… nor, perhaps, more beautiful…

We’ve looked before at the at the “intelligent” accomplishments of the humble slime mold, and wondered what they might mean and what they might teach us. Photographer Barry Webb invites us to appreciate their spendor…

Blown wildly out of proportion in large format, the slime molds that British photographer Barry Webb captures seem atmospheric and sculptural. Stemonitis, for example, looks like dozens of thin pieces of wire with their ends coated in colored wax. But this fungi-like form is one of hundreds of kinds of slime mold, and it typically only reaches a height of about two centimeters at the most. Thanks to Webb’s macro photos, we glimpse a phenomenally beautiful world up-close that is otherwise virtually invisible.

Scientists have documented hundreds of these organisms, which aren’t actually related to plants, fungi, animals, or molds—despite the name. They comprise a unique group unto themselves, more closely related to amoebas. And new discoveries are being made all the time. From mottled gray bulbs that look like snow-covered trees to pink, coral-like tendrils, Webb chronicles a huge array of colors and shapes. He also consistently submits images to local and national botanical records so that researchers have access to high-resolution imagery…

“Barry Webb Documents a Marvelous, Macro Array of Colorful Slime Molds,” from @thisiscolossal.com.

More of Webb’s portraits of slime mold on his site.

* Brandon Keim (in “Complexity Theory in Icky Action: Meet the Slime Mold“)

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As we get small, we might send microscopic greetings to William Ian Beardmore (W. I. B.) Beveridge; he was born on this date in 1908.  A microbiologist and veterinarian who served as  director of the Institute of Animal Pathology at Cambridge, he identified the origin of the Great Influenza (the Spanish Flu pandemic, 1918-19)– a strain of swine flu.

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Happy Shakespeare’s Birthday!

While there is no way to know with certainty the Bard’s birth date, his baptism was recorded at Stratford-on-Avon on April 26, 1564; and three days was the then-customary wait before baptism. In any case, we do know with some certainty that Shakespeare died on this date in 1616.

AI doesn’t really “think.” Rather, it remembers how we thought together. Are we’re about to stop giving it anything worth remembering? Bright Simons with a provocative analysis…

We are on the verge of the age of human redundancy. In 2023, IBM’s chief executive told Bloomberg that soon some 7,800 roles might be replaced by AI. The following year, Duolingo cut a tenth of its contractor workforce; it needed to free up desks for AI. Atlassian followed. Klarna announced that its AI assistant was performing work equivalent to 700 customer-service employees and that reducing the size of its workforce to under 2000 is now its North Star. And Jack Dorsey has been forthright about wanting to hold Block’s headcount flat while AI shoulders the growth.

The trajectory has a compelling internal logic. Routine cognitive work gets automated; junior roles thin out; productivity gains compound year on year. For boards reviewing cost structures, it is the cleanest investment proposition since the internal combustion engine retired the horse, topped up with a kind of moral momentum. Hesitate, the thinking goes, and fall behind.

But the research results of a team in the UK should give us pause. In the spring of 2024, they asked around 300 writers to produce short fiction. Some were aided by GPT-4 and others worked alone. Which stories, the researchers wanted to know, would be more creative? On average, the writers with AI help produced stories that independent judges rated as more creative than those written without it.

So far, so on message: a familiar story about the inevitable takeover by intelligent machines. But when the researchers examined the full body of stories rather than individual ones, the picture became murky. The AI-assisted stories were more similar to each other. Each writer had been individually elevated; collectively, they had converged. Anil R  Doshi and Oliver Hauser, who published the study in Science Advances, reached for a phrase from ecology to explain this: a tragedy of the commons.

Hold that result in mind: individual gain, collective loss. It describes something far more consequential than a writing experiment—it describes the hidden logic of our entire relationship with artificial intelligence. And it suggests that the most successful organizations of the coming decade will be the ones that do something profoundly counterintuitive: instead of using AI to eliminate human interaction by firing droves of workers, they will use it to create more human interaction. IBM has reversed course on its earlier human redundancy fantasies. I bet more will in due course…

[Simons sketches the history of humans’ intertwined development of both social/organizational and utile technologies, concluding…]

… What the chain reveals is a dependency the AI industry has largely declined to examine. The underlying intelligence of a large language model isn’t a function of its architecture, its parameter count, or the volume of compute thrown at its training. It is not even about the training data. It is a function of the social complexity of the civilization whose language it digested.

