AI and international development

‘The time has arrived for all of us – governments, industry and civil society – to consider how AI will affect our future.’    —  UN Secretary General, António Guterres

Last week, I had the privilege of visiting Restless Development to give a presentation and have a bit of a discussion about artificial intelligence (AI). This seemed a slightly unusual proposition when we were first organising it: links between the AI and development communities appeared few and far between. But it was becoming increasingly apparent that AI could be used to help solve a range of global problems, on the one hand, and that it risked further entrenching some of those problems on the other.

In light of the talk – and, conveniently, the AI for Good Global Summit that brought together a range of international institutions to discuss similar things a few weeks earlier – I thought I’d share a quick overview of my thoughts and some introductory links.

How could AI help?

I summarised the possible applications of AI to development problems as covering four main areas. AI could help with:

• finding efficiencies in existing systems, processes and supply chains (e.g. transport systems, or energy supplies);
• monitoring situations on the ground (e.g. public opinions on issues, or migration patterns);
• predicting events or crises before they happen, to aid prevention or preparation (e.g. political turmoil, or natural disasters); and
• responding more quickly and more effectively to crises when they happen (e.g. mining social media for breaking news and information before it reaches traditional news media).

The UN’s “Global Pulse” initiative is really pushing things forward in this area, capitalising on the vast quantities of data increasingly available on almost every aspect of human life. It’s worth browsing their site for examples and ongoing projects, and taking a look at their Guide to Data Innovation for Development if you’re considering starting a project along similar lines (they’re also open to collaboration).

There is almost endless scope for growth here – particularly from a development perspective. A 2014 study found that the amount of data in the “digital universe” roughly doubles every two years. About 22% of it was deemed useful or informative in 2013, but less than 5% of that (~1% of the overall total) was actually analysed. It predicted that closer to 35% of a much larger total would be useful by 2020, and that the majority of data would be from “emerging” markets from 2017 onwards. At the moment, we’re barely scratching the surface of what could be possible.

On a related note, there’s a lot of potential for drones to help with collecting data (satellite imagery, primarily) and responding to emergencies. This report is a decent overview of how they can be used in humanitarian action, if you’re interested.

What should we be worried about?

While AI could certainly be of assistance, there are a number of areas in which AI could also hinder progress towards development goals.

Employment

There’s a lot of chat about the possible impact of AI on employment, and just as much disagreement over how many jobs will actually be lost. What is less discussed in the UK and US, though, is that the extent to which jobs might be taken by machines is likely to differ between countries. A World Bank report from last year, for instance, suggested that the percentage of jobs in developing countries that are susceptible to automation could be as high as 85% (that was for Ethiopia, with the OECD average at 57%; see p.23 of the report).

This sounds pretty terrifying, but the report does also acknowledge that this should be offset in the near-term by the slower uptake of technology in much of the developing world. There are other worries, though. If, for instance, manufacturing that has typically been offshored by companies in the West can be automated increasingly cheaply, it might soon be brought back to the developed world – blocking a typical “path to prosperity” for developing countries. This is particularly likely given that companies can then avoid the ethical issues surrounding working conditions, and offer faster turnaround of orders to the domestic market.

On this reading, making sure that livelihoods in the Global South aren’t impacted too significantly by rapidly advancing AI could become a key development concern.

Inequalities, old and new

That said, we need to go beyond thinking about how to stop individuals, communities and countries (see this on the scope for widening inequalities between nations in an AI-centric world) from being left behind economically – although this more traditional form of inequality is still a fundamental problem. We now live in a world where a small clique of companies has not only accumulated huge amounts of money, but where those companies have astonishing volumes of data on billions of individuals, and an increasing influence on their thoughts and day-to-day lives. Working out how to make sure these money-making organisations that lack any democratic accountability don’t abuse this power will be a key concern in the coming years and decades. I could write a lot about this, but frankly I wouldn’t do any better than Maciej Ceglowski does here (should really be compulsory reading for pretty much everyone).

It is important to note that leaving the process of curbing the power of big tech firms to the market will not be enough. AI is a large part of the problem. Perhaps more than any other technology, it favours those that are ahead. The companies with the most data (and the most computing power) have an astonishing advantage when it comes to innovating in the AI space. Most start-ups, however inventive, simply don’t have the capacity to do what the likes of Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft do – and they increasingly run their services on platforms provided by the big names anyway (AWS being the typical example). Even if smaller companies do manage to offer a competitive service, they tend to get swallowed up by one of the big names pretty quickly. Again, there’s lots more to say here; this panel is a good starting point on the prevailing “façade of competition”.

