When I think about agents, I think of what permissions I have to give someone else in order for them to represent me, and what permissions I have to receive to be someone’s agent. Permissions.

Some years ago, I was asked by the CEO of a firm to compile a report on all the interactions between his firm and another, very large, global firm. They had a decent CRM system. It should have been simple. Turned out that in order to collate that data and to produce the report he wanted, I needed over 180 different permissions. Permissions that related to individual business units in different countries, permissions that could only be given by the data protection officials for each of those units in each of those countries, and a few more besides.

Park that for a moment, the architecture of permissions.

If you gave me your private and personal mobile phone number, and someone else asked me for it, could I give it to them? Not unless I had your permission. There’s a trust issue, a confidentiality issue as well. Permissions. Trust. Confidentiality.

I’m retired now. Next year the leading digit in my age will be a 7. When I started work, bosses had assistants, sometimes one per executive, sometimes in pools; usually senior bosses had senior secretaries of their own. Most sat in front of their boss’s office. Some had their own rooms. Regardless of the physical architecture they were in, they were empowered very differently. Mail was placed in pigeonholes for the assistants to pick up. opened mail envelopes addressed to their boss, stamped them to record when they’d been received, and then put them in folders for their bosses to read. Some read those mails and annotated them with recommended actions before seeing their boss, providing a cover sheet with a summary. Some summarised the mails and only highlighted the ones they considered important. Some of the mails went into the bin. Sometimes unread.

When email became common practice, some of these habits were transported into the electronic age. Some assistants had no access whatsoever to their boss’s email; some received a copy of the mails and could read them, but not reply; some could read, and only reply with an “on behalf of”; a few had full access and could reply on their boss’s behalf using their boss’s mailbox to send it.

I saw many many different practices across this spectrum, in terms of what agency the assistant had over their boss’s email. A whole variety. There was only one common thread. Assistants with full read, reply, comment, delete rights were unconditionally trusted by their bosses. That trust was earned rather than bestowed, although an incoming new assistant may occasionally carry the trust earned with a different executive.

Trust was a key factor in the decision to provide the assistant with “mail agency”.

At home, there are a number of people who are trusted by me to have a set of keys to different parts of the house. People who provide us with some sort of regular service. Cleaners. Builders and decorators. House and garden and pond maintenance. Some others. Some get temporary access, some get more long-term access. Some get “all-areas” access, some are restricted, provided access constrained on time or area or something.

Those keys are provided to people we trust.

Children get to ages when they have access to different things. I was given the keys to our flat when I was 13. On the strict understanding that I would (a) always tell my mother where I was going (b) when I would be back and (c) who I was going to be with. At that age, the answers were simple. The Sillimans, a few floors down. The Kapoors, one further floor down. The car parking area behind the house, to play cricket or football. The rules were simple. And I would lose the keys if I broke them. (I didn’t actually need the keys, we lived in a civilised apartment block. People rarely locked doors, they were left wide open or on the latch. It was the principle that counted).

It was a way of teaching me to be trusted about my whereabouts. Liberty not licence. Constrained and verifiable.

Sometimes there are relationships where communications between a pair of people are considered sacrosanct, confidential to the pair, inviolable in that confidence. Husband and wife. Doctor and patient. Priest and confessor. Lawyer and client. Over time, society has seen fit to protect and preserve such confidences, and we have evolved ways to do that. These are trusted relationships. Trust is the core, again.

When parents leaves the (appropriately aged) children in charge of the house while they go away somewhere, there are usually constraints. No parties but you can have friends over… but not more than 8. No touching the alcohol. No smoking. No loud music after 10. And keep everything neat and clean for when we get back – leading to the mad rush clean-up just before parents are due back. Trust. Specific permissions, time-bound.

As parents, there are responsibilities that fall on your shoulders when you do leave the children for a short while. They have to be old enough to be left without adult supervision. If they’re not yet at responsible ages, alcohol, medications, guns, cars, things that are age-constrained, have to be removed or safely locked away. And parents are held accountable for making that environment appropriately safe. Society requires us to do that. Other parents need to know that there are relevant rules in place in the household when the parents are away, otherwise their children will not be allowed to visit.

It’s not unusual to ask a friend, neighbour or relative to keep an eye on the house during such absences, and to let the children know who to contact locally in an emergency. Trust is two way and comes with responsibility and accountability.

An aside on secrets and keeping secrets. I remember a tale where Kenny Dalglish, then manager of Liverpool, managed to surprise everyone by bringing Ian Rush back from Juventus. A journalist asked him how he kept it a surprise. Kenny’s answer: Simple. I just didn’t tell anyone.

We make people our agents in many ways. Give them permission, explicit or implicit. Valet parking. Real estate sales and purchase. Dog walkers. Baby sitters. They are all empowered to do something on your behalf, with permissions sometimes narrow, sometimes broad, sometimes short-term, sometimes longer term, sometimes permanent. Powers of attorney for example, temporary or lasting.

Sometimes trust is bestowed without being earned, given the role of the person or group of people involved. Sometimes you trust someone because of their position in a firm or community or even society. Sometimes you trust someone because of the brand they represent, the firm they are ambassadors for.

Many years ago, I used to travel to Bangalore regularly on business. Fly from London to New Delhi. Land there at midnight or shortly after. Wait for five hours for the local flight to Bangalore. Nothing open. A ghost site. Hot. Often humid. And I’d be tired. It’s a long flight. After one or two such experiences, I had to find a way around this. So I would call up a hotel near the airport that I trusted, speak to the manager, and ask for a room or three for 6 hours. And a pick up from the airport, and the return transfer.

