May
18
Facing up to Father: The pleasures and pains of a Cotswold childhood
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New book by David Worlock. Pre-order now at Marble Hill Publishers or Amazon.
A small Cotswold farm is the setting for a classic struggle of wills. Robert Worlock, eccentric and demanding, resolutely maintains the old ways, determined above all to make his son into a farmer fit to take over the family acres. His son, David, is equally determined not to be bullied into something he neither wants nor likes. His childhood becomes a battleground: can he find a way to make his father love him without denying his right to determine his own life?
Jan
28
DeepSeek , Donald Trump and me!
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It has been a difficult few days. Midway through last week I was feeling a rising emotion of joyful exhilaration. Despite the sanctions, despite the US technological lead, despite the TikTok war, China was fighting back. and demonstrating a technological resilience which I had discussed last month in an Outsell interview with a Chinese AI researcher in Beijing.Surely just what was needed to counterbalance the sheer arrogance of the praetorian guard of tech billionaires flanking the US President?
The weekend was spent watching the feedback. As Nvidia plunged, my thoughts turned to events switch ignite recessions, and the fact that all of this was likely to impact investment, markets and pension funds – including mine. Elation turned to depression. I postponed the grocery delivery order by a day to wait out events. With this new week dawning, Donald Trump interrupted his 24 hour newscast to say that DeepSeek was “a good thing“. What is this? Am I agreeing with Donald Trump? My weekend sense of depression rapidly turned to despair as I scrabbled two read all I can find in the past 24 hours in order to try to restore my mental stability. What followers is the result!
DeepSeek does not seem to be a technological breakthrough. It appears to be an extremely clever piece of reverse engineering. It is the type of process which happens throughout all phases of technological change. And it appears to have happened in China before the Biden ban on high-tech chips really began to bite. High Flyer, the incubator parent of DeepSeek, is an investment company and would not have been one of the places where observers would have looked for a high-tech response to Silicon Valley. This part accounts for the shock. But we might have expected someone to use the advances that Silicon Valley has made, at great expense, and reproces them to get more cheaply to the same conclusion. Would there have been a Japanese car industry without Dearborn?
But surely the important thing is that DeepSeek takes us to where ChatGPT is, but in an open source context. This is vitally important in terms of the widespread use of the release.. This alsobegs another question: what is the business model of DeepSeek? As far as I can see, nobody knows. Yet since nobody does very much unintentionally in China, I must presume that somebody somewhere does know. Apart from Chinese altruism (yes, you did just read those two words in the same sentence) there may have been a desire to spike US confidence at a moment of chronic rhetorical overstatement. Or, if you believe in the ability of TikTok to collect dangerous data on behalf of the Chinese state from US citizens, what would be the effect of prompting the greatest numerical download of software to US computers from a Chinese source ever?
Leaving aside the unanswered questions I’ve also found myself in the last 24 hours trying to create a balance sheet. The idea that a really effective open weights AI environment is available to the world’s scientist very cheaply must be a huge plus. I grant that it may not be found to be as effective as claimed, or as cheapto operate as claimed. But for many of us, there is a huge plus in deploying niche based sectorized AI using small learning models to automate definable process activity. For reasons of economic growth and productivity (ask the UK government) we want applications rolled out faster and cheaper, so that we can detect cancer before the human eye can see it on a scan, engineer our tax filings, sort out logistics and transport problems and solve the problems of a society where expectations surge while solutions creak.
For those who have been spending billions, including the US government, in funding the undeniably expensive business of leading edge AI development, this is a sobering moment. It appears that the lead time before the rest of the world re-engineers your solutions and catches up is about 2- 3 years. The days when you had a decade to exploit a technology breakthrough are over. Just as the speed of technology development is growing, so the speed of technology catch up is quickening.
The next bit is really scary. As Mr Trump calls for a speeding up of competitive responses, and removes entirely the very modest Biden administration safety rules on AI releases, there must surely be real fears that either the Chinese or the Americans will release prematurely a piece of unvalidated intelligent code which has a disastrous effect upon the world’s systems and services. Then we can really talk about recession. This is not about the
deregulation: it is about the basic safety rules that secure society against self harm. A world that keeps on talking about national sovereignty as if we were in the 1890s ignores at its peril the digital revolution which since the late 1990s has interconnected all of us in a network configuration whose implications it seems we keep on trying to evade or avoid.
