Martin Amis and Israel

 

A friend called me from New York this week. An old friend, a Jewish friend. A close friend, a guy I shared meals with as bullets whistled over our heads.

He wanted to know, would I go to Israel and tell the Israelis to stop blowing things up, stop killing people.

He was joking – he didn’t really want me to go to Israel and talk to the Israelis. It would be futile.

He wasn’t joking – he wants them to stop blowing things up, stop killing people. Like so many Jews, he’s trapped between the extremes of an Israel he feels some allegiance to and the growing weight of humanity asking ‘why’ – to which there is increasingly no justifiable answer.

The Israelis won’t desist for several reasons, two of which are discussed here. One applies generally, perhaps increasingly as time passes. The second more specifically to the current regime.

 

I spent five years in Jerusalem, off and on, between 2004 and 2012. My observations are coloured by that experience. To illustrate:

After a week’s holiday in 2005, where I took my wife’s advice and put the situation in Jerusalem out of my mind, I began the drive from home in one indigenous enclave, to work in another. Turning onto the main road, two Arab high school students were pinned to a wall as Israeli paramilitary police descended from an armoured vehicle and tossed the contents of their schoolbags into and along the road. I waited an age at the intersection that is green five minutes for the foreigners (called ‘settlers’) driving from their homes in the West Bank to work in the factories of the elites on the coastal plain, and then five seconds green for the locals. The lights behave this way even on the Sabbath. On the highway into town, I passed a kilometres-long line of ‘green’ buses (ie. colour-coded for indigenes) – all subject to emissions tests at a single Israeli testing station. Passengers were not permitted to descend and all would be very late for work. Turning into the suburb where I worked, an older Palestinian woman, hands spread against a wall, was being frisked by an Israeli policewoman. 8.40am as I drove through the office gate, and in tears again.

 

Israel won’t desist from its ‘wars’ with the indigenous population of Palestine – the population directly descended from the ancient Jews (and if you don’t believe that, go stick it in your DNA sampler).

It won’t desist because it depends on prolonging the ‘security situation’ to maintain, above all else, its economy.

-          The USD3b (all my figures are rubbery and approx. 2012) it receives from the US each year in security aid. Much of which funds the development of new weapons (tested on the indigenous population as Lowenstein asserts) and new technologies, then spun out to fire up the ‘start-up nation’ (as Senor and Singer make palpably clear in their book). Start-ups so often owned and run by the (retired and current) military elite, their families and descendants.

-          The soft loans the US makes available to support Israel – with a balance of USD5b and another USD4b available, again in 2012.

-          The generous donations (approx. USD2.5b in 2012) to health/welfare/education programs from donors who ‘understand’ those programs are underfunded as the government prioritises security.

-          The USD8b (2012) in humanitarian aid going to the indigenous population, 80% of which, because of Israel’s stranglehold on goods entering the West Bank and Gaza from outside, passes directly into Israel’s economy (World Bank, 2012).

-          That’s around USD12b a year in 2012 dollars, not counting soft loans nor the income generated by spin-outs from the military and the international sales of both the military and non-military technology they enable. Over USD1500 per citizen – in 2012 terms more than most Israeli workers earned in a month.

That’s big business. Turning that around will take a lot of work. Not that it’s anything Israel’s aging and extremist regime will consider. Their preference is to exploit the model even further by growing the threat perception, given the wealth and prestige it has brought them to date.

 

The regime won’t desist with its belligerence because it’s dug itself into an economic and ideological hole. Instead it keeps on digging. To diverge briefly.

Martin Amis’ ‘Zone of Interest’, a darkly satirical novel set in Auschwitz, explores the banality of evil and the human capacity for both cruelty and love in the most horrific circumstances. Amis creates an unsettling portrait of the Holocaust that avoids typical representations while still conveying its horrors. He highlights the cognitive dissonance and moral bankruptcy of the Nazis. Characters go about their daily lives and petty concerns while participating in genocide, revealing how people can compartmentalize and normalize even the most abhorrent acts. (Drawn from a summary of multiple reviews and critiques.)

Discussing the context, Amis says the German high command (and Hitler) knew the war was lost by November 1941. Why then persist? He suggests it was Hitler’s revenge on the Germans for having failed him. That the objective of completing an unfathomable genocide, the process of which accelerated rapidly from around that date, is a convenient justification for prolonging the suffering of all. Hitler’s perverse gift to the future: a Europe without Jews (and without a Germany either).

I hope it’s not too late for Israel to back out of its hole and change direction. To divest itself of its mission to clear the world of every last militant indigene within its sphere of influence. By, it does increasingly seem to the world at large, if necessary then killing every last indigene.