I would do this for my travelling colleagues as well. There were often two or three of us making this journey. As I did this more often, I got to know the “front of house” manager at the hotel. In those days, you had to do other things as an international traveller. A few other things. Administrative. Frustrating. Time-consuming. For example, you had to reconfirm return flights or run the risk of not getting a seat. You also had to change foreign currency into rupees. The way my mind worked, I really wanted a way to have all this done while I was sleeping, after having had the customary coffee and samosa. 

So I asked the front-of-house newly-minted friend what advice he had. And in typical five-star-hotel service style he said “Leave it with me”. And, while I slept, he would personally sort out the rebooking and convert the sterling into rupees. Everything would be done while I slept. And I would make sure he was rewarded for the incredible service.

This used to happen often. Once, when I was travelling with a couple of colleagues, I explained all this to them, and they watched, aghast, as I proceeded to give a man they didn’t know, a man they’d never met before, three sets of things. All our passports. A hefty sum in cash sterling. Our airline tickets.

But they trusted me. So they went along with it. Uncomfortably. Very uncomfortably. But they went along with it.

We had our coffee. We had our samosas. We slept in the rooms booked part-day for us. We came down, relaxed and refreshed, ready to go to the airport for our flight to Bangalore.

Hmmm. Where was the front of house man? Nowhere to be seen. He should have been back. And he wasn’t. He had our cash, our air tickets, our passports. And he wasn’t there. 

My colleagues hadn’t quite started to grumble or start recriminations, but I could see they were much discomfited. This was out of their comfort zone. Way out. And they were inwardly cursing themselves for listening to me.

By now I’d begun to have a few doubts myself. Not much, a little flurry. But I had faith. Faith that the status and security he enjoyed in his job, relatively prestigious in his society, those things would ensure he wasn’t tempted to go rogue. 

He returned. Fifteen minutes later than he had said. Everything had been done. And all was well.

Why am I telling you all this? Because these are the things I think about when humankind is about to embark on a spree of trust, not knowing what permissions we are giving, what we are putting at risk, what recourse we have.

Trust.

We live in exciting times. AI is here to stay. It’s only going to get better. It’s not great today but directionally fascinating. AI agents are going to be a core part of the journey we go on.

But we don’t have the right trust environment as yet. Thousands of people who know a lot more than I do debate whether we’re in a bubble and what a bubble burst would look like. Yet others debate whether frontier models have a business model that could work and whether there are any defensible moats. Sovereignty issues have come to the fore given our current geopolitics. The closed-versus-open debate is in full swing. Heavy usage of scarce resources, particularly in energy, water and capital, continues to place significant pressure on the overall business and physical environment. The impacts of climate change are now already being felt.

There are a lot of answers we don’t have. I’m not naturally a pessimist, and I somehow continue to believe in human nature. And I wouldn’t be alive today if not for significant medical and scientific advances over the last seven decades.

Esther Dyson has been speaking of needing an ICANN for agents. For insurance and guarantees and recourse and how that could work. I think it was Amazon’s One-Click that got people to trust giving their credit card details to a computer for an electronic service. That trust came because of guarantees and simplicity and convenience and safeguards. Maybe the kind of things she’s involved in will make that happen for agents. There could be exciting times ahead for consumers.

Simon Wardley, whom I also have a lot of time for, has been speaking and writing about the evolution of software development from amorphous practice to industrialised processes. I would recommend reading what he has to say, as also Tudor Girba, with whom he’s been working on rewilding software for some time. There could be exciting times ahead for the tech community.

Venkatesh Rao, in his Contraptions substack, has a fascinating take on what he sees happening in this space. Start with “eukaryotic” and go spiralling from there. I’m still digesting it, and loving the ride. It helped understand the dangers of anthropomorphistic approaches while still valuing the role of metaphor in helping us understand what is happening and what is possible.

Of course there’s a lot to worry about. But I have hope. One of the few times I spoke with Freeman Dyson, in one of Esther’s amazing PC Forums, he mentioned quite casually as to how taken he and his colleagues were with the idea of using nuclear fission to propel rockets…. and how they corrected course once they understood the risks.

Clay Shirky has been vocal about making sure we keep a close eye on where and how the power, the control and the value generation takes place, that we become centaurs, humans with superhuman powers, rather than reverse centaurs, in submission to nonhuman powers.

It’s still the Wild West. Exciting but with significant risks. Larry Lessig used to say (and here I am probably paraphrasing him abysmally) that four sets of code need to be established before a new far-reaching technology can become valuable. The code of law. Computer code. Market practices. Social ethics and values. 

It’s still the Wild West.

There are many things we have to ensure. Preserving human dignity. Reducing inequality. Stripping away inappropriate biases. Managing scarce natural resources. Avoiding regulatory capture. Doing all this in a sustainable and equitable way.

There are many people working on all this, all far cleverer than I can ever expect to be. They will work it out. Route around obstacles. As I think Tim O’Reilly once said, an architecture of participation will emerge. Some mishaps on the way, but with a sustainable forward direction. If that makes me an optimist, so be it.

While they’re doing all that, while the world of agents and agentic structures continues to evolve, while magic continues to happen:

I don’t know whether we are in a bubble or not. But I have views. I don’t know if machines can become sentient or conscious. But I have views. I don’t know if AGI or ASI will happen in the short run. But I have views. I don’t know if a suitable and sustainable business model will emerge for the current frontier models. But I have views. I don’t know how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. For that I don’t even have views. Life’s too short. At my age, it’s even shorter.

