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Wednesday 4 February, 2026
Feb. 4th, 2026 12:49 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
john_naughton_feedAcademic life, West London
Two professors out for a walk?
Quote of the Day
”Working with AI involves a mixture of achievement, sycophancy and disappointment. This is a faithful reflection of office life, but not exactly what was promised.”
- The Economist
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Joni Mitchell | A Case Of You
Long Read of the Day
A farce that prefigured our times
Lovely essay by Andrew Brown on a novel that I had forgotten.
Fifty five years ago Philip Roth published Our Gang, a broad satire on the Nixon regime in which the president invades Denmark to distract from his domestic troubles. Whole chunks of the dialogue could come from inside the White House today.
“Gentlemen,” President Trick E. Dixon explains to his staff, “these are going to be free elections. I want it to be perfectly clear beforehand that I wouldn’t have it otherwise, unless there were some reason to believe that the vote might go the wrong way.
“They have thrown me out of office enough in my lifetime! I will not be cast in the role of a loser—of a war, or of anything. And if that means bringing the full firepower of our Armed Forces to bear upon every last Brownie and Cub Scout in America, then that is what we are going to do. Because the President of the United States and Leader of the Free World can ill-afford to be humiliated by anyone, let alone by third- and fourth-graders who have nothing better to do than engage the United States Army in treacherous house-to-house combat.”
How can this threat best be dealt with? Here he explains that
“One experiment that we have tried with some success here in Washington is the ‘Justice in the Streets Program.’ This is a program whereby sentencing and punishment, for capital crimes as well as felonies and misdemeanours, is delivered on the spot at the very moment the crime is committed, or even appears to have been committed.”
History sometimes rhymes. But how perceptive of Roth to have spotted that twice. What a writer.
‘AI swarms’ are mass-producing credible misinformation. Democracy may get stung
My most recent Observer column:
The next escalation in this process of manufacturing “reality” is now upon us, courtesy of AI. A recently published paper by a large group of scholars in the prestigious journal Science lays out the scenario. ChatGPT et al offer the prospect of manipulating beliefs and behaviours on “a population-wide level”. The combination of large language models (LLMs) and autonomous agents will enable what the researchers call “AI swarms” to reach “unprecedented scale and precision”. They will expand propaganda output without sacrificing credibility and inexpensively create “falsehoods that are rated as more humanlike than those written by humans”.
These capabilities easily transcend the limitations of the “dumb” botnets favoured by the Russians, Chinese and others, which simply amplified the spread of misinformation by incessantly retweeting to trigger algorithmic visibility through repetition, manual scheduling and rigid scripts.
An AI swarm is fundamentally different: it maintains persistent identities and memory, coordinates towards shared objectives while varying tone and content and, crucially, “adapts in real time to engagement, platform cues, and human responses; operates with minimal human oversight; and can deploy across platforms”...
For a pdf version, see here
Feedback
This photograph of a mural, which I wrongly thought was something I had seen in an East Anglian village, set many readers off a delicious quest for the actual location of the mural. And they found it! It’s a mural by the Polish artist and graphic designer Natalia Rak that was painted as part of the Folk on the Street art festival in Bialystok in Poland!
I’ve been a photographer for many decades and have a huge archive, from which I draw for this newsletter. I also love street murals and often photograph striking ones when I encounter them. But I’ve never been to Poland and couldn’t have photographed Ms Rak’s one. So I guess I saw it somewhere on the Web and copied it into the archive.
It’s embarrassing, of course, but it was also hugely enjoyable reading the genteel (and often sympathetic) reproofs from the successful sleuths. And it encourages me to fall back on Mark Twain’s observation that “The older I get the more clearly I remember things that never happened.” Thanks to all the participants in the quest for the truth.
And, given that the mural was in Bialystok, isn’t it nice that the hapless heroes of Mel Brooks’s The Producers had a partnership called Bialystock and Bloom!
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