Each epoch advanced the cognitive frontier through something far richer and more complex than the isolated genius of an individual guru or machine. It did so through new forms of collective problem-solving. Think new institutions (the Greek agora, the Roman lex, the medieval university, the scientific society, the modern corporation, and the social internet) that demanded and rewarded ever more sophisticated uses of language.

The cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins studied how Navy navigation teams actually think. In his 1995 book Cognition in the Wild, he wrote something that reads today like an accidental prophecy. The physical symbol system, he observed, is “a model of the operation of the sociocultural system from which the human actor has been removed.”

That is, with eerie precision, a description of what a large language model (LLM) really is, stripped of all the unapproachable jargon and mathematical wizardry. An LLM like ChatGPT is a model of human social reasoning with the human wrangled out. And the question nobody in Silicon Valley is asking with sufficient urgency is: What happens to the model when the social reasoning that produced its training data begins to thin?…

[Simons explores evidence that this may already be materially underway, then explores what that “atrophy” might mean …]

… If AI capability depends on the social complexity of human language production—and if AI deployment systematically reduces that complexity through cognitive offloading, homogenization of creative output, and the elimination of interaction-dense work—then the technology is gradually undermining the conditions for its own advancement. Its successes, rather than failures, create a spiral: a slow attenuation of the very substrate it feeds on, spelling doom.

This is the Social Edge Paradox, and the intellectual tradition it draws from is older and more interdisciplinary than most AI commentary acknowledges…

[Simons unpacks that heritage, and puts it into dialogues with recent thoughts from Dario Amodei, Leopold Aschenbrenner, and Sam Altman, concluding…]

… The Social Edge Framework outlined here is a direct counterpoint to Amodei, Aschenbrenner, and Altman. It is a program of action to counter the human redundancy fantasy.  It challenges the self-fulfilling doom-spirals created by the premature reallocation of material resources to a vision of AI. I speak of the philosophy that underestimates the sheer amount of human priming needed to support the Great Recode of legacy infrastructure before our current civilization can even benefit substantially from AI advances.

By “Great Recode,” I am paying homage to the simple but widely ignored fact that the overwhelming number of tools and services that advanced AI models still need to produce useful outputs for users are not themselves AI-like and most were built before the high-intensity computing era began with AI. In the unsexy but critical field of PDF parsing—one of the ways in which AI consumes large amounts of historical data to get smart—studies show that only a very small proportion of tools were created using techniques like deep learning that characterize the AI age. And in some important cases, the older tools remain indispensable. Vast investments are thus required to upgrade all or most of these tools—from PDF parsers to database schemas—to align with the pace of high-intensity computing driven by the power-thirst of AI. Yet, we are not at the point where AI can simply create its own dependencies.

Indeed, the so-called “legacy tech debt” supposedly hampering the faster adoption of AI has in many instances been revealed as a problem of mediation and translation. AI companies are learning that they need to hire people who deeply understand legacy systems to guide this Recoding effort. A whole new “digital archaeology” field is emerging where cutting-edge tools like ArgonSense are deployed to try to excavate the latent intelligence in legacy systems and code often after rushed modernization efforts have failed. In many cases, swashbuckling new-age AI adventurers have found that mainframe specialists of a bygone age remain critical, and multidisciplinary dialogues and contentions are essential to progress on the frontier. Hence the strange phenomenon of the COBOL hiring boom. New knowledge must keep feeding on old.

The Social Edge Framework says: yes, scaling matters, architecture matters, and compute matters. But none of these will continue to deliver if the social substrate—the complex, argumentative, institutionally diverse, perspectivally rich fabric of human interaction—is allowed to thin. And thinning is very possible…

… The Social Edge prescription is that organizations that hire more people to work in AI-enriched, high-interaction, and transmediary roles—where AI scaffolds learning rather than substituting it—will derive greater long-term advantage than those that treat the technology as a headcount-reduction device. In a world where raw cognitive throughput has been commodified, the value arc shifts to something considerably harder to replicate: the capacity to coordinate human intent with precision, speed, and genuine depth. That edge lies in trans-mediation and high human interactionism.

