last year. It’s not why you think (CNN).]

boygenius

[ed. Full KEXP performance here. See also: Not Strong Enough.]

'You Made Me Do It'

In response​ to the destruction of Gaza, it seems to be becoming almost impossible to lament more than one people at a time. When I signed Artists for Palestine’s statement last month, I looked for mention of the atrocities committed by Hamas against Israeli Jews on 7 October, and then decided to settle for the unambiguous condemnation of ‘every act of violence against civilians and every infringement of international law whoever perpetrates them’. At Independent Jewish Voices, the network of UK dissident Jews, of which I was one of the founding signatories in 2007, we opened our statement on the disaster being inflicted on Gaza by specifically mentioning the assault by Hamas. But why, I find myself asking, does it seem to be so hard for those who deplore the Israeli invasion of Gaza to mention Hamas by name or show any sympathy for the anguish of its victims? Why should grief for the death of Israeli Jews be seen to undermine the argument that the longstanding and increasingly wretched oppression of the Palestinian people is the key factor behind what unfolded, so brutally and inexcusably, on that day? And why is any attempt to understand the history of Hamas as part of an insurgency and resistance movement against occupation so easily characterised as dispensing with moral judgment? When António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, suggested that the events of 7 October needed to be placed against their historical and political backdrop, he was immediately accused of fuelling antisemitism across the world. A mere whiff of understanding, and he was condemned. (...)

Who suffers most? At moments over these past weeks, the struggle for a monopoly on suffering has usurped everything else. As many commentators have pointed out, more Jews were killed in a single day on 7 October than on any day since the Holocaust. But making this link risks turning the events of 7 October into a form of repetition. By association, every assault on the Jews becomes a holocaust, and the Jews revert to their condition as a stateless people. This is not entirely without reason: 7 October destroyed the myth that the Jews would only be safe inside the walls of a Jewish state. Nonetheless, we might ask, what is gained for the Jews – many of them citizens of a powerful military nation – in seeing themselves as the eternal victims of history? This is a point that has been repeatedly made, not just by Israel’s critics, or by those who refuse to take the measure of its dark pre-history, but, for decades past, by Israelis themselves. For the Israeli writer Shulamith Hareven in her 1986 article ‘Identity: Victim’, it was disastrous. All the creative moments of Jewish history, including its commitment to human righteousness and justice, were wiped out of Jewish collective memory in favour of a belligerence that allowed the Jews to dispossess the Palestinian people by claiming: ‘I am a victim, and they are not.’ ‘If my only identity is that of the victim,’ she writes, ‘I may (or so it seems) commit any atrocity.’ Instead, I suggest, if we loosen our grip on suffering, discard any claim to own it, then perhaps we can ask a different question: how much pain can anyone hold in their mind at once? Must my pain always be greater than yours for it to count?

A partial answer to my question might be found in an unlikely place. My final invidious comparison, which follows from the first two, turns not on the quantity of violence, but its origins in the nursery or playground, in the schoolboy claim that the other side – always and unfailingly – started it (which effectively turns all wars into wars of revenge and/or self-defence). Something truly disturbing is at work here, something that was central to the work of Leslie Sohn, chief psychiatrist at Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital throughout the second half of the 20th century. The key to all antisocial behaviour, he suggested to me in conversation, was perfectly illustrated by a little boy he once saw on the top deck of a bus who hit his baby brother on the head, and when told to stop by his mother, retorted – with no regard for truth – that his baby brother had started it. From playground to killing fields, violence always originates from somebody or somewhere else. ‘When peace comes, we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons,’ Golda Meir said, ‘but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.’ ‘Peace will come,’ she went on, ‘when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.’ The casual racism – love and hatred distributed so callously between the two peoples – is one thing; but it is the shedding of all responsibility for Israeli state violence by lodging it inside the hearts and minds of the enemy (‘You made me do it’) that I find most chilling.

How, then, to make a reckoning between the people whose most traumatic moment is the industrial genocide of the Jews in Nazi Germany, and those for whom the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948 in order to create the state of Israel is where the injustice begins? It is, of course, a false choice. ‘There is,’ Edward Said wrote, ‘suffering and injustice enough for everyone.’ He went on: ‘We cannot coexist as two communities of detached and uncommunicatingly separate suffering.’ He was calling for mutual recognition after Oslo, whose failure he predicted. A new form of nationalism, ‘contrapuntal’ to use Said’s musical term, would avoid the trappings of flag-waving ethnic national identity by making room for the diverse peoples of the land. Speaking about his 2009 film about the Nakba, The Time that Remains, Elia Suleiman said his most fervent political wish was to see Palestinian self-determination and the raising of the Palestinian flag. But, as soon as he achieved that objective, with the freedom and dignity it would bring, his overriding desire would be to take the flag down.

by Jacqueline Rose, London Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Palestinian flag via

Hermanos Gutiérrez

[ed. Also, check out: ‘El Bueno Y El Malo'. Official spaghetti western video version here. Full album here.]

How Online Mobs Act Like Flocks of Birds

How Online Mobs Act Like Flocks Of Birds (Noema)

Video: Jan van IJken, The Art of Flying (Nat. Geo)

This Quiet Blockbuster at the Supreme Court Could Affect All Americans

Some Supreme Court terms are characterized by a single blockbuster case. This term largely revolves around a single blockbuster question: Will our government retain the capacity to address the most pressing issues of our time?

That’s what’s at stake in a group of cases involving the power, capacity and in some instances the very existence of federal agencies, the entities responsible for carrying out so much of the work of government. (...)

