Saturday Links
A history of the “TLS,” pausing AI research, the influence of Arvo Pärt, and more.
Good morning. First up, one of the founders of the field, Eliezer Yudkowsky, calls for a moratorium on AI use and research: “An open letter published today calls for ‘all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.’ This 6-month moratorium would be better than no moratorium. I have respect for everyone who stepped up and signed it. It’s an improvement on the margin. I refrained from signing because I think the letter is understating the seriousness of the situation and asking for too little to solve it. The key issue is not ‘human-competitive’ intelligence (as the open letter puts it); it’s what happens after AI gets to smarter-than-human intelligence. Key thresholds there may not be obvious, we definitely can’t calculate in advance what happens when, and it currently seems imaginable that a research lab would cross critical lines without noticing.”
A history of the Times Literary Supplement: It was started as a “makeshift” supplement in 1902 and was not sure to “survive into 1903”: “When the parliamentary session closed, it was expected that the makeshift would close with it. Thanks to the manager of The Times, Charles Moberly Bell, however, the Supplement was discreetly steered into a second year . . . Bruce Richmond guided the thing through one world war, on to the brink of another, navigating two further premonitions of closure, before stepping down in 1938. Having spent thirty-six years in the chair, he is the longest-serving editor of the TLS, possibly the most enduring in British weekly journalism—neither Robert Rintoul, founder of the Spectator and its editor between 1828 and 1858, nor Kingsley Martin of the New Statesman (1930–1960), outdo him . . . In common with two long-serving editors of a more modern era, William Shawn of the New Yorker and Robert Silvers of the New York Review of Books, Richmond rarely, if ever, wrote anything for publication himself. His talent was to enable the writing of others. In a fond tribute published in the TLS in 1961, T. S. Eliot recalled that Richmond “did not hesitate to object or delete, and I had always to admit that he was right.” Like other victims of the blue pencil through the ages, Eliot might have felt on occasion that those deletions were wounding, if not plain wrong. But, again like those others, once obliged to see his work from a different viewpoint, he came round.”
Check out Josh Weiss’s list of “must-read alternate history thrillers”: “Coming in at a brisk 244 pages, The Divide is one of those light paperbacks you can easily knock out in a long summer afternoon. Just like The Man in the High Castle, the novel takes place in an alternate United States carved up between Nazi Germany to the East and Imperial Japan to the West. The post-war superpowers enjoy a tenuous peace maintained by the threat of total nuclear annihilation.”
How the British Army was made—and unmade: Dominic Green reviews The Wandering Army: “The Wandering Army is a detailed reconstruction of how, in the decades between the start of the Seven Years War (1756-1763) and the end of the long war against France (1794-1815), a European army became an imperial one, and an early modern army became a modern one. It would be tempting to surrender to the mood of the age Huw J. Davies describes and identify a ‘revolution’ in these changes, but the actual story is one of erratic alterations, lessons missed or misunderstood, slow professionalization, and irregular institutional reform and development. This might not sound as exciting, but it is in many ways more interesting.”
Poem: Gail White, “List for Confession”
We have laws to protect children from factory work. Why don’t we have laws that protect them from parents monetizing their lives online? The perfect mom, Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore writes in Aeon, is big money in the United States. She “must have a flat stomach, shiny hair, a cool job, a handsome husband, be able to cook a balanced organic meal, and be rich – all with the help of ‘sustainable’ skincare brands, fitness apps, weight-loss programmes, and the latest fashion. The more intimate the image, the more the message appears authentic. In one photo posted to her 29 million Instagram followers, the US model Emily Ratajkowski lies naked and languid in the bath as her toddler son cuddles her. Captioned ‘Loml’ (‘love of my life’), it’s a sweet snapshot of motherhood. It is also a brand-building exercise . . . The momfluencer economy is much like the regular one: wildly unequal. The top 1 per cent make six-figure salaries, charging $125,000-plus for a single post. The rest dabble, hawking diapers for a few hundred dollars. But there is a potential (and growing) goldmine for those who succeed: in 2019, Forbes estimated that the ‘new mom economy’ (the apps, products and services targeting Millennial parents) stood at $46 billion. One thing is certain: you can’t be a momfluencer without kids. Or without pushing those kids into the public eye – handing them on a digital platter to ever-ravenous spectators hankering for access. And you can’t be a momfluencer without putting your kids to work.”
The influence of Arvo Pärt: “He did not turn towards any of the salient directions of the West or the ex-Soviet republics. He simply separated himself completely from the fray by going towards the deep past. Surprisingly, as a consequence of these choices, he upended many conventional relationships in the classical music profession, including those between creator and performer, between the live concert and the recorded album, and between the position of the artist as a high priest of culture above the corruptions served out by the marketing and branding of popular music.”
The prescience of Thomas Pynchon: “Pynchon shows us that the drive to transcend all limits has constructed systems of another order. These systems, though based first on human networks of power and control, eventually exceed our individual and collective grasp, and take on a life, or rather an anti-life, of their own.”
Leo Dan Sullivan, an artist who worked on Fat Albert and Scooby-Doo, and who started his own animation studio, has died. He was 82.
On Wednesday, I noted that Substack was giving its users an opportunity to invest in the company. Elizabeth Lopatto explains why she thinks it would be a mistake to do so: “Some VCs are slicing valuations by as much as 95 percent. There may be even more write-downs coming. And following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, there’s a considerable amount of uncertainty in the VC world. Substack certainly knows this. It tried to raise last year, seeking $75 million to $100 million from investors. But it had revenue of only $9 million in 2021, and a sky-high valuation on relatively little revenue was not the vibe in 2022. The company gave up. On its Wefunder page, the company says that the pre-money valuation on Substack is now $585 million, a 10 percent decrease from 2021.”
Forthcoming: Kathleen L. Housley, Stone Breaker: The Poet James Gates Percival and the Beginning of Geology in New England (Wesleyan, April 4): “Stone Breaker is an in-depth, accessible biography of a true American polymath, James Gates Percival. A poet, linguist, and unstable savant Percival was also a brilliant geologist who walked thousands of miles crisscrossing first Connecticut and then Wisconsin to lay the foundation for the work of generations of Earth scientists. Exploring the confluences of literature, art, and geology, Kathleen L. Housley reveals how one of most famous poets of the 1820's became a renowned geologist with his groundbreaking 1843 work Report on the Geology of the State of Connecticut.”