While I have many issues with how the Nobel Prizes are put together as an institution, the scientific achievements they have revealed have been some of the funnest concepts I’ve discovered in science, including the clever ways in which scientists revealed them. If I had to rank them on this metric, the first place would be a tie between the chemistry and the physics prizes of 2016. The chemistry prize went to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Fraser Stoddart, and Ben Feringa for “for the design and synthesis of molecular machines”. Likewise, the physics prize was shared between David Thouless, Duncan Haldane, and John Kosterlitz “for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter”. If you like, you can read my piece about the 2016 chemistry prize here. A short excerpt about the laureates’ work:

… it is fruitless to carry on speculating about what these achievements could be good for. J. Fraser Stoddart, who shared the Nobel Prize last year with Feringa for having assembled curious molecular arrangements like Borromean rings, wrote in an essay in 2005, “It is amazing how something that was difficult to do in the beginning will surely become easy to do in the event of its having been done. The Borromean rings have captured our imagination simply because of their sheer beauty. What will they be good for? Something for sure, and we still have the excitement of finding out what that something might be.” Feringa said in a 2014 interview that he likes to build his “own world of molecules”. In fact, Stoddart, Feringa and Jean-Pierre Sauvage shared the chemistry prize for having developed new techniques to synthesise and assemble organic molecules in their pursuits.

In the annals of the science Nobel Prizes, there are many, many laureates who allowed their curiosity about something rather than its applications to guide their research. In the course of these pursuits, they developed techniques, insights, technologies or something else that benefited their field as a whole but which wasn’t the end goal. Over time the objects of many of these pursuits have also paved the way for some futuristic technology themselves. All of this is a testament to the peculiar roads the guiding light of curiosity opens. Of course, scientists need specific conditions of their work to be met before they can commitment themselves to such lines of inquiry. For just two examples, they shouldn’t be under pressure to publish papers and they shouldn’t have to worry about losing their jobs if they don’t file patents. I can also see where the critics of such blue-sky research stand and why: while there are benefits, it’s hard to say ahead of time what they might be and when they might appear.

This said, the work that won the 2016 physics prize is of a similar nature and also particularly relevant in light of a ‘development’ in the realm of quantum computing earlier this month. Two of the three laureates, Thouless and Kosterlitz, performed an experiment in the 1970s in which they found something unusual. To quote from my piece in The Hindu on February 23:

If you cool some water vapour, it will become water and then ice. If you keep lowering the temperature until nearly absolute zero, the system will have minimal thermal energy, allowing quantum states of matter to show. In the 1970s, Michael Kosterlitz and David Thouless found that the surface of superfluid helium sometimes developed microscopic vortices that moved in pairs. When they raised the temperature, the vortices decoupled and moved freely. It was a new kind of … phase transition: the object’s topological attributes changed in response to changes in energy [rather than it turning from liquid to gas].

The findings here, followed by many others that followed, together with efforts by physicists to describe this new property of matter using mathematics, in harmony with other existing theories of nature all laid the foundation for Microsoft’s February 19 announcement: that it had developed a quantum-computing chip named Majorana 1 with topological qubits inside. (For more on this, please read my February 23 piece.) Microsoft has been trying to build this chip since at least 2000, when a physicist then on the company’s payroll named Alexei Kitaev published a paper exploring its possibility. Building the thing was a tall order, requiring advances in a variety of fields that eventually had to be brought together in just the right way, but Microsoft knew that if it succeeded the payoff would be tremendous.

This said, even if this wasn’t curiosity-driven research on Microsoft’s part, such research has already played a big role in both the company’s and the world’s fortunes. In the world’s fortune because, as with the work of Stoddart, Feringa, and Sauvage, the team explored, invented and/or refined new methods en route to building Majorana 1, methods which the rest of the world can potentially use to solve other problems. And in the company’s fortune because while Kitaev’s paper was motivated by the possibility of a device of considerable technological and commercial value, it drew from a large body of knowledge that — at the time it was unearthed and harmonised with the rest of science — wasn’t at all concerned with a quantum-computing chip in its then-distant future. For all its criticism, blue-sky research leads to some outcomes that no other forms of research can. This isn’t an argument in support of it so much as in defence of not sidelining it altogether.