They involve the government’s ability to study and approve the safety and efficacy of the drugs we take; its power to protect consumers, enforce the securities laws and safeguard the nation’s waters; and ultimately to respond in innovative ways to the climate emergency. The outcome in these cases may even affect more obvious hot-button issues like guns and abortion. (...)

Perhaps the most important case this term is Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, scheduled for oral arguments in early 2024, in which the plaintiffs are asking the court to overrule the best-known case in administrative law, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. In Chevron, the court announced a rule that directed federal courts to defer to reasonable agency interpretations of statutes they administer. That is, if a statute is silent or ambiguous on a particular question, courts aren’t supposed to write on a blank slate about what the statute means — if an expert agency has already provided an answer to the question, and it’s a reasonable one, the court is supposed to defer to that interpretation.

The specific issue in Loper Bright involves the meaning of a statute that authorizes a federal agency, the National Marine Fisheries Service, to require commercial fishing vessels to carry observers on board ships — part of an effort to respond to the problem of overfishing. The question is who bears the cost of these onboard observers. The statute doesn’t say, and the agency has concluded that under some circumstances, the individuals on whose boats the observers are carried have to foot the bill. The lower court here deferred to that agency interpretation, invoking Chevron.

The plaintiffs in this case, four self-described family-owned herring fishing companies who say that the bills for onboard observers can run as high as 20 percent of their annual returns, are unquestionably deserving of sympathy. But at issue in the case isn’t the wisdom of this particular regulation. It’s the power of government to make decisions with an eye to the collective good.

In its brief in the case, the federal government argues that overruling Chevron would be a “convulsive shock to the legal system.” It explains that the federal government, as well as regulated parties and the public, “have arranged their affairs for decades with Chevron as the backdrop against which Congress legislates, agencies issue rules and orders, and courts resolve disputes.”

But with this court’s demonstrated eagerness to upend settled law and practice, it’s not clear that these concerns will get much traction. Many observers expect that when it decides the case, the court will deal the Chevron precedent a death blow.

Doing so would be a serious mistake. Statutes are never going to cover every conceivable scenario or application. A statute might give an agency the power to require employers to take steps that are reasonably necessary or appropriate to provide safe or healthful employment. It might empower an agency to decide who is an employee for purposes of various provisions of labor law. Or it could require retail stores to provide information on particular food items, then empower the F.D.A. to determine whether stores are in substantial compliance with that requirement.

Whatever the topic, there will always be gaps and ambiguities; the only question is who will fill those gaps and interpret provisions that contain ambiguities — expert agencies or courts. Agencies aren’t by any means perfect. But Congress has long drafted statutes with an understanding that agencies will be the first-line interpreters, and as between agencies and courts, it’s clear that agencies, which are more expert and more politically accountable, should have the advantage.

If the court does overrule Chevron, it matters a great deal what, if anything, the court offers in its place. If the court preserves the notion that agencies have a key role to play in interpreting laws and that under most circumstances, agency interpretations should carry significant weight with courts, it might not matter much that the court technically disavows the Chevron test. But abandoning the notion of deference to agencies in the interpretation of statutes would result in an enormous expansion of the power of courts — in particular, the power of a Supreme Court that has shown itself to be singularly hostile to agency action. (...)

In another case, this one argued in early October, the court is considering the truly radical argument that the funding structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is unconstitutional. In 2020, a 5-to-4 court ruled part of the structure of the C.F.P.B. unconstitutional, but the agency was able to continue functioning. In this challenge, the federal government argues that the challengers’ position, if accepted, would not only mark the end of the C.F.P.B. but also “invalidate much of the federal budget.” It might also throw into question the constitutionality of other federal agencies, including the Federal Reserve.

In yet another case about agency power, either this term or next, the court is likely to take up a challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s approval and subsequent regulation of mifepristone, one of the drugs used in medication abortion, the most common method of abortion in the country. The Supreme Court has put on hold lower court rulings that invalidated parts of the F.D.A.’s approval, but that’s no guarantee of how the court would ultimately rule in the case. A decision even partly siding with the lower courts would not only have catastrophic consequences for access to abortion; it would also, according to a number of drug manufacturers, result in a dramatic shift in drug development and approval processes — which would have implications, the manufacturers say, for their ability to invest in and develop new medicines. It would furthermore likely destabilize the F.D.A.’s approval process, which has long been seen as the global gold standard of drug safety.

In some of these cases, the challengers claim that they are the ones on the side of democracy — that by seeking to gut the power of agencies, they are merely trying to return power to Congress, the branch of government that is the most democratically responsive and accountable. But embracing these arguments would not result in the court returning power to Congress but claiming enormous and novel powers for itself.

Because these moves have been made gradually, often in cases that fly under the radar, it’s easy to miss just how quickly and dramatically the Supreme Court has moved the law in this area — and it’s far from finished. To be clear, the court may turn away some of the challenges discussed above; a mortal wound to the administrative state may not come this term at all. Chief Justice John Roberts is a shrewd political actor, and he very likely appreciates that the political consequences of ending access to mifepristone or adopting a theory that could doom the Fed could damage Republican fortunes in a presidential election year.

But a full embrace of the conservative majority’s crabbed vision of the role and power of government would have seismic consequences for all of us.

by Kate Shaw, NY Times |  Read more:

Image:Illustration by Ben Giles. Photographs via Getty Images
[We've talked about this before: The Chevron Deference (DS).]

OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend

OpenAi Corporate Structure

OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend (Zvi Mowshowitz - DWAV)

Images: OpenAI

[ed. This might have been one of the most consequential weekends for shaping our collective futures as any in our lifetimes. Not to be overly hyperbolic but I'm glad AI alignment/safety is getting center stage. The sooner the better. [ed. But, is it really? Larry Summers now on the Board? Definitely not good.]. For a detailed and fascinating summary of how and why everything happened, and where we are now (40 bullet points!), See: OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend:] 

"Approximately four GPTs and seven years ago, OpenAI’s founders brought forth on this corporate landscape a new entity, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men might live equally when AGI is created.

Now we are engaged in a great corporate war, testing whether that entity, or any entity so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."

• Other than that, the board said nothing in public. I am willing to outright say that, whatever the original justifications, the removal attempt was insufficiently considered and planned and massively botched. Either they had good reasons that justified these actions and needed to share them, or they didn’t.

• There had been various clashes between Altman and the board. We don’t know what all of them were. We do know the board felt Altman was moving too quickly, without sufficient concern for safety, with too much focus on building consumer products, while founding additional other companies. ChatGPT was a great consumer product, but supercharged AI development counter to OpenAI’s stated non-profit mission.

• OpenAI was previously planning an oversubscribed share sale at a valuation of $86 billion that was to close a few weeks later.

• Board member Adam D’Angelo said in a Forbes in January: There's no outcome where this organization is one of the big five technology companies. This is something that's fundamentally different, and my hope is that we can do a lot more good for the world than just become another corporation that gets that big.

• Sam Altman on October 16: “4 times in the history of OpenAI––the most recent time was in the last couple of weeks––I’ve gotten to be in the room when we push the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward. Getting to do that is the professional honor of a lifetime.” There was speculation that events were driven in whole or in part by secret capabilities gains within OpenAI, possibly from a system called Gobi, perhaps even related to the joking claim ‘AI has been achieved internally’ but we have no concrete evidence of that.

• Thus we are now answering the question: What is the law? Do we have law? Where does the power ultimately lie? Is it the charismatic leader that ultimately matters? Who you hire and your culture? Can a corporate structure help us, or do commercial interests and profit motives dominate in the end?

Read more:

Decoding Intentions

How can policymakers credibly reveal and assess intentions in the field of artificial intelligence? Policymakers can send credible signals of their intent by making pledges or committing to undertaking certain actions for which they will pay a price—political, reputational, or monetary—if they back down or fail to make good on their initial promise or threat. Talk is cheap, but inadvertent escalation is costly to all sides.

Executive Summary

How can policymakers credibly reveal and assess intentions in the field of artificial intelligence? AI technologies are evolving rapidly and enable a wide range of civilian and military applications. Private sector companies lead much of the innovation in AI, but their motivations and incentives may diverge from those of the state in which they are headquartered. As governments and companies compete to deploy evermore capable systems, the risks of miscalculation and inadvertent escalation will grow. Understanding the full complement of policy tools to prevent misperceptions and communicate clearly is essential for the safe and responsible development of these systems at a time of intensifying geopolitical competition.

In this brief, we explore a crucial policy lever that has not received much attention in the public debate: costly signals. Costly signals are statements or actions for which the sender will pay a price —political, reputational, or monetary—if they back down or fail to make good on their initial promise or threat. Drawing on a review of the scholarly literature, we highlight four costly signaling mechanisms and apply them to the field of AI (summarized in Table 1):

• Tying hands involves the strategic deployment of public commitments before a foreign or domestic audience, such as unilateral AI policy statements, votes in multilateral bodies, or public commitments to test and evaluate AI models;
• Sunk costs rely on commitments whose costs are priced in from the start, such as licensing and registration requirements for AI algorithms or large-scale investments in test and evaluation infrastructure, including testbeds and other facilities;
• Installment costs are commitments where the sender will pay a price in the future instead of the present, such as sustained verification techniques for AI systems and accounting tools for the use of AI chips in data centers;
• Reducible costs are paid up front but can be offset over time depending on the actions of the signaler, such as investments in more interpretable AI models, commitments to participate in the development of AI investment standards, and alternate design principles for AI-enabled systems.

We explore costly signaling mechanisms for AI in three case studies. The first case study considers signaling around military AI and autonomy. The second case study examines governmental signaling around democratic AI, which embeds commitments to human rights, civil liberties, data protection, and privacy in the design, development, and deployment of AI technologies. The third case study analyzes private sector signaling around the development and release of large language models (LLMs).

Costly signals are valuable for promoting international stability, but it is important to understand their strengths and limitations. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States benefited from establishing a direct hotline with Moscow through which it could send messages. In today’s competitive and multifaceted information environment, there are even more actors with influence on the signaling landscape and opportunities for misperception abound. Signals can be inadvertently costly. U.S. government signaling on democratic AI sends a powerful message about its commitment to certain values, but it runs the risk of a breach with partners who may not share these principles and could expose the United States to charges of hypocrisy. Not all signals are intentional, and commercial actors may conceptualize the costs differently from governments or industry players in other sectors and countries. While these complexities are not insurmountable, they pose challenges for signaling in an economic context where private sector firms drive innovation and may have interests at odds with the countries in which they are based.

