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)

Travis, Taylor and the Weirdness of Celebrity Relationships

Could it be true love for Taylor and Travis? Sure! Why not?

Do you know how many of the bachelors who have been bachelors on The Bachelor are currently married to the woman they chose in the final episode? As of this writing, one. One! Out of 27 seasons. That is, let's acknowledge, hilarious. But even more hilarious is the fact that reportedly, seven couples are married who have met on various seasons of Big Brother, which is not designed to lead to marriage. The only logical conclusion to draw is that if you want to create lasting relationships, a setup designed to get compatible people married doesn't work as well as locking a bunch of young and horny randos in a house together for a couple of months, feeding them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and not letting them leave.

As far as we know, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce have never been locked in a house together. As Brittany Luse and crisis PR person Molly McPherson discussed on NPR's It's Been a Minute, Swift (the megastar) and Kelce (the Kansas City Chiefs tight end) are in a PR relationship that is going great guns. And maybe they're in a real relationship, too. Who knows? (...)

In fairness, what kind of a relationship for Taylor Swift would not seem suspicious and publicity-seeking? It's tempting to say "a relationship with an ordinary person," but where in the world would Taylor Swift meet an ordinary person? On Hinge? At the grocery store? At a bar? According to the internet (and the story Kelce told on his podcast), he went to one of her shows in July. He wanted to give her a friendship bracelet with his number on it, but it didn't work, and then the story got out there, and before you knew it, they were maybe/possibly/perhaps dating.

Now, certainly, you can choose to think this is absurd and that what, in fact happened was that her publicists and his publicists met in an underground lair beneath an active volcano, and after ceremonially burning some copies of Us Weekly while chanting "Co-ver! Co-ver! Co-ver!", they schemed to put together this entire story to inure to everyone's benefit, and Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce don't even like each other. There is a long history of suspicion that celebrity couples are cooked up for publicity reasons, whether it's because they're in a project together or, more insidiously, because the true nature of somebody's personal life has been deemed a potential liability.

But on the flip side, famous people dating other famous people makes a certain kind of logical sense, over and above the PR advantages. You would need a month-long orientation to date Taylor Swift if you came from any sort of anonymous background — you'd need to understand all the people on her team, how PR works, all kinds of things about confidentiality and safety and security, obligations she has, what it's like to be in the press, what it's like to be watched all the time ... that's a tall order.

Travis Kelce, on the other hand, had a dating show on E! back in 2016 called Catching Kelce, which, according to Vanity Fair, was being pretty successfully memory-holed until he connected with Swift. (...)

You don't have to believe Taylor Swift is any sort of victim — at all — to think that it's functionally impossible for a normie to casually date a person as famous as she is who handles the rest of her life the way she does. Yes, she could have someone smuggled in and out of her hotel in a laundry cart, she could decline to comment on her personal life, and she could decide not to share herself with her fans beyond what happens on stage. But that would be a reversal of her entire oversharing strategy, in which her friends are part of her persona and her broken heart is part of her persona. This is exactly how Taylor Swift would be behaving if she were in a fake relationship with Travis Kelce, sure. But this is also exactly how Taylor Swift would be behaving if she were in a real relationship with Travis Kelce.

She lives this way. She shows up at things. She is the most animated person in the audience at any awards show. Given all that, dating somebody who's already famous is both the most strategic thing for her to do and the most sensible thing for her to do. (And listen, she's almost six feet tall. Maybe she likes a tall guy and was intrigued by the fact that a 6'5" football player wanted to give her a friendship bracelet.) (...)

It doesn't matter to anybody else's life whether this relationship is real or not, nor is it something you can figure out from watching her watching him or watching them leave a football game together. Maybe it's PR. Maybe it's lust. Maybe it's going to be over in a month. Maybe it's going to last. Maybe she's going to write a song someday heavily hinting that somebody who wore pads and a helmet betrayed her. It's a weird and beautiful and ultimately unimportant thing: Who knows?

by Linda Holmes, NPR |  Read more:

Image: Amy Sussman/Getty Images.
[ed. She's got my number just in case. See also: Real relationship aside, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are 100% in a PR relationship (NPR).]

Not All 'Pow-Wow'

From Reservation Dogs to reggae rock: celebrating the amazing things Natives are doing right now.