While I have many issues with how the Nobel Prizes are put together as an institution, I’ve covered each edition with not inconsiderable excitement[1]. Given the fondness of the prize-giving committee for work on or with artificial intelligence last year, it’s possible there’s a physics prize vouchsafed for work on the foundations of contemporary quantum computers in the not-too-distant future. When it comes to pass, I will be all too happy to fall back on the many pieces I’ve written on this topic over the years, to be able to confidently piece together the achievements in context and, personally, to understand the work beyond my needs as a journalist, as a global citizen. But until that day, I can’t justify the time I do spend reading up about and writing on this and similar topics as a journalist in a non-niche news publication — one publishing reports, analyses, and commentary for a general audience rather than those with specialised interests.

The justification is necessary at all because the time I spend doing something is time spent not doing something else and the opportunity cost needs to be rational in the eyes of my employers. At the same time, journalism as a “history of now” would fail if it didn’t bring the ideas, priorities, and goals at play in the development of curiosity-driven research and — with the benefit of hindsight — its almost inevitable value for commerce and strategy to the people at large. This post so far, until this point, is the preamble I had in mind for my edition of The Hindu’s Notebook column today. Excerpt:

It isn’t until a revolutionary new technology appears that the value of investing in basic research becomes clear. Many scientists are rooting for more of it. India’s National Science Day, today, is itself rooted in celebrating the discovery of the Raman effect by curiosity-driven study. The Indian government also wants such research in this age of quantum computing, renewable energy, and artificial intelligence. But it isn’t until such technology appears that the value of investing in a science journalism of the underlying research — slow-moving, unglamorous, not application-oriented — also becomes clear. It might even be too late by then.

The scientific ideas that most journalists have overlooked are still very important: they’re the pillars on which the technologies reshaping the world stand. So it’s not fair that they’re overlooked when they’re happening and obscured by other concerns by the time they’ve matured. Without public understanding, input, and scrutiny in the developmental phase, the resulting technologies have fewer chances to be democratic, and the absence of the corresponding variety of journalism is partly to blame.

I would have liked to include the preamble with the piece itself but the word limit is an exacting 620. This is also why I left something else unsaid in the piece, something important for me, the author, to have acknowledged. After the penultimate line — “You might think just the fact that journalists are writing about an idea should fetch it from the fringes to the mainstream, but it does not” — I wanted to say there’s a confounding factor: the skills, choices, and circumstances of the journalists themselves. If a journalist isn’t a good writer[2] or doesn’t have the assistance of good editors, what they write about curiosity-driven research, which already runs on weak legs among the people at large, may simply pass through their feeds and newsletters without inviting even a “huh?”. But as I put down the aforementioned line, a more discomfiting thought erupted at the back of my mind.

In 2017, on the Last Word on Nothing blog, science journalist Cassandra Willyard made a passionate case for the science journalism of obscure things to put people at its centre in order to be effective. The argument’s allure was obvious but it has never sat well with me. The narrative power of human emotion, drawn from the highs or lows in the lives of the people working on obscure scientific ideas, is in being able to render those ideas more relatable. But my view is that there’s a lot out there we may never write about if we couldn’t also write about what highs/lows it rendered among its discoverers or beholders, and more so if such highs/lows don’t exist at all, as is often the case with a big chunk of curiosity-driven research. Willyard herself had used the then-recent example of the detection of gravitational waves from two neutron stars smashing into each other billions of lightyears away. This is conveniently (but perhaps not by her design) an example of Big Science where many people spent a long time looking for something and finally found it. There’s certainly a lot of drama here.

