Pike Place Merchant Association, 1991
Photo: markk
Monday, October 31, 2022
Image: Luke Misclevitz via; from the book Talk Louder I Can't Hear You
Why a City without Graffiti Is Not a City
Image: Charles Mudede
"And don't worry about getting lost. Some say it's the only way really to experience a city." Smith is right when he talks about getting lost, for there is always another city alley to take, doorway to enter, park to stroll through or some overlooked or even forbidden quarter of a city to sidle through. The greatest cities are inexhaustible, and not least because they are constantly changing. And when a city stops evolving, its lifeblood freezes and it becomes – as history proves – little or nothing more than a museum showcasing its own past or a cluster of haunting ruins."
"Cities, like dreams, are made of desire and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else."
"The city, then, is never as rational as its founders, patrons, architects, planners, bureaucrats and engineers might have wished it to be. Truly great cities have always been a heady mix of the planned and the unplanned, the rational and the irrational, the dreamlike and the matter-of-fact. A great city today might have a magnificent core of grand central streets, stirring architecture, a comprehensive public transport system running like clockwork, secret sewers going about their sulphurous business untiringly, sane governance, bright schools, comforting hospitals, and all of these underpinned by healthy commerce and adorned by a confident culture. And, yet, the same city would be woven through with the unpredictable worlds of fashion, music, art, cuisine, carnivals, hobbies, cults, clubs.
So behind the walls of the city – Smith has a chapter on these – there is darkness, graffiti, street language, uprisings, religions, ghettos and slums, cathedral-like railway stations, traffic, trade, bazaars, malls, museums, red-light districts and so much else."
City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by PD Smith – review (The Guardian)
Geno and The Seahawks
Images: Dean Rutz and Jennifer Buchanan
[ed. Great pics (more in the article). Also: Go Geno! What a gem that just needed a chance. As he said, “They wrote me off—I ain’t write back, though"]
Sunday, October 30, 2022
Saturday, October 29, 2022
Technology That Lets Us “Speak” To The Dead Has Arrived. Are We Ready?
My parents don’t know that I spoke to them last night.
At first, they sounded distant and tinny, as if they were huddled around a phone in a prison cell. But as we chatted, they slowly started to sound more like themselves. They told me personal stories that I’d never heard. I learned about the first (and certainly not last) time my dad got drunk. Mum talked about getting in trouble for staying out late. They gave me life advice and told me things about their childhoods, as well as my own. It was mesmerizing.
“What’s the worst thing about you?” I asked Dad, since he was clearly in such a candid mood.
“My worst quality is that I am a perfectionist. I can’t stand messiness and untidiness, and that always presents a challenge, especially with being married to Jane.”
This Mum and Dad live inside an app on my phone, as voice assistants constructed by the California-based company HereAfter AI and powered by more than four hours of conversations they each had with an interviewer about their lives and memories. (For the record, Mum isn’t that untidy.) The company’s goal is to let the living communicate with the dead. I wanted to test out what it might be like.
Technology like this, which lets you “talk” to people who’ve died, has been a mainstay of science fiction for decades. It’s an idea that’s been peddled by charlatans and spiritualists for centuries. But now it’s becoming a reality—and an increasingly accessible one, thanks to advances in AI and voice technology.
My real, flesh-and-blood parents are still alive and well; their virtual versions were just made to help me understand the technology. But their avatars offer a glimpse at a world where it’s possible to converse with loved ones—or simulacra of them—long after they’re gone.
From what I could glean over a dozen conversations with my virtually deceased parents, this really will make it easier to keep close the people we love. It’s not hard to see the appeal. People might turn to digital replicas for comfort, or to mark special milestones like anniversaries.
At the same time, the technology and the world it’s enabling are, unsurprisingly, imperfect, and the ethics of creating a virtual version of someone are complex, especially if that person hasn’t been able to provide consent.