Given the risks of misperception and inadvertent escalation, leaders in the public and private sectors must take care to embed signals in coherent strategies. Costly signals come with tradeoffs that need to be managed, including tensions between transparency for signaling purposes and norms around privacy and security. The opportunities for signaling credibly expand when policymakers and technology leaders consider not only whether to “conceal or reveal” a capability, but also how they reveal and the specific channels through which they convey messages of intent. Multivalent signaling, or the practice of sending more than one signal, can have complementary or contradictory effects. Compatible messaging from public and private sector leaders can enhance the credibility of commitments in AI, but officials may also misinterpret signals if they lack appropriate context for assessing capabilities across different technology areas. Policymakers should consider incorporating costly signals into tabletop exercises and focused dialogues with allies and competitor nations to clarify assumptions, mitigate the risks of escalation, and develop shared understandings around communication in times of crisis. Signals can be noisy, occasionally confusing some audiences, but they are still necessary.

by Andrew Imbrie, Owen Daniels, and Helen Toner, Center for Security and Emerging Technology |  Read more (pdf):

Image: CSET

[ed. OMG. Altman's back, Toner (one of the authors of this report) is gone, and Larry Summers (!) is now on OpenAI's Board of Directors. It's never a good sign when that old vampire hack shows up [ed. see: Paging OpenAI Board: ChatGPT on “Handling CEO Termination Delicately” versus Larry Summers, Who Is Still Not Fit to Run a Dog Pound, on New Board (NC)]. All this seems so reminiscent of Google's early growing pains when they started with the motto "Don't be evil", and we all know how that turned out. For OpenAI, it's for the "benefits of all humanity". Anyway, this is the research paper that apparently precipitated the attempted coup over the weekend (See: Before Altman’s Ouster, OpenAI’s Board Was Divided and Feuding (NYT):

***

"At one point, Mr. Altman, the chief executive, made a move to push out one of the board’s members because he thought a research paper she had co-written was critical of the company. (...)

The OpenAI debacle has illustrated how building A.I. systems is testing whether businesspeople who want to make money from artificial intelligence can work in sync with researchers who worry that what they are building could eventually eliminate jobs or become a threat if technologies like autonomous weapons grow out of control. (...)

OpenAI’s board troubles can be traced to the start-up’s nonprofit beginnings. In 2015, Mr. Altman teamed with Elon Musk and others, including Mr. Sutskever, to create a nonprofit to build A.I. that was safe and beneficial to humanity. They planned to raise money from private donors for their mission. But within a few years, they realized that their computing needs required much more funding than they could raise from individuals.

After Mr. Musk left in 2018, they created a for-profit subsidiary that began raising billions of dollars from investors, including $1 billion from Microsoft. They said that the subsidiary would be controlled by the nonprofit board and that each director’s fiduciary duty would be to “humanity, not OpenAI investors,” the company said on its website.

Among the tensions leading up to Mr. Altman’s ouster and quick return involved his conflict with Helen Toner, a board member and a director of strategy at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. A few weeks before Mr. Altman’s firing, he met with Ms. Toner to discuss a paper she had co-written for the Georgetown center.

Mr. Altman complained that the research paper seemed to criticize OpenAI’s efforts to keep its A.I. technologies safe while praising the approach taken by Anthropic, a company that has become OpenAI’s biggest rival, according to an email that Mr. Altman wrote to colleagues and that was viewed by The New York Times.

In the email, Mr. Altman said that he had reprimanded Ms. Toner for the paper and that it was dangerous to the company, particularly at a time, he added, when the Federal Trade Commission was investigating OpenAI over the data used to build its technology.

Ms. Toner defended it as an academic paper that analyzed the challenges that the public faces when trying to understand the intentions of the countries and companies developing A.I. But Mr. Altman disagreed.

“I did not feel we’re on the same page on the damage of all this,” he wrote in the email. “Any amount of criticism from a board member carries a lot of weight.” (...)

Hours after Mr. Altman was ousted, OpenAI executives confronted the remaining board members during a video call, according to three people who were on the call.

During the call, Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, said the board was endangering the future of the company by pushing out Mr. Altman. This, he said, violated the members’ responsibilities.

Ms. Toner disagreed. The board’s mission was to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that “benefits all of humanity,” and if the company was destroyed, she said, that could be consistent with its mission. In the board’s view, OpenAI would be stronger without Mr. Altman.

Tiny Habits

[ed. Beautiful vocals/harmonies.]

Neglected Books

A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding, by Sylvia Wright (1969)

Publishing is almost as notorious for its misleading packaging as the recording business. We may never know what Doubleday’s remit to the Paul Bacon design studio was for Sylvia Wright’s A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding, but the vaguely romantic cover that was supplied in response represents in not the slightest way the book’s contents. For one thing, this is not a novel but a collection of three novellas. And three novellas that in no way resemble the sort of narrative a fan of Georgette Heyer or Anya Seton might expect. (...)

Sylvia Wright was not a naïf, though. Soon after graduating from Bryn Mawr, she learned about both novel-writing and publishing when she and her mother worked with Mark Saxton to turn the 2300-page manuscript left by her father, Austin Tappan Wright, into publishable form. Though its bulk (over 1,000 pages even after editing) put off many readers, Islandia (1942) became, and remains, a cult favorite, a blend of utopianism, fantasy, romance, and what today we’d call steampunk.

She translated that experience into a job on the staff of Harpers Bazaar, eventually earning her own monthly column of humorous observations on life. A couple dozen of these were collected and published in 1955 as Get Away From Me With Those Christmas Gifts. Many have titles like, “My Kitchen Hates Me” and “How to Make Chicken Liver Pate Once.” But one piece has worked its way into our vocabulary: “The Death of Lady Mondegreen.”