The state of Arizona is not among those that recognises Indigenous Peoples Day as a public holiday but this year, for the first time, the sprawling city of Phoenix is. An open-air market in a downtown park has been set up to celebrate all things Native American – jewellery, food, clothing – bringing their creators from all across the south-west.

At one end of the park is a low stage, and throughout the late summer day, musicians from Indigenous communities far across the US have been performing. Now, after dark, in the Arizona heat, Ed Kabotie is dangling his legs off the tailgate of a battered pickup, beer in hand.

Kabotie has driven down from the Hopi reservation 200 miles north of here to play with his reggae-rock band, the Yoties. And he is keen to tell his story, one that weaves in and out of his identity as Native American, as it does for most musicians here gathered together under the banner of Native Guitars Tour, a collective of Indigenous artists promoting Native music, art and fashion that advocates for greater cultural and economic representation.

Kabotie, who is Hopi, emphasises that the vision of Indigenous life that is presented online or in films is frequently generalised, crudely drawn or misleading.

“It’s important that people recognise that a Hopi is not a Havasupai, and a Havasupai is not an Apache,” he says. “We don’t all have casinos, and some of our governments hate that shit. We’re not all pow-wow people, and the pow-wow culture that you see isn’t necessarily an internal tribal culture. For some it is, for others it’s not.”

Where Kabotie is from, “a lot of people don’t have running water and electricity … we don’t have stores and it’s two hours to get to a hospital. All that being said, I like it. It’s not representative of every Native culture, it’s just one, whatever that is.”

Soon after we speak, Wavelengths, a Navajo-Zuni powerpop band from Shiprock, New Mexico, come on. “We’re trying to inspire ordinary Native Americans that you can do more than stay at home,” says their singer-guitarist Cody Waybenais. “I feel we are reaching a point where all of us, all Indigenous people, are collectively worldwide, all directions; all tribes are finally reaching a world platform.” (...)

But how real is real, and who gets to channel that reality, remains contentious. Devery Jacobs, a Canadian First Nations actor who stars in Reservation Dogs, recently critiqued Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, calling it “painful, gruelling, unrelenting and unnecessarily graphic” in its depiction of a series of murders of members of the Osage Nation tribe in 1920s Oklahoma.

The bands in Arizona are not – and may never be – competing with the giants of the music business, but the point is clear: Native American arts and cultural expression that were once limited to their localities are gaining a wider reach. The social and economic filters that once isolated and constrained Indigenous voices are lifting.

by Edward Helmore, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Reservation Dogs/Hulu/YouTube

[ed. Spirit apparently appears every time Bear gets knocked out (which is often). Man, I have to see this show but unfortunately don't have Hulu. See also: Reservation Dogs review – a stereotype-smashing, Tarantino-esque triumph (The Guardian). Besides the video below, more words of wisdom from Spirit here (YT).]

Eat, Poop, Die

What happened to Washington's wildlife after the largest dam removal in US history. Sometimes the best thing we can do to restore nature is just get out of the way.

The man made flood that miraculously saved our heroes at the end of O Brother Where Art Thou were an actual occurrence in the 19th and 20th century — and a fairly common one at that — as river valleys across the American West were dammed up and drowned out at the altar of economic progress and electrification. Such was the case with Washington State's Elwha river in the 1910s. Its dam provided the economic impetus to develop the Olympic Peninsula but also blocked off nearly 40 miles of river from the open ocean, preventing native salmon species from making their annual spawning trek. However, after decades of legal wrangling by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, the biggest dams on the river today are the kind made by beavers. (...)

When construction began in 1910, the Elwha Dam was designed to attract economic development to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, supplying the growing community of Port Angeles with electric power. It was one of the first high-head dams in the region, with water moving more than a hundred yards from the reservoir to the river below. Before the dam was built, the river hosted ten anadromous fish runs. All five species of Pacific salmon — pink, chum, sockeye, Chinook, and coho — were found in the river, along with bull trout and steelhead. In a good year, hundreds of thousands of salmon ascended the Elwha to spawn. But the contractors never finished the promised fish ladders. As a result, the Elwha cut off most of the watershed from the ocean and 90 percent of migratory salmon habitat.

Thousands of dams block the rivers of the world, decimating fish populations and clogging nutrient arteries from sea to mountain spring. Some have fish ladders. Others ship fish across concrete walls. Many act as permanent barriers to migration for thousands of species.

