Review : The Making Of The Middle Ages (II)

Welcome back to my review-summary of John Haywood's The Making Of The Middle Ages. Last time we looked at the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, as one does. In this concluding part, we need to look at what happened to a fragmented (and sometimes not so fragmented) Europe in the aftermath of its first superstate, especially Britain because it's my blog and I can if I want to. I'll finish with a look at some of the deeper structural changes that were happening, which are directly relevant to an awful lot more than just Dark Age European history.

3) What happened next ?

Haywood has a somewhat pointless comment that the term "Dark Ages" only really applies to Europe; as a European, I would take it for granted that European studies are first and foremost concerned with, well, Europe.

Across the continent, the complexities of the changes are far too complex to attempt a summary here. Broadly though, Haywood notes that the collapse of the Roman free trade area meant a reversion to a simpler existence; there was just no other way people could get by. But change was enormously inhomogeneous. For those at the top it could be a true catastrophe, with their whole lifestyles depending on the resources of an Empire which was, quite suddenly, not there. For those at the bottom it might not have made much difference : instead of farming on the estate of some local governor, they now found themselves... still farming. 

But it wasn't anything like this simple. Peasants were now without the protection of the army against a series of invasions; they could be both at once the most and least affected by the change (and Haywood needs a better lower-level description to explain this better). The elite didn't suffer in the same way everywhere. In a few places, as we've seen in other books, they could sometimes sustain their lifestyles long after Rome had faded into legend. The organs of administration sometimes survived locally, but not always; political change was extremely rapid, but social change – the basic beliefs and ways in which people ran their own lives – could be much slower and more varied. 

Barbarians might, for instance, find themselves living as pagans surrounded by people who had been Christian* for centuries. Different laws were enacted that gave different rights to different groups. On the short term there was a chaotic mixture of beliefs that led to hatred and massacres; on the longer term, toleration of pagans made them more susceptible to conversion. 

* Or rather, monotheistic. Jewish treatment was highly varied : the Khazar Khanate even had Jewish leadership.

And again, not everywhere, and not all in the same way. In Britain a deliberate decision not to destroy the sacred shrines and holy places of the locals allowed priests to rebrand them for a Christian age. In Scandinavia, with tremendous irony, the supposedly more peaceful and moral Christian religion was enforced by methods of such brutality that even HBO would shirk from depicting them, including forcing live venomous snakes inside the unfortunate pagans by means of red hot pokers. Quite how you manage to do this probably doesn't bear thinking about.

Oddly enough, the "let's be nice to everyone" approach actually worked out far more successfully in the end. Funny that.

Whether we should see the end of Rome as the lights going out or an oppressive chain being lifted is not a question that has a single valid answer. In some case it could be either, in others, not really one or the other. The warrior culture that often replaced it was different, but it could sometimes just be a different kind of nasty. While Rome wiped Carthage from the map, you can't really imagine even the nastiest Roman general just heading out at random and declaring, "Let us go against the people with whom God is angry" as one barbarian warlord did. 

Haywood's presentation of the people who filled the vacuum of Empire is nuanced : their art could be as sophisticated as anything Rome ever produced, their technical skills their equal (or superior, as in the case of the composite bow), but their politics... that could be primitive and shite. They had a sophisticated, highly developed society, but their warrior, honour-based culture all but made peace impossible. They were not the monsters of later Christian legend, but they absolutely could be barbaric.

In the south, maps here again help with understanding the stupendous advance of the Arab invasions. Here was a civilisation as aggressive, imperial, and sophisticated as Rome had been, and it faced all the same problems of monumental scale but at a speed of advance unprecedented in Roman history. Haywood essentially presents this as more a conversion than a conquest, with the early Caliphate fragmenting almost immediately because there was simply no way to sustain an empire this large that had arisen this quickly. 

Nonetheless, the map of Europe dominated by the Caliphate, Carolingian Empire, and Byzantium is fascinating : three centuries after the fall of the West, Europe was already dominated once more by vast power blocs. No simple narrative can be told here. As on the smaller scale of Britain, there is no one story to tell. Sometimes provinces fragmented into a multitude of miniature kingdoms, sometimes they were subsumed once again into massive empires. The end of the Pax Romana led eventually to modern Europe, but not at all in a straightforward way.

One particular instance exemplifies this. I was aware that the Magyar people moved into Hungary sometime during this period, but I had absolutely no idea that they essentially invaded all of Europe. Virtually the entirety of the continent, except Britain, and this is the first I've heard of it ! It's like someone had conspired to hide the existence of the Vikings from me... I find it properly bizarre that we've forgotten this*. Granted, they were raids rather than an invasion proper, and short-lived. It just goes to show the power of simplifying the narrative, I guess.

* Its's not just me, right ?

4) What about Britain ?

There's a second outstanding point where I feel like a owe Haywood a beer. It's incredibly well-known in British popular history that Rome abandoned us due to a lack of resources; the famous letter sent by the Emperor in 410 AD instructing the British to "look to your own defences" is widely touted as categorical proof for this version of events.

So I was very much caught off-guard by Haywood's repeated assertions that it was Britain who left Rome, not the other way around. I felt sure this must be another of his more dubious throwaway claims, because why would so many popular historians insist so strongly, and so clearly, that this is undoubtedly what happened ?

But apparently... it isn't so straightforward as that. The text of the famous letter hasn't survived, only a reference to it in another document which in context doesn't even refer to Britain at all. I consulted ChatGPT about this and (checking the citation links) got somewhat mixed messages. Haywood's blunt assertion that we decided to leave and even expel the Romans looks to be heavily overstating the case, but it's by no means a unique view among historians. It still feels to me more plausible that Roman rule collapsed in Britain rather than being the result of local dissatisfaction; I find this earliest possible Brexit hard to swallow. Even so, learning how unreliable the letter is as evidence is very much like having the rug pulled from under one's feet.

More securely, all these maps of the enormous scale of mass migration and conquest across Europe do help – in another case of "show, don't tell" – why scholars of previous eras were so keen to believe the scant historical records of genocide in Britain by the Anglo-Saxons. Vast migrations really were a thing on the mainland, and when you chart this, when you see all those arrows drawn across the land (other books lack this context), it becomes much more difficult to believe that Britain alone could be such an outlier. Previous scholars might have been biased and had their own agendas, but we do them a disservice to attribute their beliefs solely to their prejudices. They weren't stupid.

Haywood nonetheless favours a mixed model, which I think is by far the most likely set of events. In some cases there may have been local massacres, in others a purely cultural change (essentially ideas spreading as a social contagion), in others an "elite transfer" where only the rulers were replaced. Thomas Williams presents much the most convincing argument for this, with the evolution and development of subsequent British minor kingdoms being so varied that the simplistic "the Saxons killed everybody" or "the Saxons never even showed up" interpretations both now look faintly preposterous.

Here Haywood feels in much better agreement with my other recent reads on Dark Age British history. He favours a somewhat later Christian conversion than others, pushing the final end of native paganism more towards 700 AD than Ronald Hutton thinks likely but still well within error bars. He also treats Ambrosius Aurelianus as a perfectly credible figure behind the myth of Arthur, something that Max Adams mentions but rejects without explanation despite their obvious similarities.

Conclusions : Networks and Hierarchies

Haywood does an excellent job of considering how the multitude of different polities in Dark Age Europe functioned as organisational systems. He considers both the economic forces governing them but also their religious and political ideals : the deliberate choices their leaders made, for good and ill, in a conscious effort to shape their own realities. Nobody here is purely a victim of circumstance nor wholly immune to forces beyond their control. Rulers shape their world just as much as they are shaped by it.

But one important system-level process which emerges repeatedly here is whether a state is a network or a hierarchy. Niall Ferguson considered this in his dedicated but somewhat hit-and-miss book The Square And The Tower, but I think Haywood helps clarify things. Broadly, a centralised state can marshall immense, well-coordinated resources : its military force can be highly destructive and highly targeted. This presumes, of course, that the state is well run (such that it really is a hierarchy, not just the semblance of one) and its ruler(s) intelligent. Depending on the details it can be slow to assemble its forces. A centralised administration can also be vulnerable to decapitation : kill the leader and you get to claim the whole empire.

By contrast, more egalitarian networks tend to be less coordinated. They can respond to local problems extremely rapidly, but find it difficult to assemble organised, large-scale invasion forces. They can be easy for a centralised state to raid but extremely hard to fully conquer, since each individual town and village is essentially an independent unit : there's no single person you can replace as ruler. You have to take them all one at a time.

These are only ever rough guidelines though. Centralised Lombardy, says Haywood, was much easier for Charlemagne to conquer than the more egalitarian Saxony, and similarly decentralised Ireland was a much tougher nut to crack for the Vikings than the poorly-run but centralised kingdoms of England. Conversely, the Viking decentralised network was extraordinarily effective during its invasion phase, but it lost all unity after England was (mostly) conquered. This made it disproportionately vulnerable to the disciplined, centralised, resurgent Wessex.

All this points to Ferguson's claim that networks tend to beat hierarchies as needing a lot of qualification. A group of disconnected villages is not a true network, any more than a centralised state where nobody actually cares what the ruler thinks is really a hierarchy. You don't necessarily need a ruler to be successful, but you do need coordination and communication. Once this is lost, once the network loses common purpose, it collapses into tiny, vulnerable fragments. Restoring unity may be much more difficult than replacing a failed leader in a hierarchy.

What eventually emerged from the wreck of Rome was a compromise : feudalism. This is essentially a decentralised hierarchy, or a sort of coordinated series of hierarchies. Yes, the king supposedly has the last say, but the power of medieval monarchs was very far from absolute. His immediate underlings often had wealth and armies of comparable power to his own, with a power base residing at significant distances from the royal court. And similarly for the dukes and earls and suchlike : centrally concentrated power with a clear sense of who the ruler was, but with their own agents – barons and counts and other lesser nobles – widely dispersed within their own provinces, and each having their own forces.

Which underscores two things. First, it's important to understand the actual structure of a network in practise, as opposed to its theoretical organisation. Second, that the network/hierarchy distinction is subtle, perhaps more subtle than centralised = hierarchy or decentralised = network.  

Max Adams also considered if kingdoms raised their kings or it was kings who raised kingdoms. That is, did a feudal structure emerge by itself, eventually resulting in centralised rulers, or did powerful warlords clobber their opponents and eventually enact feudalism ? This probably can't be satisfactorily answered, though a theoretical, sociological approach to understanding the currents of history sounds like a thoroughly good idea to me.