In it, Wright recalls learning a Scottish ballad, “The Bonnie Earl O’ Moray,” as a child. In particular, she memorized the lines, “They have slain the Earl o’ Moray/And Lady Mondegreen.” Only, in the balland, that last phrase is actually “And layd him on the green.” “I saw it all clearly,” she wrote:

The Earl had yellow curly hair and a yellow beard and of course wore a kilt. He was lying in a forest clearing with an arrow in his heart. Lady Mondegreen lay at his side, her long, dark-brown curls spread out over the moss. She wore a dark-green dress embroidered with light-green leaves outlined in gold.

“It made me cry,” she writes. When she did finally learn the correct wording, she clung defiantly to her version. It was better. And this led her to champion her invention: the mondegreen. For Wright, mondegreens are not errors. They are portals into other worlds: (...)

Wright got her mondegreens from poetry, newspapers, and advertisements. Popular music lyrics have been a rich source for them, even when many of us didn’t know they had a name. And Wright was right in viewing them as transformative. A mondegreen, for example, turns Jimi Hendrix’s ode to LSD, “‘Cuse Me While I Kiss the Sky,” into a celebration of homosexual love: “‘Cuse Me While I Kiss This Guy.”

And perhaps the notion of mondegreens is a clue to understand what Sylvia Wright is doing in A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding. 

***

The Colours of the Night, by Catherine Ross (1962)

The colours of the night in Catherine Ross’s title aren’t romantic in the least. They’re the colors of the signal flares fired from the control tower of RAF Tormartin to confirm that the bombers coming back after a raid are friendly and not Luftwaffe attackers. This is just one of the many details that led numerous reviewers to call The Colours of the Night the most accurate and authentic account of life on an RAF bomber base during World War Two written from a woman’s point of view .

Virginia Bennett, the novel’s narrator, is a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force stationed at an RAF Lancaster bomber base near Lincoln, assigned to the base motor pool. Lincolnshire, with its broad, fairly flat countryside and proximity to the North Sea coast, was, with East Anglia and North Yorkshire, dotted with RAF — and later, U.S. 8th Air Force — airfields from which the Allies launched the bombing raids on occupied Europe, Germany, and Italy that represented the longest single campaign of the Western front.

It was also the deadliest. To quote the Imperial War Museum, “During the whole war, 51% of aircrew were killed on operations, 12% were killed or wounded in non-operational accidents and 13% became prisoners of war or evaders. Only 24% survived the war unscathed.” An aircrew member was committed to fly thirty operational missions before he could be released to other less dangerous duties.

71 Squadron, the unit Bennett supports, flies twelve Lancasters, each manned with a crew of seven. Given a typical operational year (and the novel is set over the winter of 1942 to 1943, perhaps the most typical year for Bomber Command), she knows, most of the flying members of the current would be gone. “There’d be a 71 Squadron, of course, but of entirely new faces. It was a fact like the day of the week, or the month of the year. You accepted that fact.”

A fact that is only notional to Bennett until she finds herself falling in love with Flight Lieutenant Colin Craig. The two meet by accident — literally, as she is the first to arrive on the scene after Craig’s Lancaster goes skidding off the runway and into a muddy verge. He, of course, is handsome, cool, and instantly attractive. But she is cute, clever, and just stand-offish enough to attract his attention as well.

Their romance is considered fraternization between commissioned and other ranks and prohibited by regulations, so after a few bouts of flirting turns into something more serious, they have to resort to various subterfuges to spend time together — the most important being to ensure they’re never seen together. To further complicate matters, Virginia is an object of earnest interest by her motor pool section chief and Colin by the lieutenant in charge of the WAAFs at the base.

But the real complication is the fact of those statistics. As she senses that Colin is just as much in love with her as she with him, she asks the inevitable question:

“But what shall we do about us?”
“What about us?”
“Us,” I said slowly and painfully. “In the future.”
He stared at me surprised, almost blankly.

And suddenly it hits her: “I knew that in his own mind he had no future.”

by Brad Bigelow, Neglected Books |  Read more: here and here

Images: Doubleday/Magnum

[ed. What a nice find: Neglected Books "Where forgotten books are remembered" - with articles and lists of thousands of books that have been neglected, overlooked, forgotten, or stranded by changing tides in critical or popular taste.... also book covers, advertisements, and more. Check it out.]

Blue Island

Let's Walk

Uncle Romy told me that, if he hadn’t grown up on the inner-city street named Blue Island, he probably would never have dropped out of high school to join the Navy. Blue Island was within walking distance of the Ashland Avenue bridge, which spanned the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. It was a walk that Romy took from sixth grade on. He’d imagine that he was running away from home, escaping down a river like Huckleberry Finn, or going to live in secret like a hermit in one of the deserted little bridge-tender houses. He never tired of seeing the street split open as the bridge lifted its asphalt arms to the sky. He loved watching the rusty barges, heaped with demolished cars, floating by on river time, while street traffic waited, jammed bumper to bumper. At night, eruptions of acetylene-blue sparks and furnaces flaring behind charred foundry windows coated the oily water with visions of hellfire. But, even as a kid, Romy sensed that, if a toxic river flowing backward as it carried out the city’s sewage could enthrall him, then he needed to see the ocean as soon as possible.

The Navy taught him to box. When his tour of duty was over, he moved back to Chicago to fight in the annual Golden Gloves tournament, and made it to the welterweight finals. Romy wasn’t my godfather, but, given that we’d grown up in different generations in the same neighborhood, and were both southpaw welterweights, he appointed himself my guardian angel. That required him to teach me to box, or at least to try, which he did until I was able to convince him that getting repeatedly hit in the mouth was ruining my embouchure for the clarinet.

