New decisions in a cloudy world
How to keep a clear mind in the midst of the fog? Radical Uncertainty. Tribal AI divides. Deepfakes' threats to the extortion business. Chinese farmers. Pipes and Copyright Lawyers.
Hello! Welcome back onto the dizzy drifting clouds. This week we explore in an unusual format. After I have collected way too many amazing links and reads from last week, I asked myself how could I reconstruct a meaningful story around them. This is what happened! I will be releasing the series little by little for the next three days.
Don’t worry. If you only have two minutes, here is the short version of the story with most of its hot takes. Use it as your map to navigate the piece and jump straight to sections you are curious about by clicking on the fast-forward emoji! ⏩
Today - the stage: radical uncertainty
Oh, Italy! AI is getting tribal. The new divide you need to worry about. Expect to argue a lot more about existential survival . ⏩
Understandably? Images are fooling us en masse. Widely available deepfakes may mean... ⏩
No more extortion business for paparazzi? More plausibly deniable revenge porn? New headaches and business for (AI) copyright lawyers? It's beginning to sound like the Chinese farmer story... ⏩
Remember Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe? We are relearning not to trust what we see. But you know what else a healthy dose of skepticism gifts you? ⏩
Tomorrow - the main character: detachment
Suspension of judgment. Please stop judging filthy art. Censorship and cancel-culture gets you nowhere moral! We need the unpleasant close to stay true to what matters: ambiguity. Homo sum, humani nihil alieno.. ⏩
Fields that value analytical rigor over loyalty are scarce. I want a grant for academics that change their mind most often! Today, surprisingly true intellectual honesty is only found ... in the financial markets! There is no real expertise without skin in the game. ⏩
Knowledge is a bit like options: it needs a falsifiable strike price and an expiration date. When you're dancing with risk, detachment is all you have. Practice the investor posture: seek understanding, not change. ⏩
Wait, but why? I have a painful personal story for this. At 16 I pitched my uncle (smart and successful IBM executive) Bitcoin at 2$. I was questioned on my motives, not on my understanding. He listened, got the tech, but did not see any valuable (ehm, desirable) use case. I did not have a chance to articulate its inherent value (and obvious upside momentum, duh). ⏩
The day after tomorrow - the quest: structural glimpses
Uh, inherent what? Modularity compounds into action. Distributed systems improve faster over time. Decentralization made trust systems permissionless and more participatory. A structural property can compound into societal shifts.
The main takeaway: understanding comes from letting go of control. Don’t let fear or judgment stop you. Fight the biases. Nurturing high-conviction contrarian ideas is the most valuable thing we can do. Look for bold ideas that don’t just scrape the surface of what’s desirable or possible, but unravel its underlying structures.
Coda. We need to mix fiction and theory more often. Surprisingly, we can use AI to actively challenge our biases, the same biases it is built on and often fooled by. Imagine wildly more!
Bonus: There is a secret Easter egg hidden in your new Macbook you didn't know about. Find it out!
Since my AI editor is rotting in Italian privacy jail, I turn to you... Let me know the infinite ways I could be wrong by replying to this email. Hate this? Let’s get to it.
David
Oh, Italy! AI is getting tribal
We are only beginning to realize how little we know. I can’t shake off the feeling that a distant future can’t wait to abruptly break into the present.
Last week, Italy decided to be as forward looking as it could. It banned ChatGPT before any other government even acknowledged it. As many love to think, we are the most advanced political experiment on earth. After all, we invented show business politics decades in advance. Our privacy sheriffs like to lead swiftly: with quick wits and even quicker with their cease-and-desist guns.
I must admit that the new fracture around AI discourse is surprisingly entertaining. Previously, the debate had been mostly limited to academics on Twitter. Conversations around AI were salacious but informed. Now, as AI ripples through society, animal spirits are heating up. The discourse bridges any conventional red/blue divide. I am sure it is going to be increasingly confusing for dogmatic folks out there.
To prepare for future political bar fights, read this humorous and detailed ethnographic account by Jon Stokes. This are the new polarizing ideologies that you need to worry about, since they may largely shape our future public discourse. Most sound like sci-fi. Annoyingly, expect to argue a lot more about existential survival than you need to. When fear is involved, don't we know how orderly and openly debates flow?