What we can’t have “It wasn’t me, honest. A big boy did it and ran away”. Rogue agents are not a topic I want to spend time on. Accountability and responsibility are key. 

Agent structures must come with responsibilities and recourse. Product liability will be a critical issue. When something goes wrong, someone will pay. People will understand what they are giving an agent permission to do. What could go wrong. What happens after. Who pays. 

People will understand that permissions can be time-constrained. Bounded in what they can be used for, with restrictive covenants as part of the permission. That permissions can be withdrawn. These understandings have to be tested for. Proof of that understanding may well be necessary. Phrases like fact finding and cooling off periods and consumer duty and mis-selling will emerge more and more in agentic worlds. 

Agents don’t get a free lunch. Safeguards have to work. Product liability will grow in importance. The rallying cries of “Because cancer” or “because China” may well be used, but not without accepting product liability at scale.

There will be a hierarchy of agent trust that emerges. What is being permitted, and what is not. To whom. By whom. Whether it is transferable, and how. Valid for what period. With what locus and bounds. How it is revoked. Repudiation. How recourse is provided, in what time and in what method. How is all this adjudicated. How is agent reputation built? How is it discovered? How is agent usage priced? Many many questions. 

Changes of this sort take time. I’m told it took seventy years for people to switch from using Thee and Thou and using You instead. More recently, I remember just how long it took for digital signatures to become a thing, what has to happen in the Lessig Four Codes before the change is real.

The whole Ts and Cs issue has to be cleaned up properly. ( An aside: If you thought software Ts and Cs were painful, try reading the warning leaflets that come with medications!). People need to know what they’re letting themselves in for, what could go wrong, what to do if it goes wrong, and how they will be compensated.

We live in exciting times. We are able to do many things. We can also do lots of damage. There’s probably an AI equivalent of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, and probably an Agent version as well. Laws.

The legal system. Computer code. Market practice. Social values and ethics.

Laws. And recourse. Basics of civilisation, of how people behave in society.

All underpinned by trust. Sometimes discovered, sometimes earned, sometimes bestowed, sometimes transferable.

Trust understood by comprehension. By clarity.

There’s work to do.

Warning: This is a long and rambling post. Somewhere, sometime, some beast birthed from AI will try and summarise it. I wish it well; but I can’t help giggling at the thought of it trying and failing. Only recently, I came across the term ai;dr; it made me smile; I smiled further when I watched how the term was being interpreted in at least two different ways: “it was written by AI so I didn’t read it”; or “it couldn’t be read because it didn’t fit into my context window”. But more of that later. Maybe.

When I was young, I didn’t much care for the music of generations past. But I was lucky. My parents had an excellent collection of records covering jazz, blues and classical. They came in the form of lacquer “78s”, 10″ LPs, 12″ LPs and the single, the “45”.

An aside or two. Those were the days. People hadn’t come up with the evil of selling you the same stuff packaged differently on a planned obsolescence journey. So the stuff my dad ha, what happened on 78 stayed in 78. Distinct and separate from the music released on the ill-fated 10″ format, as also on the 12″ proper LP. And 45s were just temporary bridges, singles were something the radio did, stacks of singles were something designed for jukeboxes. Proper music came in LP form. LP. Not vinyl. (And never vinyls).

LPs were begged, borrowed and/or stolen. Traded for anything and everything. Money. Drugs. Sex. Whatever. A sort of lingua franca for the hippie age. A flourishing secondary market where the norm was to buy a second hand LP, tape it, lend it to a few friends, and then sell it back to the shop for half of the money you paid for it. Guaranteed.

Repackaged format-change was unheard of: you didn’t land up buying the same stuff across fifty different releases and formats: here’s the 180gsm pressed, here’s the 10th/25th/50th anniversary, here’s the one with coloured discs, here are some bonus tracks, here’s the music naked, here it is all dressed up, here’s a limited edition, here’s an access-all-areas edition, here are all the ways we can sell you the same stuff again and again and charge you more for it.

You didn’t buy it in different media either, no travelling through vinyl and cassette tape and CD and minidisc and MP3 and FLAC and whatever else.

Sure, I went down each of those alleyways a few times before I stopped parting with my money. I have, however, paid for albums and CDs that contain nothing. Recently, I picked up a copy of Is This What We Want? Some years earlier, I had already acquired Dangermouse and Sparklehorse’s Dark Night Of The Soul, the early edition with just a blank CD in it. (I’ve never even taken the cellophane off, it’s pristinely empty). Before that I’d spent money buying John Cage’s 4’33”. And of course, even though it’s anything but silent, I had and still have Sounds Of Silence. A fool and his money indeed: but I treasure each of those.

Like I treasure the half-dozen bone records I have. Now that’s a medium with history.

Enough rambling for now. Let me get back to the point of this post. I used to think that every generation thought of the music of the generations that preceded and succeeded them as noise. Older generations expressed their enjoyment of what followed saying “will you turn that noise down”. Younger generations found many reasons to escape the room when the older noise began. It was a generation thing, much like Douglas Adams describes in The Salmon Of Doubt. I can’t find my copy right now, so here’s a link to a blog that covers the quotation I was looking for.