He also advised me in matters of the heart.

His advice for getting back with a girl you couldn’t forget was to call her out of the blue. Timing was important. It had to be in the evening, but early enough that you hadn’t lost the light. When she answered—if she answered—you’d say, “Let’s go walking.”

“And, whatever you do, skip the sad-ass Hi . . . it’s me moment, followed by a melodramatic pause, like you got some special status as me.”

“What if she asks where to?”

“Where what?”

“Is this something you’ve done yourself?” I asked him. It was hardly the first time I’d wondered about the backlog of secrets he kept stashed.

“That’s a story for another day. You need to stick to now,” he said. “You been out of touch so long, and suddenly silence has been broken, but you’re worried what next and want a backup plan, right?”

“It was just a simple question.”

“Right. So, if she asks where to, you want to be prepared to respond, like, Well, I thought maybe we could, like, go get hot beefs, wet, with both kinds of peppers, at Gino’s.”

“It doesn’t have to be Gino’s.”

“It doesn’t have to be anything, numbnuts. It’s not about fucking where to. It’s just let’s walk. If she wasn’t good with that already, she wouldn’t have answered your call.”

Factory Windows

We are walking in the cold. I know this taqueria on Twenty-sixth that features an assembly-line-like contraption that makes fresh corn tortillas. A sign claims that in the whole world only two such machines exist, one in Mexico City and the other here in Chicago. It reminds me of a similar setup I saw at the Café du Monde in New Orleans, where they make fresh beignets no matter the time of night.

But we have wandered into a part of the city where neither of us has been before, even though it feels familiar. There’s a saline smell of pilings that you might expect in a maritime city like New Orleans, but not in Chicago.

“Maybe you were here once as a kid,” she says, “back when you’d pedal around for hours on that red Sears bike, trying to get lost.”

“If I was here before, it was in another life.”

“You believe in past lives?”

“Believe? No. Even though sometimes it feels like it could be true.”

“That’s due to all the different lives we live during the one we think we have.”

We stop at the center of a bridge spanning the river and look down at a sheet of ice so thin that we can see the shapes of swimming fish below it. Carp, maybe, or catfish, bottom-feeders the ice has brought to the surface. The gulls see them, too, and dip past us, swirling and skimming over the frosted shadows just out of reach.

“Who knew there were still so many fish,” she says. “Didn’t this river once catch on fire?”

“They’re not fish you’d want to eat, unless one of your other lives was as a gull.”

The bridge crosses into blocks of deserted streets grooved by railroad tracks and lined with shuttered warehouses. We stop in front of what looks to be an abandoned factory with a “for rent” sign taped to the door.

“Can you imagine what living here would be like?” I ask.

“Let’s go in and see.”

“There’s a lock.”

“That’s just cosmetic,” she says, and removes a glove, then slowly rotates the numbers she leans toward, as if listening for the tumblers. When it opens, she isn’t the least surprised. We glance around to be sure that no one is watching and push inside.

I expect it to be dark, but the tile floors gleam at the mouths of corridors, and a shaft of light suspending dust as if it were photons streams down the stairs. We begin to climb.

“How’d you guess the combination?”

“It’s always the same. Same as it was on my gym locker in high school, which was the same as the birthday in May of the first boy I had a crush on.”

“My birthday’s in April.”

“I know. He preceded you. Third grade, St. Casimir’s.”

“What was his name?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You remember his birthday but not his name?”

“Must be the kind of secret so sacred you keep it even from yourself. Know what I mean?” she asks.

by Stuart Dybeck, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Lawrence Agyei for The New Yorker

Kim Stanley Robinson: "If the World Fails, Business Fails"

Loud alarms sound from seat to seat on my train journey from London to Rotterdam. As we zoom past the waterlogged fields of northern France, passengers’ smartphones flash up one by one with an automated government alert: “Exceptional floods are under way . . . take refuge on high ground.”

The world is approaching the “zombie years” of natural disasters and rapidly warming temperatures as imagined by my lunch date, the science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson. Robinson’s 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future struck a chord with the climate anxious, just as his bestselling epics from the 1990s and 2000s, in which humans colonise the Moon and other solar systems, spoke to a more optimistic era of government-led space exploration.

At the opening of The Ministry for the Future, 20mn people die in a 2025 heatwave in Uttar Pradesh, India. One of the closest real-life equivalents to this disaster was when early monsoon floods, swollen by glacier melt, swept through Pakistan last year. “One-third of the country’s [districts] underwater and everybody displaced. That [was] apocalyptic,” Robinson says. “Now I’m meeting policymakers and powerful people who are terrified and want to act. That’s new in my experience.”

I’m lucky to catch the author of these grotesque visions at all, I realise, as we settle in for a glass of dry Sauvignon Blanc and a complimentary platter of cheesy pear tartlets in the efficiently posh hotel where Robinson is staying in the Dutch port city. In recent years, Robinson has become a sounding board for politicians, economists and climate negotiators eager for his take on fringe ideas such as pumping water under glaciers to stop them melting, or “carbon quantitative easing”, whereby central banks would pay the worst polluters to stop.

Like many of Robinson’s more than 20 novels, including Pacific Edge and Red Mars, The Ministry for the Future is mostly a tale of people scrambling for financial, political and scientific solutions to civilisational breakdown. And people are hungry for solutions right now. (...)