As Hamas re-organised in the northern areas of Gaza last week, one of its leaders observed: ‘we have a whole new generation of fighters now’. Consequent to the Israeli regime’s bloody and persistent single-mindedness.

Will the Israelis figure it out before too late? Perhaps. I have vivid memories of Israelis occasionally confessing, unprompted, that ‘it wasn’t meant to be like this’. But perhaps not. My closest Israeli friend, a celebrated academic from a founding family, emigrated (as most Israelis unfortunately cannot afford to do). Because she didn’t want her children “growing up Israeli”.

 

That’s about the best I can do today old friend. May it give you hope.

Me and My AI #3

 

One of these things is not like the others

 

The Internet. Smartphones. Crypto-currencies. Artificial Intelligence.

A series of technological …. innovations.

But crypto, despite its massive profile, is not like the others. For two reasons: economy and society.

The internet, smartphones and artificial intelligence have all had an economic impact, bringing down costs associated with economic activity. They’ve all had a social impact, changing the way we engage with each other and the world.

The internet in terms of access to information (and connectivity) – finding information and contacting others suddenly became cheaper and easier by orders of magnitude.

Smartphones for making all that mobile. Suddenly, the power of the internet could be just about anywhere. Work from anywhere anytime. Conduct a social life from anywhere anytime. Arguably, the success of the smartphone hinges to a significant extent on the internet, but it’s had massive impact regardless. If the internet hadn’t pre-dated mobile phones, then SMS would have evolved to effectively covered the same ground.

Artificial intelligence for automation. Ai has been automating our world for decades – the spellcheck on your smartphone, dynamic pricing, social media feeds, etc. – and its already significant impact is growing as automation takes over one task after another.

But crypto-currencies … the hyped era of ‘defi’ (decentralised finance) isn’t upon us. Instead, transferring value with crypto is more expensive and more difficult than a regular bank, and the records of transactions are kept all over the place, instead of in just one. The main benefit of business via crypto is the lack of transparency. Economically, at the end of the crypto boom, it’s just been a transfer of wealth – some people came out of it richer, most poorer.

Some continue to use it as a ‘store of value’ and it does effectively store whatever value people wish to associate with it – subject to change without warning. Coindesk’s crypt of coins displays just how much its various offerings have gone up or down (mostly down) over the preceding 24 hours.

Hopefully, for all that’s been invested in it, someone will devise a more useful application for this particular innovation.

In the meantime, the social categories who benefit are the owners of crypto networks and tech (the ones selling shovels in the goldfields), criminals laundering cash through the crypto-casino of coins and NFTs, and the cyber-criminals harder to track down via crypto transactions. Their victims, not so much. It’s like horse-racing with funny coins instead of funny hats.

The internet, smartphones, Ai – all have significantly impacted economy and society. Imagine a world without the internet or smartphones. Hard to do, especially if you grew up with them. A world without crypto? That would be like, I don’t know, a world without ‘Love Island UK’.

Artificial intelligence has been around a long while. The first serious Ai enterprises date back sixty-odd years, and it’s thirty-odd years since an Ai beat the world chess champion (at chess, duh). Ai has been a far more serious proposition since the early teens, with the onset of effective neural networks. As larger amounts of data and significant improvements in processing power came online, it began to step up and beyond the showcase applications. Five years ago, those who knew knew what was coming. It’s now a year since the generative Ai explosion.

Unlike crypto, Ai has lived up to the hype. It has growing applications and a growing body of people and businesses making effective economic and social use of it. Even in the unlikely circumstance that Ai was to cease developing from its current technological level, it still has millions of technological niches to automate.

Me and My Ai #2

 

Me and My AI #2

LLMs: the bath is overflowing

 

Large Language Models – ChatGPT et al – make for the generation of endless volumes of textual material in effectively realtime. We humans face the possibility of total and utter immersion in more ‘important’ and/or ‘essential’ reading than we can possibly take stock of.

Already, folk with a need to cover what’s happening in their specialised fields complain of the rapid uptick in material directed at them as contributors leverage Ai. You too may be subject to similar experiences.

How will content creation and consumption change as a consequence of the potentially exponential growth of written material within any given field of reference?

 

Early adopters of LLMs are already out there leveraging the window of opportunity between the widespread availability of the technology and the rest of the world catching on – selling material generated by or largely by generative Ai as if it is of purely human origin – and enjoying the margins that heightened Ai enhanced productivity grants them. OpenAI is already marketing ‘GPTs’ – mini ChatGPTs that the purchaser can pre-load with their own content and preferences and use to generate specific client-oriented content.