The AI industry is telling a story about the future of work that goes roughly like this: automate what can be automated, augment what remains, and trust that the productivity gains will compound into a wealthier, more efficient world.

The Social Edge Framework tells a different story. It says: the intelligence we are automating was never ours alone. It was forged in conversation, argument, institutional friction, and collaborative struggle. It lives in the spaces between people, and it shows up in AI capabilities only because those spaces were rich enough to leave linguistic traces worth learning from.

Every time a company automates an entry-level role, it saves a salary and loses a learning curve, unless it compensates. Every time a knowledge worker delegates a draft to an AI without engaging critically, the statistical thinning of the organizational record advances by an imperceptible increment. Every time an organization mistakes polished output for strategic progress, it consumes cognitive surplus without generating new knowledge.

None of these individual acts is catastrophic. However, their compound effect may be.

The organizations that will thrive in the next decade are not those with the highest AI utilization rates. They are those that understand something the epoch-chaining thought experiment makes vivid: that AI’s capabilities are an inheritance from the complexity of human social life. And inheritances, if consumed without reinvestment, eventually run out. This is particularly critical as AI becomes heavily customized for our organizational culture.

Making the right strategic choices about AI is going to become a defining trait in leadership. Bloom et al. cross-country research has long established that management quality explains a substantial share of productivity variance between teams and organizations, and even countries.

In the AI age, small differences in leadership quality can generate large differences in outcomes—a non-linear payoff I call convex leadership. The term is borrowed from options mathematics, where a convex payoff is one whose upside accelerates faster than the downside decelerates. Convex leaders convert cognitive abundance into structural ambition and thus avoid turning their creative and discovery pipelines into stagnant pools of polished busywork. Conversely, in organizations led by what we might call concave leaders—cautious, procedurally anchored, optimizing for error-avoidance—AI would tend to produce more noise than signal. Because leadership is such a major shaper of all our lives, it is in our interest to pay serious attention to its evolution in this new age.

The Social Edge is more than a metaphor. It is the literal boundary between what AI can do well and what it will keep struggling with due to fundamental internal contradictions. Furthermore, the framework asks us all to pay attention to how the very investment thesis behind AI also contains the seeds of its own failure. And it reminds leaders that AI’s frontier today is set by the richness of the social world that produced the data it learned from…

Eminently worth reading in full: “The Social Edge of Intelligence.”

Consider also the complementary perspectives in “What will be scarce?,” from Alex Imas (via Tim O’Reilly/ @timoreilly.bsky.social)… and in the second piece featured last Monday: ““Curiosity Is No Solo Act.“

Apposite: “Some Unintended Consequences Of AI,” from Quentin Hardy.

And finally, from the estimable Nathan Gardels, a suggestion that Open AI’s recent paper on industrial policy for the Age of AI fills a vacuum left by an unimaginative political class and should be taken seriously, at least as a conversation starter: “OpenAI Proposes A ‘Social Contract’ For The Intelligence Age.”

* Old agricultural proverb

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As we take the long view, we might recall that today is the anniverary of a techological advance that both fed the social edge and encouraged the build out of the technostructure from which today’s AI hatched: on this date in 1993 Version 1.0 of the web browser Mosaic was released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. It was the first software to provide a graphical user interface for the emerging World Wide Web, including the ability to display inline graphics. 

The lead Mosaic developer was Marc Andreesen, one of the future founders of Netscape, and now a principal at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (AKA “a16z”)… where he has been become a major investor in, promoter of, and politicial champion of the current crop of AI firms.

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Today we have Substack and social media and blogs. In the old days, we “spoke” in person…

Speaker’s Corner, in Hyde Park in London, is a fabled site of on-going, open public speeches and debate. As Amelia Soth reminds us, that tradition also has a long history in the U.S…

There is nothing in American civic life today like Chicago’s old “Bughouse Square.” From the 1890s to the mid-1960s, it was a hotspot for soapbox speakers: radicals, evangelists, cranks, poets, philosophers, and eccentrics. Anyone with a perspective outside the mainstream gathered there nightly to declaim from their improvised podiums. The ethos, as one newspaper put it, was “free speech and the louder the better.” People actually came to listen, too, in crowds.

