“Cocaine and its metabolites are increasingly being detected in aquatic environments worldwide,” observed a team of scientists from Sweden, the U.K., the Czech Republic and elsewhere after they had used grant money to score a bunch of cocaine. But a team of scientists in possession of a good fortune in medical grade blow must be in want of a cockamamie experiment to perform with it, and in this case, as Wired’s Marta Musso reported: “Scientists Gave Cocaine to Salmon and You Will Absolutely Believe What Happened Next.” That’s right: the salmon all started making reckless prediction market bets and cheating on their spouses.
It isn’t actually obvious to me that cocaine (or cocaine metabolites) would affect fish the same way they affect people but apparently the literature is already full of other scientists who had this same great idea, and who have demonstrated that, for example, “exposure to 500 ng L−1 of cocaine increased risk-taking behavior and reduced feeding in red swamp crayfish (Procambarus clarkii).”
Procambarus sandlerii demonstrated increased risk-taking behavior after exposure to cocaine.
Scientific American’s Tom Lum made a video explaining how this is not just a funny headline but also good and valuable environmental science, and sure, fine. But I would like to stand up for the principle that scientists, as a group, are allowed to put on white lab coats and caper about madly, asking questions that would get the rest of us ostracized from society if not formally incarcerated regardless of whether those questions have any utility or, indeed, sanity, because human nature demands that someone be allowed to do it. Just don’t ask them where they got all that “cocaine metabolite.”
Of course one of the all-time classic scientific questions is:
The furry blob wrecking the interior of a Rolls-Royce at Lake Arrowhead turned out to be a person in a bear suit trying to do insurance fraud. The “enigmatic Golden Orb” that scientists found two miles deep at the bottom of the Gulf of Alaska and then brought to the surface in one of their more flagrant bids to exterminate us all turned out to be “a remnant of the dead cells that formed at the base of a giant deep-sea anemone, Relicanthus daphneae,” reported NOAA. Better luck next time, scientists. The blob blocking a major sewer pipe in Glasgow turned out to be a space hopper which appears dirty but still fully functional if anyone would like to go for a stinky hop. The blob that Tyson Ehlers discovered two separate times on the same log in British Columbia turned out to be a new species of slime mold. The enormous furry blob recently found lounging among the sea lions on San Francisco’s Pier 39 is Chonkers. According to observations taken with the James Webb Space Telescope the yellowish blob orbiting a star twelve light years away is a giant ammonia-covered Piss Planet. Those blobby A.I. company logos you’re seeing lately: why do they all look like buttholes? And this shiny pink egg shaped blob? It’s the Marc Andreessen Egg Game. “You're still early. Ship the eggs. Save the world.”
Ploopy Has Launched The Bean
Beef Futures Report:
A couple months ago I wrote a post titled A.I. Isn’t People which took a New Yorker story about Anthropic by Gideon Lewis-Kraus as an illuminating example of some of the woolier thinking we’ve been fed about what generative A.I. is and what it might be capable of, mostly by the companies that would like to make trillions of dollars selling it to us. I guess Lewis-Kraus saw the post, because yesterday in a report on one of the candidates for New York’s 12th Congressional district he used something else I wrote as an example himself:
The fashionable newsletter “Today in Tabs,” which tends to reflect and reproduce the consensus opinion in certain left-leaning media-insider quarters, recently published a post titled “Who Goes AI?” The column gossiped about which journalists and pundits did not pass the new purity test. (For those who might be slow on the uptake, an italicized note emphasized that it was a tribute to Dorothy Parker’s1 famous 1941 Harper’s story “Who Goes Nazi?”)
Congratulations, you fashionable media insiders! Personally, I would call myself an A.I. skeptic but Lewis-Kraus designates me a standard bearer of “A.I. populism,” an allegedly cross-partisan movement that somehow unites Steve Bannon, Josh Hawley, Bernie Sanders, and Eliezer Yudkowsky under the wishy-washy battle flag of “people who are worried about A.I. for all sorts of disparate reasons.” Politically I lean socialist, which you can also find reported in the New Yorker, but at heart I’m a lot more of a “fashionable insider” than I am any sort of populist. As evidence for this I would submit the fact that the New Yorker simply can’t stop talking about me.
Lewis-Kraus’s fellow hyphenate David Wallace-Wells provided an overview of A.I. populism in the New York Times Magazine today, along with the reassuring news that:
We’ve passed through a panic about A.I. slop and generative disinformation, though social media is inarguably awash in them still, and balance-sheet debates about the A.I. bubble have subsided for now, too.
Have we? Interesting. I think Lewis-Kraus and Wallace-Wells are both right that Americans don’t trust our government to be able (or willing) to protect us from the rapacious sociopaths in charge of the leading A.I. companies. And I suppose A.I. has a few uses—this morning I used Merlin to identify some bird calls, for example—but Lewis-Kraus ends with this list:
I recently used a chatbot to help fix a stupid if beloved (by my five-year-old) remote-control airplane I otherwise would have thrown out, and I saved a lot of money by opting out of a health-care plan that one broker had confidently deemed a necessity. I’ve handled minor plumbing issues, and other vexations around the house, that might otherwise have put me at the mercy of service providers in dubious good faith. And I determined that a local branch of a startup dentistry practice had indeed tried to pressure me into an expensive procedure I didn’t actually require.
All I could think reading it was that these were all things you used to be able to find out how to do by searching the internet with Google, before the accretion of A.I. slop made it unusable.
Today’s Song: Rancid, “Dope Sick Girl”
Thank you for reading Today in Tabs, the internet’s most fashionable reflection of consensus opinion in certain left-leaning media-insider quarters. Procambarus sandlerii is yet another W for Tabs’ Senior Managing Editor for Graphics Alison Headley, who didn’t even flinch when I texted to ask if they could put Adam Sandler’s “this is how I win” sunglasses on a crawdad.
Only the most fashionable of media insiders become a paid Tabs subscriber and gain the privilege of commenting on posts and joining today’s Algonquin Round Table, the Tabs Discord. But you seem extremely chic, you should join us.
1 The New Yorker has since corrected the author of “Who Goes Nazi?” which was written by Dorothy Parker’s friend Dorothy Thompson.