The big tech firms seem to have good intentions (Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil” – what could possibly go wrong?), but good intentions don’t always lead to desirable outcomes (see Dave Eggers’ The Circle). And we need to acknowledge that if even their existing capabilities fall into the wrong hands, the consequences could be horrendous. We only have to look to China – with advanced facial recognition set to combine with a planned national ‘social credit’ system to perfect the surveillance state formula – for an inkling of what could be yet to come.

Cultural Consumption, April-May 2017

The usual deluge of end-of-academic-year coursework deadlines and exams meant this wasn’t the best of periods for me on a cultural front. The only film I went to see was Get Out (which was, to be fair, absolutely brilliant) and I didn’t make it to any gigs or exhibitions or plays or anything else (read: I didn’t get out much…). Which is a bit disappointing. Still managed to get through some decent music and books, though.

 

Music

Three albums were consistently with me throughout the period. The first of those was Palmistry’s Pagan – all melancholy, stripped back, dancehall-infused pop – on Mixpak. The latest weird and wonderful offerings from Clark and Arca were the other two. Both are typically immersive, with the former more playful, and the latter more intense – but probably my favourite Arca material yet.

I ended up listening to a lot of guitar music, too, which worked well while cross-training through injury. EPs from Sløtface and Estrons were the excellent starting point, but I also got really into albums from IDLES (quite hilarious, quite punk) and VANT (more predictable, but with some catchy tunes).

Luke Abbott’s latest EP, and first as Earlham Mystics, is also stunning (“Truth” is on the playlist below, but I actually think “Stolen Hearts” might be better). Oh, and I rediscovered all my vinyl from years gone by – I end the usual YouTube playlist with a single by Dartz! from yeeeaaaarrrs ago.

(Playlist embedding isn’t working, for some reason. Link here.)

 

Books

David Lodge’s Nice Work seemed very relevant post-Brexit. A story about overcoming barriers in a divided Britain, it preceded the recent fuss by nearly 30 years.  More contemporary yet was Peter Pomerantsev‘s Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, which shone a consistently entertaining light on the farce that is Russian politics.

On a Japan tip, Haruki Murakami’s Underground is an insightful series of interviews and reflections collected in the wake of the terror attack on the Tokyo underground in 1995. Not exactly fast-paced, but it did get very interesting towards the end. Zen in the Art of Archery is a short classic I was recommended before going to Japan a couple of years ago, and the sort of read that makes you rethink your approach to life.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, perhaps the most famous of Philip K Dick’s novels, was another book I’d been sat on for a while. And I thought it was wicked, offering a welcome escape from hours of work. Former soldier Harry Parker’s Anatomy of a Soldier was harder going, and I had to return to it after exams (and after the easier and pretty OK Shame, by Melanie Finn). When I did, though, I found it excellent. Supremely moving and evenhanded in its presentation of modern warfare and its personal impact.

On Healthware

There’s a hypothetical scenario I’ve been pondering for a while. I’ve actually been trying to write a short story about it, framing it from different perspectives. But that’s taking too long, and reality is fast catching up.

In the scenario, the British government has decided that the only way of making universal free health care affordable is by compelling citizens to have data on their bodily health and lifestyle tracked, with behavioural changes recommended to individuals by artificially intelligent “healthware” to keep them from from falling ill. The healthware learns how best to persuade people to act differently, fitting itself to individuals’ personalities to ensure maximum compliance. If people are consistently non-compliant, they have their access to free healthcare revoked.

Naturally, hospital visits are still required for genetic and particularly complex conditions, and in the wake of accidents or unexpected emergencies. But there are no more queues in GP surgeries or A&E. The number of people on medication drops to levels not seen for decades. The physical and mental health of the population soars, with higher productivity, longer life expectancy, and wellbeing to match (or better) the Scandinavians.

On the one hand, this sounds wonderful. On the other, it would herald the arrival of the sort of big state that socialist governments of the past could hardly dream of (their dreams looked more like this). The level of social control that would become possible – with our every behaviour monitored and, ultimately, made to fit a “healthy” norm – is intensely disquieting. Even more perturbing is the fact that, at least to me, this doesn’t seem particularly far-fetched.