Bughouse Square (properly named Washington Square Park) might be the most famous free-speech center, but the practice of soapboxing stretched from sea to shining sea. New York City had its own crew of “peripatetic philosophers.” Hubert Harrison, known as the “Black Socrates,” delivered his critiques of capital right in front of the New York Stock Exchange. Then there was Portia Willis, the “suffrage beauty,” who drew in crowds with her looks and kept them with her wits.

As Mary Anne Trasciatti writes in “Athens or Anarchy? Soapbox Oratory and the Early Twentieth-Century American City,” the soapbox was a particularly democratic mode of public address. Even if you couldn’t get your cause into a meeting hall or a newspaper column, you could still hop on a box, lift your head a few inches above the crowd, and start talking. But that doesn’t mean just anyone could be a successful soapboxer. You had to be a good speaker to keep the crowds listening.

People tried all kinds of tricks to get attention. One soapboxer (wonderfully named Lowlife McCormick) would perform a Houdini-like escape from a straitjacket, which he would then declare to be a metaphor for the bonds of wage labor. Another would catch the crowd’s attention by shouting “I’ve been robbed! I’ve been robbed!” Once he had their ears, he’d finish up with “…by the capitalist system!” A really good soapboxer could draw in so many listeners as to render the streets impassable. One photo shows anarchist Alexander Berkman completely surrounded by a sea of hats.

But the attention soapboxing attracted wasn’t always positive. The 1910s saw a series of vicious “free speech fights” kick off in cities like Spokane, San Diego, and Fresno. Grace L. Miller lays out the history of perhaps the most violent of these struggles in “The I.W.W. Free Speech Fight: San Diego, 1912.” Things started to heat up when a deputy sheriff drove his car into a crowd of people listening to a socialist speaker. One listener reacted by slashing the sheriff’s tire. Within two days, the city passed an ordinance banning street speaking.

In response, the I.W.W. (the Industrial Workers of the World, or the “Wobblies”) urged supporters to ride the rails to San Diego and fight for their right to soapbox:

Come on the cushions; ride up on top;
stick to the brake beams; let nothing stop.
Come in great numbers; this we beseech;
Help San Diego to win free speech.

Soapboxers descended on the town en masse. Each would step up on the box, say a word or two, and then get yanked off by the police and carried to jail. There’s even an old Wobbly joke about a speaker who starts his speech with the traditional salutation—“Fellow friends and workers”—and then, when he realizes no one’s coming to arrest him, panics and shouts “Where are the cops?!”

The Wobblies’ goal was to overwhelm the court system with free-speech cases until the city was forced to give up prosecuting soapboxers. Soon the jail was overflowing. But instead of following the legal process, the city discharged the arrestees right into the waiting arms of a vigilante gang, who drove the Wobblies to the county line and viciously beat them with axe handles.

It’s not exactly clear who the vigilantes were, but the gang may have been composed of some of the city’s most prominent citizens. A newspaper editor who was run out of town for his sympathy to the free-speechers wrote of them (as quoted by Miller): “The chamber of commerce and the real estate board are well represented. The press and public utility corporations, as well as members of the Grand Jury are known to belong.”

Yet the vigilantes went too far, and labor organizations called on the state government to intervene. The commissioner sent to investigate declared that the abuses he saw weren’t taking place in Tsarist Russia. At great personal cost, the Wobblies had put the concept of free speech to the test, and won…

When public oratory was a defining feature of civic life: “The Golden Age of the American Soapbox,” from @amelia-soth.bsky.social in @jstordaily.bsky.social.

* John Milton, Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicens’d Printing, to the Parliament of England

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As we speak up, we might ponder another Chicago-related phenomenon, recalling that it was on this date in 1986 that Geraldo Rivera made a “shocking discovery”:

Notorious and “most wanted” gangster, Al Capone, began his life of crime in Chicago in 1919 and had his headquarters set up at the Lexington Hotel until his arrest in 1931.