For some, this tech may even be alarming, or downright creepy. I spoke to one man who’d created a virtual version of his mother, which he booted up and talked to at her own funeral. Some people argue that conversing with digital versions of lost loved ones could prolong your grief or loosen your grip on reality. And when I talked to friends about this article, some of them physically recoiled. There’s a common, deeply held belief that we mess with death at our peril.
I understand these concerns. I found speaking to a virtual version of my parents uncomfortable, especially at first. Even now, it still feels slightly transgressive to speak to an artificial version of someone—especially when that someone is in your own family.
But I’m only human, and those worries end up being washed away by the even scarier prospect of losing the people I love—dead and gone without a trace. If technology might help me hang onto them, is it so wrong to try?
At first, they sounded distant and tinny, as if they were huddled around a phone in a prison cell. But as we chatted, they slowly started to sound more like themselves. They told me personal stories that I’d never heard. I learned about the first (and certainly not last) time my dad got drunk. Mum talked about getting in trouble for staying out late. They gave me life advice and told me things about their childhoods, as well as my own. It was mesmerizing.
“What’s the worst thing about you?” I asked Dad, since he was clearly in such a candid mood.
“My worst quality is that I am a perfectionist. I can’t stand messiness and untidiness, and that always presents a challenge, especially with being married to Jane.”
Then he laughed—and for a moment I forgot I wasn’t really speaking to my parents at all, but to their digital replicas.
Technology like this, which lets you “talk” to people who’ve died, has been a mainstay of science fiction for decades. It’s an idea that’s been peddled by charlatans and spiritualists for centuries. But now it’s becoming a reality—and an increasingly accessible one, thanks to advances in AI and voice technology.
My real, flesh-and-blood parents are still alive and well; their virtual versions were just made to help me understand the technology. But their avatars offer a glimpse at a world where it’s possible to converse with loved ones—or simulacra of them—long after they’re gone.
From what I could glean over a dozen conversations with my virtually deceased parents, this really will make it easier to keep close the people we love. It’s not hard to see the appeal. People might turn to digital replicas for comfort, or to mark special milestones like anniversaries.
At the same time, the technology and the world it’s enabling are, unsurprisingly, imperfect, and the ethics of creating a virtual version of someone are complex, especially if that person hasn’t been able to provide consent.
For some, this tech may even be alarming, or downright creepy. I spoke to one man who’d created a virtual version of his mother, which he booted up and talked to at her own funeral. Some people argue that conversing with digital versions of lost loved ones could prolong your grief or loosen your grip on reality. And when I talked to friends about this article, some of them physically recoiled. There’s a common, deeply held belief that we mess with death at our peril.
I understand these concerns. I found speaking to a virtual version of my parents uncomfortable, especially at first. Even now, it still feels slightly transgressive to speak to an artificial version of someone—especially when that someone is in your own family.
But I’m only human, and those worries end up being washed away by the even scarier prospect of losing the people I love—dead and gone without a trace. If technology might help me hang onto them, is it so wrong to try?
by Charlotte Jee, MIT Technology Review | Read more:
Image: Najeebah Al-Ghadban
Friday, October 28, 2022
Kim Stanley Robinson: We Need Democratic Socialism
There aren’t many popular writers who take head-on the capitalist system, big social and economic theories, and utopia. Still fewer take an interest in the environmental crisis and the near future it has in store for us. But Kim Stanley Robinson is one of them — a both prolific and political author, famed for his Mars trilogy.
His most recent novel is called The Ministry for the Future, dubbed a work of “cli-fi” — climate fiction. It helps us think about the disasters in front of us, but also what we can do about them. Philippe Vion-Dury of Socialter magazine spoke to the author about ecoterrorism, geoengineering, and the themes that pervade contemporary literature.