In reality, healthware this sophisticated would come from a big tech firm before any government had even properly thought about it. I’ve posted a piece on Medium that comes at the possibility more from this angle. But I also wanted to take a few minutes to expand on why I think such a scenario is feasible, and offer a list of related things to read.

Technical feasibility

I’ve actually written before about the difficulties of applying a data-driven approach to a biological system as endlessly curious as the human body. That, though, was in the context of elite performance, and keeping someone within the bounds of reasonably good health ought to be more straightforward than turning them into an Olympian.

Naturally, it could take years for a system to be successfully trained with the sort of capacity outlined here. This is particularly the case given that the learning process would likely require real-time participants, and accordingly move only as fast as the rate at which people live and fall ill. Historical health records, along with some expert knowledge, could be used to speed up the process, but both may prove to be sub-optimal and useful only as a starting point. The concurrent analysis of the data of many, many individuals, and the pooling of the resulting knowledge (as has happened for the training of autonomous vehicles) will likely prove crucial – the more participants the better.

Eventually, a system should be sufficiently accurate for commercial roll-out. And over time it would just get better: optimising to take into account the individual quirks of your body, and benefitting from the more general findings from everyone else’s systems (perhaps attributing greater weight to data from family members and those physiologically similar to you). It could also keep abreast of the latest medical research findings (as IBM’s Watson does) in a way that would be impossible for a human, incorporating these into its predictions and recommendations to boost performance even further.

The bigger problem will be that there is currently far too much missing data on almost everyone to accurately predict health outcomes. Making wearable technology as ubiquitous as phones, and developing more ways of collecting health and lifestyle data automatically so you don’t need to rely on useless humans to input it manually, will be key (Apple is attempting to do both).

Motivation

From the perspective of business, developing healthware at this level of sophistication could make some of the most powerful companies in the world even more money. If Apple could even get close to it, the Apple Watch would become a must-have – which seems ample motivation for pushing on with it as smartphone sales stagnate. Health insurers would happily make use of all that data to aid their own predictive models, and big pharma’s displeasure at a possible decline in medication levels could be offset by having healthware recommend, and automatically deliver their drugs.

Government would also likely be supportive given the scope for relieving strain on health services. It might be that government – or health providers more generally – come to endorse, or even require the use of this sort of technology (hence the scenario painted above). Besides, the British government seems supportive of pretty much any new way to better track people and invade their privacy, so there should be no problem on that front.

Another force that might drive the development of this sort of technology is the longevity hype that’s apparently consuming Silicon Valley. You could almost imagine this sort of healthware being pursued as a vanity project by one of any number of tech-entrepreneurs-turned-billionaires looking for a data-driven approach to living forever, regardless of whether or not it would end up being profitable.

The patient-consumer

What about, well, normal people? As a starting point, a 2016 survey of American healthcare “consumers” found that a quarter own wearable tech, 88% have used some sort of “digital health tool”, and 77% are willing to share their health data with their doctor to improve care – with 60% happy to give that data to Google.

The number of people buying wearables will continue to grow (likely driven more by marketing campaigns and the waning allure of near-identical mobile phones than anything else), as will the adoption of digital health tools as they become ever more useful. The figures on willingness to share health data may not sound especially high, but they’re ample for an initial phase of developing sophisticated predictive healthware – and if any system proved to be effective, they’d likely go up.

Americans are, admittedly, much further down this road than the rest of the world. But given that so many of our recent technological trends (e.g. personal computers, smartphones) have come from the US, and have been driven by American companies, it wouldn’t be an enormous surprise if the rest of the “developed” world soon caught up.

OK, enough. A few things to read / listen to that haven’t been linked to in either this or the Medium piece:

2017 Internet Trends Report – Kleiner Perkins (Mary Meeker)   >   See slides 288-319 for a range of pointers as to where healthcare might be going. (The rest is interesting, too.)

Self-regulation in Sensor Society – Natasha Schüll   >   Cool talk, available as a podcast from Data & Society, on the softer, fuzzier form of tracking represented by wearable tech (“little mother”, as opposed to the “big brother” of CCTV etc.) and its implications for individual autonomy and selfhood.

Some decent long-ish reads from a range of publications: this from the FT (paywalled), which is from a while ago and probably the first thing I remember reading on the subject, focusing mainly on Babylon; this from the Atlantic, which is even older (2013!) and concentrates on IBM’s Watson (which is still going strong in the healthcare game); and this from Newsweek International last Friday, which has more of an American bent but covers a load of interesting startups I haven’t really discussed here.