By the 1980s, there was growing concern about the effect of the Elwha on native salmon. Populations had declined by 95 per cent, devastating local wildlife and Indigenous communities. River salmon are essential to the culture and economy of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe. In 1986, the tribe filed a motion through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to stop the relicensing of the Elwha Dam and the Glines Canyon Dam, an upstream impoundment that was even taller than the Elwha. By blocking salmon migration, the dams violated the 1855 Treaty of Point No Point, in which the Klallam ceded a vast amount of the Olympic Peninsula on the stipulation that they and all their descendants would have “the right of taking fish at usual and accustomed grounds.” The tribe partnered with environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the Seattle Audubon Society, to pressure local and federal officials to remove the dams. In 1992, Congress passed the Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act, which authorized the dismantling of the Elwha and Glines Canyon Dams.

The demolition of the Elwha Dam was the largest dam-removal project in history; it cost $350 million and took about three years. Beginning in September 2011, coffer dams shunted water to one side as the Elwha Dam was decommissioned and destroyed. The Glines Canyon was more challenging. According to Pess, a “glorified jackhammer on a floating barge” was required to dismantle the two-hundred-foot impoundment. The barge didn’t work when the water got low, so new equipment was helicoptered in. By 2014, most of the dam had come down, but rockfall still blocked fish passage. It took another year of moving rocks and concrete before the fish had full access to the river.

The response of the fish was quick, satisfying, and sometimes surprising. Elwha River bull trout, landlocked for more than a century, started swimming back to the ocean. The Chinook salmon in the watershed increased from an average of about two thousand to four thousand. Many of the Chinook were descendants of hatchery fish, Pess told me over dinner at Nerka. “If ninety percent of your population prior to dam removal is from a hatchery, you can’t just assume that a totally natural population will show up right away.” Steelhead trout, which had been down to a few hundred, now numbered more than two thousand.

Within a few years, a larger mix of wild and local hatchery fish had moved back to the Elwha watershed. And the surrounding wildlife responded too. The American dipper, a river bird, fed on salmon eggs and insects infused with the new marine-derived nutrients. Their survival rates went up, and the females who had access to fish became healthier than those without. They started having multiple broods and didn’t have to travel so far for their food, a return, perhaps, to how life was before the dam. A study in nearby British Columbia showed that songbird abundance and diversity increased with the number of salmon. They weren’t eating the fish — in fact, they weren’t even present during salmon migration. But they were benefiting from the increase in insects and other invertebrates.

Just as exciting, the removal of the dams rekindled migratory patterns that had gone dormant. Pacific lamprey started traveling up the river to breed. Bull trout that had spent generations in the reservoir above the dam began migrating out to sea. Rainbow trout swam up and down the river for the first time in decades. Over the years, the river started to look almost natural as the sediments that had built up behind the dams washed downstream.

by Andrew Tarantola, Endgadget |  Read more:

Image: Hatchette Books
[ed. Long, long overdue, here and elsewhere. An artifact of competition between the Bureau of Reclamation and Corps of Engineers over land development and water policy in the western United States during the post-Depression era, when over 250,000 dams were contructed (as described in the excellent Cadillac Desert).  Next on deck: Klamath River (Iron Gate Reservoir). See: After the Flood (Science):]

"In early 2024, operators will open the floodgates on the 49-meter-high dam that blocks the Klamath River, allowing the more than 50 million tons of water it impounds to begin to drain. Once it’s gone, heavy equipment will dismantle the structure. All that will remain of the 11-kilometer-long reservoir that filled the valley for 60 years will be steep-sided slopes coated in gray mud, split once again by a free-flowing river."

Turning Hums into Melodies

and also:

YouTube's first AI-generated music tools can clone artist voices and turn hums into melodies (Endgadget)

Images: YouTube

[ed. Great, just what we need: more music without musicianship. Why would anyone actually want to learn to play an instrument? Can't imagine.]

Macrobiome

XKCD, Gut Fauna

via:

Storm Patrol

In the Nineteenth Century, Scientists Set Out to Solve the “Problem of American Storms”

To fully appreciate the modern-day marvel that is the National Weather Service, it’s useful to start with numbers. There’s 6.3 billion. (The number of observations the agency collects and analyzes every day.) There’s 1.5 million. (The number of forecasts it issues each year.) There’s 184 and 100,000. (The number of weather balloons NWS releases every day, including on weekends and holidays, and the number of feet said balloons can rise into the atmosphere.) And there’s 90 percent. (The average accuracy of a five-day forecast.)