Two final practical points. There's an interesting parallel between the Merovingian kings, the later stages of the Roman Empire, and the early medieval Welsh. How so ? Well, just as the Romans sought to break into several self-governing units but maintain a single polity, so the Merovingian kings actually managed this for a time. You could point to a map of France and say this ruler controls this part, this one that, but all are Merovingian : again, a sort of decentralised hierarchy. And they in turn had inheritance laws which distributed their wealth somewhat equally among their children, a far more egalitarian approach than most European kings and strikingly similar to that of the Welsh. Understanding how this worked in detail, I think, is another area which requires a thoroughly holistic approach, and probably a purely network-based analysis is doomed to fail.

And this "consider ALL the things !" approach goes further. Last time I mentioned that you really have to consider systems in their entirety before reaching general conclusions. Selecting a single important aspect to say "look, this happened before, so if it repeats, this other thing is likely to happen as well" is a valid starting point, but it can't be the end of the analysis. Factors which can seem extraneous can be anything but, and one of the strangest examples of this is the nature of medieval scholarship. The interesting thing here is that medieval scholars were concerned with cultivating different ways of thought, teaching how to think more than what to think... but paradoxically, this didn't result in many novel ideas. Other authors certainly disagree with this, but still it's worth considering : in progressive circles, we so often take it for granted that teaching how is more important than what, but if we really want more creativity, perhaps there's more to it than that.

Finally, if rulers were both shaped by but also shaped their own environment, then the importance of long-term thinking becomes apparent. The institutional reforms of Heraclius (especially in terms of who could own what) didn't work in the short term, albeit because of the Arabian storm that would sweep away much of the battered Empire in a few short years. But they did save the foundations. His reforms led the way for a comeback : if not to anything like the old Roman state, then to a nation that would be in the top rank of European powers for centuries to come. 

Failure is indeed not fatal... but success is equally not final. Perhaps a greater understanding of the structures of our own age would better help us make sense of the confusing omnishambles in which we find ourselves, but mere data alone is not enough to convey understanding. And in the end, nothing lasts forever.

Review : The Making the Middle Ages (I)

I picked up John Haywood's The Making Of The Middle Ages : An Atlas of Europe as a treat to myself for no particular reason at all. I'm pleased to say that once again, Thames & Hudson do not disappoint. Physically, this is an exceptional product of thick paper, outstanding print quality, more than enough maps that the "Atlas" subtitle is fully earned, and accompanied by insightful, analytical text that attempts to draw out the large-scale trends driving Europe in the period c.400 – 1000 A.D.

I have two small complaints about the text. First, there are a few throwaway comments that appear to be pure bunk. Nothing very substantial*, but it does distract somewhat. Second, the balance is a little off, concentrating a bit more on the Fall of the Roman Empire than in the actual birth of European nations : an extra fifty pages here would have solved this nicely.

* One is that Marcus Aurelius inexplicably broke a tradition of emperors appointing successors meritocratically rather than dynastically, which simply isn't true at all. Another is that Britain in the Dark Ages was indeed a grim, dark place, which is massive oversimplification at best. A third, more serious accusation is that the Vikings were purely piratical, but for that one, wait for the post(s) on Neil Price's PhD thesis.

Against this, the maps are outstanding. They are not just there for eye candy, but significantly enhance the text itself : at a glance, the points that Haywood describes become clear, and trends that are complex to present in text become obvious in map form. A further compensation is that Haywood takes a much more economic, materialistic approach to history than most popular historians. He looks for the reasons driving the shifting demographics and political boundaries beyond the personal choices made by the great and good, without neglecting the importance of individuals during pivotal moments.

The only logistical issue I can raise is that it would have been extremely helpful to have a more detailed contents with a full list of maps. A better epilogue with a more thorough synthesis of the broad narrative and conclusions would also have boosted this from the "excellent" to "truly outstanding" category. As it stands, I'd probably give it... 8.5/10. Not too shabby, that.

I doubt every piece of analysis here will survive the judgement of history, and nor should it. These kinds of theories are offerings, suggestions to be made for examination, not pronouncements about what really happened. Plenty of them, though, seem very good indeed. So let's dive into what makes this such an interesting read.

1) The Non-Decline Of The Roman Empire

Haywood's interpretation of the late stages of the Roman Empire is very different from the classical, "collapsing morality and deplorable loss of manly virtues" of Gibbon and other antiquarians. The Roman state, by the start of the fifth century, would not have been much recognisable to Julius Caesar, but only in the same way that modern Britain wouldn't be familiar to Henry VIII. The original J.C., had he found himself thrown forwards into the worlds of Stilicho and Aetius, would have had a lot of radical unfamiliarity and a monstrous dose of culture shock to deal with... but if he'd persevered, he'd have been able to understand the lineage. He's have been able to say, "yep, this isn't the Empire of my day, but it's still definitely the Roman Empire".

The crucial point here is that, as in earlier times, the organisations and systems of the later Empire fundamentally worked. The structural changes which had occurred were basically sensible, necessary, and beneficial, and the Empire remained an unquestionable superpower; Haywood is excellent at stressing all this in a way that's sometimes obscured in other histories. But this is not to say that things were optimal... far from it. 

The Empire had reached the innate limits of its maximum extent. For one thing, communication delays alone made further expansion hugely impractical, but worse was that the grandeur of the imperial throne – the allure of pretensions to world rule – made it chronically unstable. It might well have been possible to devise a better system of government and succession, but whether one could have actually been implemented is another matter entirely.  

So things were functioning, and showing no obvious signs of collapse : the underlying problems the Empire faced were real but subtle. Past historians were too unkind to say it was all corruption, incompetence and cowardice, but there really was something rotten in the state of Roman Europe. To understand what was going on will take a bit of explaining, so bear with me for a little while.

One of the best cases of "show, don't tell" in the book is the series of maps showing the Third Century Crisis and the Tetrarchy. Something that comes across very quickly in any reading of Roman history is just how unstable the Empire really was : in its ~500 years of development, the heartlands were truly secure for perhaps one century out of that. The rest of the time it was constantly being split apart and reformed by rebellious governors, seceding provinces, and the occasional invader. But what the maps here show is just how similar the temporary fragmentation was in both the Crisis and the Tetrarchy; quite possibly, as though one directly inspired the other. The four political blocs the Empire broke into are not quite the same in each case, but they're of such similar size and number that it's impossible to believe they're unconnected.

On paper, then, the Tetrarchy was a decent plan, aiming to maintain the Empire as a very real polity without making the thing an ungovernable, bloated monster; more a federation of mini-Empires than one gigantic behemoth. It would also, I suppose allow aspiring Emperors a career trajectory which would satisfy their ambitions without burdening them with the superhuman demands of running the whole thing. It might have worked (after all, the Empire had already naturally split along such lines of its own accord), had the system had enough time to make this a cultural norm rather than being immediately undone by the phenomenally energetic and ambitious Constantine.

But there were more basic economic problems which the Empire had to grapple with beyond political management. What Rome was essentially trying to do, post-Hadrian, was essentially a Utopian dream : a stable, self-sufficient system, relying primarily (though not entirely) on its own internal resources. This meant abandoning the idea not only of imperial expansion – it simply couldn't expand any further – but also of economic growth. Indeed, limiting expansion now put the Empire, if anything, on a reduced budget rather than merely on a fixed income. The only real way to increase growth with first millennium technology, says Haywood, was to increase population : without conquest, population growth ceased, and windfalls from ravaging the barbarians dried up completely.

But to give Rome its due, it actually managed to adapt to this remarkably well. Its reorganised army – substantially larger than during its expansionist phase – consisting of border garrisons and mobile field armies behind the lines was able to handle barbarian raids very effectively, for the most part. The larger army demanded higher taxes, but most of these were paid in kind (not cash) so the effect on the economy was significant but not crippling. Even incorporating the migrating barbarians into its own military was generally successful.

There were two other major factors which proved much more difficult to address. One was that the reorganised Empire become essentially a theocracy with extremely strong state control. Your taxes might not be unbearable but you absolutely had to pay them. This was a profoundly illiberal and hierarchical society which was definitely Not A Nice Place To Live. Survival without economic growth meant iron fiscal and social self-discipline. During economic growth, the Empire could reward its citizens; when it flatlined, it became more oppressive, demanding more of its citizens than it gave back in return. For the ordinary person, there was far less of the glory that was Rome and far more of the grudgingly-paid taxes that was Rome. Consequently, they weren't especially likely to rise up in support should some invader come knocking at the gates.

Worse, and related, it was stagnant*. Of technological development, which could have given economic growth, there was naught, nor were there any fiscal innovations beyond "adjust taxes". If the Empire's moral corruption and slide into decay probably owes more to Gibbonish rhetoric than reality, then it seems that it certainly didn't do anything for its own self-improvement either. It may not have been declining, but it certainly wasn't progressing.

* Haywood says several times, without any justification or explanation whatsoever, that it was a period of chronic population decline. This is something of an annoyance because he leans on this quite heavily, but on the face of it it seems unlikely.

My reading of Haywood on this point is that this is a significantly more nuanced version than that of Gibbon. In Gibbon's thundering yet ponderous rhetoric, the Empire became corrupt and decadent because its rule was given over to people who were just worse than their illustrious forebears, out of some tired cliché that everything just entropically decays over time. Haywood's version does away with the stupid fallacy that the rulers were "just worse people", explaining that yes, there was corruption, but the systems were reformed for very good reasons. The rot in the state of Rome was not so much morally decadent leadership as it was economic pressure and a lack of ability to innovate. It was politically and technologically stagnant, and economically on a slow but irresistible decline.

2) The Fall Of Rome

Stagnation played a real role in the Empire's eventual collapse, and in this sense, internal problems were not entirely an invention of Gibbon's fertile imagination. The wealthiest, says Haywood, could indeed escape taxation through bribery and corruption, while the poorest had no choice but to pay up. The economic basis of the empire was attacked to sustain its elite; it was, in a very real sense, eating itself. The topical nature of this particular bit of commentary would seem to be self-evident.

As of course is the stuff on immigration, with Haywood describing here a very interesting feedback loop. The Empire never achieved true self-sufficiency and economic independence, and its reliance on external economies was nowhere more apparent than along its vast borders. The highly developed artisans and workshops of Rome produced luxury goods that were a magnet to external barbarians (even when they weren't being pushed onwards by warring tribes behind them), who in turn supplied the Empire with food. The problem was that this meant the barbarians were increasingly Romanised without being incorporated : the wealth of the border regions encouraged migration there and thus, without allowing them citizenship, the result was inevitably raiding and incursions. Rome was experiencing a serious crisis of short-term thinking, its own economic gains coming at the cost of strengthening its enemies.

