Life
Khamenei at Tehran’s international book fair in 2000. Hossein Fatemi/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty
Art did nothing to civilise the Ayatollah
Reading the obituaries of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, says Sam Leith in The Spectator, I confess I was surprised. They described not just a “viciously power-hungry religious monomaniac”, but someone who, at least in his younger years, was “disciplined, modest, intellectually curious and artistically inclined”. He loved gardening and Persian poetry, played a traditional stringed instrument called a tar, and read Western authors like Tolstoy, Steinbeck and Victor Hugo. Yet in spite of his cultured hinterland, he presided over “as foul a theocracy as is to be found anywhere”.
Liberal humanists like me hew to George Eliot’s line that “if art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally”. We think reading Steinbeck and Hugo, with their “sympathy for the downtrodden”, cultivates empathy, and that “deep learning and good taste” mitigates against being the sort of malignant narcissist who massacres his own people “without a flicker of conscience”. But many despots lead “cultural and aesthetic” lives. Some senior Nazis had a canny eye for what art to steal and an “enthusiasm for Wagner” that took in the music as much as the mythos. The Borgias were a nasty bunch but they certainly can’t be accused of lacking culture. Equally, we assume that the “moral grotesquerie” of leaders like Donald Trump are exactly what to expect of people who worship power and money and show no signs of having read a book. But perhaps Trump would be like that even if he were a devotee of WH Auden’s poetry or Proust’s prose. Compare him with the late Ayatollah, and it was the cultured one who became the nastier piece of work. Eliot, it seems, was right in a way she didn’t mean to be: “perhaps art really does do nothing morally”.
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Heroes and villains
Getty
Heroes
Sun-seeking expats in Dubai, whose despair at finding themselves trapped in a war zone this week has made people look at life in Britain with fresh eyes, says Caitlin Moran in The Times. Yes, it’s cold and rainy, and yes, you do have to pay tax. But you are at least mercifully far away from a bunch of “political powder-keg deserts and angry people with deadly weapons”. As one headline put it this week: “I’ve never been hit by an Iranian missile on my way to Asda.”
Villains
South Korean police officers, who posted a press release about a $5.6m cryptocurrency seizure with pictures of the passwords to the accounts. The cack-handed cops realised their error and took the post down, but not before enterprising thieves had helped themselves to $4.8m.
Villains
Extreme fly-tippers who left an entire motorboat on a country lane in Bedfordshire. The council helpfully noted that it is a serious offence to illegally dispose of rubbish, including “builders’ rubble, garden refuse and dumped watercraft”.
Hero
Tom Bates, an accountant in Herefordshire, who saved his own life by going to the pub. Shortly after the 40-year-old left his house in Hoarwithy for a pint, a landslide of earth and rubble destroyed the room he had been in and wrecked an empty cottage next door. “It was ridiculous,” he said. “I missed it by 10 minutes.”
Tomorrow’s world
Don’t worry, it’ll all be fine (as imagined by ChatGPT)
Don’t fear the AI apocalypse
A couple of weeks ago, says Greg Ip in The Wall Street Journal, a sensational report by a little-known financial research firm depicted a future in which AI destroys so many jobs that it brings on a deep recession. In response, “the entire stock market sold off”. Huh? The problem with these doomerish – and entirely made-up – scenarios is that they ignore reality. Technological advancement empowers us to produce more or better products with less work. But that doesn’t mean we do less work overall – we do more, and thus produce more, making us richer. Some jobs are lost, but many more are created. When spreadsheet software emerged in the 1980s, for example, the number of bookkeepers shrank but the number of “newly empowered” accountants and financial analysts rose even more.
The naysayers insist that this time is different, but there’s no sign of that yet. The ranks of software developers, widely assumed to be acutely vulnerable to AI, are up 5% in January from a year earlier, a pace largely consistent with the past 23 years. Business spending on software rose 11% at the end of last year, the fastest in nearly three years. The big fallacy is that firms will ditch their legacy systems and consumers will turn their tasks over to AI “agents” almost overnight. In reality, businesses are risk-averse and consumers are “creatures of habit”. Radiologists were supposed to be among the first in line for the AI chop, but they’ve survived because patients like having humans explain their medical images. Since Google Translate launched in 2006, the number of human translators and interpreters in the US has risen by 73%. Tech has never caused a jobs apocalypse before. “Don’t bet on it now.”
📈🙄 AI could end up making us all work harder, says Tim Harford in the FT. Tech workers who use it a lot describe feeling “more productive and capable” but also “voluntarily working longer hours” as they fiddle around “prompting, iterating and experimenting”. This isn’t exactly new. Visual aids used to be made by graphic designers and were only used on special occasions, but the invention of PowerPoint meant highly skilled professionals started wasting all their time making their own slides (“badly”). Email is far quicker than letters, yet the amount of time white-collar folk spend corresponding has rocketed, bleeding into evenings and weekends.
The Knowledge Crossword
Inside politics
Carns training in Norway earlier this year. Leon Neal/Getty
The dark horse who might just be Labour’s next PM
Al Carns is not your typical government minister, says Tom Newton Dunn in The Times. This time two years ago, the 45-year-old Scot was still a colonel in the Royal Marines, having previously been commanding officer of the Special Boat Service. During his glittering 24-year military career, he served in Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan, and received a rare Distinguished Service Order, a Military Cross for bravery, an OBE and a mention in dispatches. He remains a reservist today – he did a week of Arctic training in Norway earlier this month – and, just for good measure, climbed Mount Everest last year with three other former soldiers. Now the armed forces minister, he is already being talked up as “Labour’s next prime minister”.
Carns has a back story to make his leadership rivals “wince with envy”. He was raised next to a troubled council estate in Aberdeen by his single mother, after his father walked out when he was eight. “People in my neighbourhood really had only three choices,” he says. “You roughneck on the rigs, you join the military or go slightly awry.” He decided to enter politics after briefing military chiefs at the Ministry of Defence on the pace of battlefield change in Ukraine. “I don’t think everybody got it,” he says. “So at that very moment, within four steps out of that office, I said, ‘I’ve got to leave and make this change.’” Carns doesn’t have an expansive political hinterland – there were no posters of Labour leaders on his teenage bedroom walls. But it is perhaps no surprise that he names his favourite prime minister as Clement Attlee, who fought valiantly in the war then went into politics and “changed the world”.
🎖️👍 Carns set himself on the military path at the age of 11. A four-tonne truck pulled up next to him at a junction and the Royal Marine driving it “with his commando flash on his shoulder” gave him a big thumbs up. “I gave him a thumbs up back,” he says, “and from then onwards I just wanted to be one of those guys.”
Weather
Quoted
“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.”
American economist W Edwards Deming
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