There’s also zero. That’s the approximate number of minutes a typical American like you or me spends wondering about the weather information we access every single day via print newspapers or public radio stations or the hour-by-hour forecasts delivered courtesy of the phones we carry. The ubiquitousness of those updates, the fact that we don’t consider them at all, is a testament to just how much modern meteorology has spoiled us and—probably more than anything else—a tribute to the National Weather Service’s success.

This blasé attitude would have astounded the colonists who arrived in the New World from Europe during the seventeenth century and found North American weather to be, in a word, hellish. They sent letters home describing the climate in apocalyptic terms. When it rained, wrote one colonist in New Sweden, on the Delaware River, “the whole sky seems to be on fire, and nothing can be seen but smoke and flames.” “Intemperate” was how a missionary from Rhode Island described it. “Excessive heat and cold, sudden violent changes of weather, terrible and mischievous thunder and lightning, and unwholesome air” created an environment that was “destructive to human bodies.”

The harshness of the weather—with its extreme seasons and severe storms—wasn’t just an unpleasant surprise. It was also confusing. Among the various, sketchy assumptions that the Europeans had brought with them to their new home was the idea that a location’s climate was directly correlated to its latitude. By the colonists’ logic, the seasons in Newfoundland should resemble those in Paris, and crops grown in Spain should thrive in Virginia. Instead, the olive trees imported from the Mediterranean died in the frozen ground during the mid-Atlantic winters, and the beer went sour in the summer heat. American settlers could have consulted with the resident experts—the Native Americans who had lived in the eastern part of the continent for thousands of years and knew more about the local climate than anyone else. But they generally didn’t. (“Descriptions of local indigenous knowledge in early colonial narratives,” the historian Sam White noted in his book A Cold Welcome, “are mostly conspicuous by their absence.”)

The volatile weather in the eastern United States differs from the more moderate climates of western Europe because it is largely controlled by eastward-flowing air masses that approach over land instead of air masses that arrive from over the ocean and cause temperatures to shift more gradually. And the tail end of a regional cooling period known as the Little Ice Age was, at the time of the Europeans’ arrival, still exacerbating North American winters. But the colonists had no way of knowing either of these things. Instead, the weather remained an intriguing and stubbornly unpredictable puzzle, one that was soon taken on by the new Americans who began to collect their own data, taking measurements and comparing notes with fellow observers.

A surprising number of Founding Fathers were weather enthusiasts, among them James Madison, the avid storm-tracker Benjamin Franklin (credited, among his other more electrifying feats, with first charting the Gulf Stream), and George Washington, who kept weather diaries on and off, making his final entry on the wintry December day before he died: “Morning Snowing & abt. 3 Inches deep.”

It’s safe to say, however, that no American president was as enthusiastic about meteorology, nor as obsessive in his data collection, as Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s first existing weather journal begins on July 1, 1776, while he was in Philadelphia for the signing of the Declaration of Independence. For the next 50 years (with some occasional lapses) he meticulously logged his observations in columns that tracked barometric pressure readings, wind speeds, temperature, and other natural phenomena such as frosts and springtime bird sightings. The notes he left are so detailed and extensive that researchers are currently in the process of digitizing them so they can learn more about what those seemingly baffling weather patterns of the eighteenth and nineteenth century might tell us about our own.

Jefferson was a proselytizer for weather diaries—he was the one who sold his fellow president Madison on the idea of keeping one—and he communicated with correspondents as far north as Québec and as far south as Mississippi about their observations. Various distractions (serving as minister to France, founding the University of Virginia, a stint as the nation’s third president) prevented him from achieving his dream—“this long-winded project,” he called it—of creating a national meteorological service. If he’d survived another decade or so, he would have been around to see the invention that would revolutionize the field of meteorology and make his vision possible.