Ultimately, Haywood basically agrees with Peter Heather. The final Fall wasn't due to a systemic problem, even if that system was flawed and did need overhaul. It was more a case of being simply overwhelmed : Rome just did not have the resources to deal with the scale of the threats it now faced. Where I think he does need to strengthen his argument, however, is in the statistics... Haywood presents the barbarian forces as so outnumbered by the Romans that it becomes a wonder they ever achieved anything. A fuller, even more economic analysis of where the tax revenues of Rome actually went might not be as enthralling as the the last, desperate victories against the Huns, but it might be more illuminating.

Still, Haywood's maps charting the collapse are an outstanding resource. At a stroke, the scale of the problem becomes obvious. Roughly speaking, the end took about a generation. There isn't really a clear moment you can say "this was the day the western Empire fell", but the classical date of 476 AD isn't a bad one. 

What isn't evident from the maps alone – and perhaps what led to complacency – is why this time things were different. The initial territorial losses are clearly substantial and problematic, but not on a scale the Empire hadn't experienced before. The accompanying data and interpretation help explain what had changed. Rome's vassal kingdoms might not have seemed all that much of a deal in terms of pure territory, but they were kept subservient out of fear and respect. Once that was gone, once they realised that Rome was now a paper tiger, the final institutional collapse came very quickly. It was by no means a total breakdown of society, with some local institutions surviving longer after the central administration was lost, but the idea of Rome as a polity was ended.

Nor could it be revived. Justinian's reconquests were as economically unsustainable as the western Empire itself had become – in fact the situation was very much worse. The damage done to Italy meant that it was held by the east* as a fife by sheer military end economic force. For any armchair generals wondering if Rome could have been restored to its full glory through, say, better support of Belisarius, the answer must be a firm "no". The resources needed for this did not exist, nor could the conquest have become a self-sustaining process.

* Haywood has a nice comment that we probably can point to a clear moment when the eastern Roman Empire truly became the Byzantine Empire : the reign of Heraclius. At this point, sweeping institutional reforms, though much needed, were so radical that it became a genuinely different entity. Up until then, the east survived as very much a direct, natural evolution of its predecessor; it was indeed still the Roman Empire despite the loss of Rome. After this point it was something new, more an heir to Rome rather than its literal continuation.

There's important, much more general lessons in cherry-picking here. Sometimes people decry claims that "this time it'll be different" as a sort of fallacy. And indeed, looked at in some narrow ways, such as purely through maps, situations can appear remarkably similar, such that claiming any real differences can seem foolish. Haywood shows how this is dangerous, that while some data can be a useful guide, you have to consider the situation in its entirety. So if you want to claim that, say technological advancements won't put people out of work (or indeed the opposite), you might be right, but you can't limit your study to how previous changes enfolded – no matter how similar they might appear. You can't draw a correlation without looking at all the extraneous circumstances, examining all of the context in which previous changes happened.

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Phew ! So Rome did decline, albeit more slowly than sometimes described, and the decline by itself wasn't inevitably leading to collapse. It could have been arrested, but lacked the innovation and boldness needed to do so. The east managed it, reverting from a near-total collapse into a powerful European state that kept going (albeit with varying degrees of success) for another thousand years. In the concluding part, we'll look a bit more into this, as well as how the rest of Europe fared (especially Britain), as well as considering the underlying systems at work in more detail

Navigating the AI Hype And Hysterics

Back in the days when AI development meant working towards something like an artificial human, I had three rules to bear in mind when reading most popular articles on the subject : 

1. AI does not yet have the the same kind of understanding as human intelligence.
2. There is no guarantee rule 1 will always hold true.
3. It is not necessary to violate rule 1 for AI to have a massive impact, positive or otherwise, intentional or otherwise.

These were from the earliest days of LLMs when there were many other types of AI floating around in the popular press. Most AI stories were about whether AI was or could be conscious or not, a position most serious people have moved on from completely (though not quite all). The "rules" made sense as a way to keep perspective, to independently remind myself that the author might well have gotten carried away or missed their own point.

Given the massive developments in the last few years, I think it's time for an update. There's also a nice piece on Clearer Thinking which I think has a sensible take, especially if you want more practical advice.

Personally, I still have more than a little sense of wonder about the whole thing. Regardless of what AI is used for or who controls it, I just think it's an astonishing feat to essentially teach a rock to think. I find it somewhat dismaying, much as with skeptics of the space program, that the realisation of one of mankind's oldest dreams is being treated so often with cynicism and fear more than wonder and enthusiasm. It's as though everyone is focusing on the corrupt capitalism in Jurassic Park more than they are the reincarnation of freakin' dinosaurs. Still, for this very reason, if I might vainly hope to rekindle some sense of fascination in the more cynical reader, I should also try to temper my own admiration.

Here, then, are my offerings. I'll try to keep them neutral-ish, but you've been duly forewarned as to my own bias.

0) LLMs are not human

This should be a default presumption. When I say LLMs are thinking, reasoning, or understanding, I am not saying they do so in an entirely human-like way. While I think it's legitimate to say they do all of these things, the sense in which this is meant must be very carefully defined or else presumed to be linguistic shorthand. But to be direct, LLMs are not conscious, have no will, no desires of their own, no inner awareness, no coherent long-term memory, no personality, function differently according to their current context window, etc. etc. etc. 

In some narrow but important ways, they probably are doing something closely analogous to human thinking. In the right conditions, those similarities are fascinating, and we probably shouldn't dismiss LLMs as a dead-end in intelligence more broadly. But in more general ways, LLMs are absolutely nothing like humans. I get very frustrated when people dismiss LLMs out of hand because of their differences to human cognition when the similarities actually are interesting, but nevertheless, I completely agree with the basic premise that a net of linguistic probabilities doesn't count in any way as "alive".

1) The imperfect nature of AI does not render it useless

And the useful nature of AI does not render it perfect !

Much the most common flawed argument is rotten cherry-picking : focusing entirely on the mistakes that AI makes, especially the silly ones, and thereby extrapolating that it can't do anything at all – or at the very least that it's completely untrustworthy. Less common among my feeds is the opposite view, that because AI is able to do some incredibly complex analysis very well, it can be completely relied upon in all things, or at least that it's silly mistakes in simple problems are just not worth worrying about at all.

Both of these are wrong-headed. A better way to look at it might be for pessimists to say, "just because an AI isn't useful for me, it doesn't follow that it's of no use for anyone else". Conversely, the optimist's take would be, "just because I find AI useful, that doesn't mean that everyone else will necessarily do so as well".

The "jaggedness" of LLM-intelligence seems to cause people no end of strife. Sure, it can't understand some common sense things. So what ? All that should tell you is Rule 0 : that it isn't reasoning like a human. It does not tell you that its answers on more complex topics are therefore wrong. At most, it should act as a reminder to what's best practise in all situations : when something is important, you need to check any proposed solution from any source, rather than assuming blindly that the proffered answer is correct and immediately implementing it into your workflow.

A hilarious example : this case of ChatGPT showing blatant sycophancy in analysing a fart track as a serious musical composition. True, absolutely, it shouldn't do this. But to conclude that "your product sucks" is... I mean, I honestly don't understand this mentality at all*. 

* Although I do understand it as a joke, of course, and I laughed along with the ending. Here I'm criticising people who actually do think like this, of which their numbers appear to be legion. 

A much better, more nuanced take comes from this article on the use of AI in mathematics. Time was when LLMs couldn't even use a calculator, but that time is no more. Used correctly, they can be hella productive. It's worth reading that one in full – it covers the downsides quite nicely as well as the upsides – but the most interesting bit to me was the following :

The LLMs he spoke with inevitably made lots of mistakes, leading some mathematicians to dismiss them outright. Many researchers, he said, decide that if “everything it says is kind of wrong, I will just not talk to it.” But others — he puts himself in this camp — have a higher tolerance for “the pain of talking to this bullshitting model. They say, I can still get something out of this conversation; even if not every idea is good, I can ignore the bad ones and take the good ones.” And the mistakes, Schmitt noted, are weird ones: There is virtually no way that a person with any training in mathematics would make such a plethora of basic errors while also succeeding in coming up with subtle, original, and correct ideas.

Maybe LLMs annoy certain people because they're still thinking that they must be human-like to be useful, or are simply not prepared to accept anything except the smallest error rate : either they have to be fully human, or as perfect as a calculator, and anything in between constitutes an unacceptable uncanny valley. 

I personally have always preferred to use the AI output as inspirational more than authoritative, and with that sort of mindset, even GPT-3.5 could be quite useful. If you're looking for a Truth Engine, go home, but then... why did you ever believe there was any such authority anyway ? Why would you assume that human experts have an error rate of zero ? 

I think there's a lot of double standards being applied here. Apparently, people can accept that other people might sometimes be wrong without dismissing them entirely, but such errors in LLMs seem to render them as useless junk for some reason. I find it weird. I also find the opposite techbro mentality weird, mind you : just because some mistakes seem trivial doesn't mean they don't matter at all, and just because they're very good in some situtations, it doesn't follow they should be shoved into absolutely everything.

2) AI is used by real humans in the real world, including very stupid and very clever people

Following on from that, I think AI-skeptics should approach any AI article from the stance that a vast number of people do find using AI beneficial, and that they're not all deluding themselves. Conversely, those of us who are more optimistic should acknowledge that not every negative study is necessarily flawed, and that some concerns are motivated out of entirely sensible considerations based on human psychology rather than cynical views of the techbro ilk. The scale of AI adoption is vast, and it makes no sense to say that all these hundreds of millions of users aren't seeing any benefit at all, nor to dismiss the possibility of downsides from such a rapid, enormous uptake.

Two contrasting pieces : this one in The Conversation (a usually skeptical website) finds that most students aren't just using AI to do all their homework for them, but actively engage with its output and revise it according to their own needs. This is much my own approach : I almost always reword AI text (on the rare occasions I use it for text, which I dislike doing) to suit my own style, even if the AI version might sound better. Conversely, this piece in Ars Technica gives a detailed description of the problems AI has caused for teachers, with the temptation to simply go to an AI for the answer – even if the student then rewords the thing – being sometimes irresistible.

