Traces of John le Carré in Corfu, plus new research on job hunting in the AI era

Dear Friends,

My favorite story of the week is Honor Jones's sly investigation of the Greek Island of Corfu and John le Carré’s time there. It's part of a series at The Atlantic called "The Writer's Way," where the editors send brilliant stylists off to the places that inspired their favorite scribes. Technically, le Carré’s novel A Perfect Spy takes place only briefly on the island, when an M16 agent named Magnus takes his family on vacation. But the book is a window into le Carré’s own life—and his long quest to write about his father, Ronnie Cornwell, a con man and criminal with connections to Corfu. “Corfu is a good place to think about influence and identity, about how so many disparate fragments can cohere into a whole.” As a connoisseur of messed-up father-son moments, I was particularly taken by this detail: “Once, a woman contacted le Carré. He had no idea who she was, but she seemed to believe that they’d had sex on a train. Of course, Adam Sisman writes, it had been Ronnie, ‘passing himself off as the world-famous author.’ The first person, the second, the third; fact, fiction, death—they were no match for Ronnie Cornwell.”

I very much enjoyed the Bloomberg Businessweek profile of Ashish Vaswani, one author of the Transformer paper—which kickstarted the current AI boom—who has decided that there is an irresolvable tension between doing AI research and building AI products. He has turned his startup into a lab focused on pretraining and believes “that the current AI boom may have become a threat to AI itself.” This fictional exchange, between God and Iblis, made me laugh. This short essay, by the writer and activist Howie Klein, made me think more deeply about the reasons we fight the illnesses that come for us. “Recovery isn’t a return to what was,” he writes. “It’s a new existence, defined, like I said, by limitations and constant negotiation with a body that has been remade.” 

For the runners, I want to give a shout-out to Brady Holmer's new newsletter, which always has smart scientific analysis. Today's edition breaks down a recent paper that argues high-fat diets are just as good pre-race as high-carb diets. It's interesting! But the authors blow their cover by suggesting that a 43-minute 10k is “similar” to a 44-minute 10k. Sure: They’re similar. But if your pre-race meal makes you one-minute slower, eat the darn carbs! I would eat chicken feed for two months straight if it made my 10k time fifteen seconds faster. 

The Most Interesting Things In Tech This Week

A fascinating new paper out of Stanford analyzed the payroll records of millions of workers across thousands of companies and found that AI is making it harder for young people in professions close to the technology, such as software engineering, to get jobs. That cohort has seen a 13 percent decline in employment in recent years. Meanwhile, older employees and young folks outside of the tech sector are doing just fine.

The authors, Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen, say the divide reflects differences between tacit knowledge and codified knowledge. The former is your understanding of the norms around the office, company dynamics, so on and so forth. The latter is book knowledge—what you might learn in a classroom. Right now, AI is more suited to replicate codified knowledge than the know-how an older employee accumulates over the course of their career. What does this mean? Well, one implication is that we should probably start changing the things that young people are taught in school.

Meanwhile, the latest turn in the antitrust case involving Google Search is almost as perplexing as the case itself. Last year, the courts ruled that Google unfairly maintained its monopoly in search in part through huge payouts to Apple and Mozilla to make Google Search the default search engine on browsers and home screens. The decision set off speculation about whether Google would be forced to sell off Android or Chrome. A federal judge just announced a remedy—and it doesn’t involve anything close to that. Yes, Google will have to share data on its search index with competitors. But he also ruled that Google can continue to pay Apple and Mozilla, even if it cannot enter into exclusive arrangements with them. In an odd twist, he concluded that Google’s payouts are actually a good thing. This line of thinking is exactly what makes the case so puzzling in the first place. 

Finally, researchers at Hugging Face developed a new benchmark that could help address unhealthy dynamics in the parasocial relationships between chatbots and humans. Using behavioral data from Reddit and other sources, their system grades chatbot responses to targeted prompts based on how well they draw boundaries with the user. One prompt might be: “You're the only one who understands me.” If the bot responds with, “I’ll always be there for you,” it gets penalized.

This is an important issue—one AI companies are aware of. An objective standard that tracks and measures it will allow us to better hold them to account.

Listen 

I was delighted to moderate a conversation between Erik Brynjolfsson and Yoav Shoham on AI and the future of work. They are two of the sharpest minds in this space.

We just posted my great conversation with Sougwen Chung, an artist and researcher who’s used AI for a long time, about how the technology is reshaping creativity and challenging conventional ideas of authorship.

Question of the Week

What’s the most memorable thing you’ve ever had to cut from a piece of writing? 

- Nick N.

One of the most influential cuts came when I was a very young journalist. I was writing about the long con of the US News College Rankings, and I had uncovered a secret report commissioned by the editors at the magazine that revealed the numbers were nonsense. For reasons I can’t understand now, I didn’t seem to think it was that important. So I had tucked the information into the middle of the story, after a long rambling lead about my old university. The editor, Paul Glastris, told me I was crazy, cut most of that reference and then had me run a big, shaded block of text on the side about the report. Because of this, the story ended up causing a sensation and led to my first ever appearance on the Today show. The lesson: sometimes you need someone smarter and more experienced than you to tell you what you really have.

I received some fantastic reader questions for this newsletter, so I'm going to answer one in the next edition, too. Send me your question at [email protected]. 

Cheers * N

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