PHILIPPE VION-DURY: Your novel doesn’t match classic genres of “utopia” or “dystopia”… it’s not even science fiction really. How would you define your attempt with The Ministry for the Future? Proleptic realism? Fictional Prospective? Some even say it is an essay or a political tract (albeit one that’s eight hundred pages long) turned into a novel. There are, indeed, multiple passages that are clearly meant to inform the reader…
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: I would insist that The Ministry for the Future is a science fiction novel. It’s a novel, for sure, because the novel is a very capacious form, which can include many other kinds of genres in it, all thrown into the pot to make a kind of stew; and also it’s science fiction, simply because it’s set in the future. I would say science fiction is a genre that divides into three parts: the far future (often called space opera), the near future (proleptic realism, perhaps), and then a third less frequent middle zone in time that I call “future history,” which is say about a hundred to three hundred years in the future; this zone is much rarer, but very interesting, and it’s where I’ve placed many of my novels. But Ministry is near-future science fiction.
There are some famous novels in American literature which make the mixed nature of the form very clear — Moby Dick by [Herman] Melville, and USA by John Dos Passos, which was [Jean-Paul] Sartre’s favorite American novel. These are great novels, beyond my capacities, but they have been inspirational for me in my own work, in particular for 2312 and Ministry. You could say these novels are in the form of a bricolage or heteroglossia, or poly-vocal braids — but you see what I mean. (...)
PHILIPPE VION-DURY: The ambivalence of a certain kind of sci-fi regarding technology is sometimes emphasized: while criticizing technology or it’s possible use, it also strengthens its core position in our vision of the future, its halo of ineluctability. We could say, with the Mars trilogy, that you were doomed to strengthen the belief that one day we will be able to terraform an exoplanet, and why not alter or save Earth, too, by these same means. You also stage geoengineering experiments in The Ministry for the Future, which carry an additional ambivalence: Even if we don’t want to do it, will we be able to keep us from doing it if things go mad? How do you feel about that?
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: I want to point out that we have been technological for the entire history of our species, and indeed we evolved with technologies (of fire and stone and wood, etc.) to become human in the first place. Any simple criticism of technology as such is a misunderstanding of what humans are: the social primate that uses technology. Homo faber.
So, if the underlying power source for our civilization — a technology — has accidentally poisoned us — which it has — then it’s entirely appropriate to wield other technologies to reverse the damage if we can. Some damage can be reversed (buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere), but other damage can never be reversed (extinctions). Since we’re beginning a mass extinction event, we have to consider all possible actions as things we might want to do while they will still help.
Calling some of these actions “geoengineering” and then defining them in advance as bad actions is not a helpful move at this point. Women’s rights are geoengineering: when women have their full human rights, the number of humans goes down, and there is less impact on the Earth. Once you accept that, the uselessness of the word is made evident. Each move our civilization makes has planetary repercussions, and all are now important. Just think of it that way, please, and avoid all knee-jerk judgments in the service of ideological purity of the individual bourgeois subject holding said opinion. Purity of one’s beliefs is highly overrated.
PHILIPPE VION-DURY: Regarding technology, Ursula Le Guin says it’s “a heroic undertaking, Herculean, Promethean, conceived as triumph, hence ultimately as tragedy.” I’ll quote: “If, however, one avoids the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as primarily cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination, one pleasant side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythological genre than a realistic one.” What do you think about that?
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: That’s all fine, and I loved Ursula and her transformative views, but she would agree with this, I hope: a carrier bag is a technology! So quit with the mythic distinctions and focus on survival of civilization, please, which will be a technological accomplishment, just as the danger was created in part by earlier technological accomplishments.
That said, the real creation of danger comes from capitalism, as Le Guin would also agree with. If technology was deployed for human and biosphere welfare, we would be in good shape even now; but it’s deployed for profit, appropriation, exploitation, and gains for the rich, very often — and so the best good is not accomplished and we are in terrible danger. This is not the fault of technology, but of capitalism, which of course is a systems software, so therefore also a technology — but a better one is justice.
His most recent novel is called The Ministry for the Future, dubbed a work of “cli-fi” — climate fiction. It helps us think about the disasters in front of us, but also what we can do about them. Philippe Vion-Dury of Socialter magazine spoke to the author about ecoterrorism, geoengineering, and the themes that pervade contemporary literature.