Quite honestly I don't know what to do about that. In school, we probably want to keep AI and maybe even computer use down to a minimum, with single-use devices like books, pencil and paper etc. being innately better at creating focus. It's always seemed to me that this trajectory is obvious : begin with training on the basics so you have a full, deep understanding of what's going on and can do it on your own, then gradually transition to using more and more learning aids like reference books and calculators and so on. In this way you move slowly into the real world, with a solid grounding in the fundamentals so you can make better use of all the productivity boosters everyone uses when they have to actually get stuff done for real. Keep exams device-free when necessary and that's all there is to it.

The difficulty with this is coursework. In principle, this is the best guide to how to use knowledge and skills in the real world. In the pre-LLM world it was relatively easy to set a task that couldn't be automated, and I personally always preferred this to examinations. Exams carry a weird kind of stress that isn't replicated in real life, whereas coursework can be done more at one's own pace. I preferred it and would have encouraged it to replace examinations as much as possible. But with LLMs in the picture, I honestly don't know what to do.

The only thing I can offer is to acknowledge that coursework is still a chore. I believe quite strongly in a work-life balance, and the need to continue working outside of working hours is something I always found depressing : even when it's something I enjoy doing, I dislike being compelled to do it during what seems like it should be my own personal time, even when I can largely set my own schedule. So I wouldn't want to knee-jerk to "students are cheating" here* : they're doing exactly what the rest of us are doing, a perfectly natural reaction to avoiding things they'd rather not do.

* Indeed, some of my students would probably benefit from using LLMs a lot more to polish their language. 

Maybe the only solution here is, as with multi-functional devices, to take them away. Give students a good working environment where they can go at any time for coursework in which LLM-use is absolutely restricted... I don't know. 

Using AI definitely isn't something we should allow to be complete free-range in all situations for all people, but at the same time, it definitely isn't something we should strangle at birth either. While I think the suicide/murder stories are not something worth taking very seriously – there are hundreds of millions of users, and if AI was a causal factor in this, then violence would already have skyrocketed – there are definite concerns about over-use and the degradation of critical thinking and suchlike. I just think that while it might have negative effects on some, this does not automatically offset the positive benefits for others. Cherry-picking on either side isn't helpful.

3) This is the worst it will ever be

Finally, even quite recently I would have said that AI could never do a whole bunch of things it's now reasonably competent at. How far this is going to progress is a matter of debate, but while I find this video to be largely hyperbole, it has one outstanding point : if we're not good at intuiting exponential progress, we're even worse at understanding S-curve exponentials. That is, development follows an exponential trajectory but only by averages. Sometimes there can be protracted periods – months or more – when development plateaus or increases only slowly, but these are followed by short periods of enormous breakthroughs. 

Thus far the pattern has held every time the nay-sayers have insisted that AI development is hitting a wall. The CEO of Microsoft (for whatever that's worth, which is not much but not nothing) says that there's no sign of this happening in the foreseeable future, while if you follow AI news, you'll know that there are plenty of other avenues under investigation for advancement beyond raw computing power.

The takeaway from this one is simple : to say that "AI can't do this and therefore it's useless to me" is a largely vacuous statement. There is absolutely no guarantee that it won't be able to what you need in the (very) near future. Some things will likely take longer than others, but realistically, nothing is off the cards. Full automation even for the most complex of jobs looks like a real possibility, and some of the seeming hype is worth taking seriously. To pretend that we're still in the era of GPT-3.5 is not at all sensible, and to "hope" that development will somehow just stop here is scarcely any better.

Whether you think that this will be a good thing or not is another matter. If you think that LLMs thus far have been generally positive, presumably you think that further advances will be more of the same. Conversely, if you think they're been detrimental, you probably don't want to see them continue. Neither is correct : if AI use thus far has been generally positive, it does not follow that further developments cannot be problematic; equally, and conversely, if AI has been harmful thus far, it does not follow that future developments must inevitably be more of the same.

My point is that it's so easy to pick and choose whatever set of stories you want to support your position, whereas reality is likely more complex than either. If we can predict how LLMs will advance for at least the next few years, predicting what humans will do with them is another matter entirely : here I would tend to side with the cynics much more than the techbros, even I think they're hardly going in to usher some kind of apocalypse. Reaching for the heuristics of "I dis/like what's happened so far, so we can expect more of the same in the future", is, however, simply not good enough, especially in this most non-linear of development trajectories.

---

That's my take then. That LLMs aren't human doesn't mean they're useless, nor are they perfect or their mistakes inconsequential. Neither the benefits nor the downsides can be taken to completely offset the other and cherry-picking from either perspective is a trap which is perilously easy to fall into. Accounting for how people, both those who do and don't understand their operation, actually use them, is already a mixed bag, and predicting what comes next is only going to get harder even though we can actually make quite a reasonable extrapolation as to future LLM performance abilities. Critiquing LLMs for current shortcomings is valid, but it's worth getting some perspective and realising they have already made truly astonishing gains, and insisting that current problems are unsolvable just lacks any common sense. 

The future is coming whether we want it to or not, and to try and force everyone who benefits from it to put it back in the bottle even for those who are genuinely badly affected by it... is just not a realistic expectation of humanity. LLMs are not truth engines, but they are certainly powerful thinking engines of a sort, which can no more be stopped than the rise of steam power. Whether they will have the same degree of impact I don't know, I still tend towards thinking probably not, or at least not yet, but one thing I am confident on is that to dismiss them entirely is just not a sensible thing at all.

Review : Galileo's Daughter (II)

Welcome back to the concluding part of my review-summary of Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter. In part one I covered how Galileo was a prodigious polymath, something which often gets lost in the simplified "he was imprisoned for teaching that the Sun goes around the Earth" version of events. I also looked briefly at Galileo as a man, ending with how for him, the idea of a conflict between natural inquiry and holy doctrine barely made sense. 

In this second part, I'll begin with these now largely estranged viewpoints didn't pose a problem for Galileo's own philosophy, but then how this came into such prominent conflict with the Church. I'll end with a look at whether Sobel's own interpretation – that the problem was not one of a clash of world views – is really correct.

3) Galileo the Philosopher

Galileo, says Sobel, believed that God revealed truths through two books. One of these was Holy Scripture, which could never be wrong, but could be misinterpreted and wasn't intended to be taken literally. The second was nature itself, "this grand book the Universe". Observation was truth and could never be wrong. Where the two appeared in conflict, ultimately nature must prevail, and scripture recognised to be symbolic :

"Holy Scripture and Nature are both emanations from the divine word : the former dictated by the Holy Spirit, the latter the observant executrix of God's commands."

Key here is that while Galileo might be somewhat morally flexible, he really seems to have believed this. Nor was this an unusual or even unorthodox view. While Galileo himself popularised the famous quote that the Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go... the original source was no less than a Cardinal ! Indeed, the book is replete with high-ranking Church officials endorsing Galileo's work with some enthusiasm, and until the moment of the publication of the famous Dialogue, it would be hard to see him as being anything other than on the best of terms with the Church fathers. 

Not everyone, it's true, was a fan, but the overwhelming nature of his detractors appears to have been one of envy. There might be a smattering of religious fanaticism here and there, but Galileo himself dismissed this as mere "pretended religion", a means to an end, not a sincere belief at all.

This view of nature as the work of God led to a total rejection of the idea of intelligent design. He offers an argument for accepting uncertainty and rejecting the exalted status of mankind which is at once both theological and scientific :

"When I am told that an immense space interposed between the planetary orbits and the starry sphere would be useless and vain, being idle and devoid of stars, and that any immensity going beyond our comprehension would be superfluous for holding the fixed stars, I say that it is brash for our feebleness to attempt to judge the reason for God's actions, and to call everything in the universe vain and superfluous which does not serve us."

In other words, we might not understand why or how God operates, but that damn well doesn't mean we can't observe the world he's made, or reject it because it disagrees with our ideas about how it should be. He continues :

"I believe that one of the greatest pieces of arrogance, or rather madness, that can be thought of is to say, 'Since I do not know how Jupiter or Saturn is of service to me, they are superfluous, and even do not exist*'. Because, o deluded man, neither do I know how my arteries are of service to me, nor my cartilages, spleen or gall; I should not even know that I had a gall, or a spleen, or kidneys, if they had not been shown to me in many dissected corpses."

* While the majority response seems to have been one of awe, a few people had indeed refused to even look through Galileo's telescope. 

Practically minded as he was, he was also thinking of the philosophical implications of what he was doing and his methodology. While he was clear that experiment and observation had the last word, he used thought experiments as guides. For example, when considering whether heavier objects fall faster, he imagined two objects merging in mid-fall to ask whether their speed would then spontaneously increase. Although the notion of gravity evaded him, he at least considered the basis of relative motion, imagining that if you dropped a ball when pulled along on a moving platform, the ball would still keep moving forwards as it fell. In understanding why 45 degrees was the optimum angle to maximise the range of a projectile, he wrote :

"To understand why this happens far outweighs the mere information obtained by the testimony of others or even by repeated experiment."

I like this argument very much. When you understand the reason for something, you can predict what will happen in new situations. You've gained a fundamental insight into how the world works, even, in sense, a measure of control over it. Pure data collection and observation are sometimes an underrated part of the scientific process (likened unflatteringly to stamp collecting), but ultimately this kind of understanding is the nugget of shining gold we're all searching for. This is the epitomy of the scientific endeavour, not to merely quantify the world, but to understand it at the deepest level the human mind allows.

Galileo even came up with an argument that would presage Wigner by several centuries, recognising that the Universe did indeed follow mathematical laws – in sharp contradiction to Aristotle's silly view that the world was just more complicated than that :

"Just as the accountant who wants his calculations to deal with sugar, silk and wool must discount the boxes, bales, and other packings, so the mathematical scientist, when he wants to recognise in the concrete the effects he has proved in the abstract, must deduct any material hinderances; and if he is able to do that, I assure you that things are in no less agreement than are arithmetical computations. The trouble lies, then, not in abstractness or concreteness, but with the accountant who does not know how to balance his books."

Here was a true, practical philosopher*. He saw no contradiction between science and religion and indeed saw his work as revealing the glory of god : "To imagine an infinite universe was merely to grant almighty God his proper due". There were, of course, those who disagreed. Some did so out of envy and jealously, some out of sheer stupidity. And one, in particular, seems to have done so, if we have to reduce it to a single cause, out of an insistence on authoritarian control. Belief in a deity itself was never the cause of the strife, but the need to assert power over others has an awful lot to answer for.

