| This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a galloping gallimaufry of Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions. Sign up here. What Happened to Fear and Loathing Over AI? | Talk of artificial intelligence always made me anxious. Case in point was Chris Bryant’s column last week about about how to hedge against AI stealing your job. Eek! No eek this week, though. Catherine Thorbecke has a bit of an antidote: AI that can make your work easier. That’s via the user-friendly benefits of Manus AI, an agent — a program that can independently organize and work out complicated tasks — designed by the Wuhan-based startup Butterfly Effect. It’s probably easier to get a sense of her excitement — and the rest of the tech world’s as well — with a long citation from her column: I asked Manus to build me a personal website, and within roughly 30 minutes it fully deployed a temporary URL with a simple design and everything I had asked for. It drafted a bio page based on publicly available information, included a portfolio tab with links to my latest columns, and a contact page with my email, LinkedIn and X accounts. The copy could use a light edit, but it was a remarkable first draft. It even offered instructions for deploying the website to a permanent hosting service, or gave me the option of downloading the project files. This has been on my to-do list for years. Without the agent I would have either had to hire a coder, pay a software service, or spend days building the site myself.
She says there are still glitches, but it’s still in beta (and Manus has admitted to “genuinely limited server capacity”). It’s more evidence that China isn’t napping in the race for AI dominance. DeepSeek — which caused a Nasdaq kerfuffle that seemed ages ago but was really just on Jan. 27 — was all about a much less capital-intensive AI framework. Catherine writes, “Manus was built on outside models that were fine-tuned to create a practical service beyond just a chatbot: It can complete a range of tasks on its own. Manus might not be the next leap in artificial general intelligence, but it is a reminder of how this emerging technology can be useful to human beings now.” Right now, Catherine has been one of the few people in the world invited to play with it. She says getting the access code was like “scoring free front-row tickets to a Beyoncé concert, ” and invitation codes are being resold online for $1,000 or more. That kind of AI talk isn’t making me anxious. It’s making me jealous. How the Mighty Have Fallen | For a long time, I refused to visit the Philippines, the country of my birth and where I still have many relatives I love. That was because Rodrigo Duterte was president. After his term in office was over, I still refused to return because of the alliance his family had made with that of incoming president Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. (another clan I have little sympathy for). Duterte’s daughter Sara is Marcos’s vice-president. Now, however, Duterte père has been shipped off to the Hague, where the International Criminal Court sits, to face charges of crimes against humanity for his so-called war against drugs. As Karishma Vaswani writes: “During his presidency from 2016 until 2022, his campaign killed more than 6,000 people, according to government data. Human rights groups say that number is at least double. Most were poor young men, shot dead after coming into contact with police, as well as children and others caught in the crossfire. According to the New York Times, which has seen a copy of the ICC warrant, a three-judge panel said the killings Duterte ordered were both widespread and systematic.” Duterte has denied authorizing police to gun down suspects. But on the flight over to the Netherlands, he said he was taking responsibility so that the police and military personnel who believed they were pursuing his goals would not have to. He also blamed his plight on the puti or White people. Even before the ex-president’s extradition, the alliance between the Marcoses and the Dutertes had fallen apart — with Duterte fille making veiled threats against the incumbent president’s family. She’s now facing impeachment. Marcos has been applauded for complying with the International Criminal Court’s warrant. But there’s a substantial amount of self-interest in making sure justice is served. The fall of the Dutertes means the Philippines is once again a Marcos playground. “A 2022 report from the US National Academies found that the biggest source of oil in the sea between 2010 and 2019 came from land-based runoff, which had increased more than any other cause. As coastal areas have become more densely populated and motor-vehicle use has grown, more hydrocarbons are being washed into the ocean. These chronic sources likely have a very different effect on ecosystems than accidental spills, but it’s something that’s not well understood and ought to be researched.” — Lara Williams in “Preventing the North Sea Collision From Echoing Deepwater.” Peace, peace when there is no peace. — Andreas Kluth The bitter lessons of Monsanto. — Chris Hughes That great Panama deal ain’t so great after all. — Shuli Ren Corporate America needs to tell Trump what to do. — Adrian Wooldridge Ukraine needs intelligence more than arms. — James Stavridis America’s golden child no more. — Rosa Prince US tourists: Why Europe must love them. — Chris Bryant LinkedIn’s AI dreams are scary. — Parmy Olson When King Dollar goes on vacation... — Daniel Moss The plight of India’s amateur investors. — Mihir Sharma Walk of the Town: This Is Not the Book You’re Looking For | The Warburg Institute sits quietly in the Bloomsbury campus of the University of London, on the corner where Byng Place curves into Gordon Square. I was there this week to look at an exhibition of tarot cards, including original art for a deck inspired by the scandalous British magus Aleister Crowley. But I was much more interested in the library bequeathed to the organization by Aby Warburg, the bibliophile scion of a Hamburg banking clan who ceded his inheritance to his brother in exchange for the promise that his sibling would buy him any book he wanted. A madly imaginative art historian, he brought 60,000 books and 25,000 photographs with him to London when he fled the Nazis in 1933. That’s the foundation for the Warburg’s 350,000-book collection today.  The nine daughters of memory at the Warburg Institute. Photograph by Howard Chua-Eoan/Bloomberg The building is dedicated to the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne. Her name is carved over a door in the lobby, where a gorgeous bas relief portrays her daughters — the nine muses. Aby Warburg’s legacy is wrapped around historical and cultural memory — how we remember and how we discover. The library continues to be organized around main guidelines (image, word, orientation and action), as laid out in a guide by one of the elevators (see below).  Organized serendipity at the Warburg. Photograph by Howard Chua-Eoan/Bloomberg One of the most enigmatic and beautiful principles of this idiosyncratic book lover was all about serendipity: the knowledge you want isn’t in the book you are looking for; it’s in the one next to it. His library was built to help that happen. I think I want to spend the rest of my life in it. To those on the other side of the pond, I hope you’re adjusting to daylight savings! We’ll follow a little later here in London.  ”Spring ahead all you want. I’m happy to fall behind.” Illustration by Howard Chua-Eoan/Bloomberg Notes: Please send leaps of logic and feedback to Howard Chua-Eoan at hchuaeoan@bloomberg.net. 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