Networks of Control – Wolfie Christl and Sarah Spiekermann   >   A longer, broader work focusing on the collection and use of personal data by businesses working in a range of areas. Considers whether this corporate surveillance can enable businesses to control consumer behaviour – which is relevant here.

Intervention Symposium: “Algorithmic Governance” – org. Jeremy Crampton and Andrea Miller   >   A bit academic, but some interesting thoughts here and in the collected essays giving some background to the notion of algorithmic control and its implications.

As usual, I’m always keen for cool new stuff to read, so hmu if anything jumps to mind!

Cultural Consumption, March 2017

I’ve been sat on this for ages, not sure why. Better late than never, etc.

Music:

First things first: I’m not sure where I’d have been this month without Visible Cloaks’ Reassemblage. I mentioned it as a highlight in my February post, but in March it came into its own. The musical equivalent of a secluded room, cut off from the noisy computer lab, I weathered a number of coursework storms in its peaceful embrace.

Noveller’s expansive A Pink Sunset for No One was my belated introduction to the work of a wicked cool artist, and the thoughtful-but-accessible pop of Lowly’s Heba was perfect for tired ears at the end of the lengthening days. Both served as alternative havens – along with the Disasterpeace (possibly my favourite producer moniker ever) soundtrack to last year’s Hyper Light Drifter.

Perhaps my favourite discovery of the month, though, was K À R Y Y N. ‘Aleppo’ and ‘Binary’, the two parts to her double A-side single dubbed Quanta 1, both hit me hard. And my biggest banger was this Celestial Trax / Orlando Volcano-produced tune that I’ve come across about 6 months late…well, that and last year’s Floorplan album, which seemed perfect to catch up on when the sun came out at the end of the month.

My one live outing was to see Cloud Nothings at The Haunt in Brighton. And it was probably one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to. Much more raucous than I’d anticipated, and all the better for it. It prompted the realisation that their songs, however good on record, are made to be played live. Was also impressed with Nature Channel – the first of the warm up acts. Thought they were very tight.

The usual scrapbook documents whatever of the above I could find on Youtube along with some other bits and pieces there isn’t really space to write about. Enjoy.

 

Books:

Read quite a mix of different things. Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust was emotive and strikingly poetic. A little too flowery for me, at first, but I got used to it. A friend lent me Mina Loy’s Insel for my next read, which was also pretty poetic but much more surreal. Not quite like anything I’ve read before, in fact. A woozy and discombobulating character study of a mad German artist in 1930s Paris, that sweeps you up in his uncanny wake.

Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time was an elegant series of vignettes, offering a fictionalised insight into the troubled reflections of Dmitri Shostakovich. Left me thinking a lot about the relationship between music, or art generally, and politics. (See also this podcast wrt electronic music and political protest.)

To round off the month, I finally read Ivan Illich’s short but illuminating Energy and Equity. A guy doing a PhD in Development Studies had recommended it to me months ago, and it was really excellent. Made most seemingly radical politics look positively conservative. I’ve been meaning to put some notes on it up, but haven’t got round to it. In the meantime, just go and read it yourself – it’s pretty short, and you can access the whole text here.

 

Films:

Hidden Figures was good, with a cool message, but far too dumbed-down Hollywood for my liking. All seemed a bit too nice, a bit too before-the-watershed. Interesting that automation came up again, considering I was thinking so much about it last month.

Got round to watching The Big Short, which was very entertaining, and went to see The Salesman. The latter I thought was outstanding – very real despite its improbability, with a brilliant moral conundrum framing the closing scenes.

I also listened to a load of podcasts – Exponential View, Talking Politics, Line Noise, Trackside – but am just writing a load of rubbish now so will leave it. Ciao.

The world’s problems are political

‘If people today still die from starvation, it’s only for political reasons.’ – Yuval Noah Harari.

I had a revelation yesterday. I was running along the South Downs Way, looking out across the English countryside and thinking about how to make the world a better place. This is pretty standard for me (lol), and since starting a Masters in artificial intelligence (AI) last September I’ve been particularly concerned with how far AI can help, rather than hinder (or just make money for businesses). But yesterday I decided that when it comes to solving some of the world’s most intractable problems, AI is small fry.