* What's especially fascinating to me is how some other philosophical arguments of this and earlier eras are incredibly sophisticated, yet the practical, natural philosophy remained stuck in an age of astonishing stupidity. This is quite the reverse of the common tendency to proclaim that our intellect gets ahead of our morality. Maybe this is true today, but for the longest time, our practical understanding was incredibly slight and completely outpaced by moral philosophy – if not by how we actually treated each other in reality.

4) Galileo the Criminal

Pope Urban VIII was a cunt. He wasn't the only cunt, and he didn't start out being such a cunt, and he certainly wasn't one of the stupid cunts like what we have nowadays, but nevertheless, he had a nasty, vindictive streak, was thin-skinned, and didn't like to back down in the face of a challenge. He was, I say again, a cunt.

Galileo had a tendency to sail close to the wind, to push the boundaries of what the Church would allow. He also had a healthy fear of being ostracised, and in the face of censure and censorship, he usually backed down. He consistently tried very hard, however, to pre-empt this, discussing his ideas with high-ranking members of the clergy before publishing them and always (until the very end) doing everything through the proper channels. He was personally friends with many high-ranking members of the Church, most of whom praised him for his wonderful discoveries of all kinds, and on good terms with the Pope himself. So how did it all go so suddenly and catastrophically wrong ?

The initial dispute in 1616 was relatively mild. Heliocentrism wasn't deemed heretical, but the Church required it to be discussed as a hypothesis, not fact. The Church, in the wake of the Reformation, was not feeling terribly secure, but Galileo was given personal assurances that his minor infraction hadn't damaged his high standing : he just had to be a bit more careful in the future, but everyone still thought he was the bee's knees.

More problematic was the business of interpreting the Bible. The problem with not taking Scripture as literal truth meant that both sides argued with each other as to whose interpretation was correct, and worse, who got to interpret the interpretations. The Church was moving in a direction of declaring itself the sole authority as to who was allowed to do this, which made Galileo's personal attempts at theology dangerous. Galileo, in contrast, was seeking to save the Church from itself, knowing that while the evidence for heliocentrism was not yet irrefutable – arguments were genuinely lacking, especially a theory of gravity for how it would all work – the time was coming when it would be proved with certainty, and to maintain denial would cause the Church to be ridiculed. People would, quite literally, lose faith.

But for the next 16 years or so, Galileo kept his work to himself and close colleagues. Only after much effort, seeking assurances from multiple clergy, and sending it through the Papal-approved publication censors and channels, did he submit a much more elaborate discussion. Initially, it was received with all the applause Galileo was accustomed to. Only when Pope Urban got wind of it did things go very quickly south.

What seems to have happened was a confluence of factors all making the Pope more of a cunt than usual. As well as the Reformation, he was feeling personally insecure due to accusations of not defending the faith with sufficient vigour. Galileo's detractors, recognising the early censure* of heliocentrism, sensed a chance to bring him low, and they seized upon it in full force. The Pope never read the 500 pages himself – all he heard was the filtered version from Galileo's enemies.

* With just two very small amendments and insertions required by the Church, the stronger term of "censorship" hardly seems appropriate. This was scarcely more than the actions of modern-day broadcast regulators, albeit applied to an arena which is out of bounds to the Inquisition's modern-day counterparts.

What the Pope heard was partly correct and partly an egregious distortion. It was true that Galileo was openly supporting heliocentrism as fact, not hypothesis. Technically he had fully complied with all the directives, but in practise, nobody reading it would ever come away with the impression the geocentrism remained a valid theory. At his trial, he bowed completely to the pressure – there was never any famous "and yet it moves !" defiance from a by now frail old man – and pretended that he actually fully believed in the Ptolemaic model, saying that maybe he'd once considered heliocentrism an interesting alternative but no more than that. He maintained that his work was not intended to promote the heliocentric model in any way. He presented a document that he believed gave him full license to consider it hypothetically, but none of this was enough to satisfy the more belligerent Inquisitors (although only 7/10 signed the final verdict) or the Pope himself... who was, of course, a cunt.

Why do I labour this point ? Because Urban never even read the document, yet doubled down on his wrath. He eventually had Galileo moved, not out of kindness so he could be closer to his daughter, but because his ostensible gaolkeeper was actually treating him as more of an honoured guest, receiving many visitors for scientific discussions. Far worse, Urban had all of his existing (and future) works banned from further printing : a wholly mean-spirited and petty thing to do, an action of pure spite given that half of Europe had already read them. 

The part that seemed to personally wind him up was that Galileo had used some of his favourite arguments to favour heliocentrism... or at least, this is how things are usually described, but really this is a bit too simple. The fuller version is more subtle.

In an earlier essay, Galileo had written an analogy that was pleasing to both scientist and theologian alike, a story of a man who goes around looking to understand the various ways in which animals produce sounds. He learns a great deal, but eventually finds one which doesn't fit any of theories, so realising that the omnipotence of God is greater than he can imagine. Man can learn much, the fictional investigator realises, but the full wonders of the Universe are beyond human comprehension. 

This argument "delighted Urban", and so Galileo used it in the dialogue (as he was instructed to do) for the debater who prefers geocentrism. At the end, he concedes that the magnificence of God is such that he might be wrong, and that God might indeed allow a heliocentric universe. Together with the others conceding that they cannot offer certain proof of heliocentrism, this was enough for the document to pass muster for publication. It all feels very delicate and respectable, and not at all the case of "Galileo made fun of the Pope" which even today is how it's written in some popular descriptions. Rather it seems thoroughly intellectual and nuanced.

What marks Urban as a complete cunt is that he swallowed the argument that Galileo was mocking him without ever bothering to check. He was willing to fine him and sentence him to life imprisonment – Galileo was even threatened with torture – all on the basis of what other people said, despite having been on such personally good terms with the man until almost that very moment. He would have undone all his life's works without ever even trying to check if he was being fed the correct interpretation of what Galileo had actually written. Why he did this is, sadly, the missing piece of the argument, but the result, of course is history.

Conclusions

The censorship of the Catholic Church was indefensible by modern standards, but its importance has been massively exaggerated by New Atheists. Neither Galileo nor Copernicus (who was never branded a heretic) were seeking any conflict with the Church or to undermine religion, but they did have a different approach to theological inquiry. For them, studying the natural world revealed the handiwork of God and was literally incapable of contradiction with holy writ, with the Scriptures subject to human error and therefore subservient to observation. 

For those like Pope Urban, it was not quite that the situation was reversed. It was more that he believed that God was not bound even by human imagination, that God could, if he wanted, commit something logically inconsistent like creating a rock so heavy he couldn't lift it. Whereas Galileo might see God as bound to create things which were ordered and harmonious, Urban imposed no such restrictions.

Galileo also offered an argument of cosmic economics. Whereas the Ptolemaic system offered Earth an exalted central status, but at the same time made it degenerate and changeable, Galileo said that its rarity in the heavens – not its immutability or position – made it valuable. Morality and cosmology were linked, and so Galileo made clever arguments to overturn the Ptolemaic framework on this front too. But the weight of history was perhaps here against him, and worse was the Church's increasing zeal to control information.

And this, I think, is the really interesting discrepancy between Galileo and his detractors. It's not at all about science versus religion in the highest, abstract sense : belief in deities is orthogonal to belief in what those deities happen to do or what they require of humans, and says nothing in itself about how they chose to order the world. It might be fairer to compare science to academia and religions to the Church, human institutions pitted against one another rather than their ideals. And at the heart of it seems a strongly illiberal desire amongst the Church – not the religion – to dictate what is true. 

I always remember hearing a well-known scientific contrarian declare, for no real reason at all, that "at some point you've got to make a decision", that is, to declare what the answer is so that everyone else can move forward. For the scientific consensus this is exactly what you mustn't ever do. Consensus is only successfully forged from independent findings, and only achieves its strength precisely because everyone has worked so hard to pull it down and failed. The idea that anyone gets to decide what's True, to tell everyone else what they have to believe, is anathema to the whole project. 

As scientists, we can only offer evidence and arguments; as humans, we can certainly try and persuade because we think that believing the truth as we see it will be of benefit to others. What we cannot ever do is to Declare Truth. Once we decide on truth by authority, we have lost the path of righteous truth-seeking and fallen into a need for power. The need to control others, for them to believe specific things even when the alternatives are completely harmless... that's what was at work with Urban. That's, I think, the "one trial of Galileo" that was really going on beneath the surface accusations.

It's what we see today among many fanatics, both of religious ilk but also the weirder segments of the political ideologues. To brand all the religious as being unthinking dolts as the New Atheists would have it is to catastrophically miss the point : what we should be fighting against is not spiritual beliefs, but the the illiberal ideas that we must impose our ideas on everyone else, to control rather than convince, to declare rather than discuss. In this age where one political side appears to be degenerating into ever more incoherent fascist farce, maintaining this liberal view is increasingly difficult. But if we can't accept that other people are perfectly entitled to hold stupid but harmless beliefs, then what are we even struggling for ? 

Review : Galileo's Daughter (I)

There was only one trial of Galileo, although legends often speak of two... There was only one trial of Galileo, and yet it seems there were a thousand – the suppression of science by religion, the defence of individualism against authority, the clash between revolutionary and establishment, the challenge of radical new discoveries to ancient beliefs, the struggle against intolerance for freedom of thought and freedom of speech. No other process in the annals of canon or common law had ricocheted through history with more meanings, more consequences, more conjectures, more regrets.

Today, a look at Dava Sobel's magisterial Galileo's Daughter. First published in 1999, this was one of the books from an unread stockpile I bought back with me from my last trip home.

I can only find two real weaknesses with this book, both minor. It's a little weirdly undefined in its goals in the first couple of chapters or so, making the pace a feel just a little bit off. It would have helped a little to spell out what the book was going to be about, especially because of the title. We hear almost nothing of the eponymous daughter until a hundred pages in, and even thereafter, she's not really the focus at all.

Not that this matters. What the book actually is is a biography of Galileo, focusing heavily on his conflict with the Inquisition. The central thesis is that while this might have been a conflict between an academic and the Church, by no means was this a clash between science and religion. Along the way we get an in-depth look at Galileo the man, particularly drawing on letters from his daughter, but also plenty of theological and philosophical insights. 

If she fails to give a clear mission statement of what the book is supposed to be, Sobel nevertheless manages to balance things perfectly. The book is not one word too long or too short. We get enough background to Galileo's life to understand the trial in its full context without losing focus; enough detail on the trial itself to understand how things proceeded without getting into unnecessary minutiae; enough of the aftermath to follow the consequences without losing sight of Galileo the man. We get all the core philosophical arguments, all the essential subtle differences between the views of Galileo and his detractors, presented in a clear and unbroken narrative flow. Overall, I think I have to give this one 9/10.

