Universities, television vs. AI, negativity bias

Lux Recommends #491

Why everyone hates universities, how everyone came to love television, and why no one cares about good news. Plus my latest on Iran and the AI backlash.

From around the web

1. Ivory rubble

As I wrote before, American universities — particularly when it comes to scientific research — are broken. If there could be any upside to President Donald Trump’s funding cuts, I noted back in July, it might be to force a reckoning inside schools about what’s gone wrong and how to fix it. Over in the New Yorker, Nicholas Lehmann updates the story with tales of the institutions that have simply settled, and those that are fighting back.

The premise of the great American universities today is a difficult one, to say the least: that they can be fantastically selective (but in a completely fair way), offer their students and faculty access to the most prestigious and well-rewarded precincts of American society, relentlessly increase their costs, assure the world that they are devoted to public service and social justice, and win the public’s grateful appreciation for being among our country’s most successful institutions. Trump, with his unerring talent for exploiting vulnerabilities in the liberal order, took full advantage of these contradictions and has caused enormous damage. It is going to be hard to undo.

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2. Screen time

In some ways, the early adoption of television mirrored that of AI: initial skepticism followed by massive interest. But as Virginia Postrel writes in Works in Progress, for television at least, success was far from guaranteed. In fact, it faced some major structural obstacles AI doesn’t. Virginia explains how sports and kids became the medium’s saviors.

Amid widespread fears of ‘juvenile delinquency’, television promised to keep kids out of trouble. ‘There’s no juvenile delinquency here’, proclaimed an ad for TV sets, portraying a family seated around their living room console.

…In response, churches, Boys Clubs, youth centers, and YMCAs began buying their own sets. On a summer evening in 1948, a Methodist church outside Philadelphia attracted a crowd of 125, mostly teenagers, to watch a baseball game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Cincinnati Reds. Pastors around the country reported that TV was drawing in the kids. ‘Our church set is used primarily for hockey games, prize fights, and other sports events’, said a Presbyterian minister in Chicago. ‘We’re sorry we didn’t think of it before’.

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3. Claude whisperers

Speaking of skepticism: A majority of Americans may be neutral or skeptical on AI. But not coders. In the New York Times Magazine, Clive Thompson writes how AI solved one of coding’s main problems, drudgery. AI has transformed software development so dramatically, he writes, that most programmers now spend their days directing AI agents in plain English rather than writing code themselves, boosting productivity by anywhere from 10x to 100x. H/t Lux’s scientist-in-residence Samuel Arbesman.

I looked at Ebert’s prompt file. It included a prompt telling the agents that any new code had to pass every single test before it got pushed into Hyperspell’s real-world product. One such test for Python code, called a pytest, had its own specific prompt that caught my eye: “Pushing code that fails pytest is unacceptable and embarrassing.”

Embarrassing? Did that actually help, I wondered, telling the A.I. not to “embarrass” you? Ebert grinned sheepishly. He couldn’t prove it, but prompts like that seem to have slightly improved Claude’s performance.

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4. AI’s victims

I’ve long worried that the rise of AI may be pushing India toward a dangerous precipice. In Hyperdimensional, Dean W. Ball adds to the alarm. At an AI summit in Delhi, he found that India, among others, seems to be ignoring the likelihood of near-term superintelligence, instead focusing on smaller, more accessible AI models. He argues this is partly denial, partly a pushback against supposed American technological imperialism — but that this stance will ultimately leave countries dangerously unprepared for what’s coming.

Once countries have accepted the likely reality we occupy, a range of positive options become available. First and foremost, many Middle Powers and developing countries can bet that they have greater institutional flexibility than the more rigid U.S. Indeed, betting on continued American institutional sclerosis seems much safer than betting against deep learning. They can build new institutions, and reimagine existing ones, using the many new things frontier AI systems make possible (of which we have scratched the surface).

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5. Bloom scroll

Finally some good news. The environment is recovering, Britain’s inactivity crisis is receding and Western power is underestimated. So why don’t we hear about it? According to Stefan Schubert in The Update, the negativity bias is strong with these ones.

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From Riskgaming