The Way We Eat Now

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Wilson, Bee, and Annabel Lee. The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change. London: 4th Estate, 2019.

I discovered Bee Wilson through Consider the Fork, an excellent ‘history of how we cook and eat’⁠ that draws heavily on Kranzberg’s Laws.⁠ Recently, I came across The Way We Eat Now, first published in 2019. While Consider the Fork examines the evolution of kitchen technology, this book explores how our relationship with food—and related cultural practices—has changed over time.

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Three (good) books on creativity

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Creativity is an important and interesting topic. Unfortunately it’s a topic that seems to be dominated by hot takes, uninformed speculation, and personal anecdotes. This is even true for much academic work and articles in magazines published by the b.schools.

There’s a rich body of creativity research full of all sorts of interesting ideas, but it’s often ignored or glossed over. One factor contributing to this is the lack of a good introductory book for a general reader. For some time I’ve been referring folk interested in creativity research to Teaching creativity in the common core. The books limitation, though, is that it’s focused on secondary education which can be a distraction for some readers.

A new book, The creativity advantage by James Kaufman (one of the authors of Teaching creativity in the common core) neatly fills this hole. James provides us with an easy to read overview of research into creativity (in a somewhat quirky style, but which works) and delves into some of the benefits of creativity (beyond the obvious). The whole narrative is illustrated with anecdotes to help make the ideas concrete for the read. It’s now my go-to recommendation for a a good introductory book on creativity.

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Distributed stupidity

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There’s been a recent up tic in interest in the ethics of AI, and the challenge of AI alignment. Particularly given the challenges at OpenAI, the consequences of which are still appearing the news. Many pundits think that we’re on the cusp of creating an artificial general intelligence (AGI), or that AGI is already here. There’s talk of the need for regulations, or even an “AI pause”, so that we can get this disruptive technology under control. Or, at least, prevent the extinction of humanity.

AGI is certainly a good foundation for building visions of dystopian futures (or utopian future, if you choose), though we do appear to reading a lot into the technology’s potential. Tools such as large language models (LLMs) are powerful tools and definitely surprising (for many) but (as we’ve written before) they don’t appear to be the existential threat many assume.

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Even the effects already discovered are due to chance and experiment rather than to the sciences; for our present sciences are nothing more than peculiar arrangements of matters already discovered, and not methods for discovery or plans for new operations.

Aphorism VIII. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Book 1, 1620

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Where will LLMs take us?

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Not a week seems to pass by without some surprising news concerning large-language models (LLMs). Most recently it was when an LLM trained for other purposes played chess at a reasonable level. This seemingly constant stream of surprising news has led to talk that LLMs are the next general-purpose technology—a technology that affects an entire economy—and will usher in new era of rapid productivity growth. They might even accelerate global economic growth by an order of magnitude, as the Industrial Revolution did, providing us with a Fifth Industrial Revolution.

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