Sam Bowman

Coming soon. worksinprogress.co/print/

@IwanDoherty98 @pastasnack_e Haha, no worries!

@s8mb @pastasnack_e I haven't read your tweet correctly. My bad

Exactly right, and if you allowed these people to sell the rights to these properties, most of them would. It’s a gigantic misallocation of resources, and fixing it is the fastest way to create a lot more housing in central London for economically productive people.

@RMudie96 There are half a million “socially rented” homes in Inner London alone. Half (!) of social households are economically inactive. I think many of them would love to get £300k+ and a home in a further-out area if given the opportunity. I’m not proposing to forcibly evict them.

That assumes though everyone sells up and leaves. What makes you confident they will? People’s jobs, formal and informal networks, children’s schooling, all of these are factors (and there are ofc more - obvs private housing costs) that would mean many wouldn’t budge. Many eligible for right to buy haven’t taken it even though they’d profit, too. Hard to see how a huge and much bigger carrot (or push) wouldn’t be needed, and if so I’d relay my points re huge negative externalities stemming from displacement

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America's fastest-growing cities are all in exurbs, and that's not going to change. Urbanists have two choices: 1) pretend this is not the case (2) recognize that the only way to make these projects better is to invent and prove a new, different model, like @CAForever.

@OnTheWoolsack @pastasnack_e They are! So were people who took advantage of Right to Buy. I think that’s a necessary evil to free up the housing for people who will work and pay for themselves. I can’t see mass evictions being politically tenable even if they were desirable (and I’m not convinced they are).

@s8mb @pastasnack_e What’s your response to the argument that those tenants are getting something for nothing, especially when the tradeable right was publicly funded?

@RMudie96 Of course. The benefits would be enormous – akin to building hundreds of thousands of new homes in inner London. And if you do it the way I propose, giving existing tenants control over their tenancy with the freedom to sell it, they would move when that was beneficial for them.

@s8mb Do you hand on heart think the potential agglomeration benefits of doing this would be enough to offset the absolutely gigantic economic, social, fiscal, human costs of the displacement this would create?

@TonyJuniper @MattRCBrowne @DanicaPriest @Sam_Dumitriu @edfenergy You see the way he talks about you in public? Imagine what he says in private!

@MattRCBrowne @DanicaPriest @Sam_Dumitriu Goodness me. 7 times over budget. Was it a bird or a fish that did that? I’m sure it wasn’t cackhanded project management, or having an endless budget funded by the French Government, or anything like that.

NEW: Natural England are set to delay Hinkley Point C by insisting on even more measures to protect fish. A two-year delay to Hinkley Point C Unit 1 would mean about 24TWh less clean firm power on the grid, between 2-4bn cubic metres more gas burnt, and between 4-8m tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Even though EDF have spent £700m on fish protection, including a £50m acoustic fish deterrent that is 93% effective, regulator Natural England wants them to do even more. This is likely to involve creating a salt marsh on nearby farmland. This could take years. samdumitriu.com/p/natural-engl…

@stephenadedalus Yeah, it's easy to romanticise (I often daydream of moving to the countryside too) but isolation is no fun in practice.

@s8mb I just moved back to civilization after a decade driving down from the mountains for work. I don’t think people like this understand how difficult not having trash removal or mail delivery can be, nevermind accessing healthcare/good food/etc

I've done both and I prefer the emails.

@BarryPCotter Ha ha. I spent about ten years living in the countryside outside Carrigtwohill in a somewhat-crooked little cottage. Dried herbs from the ceiling, spoke to birds, and bubbled soup while it rained. I didn't work the land though.

@s8mb You’re a Corkman of approximately my vintage so I’m going to roll to disbelieve on the youth as country peasant, being from just barely urban Limerick Kerry borderlands first generation urban myself.

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I wrote an incredibly navel-gazing essay for the Institute of Economic Affairs about what I think, where my views come from, and how they have developed over time. I actually wrote it a year ago, but it has come out today and I am so old that I have barely changed in that 12 months. Learn: - How I became a wild-eyed obsessive as a teen - What ideology I consider myself to have - Why I don't think that the difference between 'state' and 'market' matters all that much - The reason I am obsessed with the infrastructure delivery mechanisms of the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s insider.iea.org.uk/p/millenial-li…

@quant_____ Thank you!

@s8mb Beautiful

Coming soon: Works in Progress issue 24.

@Hamish_Low5 Nice points, very interesting! All sounds worth considering to me.

I agree Sam that fixing the real basics is the right move and would help on the margin but there are reasons to think this problem is even harder than that! The challenge here is not necessarily just importing compute but access to specific frontier models which raises some more precise issues around compute. For instance the heightened capability of these models means a need for higher physical and cyber security requirements for the underlying data centres. Given the pace of progress here and how much more important these models will become there is a lot of focus among the frontier firms on raising their security levels up above anything traditionally done with large scale commercial data centres. Potentially even up to the SL5 level to try protect against attacks from sophisticated state actors. It isn’t clear at all that private firms would construct sufficiently secure data centres in the UK that these US firms would be happy have their future highly capable/highly securitised models hosted here. This probably does need more state involvement via incentivisation and cooperation from the UK intelligence community. Then another challenge is the specific hardware. Compute is generally pretty fungible but is becoming less so over time as systems become more specialised. There is good reason to believe that Mythos is a much larger model than previous ones, and so requires significantly more memory to store it on the relevant AI chips. It has to be ‘sharded’ across a large number of chips which are all integrated into a single ‘scale-up’ domain. Only a few types of chips currently can reach large enough scale up domains to inference such a large model economically, just Google TPUs and maybe just about the latest Nvidia generation but likely only the next iteration with Nvidia’s Blackwell Ultra. The challenge for the UK is that data centres here generally deploy hardware that is a couple years behind the frontier due to firms not prioritising the UK for deploying cutting edge chips, and those firms focused on the UK (e.g. Nscale) not having early allocation of those cutting edge chips. Again maybe some more role for the state here in ensuring that we get access to the cutting edge, not working on a lag. Reasons why things are trickier but broadly strong agree that just actually allowing things to be built is the right step

In a global gas shortage, the US will restrict its LNG exports. In a global compute shortage, the US will do the same for its data centres, even if it regards us as trustworthy enough to access the models themselves. Relying on imported compute from the US could thus put us in a very vulnerable position. That means we want to get as much compute built here, or in reliably friendly allies, as possible. I don't think we need or want to subsidise data centres for that, which would risk misdirecting talent and resources for political ends. (Hydrogen-powered data centres in Barnsley, creating as many jobs as possible!) Instead, we need to make it extremely quick and easy to build them where there is private willingness and financing to do so, build in rewards for areas that take them, and get them connected to the electricity grid quickly by auctioning grid connections. Although I think AI is exciting and very promising, the risks from it are still pretty grave, especially if you are not the US or China. I am nervous about the decade ahead. But the key point is that if you think it will be a big deal, good or bad, getting compute built in your own country is a lifejacket that can protect against some of the most basic risks. In Britain, we can do that by fixing a few key policy areas that relate to building, many of which will not even provoke a political backlash.

@matthewlesh I'm sure that's right. It seems politically very challenging until the rightsholders realise that Britain being a holdout isn't going to help them much internationally.

@s8mb We also need to reform the UK’s copyright rules, so it’s viable to train models and do more inference in Britain, which will then unlock significant data centre investment.

This is great: "I am a natural fanatic. My mind always tells me that if something is true, it must be true to its maximum logical extent."