So, how are you all feeling this week? AI fear? Anger? Despair? Personally, I embrace the bluntness of Nassim Taleb optimism.
@nntaleb Let me be blunt. Those who are afraid of AI feel deep down that they are impostors & have no edge. If you have a 1) clear mind, 2) a deep, not just cosmetic, understanding of your specialty, 3) and/or are original enough to reinvent yourself when needed, AI will be your friend. https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1642241685823315972
His J'accuse resonates deeply with me. It sounds so “self-serving to invoke a threat to society when what's under threat is your little franchise and rent seeking”! A hint of accellerationism? I don't know what derogatory term to use yet. AI marketing irony does not help. The first robot lawyer is called DoNotPay. No wonders social rentiers are frightened.
Enough roasting. I feel there is value to unpack in Nassim's definition. Who would not want a sufficient condition for not being impostor and having an edge? Let's break it down. Specialty is nowhere to be found in my cosmetic vocabulary. Originality is a matter fit for much higher prose. So today the question I am left to answer in this essay is What does a clear mind look like?
Please brace yourselves and don't expect a smooth ride.
Images are fooling us en masse. Long live the king!
Our mind resembles a blank page. We are white canvases of incredulity. Being gullible is a vital evolutionary strategy. Without trust, cooperation is impossible. While we developed a certain diffidence for words we hear, we have always been trusting our eyes blindly. It is not a surprise, then, that this shiny photograph of the Pope fooled the masses. Its iconic qualities are an availability cascade just waiting to burst.
A good catch I found last week on The Diff by Byrne Hobart is Richard Hanania’s Deepfakes will make the establishment stronger. He makes valid points on how people adjust to technological shifts.
Richard argues that since videos will be no longer reliable as-is, we will need to rely more on gatekeeping authorities for knowing what's happening. Distinguishing fakes is as hard as ever. You are left either ignoring everything that does not fit your worldview, or trusting someone else to do exactly just that for you (but arguably a little better).
I am unconvinced this shift translates into more power to the actual political establishment. In his words, "we are already in the deepfake world for text”, so why would it be any different with images? Did textual fake news strengthened institutions?
The implications are narrower: with broader epistemic uncertainty intermediaries that stake their reputational capital have a harder job to do. They do not necessarily thrive. In some fields, I grant they might become increasingly important in the chain of trust, provided a direct access to source isn't available. The question remains: is there a trustless and permissionless ways to achieve the same thing? Yes. But would most people bother? Probably not.
Content production and diffusion are already fairly decentralized. The horses have already left the farm. Authority means many different things for different tribes. It can be the NYT brand for some, a TikTok influencer mom for others. Or anything in between. Ignoring the current structures of information flows when accounting for the social relevance of news is misguided.
What it the case is that institutions have more reputational capital to maintain. Will media outlets become more conservative to protect precious reputational capital?
Trust, reputation and social capital may be increasingly crucial in the current post-truth world. But remember the conclusions of Andrej Mir's post-journalism: in the donscription economy, factual accuracy is less of a priority since everyone just wants to hear what they like.
The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (Caravaggio) - The saint wanted to touch not just to see!
It's beginning to sound like the Chinese farmer story...
The upside? We are not bound to our online digital image as much as before. Reality and imagination are forcefully decoupling.
If you have been a victim of revenge porn (very sorry, first of all), you now have plausible deniability. You can argue that whatever picture of you there is out there was generated by an hostile AI of your ex.
Caitlin in her vivid Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends picks up on a NBC report from inside the deepfake porn economy where non-consensual explicit images and video are produced and exchanged very affordably. Such a loss of control to our image feels a little frightening.
But if victims have plausible deniability, so can perpetrators. The days of the scandalous conclusive photographic evidence imparting a coup de grace to a crook's career are behind us. Not good news. Unless you are in the extortion business.
This is extremely bad news for paparazzi whose sole business model was to run extortion schemes against wealthy celebrities, I guess? With less extortion the world sounds like a happier place. Though, not for the same celebrities that would rather not have those non-consensual images flying around... Good luck, bad luck, who knows?
Leaving the libidinal on the side for a moment. There are flourishing serious business models around AI generated photo realistic images. Many already available. The first use case it's about replacing professional photographers. It involves selling you professional photo shoot, pictures that look just like you will cost you a fraction. Perfect lighting, perfect facial expression. Deep looks, great clothing choice, perfect composition. Your professional portrait looks as dapper as Rockefeller's. Your dating profile? Set. It's hardly reprehensible. Just remember your mom not to trust the exotic beach pictures your distant cousin just posted!
