Hello all,
Like lots of people, I’ve continued to feel conflicted about the morality of AI. It’s so damaging in so many ways to the things I hold dear and value culturally, but is clearly also already useful and has the potential – but not the guarantee – to be much more useful in the future. It leaches content from the commons without immediately destroying it, but potentially fatally undermines it in the long term. It’s a moral minefield.
So, where should we come down? What could make us conclude “actually, no – the price is simply too high”? What could make us conclude “sure, it did some damage, but look at all the benefits?” How do we avoid inadvertently becoming either cack-handed cultural vandals or technophobic deniers of progress? This week’s article tries to make some sense of it all, and offers up a way of thinking about what good looks like.
Best,
Rob
This week’s article
Commons over, baby
AI is the latest technology to threaten our digital commons, and culture more broadly. Can we stop it destroying what we hold dear? Or is the juice worth the squeeze?
Click here to read the article »
This week’s five interesting links
Flipping the switch on far-UVC
A fascinating post from Richard Williamson about far-UVC, a technique that uses ultraviolet light to kill pathogens in the air without harming people or other organisms:
“One of the best shots we have at turning the page on airborne disease is an emerging type of germicidal UV (GUV) light called far-UVC. Over the last decade, researchers have documented its ability to eliminate pathogens while being safe for humans. A landmark study from 2022 found that far-UVC reduced the concentrations of airborne bacteria by 98.4 percent in a room-sized chamber, all while operating within safe UV exposure limits. Compared to standard ventilation, this was the equivalent of changing the air completely over in the room 184 times every hour. To put that in perspective, the CDC recommends 5 or more air changes per hour in the workplace. Even hospital operating rooms in the US only require 20. Far-UVC is effective against viruses too; airborne coronaviruses are more susceptible to far-UVC than the same bacteria used in the other study.”
If it’s so simple, why hasn’t it been adopted yet? Richard argues that the problem is partly regulatory: there is no straightforward approval pathway for a device like this, like there would be if it were a drug. That means that people can just implement it (good) but also that there’s no rigorous trial process that proves its efficacy (bad). Without that proof, large institutions are unlikely to invest in a rollout of something that might be hokum.
Why doesn’t someone pay for a rigorous trial, then? The other problem is that UVC isn’t patentable (it’s already generic, there’s lots of prior art), so if a manufacturer made the huge investment in proving UVC’s efficacy then its competitors would be able to free-ride off the back of its work.
This is one of those posts where I have a slight amount of epistemic learned helplessness; I don’t know enough about the science to know if the bold claims of efficacy are true, or if there are unforeseen consequences or side-effects lurking here. But there’s something interesting in Richard’s proposed solution, which is to set up a non-profit to validate the claims so that everyone can benefit. I wonder what other inventions and breakthroughs have this same shape of coordination problem preventing their widepsread adoption? #
The case for subspecies – the neglected unit of conservation
I’ve always found useful the idea of people temperamentally being either “lumpers” and “splitters”. Lumpers are those who assign things broadly and generally, valuing similarities over differences, and splitters are those who assign things narrowly and precisely, valuing differences over similarities. XKCD described the distinction well.
This fascinating essay by Richard Smyth is about the very real consequences of lumping and splitting in the world of conservation, and about how our decision whether or not to assign an animal its own taxonomic category can have transformative consequences for its chances of survival:
“Similarly, a segment in the BBC’s recent wildlife series Asia highlighted the grave plight of the Gobi bear. There are, Sir David Attenborough told us, fewer than 40 Gobi bears left. It’s a miserable statistic. But it’s worth thinking about exactly what’s being said here. The Gobi bear is, as it happens, a subspecies, a significant sub-population of the brown bear Ursus arctos. But what if it wasn’t? ‘There are 40 Gobi bears left’ lands a little differently than ‘There are 40 brown bears left in this part of the Gobi desert’; the former sounds like a call to action, no time to lose! – whereas the latter is more, well, who cares? What’s a few brown bears, here or there?
“What this boils down to, again, is the question of what’s real – what’s significant, what means something.”
We don't need more cynics. We need more builders.
I wrote recently about the “vibe shift” that’s currently underway, and how we might build out way out of it. Joan Westenberg hits on a similar theme, and makes a powerful call for “pragmatic meliorism” – that is, neither deluded optimism nor destructive cynicism, but rather a pragmatic belief that “things are broken, AND they can be fixed; people are flawed AND capable of growth; systems are complex AND can be improved.”
It’s hard not to be cynical in a world as seemingly screwed up as this one, but Westenberg’s case against the cynics is convincing:
“Here’s a more charitable reading of cynicism: it’s not an intellectual position. It’s an emotional defense mechanism. If you expect the worst, you’ll never be disappointed. If you assume everything is corrupt, you can’t be betrayed.
“But this protection comes at a terrible price. The cynic builds emotional armor that also functions as a prison, keeping out not just pain but also possibility, connection, and growth.”
What Britain looks like after Brexit, by Daniel Hannan
Shortly before the Brexit referendum in 2016, Dan Hannan – one of the most unserious people ever to briefly be taken seriously by the British establishment, proof alongside Boris Johnson that a plummy accent and the occasional Latin phrase are all you need to appear an intellectual titan in British politics – wrote a vision of what life would be like in Britain in June 2025, nine years after the referendum.
The whole thing is worth reading, to remind yourselves of what these charlatans promised us, but I particularly hated this bit. It combines a level of oversimplification that is almost beautiful with a complete failure to understand both one’s own bargaining position and the priorities of the other side. In hindsight, it’s almost funny:
“The last thing most EU leaders wanted, once the shock had worn off, was a protracted argument with the United Kingdom which, on the day it left, became their single biggest market. Terms were agreed easily enough. Britain withdrew from the EU’s political structures and institutions, but kept its tariff-free arrangements in place.”
Almost funny.
Perhaps I’m being unfair; we do still have six months left for Hannan’s vision to come true. I’m not holding my breath. #
Wim Wenders’s Tokyo-Ga
I watched Wim Wenders’s 1985 documentary Tokyo-Ga this week. It chronicles his trip to Japan in search of the Tokyo of film director Yasujirō Ozu, whom Wenders idolises. Will he be able to catch glimpses of Ozu’s city, or will it have been buried under the frantic rebuilding of postwar Japan? Along the way he meets Chishū Ryū, who starred in 14 of Ozu’s films; Yūharu Atsuta, Ozu’s cinematographer; fellow German director Werner Herzog; and countless others. Wenders’s open-minded and slow-paced journey is all the more remarkable for being filmed at a time of great western anxiety about Japan. Well worth a watch. #