The roots of human suffering are not technological, but political. This is a situation that is, I think, peculiar to the 21st Century. In a recent Exponential View podcast, Yuval Harari argued that over the last few decades we have acquired the technological means to limit the three problems that have most affected society for all of human history – famine, plague, and war. No longer are these seen as unavoidable forces of nature, but as catastrophes that need never happen. The issue is that despite this progress, they still do.

Millions are starving in Yemen, South Sudan, northeast Nigeria and Somalia not because of some technological failing or lack of innovation – enough calories of food are being produced worldwide to feed everyone (see p.4 of this from 2008(!)) – but because of politics. There may be scope for the effective use of, say, drones in humanitarian action, but the fact that humanitarian action is needed in the first place is a question of political inaction and incapacity – primarily with regard to conflict in the Yemeni, South Sudanese and Nigerian cases, and climate change (and its consequences) in Somalia.

With the main technological hurdles overcome, there must exist some ordering of society, some allocation of the resources at our global disposal, such that suffering is minimised, and human potential and wellbeing maximised. In identifying what that ordering might be, AI could help. Running complex simulations of possible futures that incorporate global supply chains, resource consumption requirements, alternative forms of political organisation, and so on, could perhaps point the way.

But politics would always rear its head. The enactment in reality of any apparently ‘fair’ simulation would involve some powerful people losing a lot of money and influence. Those powerful actors would resist change, or at least seek to minimise the extent to which it affects them, just as weaker actors might look to elevate themselves excessively at the expense of the formerly strong (this goes for countries, companies and other organisations as much as for individuals). Even if a ‘just’ ordering of human civilisation was identified, the question would remain of how to make the transition.

A recent Dominic Cummings blog on effective systems management (applied particularly to Whitehall, so relevant in this context) reminded me of that famous James Madison quote from the 51st and most-cited of The Federalist Papers. “If men were angels,” Madison wrote, “no government would be necessary”. Identifying solutions to the world’s problems is one thing, but making people sufficiently angelic to implement those solutions is an entirely different beast. And that beast – a beast that we have yet to fully fathom – is politics.

Cultural consumption, Feb 2017

Music:

My listening was dominated in the opening weeks of the month by the latest Japandroids and Cloud Nothings albums. The former are the kings of anthemic, rousing choruses that make you feel sort of invincible. Good to listen to before machine learning lectures. The latter are less earnest and more quirky, with janglier guitars. Still very catchy, and great company for walks to and from campus. Both are also playing Brighton in the coming months – more on that in due course.

On a different hype, I got pretty into Stefflon Don’s Real Ting mixtape (although calling it that doesn’t really do it justice…it’s essentially a fully-fledged album), which actually came out late last year. Also noticed that Suicideyear had been back in action, in collaboration with outthepound; their excellent new EP, Brothers, is a collection of utopian trap instrumentals (cf. vapourwave) and available for free download.

There were two real standouts, though. The first was Shackleton’s return to the fold, accompanied by Vengeance Tenfold, with a typically complex and immersive album. Don’t think I’ve ever heard anything quite like Sferic Ghost Transmits: ‘the warped digital hymnal for a lost civilisation’ would be my attempt to describe it. That and Visible Cloak’s Reassemblage – a stunning assortment of synthesised ambient textures and reflections – actually swung me back onto a massive experimental / electronic music hype over the last week or so of the month. I even got back on Logic to do some production myself…

The usual 17-track YouTube scrapbook tries to capture some of that, along with some other bits and pieces that I’d write about if time and space were no object.

The last track on that playlist is a 360° video made in advance of the one live show I went to. That was Still Be Here, a performance piece that lay somewhere between concert, animated film and documentary, celebrating and picking apart the appeal of the virtual Japanese pop star, Hatsune Miku. It was at the Barbican, and the whole experience was pretty bizarre on a number of counts – but I should probably write about it separately. A darn cool work of art, though.

 

Books:

I read one work of non-fiction: Martin Ford’s The Rise of the Robots. It prompted many thoughts, and I put together a short Medium piece outlining some of my objections, accompanied by a blog post with a few related reflections. So enough on that for now.

The fiction I read jumped from rural Estonia – Sofi Oksanen’s Purge – to provincial 1950s Japan – Shūsaku Endō’s Volcano – and then to the Scottish Highlands – His Bloody Project, by Graeme Macrae Burnet. All 3 were excellent, and unsettling to different degrees. The links are to the OurStories recommendations I wrote for each, have a look if you’re interested – they’re only short!