That invention was not a scientific tool, it was a communications device. And its inventor was not a scientist, but a painter. In 1837, Samuel F. B. Morse received a patent for his new “Electro Magnetic Telegraph,” which would astonish a crowd of onlookers at its debut seven years later in Baltimore. As the receiving operator decoded the message that had just flashed like magic across a wire from an office miles away in Washington, D.C., no one was thinking about what this incredible new device might mean for the weather. But newly employed telegraph operators with time on their hands quickly caught on. Jeptha Homer Wade, one of the founders of Western Union, would later recall:

I commenced operation in a telegraph office in 1846. With the small amount of commercial business then on the lines, the employees had less to do than they have now, and it was quite common for the operators in different parts of the country to enquire of each other about the weather, such as the direction and force of the wind as nearly as we could guess it, together with the temperature and its changes from time to time at different points. . . . I would frequently write upon the bulletin board in my office, what and when weather changes were coming. Frequently this was with such accuracy as to create considerable comment and wonder.

The operators had discovered something both interesting and paradoxical, the writer Andrew Blum observes in his book The Weather Machine. The telegraph had collapsed time but, in doing so, it had somehow simultaneously created more of it. Now people could see what the future held before it happened; they could know that a storm was on its way hours before the rain started falling or the clouds appeared in the sky. This new, real-time information also did something else, Blum points out. It allowed weather to be visualized as a system, transforming static, localized pieces of data into one large and ever-shifting whole.

by Alyson Foster, National Endowment for the Humanities |  Read more:

Image: Albert Bierstadt, A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie

Operation Root Canal

Banksy, Spy Booth
Image: via
How the Drug War Convinced America to Wiretap the Digital Revolution - Operation Root Canal (NEH).

Baby Boomers Are Buying Up All the Houses

For the last 36 years, Rick and Laura Zinnick had a life in Nevada. But when their son and grandchildren decided to relocate to Oklahoma City, the Zinnicks decided to follow them, putting their four-bedroom house on one-third of an acre up for sale.

The decision worked out well. That house sold for $480,000, giving the Zinnicks a windfall. They found a more manageable, one-story home in Oklahoma for $275,000 that was close to their family. And for the first time in their lives, they paid all cash, dodging soaring mortgage rates.

“This move was meant for us,” said Laura Zinnick, 77. “I’m so glad we’ve been able to buy this house later in our life.”

The Zinnick’s aren’t alone: Older buyers are prevailing in America’s hot housing market. This year, the median age for a repeat buyer - someone who has bought a home before - was 58, according to data released Monday by the National Association of Realtors. That’s down just a smidgen from last year’s record of 59, but it’s up significantly from 36 years old in 1981, when NAR began conducting its survey.

Lately, grandparents have been edging out younger buyers who are struggling to get into the market for the first time. Nowadays, first-time buyers make up 32 percent of the market, well below an average of 38 percent since 1981, according to NAR. They’re also more likely to be in their mid-30s today, in contrast to their late 20s in the early 1980s.

The result is yet another quirk of the post-covid economy, and in particular, a housing market that has proved remarkably strong. As the Federal Reserve hoisted interest rates to 22-year highs, the widespread expectation was that a subsequent spike in mortgage rates would zap buyer demand. But even while the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage approaches 8 percent, the housing downturn was short-lived.

And in the meantime, a new picture is emerging of the buyers who still find a way to get a house: They’re older, and because many of them sold a home before buying, they’re also wealthier.

“We are still talking about an incredibly difficult market for first-time buyers to enter, even if there’s slightly less competition,” said Jessica Lautz, the deputy chief economist at NAR. “If there’s a multi-offer situation, an all-cash buyer or someone who has a lot of equity is likely to win. And that person is going to be older.”

There are many reasons. For starters, older buyers are also likely to be selling a house, which provides them fresh cash. Indeed, the typical home seller was 60 years old in 2023, according to NAR, the same as last year.

And with so few homes available, sellers often go with the potential buyer making the most attractive offer - be it a large down payment, stellar credit or all cash. There, too, older buyers have a leg up.

Jennifer Dodds sees that dynamic in the Houston area, where the median sale price has jumped from around $275,000 to $325,000 in the past three years, according to Redfin. As a real estate agent working primarily with seniors, Dodds focuses on helping older buyers find their next homes, and she’s often scouring for one-story houses that work best for shoppers who are downsizing but aren’t yet looking to move into assisted-living centers or senior communities. (According to NAR, 70 percent of recent buyers did not have children under the age of 18 in their homes, the highest share recorded, and well above 42 percent in 1985.)