But the reason I call having to countenance Willyard’s arguments discomfiting is that I understand what she’s getting at and I know I’m rebutting it on the back of only a small modicum of logic. It’s a sentimental holdout, even: I don’t want to have to care about the lives of other people when I know I care very well for how we extracted a world’s worth of new information by ‘reading’ gravitational waves emitted by a highly unusual cosmic event. The awe, to me, is right there. Yet I’m also keenly aware how impactful the journalism advocated by Willyard can be, having seen it in ‘action’ in the feature-esque pieces published by science magazines, where the people are front and centre, and the number of people that read and talk about them.

I hold out because I believe there are, like me, many people out there (I’ve met a few) that can be awed by narratives of neutron-star collisions that dispense with invoking the human condition. I also believe that while a large number of people may read those feature-esque pieces, I’m not convinced they have a value that goes beyond storytelling, which is of course typically excellent. But I suppose those narratives of purely scientific research devoid of human protagonists (or antagonists) would have to be at least as excellent in order to captivate audiences just as well. If a journalist — together with the context in which they produce their work — isn’t up to the mark yet, they should strive to be. And this striving is essential if “you might think just the fact that journalists are writing about an idea should fetch it from the fringes to the mainstream, but it does not” is to be meaningful.

[1] Not least because each Nobel Prize announcement is accompanied by three press releases: one making the announcement, one explaining the prize-winning work to a non-expert audience, and one explaining it in its full technical context. Journalism with these resources is actually quite enjoyable. This helps, too.

[2] I’m predominantly a textual journalist and default to “write” when writing about journalistic communication. But of course in this sentence I mean journalists who aren’t good writers and/or good video-makers or editors and/or good podcasters, etc.

Leah Nylen, Josh Sisco, and Dina Bass, Bloomberg:

The US Federal Trade Commission has opened an antitrust investigation of Microsoft Corp., drilling into everything from the company’s cloud computing and software licensing businesses to cybersecurity offerings and artificial intelligence products.

Seems like a lot of people who thought Microsoft would escape antitrust investigations in the U.S. might have been a little too eager.

This kind of scrutiny is a good thing, and long overdue. Yet one of the unavoidable problems of reducing the influence of these giant corporations now is the pain it is going to cause — almost by definition. If a corporation is abusing its power and scale to such a degree the FTC initiates an investigation, unwinding that will have — to put it mildly — an effect. We are seeing this in the Google case. This is true for any situation where a business or a group of people with too much influence needs correcting. That does not mean it should not happen.

It is true that Microsoft’s products and services are the backbone of businesses and governments the world over. These are delivered through tight integrations, all of which encourages further fealty to this singular solution. For example, it used its dominant position with Office 365 to distribute Teams for free, thereby making it even harder for other businesses to compete. It then leveraged Outlook and Teams to boost its web browser, after doing the same with Windows. If it charged for Teams out of the gate, this would be having a different discussion.

Obviously, the FTC’s concerns with Microsoft’s business practices stretch well beyond bundling Teams. According to this Bloomberg report, the Commission is interested in cloud and identity tying, too. On the one hand, it is enormously useful to businesses to have a suite of products with a single point of management and shared credentials. On the other hand, it is a monolithic system that is a non-starter for potential competitors.

The government is understandably worried about the security and stability risks of global dependence on Microsoft, too, but this is odd:

The CrowdStrike crash that affected millions of devices operating on Microsoft Windows systems earlier this year was itself a testament to the widespread use of the company’s products and how it directly affects the global economy.

This might just be Bloomberg’s contextualizing more than it is relevant to the government’s position. But, still, it seems wrong to me to isolate Windows as the problem instead of Crowdstrike itself, especially with better examples to be found in the SolarWinds breach and its track record with first-party security.