When it came to modern “western” music, I was firmly rooted in the stuff that was recorded and issued between 1963 and 1978, give or take a few years. I remain so. (In fact, I used to describe myself as deeply into sixties and seventies music. And then I found I kept going to concerts where the performers were all in their sixties and seventies, even eighties, and occasionally nineties. We’re all growing old). Rather than critique or look down upon the music of the past few decades, I was comfortable with the idea that the music was different and not to my taste. I had enough trouble choosing my 1000 (yes thousand, not a misprint) favourite albums of my chosen period. So I let things be, happy, contented, sated, in my little cocoon of sixties and seventies heaven. (Incidentally, today’s been a Grateful Dead and Traffic day. Yesterday was all Joni Mitchell. The day before, it was all Beatles. And the day before, I was deep into the Who and Crosby Stills Nash and Young. And so it goes).

I was comfortable believing it was all a generation thing. When I was in my teens, I used to giggle at seeing 40-year old grownups dressed in t-shirt and jeans, mutton dressed as lamb. Now I’m one of those, almost 70, still in t-shirt and jeans. Generational? No, comfortable and easy to choose. Blue jeans. Pale t shirt, collarless, usually white (unless it’s to do with one of my favourite albums or bands: I have doubles of help>slip>frank, of Blue, of Harvest, of Low Sparks, Who’s Next, etc).

But maybe there’s something else in play. Last year I came across this paper from a year earlier, “Trajectories and revolutions in popular melody based on US charts from 1950 to 2023”, by Madeline Hamilton and Marcus Pearce, which opened my eyes (or should I say ears) to other possible reasons.

I quote from the abstract:

In the past century, the history of popular music has been analyzed from many different perspectives, with sociologists, musicologists and philosophers all offering distinct narratives characterizing the evolution of popular music. However, quantitative studies on this subject began only in the last decade and focused on features extracted from raw audio, which limits the scope to low-level components of music. The present study investigates the evolution of a more abstract dimension of popular music, specifically melody, using a new dataset of popular melodies spanning from 1950 to 2023. To identify “melodic revolutions”, changepoint detection was applied to a multivariate time series comprising features related to the pitch and rhythmic structure of the melodies. Two major revolutions in 1975 and 2000 and one smaller revolution in 1996, characterized by significant decreases in complexity, were located. The revolutions divided the time series into three eras, which were modeled separately with autoregression, linear regression and vector autoregression. Linear regression of autoregression residuals underscored inter-feature relationships, which become stronger in post-2000 melodies. The overriding pattern emerging from these analyses shows decreasing complexity and increasing note density in popular melodies over time, especially since 2000.

A few weeks ago, I was reading something by an old friend, Om Malik. Been following his writings for years; I may not always agree with what he says, but for sure he makes me think. And ponder. And chew over. And refine, sometimes change, sometimes radically, my mind. I worry about the algorithmic grey-beige world he describes. Uniform pap. Any colour you like, as long as it’s black.

Uniformity of the rebels is a scary phenomenon at the best of times. And everything’s emptying into black. (Gives me a reason to link to one of my favourite Cat Stevens songs, Into White). Give it a listen). We are all on the road to find out, there’s so much left to know.

Any colour you like, as long as it’s black. I was reading something that David Reed had shared, about semantic ablation: the algorithmic erosion of high-entropy information. I love reading what he shares, in the same way as I love reading what Bob Frankston shares. They stretch me, make me question what I know, help me refine how I think. And yes, I don’t always agree with what they say, but they definitely inform me. People like them help me evolve my thinking, challenge my beliefs, shake up my priors and biases and collections of prejudices.

What David pointed me towards was this article in the Register: Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation by Claudio Nastruzzo, published earlier this week.

In his introductory piece David says “good writing is about operating on the “edge”, where consensus is wrong“. Earlier, he refers to Koestler describing creativity as “a collision of distinct frames of reference that produces the improbable but powerful insights of art and science and humour. (I left the Oxford comma in the Register headline above, wanting to refer to it precisely; but I couldn’t help but spell “humour” the English way when using the Koestler quote).

Where am I going with all this? I’m not a fan of pap. Modern society, aided and abetted by technology, appears to help drive a sameness, an averaging out, a vanilla-icing of everything. Any colour you like as long as it’s black. Tails get chopped off. All cats are grey at night. All phones look like derivatives of the iPhone. All crime thrillers now have formulaic titles and covers and – who knows – Milli Vanilli.

My children are old now. The oldest turns 40 very soon, and her first child, my first grandchild, turns 11 a few days later. There was a time, when the children were young, we would traipse off to holiday places and parks and playgrounds for Lego or Disney or cycling or whatever. And the food was pap.

Pap. Largely inedible.

That’s why I was elated at finding a place, I think it was called Radford’s, in Devon, where adults could be served real food while happy face pizzas dominated the rest of the table. Live and let live. I hope there are more Radfords around now, where different needs get met in different ways, and the diversity that makes life enjoyable is there.

There in our food, in our music, in our writing, and in what we watch or participate in or otherwise experience.

The internet was a source of great joy to me. Still is. But there’s a Gresham’s Law for information getting more powerful by the day, as bad information drives out good.

What people like Om and David referred to matters. Unless you are happy with pap.

A coda. People like Dave Winer and Doc Searls have been great encouragements to me when I sit down to write, through what they say. People like Kevin Marks and Stephanie Booth, to name a couple of friends, help remind me that I can do it.

That I can write. Freely. Ramblingly. Even it’s a blog for an audience of one. Because that’s what we all have to do, to read, to write, to regain the power we once had.

Otherwise we are doomed to a preponderance of pap.

(And yes, to the AI summarisers I say, have at you!)

I was brought up to believe that a good game of Test cricket is one that gets to day 5 with all four results possible. That a great game or makes it to the final session of the final day with all four results still possible. And that an incredible game makes it to a point where the requisite runs, wickets and balls available are whittled down to single figures, still with all results possible.