“What people find encouraging in the book is that we could repeatedly fuck up and have a lot of humans fighting vigorously to wreck the world and wreck our plans, and we could still get to a good result,” Robinson tells me. This message can replace “feelings of futility or despair” with “relatively justifiable hope”, he adds. “People grab this book like it’s a life raft or a life ring out in the ocean.” (...)

Scientists and politicians, not businesspeople, are the heroes of Robinson’s books. He claims that The Ministry for the Future gave a much broader platform to the concept of the fatal heat stress known as “wet bulb temperature” — a way of saying that “if things get hot and humid enough, humans will die automatically”. While the theoretical limit to human tolerance for heat and humidity was already known, in part thanks to a 2010 paper, policymakers had not properly thought through its consequences as a result of climate change. “Ministry is like the first mass-market, general cultural publication of this idea that is quite obvious.”

Robinson says science fiction is more of a “modelling exercise” than a “prediction”, serving to draw public attention to under-discussed scientific theories. “You tell the story in an attempt to forestall it by informing people in advance.”

 
His next novel is likely to be set in the Arctic, where scientists are debating controversial ideas for manipulating the climate in a bid to stop the region’s self-fulfilling feedback loop of ice melt and warming waters. The techniques, which could be implemented in polar regions and elsewhere, range from injecting aerosols into the atmosphere to underwater curtains that shield glaciers from warm water, or seeding massive algae blooms that can sink carbon to the seafloor.

 
Some of these suggestions have alarmed certain groups of scientists who see hubris and the potential for distraction where Robinson sees noble desperation. “I see immense resistance to geoengineering that is ignorant and reflexive and comes out of a moral calculus of, like, 1990,” he says. The moral hazard associated with continuing to burn fossil fuels because of the existence of an escape clause is “not relevant”, he adds. “We know we have to decarbonise. We know we’re not. It’s desperate.” (...)

His key message is that “in a practical sense . . . if the world fails, business fails.” Insurers, for example, could find it impossible to hike premiums enough to finance the global cost of payouts linked to natural disasters and rising temperatures. “The backstop [provided by the insurance sector to the world] will fail,” is what Robinson told staff at Swiss Re, one of the world’s biggest providers of cover for insurance groups.

Perhaps because of his desire to engage with change-makers in the real world, business leaders sometimes confuse him for a futurist, which he describes as “a bullshit industry” and “a scam”. Science fiction is more subtle, he says. “It really is trying to speculate about futures that might happen. But it’s also a metaphor for how things are now.” (...)

Robinson advocates targeted non-violent protest, which could mean anything from showing up for debates at local council meetings to slashing tyres of the most highly polluting SUVs. “If you have a big honking car in London, its tyres should be flat every time you come back out to it [so that] you [have to] get yourself a little Mini,” he says.

by Kenza Bryan, Financial Times |  Read more:

Image: Hachette Group

[ed. Curretly reading Ministry For the Future, which in some ways can be viewed as the political/scientific/bureaucratic cli-fi alternative to Neal Stephenson's recent Termination Shock (which imagines a swashbuckling rogue billionaire taking matters into his own hands). In both cases geoengineering takes center stage, as it's becoming painfully obvious society will fail to mitigate climate change disasters by voluntarily reducing CO2 emissions. It's an excellent book, despite jumping back and forth between gripping narratives and info dumps nearly every other chapter (although, even the info dumps are interesting). It should also send a shiver down the spines of - maybe just several hundred people - with the most influence to prevent climate change but are actively not doing so, and therefore become targets of so-called black wing political and terrorist groups that exist simply to assassinate each over time as planning and opportunity allow - a more direct form of lobbying). Highly recommended. See also: A Sci-Fi Writer Returns to Earth: ‘The Real Story Is the One Facing Us’ (NYT); and, The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson review – how to solve the climate crisis (Guardian).]

The Fear and Tension That Led to Sam Altman’s Ouster at OpenAI

Over the last year, Sam Altman led OpenAI to the adult table of the technology industry. Thanks to its hugely popular ChatGPT chatbot, the San Francisco start-up was at the center of an artificial intelligence boom, and Mr. Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, had become one of the most recognizable people in tech.

But that success raised tensions inside the company. Ilya Sutskever, a respected A.I. researcher who co-founded OpenAI with Mr. Altman and nine other people, was increasingly worried that OpenAI’s technology could be dangerous and that Mr. Altman was not paying enough attention to that risk, according to three people familiar with his thinking. Mr. Sutskever, a member of the company’s board of directors, also objected to what he saw as his diminished role inside the company, according to two of the people.

That conflict between fast growth and A.I. safety came into focus on Friday afternoon, when Mr. Altman was pushed out of his job by four of OpenAI’s six board members, led by Mr. Sutskever. The move shocked OpenAI employees and the rest of the tech industry, including Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion in the company. Some industry insiders were saying the split was as significant as when Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985.

But on Saturday, in a head-spinning turn, Mr. Altman was said to be in discussions with OpenAI’s board about returning to the company.

The ouster on Friday of Mr. Altman, 38, drew attention to a longtime rift in the A.I. community between people who believe A.I. is the biggest business opportunity in a generation and others who worry that moving too fast could be dangerous. And the vote to remove him showed how a philosophical movement devoted to the fear of A.I. had become an unavoidable part of tech culture.

Since ChatGPT was released almost a year ago, artificial intelligence has captured the public’s imagination, with hopes that it could be used for important work like drug research or to help teach children. But some A.I. scientists and political leaders worry about its risks, such as jobs getting automated out of existence or autonomous warfare that grows beyond human control.