So for the ever anxious futurist – people like me – there is some relief (I do not in fact agree with Donald Trump after all) and the sense that we must work to restore the focus once again. The arrival of DeepSeek is momentous, especially if it allows us to cheaper , smallscale research and applications enabling real advances that change peoples lives in a day-to-day sense. But perhaps it over shadows what should have been the subject we were all thinking about this week. The launch of Open AI Operator is the opening salvo of a new development war: it is a push into the agented world that many of us feel will be a hallmark of the next five years. Indeed, many of us will never touch AI in the sense of becoming users of DeepSeek or anything else. Perhaps for most of us change will come through the agents we use and the interactions that they make, and the intelligence that they display. If you are, like me, worried about AGI and unsafe systems and in your 80th year, then a stiff whiskey helps. If you want to think about the impact on society of AI in the next five years, then studying developments like Operator and Rabbit-R1 maybe more to the point.
Jan
15
One of Dr Johnson’s most famous utterances, made on the 7th of April 1775, was “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel“. But of course he did not mean that you should not love your country. He simply meant, in his time, that people who waved the flag and proclaimed their loyalty to King and country were usually hiding something or trying to distract you from something else. “Free speech” is the “patriotism” of our times.
Over the holidays, a painful attack of sciatica kept me lying down and lying still, especially during the critical festive days! This provided plenty of space for thought. I found that I had become obsessed by an article that I read in the Guardian newspaper (10 December 2024 by Hannah Milner and David Pegg) concerning Elsevier‘s decision to reevaluate articles by the “race scientist“ Professor Richard Lynn. This man, now deceased, had apparently published over 100 articles in several Elsevier journals between 2002 and 2023. He is particularly widely known for his national IQ data sets, first published in 2002 and revised in 2010. The Guardian elicited these views from fellow academics:
“They are concerned about flawed research being used to support racist ideology, but also about the frequency with which Lynn is cited in passing by experts in other fields who may not be familiar with the controversy that surrounds his work.”
And “Critics say Lynn relied upon samples that were unrepresentative or too small to be meaningful. According to Sear(Prof Rebecca Sear, president of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Associat), Angola’s national IQ was based on 19 people from a malaria study, while the Eritrean average IQ was derived from tests of children in orphanages.
The 2010 iteration of the dataset asserted an average national IQ of 60 for Malawi, 64 for Mozambique and 69 for Nigeria – all below the typical threshold for intellectual disability. “It is wholly implausible that an entire world region should, on average, be on the verge of intellectual impairment,” wrote Sear in a critique of the 2019 edition.
Prof Jelte Wicherts, of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, has published several critiques of Lynn’s methodology and concluded that Lynn’s 2010 paper appeared to have systematically excluded higher IQ scores in calculations of IQ in African countries.
“The main inclusion criteria he had been using appeared to be the IQ itself, not objective measures like whether it was a normal, healthy sample,” said Wicherts. “That’s quite a lethal indicator of bias.”
I am no expert in the academic disciplines concerned, but it does seem to me that the judgement that much of an entire continent was nearly educationally subnormal was worthy of some interrogation, by the editors of the journals concerned and not only by Professor Lynn’s peers. That this material has been floating around as respectable data for 22 years is difficult to imagine; the fact that even when retracted it will still exist in the data systems of the world, and in the AI sensibilities of the world seems to me almost unthinkable. In the past few years I have become acquainted with quite a few directors and managers of integrity units in journal publishing. They have all been splendid people and I admire their ethics and their effort. Yet in my 55 years in publishing, appointments like this have only come along in the last five years. We do have a lot of catching up to do.
And then, as I tried to lie still and wait for the anti-inflammatory drugs to work, came further inflammation of a different sort. Elon Musk and his abandonment of fact checking, followed by Mark Zuckerberg‘s pathetic “me too“ led me to read articles describing the pushback of these “free speech“ advocates against the “soft authoritarian dictatorship of woke“. Apart from wondering whether these men were more concerned with cost cutting than ideology, with margins rather than freedom of expression, I also wondered about these two streams of public information flowing in opposite directions. In science, we are desperate to root out the illegitimate, the unfounded and the downright wrong; in social media we will tolerate any lie, distortion or pure prejudice on the grounds that anyone, anonymously or not, has the right to say anything about anyone. Professor Lynn should be alive and publishing on X.
Eventually the drugs worked and I was able to walk again. All that I have left from my festive season in bed is a nasty headache – the world of information is in crisis. I know that I am meant to believe that the world cannot survive without continuous sacrifice to the gods of growth and profit. My experience of the world of information and data tells me however that the world cannot survive without trust in the data that we handle and in the identity of its sources.. Reliable truth is fundamental to both of them.
The full text of the Guardian article of 10 December 2024 is available here:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/10/elsevier-reviews-national-iq-research-by-british-race-scientist-richard-lynn?dcr=apps&edition=uk#:~:text=Prof Rebecca Sear,issue very seriously.”
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