PHILIPPE VION-DURY: Your novel doesn’t match classic genres of “utopia” or “dystopia”… it’s not even science fiction really. How would you define your attempt with The Ministry for the Future? Proleptic realism? Fictional Prospective? Some even say it is an essay or a political tract (albeit one that’s eight hundred pages long) turned into a novel. There are, indeed, multiple passages that are clearly meant to inform the reader…
There are some famous novels in American literature which make the mixed nature of the form very clear — Moby Dick by [Herman] Melville, and USA by John Dos Passos, which was [Jean-Paul] Sartre’s favorite American novel. These are great novels, beyond my capacities, but they have been inspirational for me in my own work, in particular for 2312 and Ministry. You could say these novels are in the form of a bricolage or heteroglossia, or poly-vocal braids — but you see what I mean. (...)
PHILIPPE VION-DURY: The ambivalence of a certain kind of sci-fi regarding technology is sometimes emphasized: while criticizing technology or it’s possible use, it also strengthens its core position in our vision of the future, its halo of ineluctability. We could say, with the Mars trilogy, that you were doomed to strengthen the belief that one day we will be able to terraform an exoplanet, and why not alter or save Earth, too, by these same means. You also stage geoengineering experiments in The Ministry for the Future, which carry an additional ambivalence: Even if we don’t want to do it, will we be able to keep us from doing it if things go mad? How do you feel about that?
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: I want to point out that we have been technological for the entire history of our species, and indeed we evolved with technologies (of fire and stone and wood, etc.) to become human in the first place. Any simple criticism of technology as such is a misunderstanding of what humans are: the social primate that uses technology. Homo faber.
So, if the underlying power source for our civilization — a technology — has accidentally poisoned us — which it has — then it’s entirely appropriate to wield other technologies to reverse the damage if we can. Some damage can be reversed (buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere), but other damage can never be reversed (extinctions). Since we’re beginning a mass extinction event, we have to consider all possible actions as things we might want to do while they will still help.
Calling some of these actions “geoengineering” and then defining them in advance as bad actions is not a helpful move at this point. Women’s rights are geoengineering: when women have their full human rights, the number of humans goes down, and there is less impact on the Earth. Once you accept that, the uselessness of the word is made evident. Each move our civilization makes has planetary repercussions, and all are now important. Just think of it that way, please, and avoid all knee-jerk judgments in the service of ideological purity of the individual bourgeois subject holding said opinion. Purity of one’s beliefs is highly overrated.
PHILIPPE VION-DURY: Regarding technology, Ursula Le Guin says it’s “a heroic undertaking, Herculean, Promethean, conceived as triumph, hence ultimately as tragedy.” I’ll quote: “If, however, one avoids the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as primarily cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination, one pleasant side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythological genre than a realistic one.” What do you think about that?
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: That’s all fine, and I loved Ursula and her transformative views, but she would agree with this, I hope: a carrier bag is a technology! So quit with the mythic distinctions and focus on survival of civilization, please, which will be a technological accomplishment, just as the danger was created in part by earlier technological accomplishments.
That said, the real creation of danger comes from capitalism, as Le Guin would also agree with. If technology was deployed for human and biosphere welfare, we would be in good shape even now; but it’s deployed for profit, appropriation, exploitation, and gains for the rich, very often — and so the best good is not accomplished and we are in terrible danger. This is not the fault of technology, but of capitalism, which of course is a systems software, so therefore also a technology — but a better one is justice.
by Philip Vion-Dury, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: Will Ireland / SFX Magazine / Future via Getty Images
Thursday, October 27, 2022
Elon Musk Visits Twitter as $44 Billion Deal Nears Completion
Mr. Musk, who runs Tesla and SpaceX, visited Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters on Wednesday and tweeted a nine-second video of himself smiling and carrying a porcelain sink into the building.
“Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in!” he wrote.
Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in! pic.twitter.com/D68z4K2wq7— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 26, 2022
Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, faces a Friday deadline to complete his purchase of Twitter, according to a judicial ruling. He is expected to attend a variety of meetings this week at the social media company, said three Twitter employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity. He is also set to address Twitter employees on Friday, according to the employees and an internal note from Leslie Berland, the company’s chief marketing officer.
Mr. Musk, 51, also changed his profile on Twitter by describing himself as “Chief Twit” and marking his location as “Twitter HQ.”
by Ryan Mac and Kate Conger, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jim Wilson/The New York Times
[ed. This feels like some kind of expensive ego trip (with large cultural/media impacts). Reminds me of Ted Turner back in the day. But there are other forms of significant disruption on the media horizon, too... see also: Please stop calling it the ‘newsletter economy’ (Substack); and, 10 Reasons Why I'm Publishing My Next Book on Substack (Honest Broker):]
***
"This kind of concentration of power can’t be healthy for other writers—or for readers. Or for our culture at large. (...)"I told them that I was initially skeptical about the platform, but a moment arrived when I finally grasped the way Substack empowered me.
“What made the difference for you?” CEO Chris Best asked.
“The lightbulb went on when I saw that Substack was an accelerating platform,” I replied. “I initially thought that I would gain some early subscribers and then growth would flatten. In fact, the opposite occurred—my subscriber growth and impact have accelerated over time. I had no idea this would happen, or in such a dramatic way.”
I started out on Substack attracting around one thousand new subscribers per month. But within a short while I was gaining around one thousand subscribers per week. In other words, not only do I continue to gain an audience on the platform, but the pace at which it grows gets faster and faster all the time.
Below is a mind-blowing chart. A few months ago, I would have told you that the best decision I made in expanding my audience was getting into direct contact with my readers on Twitter. But check out this comparison between my Twitter followers and Substack subscribers." (Honest Broker)
via:
The Greatest Evil Is War
Ashleigh Banfield, who was ousted by NBC after speaking critically of the Iraq war, said in the lecture that got her fired that Americans did not understand what the war was really like because they were seeing sanitized images that didn’t show the reality of civilian casualties. Journalists embedded with U.S. troops, for instance, would show soldiers firing M16s into a building, but:
I don’t think there’s much understanding in this country of just how much real warfare differs from depictions on TV news, in films, and in video games. Nobody would deny that it does differ, but when I went to the World War II museum, what I saw was a strange depiction of a war that didn’t have any actual blood or gore. The story of the war wasn’t even really that upsetting.
Chris Hedges, who spent decades as a war correspondent for the New York Times, is deeply troubled by our collective lack of understanding of what war actually does to people. His new book The Greatest Evil is War is an effort to show just what a monstrous thing war is and to make readers determined to eliminate war from the Earth for good. (...)
Hedges shows us the darkest parts of war, the parts left out of Call of Duty. He introduces us, for instance, to Jessica Goodell, a Marine in the Mortuary Affairs unit, whose job it was in Iraq to collect and process the remains of dead marines. Goodell had to go around the scenes of explosions picking up bits of corpses. She saw how real people, with letters and photos of their families in their pockets, were turned by IEDs into nothing but piles of meat, to be scooped into bags. (“We would open a body bag and there was nothing but vaporized flesh. There were not four hands or a whole leg in a bag. We tried to distribute the mush evenly throughout the bags. We had the last body bag come in. We opened it up and it was filled with the heads. I looked at four before looking away. Not only did we have to look at them, we had to pick them up and figure out who it belonged to. The eyes were looking back at us.”).
Goodell’s experience never aired as part of the cable news coverage showing the glorious American entry into Baghdad. But when George W. Bush sent young people into that war, that’s what he was sentencing them to. His decisions meant some of them would become heads in a bag, and others would have to sort and process those heads. Many, many more Iraqis would meet similar violent deaths thanks to Bush. Similar fates have now been inflicted on thousands of Ukrainians and Russians by Vladimir Putin.