I cannot possibly give a summary that retains Sobel's narrative without still being many thousands of words long. So instead, let's try the usual thematic approach, gradually building up to the all-important trial which has become so (arguably) spuriously emblematic of the conflict between science and religion. In this first part, I'll look at Galileo's other achievements outside astronomy and his character as a person. In part two, I'll cover his philosophical approach to scientific inquiry and his conflict with the Church.

1) Galileo the Polymath

Perhaps the first thing that becomes apparent is that Galileo was no one-hit-wonder. To be honest this is something I should have been more aware of, but while I knew something of Galileo's astronomy, I had only vague impressions of his experiments on motion, and I knew nothing at all about his more practical skills.

Here Galileo is revealed to be a true renaissance man, a veritable polymath to rival Da Vinci except for his lack of artistic achievements. He possibly could have gone down this route – his father was a musician and his own drawings of the Moon are of extremely high quality – but he seems to have preferred to have concentrated firmly on science and engineering. His more creative tendencies were reserved for his public outreach activities and tending to his garden. And this is no bad thing, since, unlike Da Vinci, he left little unfinished. His interests were wide-ranging, and yet he seemed to have no issue with taking years to complete his projects : not to say that he wanted things to take this long, but he wouldn't get distracted along the way. If he was ever derailed, then it wasn't by choice, and he'd almost always eventually pick up where he left off.

Galileo's most famous non-astronomy work is surely dropping cannonballs off the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Sobel is careful is her framing here of this "legendary" experiment, but in the text as written, it sounds very much as though he actually did do this, and much earlier in his career than in the more carefully-documented case of rolling balls down an inclined plane. Still, he wrote with some bitterness that while the larger ball did beat the smaller, the point was that they don't fall at anything like the same speed, as Aristotle had claimed : his detractors were completely missing the point. "Speaking of my tiny error", he wrote, they "remain silent about his enormous mistake".

He would tackle more minor but important problems throughout his life. In Venice he was granted a patent on an irrigation device, and while under house arrest much later in life, he prepared a practical demonstration to explain why a recent bell-casting had failed in spectacular fashion. For income, he was partly supported by the sale of his own geometric calculating compass : a sort of elaborate slide-rule for a wide variety of mathematical calculations. Whilst conducting his early observations of the heavens, he also showed, as a side project, that objects float because of their density and not their shape as the prevailing wisdom dictated*, thus overturning centuries of conventional wisdom by having some bloody common sense.

* There was an odd belief that ice was actually heavier than water, which is something so easy to test that it just seems bizarre that nobody ever checked it.

Perhaps the most impressive Galilean spin-off came later. During his experiments on acceleration with inclined planes, he developed standardised measurements to ensure he was making fair comparisons between data points. This was in itself a monumental breakthrough. First, that he came up with a practical method to reach the precision and accuracy needed, but secondly, that the concept of standardised measurements simply didn't exist. This was a profoundly non-mathematical world, and while the mentality of those in the distant past can be startlingly similar to our own, in other ways it can be shocking in its most fundamental differences. Galileo played no small role in changing that. And finally, he did this in his old age while in chronic ill health. So much for the idea that scientific revolutions are the province of the young... In his rigorously quantitative approach, Galileo would surely appreciate the cliché that age really is just a number.

Oh yes, and he also invented the microscope. Janus-like, he looked both to world above and below, and if he spent more time on the firmament than terra firma, this seems to have been merely a matter of happenstance. Galileo appears to have been very much the right man at the right time : he had the practical skills needed to develop the instruments and the mindset to appreciate just how radical his discoveries really were. As he himself wrote with no false modesty :

"I render infinite thanks to God for being so kind as to make me alone the first observer of marvels kept hidden in obscurity for all previous centuries... four planets never seen from the beginning of the world right up to our day."

Through some admittedly blurry images from crude glass, Galileo's discoveries would change the world. Small wonder that not everyone approved. With the simplest of devices and an image quality that still left much to be desired, he was proposing nothing less than a total restructuring of reality.

2) Galileo the man

But before we get carried away, it's worth a brief look at the character of Galileo. The figure that emerges from Sobel's telling is a genius and generally a good egg by the standards of his day. He seems to have been extremely generous to his family, sparing what little income he had (in his early days) to support them with enthusiasm rather than reluctance. 

But he was not much of a social radical. True, he wrote a rather bawdy poem bemoaning the fact that his scholarly toga wouldn't let him visit brothels (we've all had that problem), but he also put his daughters in convents and didn't marry his partner as this was just not the done thing for scholars at the time. Which also reveals that even this most Catholic of countries could, and did, easily find ways around the rules when it suited them. It was never a case of the Church having absolute control over people's lives, which is purely the stuff of myth.

The advantage of Sobel's biography is to set Galileo's work in the context of his personal life. In many scientific histories, it's easy to think of them as pathologically obsessed with research : this Galileo is, instead, a real person with real person things to do. We follow his surprisingly mobile career in institutes in towns across Italy, his chronic ill health (making it all the more impressive that he reached 77 years of age by the time of his death), his love for his family along with his (very) occasional chastisements. We see him being delighted to send them fruit and exasperated when they turn up en masse for a while in his rather modest accommodations; the embarrassment of his daughter on learning that "buffalo eggs" were actually a type of cheese is still palpable after more than three centuries.

What emerges is, as you might expect, a complex character. He was famously entertaining and flamboyant, and could use this in the most obsequious terms of flattery when seeking a patron. He seems to have a real need to be liked by people as well as persuade them of his ideas, but also (like many exuberant promoters) was quite willing to offend. Although generally quite careful in what he wrote, he would sometimes deliberately tread on people's toes if they disagreed with him. He definitely seems to have had an arrogant streak that was perhaps the source of his rhetorical flair, but it was hardly unjustified : he really had seen things that nobody had seen before and contemplated them in ways undreamt of.

But he also seems to have been something of an egalitarian and favoured a meritocratic approach to education. He worked under the patronage system and adopted university dress codes only insofar as he could not avoid them, preferring more casual attire whenever possible. He wrote his outreach dialogues in Italian, not Latin, having a genuine belief that this would be of benefit to the common man and not just to the scholarly elite. If he does seem to nonetheless have enjoyed being one of the elite, he definitely valued learning wherever he found it. He does not appear to have been especially concerned with fighting culture wars or calling for any sort of social reform. He would help people when he could, but doesn't seem to have contemplated any structural changes to society – though he did have some very definite ideas about where the Church was going wrong theologically.

Perhaps his biggest contradiction was that he was willing the bend the rules and outright lie in the interests of the greater truth. In this we must allow two things : first, that most of us will probably try to save our own skins ahead of sticking to our principles, and that parts of the Church were most certainly corrupt. "No-one has spoken with more piety or with greater zeal for the Church than I", he wrote. Yet when necessary, he also called his own work, "merely a poetical conceit, or a dream... this fancy of mine... this chimera." His beliefs were sincere, but his approach was flexible.

Galileo knew he was right and the Church was wrong, and that in his mind, suppression of his ideas was harmful to everyone – including the Church. If he had to lie about what he really believed in order to publish it, then so be it. If he had to take desperate measures in publishing them in the protestant Netherlands, and then proclaiming in transparently ridiculous terms that he had no idea how that happened, then he was surely justified in doing so. Sticking rigidly to his principles and telling the Church where to shove it might have been a heroic stance to take, but Galileo was no hero... and it would have been profoundly unwise. Galileo was right and the Church was wrong, but as we shall see, this is not at all the same as the claim that science and religion were at odds. In Galileo's own mind, such a thing was not even possible. 

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In part two, we'll move on to see how Galileo had no issues in reconciling science and religion, and indeed the very idea of a conflict was barely imagined. Nor was he alone in his theological happiness, with his views being widely shared amongst the upper echelons of the Church. Naturally, then, we'll conclude with a look at how, despite everyone being one big happy god-fearing family, everything went so catastrophically wrong for a man so used to widespread acclaim and admiration. 

Review : The Damned

In the midst of reading Neil Price's Phd thesis-book The Viking Way, I happened to stumble upon this 2024 movie by someone I've never heard of. I'm going to review this one for no particular reason, and there's every possibility this will be among the least consequential things I ever write.

Even so, fair warning : this review will contain detailed spoilers. There's just no way I can go on the rant I want to go on without giving the whole game away, so I won't try. Be further advised that this isn't a movie I actually care about in the slightest, and while it may appear otherwise in what follows below, this is only for the sake of hyperbole. In fact, despite everything, the movie left a lingering sense of "that was rather good, actually."

SPOILER-FREE BIT : In terns of production quality this is downright slick. Set somewhere in the icy north of the 19th century, the cinematography is excellent. The costumes are top quality, the acting is on point, and the pacing is just right – likely a bit slow for some, but right for the story in my opinion. The extraneous dialogue is enough to give the characters some depth without feeling tacked-on, and generally everything fits together pretty harmoniously. It's a solid setup for a horror movie : good atmosphere, sensible enough characters, a decent premise. Good job, team !

The plot revolves around a small group of fishermen led by a woman who inherited her husband's business. One day a ship goes down and they find a group of apparently desperate, almost rabid survivors. In their immediate rush to escape (fearing their own small boat will capsize), our protagonists are forced to kill one of them, who sinks into the blackness.

Throughout the rest of the movie, our characters are increasingly concerned and divided over the possibility that the dead man has become a draugr bent on revenge. Full marks for bringing this under-used bit of folklore to the world of cinema, and the resulting character conflicts are well done. Some are convinced from the off that it's a draugr, some initially aren't, but rarely does disagreement becoming anything unbelievable. Character interactions remain fundamentally normal, rather than the usual "let's immediately set everyone at each other's throats" approach which many movies are apt to do. No, here things might get argumentative, but there are no challenges to authority, and breaches of trust, no disagreement that goes beyond the bounds of reconciliation. 

It's a welcome change from the usual stock movie script. About the only minor thing I could pick up on in the preliminary stages of the film is that though it's certainly creepy, it's not really very scary. It's well-executed, but somehow needs to induce just a bit more fear in the audience.

What I haven't mentioned are the reasons our plucky band are concerned about the draugr. For that, I'm afraid I have to go into spoilerville. Stop reading now to avoid disappointment, unless you don't care about such things.