Gone are the days of out-of-control bidding wars, which defined the market during the pandemic. But Dodds said there still can be a clear advantage for older buyers who have built up their wealth and income over decades and routinely emerge at the top of the pack. (...)

All the boomer buyers are keeping housing inventory - which wasn’t plentiful to begin with - even tighter.

by Rachel Siegel, The Washington Post/ADN | Read more:
Image: Matt Rourke/AP
[ed. Another example of why ageism is so persistent (see below). But, on another level, why do developers keep building expensive McMansions when there's clearly a huge market for mid-level homes? Probably for the same reason they keep building massive SUV's and pickups (that cost more than some mid-level homes) - because society's wealth inequities encourage it. Plus. America. Bigger is always better (fives acre homesites, one acre lawn, four acres weeds).]

Joni Mitchell’s Legacy Is Just Beginning

If you want a refresher course on the incredible, unique power of Joni Mitchell‘s music, take a trip back to Gordon Lightfoot’s living room. It’s 1975, and Mitchell is traveling with Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour, wearing a black beret and strumming an acoustic guitar on a new song she’s just written. Lightfoot and Roger McGuinn are hovering behind, while Dylan accompanies her on guitar. Unlike that time she played him Court and Spark, Bob isn’t falling asleep. Instead, he and the other dudes are completely transfixed, hearing this brand-new stunner about romantic freedom and loneliness on the road. They’ve all lived it, but none of them can sum it up the way she does. She calls this one “Coyote.”

That clip, which resurfaced in Martin Scorsese’s 2019 Rolling Thunder Revue doc, currently has 3.5 million views. “Holy Jesus, what did I just stumble upon?” one comment reads. “This is hypnotizing, I had never heard of this song prior to 20 minutes ago,” another says. One subscriber is incredibly honest: “When I was younger I never got the appeal of Joni Mitchell, now I’m kicking myself for not realizing sooner in my life how great she is.”

This kind of discourse is expected today, but it wasn’t always the case. Mitchell has been on this earth for 80 years, but we’ve only started to truly appreciate her the way she deserves in the last five. In that timeframe, she’s received countless awards, from the Kennedy Center Honors to the MusiCares Person of the Year award to the Library of Congress’ Gershwin Prize for Popular Song — belated accolades from a world rushing to make up for lost time. At first, Mitchell (still recovering from a 2015 brain aneurysm) stayed largely off the radar while all this happened. Following a tentative return to the public eye in 2019, she performed her first full set in over 20 years at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival; a year later, she tore it up at the Gorge Amphitheater for more than 25,000 fans. She’s also been revisiting her catalog with an archive series, looking back on her stunning body of work while giving her newfound Gen Z and millennial following new releases to discover.

That following, by the way, is massive. To name just a few examples: Olivia Rodrigo recently became a Joni fan while vacationing in Hawaii; Clairo named her dog after Joni; Harry Styles embarked on a mythical dulcimer quest after hearing the instrument on Blue; and to teens on Tiktok, she’s officially on a Stevie Nicks level of coolness.  

All of this is to say: Welcome to the Jonissance.

Lifelong Joni fans might roll their eyes at how ridiculously overdue all of this recognition is — I certainly did. There was never a moment where I was formally introduced to Mitchell’s music. It was just always around me, whether through CDs in the car or my mother’s humming while she cooked tomato sauce on the stove. But in many circles, it wasn’t considered cool to like Mitchell in the early-to-mid aughts. I even remember my friends teasing me for liking Blue in school. “What is this old music, and why is her voice like that?” Skip to 2023, and the kids are all demanding to know how to get that voice.

by Angie Martoccio, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: YouTube/Martin Scorsese Rolling Thunder Review

[ed. Stevie Nicks level of coolness? Haha!...hardly. One could even make the case that Joni's more of a popular music genius than Bob Dylan (though less culturally influencial, and maybe not quite the level of Paul McCartney, but...). The songwriting, voicings, altered tunings, genre hopping dexterity and instrumental complexities of her entire oeuvre have always been consistently astounding/outstanding. Something you can't say about Dylan. And while we're on the subject of iconic female musicians, check out this interview with Dolly Parton on her new rock album "Rockstar", the Super Bowl, and "I Don’t Want It to Be Half-Ass Country" (Hollywood Reporter).]

Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)

Rock ’n’ Soul: The Amazing Story of Sly & the Family Stone

It is difficult to convey just how astoundingly unlikely it is that this book exists. Sly Stone is one of pop music’s truest geniuses and greatest mysteries, who essentially disappeared four decades ago in a cloud of drugs and legal problems after recording several albums’ worth of incomparable, visionary songs. Fleeting, baffling, blink-and-you-miss-him appearances at his 1993 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction and a 2006 Grammy tribute only served as reminders that he was still alive and still not well.

Which makes it almost impossible to set expectations for this memoir. If Amelia Earhart or the Loch Ness Monster released an autobiography tomorrow, would we complain about the unanswered questions or devour any glimpse we get into such mythic characters?

“Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” — named for Sly & the Family Stone’s monumentally funky 1969 No. 1 hit — is the first title from Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s new publishing imprint, and even the drummer/author/filmmaker acknowledges that it isn’t a definitive story. “There is plenty, too, that is not here,” writes Questlove, who is currently working on a Sly Stone documentary, in the foreword. “Some of the musical questions that I would have loved to talk about with the 30-year-old Sly, or the 40-year-old Sly, seem harder for him to recapture, mountains in the mist.”

Artists from the Jackson 5 to Prince, Miles Davis to D’Angelo borrowed elements of Stone’s sound and style, and his songs have been sampled hundreds of times, by the likes of Janet Jackson, LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys, but no one else has fully conjured the remarkable balance of virtuosity and universality, joy and pain, rhythmic sophistication and nursery rhyme singalongs of “Everyday People” or “Family Affair.” (...)

Sylvester Stewart was born into a musical family (“There were seven of us, and the eighth member of the family was music”), and he started singing and recording with his siblings at a young age, soon joining a series of high school and regional bands. He talked his way into a radio job in San Francisco, where he took on his new moniker. “There was a tension in the name,” he writes. “Sly was strategic, slick. Stone was solid.”

The D.J. gig led to songwriting and producing work. His sense of discipline is striking: studying music theory at community college, rehearsing nonstop, jumping to an in-studio piano and playing along to every song he spins on the airwaves (and always announcing the temperature as 59 degrees; “I am not sure why except that it was cool”).

Soon, he assembled the men and women, friends and relations, who made up the Family Stone, very intentionally a mixed-race and -gender ensemble. “The band had a concept — white and Black together, male and female both, and women not just singing but playing instruments,” Stone says. “That was a big deal back then and it was a big deal on purpose.”

It took a couple of albums to distill all of his influences and ambitions, and then came an explosion. A fleet of hit singles between 1967 and 1973 turned the Family Stone into one of America’s top touring bands, especially after their show-stopping performance at Woodstock became a highlight in the immensely popular film documenting the festival. “I didn’t see it but someone told me I was the star,” he writes — while elsewhere he notes that “after Woodstock, everything glowed.”

Stone breezes through the making of such earthshaking albums as “Stand!” and “Fresh,” though he looks a bit closer at “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” (1971), a hazy, slowed-down and reflective set that felt like the hangover following the exuberance of the ’60s. “I was digging down into a place where people hadn’t been before,” he writes.

By the time of “Riot,” though, drugs had also entered Sly Stone’s life, and they would define the many years that followed. He was feeling pressure to write, to record, to tour. “All of that needed to be fueled,” he says wryly. “But how did that fuel make me feel? A drug is a substance and so the question has substance. A drug can be a temporary escape and so I will temporarily escape that question.” (...)

When Sly started missing concerts and seemed increasingly surrounded by darkness, the conventional wisdom became that Sylvester Stewart and Sly Stone were two distinct people — one bright and fun, the other chaotic and antagonistic. “I didn’t agree with the two-persons-in-one theory,” writes Stone. “In my mind, there was only my mind, with different facets and edges like anyone’s, and that was the mind that minded being probed and prodded, put to someone else’s test.”

by Alan Light, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Alarmy; Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images; AP

[ed. Sly/Prince, flamboyant flip sides of the same creative coin. Check out his Wikipedia. See also: Sly Stone lives to tell the tale of his lifelong journey to heaven, hell and back (LA Times); and, Sly Stone Returns With Alternately Riveting and Horrifying Memoir (Variety).]

“It wasn’t that I didn’t like the drugs,” he writes. “If it hadn’t been a choice between them and life, I might still be doing them. But it was and I’m not.”