AI and us
The Enlightened Economist
by Diane Coyle
3d ago
Code Dependent: Living in the shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia is a gripping read. She’s the FT’s AI Editor, so the book is well-written and benefits from her reporting experience at the FT and previously Wired. It is a book of reportage, collating tales of people’s bad experiences either as part of the low-paid work force in low income countries tagging images or moderating content, or being on the receiving end of algorithmic decision-making. The common thread is the destruction of human agency and the utter absence of accountability or scope for redress when AI systems are created and deplo ..read more
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We’re all doomed – maybe
The Enlightened Economist
by Diane Coyle
1w ago
I read Peter Turchin’s (2023) End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration on a long flight yesterday (I’m at Stanford for a couple of workshops). I’m not sure what to make of it. It’s well-written and an engaging read. The basic idea that there is a pendulum in the strength and health of polities, of generation-long good times and bad times, seems valid enough. The idea that one can model these computationally, I find a bit weird – speaking as one who spent some years early in her career modelling the UK and other economies computationally. Predicting outcomes fr ..read more
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Hoping, not doing.
The Enlightened Economist
by Diane Coyle
1w ago
My in-pile of books is a bit random at the moment. I just finished a posthumously-published set of essays by Richard Rorty, What Can We Hope For? It’s a strikingly passive title (as indeed was Lenin’s What is to be Done? although less so), and the essays have a notably pessimistic tone. Rorty is known for his prescience about the threats to American democracy posed by grotesque inequality, the crumbling of jobs and the fabric of middle America and authoritarian tendencies. He famously warned of the chance of a strongman dictator 20 years before Trump’s 2026 election. Rorty is known also for hi ..read more
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Dis-uniting Kingdom
The Enlightened Economist
by Diane Coyle
2w ago
Another book about which I can’t claim impartiality: my dear colleague Michael Kenny’s Fractured Union: Politics, Sovereignty and the Fight to Save the UK. As the title suggests, it concerns the territorial constitutional arrangements of the UK: progressive devolution of powers to Scotland, Wales and (in its distinctive context) Northern Ireland, tentative moves toward devolution within England, and the shocks imposed on the governance arrangements caused by Brexit and the pandemic. None of this within the context of a written constitutional or the clarity that might have provided. I’ve had tw ..read more
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Life, the universe and everything
The Enlightened Economist
by Diane Coyle
2w ago
I’m late to Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0. For all its bestseller status, it didn’t do a lot for me. Probably more to do with me than the book. There’s a large chunk about the distant future and existential risk, which I can’t get interested in. There’s also a lot of physics and evolution, philosophy and cognitive science thrown in to the mix, at a very simplified level. And then there’s the love-in with Elon Musk – including a back cover blurb by the billionaire recently referred to by the Daily Star as a ‘car salesman’. Musk funded Tegmark’s Future of Life Institute. Life 3.0 was published in 2017 ..read more
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AI needs all of us
The Enlightened Economist
by Diane Coyle
2w ago
There’s no way I can be unbiased about Verity Harding’s new book AI Needs You: How we can change AI’s future and save our own, given that it began with a workshop Verity convened and the Bennett Institute hosted in Cambridge a few years ago. The idea – quite some time before the current wave of AI hype, hope and fear – was to reflect on how previous emerging disruptive technologies had come to be governed. After some debate we settled on space, embryology, and ICANN (the internet domain naming body), as between them these seemed to echo some of the issues regarding AI. These discussions set th ..read more
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Translation
The Enlightened Economist
by Diane Coyle
3w ago
Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri was a left-field choice for me, a book of essays about writing in English and then Italian and translating her own texts – and those of others. But I enjoyed it, not least because it made me think about the English-to-English translation needed in inter-disciplinary work. We use the same word for subtly or even significantly different concepts. Capital is an obvious example, but also discounting, efficiency, optimization, rational and many others. The first stage of any project with people from other backgrounds is a translation stage. Hard work ..read more
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Markets won’t save humanity
The Enlightened Economist
by Diane Coyle
1M ago
In his series of books (Banking Across Boundaries, Rentier Capitalism, The New Enclosure, Our Lives in Their Portfolios) Brett Christophers has provided a forensic analysis of the fundamental plumbing of the global and (especially) UK economy. For example, the first of these identified the statistical construct of ‘financial intermediation services indirectly measured’ (FISIM) as an artefact inflating the apparent contribution of the financial sector to the economy and thus enhancing its political lobbying power. He was the first researcher to point out this consequence (and is cited in my GDP ..read more
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A supply-side prime minister
The Enlightened Economist
by Diane Coyle
1M ago
It’s outside my usual territory but I enjoyed reading Harold Wilson: The Winner by Nick Thomas-Symonds. It’s an unashamedly positive biography of a Prime Minister of my childhood and teenage years, when my main awareness of him was the rather affectionate mimicry by comedian Mike Yarwood. One of the book’s key arguments is that Wilson deserves credit for keeping Britain out of the Vietnam War without falling out too badly with President Johnson. The economics was more interesting to me. Wilson was an economist who had started out (before the 2nd World War took him into public service and then ..read more
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Be happy: think about the Nash Equilibrium
The Enlightened Economist
by Diane Coyle
1M ago
I loved Kaushik Basu’s new book, Reason to be Happy: Why logical thinking is the key to a better life. Mind you, I love most everything he writes. It’s always incredibly thought-provoking. His Republic of Beliefs is one of the books I recommend to almost everyone. Reason to be Happy is not so much about logical thinking, although a constant theme is the advice not to waste emotional energy on things one can’t influence. I’d have used the word ‘strategic’ rather than ‘logical’. The book is an accessible and highly readable guide to using game theory both in personal or business life, and in pol ..read more
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