 

Films:

The Ides of March made for entertaining viewing, particularly off the back of a year during which current events have had me thinking about political campaigning (the good, the bad, and the ugly) more than ever.

Although I only made one trip to the cinema, it was a good one. It was to see Moonlight, which was exceptional. Left me feeling melancholy for a good couple of days. But no doubt you’ve already heard a million things about it, so I’ll leave things there.

Automation etc.

I mentioned in my 2016 reading round-up that I hadn’t yet had a crack at Martin Ford’s The Rise of the Robots. I finally put that right the other week, and the book prompted many, many thoughts. Which is always a good thing.

Quite a few of those thoughts were objections. I generally agree with Ford that the technological progress we’re seeing today far surpasses anything that has come before, and the mass automation of labour is a feasible possibility as a result. But I don’t see it as inevitable. For one thing, a backlash against automation could see it rolled back, rather than accelerated, before too long. I wrote a short piece explaining the thinking behind that, which you can read here.

That piece was, necessarily, a massive over-simplification of the lie of the land. You can’t really cover social change on this scale in 750 words. My purpose with it was more to suggest an alternative way of thinking about how things might pan out, rather than predicting what will happen.

One of the most interesting dynamics that I failed to cover was how all of this fits into the global / international economy. Some of the best bits of Ford’s book, I thought, were actually about offshoring, and how it could seriously shake up the world of work (if it isn’t doing so already) before automation does. We think about manufacturing going abroad, but one of the things that technology really has changed is the ability to do non-manual work remotely, arguably making the pool of potential applicants for, say, a software engineering role, global. Why limit yourself to UK graduates when you could take your pick of the best minds in Asia, or Africa, or anywhere else?

The question of how different governments shape their policies in light of and in competition with those of other governments will also be fascinating. If you’re elected on a platform of rolling back automation (as I suggest might soon happen in the piece), and you force companies to hire human workers over computers while other countries are actively promoting automation, those companies will either move elsewhere or risk becoming uncompetitive in a global market. If they move elsewhere, you end up with the same unemployment problem you would have had anyway. If they stay, domestic consumers will probably look abroad for products and services provided more cheaply and efficiently – so you’ll have maintained that vital consumer purchasing power only to reap no rewards. Unless you close yourself off from the world of international trade, or implement very stringent tariffs and what have you – but then you risk your country becoming irrelevant on the world stage (the Trump presidency should make a very interesting case study…). At which point, UBI might seem like it was the better idea after all. Although then what would you have done about all the mental health problems and social issues arising in a population of bored, unhappy, confused and unfulfilled humans?

In short, it’s complicated. My piece, and these ramblings, don’t even scratch the surface.

The other complicating factor will be the environment. Ford mentions climate change at the start and end of the book as something that could further exacerbate the problems of mass automation. What he doesn’t do, however, is consider the ways in which climate change might actually impose a natural limit on automation. Where is the energy to run all these robots going to come from? But this is something I really want to write about separately. So I’ll leave it there for now.

Any thoughts / comments / objections, fire away. If you’re interested (and if you’ve got this far?), I thought I’d include a very brief reading list with some interesting stuff that might be worth referring to.

 

The Rise of the Robots – Martin Ford   >   Obviously. It’s actually a pretty easy and entertaining read, albeit slightly repetitive at times.

The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation? – Carl B Frey & Michael Osborne   >   This now-ubiquitous report from 2013, which estimated that 47% of US jobs are susceptible to ‘computerisation’, underpins Ford’s argument. The Oxford Martin School have a load of other interesting publications on technology and unemployment which are also worth checking out.

World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends – The World Bank   >   In some ways, this could be seen as a follow-up to the above, but it takes a broader approach to the impact of technology and a much more international perspective. Very interesting on the topic of employment, though, particularly with regard to the susceptibility of jobs in the developing world to automation (see p.23 for a quick graphical overview).

New Robot Strategy – The Headquarters for Japan’s Economic Revitalization   >   A detailed plan of action for the integration of robots into multiple levels of Japanese society. Very interesting.

The Second Machine Age – Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee   >   I wasn’t overwhelmed when I read this last year, but have been dipping back into it over the past week and actually think it’s very thoughtful in terms of its policy / long-term recommendations. Worth a look.