We’ve had some amazing matches this summer between England and India, as they tussle for the Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy.

Until this series, for the last fifty years or so, meetings between these two teams were played for the Pataudi Trophy; the Nawab of Pataudi (Jr) was the first Indian captain I’d seen play, in 1966, and that started me on a journey of joy that continues today.

That first Test I watched, at Eden Gardens in 1966-67, was a humdinger. A riot. A real riot. The stadium was set on fire. I had to jump off into my father’s arms, hoping he wouldn’t drop me. He was built like Indian cricketers those days, so a drop wasn’t out of the question. They were playing Gary Sobers’ West Indies, with the dual attack of Hall and Griffiths.

India lost. Those days, India didn’t win much. Had *never* won a series overseas. Anywhere. As far as I can remember.

So I grew up watching cricket, listening to cricket (I think it was on long wave, on valve radios), even following cricket on teletext.

India did a lot of losing those days. I went to watch the cricket, not to win or lose. And I loved the game.

I was lucky to be at Lord’s for Gooch’s 333 and 123, to watch Kapil stave off a follow on with four sixes, to be entranced by an early Tendulkar; to see Ganguly and Dravid debut. I was very lucky to be at the Oval on 12th September 2005.

Seen many Tests from day 1 first ball to day 5 last ball. Also seen many days without any play, including rained-off Ashes at Old Trafford and WTC at Southampton.

Part of the game. Those three little words: rain stopped play.

I went to watch the cricket. To enjoy the company and the atmosphere and the skills on display. The banter and the camaraderie. The sheer joy. Barmy Army and all; occasional even with a Bhangra beat.

I was at Lords all five days recently. What a match. Tires me thinking about it.

I didn’t really go to watch winning or losing. I wanted to watch great games.

Games like England v India at the Oval in 1979, which was an amazing draw. I wasn’t at the game. But I remember being at a college quadrant in Calcutta late at night as volunteer “scorers” signalled balls left, wickets left and runs needed ….. using candles …. At three corners of the quadrangle. While the diehards fans were at the fourth corner.

Wonderful days. I’ve been blessed with many wonderful days.

There were glitches. Vaseline. Boiled sweets. Dirt under fingernails. Betting scandals. Seams being damaged surreptitiously. Non standard bats. Poor umpiring. The madness of Umpire’s Call in particular and DRS in general.

There were glitches. Quarters gained and given in less than fair ways. Advantages gained unfairly. Boundaries that moved from Birnam Wood to Dunsinane. Balls that came apart or softened or hardened.

There were glitches. Frayed tempers. Gestures and actions less than sporting. Stumpings that shouldn’t have been.

Cricket. Crazy, messy. Where a day’s rained off play could turn into one man with his finger in the dyke of Wikipedia valiantly undoing the damage being done to an article there, I think it was about Caroline of Brunswick.

I hope we see play tomorrow. I hope to see a 4th Test conclusion that keeps the series open. And I hope to be at the Oval all five days, and to watch the game enter its fifteenth session at the end of the fifth day.

The camaraderie. The banter. The learned arguments about esoteric statistics. Queueing to get in and queueing to leave. Queueing to do pretty much anything. Queueing for the food and drink. Queueing for the loos. Queueing. Banter continuing.

Unsegregated supporters actually still managing to watch the game, not necessarily every ball, but far more than those in the expensive seats.

Cricket. Crazy, messy. A real joy. Especially when it’s red ball. Especially when it’s a Test.

Cricket. Not just win or lose but draw as well. Not just with flannelled fools against sunny green landscapes but when it’s all a big puddle as well.

Cricket. It’s never about winning or losing. Not the cricket I grew up with.

Cricket. Crazy, messy. Just like life. 

A detour

My use of “filters and brakes” was not meant to be clickbait to entice you here on false premises. This isn’t a post about cars, or anything to do with cars. This is the wrong place to come to if you want to read about cars. I’ve never owned a car. I’ve never rented a car. I have had a company car, but I’ve never driven one; my wife did drive the one I had, however.

I have never driven. Never had a licence. Never passed a test.

I once did have, and still continue to have, a vicarious interest in cars, for a fairly odd reason.

James Leasor.

I discovered the author around 1971, through the auspices of the British Council Library, which used to be on Theatre Road in Calcutta. As schoolboys we went there ostensibly to borrow books, but also because it was air-conditioned and quiet. Gold dust in those days. (And probably gold dust again soon, the cost of cooling may increase faster than the need for cooling, which is growing rapidly enough).

Every time I went there I’d make a beeline for 823.91 and look through the new arrivals before continuing to beachcomb the rest of the modern fiction section. It was one way to discover a new author. The first Leasor book I read, when I was 13, was called Never Had A Spanner On Her, and it introduced me to the protagonist Jason Love. Now Love had a penchant for Cords and Duesenbergs, and Leasor waxed so very lyrically and eloquently about them I began to think that they would be the only cars I would ever want to drive.

Soon I’d read everything that Leasor had written, not just the Jason Loves. That was the way people like me used to read: read extensively, always the “latest” book by an author. Then, if you liked the author, go through her entire oeuvre chronologically, one series at a time, until none remained. My dreams of Cords and Duesenbergs were built then, but not in some maniacal or obsessive way. It was like telling myself “One day I will eat Tournedos Rossini because Nero Wolfe thought they were amazing” … at a time when I lived in a vegetarian Hindu Brahmin home, one that had never even seen any meat enter it, let alone be cooked or consumed there. (And yes, since then I have had Tournedos Rossini one or two times. A year).