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Pavan Davuluri, of Microsoft:

Today, we are communicating an additional update on the Recall (preview) feature for Copilot+ PCs. Recall will now shift from a preview experience broadly available for Copilot+ PCs on June 18, 2024, to a preview available first in the Windows Insider Program (WIP) in the coming weeks. Following receiving feedback on Recall from our Windows Insider Community, as we typically do, we plan to make Recall (preview) available for all Copilot+ PCs coming soon.

Microsoft has always struggled to name its products coherently, but Microsoft Copilot+ PCs with Recall (preview) available first through the Windows Insider Program (WIP) has to take the cake. Absolute gibberish.

Anyway, it is disappointing to see Microsoft botch the announcement of this feature so badly. Investors do not seem to care about how untrustworthy the company is because, face it, how many corporations big and small are going to abandon Windows and Office? As long as its leadership keeps saying the right things, it seems it is still comfortable to sit in the afterglow of its A.I. transformation.

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Renee Dudley and Doris Burke, reporting for ProPublica which is not, contrary to the opinion of one U.S. Supreme Court jackass justice, “very well-funded by ideological groups” bent on “look[ing] for any little thing they can find, and they try[ing] to make something out of it”, but is instead a distinguished publication of investigative journalism:

Microsoft hired Andrew Harris for his extraordinary skill in keeping hackers out of the nation’s most sensitive computer networks. In 2016, Harris was hard at work on a mystifying incident in which intruders had somehow penetrated a major U.S. tech company.

[…]

Early on, he focused on a Microsoft application that ensured users had permission to log on to cloud-based programs, the cyber equivalent of an officer checking passports at a border. It was there, after months of research, that he found something seriously wrong.

This is a deep and meaningful exploration of Microsoft’s internal response to the conditions that created 2020’s catastrophic SolarWinds breach. It seems that both Microsoft and the Department of Justice knew well before anyone else — perhaps as early as 2016 in Microsoft’s case — yet neither did anything with that information. Other things were deemed more important.

Perhaps this was simply a multi-person failure in which dozens of people at Microsoft could not see why Harris’ discovery was such a big deal. Maybe they all could not foresee this actually being exploited in the wild, or there was a failure to communicate some key piece of information. I am a firm believer in Hanlon’s razor.

On the other hand, the deep integration of Microsoft’s entire product line into sensitive systems — governments, healthcare, finance — magnifies any failure. The incompetence of a handful of people at a private corporation should not result in 18,000 infected networks.

Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica:

Microsoft is pivoting its company culture to make security a top priority, President Brad Smith testified to Congress on Thursday, promising that security will be “more important even than the company’s work on artificial intelligence.”

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, “has taken on the responsibility personally to serve as the senior executive with overall accountability for Microsoft’s security,” Smith told Congress.

[…]

Microsoft did not dispute ProPublica’s report. Instead, the company provided a statement that almost seems to contradict Smith’s testimony to Congress today by claiming that “protecting customers is always our highest priority.”

Microsoft’s public relations staff can say anything they want. But there is plenty of evidence — contemporary and historic — showing this is untrue. Can it do better? I am sure Microsoft employs many intelligent and creative people who desperately want to change this corrupted culture. Will it? Maybe — but for how long is anybody’s guess.

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“Conspirador Norteño” in January 2023:

BNN (the “Breaking News Network”, a news website operated by tech entrepreneur and convicted domestic abuser Gurbaksh Chahal) allegedly offers independent news coverage from an extensive worldwide network of on-the-ground reporters. As is often the case, things are not as they seem. A few minutes of perfunctory Googling reveals that much of BNN’s “coverage” appears to be mildly reworded articles copied from mainstream news sites. For science, here’s a simple technique for algorithmically detecting this form of copying.

Kashmir Hill and Tiffany Hsu, New York Times:

Many traditional news organizations are already fighting for traffic and advertising dollars. For years, they competed for clicks against pink slime journalism — so-called because of its similarity to liquefied beef, an unappetizing, low-cost food additive.