Years later, renovations were being made at the hotel when a team of workers discovered a shooting-range and series of connected tunnels that led to taverns and brothels making for an easy escape should there be a police raid. Rumors were spread that Capone had a secret vault hidden under the hotel as well.

In 1985, news reporter Geraldo Rivera had been fired from ABC after he criticized the network for canceling his report made about an alleged relationship between John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. It seemed like a good time for Rivera to scoop a new story to repair his reputation.

It was on this day [that] a live, two-hour, syndicated TV special, The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault aired. After lots of backstory, the time finally came to reveal what was in that vault. It turned out to be empty. After the show, Rivera was quoted as saying “Seems like we struck out.”

– source

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(Roughly) Daily is, in effect, a kind of notebook, a commonplace book. So it will be no surprise that your correspondent found today’s featured piece fascinating.

Jillian Hess, a professor who studies the history of note-taking, shares the lessons she took from her review of the papers of the remarkable Richard Feynman…

Formal education, at its best, prepares us for a life of learning. After all, we are only in school for a fraction of our lives and there is so much to learn!

Richard Feynman (1918-1988) understood the value of self-education. He was a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, a member of the Manhattan Project at the age of 25, and a dynamic public intellectual who never stopped learning.

Often touted as one of history’s greatest learners, Feynman taught himself a dizzying amount of science. I wanted to see his notes for myself—to observe the great autodidact thinking on the page. So, I visited his archives at Caltech in February…

… In the archives, I saw… for myself: Feynman’s notebooks contain imprints of thinking in real-time—the work as it happened. They were instruments for thinking through uncertainty.

What follows is a list of note-taking principles for self-education that I gathered while studying Feynman’s notebooks.

Start with First Principles: Feynman’s “Things I Don’t Know About” Notebook

Discussions about Feynman’s learning process usually draw from this notebook, which he compiled as a Ph.D. student at Princeton. The contents include mechanics, mathematical methods, and thermodynamics. Clearly, he knew something about these topics, but he found his understanding superficial. So, his response was to take the subject apart—to break it down into “the essential kernels” …

[Hess illustrates this principle, then unpacks two others: “create a reading index” and “keep learning.” She continues…]

… Uncertainty is Interesting

This is my biggest takeaway: We should fear certainty more than doubt. Learning to live with uncertainty is an essential aspect of learning, as Feynman said in 1981:

You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.

And then, in an echo of his “Notebook of Things I Know Nothing About,” compiled four decades prior, he adds:

…I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and there are many things I don’t know anything about.

If a man as celebrated for his genius as Feynman felt that way, certainly the rest of us have a lot more to learn…

[And she concludes…]

… Notes on Feynman’s Notes:

Use notes to think: Feynman didn’t think through problems in his head and then turn to his notebooks. Instead, he used his notebooks to think through problems. His thought process required paper.

Start with first principles: “Why” is a very powerful question. And asking why can lead us back to the fundamentals and help us understand them in an entirely new light. This applies to any subject. Feynman has helped me think of note-taking as a kind of expedition. Use your notes to dig deeper into topics you think you already understand.

Never stop learning: How wonderful would it be if we could hold onto the excitement of learning we had as children? After all, the world didn’t get less interesting. It’s worth returning to the note-taking methods you used in school to see if they are still useful in adulthood. I particularly like Feynman’s high school method of taking 30 minutes to understand a subject before he allowed himself to take notes on it.

[Then leaves us with the man himself, “in all his radiant, enthusiastic, brilliance”…]

On “Richard Feynman’s Notes For Self-Education.”

Pair with: “Curiosity Is No Solo Act“: “it gains its real power when embedded in webs of relationship and shared meaning-making”… something that Feynman’s life also demonstrated (as you can see in his autobiography and/or in James Gleick‘s biography, Genius)

* Plutarch

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As we light that fire, we might spare a thought for Jeremy Bernstein; he died on this date last year. A physicist who woked on nuclear propulsion for Project Orion and held research and teaching positions at Stevens Institute of Technology, the Institute for Advanced Study, Brookhaven National Laboratory, CERN, Oxford University, University of Islamabad, and École Polytechnique, he is better remembered as a gifted popular science writer and profiler of scientists.