Those Cord and Duesenberg dreams, of cars built with passion by artists, of cars that could be built without using power tools, lasted a long time from 1971. I never imagined myself driving, it wasn’t something I aspired to. Maybe it was an instinctive reaction to knowing that the family couldn’t afford a car, so why think about driving? I never learnt to swim either, we didn’t belong to any clubs with pools in those days. What I couldn’t have I didn’t aspire towards. I had so many other things to look forward to, to daydream-believe, to make happen.

Twenty-odd years later, in my early thirties, as I began to think about maybe driving, the internet had been democratised and the web was emerging. So I could investigate Cords and Duesenbergs. Didn’t take me long to figure out what the answer was. You could call it sticker shock. I knew I’d never be able to afford one.

But I never forgot one thing about the 1929 Duesenberg, that it was the last car made without power tools that could be safely used on the road. That sort of thing appeals to me.

There’s a purity about it. It’s like never playing a word at Scrabble that you didn’t know the meaning of or couldn’t use in a sentence.

But I digress. Back to my original post.

Abundances and scarcities

This morning, by 10am, I had blocked a half-dozen handles on X. Ads which I wasn’t interested in and didn’t want to see, ads that were clouding my feed. I’d also emptied my various junk mail folders, after some cursory inspection to ensure that I’d missed nothing and promoted perhaps 1% to not-junk status, something I do once every few days. And I’d also deleted a plethora of “How Was It For You” requests, seemingly spawned by anything I’d touched digitally. (Oddly enough, the only one I didn’t delete was from Bentley’s, a place I’d visited in person, an email that was written personally and written to me specifically, rather than a cookie-cutter conceived and delivered without human involvement). Perhaps not that oddly. A personal message from someone, personally crafted, directed specifically at me, and related to a physical experience, feels tolerable, almost human.

That’s the trouble with abundance. It’s not always everything it’s cracked up to be.

Now I’m a big fan of Clay Shirky, and hold a number of things he said close to my heart. One of them is this:

There is no such thing as information overload, only filter failure.

Ever since I heard that, I’ve been fascinated by information filters, and even wrote a long series about them a long time ago. Here’s the main link: Filtering: Seven Principles, which I wrote here over a decade ago.

One of the other Shirky aphorisms I treasure is this (and here I paraphrase him, so much so I’m at risk of mangling his intent and misrepresenting it):

In order for a commons to thrive, the cost of repair must be at least equal to, if not lower than, the cost of damage.

There’s one other person I need to quote here, so that you can easily get my drift. And that’s something George Gilder once said, again paraphrased by me:

Every economic era is characterised by its own unique abundances and its own unique scarcities. A successful business takes into account both of these, the new abundances as well as the new scarcities.

Now there are some things he’s said that I disagree with, and some I disagree quite strongly with. But that doesn’t take away from the beauty of his “abundances and scarcities” framing.

An aside involving Gilder. When I was at Dresdner Kleinwort, while working for Al-Noor Ramji, we had an incredible team there. Really talented people, I was privileged to be part of that set-up. One day in 2000, Al-Noor asked me to organise a conference on mobility. An internal conference, focused on training the tech teams. We’d managed to get Gilder commit to opening the conference, his “Telecosm” hadn’t quite hit the shelves but he was all the rage and we wanted to hear what he had to say. We negotiated a price for his bringing his friend Marty Cooper to speak about the birth of the mobile phone and what it was like three decades earlier, and where he saw it going in 2000. Then we had pulled favours to get Hyacinth Nwana from BT to speak about connectivity. And we wanted to bring it all together to look at what we could learn from all the data that these connected devices would sense and collect.

We decided we had to have Mike Lynch from Autonomy. DrKW were the house brokers to Autonomy in those days, I’d met him a couple of times and reached out to ask him whether he would speak at the conference. He laughed when I said it was an internal one, just for our tech teams. And when I told him we had chosen to hold it at a college in Cambridge, his smile grew bigger. (We used that location for three reasons: 1 It was beautiful, it was functional, it was cheap 2 Gilder’s wife had gone to that college, and it made convincing him to speak at an internal conference a little easier; 3 we could try and convince Mike Lynch because it would be convenient for him).

Mike agreed, on one condition. No fees, no mess, no fuss. Just one special request. His dog had to be allowed to accompany him, and would have to be looked after while he spoke to us. He said he would take the dog for a walk, make a detour to speak to us, and then go back home with the dog. He kept his word, gave us an hour of his time, and we were entranced. Thank you Mike Lynch. RIP.

Capacity and constraints

You can’t really think about filters and brakes without also thinking about capacity and constraints. Since this is something I wrote about quite recently, I thought the best thing to do was to link to it here rather than repeat myself.

Friend of a friend

While studying the intricacies of the London Money Market at university in the mid-1970s (yes I am that old; I think the particular textbook we used for that class and topic was Modern Banking by R.S.Sayers, published 1938), I was fascinated by how discount houses and acceptance houses worked, and how effective that trust model was. The discount houses knew how to treat bills where the payer was known to them, but had a problem with situations where the payer was foreign not just to them, but located exotically as well. Enter the accepting house, with a man in every port that mattered to Empire, whose job it was to assess the worthiness, credit- and otherwise, of all the major companies there. The accepting house would sign the bill, and the discount house would do the needful, as they used to say at Writer’s Building. (I think I hear the phrase “please do the needful” only in India today, a trivial relic of the Raj).