It's a cycle that’s played out so many times in the history of technology, particularly so for digital technologies. An exciting new tech with relatively low capital costs emerges and undermines existing markets – in this case, writers (hey, that’s me ..). The creators of the new tech rapidly generate a sizeable income. Early adopters put the tech to work and enjoy large margins. Other folk notice what they’re up to and pile into the same space.

Soon, consumers enthusiasm for this bright new thing begins to wane. Competition causes margins to collapse and the mergers and closures begin. A few years down the track and the tech is fully incorporated into the larger market.

 

Setting that familiar market cycle aside and focussing on this instance, specifically interesting is how the human intellectual and Ai technology networks might respond to this technological step up. How will we deal with all this stuff we previously might have liked to but now won’t have time to read?

Initially, apply a personal filter to select material and limit the volume of material vying for attention. Google and other search engines already do this in a limited sense. Other services such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook also do this, allowing users to set filters of their own. So nothing particularly innovative in this response per se. Though augmenting filters with Ai will make for a better user experience. For example a filter that undermines the ‘clickbait’ tendencies many content producers insert in their material.

The longer-term is more interesting. A potential evolution in the information ecosystem triggered by the potential to create infinite textual content. Here’s one pathway:

As the consumer’s filtered stream versus the content generator’s flood model evolves:

-          The content being generated becomes more and more specific to the end user and their expressed preferences, interests, etc.

-          The filter and the generator enter into a negotiation process – after all the generator can create an endless variety of written material in realtime and the filter can re-write it equally quickly, so why would they bother.

-          Instead, the new information dispersed by a generator node remains in a ‘pre-textual’ form – the numerical values that can be processed by machine learning algorithms – and attaches to these values vectors and other metrics that weight the value of the new information in a form designed to appease the consumer’s filter.

-          The consumer’s filter weighs up the values and metrics attached to this information in relation to other available information sets and the consumer’s own preferences. Only then does the information set get integrated with other sets and turned into a natural language form suitable for consumption.

-          A mediator might modify vectors created by the generator’s attempts to insist its information is of the highest order, most recent, most relevant etc.

Such a system demands collusion between creators and consumers. Though the first generation of mass-market LLMs already effectively operate like this, but from the pile or the internet in general and not on behalf of specific creators or consumers.

Imagine the consumer, surrounded by nodes for information distribution that rise around like mountains, information racing down the mountains like the spring melt, creating torrents that rush through a steep valley. Off to one side, a filter sorts the waters from the waters and channels it on to the consumer. Visionary? Not really, more like fantasy.

 

Some time ago I wrote a very short and (I thought) amusing story about benevolent Ai’s competing to run the world with near perfect analytical and predictive powers. But occasionally humans do something unanticipated. The Ai’s would then race each other to best leverage (for commercial advantage and ultimately control of the planet) these rare instances of unanticipated human creativity and divergence from the world as predicted. Something like Asimov’s ‘mule’ in Foundation and Empire but wrapped up in a mere two minute read. Find “Uniquity”: here.

 

Another diversion on this theme before I fold: regulation. We’ve seen the understandable angst and anger of human creatives whose works have been consumed by LLMs, turned into numeric values suitable for algorithmic processing, and regurgitated without credit in the growing stream of LLM utterances.

It’s not hard to imagine, in response to LLMs’ unregulated siphoning of others’ creativity, governments attempting to regulate content such that it must display which of its constituent components or parts are human sourced and which are of the machine. This is already happening in tertiary institutions.

The written material above was written off my own bat with machine support for research.

 

To close: follows is ChatGPT 4.0’s far more pedestrian and sensible response to a query from me about how we humans might cope with the flood of written material that it and other LLMs can generate ad infinitum:

1.         Filtering and Curation: Search engines, platforms, and other content aggregators are continuously improving their algorithms to filter and curate content. This helps in managing the influx of information and presenting users with what is most relevant to them.

2.         Content Quality: While LLMs can generate large amounts of content, the quality and usefulness of that content can vary. High-quality, insightful, or unique content is more likely to get attention and be shared, while low-quality content may be ignored or filtered out.

3.         Consumption Habits: The impact of increased content also depends on consumption habits. People may become more selective about their sources and choose to engage with content that provides the most value to them.

4.         Regulation and Standards: There could be an emergence of new standards and regulations that govern the use of LLMs for content creation, which may affect the amount of content that is produced and published.

5.         Technological Advancements: Advancements in technology could also provide new ways to manage and navigate information effectively, such as personalized AI assistants that can summarize and prioritize content based on individual preferences.

 

Which kind of covers it, thanks ChatGPT. But leaves a lot to the imagination.

 

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