Bernstein wrote 30 books, and scores of magazine articles for “general readers”– for The New Yorker, where he was a staff writer from 1961 to 1995, and for The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Review of Books, and Scientific American, among others.

Of Feynman, Bernstein wrote “[his] Mozartean genius in physics seemed to be combined with an almost equally Mozartean urge to play the clown.” (in which, of course, Feynman was in the good company of Einstein, Claude Shannon, and others :-)

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… or better yet, as Neophytos of Cyprus attempted, both…

The Hermitage (enkleistra) of Saint Neophytos is one of the most celebrated Byzantine twelfth-century monuments worldwide, given the high quality and the unique iconographic program of its frescoes, encountered nowhere else in the Byzantine world, as well as the fact that the whole complex was cut in rock.

The monument is connected with an important intangible heritage. In fact, the community that was built and organised around Neophytos has been the centre of intellectual production with strong connections to the Byzantine elites of the island and the capital of the Byzantine empire (Constantinople), during the tumultuous period spanning the last decades of the Byzantine era -which ended with the conquest of the island by Richard the Lionheart in 1191- through the first decades of the Frankish period of Cyprus.

The intellectual production at the Enkleistra is evidenced by the writings of Neophytos and the composition of the pictorial narratives of the frescoes. The latter have been studied extensively in the past, whereas the writings of Neophytos, as well as the artefacts produced by or connected to the members of the circle of Neophytos –both monks and laymen– have made the object of far less studies.

Saint Neophytos the Recluse (1134-ca.1214) is one of the most important Cypriot Saints and historic figures. He was a prolific writer who composed his biography, an account of the first years of the Latin conquest of the island, as well as several theological treatises. At the age of 17 he became monk at Koutsoventis Monastery. In search of the solitary life, he quitted this Monastery two years later. After many adventures he decided to become an ascetic at the mountainous area above the city of Paphos. In 1159 he started building his cell, by enlarging and modifying an already existing cave, which was expanded into a complex comprising three caves: the Cell, the Bema and the Naos dedicated to the Holy Cross.

Neophytos soon became a well-known spiritual figure and in 1170 he was forced by Basil Kinnamos, the bishop of Paphos at the time, to accept a disciple. During this same period, the Enkleistra began to be extended and was adorned with paintings, while the whole cliff was excavated for the creation of additional cells. This extension phase included possibly as well the Refectory, which it was also adorned. According to Neophytos’ testimony, however, the Naos was excavated in 1183. The increasing number of pilgrims visiting him, obliged Neophytos to dig another cave above the first one (the so-called New Zion), in search of solitude and inner peace. This latter cave was completed and painted by the end of 1197. According to written testimonies, the Enkleistra was painted in 1183 by Theodoros Apseudis, likely a Constantinopolitan painter who came to Cyprus at the instigation of the bishop of Paphos Basil Kinnamos. To the same painter are also attributed the Bema and the Naos of the church of the Virgin at Lagoudera (UNESCO World Heritage monument in Cyprus, dated ca. 1192), as well as at least seven icons currently owned by different ecclesiastical institutions in Cyprus…

More– and more images: “The Hermitage of Saint Neophytos,” from @unesco.bsky.social

On the subjects of shared secrets and of things divine: Aadam Jacobs, a Chicago concert enthusiast, used a Sony cassette recorder to capture concerts… lots of concerts… around 10,000 concerts– everyone from (early) Nirvana and REM to James Brown and Phish. Now (with help from volunteer digitizers), you can hear them on the Internet Archive.

* Rainer Maria Rilke

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As we get away from it all, we might spare a thought for Ælfheah of Canterbury (or as he’s also known these days, Alphege); he died on this date in 1012. An Anglo-Saxon Bishop of Winchester, later Archbishop of Canterbury (from 1006 to 1012) renown for piety and sanctity, he furthered the cult of Dunstan and encouraged learning.

Ælfheah was captured by Viking raiders in 1011 during the siege of Canterbury and killed by them the following year after refusing to allow himself to be ransomed. He was canonized as a saint (by Pope Gregory VII) in 1078.  (Thomas Becket, a later Archbishop of Canterbury, prayed to Ælfheah just before his murder in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170.)