SPOILERS GALORE : We get a host of clues that there's a draugr afoot, not all of them definite. Actually the movie builds this theme up quite nicely, with initially just one older lady (Helga) convinced they're being haunted. Most of the rest disagree, but they respect her, and don't treat her with disdain. She puts up charms to guard against both spiritual and physical attacks, saying that the draugr can invade also the mind as well as being a creature of flesh and blood that can bash your head it. People argue about this, but nobody does the obviously-stupid movie trope of removing the harmless bundles of wood that she thinks will provide a supernatural defence.

And we get some nice bits of draugr-lore and a slow, well-constructed development : one of the fishermen chants a creepy draugr-rhyme in his sleep, and the leader (Eva) begins to see visions of the draugr in her room and around the camp. In most cases, it's clear that this are only visions, with the draugr disappearing when interrupted. Only in the first sighting are things more ambiguous, with the creature appearing outside hunched in the snow, coming towards her but then again disappearing from view once she finds someone else : here we can't tell if the draugr has literally vanished or has just run out of view.

There are much more concrete signs of the draugr though. After nearly exhausting their food supply, our unfortunate band finally have a good catch and their larder is resupplied – enough to feed all half-dozen of them for some considerable time. But the next morning it's all gone. Bits of fish, especially the heads, lie strewn about the landscape. Helga goes missing and is eventually found dead, frozen upright in a kneeling position. One of the coffins of the men they buried from the ship is found opened and empty (the lid placed back with the nails on top), with the others still containing bodies. And two of the crew go insane, one almost murdering another until he's forcibly removed by means of a hammer (resulting in his death) while another gets stabby and then slits his own throat. These men have been worried, but quite sane and amicable right up until their final moments.

At last we have the Final Showdown between Eva and the draugr. He confronts her in the house in a rather good creepy sequence where he slowly comes down the stairs and she hides under a table, and all we see is that his clothing is surprisingly smart. But then we see his hideous and ruined face, which she blasts with a shotgun and then burns the whole place to the ground with alcohol, knowing that only fire can stop a draugr.

Except... then we see a new sequence. It turns out it wasn't a draugr at all, just one of the Basque men from the ship that went down. She's actually just murdered an innocent man who explains (in language translated for the audience only) that he's very sorry for stealing all the fish. All his horrifying attributes are only in his her mind. Instead of a terrifying supernatural corpse sustained by hate and a love of cruelty, the real monsters turn out to be work-related stress and casual racism.

Look, this is a good idea. It's a clever twist on the more typical "rational people turn out to be dogmatic and wrong" plot, but the execution makes no sense. This means the ending, in the space of a few seconds, instantly undoes all the hard work the rest of the movie has done in bringing us to the final confrontation.

If this had been an episode of Uncanny, I'd have found myself on Team Believer. True, not everything here requires a supernatural explanation, and some events can indeed be explained by stress, hunger, and fear of the unknown. The problem is that there are massive unexplained holes here which should have been explained : tell me it's a magical monster and I'll believe it, but ask me to accept that the explanation is rational and I'm damn well going to go looking for rational explanations. Without suitably clever explanations as to how everyone could be so mistaken about things which seemed completely inexplicable, it feels like the writer is being extremely lazy. It would be a bit like if a Scooby Doo episode ended with, "nope it definitely wasn't a ghost" and nothing else.

For example, how has this single man escaped the shipwreck ? Actually back up a bit, why were he and all his comrades lurking in a tiny, sinister, damp cave on the island rather than being on the surface trying to attract attention ? Why, after just one day on the island, did they rush the small boat by jumping into the icy water ? Sure, they're desperate, but this is asking a bit much.

Worse is how that one guy gets off the island to the mainland, a distance which appears to be several miles. If they had their own boat they'd have already used it, so this by itself shoots a massive hole in the subsequent plot. There is absolutely no reason to expect that any survivors could possibly have made it to shore.

Then there's the fish. Sure, he's hungry, but we see enough fish to feed a small group for many days at once. This guy has stolen all of them, single handed, and scattered their filleted remains across the land, has he ? Not bloody likely. And are any of the leader's visions of him real ? If so, then he did a pisspoor job of trying to appear non-threatening, even if hunger and fear are working in her mind to make him appear worse than he is.

Of course we also have the frozen-solid Helga. Sure, someone might wander off and get lost. But frozen in a kneeling position looks a lot more like "work of demonic entity" than "unfortunate case of misdirection". Similarly, I believe that people in this situation could go insane and turn against each other, but not in the way it's portrayed here. You aren't going to go into murder-suicide mode almost instantly : again, that feels far easier to explain as possession or malign influence than the flawed nature of humanity.

Worst of all is that missing corpse. Where's it gone ? Who's stolen it ? Not Helga, presumably, being an old woman. So the Basque sailor ? Why, what's he going to do with it ? Why has he un-nailed a coffin and not re-sealed it ? Where did he put the body ? Why just that one and not the others ? Did he have to open all the others first, and where did he get the hammer ? Did he politely put it back after his inexplicable grave-robbery, or did he just happen to have one with him anyway ?

I think what winds me up about this is that there's very little clue that it might not be a draugr at all. Not that there's none : there's a nice quote about how the living are always more dangerous than the dead, and it's clear that some of the draugr-sightings might just be hallucinations. But the overall trajectory is very clear, going from "maybe it's a monster" to "yes, it's definitely a monster, run like hell".

To be fair, there could be explanations for all of the misinterpretations. But what we needed was a few minutes (a montage flashback) to show how all this had come about, say, showing him disappearing in the snow when she saw him outside; his grief over his comrades and his need to exhume.... well no, probably not that bit. Maybe there's an explanation for that, but it's not at all obvious what it is. 

Without the movie even trying to explain the parts which made it clear there was a supernatural entity at work, it feels like the audience is cheated. The premise is clever and the setup is well done, but if the explanation is supposed to be rational, it's deeply frustrating when half the clues seem to pretty much exclude a logical interpretation. A draugr explains everything easily and naturally, whereas a lost foreigner really doesn't.

My compromise : he wasn't a draugr but a necromancer. Then we get a more satisfying supernatural element without an actual monster (so still giving us a plot twist) which still explains everything a hundredfold more easily than what we're expected to believe. The stolen fish, murder, grave-robbing and insanity are all related to sinister rituals...It undermines the moral message, to be sure, but it makes the whole thing a heck of a lot more fun. 

I get the intention to show that xenophobia is bad, that fear is literally the mind-killer, but I like monsters to be monsters. If you want to explore morality by way of the supernatural, or play mind games with the audience, then you need to have things fully-thought through. As it is, it feels like trying to have it both ways, to say, "actually, there was nothing weird going on at all, hahah, how silly to think so" while at the same time claiming "these people acted in a perfectly sensible way given the evidence". These are plotholes that need to be seen to be sealed off, otherwise it feels like the movie's declaration of what happens feels incredibly forced and unbelievable. Ironically, the movie's important message that we're vulnerable to misinterpretations is undermined by its own wholly unbelievable interpretation of its own events. 

Sam Altman Isn't A Nice Chap

Today, an excellent piece of investigative journalism from The New Yorker. 

Anyone remember those brief few days in 2023 when Sam Altman was removed from the board of OpenAI ? Of course you do. But now, more than two years later, we finally get an inside look into what the hell that was all about. Months of investigations have revealed in extreme detail just what was going on behind closed doors. If you're at all interested in these kinds of companies, then this is well worth your time. 

In the most compact form possible, this amounts to : "Sam Altman isn't a paedophile, but he's definitely a lying scumbag". As far as a character assessment goes, this is devastating. With regards to OpenAI the company, the picture is considerably more nuanced, especially in terms of the actual researchers involved (Altman himself is only a businessman). To their great credit, the author here interviews everyone involved, including Altman on multiple occasions. This is by no means a hit piece, but what emerges is abundantly clear. Virtually all those involved say that Altman is an inveterate liar, and while Altman may rightly dispute the interpretation of some recollected conversations, the idea that everyone else but him is misremembering beggars belief. 

In PDF form this runs to 39 pages. No doubt other media outlets will produce a more distilled version, but in the meantime, what follows below is my own 2200 word-summary in pure quotation form. To keep the narrative coherent, some of these are rearranged from their original sequence but no paraphrasing is used. Highlights are my own.

But first, there are two comments I should add for my own perspective. First, the main concerns of the other employees and board members revolved around the issue of AI safety, especially whether it would be aligned with human values and suchlike. I personally believe that these concerns are – provisionally – not sensible. I've said many times that while we can legitimately call LLMs intelligent in a carefully-defined way, I don't believe they show the merest glimmer of consciousness. Safety in terms of "killer robots will be the death of us all" is, I believe, complete hogwash; LLMs have absolutely no will of their own, and if putting them in certain situations is a bad idea, that is entirely the result of human error : we can simply choose not to do that, and nothing stops us from pulling the plug. I said almost from the very start that the whole "this is too dangerous" thing was a genius bit of marketing spin, not a genuine concern on Altman's part.

The provision I make here is that safety and alignment may still matter in the lesser regard of AI not behaving as expected. This certainly does pose problems and it clearly is important to have it behave in a basically-predictable way, as a useful tool rather than as an independent entity. But given a lack of any consciousness, I don't worry at all about a rogue AI deliberately trying to murder everyone of its own volition, as many of the top researchers are apparently genuinely concerned with. 

What matters here in terms of Altman's character is, then, not who's right about safety, but what he said he'd do about it. He lied about this over and over again, and whereas absolutely everyone tells lies from time to time, the degree to which Altman does this, routinely, is inexcusable. He's also a bullshit artist. It's fine to change your mind, but you should acknowledge that you've done this, as well as explaining how and why. Altman simply doesn't bother.

This leads me to my second point : people are being awfully naïve about this. The subreddits exploding with people saying they were ditching OpenAI for Anthropic never made any sense; the idea that the US government bunch of deranged fascist fuckwits wouldn't be using LLMs was beyond belief, never mind that Anthropic were already deeply in bed with the US military (the article also goes into Anthropic's misbehaviour as well, though to a lesser extent). Trying to lionise Anthropic for pushing back on a couple of points is, in my view, a classic example of naivety curving back on itself in an ouroboros of cynicism. And again, to pretend that a CEO will never lie is an absurdity, but this should not be the take-home message of this piece. Rather it should be the more realistic and far more important point that Altman lies so much you can never trust him about anything. That's what should concern everyone, not the non-story that "CEO is a scumbag". That's par for the course. 

That's more than enough from me. On, then, to the summary.