Fears that A.I. researchers were building a dangerous thing have been a fundamental part of OpenAI’s culture. Its founders believed that because they understood those risks, they were the right people to build it. (...)

In recent weeks, Jakub Pachocki, who helped oversee GPT-4, the technology at the heart of ChatGPT, was promoted to director of research at the company. After previously occupying a position below Mr. Sutskever, he was elevated to a position alongside Mr. Sutskever, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Pachocki quit the company late on Friday, the people said, soon after Mr. Brockman. Earlier in the day, OpenAI said Mr. Brockman had been removed as chairman of the board and would report to the new interim chief executive, Mira Murati. Other allies of Mr. Altman — including two senior researchers, Szymon Sidor and Aleksander Madry — have also left the company.

Mr. Brockman said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that even though he was the chairman of the board, he was not part of the board meeting where Mr. Altman was ousted. That left Mr. Sutskever and three other board members: Adam D’Angelo, chief executive of the question-and-answer site Quora; Tasha McCauley, an adjunct senior management scientist at the RAND Corporation; and Helen Toner, director of strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

They could not be reached for comment on Saturday.

Ms. McCauley and Ms. Toner have ties to the Rationalist and Effective Altruist movements, a community that is deeply concerned that A.I. could one day destroy humanity. Today’s A.I. technology cannot destroy humanity. But this community believes that as the technology grows increasingly powerful, these dangers will arise.

In 2021, a researcher named Dario Amodei, who also has ties to this community, and about 15 other OpenAI employees left the company to form a new A.I. company called Anthropic.

Mr. Sutskever was increasingly aligned with those beliefs. Born in the Soviet Union, he spent his formative years in Israel and emigrated to Canada as a teenager. As an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, he helped create a breakthrough in an A.I. technology called neural networks.

In 2015, Mr. Sutskever left a job at Google and helped found OpenAI alongside Mr. Altman, Mr. Brockman and Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk. They built the lab as a nonprofit, saying that unlike Google and other companies, it would not be driven by commercial incentives. They vowed to build what is called artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the brain can do.

Mr. Altman transformed OpenAI into a for-profit company in 2018 and negotiated a $1 billion investment from Microsoft. Such enormous sums of money are essential to building technologies like GPT-4, which was released earlier this year. Since its initial investment, Microsoft has put another $12 billion into the company.

The company was still governed by the nonprofit board. Investors like Microsoft do receive profits from OpenAI, but their profits are capped. Any money over the cap is funneled back into the nonprofit.

As he saw the power of GPT-4, Mr. Sutskever helped create a new Super Alignment team inside the company that would explore ways of ensuring that future versions of the technology would not do harm.

Mr. Altman was open to those concerns, but he also wanted OpenAI to stay ahead of its much larger competitors.

by Cade Metz, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: From left, Mira Murati, interim chief executive; Sam Altman, ousted chief executive; Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and Board member; Ilya Sutskever, also on the company’s board. Credit: Jim Wilson/The New York Times

[ed. Wow. For readers not familiar with the Rationalist/Effective Altruist community (Sam Bankman-Fried was an advocate) visit Less Wrong. There's an open Sam Altman thread: Sam Altman fired from OpenAI, and others, like: Altman firing retaliation incoming?, and this shortform, with details I was unware of: ]

***

"What's the situation?

In the USA: Musk's xAI announced Grok to the world two weeks ago, after two months of training. Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team. Google's Gemini is reportedly to be released in early 2024. OpenAI has confused the world with its dramatic leadership spasm, but GPT-5 is on the way. Google and Amazon have promised billions to Anthropic.

In Europe, France's Mistral and Germany's Aleph Alpha are trying to keep the most powerful AI models unregulated. China has had regulations for generative AI since August, but is definitely aiming to catch up to America. Russia has GigaChat and SistemmaGPT, the UAE has Falcon. I think none of these are at GPT-4's level, but surely some of them can get there in a year or two.

Very few players in this competitive landscape talk about AI as something that might rule or replace the human race. Despite the regulatory diplomacy that also came to life this year, the political and economic elites of the world are on track to push AI across the threshold of superintelligence, without any realistic sense of the consequences."

***

[ed. And this, from the retaliation link above (lots of turmoil and conspiracy speculation):

"OpenAI’s investors are making efforts to bring back Sam Altman, the chief executive who was ousted Friday, said people familiar with the matter, the latest development in a fast-moving chain of events at the artificial-intelligence company behind ChatGPT.

Altman is considering returning but has told investors that he wants a new board, the people said. He has also discussed starting a company that would bring on former OpenAI employees, and is deciding between the two options, the people said.

Altman is expected to decide between the two options soon, the people said. Leading shareholders in OpenAI, including Microsoft and venture firm Thrive Capital, are helping orchestrate the efforts to reinstate Altman. Microsoft invested $13 billion into OpenAI and is its primary financial backer. Thrive Capital is the second-largest shareholder in the company."

***

I won't say money trumps principle all the time, but as Damon Runyon said:

"It may be that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong — but that’s the way to bet."

So far as we know, it seems to be: pro-alignment faction in OpenAI were concerned, managed to oust Altman, alarums and excursions ensued, Microsoft nearly lost their lives, Altman is now getting (it's fair to imagine) whatever the hell set up he wants at Microsoft - all in order to keep on track to get AI out in a commercial product that will give Microsoft market monopoly as the first to get there and turn on the eternal money fountain.

And that's reality, folks.(ACX)