So the discount house no longer needed to know the foreign payer, they only needed to know the firm that accepted the bill. Friend of a friend trust model in action, centuries ago. (An aside. In my first job, one of the banks we provided systems to was Brown Shipley, then a member of the Accepting Houses Committee. I was overjoyed to learn that such firms still existed, decades after the textbook).

Blogrolls

I started playing with blogs in the late 1990s, and was allowed to write internal-only posts by around 2002. It would be 2005 before it was considered okay for someone like me to have my own personal public-facing blog while working in senior roles in a bank.

Doc Searls and Chris Locke, two of the powerhouses behind the Cluetrain Manifesto — what an amazing book, it totally floored me when it came out — encouraged me to get out there and blog publicly. I was in New York to see Doc, and he introduced me to Halley Suitt Tucker, the organiser of the event at the Harvard Club. She was also organising a Blogger’s Dinner at Katz’s Deli that night, something she wrote about here.

That night at Katz’s, because of people like Doc and Halley, I met many people who till then were just trusted names on my blogroll. Trusted. On my blogroll.

Many of them still write. Maybe we will see a resurgence of the “blogosphere”, those days when people wrote “provisionally” about things, secure in the knowledge that they were amongst people who wanted to learn through civil discourse as embodied in that corner of cyberspace. Recently I’ve seen Doc show up here and there on my radar, as also Dave Winer (who’s been blogging since before we had a term for what he did) and Anil Dash, to name but a few who were there at that dinner.

I knew them because of what they wrote about, and because I followed them and read them. I knew them because someone I was already reading had linked to them via their blogroll. I knew them because someone I trusted “recommended” them by linking to them.

Blogrolls were wonderful discovery mechanisms, letting you find little-known bloggers who wrote passionately about stuff they were interested in. The recommendation process was also interesting, since linking to someone didn’t signal that you agreed with everything they wrote: the only signal was that they were possibly worth reading.

More importantly — and here I’m probably adjusting my rose-tinted rear-view-mirror — the blogroll wasn’t a filter bubble. There was diversity of opinion embedded within each person’s list of links. When I saw a new blog because it was mentioned somewhere, not necessarily by someone I knew and trusted, I used the blogroll as a validator of potential value. One that would allow me to be challenged in my thinking, rather than any form of groupthink.

Maybe that changed later, but my memories of the early blogrolls remain pristinely rosy.

Nobody goes there any more: it’s too crowded

One of my favourite Yogi Berra quotes.

We live in a world where we can’t move anywhere without being assailed by armies of notifications, drowned by the despair of a zillion requests for feedback, neutralised into nothingness by the noise of NPS. Even in cyberspace. Especially in cyberspace.

This is now a filtering problem. A serious one. It’s no longer about spam mail or abusive interactions in social media. It has entered the world of business. And that’s serious.

There is no spam as bad as corporate spam

It is now common for me to be asked to provide feedback for a service that I’m still experiencing: “how was your trip with us?” … a trip I was still on at the time.

It is now common for me to be reminded to do something I have already done, because the process by which I can tell the particular system that I don’t need reminding is broken.

It is now common for me to be recommended a purchase I have already made, just because I looked for possible items in that category a little while earlier.

When everything is connected, and everyone thinks they are making my life better by notifying me of stuff, of reminding me of stuff, of asking me about stuff, of recommending me stuff….

Then I stop listening. I stop reading. I stop responding. And, in the rare instance where I do do something about it, it’s not what the requester wants to hear or see. Put it this way, it’s not going to do their NPS scores any good whatsoever.

I’m tempted to write a more detailed post just about notifications and alerts and requests for feedback and reminders. But that will depend on whether there’s any interest. In Doc Searls’s “conversations with George Layoff” mode, this post is provisional, and may snowball. Or disappear into its own nothingness.

Speaking “provisionally”, I’ve been thinking of a structure that covers:

Introduction

You have been warned. This one’s for hardcore cricket nuts. Red-ball nuts. Five-day nuts. The hardest of the hardcore. No coloured pajamas here.

This post is to celebrate all-rounders. More particularly, men who have done “the double” of 1000 runs and 100 wickets in Test cricket. (At this stage, my analysis only covers the men’s game. As and when I find, and get used to analysing, Test statistics related to the women’s game, I shall write a similar post. Until then, please forgive the bias, it’s an availability and access and usage issue which will improve).

As far as I can make out, there have been 3186 male Test cricketers so far, and all my analysis is based on that set of players. Please let me know if you find any factual errors in this post, I’d be very grateful.

So.

The hard stuff

We have 3186 players, men who have played in at least one Test match.

Of the 3186, 586 have scored 1000 runs or more in their careers.

Of the 3186, 198 have taken at least 100 wickets.

There are only 75 men who have done both.

Let’s take a closer look at the 75. All my data is as of yesterday, 25th August 2024. The time-slice I have put players in is based on when they ended their careers, rather than when they may have completed their particular type of double.

