Technology

The Amazon reviews for David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity don’t alert you to the fact that this is a book on theoretical physics. They sound more like a weepy divorcé’s YouTube comments below a Mark Knopfler guitar solo. “I didn’t so much read it,’ says one. “It read me.’ ‘I was honestly sad when it was over,’ writes another. “This book changed my way of seeing the world, politics, science and, most importantly, of seeing what I will understand as containing some truth.” When I talk to Deutsch – one of the most sensationally interesting theoretical physicists of our age – on Zoom, I see two beady eyes peering at me over some non-spectacular spectacles under a mess of thin white hair, borne by a thin white man in a thin white shirt.

If a military team made a mistake during a nuclear war preparedness exercise and accidentally obliterated millions of people, you would not expect to find some of the very same people merrily admitting a couple of years later that they have carried out the very same kind of exercise with different live nukes and slightly fewer safeguards. Would you? That is roughly what I recently found out has apparently been going on in China. The Wuhan laboratory that conducted risky experiments on bat viruses at inadequate biosafety levels and almost certainly caused the pandemic has now revealed that it has done the same kind of risky experiments on another lot of horseshoe-bat viruses at low biosafety levels. Is accidentally killing millions not enough to give them pause?

In 2017, Zoom finally achieved what Skype never could: hosting video calls that didn’t freeze. It was a golden moment to take education online. Enter Lambda School, a Silicon Valley startup founded by Austen Allred with the aim of disrupting higher education. Allred’s idea was simple: people wanted to learn to code but often couldn’t pay $20,000 upfront. His solution? You’d pay nothing until you landed a job earning more than $50,000 a year. At that point, a share of your income would go back to Lambda. But never more than $30,000, and never with interest. The technical term for this is an income share agreement, or ISA, an equity-like stake in a few years of a person’s future income. If you got a good job, the school was repaid. If you didn’t, the school took the loss.

Copper has a nickname in the commodities market. It’s known as “Doctor Copper” because it’s so deeply integrated into the physical fabric of our lives and all the technology we depend on that its price reflects the health of the economy. “Gold is money, everything else is credit,” said J.P. Morgan more than a century ago. But copper is more than money. It’s modern human life. It is used in every corner of our technology, from houses to windfarms to warehouses. Which is why I think, while everyone’s still obsessing about gold, it’s worth taking a look at copper. Since the global financial crisis in 2008, stock markets may have reached new highs but the physical world of construction, infrastructure and manufacturing has never quite regained its old growth rate.

Doing the rounds on social media is the most disturbing ad I’ve ever seen. And I’m telling you about it because you need to be forewarned, just in case this Christmas a child or a grandchild happens to mention that it might be an idea to record a video for posterity, and opens the 2wai app. 2wai is the company responsible for the ad, and the service it offers is the creation of AI versions of family members so that relatives can talk to them after they’re dead. Catch ’em while they’re still alive, says 2wai; film a three-minute interview and Bob’s your AI uncle. “Loved ones we’ve lost can be part of our future.” That’s its catchphrase. The 2wai ad is about “Baby Charlie,” and it goes like this.

As new technology, AI and the internet take over 21st-century life, I suggest looking to the Amish for guidance. Far from being the Luddites most folk assume, the Amish undertake a guided policy of technological discernment. When a new practice or device emerges into the world, the elders often gather to test it out over a set period of time. The entire process rests upon this deceptively simple inquiry – “What is this tool for and what does it make us become?” All potential effects on family unity, social cohesion and self-reliance are soon revealed by this one question. Diesel and solar generators pass the test and are often adopted, while social media is largely shunned.

On the day the Marihuana Regulation & Taxation Act (MRTA) was signed into law in 2021, the man who was to become mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, made the following statement: “I’m proud to be here today to debate the adult use of marijuana – also known as loud, Sour D, herb, Mary Jane, kush, green, pot, weed, zaza, a jazz cigarette and marijuana. In the course of this debate I’ve heard many of our colleagues from across the aisle discuss that smoking or ingesting marijuana is an indication of lawlessness and a deteriorating quality of life, makes one lazy and a burden to society, serves as a gateway drug.

Our latest visitor from interstellar space is leaving us. It reached its closest point to the Sun on October 29 and is now heading back toward the stars at great speed, having spent a few months traversing our region of space. This visitor – a comet called 3I/Atlas – scared some, fascinated astronomers and thrilled us all as we marveled at its strange journey. 3I/Atlas, which Michael P. Gibson introduced Spectator readers to in the last issue of this magazine, got its name because it is the third object ever found to have entered our solar system from interstellar space – and Atlas is the name of the sky survey that found it as a point of light moving against the distant stars.