Please let me know if you’ve read anything good!

Cultural consumption, Jan 2017

With apologies for the tardiness…it’s been a busy time!

 

Music:

I’ve been keeping a monthly Youtube scrapbook for a while now. January’s is available here, or you can watch/listen below. There’s also some cracking stuff working back through the lists from December, November and October of last year (if I do say so myself). 

It wasn’t an amazing month for me, musically. I seemed to struggle to connect with much – not sure exams helped. Got into Lil Peep for a bit, then tired of the abrasiveness of some of his tracks. Ended up listening to a lot of Yung Lean and Bladee, as usual. Picked through a few best of lists from the end of last year, but wasn’t really getting inspired. Actually think the new XX album is very good, though, as is new Bonobo. Started to appreciate the Trentemøller and Nicolas Jaar albums from last year a little more, too – worth checking them out.

The highlight was Hannah releasing her first single right at the end of the month. It’s called A to B, and it’s an absolute banger. Watching how much work goes into taking something from conception to full realisation and release has been fascinating, not to mention humbling.

My one live outing was to see Beach Slang at the Haunt in Brighton. I missed the opening act, but Harker who were second on were really very good. And Beach Slang “exceeded expectations”, as a fellow audience member put it. Lots of drunk energy, and they played for a full hour and a quarter, filling gaps in the set list with the Cure / Pixies / Oasis covers. Interesting mix of young and old there, too – they seem to appeal to people between the ages of 16 and 60, which is pretty impressive!

 

Books:

It’s taken me a while, but I’ve finally caught up with the rest of the literary world and read some Ferrante. It was the first of the Neapolitan novels – My Brilliant Friend – and frankly, it was great. The atmosphere of it was enveloping, the plot gently engrossing, and it did a very good job of winding down a brain fried and alert from revision in the evenings.

I also read Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Comes Last, and Laline Paull’s The Bees. Both were dystopian visions: one of a near future in which a collapsed economy has forced people into voluntarily entering a community where they spend half of their time in jail, the other a humanised insight into the totalitarian workings of a beehive.

The former was entertaining, but felt a little forced – particularly having read Oryx and Crake last year, which was exceptional. The Bees was more inventive, and I read the first hundred pages or so in a flurry of activity. I began to tire of the protagonist by the end, though. They seemed more a guide around the hive than a fully-fledged character. Which was a shame, because the world was incredibly well imagined. I’ll certainly never look at bees the same way again.

Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea has been sat on my bookshelf waiting to be read for years, now. At the end of the month, I finally got round to it. An epic tale of human endurance and futility told in 100 pages, it’s a masterful example of lean but evocative storytelling.

 

Films / television:

Briefly. I’ll start with TV. As with books, I’ve been catching up – firstly with Billions, which was wicked, and secondly with the bizarre and slightly barmy Westworld. Billions was the more enjoyable, Westworld the more ambitious, thoughtful and, frankly, creepy.

Was unusually bad at going to the cinema. Didn’t even make it to La La Land, despite the hype (or perhaps because of it?). I did manage to catch Rogue One before it left cinemas, though. Nothing groundbreaking there, but entertaining stuff with some of the most astonishing CGI scenery I’ve ever seen. 

The best film I watched wasn’t in the cinema, and was a documentary. Alex Gibney’s Zero Days, about the “Stuxnet” virus co-developed by US and Israeli intelligence to take down Iranian nuclear facilities, was astonishing. I’d almost call it compulsory viewing. All the more compelling for the fact that the existence of the virus may never have come to light. Makes you wonder how much other crazy stuff is going on beneath the banal news headlines.

Books read, 2016

A belated rundown of the books I read last year. A few themes to quickly pick out:

 

1.

International fiction is strongly represented. 2016 was the year Rhianna and I set up OurStories, having noticed how horrendously Anglo-American our reading tended to be. Some of the books below, like Green Grass, Running Water, I read off the back of recommendations people posted to the site. Many of the others – including the excellent Kurniawan, Kang and Knausgård, to name a few – we ended up recommending ourselves. The site features fiction set in about 45 different countries so far, so it’s worth exploring if you’re interested.

 

2.