Low-paid freelancers and algorithms have churned out much of the faux-news content, prizing speed and volume over accuracy. Now, experts say, A.I. could turbocharge the threat, easily ripping off the work of journalists and enabling error-ridden counterfeits to circulate even more widely — as has already happened with travel guidebooks, celebrity biographies and obituaries.

See, it is not just humans producing abject garbage; robots can do it, too — and way better. There was a time when newsrooms could be financially stable on display ads. Those days are over for a team of human reporters, even if all they do is rewrite rich guy tweets. But if you only need to pay a skeleton operations staff to ensure the robots continue their automated publishing schedule, well that becomes a more plausible business venture.

Another thing of note from the Times story:

Before ending its agreement with BNN Breaking, Microsoft had licensed content from the site for MSN.com, as it does with reputable news organizations such as Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, republishing their articles and splitting the advertising revenue.

I have to wonder how much of an impact this co-sign had on the success of BNN Breaking. Syndicated articles on MSN like these are shown in various places on a Windows computer, and are boosted in Bing search results. Microsoft is increasingly dependent on A.I. for editing its MSN portal with predictable consequences.

“Conspirador Norteño” in April:

The YouTube channel is not the only data point that connects Trimfeed to BNN. A quick comparison of the bylines on BNN’s and Trimfeed’s (plagiarized) articles shows that many of the same names appear on both sites, and several X accounts that regularly posted links to BNN articles prior to April 2024 now post links to Trimfeed content. Additionally, BNN seems to have largely stopped publishing in early April, both on its website and social media, with the Trimfeed website and related social media efforts activating shortly thereafter. It is possible that BNN was mothballed due to being downranked in Google search results in March 2024, and that the new Trimfeed site is an attempt to evade Google’s decision to classify Trimfeed’s predecessor as spam.

The Times reporters definitively linked the two and, after doing so, Trimfeed stopped publishing. Its domain, like BNN Breaking, now redirects to BNNGPT, which ostensibly uses proprietary technologies developed by Chahal. Nothing about this makes sense to me and it smells like bullshit.

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If you had just been looking at the headlines from major research organizations, you would see a lack of confidence from the public in big business, technology companies included. For years, poll after poll from around the world has found high levels of distrust in their influence, handling of private data, and new developments.

If these corporations were at all worried about this, they are not much showing it in their products — particularly the A.I. stuff they have been shipping. There has been little attempt at abating last year’s trust crisis. Google decided to launch overconfident summaries for a variety of search queries. Far from helping to sift through all that has ever been published on the web to mash together a representative summary, it was instead an embarrassing mess that made the company look ill prepared for the concept of satire. Microsoft announced a product which will record and interpret everything you do and see on your computer, but as a good thing.

Can any of them see how this looks? If not — if they really are that unaware — why should we turn to them to fill gaps and needs in society? I certainly would not wish to indulge businesses which see themselves as entirely separate from the world.

It is hard to imagine they do not, though. Sundar Pichai, in an interview with Nilay Patel, recognised there were circumstances in which an A.I. summary would be inappropriate, and cautioned that the company still considers it a work in progress. Yet Google still turned it on by default in the U.S. with plans to expand worldwide this year.

Microsoft has responded to criticism by promising Recall will now be a feature users must opt into, rather than something they must turn off after updating Windows. The company also says there are more security protections for Recall data than originally promised but, based on its track record, maybe do not get too excited yet.

These product introductions all look like hubris. Arrogance, really — recognition of the significant power these corporations wield and the lack of competition they face. Google can poison its search engine because where else are most people going to go? How many people would turn off Recall, something which requires foreknowledge of its existence, under Microsoft’s original rollout strategy?

It is more or less an admission they are all comfortable gambling with their customers’ trust to further the perception they are at the forefront of the new hotness.