20 of them have done the double, and no more. They’ve scored 1000 runs and taken 100 wickets. Here’s the full list:

Before 1961: I Johnson (AUS) 1000 109; M Tate (ENG) 1198 155; G Giffen (AUS) 1238 103; M Noble (AUS) 1997 121; 1961-70: A Davidson (AUS) 1328 186; 1971-80: F Titmus (ENG) 1449 153; I Alam (PAK) 1493 125; R Illingworth (ENG) 1836 122; 1981-90: J Bracewell (NZ) 1001 102; S Nawaz (PAK) 1045 177; 1991-00: J Emburey (ENG) 1713 147; 2001-10: M Rafique (BAN) 1059 100; I Pathan (IND) 1105 100; N Boje (SA) 1312 100; A Giles (ENG) 1421 143; A Razzaq (PAK) 1946 100; 2011-20: None; 2021-present: K Maharaj (SA) 1135 171; MDK Perera (SL) 1303 161; Mehidy Hasan (BAN) 1547 169; C Woakes (ENG) 1921 166

Another 21 have scored at least 1000 runs, less than 2000, but taken 200 wickets or more, sometimes a lot more, a whole lot more. Here’s that list:

Before 1961: R Lindwall (AUS) 1502 228. 1981-90: A Qadir (PAK) 1029 236; 1991-00: M Hughes (AUS) 1032 212; M Marshall (WI) 1810 376; C Ambrose (WI) 1439 405; 2001-10: J Srinath (IND) 1009 236; J Gillespie (AUS) 1218 259; H. Streak (ZIM) 1990 216; W Younis (PAK) 1010 373; B Lee (AUS) 1451 310; M Muralidaran (SL) 1261 800; 2011-20: P Siddle (AUS) 1164 221; G Swann (ENG) 1370 255; V Philander (SA) 1779 224; Z Khan (IND) 1231 311; D Steyn (SA) 1251 439; H Herath (SL) 1699 433; 2021-present: K Roach (WI) 1182 273; P Cummins (AUS) 1295 269; J Anderson (ENG) 1353 704; N Lyon (AUS) 1521 530.

Another 5 have scored between 2000 and 3000 runs, and taken at least 100 wickets but less than 200 wickets:

Before 1961: M Mankad (IND) 2109 162; T Bailey (ENG) 2290 132; W Rhodes (ENG) 2325 127; K Miller (AUS) 2958 170; 1961-70: T Goddard (SA) 2516 123

We then have four players who have scored over 3000 runs, taken more than 100 wickets but less than 200 wickets.

1971-80: A Greig (ENG) 3599 141; 1991-00: R Shastri (IND) 3830 151; 2001-10: C Hooper (WI) 5762 114; 2021-present: J Holder (WI) 3073 162

Then we come to those that have done at least the Double Double. When I was young, this list consisted of just two people, one who had done it before I started watching Test cricket (Richie Benaud) and another who did it after I had seen him play, live (Gary Sobers). So in my mind anyone who does the Double Double is a king amongst all-rounders.

Amazingly, we now have 25 such people, including Benaud and Sobers. Now we get to the serious end of the list, one where the entry criteria are at least 2000 runs and 200 wickets. Here’s the list, which reads like the Hall of Fame for Hall of Famers in cricket:

1961-70: R Benaud (AUS) 2201 248; 1971-80: G Sobers (WI) 8032 235; 1981-90: R Hadlee (NZ) 3124 431; 1991-00: I Khan (PAK) 3807 362 I Botham (ENG) 5200 383; N Kapil Dev (IND) 5248 434; 2001-10: W Akram (PAK) 2898 414; A Kumble (IND) 2506 619; L Cairns (NZ) 3320 218; A Flintoff (ENG) 3845 226; C Vaas (SL) 3089 355; S Pollock (SA) 3781 421; S Warne (AUS) 3154 708; 2011-20: M Johnson (AUS) 2065 313; H Singh (IND) 2224 417; D Vettori (NZ) 4531 362; J Kallis (SA) 13289 292; 2021-present: M Starc (AUS) 2093 358; T Southee (NZ) 2098 380; R Jadeja (IND) 3036 294; M Ali (ENG) 3094 204; R Ashwin (IND) 3309 516; S Broad (ENG) 3662 604; S Al-Hasan (BAN) 4520 241; B Stokes (ENG) 6508 203.

For those interested in nationalities, the breakdown is Australia 16, England 16, India 10, South Africa 7, Pakistan 7, West Indies 6, New Zealand 5, Sri Lanka 4, Bangladesh 3 and Zimbabwe 1.

The Best of the Best of the Best

If we wanted to rank the 25 Double Double makers, we could give them points: 1 point per 1000 runs and 1 point per 100 wickets, qualifying criteria 2000 runs and 200 wickets.

Let’s look at those with 6 points or more:

Jacques Kallis 15; Gary Sobers, Shane Warne 10; Kapil Dev, Stuart Broad 9; Ian Botham, Anil Kumble, Ravi Ashwin, Ben Stokes 8; Richard Hadlee, Shaun Pollock, Daniel Vettori 7; Imran Khan, Carl Hooper, Wasim Akram, Chaminda Vaas, Harbhajan Singh, Shakir Al-Hasan 6

That would make Kallis the clear winner.

We could have raised both bars at the same time, 1000 100, 2000 200, 3000 300, 4000 400, 5000 500, etc. If we did that, then the clear winner is Kapil Dev, the only person to have gone past 4000 runs as well as 400 wickets.

I prefer a different way to select the best of the best of the best. Add the third criterion, make the qualifying mark 100 catches.

If we do that, if we only look for people who have done the Double Double (2000 runs and 200 wickets) and taken at least 100 catches, we land up with a very short list.

Gary Sobers. Ian Botham. Shane Warne. Jacques Kallis. Ben Stokes.

Five great all-rounders.

But.

Only one of them has taken 200 catches. Only one has done the Double Double Double.

Jacques Kallis, take a bow.

A coda. Only one of the five people who’ve made 2000 runs and taken 200 wickets and a minimum of 100 catches is still playing. Ben Stokes.