The point I'm trying to make echoes the story of the Chinese farmer who has lost his horse. Judging a wide technological shift on its immediate moral-ish conclusions is not only petty, but pointless. In front of change, a clear mind first and foremost wonders: who knows?
Yet, photographers are only the starting casualty from first-order effects. What's next, you may ask. Second order effects involve not the medium, but the experience.
Do you know all the things we used to do just to photograph them and impress someone else? To impress our family, friends, our Instagram followers? Do we still need those? Maybe we don't. We don’t need to have that hour long queue, for that one picture with that secluded landmark to send home. You may also not have to interrupt a dinner just to take a picture of the food.. Since, anyways, you can always reconstruct it later, even improving on the host's mise en place.
Are the days of the souvenir-hungry crowds over?
The silver lining is admittedly quite bright. How could we spend the time gained not having to impress any longer an invisible digital audience? In a distant future world where you can accurately conjure up any representation you wish, what experiences still make sense?
The reality is more clouded. Cultural and technological change are dimensions don't dance at the same speed. The habits we form have a slower rate of change than their technological counterparts. Do you know why we pose for photographs? The first cameras used to require long exposures. Shutter’s speeds don't need stillness in most lightnings. We still pose.
We are relearning to live with radical uncertainty
Remember Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe? Reid Hoffman interviewed on The Generalist by Mario Gabriele brings back up the treachery of images. The questions raised by Magritte’s work challenge the assumptions of faithful representations. They play with our false beliefs. A photo realistic representation mocks our attachment to images. It says: don’t believe images, but don’t believe language, don’t believe me!
Copyright is heating up again. Unlike Magritte’s provocative stand, today the established art world is mostly curled up in a protective pose. Instead of contemplating the new questions posed by the fresh new media, there is a lot of upheaval from authors (mostly, digital designers for obvious reasons) that wish to be de-indexed from generative platforms such as Midjourney.
Benedict Evans’ latest infuriatingly fast and vivid podcast investigates how technological advancements have always re-framed copyright debates.
“If you spend an hour typing prompts into MidJourney, who owns the result?”. The easy answers to this question are all probably wrong. These are new puzzles, which reshape the problems, much like radio, photography or music have done in the past. Mozart was buried in a communal grave, as he could not afford his own burial. After him, score writing was protected. Yet, how silly would it sound today if Picasso asked art students not to imitate him or pay a royalty for his style?
I want to read and reread Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. The quote Benjamin picks up from Paul Valery’s Le Conquete de l’ubiquité is superbly on point with today’s argumentative mood.
We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art. (P. Valery)
In a previous cloud vertigo read, we compared AI to the printing press. Nobody at the time had a clue of its potential. Critics remarked the sloppy characters were unreadable and error-prone.
I think by now I have stressed enough how radical the uncertainty we face is. Images are powerful and possibly dangerous. We will have to rewire our brains, that have been trusting what they saw for millennia. with a new healthy dose of unprecedented skepticism. Nobody can really predict the longer-term or even medium-term effects. We imperfectly try to predict the short-term, but (more often than we need!) we simply react to it. Fear makes for a poor debate. Who knows whether it will bring us good fortunes or bad fortunes. Embracing uncertainty is hard, but the alternatives are worse. The only rational posture is to expect the greatest transformations, prepare for them with a clear mind and wonder what amazing changes it could mean.
This wraps it up for today. Tomorrow we are back with why we should stop judging filthy art, how hard it is to encounter worldviews that encourage you to change your mind often and a very painful story from my teenage years!
It’s really great to have you onboard! Let me know what you think by replying to this email, or by writing to david@cloudvertigo.xyz If you have the Substack app you can also join the subscribers-only chat.
After all there are infinite ways I could be wrong. First of all, I could be unclear. Secondly, I could be wrong. Or I could be right, but for the wrong reasons; I could be right, for the right reasons, with the wrong confidence. I could be right, for the right reasons, with the right confidence, but with the wrong... You get the idea.
Pick your fight and let me know. If you don’t unsubscribe now, I will keep pestering you weekly with unsolicited divergent thinking. Peace.