None of this is a judgement on the usefulness of these features or their social impact. I remain perplexed by the combination of a crisis of trust in new technologies, and the unwillingness of the companies responsible to engage with the public. There seems to be little attempt at persuasion. Instead, we are told to get on board because this rocket ship is taking off with or without us. Concerned? Too bad: the rocket ship is shaped like a giant middle finger.

What I hope we see Monday from Apple — a company which has portrayed itself as more careful and practical than many of its contemporaries — is a recognition of how this feels from outside the industry. Expect “A.I.” to be repeated in the presentation until you are sick of those two letters; investors are going to eat it up. When normal people update their phones in September, though, they should not feel like they are being bullied into accepting our A.I. future.

People need to be given time to adjust and learn. If the polls are representative, very few people trust giant corporations to get this right — understandably — yet these tech companies seem to believe we are as enthusiastic about every change they make as they are. Sorry, we are not, no matter how big a smile a company representative is wearing when they talk about it. Investors may not be patient but many of the rest of us need time.

Kevin Beaumont:

At a surface level, it [Recall] is great if you are a manager at a company with too much to do and too little time as you can instantly search what you were doing about a subject a month ago.

In practice, that audience’s needs are a very small (tiny, in fact) portion of Windows userbase — and frankly talking about screenshotting the things people in the real world, not executive world, is basically like punching customers in the face. The echo chamber effect inside Microsoft is real here, and oh boy… just oh boy. It’s a rare misfire, I think.

Via Eric Schwarz:

This fact that this feature is basically on by default and requires numerous steps to disable is going to create a lot of problems for people, especially those who click through every privacy/permission screen and fundamentally don’t know how their computer actually operates — I’ve counted way too many instances where I’ve had to help people find something and they have no idea where anything lives in their file system (mostly work off the Desktop or Downloads folders). How are they going to even grapple with this?

The problems with Recall remind me of the minor 2017 controversy around “brassiere” search results in Apple’s Photos app. Like Recall, it is entirely an on-device process with some security and privacy protections. In practice, automatically cataloguing all your photos which show a bra is kind of creepy, even if it is being done only with your own images on your own phone.

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Yusuf Mehdi of Microsoft:

Now with Recall, you can access virtually what you have seen or done on your PC in a way that feels like having photographic memory. Copilot+ PCs organize information like we do – based on relationships and associations unique to each of our individual experiences. This helps you remember things you may have forgotten so you can find what you’re looking for quickly and intuitively by simply using the cues you remember.

[…]

Recall leverages your personal semantic index, built and stored entirely on your device. Your snapshots are yours; they stay locally on your PC. You can delete individual snapshots, adjust and delete ranges of time in Settings, or pause at any point right from the icon in the System Tray on your Taskbar. You can also filter apps and websites from ever being saved. You are always in control with privacy you can trust.

Recall is the kind of feature I have always wanted but I am not sure I would ever enable. Setting aside Microsoft’s recent high-profile security problems, it seems like there is a new risk in keeping track of everything you see on your computer — bank accounts, a list of passwords, messages, work documents and other things sent by a third-party which they expect to be confidential, credit card information — for a rolling three month window.

Microsoft says all the right things about this database. It says it is all stored locally, never shared with Microsoft, access controlled, and user configurable. And besides, screen recorders have existed forever, and keeping local copies of sensitive information has always been a balance of risk.

But this is a feature that creates a rolling record of just about everything. It somehow feels more intrusive than a web browser’s history and riskier than a password manager. The Recall directory will be a new favourite target for malware. Oh and, in addition to Microsoft’s own security issues, we have just seen a massive breach of LastPass. Steal now, solve later.

This is a brilliant, deeply integrated service. It is the kind of thing I often need as I try to remember some article I read and cannot quite find it with a standard search engine. Yet even though I already have my credit cards and email and passwords stored on my computer, something about a screenshot timeline is a difficult mental hurdle to clear — not entirely rationally, but not irrationally either.

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