There isn’t a huge amount of non-fiction in what follows, but there are a few books in there that have really shaped my thinking over the past 12 months. The Naomi Klein and David Graeber both attack neo-liberal assumptions, but from different perspectives. I’d consider the former essential reading for anyone and everyone, regardless of whether they’re interested in the climate or not (in fact the less interested, the better). The latter, although long, is brilliantly readable and goes beyond debt to cover…well, just about everything.

Speaking of neo-liberalism, the Chouinard is a rethinking of what business can, and should be – with a good dose of sport and environmentalism thrown in for good measure. Again, essential reading even if business interests you not at all.

Superforecasting was also excellent, particularly in light of the “unpredictable” political upheavals of the last year. It offers a blueprint for how to improve political polling and punditry, which has been taken up by the likes of Dominic Cummings (campaign director of Vote Leave, heavily influenced by Tetlock’s approach – see here for some fascinating stuff from him on the referendum).

 

3.

Interestingly, although this was the year that I really became fascinated by AI, and even started a masters in it (which is what I’m currently doing), I found the books I read on the subject – Superintelligence; The Second Machine Age – pretty underwhelming. Azeem Azhar’s Exponential View newsletter offered a wealth of more insightful, albeit shorter, material on a weekly basis. Which means there seems to be a gap in the market for a book that covers all the interesting ground in a manner suitable for the lay person (Russell and Norvig’s Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach is the go-to if you’re willing to delve deeper). That said, I have yet to read Ford’s The Rise of the Robots, and am, of course, open to other recommendations.

 

4.

The list could do with more:

• books by female authors
• classics (Middlemarch was the best work of fiction I read all year, perhaps because it was also the oldest and most enduring. Knocked A Little Life out of the park, anyway.)
• poetry (a persistent gap)
• plays (ditto)
• biographies (ditto ditto)

All thoughts to take forward into the new year, I suppose.

 

Key: F=fiction, NF=non-fiction, S=short stories, AB=autobiography, T=travel, P=poetry

Books appear in the order I read them. Links in titles are to OurStories recommendations written by me (although there are recommendations for quite a few of the others also on the site, written by different people). I tried to pick my 5 best books of the year, failed, and expanded it to 6 – they’re emboldened.

The list:

Station Eleven – Emily St. John Mandel (F)

Barracuda – Christos Tsiolkas (F)

Let My People Go Surfing – Yvon Chouinard (NF)

Beauty is a Wound – Eka Kurniawan (F)

Rushing to Paradise – J G Ballard (F)

Middlemarch – George Eliot (F)

The Vegetarian – Han Kang (F)

The Iraqi Christ – Hassan Blasim (S)

Nowhere People – Paulo Scott (F)

Intelligence: All That Matters – Stuart Ritchie (NF)

A Death in the Family – Karl Ove Knausgård (F/AB)

The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking – E Burger and M Starbird (NF)

The Successor – Ismail Kadare (F)

Flesh – Various (S)

A General Theory of Oblivion – José Eduardo Agualusa (F)

Jebel Marra – Michelle Green (S)

The Second Machine Age – A McAfee and E Brynjolfsson (NF)

The Islands – Carlos Gamerro (F)

This Changes Everything – Naomi Klein (NF)

The Book of Rio – Various (S)

Metro – Alexander Kaletski (F)

A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara (F)

Signs Preceding the End of the World – Yuri Herrera (F)

Hurma – Ali al-Muqri (F)

Debt: The First 5000 Years – David Graeber (NF)

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot – Robert Macfarlane (NF/T)

Kitchen – Banana Yoshimoto (F)

Tourist Season – Carl Hiaasen (F)

Tram 83 – Fiston Mwanza Mujila (F)

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies – Nick Bostrom (NF)

Green Grass, Running Water – Thomas King (F)

We – Yevgeny Zamyatin (F)

Superforecasting – P Tetlock and D Gardner (NF)

The Flame Alphabet – Ben Marcus (F)

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword – Ruth Benedict (NF)

The Bone Clocks – David Mitchell (F)

The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches – Bashō (P/T)

The Lonely Hearts Club – Raul Nuñez (F)

The Man in the High Castle – Philip K Dick (F)

Who Killed Palomino Molero? – Mario Vargas Llosa (F)

Bonjour Tristesse / A Certain Smile – Françoise Sagan (F)

Girl at War – Sara Nović (F)

Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction – P H Matthews (NF)

The Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead (F)

Submission – Michel Houllebecq (F)

Brendan Foster – Brendan Foster and Cliff Temple (AB)