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In a tense call after Altman’s firing, the board pressed him to acknowledge a pattern of deception. “This is just so fucked up,” he said repeatedly, according to people on the call. “I can’t change my personality.” Altman says that he doesn’t recall the exchange. “It’s possible I meant something like ‘I do try to be a unifying force,’ ” he told us, adding that this trait had enabled him to lead an immensely successful company. He attributed the criticism to a tendency, especially early in his career, “to be too much of a conflict avoider.” But a board member offered a different interpretation of his statement: “What it meant was ‘I have this trait where I lie to people, and I’m not going to stop.’ ” Were the colleagues who fired Altman motivated by alarmism and personal animus, or were they right that he couldn’t be trusted?

Most of Altman’s employees at Loopt liked him, but some said that they were struck by his tendency to exaggerate, even about trivial things. One recalled Altman bragging widely that he was a champion Ping-Pong player—“like, Missouri high-school Ping-Pong champ”—and then proving to be one of the worst players in the office. (Altman says that he was probably joking.) As Mark Jacobstein, an older Loopt employee who was asked by investors to act as Altman’s “babysitter,” later told Keach Hagey, for “The Optimist,” a biography of Altman, “There’s a blurring between ‘I think I can maybe accomplish this thing’ and ‘I have already accomplished this thing’ that in its most toxic form leads to Theranos,” Elizabeth Holmes’s fraudulent startup.

If everything went right, the OpenAI founders believed, artificial intelligence could usher in a post-scarcity utopia, automating grunt work, curing cancer, and liberating people to enjoy lives of leisure and abundance. But if the technology went rogue, or fell into the wrong hands, the devastation could be total. China could use it to build a novel bioweapon or a fleet of advanced drones; an A.I. model could outmaneuver its overseers, replicating itself on secret servers so that it couldn’t be turned off; in extreme cases, it might seize control of the energy grid, the stock market, or the nuclear arsenal. 

Not everyone believed this, to say the least, but Altman repeatedly affirmed that he did. He wrote on his blog in 2015 that superhuman machine intelligence “does not have to be the inherently evil sci-fi version to kill us all. A more probable scenario is that it simply doesn’t care about us much either way, but in an effort to accomplish some other goal . . . wipes us out.” OpenAI’s founders vowed not to privilege speed over safety, and the organization’s articles of incorporation made benefitting humanity a legally binding duty. If A.I. was going to be the most powerful technology in history, it followed that any individual with sole control over it stood to become uniquely powerful—a scenario that the founders referred to as an “AGI dictatorship.”

By September, 2017, though, Musk had grown impatient. During discussions about whether to reconstitute OpenAI as a for-profit company, he demanded majority control. Altman’s replies varied depending on the context. His main consistent demand seems to have been that if OpenAI were reorganized under the control of a C.E.O. that job should go to him. Sutskever seemed uncomfortable with this idea. He sent Musk and Altman a long, plaintive e-mail on behalf of himself and Brockman, with the subject line “Honest Thoughts.” He wrote, “The goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship.” He continued, addressing Musk, “So it is a bad idea to create a structure where you could become a dictator.” He relayed similar concerns to Altman: “We don’t understand why the CEO title is so important to you. Your stated reasons have changed, and it’s hard to really understand what’s driving it.”

By 2018, Amodei had started questioning the founders’ motives more openly. “Everything was a rotating set of schemes to raise money,” he later wrote in his notes. In early 2018, Amodei has said, he started drafting a charter for the company and, in weeks of conversations with Altman and Brockman, advocated for its most radical clause: if a “value-aligned, safety-conscious project” came close to building an A.G.I. before OpenAI did, the company would “stop competing with and start assisting this project.” According to the “merge and assist” clause, as it was called, if, say, Google’s researchers figured out how to build a safe A.G.I. first, then OpenAI could wind itself down and donate its resources to Google. By any normal corporate logic, this was an insane thing to promise. But OpenAI was not supposed to be a normal company.

That premise was tested in the spring of 2019, when OpenAI was negotiating a billion-dollar investment from Microsoft. Although Amodei, who was leading the company’s safety team, had helped to pitch the deal to Bill Gates, many people on the team were anxious about it, fearing that Microsoft would insert provisions that overrode OpenAI’s ethical commitments. Amodei presented Altman with a ranked list of safety demands, placing the preservation of the merge-and-assist clause at the very top. Altman agreed to that demand, but in June, as the deal was closing, Amodei discovered that a provision granting Microsoft the power to block OpenAI from any mergers had been added. “Eighty per cent of the charter was just betrayed,” Amodei recalled. He confronted Altman, who denied that the provision existed. Amodei read it aloud, pointing to the text, and ultimately forced another colleague to confirm its existence to Altman directly. (Altman doesn’t remember this.) 

In the course of several meetings in the spring of 2023, Altman seemed to waver. He stopped talking about endowing a prize. Instead, he advocated for establishing an in-house “superalignment team.” An official announcement, referring to the company’s reserves of computing power, pledged that the team would get “20% of the compute we’ve secured to date”—a resource potentially worth more than a billion dollars. The effort was necessary, according to the announcement, because, if alignment remained unsolved, A.G.I. might “lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction.” 

The twenty-per-cent commitment evaporated, however. Four people who worked on or closely with the team said that the actual resources were between one and two per cent of the company’s compute. Furthermore, a researcher on the team said, “most of the superalignment compute was actually on the oldest cluster with the worst chips.” The researchers believed that superior hardware was being reserved for profit-generating activities. (OpenAI disputes this.) Leike complained to Murati, then the company’s chief technology officer, but she told him to stop pressing the point—the commitment had never been realistic... the superalignment team was dissolved the following year, without completing its mission.

By then, internal messages show, executives and board members had come to believe that Altman’s omissions and deceptions might have ramifications for the safety of OpenAI’s products. In a meeting in December, 2022, Altman assured board members that a variety of features in a forthcoming model, GPT-4, had been approved by a safety panel. Toner, the board member and A.I.-policy expert, requested documentation. She learned that the most controversial features—one that allowed users to “fine-tune” the model for specific tasks, and another that deployed it as a personal assistant—had not been approved. 

Last June, on his personal blog, Altman wrote, referring to artificial superintelligence, “We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started.” This was, according to the charter, arguably the moment when OpenAI might stop competing with other companies and start working with them. But in that post, called “The Gentle Singularity,” he adopted a new tone, replacing existential terror with ebullient optimism. “We’ll all get better stuff,” he wrote. “We will build ever-more-wonderful things for each other.” He acknowledged that the alignment problem remained unsolved, but he redefined it—rather than being a deadly threat, it was an inconvenience, like the algorithms that tempt us to waste time scrolling on Instagram.

Some people defended Altman’s business acumen and dismissed his rivals, especially Sutskever and Amodei, as failed aspirants to his throne. Others portrayed them as gullible, absent-minded scientists, or as hysterical “doomers,” gripped by the delusion that the software they were building would somehow come alive and kill them. Yoon, the former board member, argued that Altman was “not this Machiavellian villain” but merely, to the point of “fecklessness,” able to convince himself of the shifting realities of his sales pitches. “He’s too caught up in his own self-belief,” she said. “So he does things that, if you live in the real world, make no sense. But he doesn’t live in the real world.”

Yet most of the people we spoke to shared the judgment of Sutskever and Amodei: Altman has a relentless will to power that, even among industrialists who put their names on spaceships, sets him apart. “He’s unconstrained by truth,” the board member told us. “He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.”

Six people close to the inquiry alleged that it seemed designed to limit transparency. Some of them said that the investigators initially did not contact important figures at the company. Others were uncomfortable sharing concerns about Altman because they felt there was not a sufficient effort to insure anonymity. “Everything pointed to the fact that they wanted to find the outcome, which is to acquit him,” the employee said. 

Given OpenAI’s 501(c)(3) status and the high-profile nature of the firing, many executives there expected to see extensive findings. In March, 2024, however, OpenAI announced that it would clear Altman but released no report. The company provided, on its website, some eight hundred words acknowledging a “breakdown in trust.” People involved in the investigation said that no report was released because none was written. Instead, the findings were limited to oral briefings.

Many former and current OpenAI employees told us that they were shocked by the lack of disclosure. Altman said he believed that all the board members who joined in the aftermath of his reinstatement received the oral briefings. “That’s an absolute, outright lie,” a person with direct knowledge of the situation said. Some board members told us that ongoing questions about the integrity of the report could prompt, as one put it, “a need for another investigation.”

In a meeting with U.S. intelligence officials in the summer of 2017, he [Altman] claimed that China had launched an “A.G.I. Manhattan Project,” and that OpenAI needed billions of dollars of government funding to keep pace. When pressed for evidence, Altman said, “I’ve heard things.” It was the first of several meetings in which he made the claim. After one of them, he told an intelligence official that he would follow up with evidence. He never did.

“My vibes don’t match a lot of the traditional A.I.-safety stuff,” Altman said. He insisted that he continued to prioritize these matters, but when pressed for specifics he was vague: “We still will run safety projects, or at least safety-adjacent projects.” When we asked to interview researchers at the company who were working on existential safety—the kinds of issues that could mean, as Altman once put it, “lights-out for all of us”—an OpenAI representative seemed confused. “What do you mean by ‘existential safety’?” he replied. “That’s not, like, a thing.”

Altman is not a technical savant—according to many in his orbit, he lacks extensive expertise in coding or machine learning. Multiple engineers recalled him misusing or confusing basic technical terms. He built OpenAI, in large part, by harnessing other people’s money and technical talent. This doesn’t make him unique. It makes him a businessman. More remarkable is his ability to convince skittish engineers, investors, and a tech-skeptical public that their priorities, even when mutually exclusive, are also his priorities. When such people have tried to hinder his next move, he has often found the words to neutralize them, at least temporarily; usually, by the time they lose patience with him, he’s got what he needs. “He sets up structures that, on paper, constrain him in the future,” Wainwright, the former OpenAI researcher, said. “But then, when the future comes and it comes time to be constrained, he does away with whatever the structure was.”

Even people close to Altman find it difficult to know where his “hope for humanity” ends and his ambition begins. His greatest strength has always been his ability to convince disparate groups that what he wants and what they need are one and the same. He made use of a unique historical juncture, when the public was wary of tech-industry hype and most of the researchers capable of building A.G.I. were terrified of bringing it into existence. Altman responded with a move that no other pitchman had perfected: he used apocalyptic rhetoric to explain how A.G.I. could destroy us all—and why, therefore, he should be the one to build it. Maybe this was a premeditated masterstroke. Maybe he was fumbling for an advantage. Either way, it worked.