The dead are not the only ones affected, of course. Hedges also looks at the veterans and their families who must suffer with lifelong trauma from exposure to extreme violence, or who live with debilitating physical injuries. The casualties of war do not appear in U.S. armed forces recruitment material, and Donald Trump infamously specified he didn’t want “wounded guys” in his military parade, because they wouldn’t look good. But Hedges wants us to come face to face with those who have burns across 90 percent of their bodies, who are paralyzed and disfigured. As he writes:
“You didn’t see where those bullets landed. You didn’t see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. … Was this journalism or was this “coverage”? … [We got] a glorious wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn’t journalism because I’m not sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful, terrific endeavor. We got rid of a horrible leader, … But we didn’t see what it took to do that.”When we hear, for instance, that the United States has bombed a wedding party, that sounds awful, but the word “bombed” can do nothing to convey what it is like for human beings who are faced with seeing their loved ones in pieces in front of them on what was supposed to be a joyful day. The true “horror” (a word we use constantly because there is none other, although it is so inadequate as to be almost useless) is literally indescribable. The reality of what it means for the United States to do something like this is so hideous that anyone who was there and saw it first-hand would likely be traumatized for life.
Chris Hedges, who spent decades as a war correspondent for the New York Times, is deeply troubled by our collective lack of understanding of what war actually does to people. His new book The Greatest Evil is War is an effort to show just what a monstrous thing war is and to make readers determined to eliminate war from the Earth for good. (...)
Hedges shows us the darkest parts of war, the parts left out of Call of Duty. He introduces us, for instance, to Jessica Goodell, a Marine in the Mortuary Affairs unit, whose job it was in Iraq to collect and process the remains of dead marines. Goodell had to go around the scenes of explosions picking up bits of corpses. She saw how real people, with letters and photos of their families in their pockets, were turned by IEDs into nothing but piles of meat, to be scooped into bags. (“We would open a body bag and there was nothing but vaporized flesh. There were not four hands or a whole leg in a bag. We tried to distribute the mush evenly throughout the bags. We had the last body bag come in. We opened it up and it was filled with the heads. I looked at four before looking away. Not only did we have to look at them, we had to pick them up and figure out who it belonged to. The eyes were looking back at us.”).
Goodell’s experience never aired as part of the cable news coverage showing the glorious American entry into Baghdad. But when George W. Bush sent young people into that war, that’s what he was sentencing them to. His decisions meant some of them would become heads in a bag, and others would have to sort and process those heads. Many, many more Iraqis would meet similar violent deaths thanks to Bush. Similar fates have now been inflicted on thousands of Ukrainians and Russians by Vladimir Putin.
The dead are not the only ones affected, of course. Hedges also looks at the veterans and their families who must suffer with lifelong trauma from exposure to extreme violence, or who live with debilitating physical injuries. The casualties of war do not appear in U.S. armed forces recruitment material, and Donald Trump infamously specified he didn’t want “wounded guys” in his military parade, because they wouldn’t look good. But Hedges wants us to come face to face with those who have burns across 90 percent of their bodies, who are paralyzed and disfigured. As he writes:
“If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be harder to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of the schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan or Ukraine and listen to the wails of their parents, the clichés about liberating the women of Afghanistan or bringing freedom to the Afghan or Ukrainian people would be obscene. Therefore, war is carefully sanitized. Television reports give us the visceral thrill of force and hide from us the effects of bullets, tank rounds, iron fragmentation bombs, and artillery rounds. We taste a bit of war’s exhilaration, but are protected from seeing what war actually does, its smells, noise, confusion, and most of all its overpowering fear… The wounded, the crippled, and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted offstage. They are war’s refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too unpleasant for us to hear.”
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: Nathan J. Robinson
Wednesday, October 26, 2022
The Husband Stitch
(If you read this story out loud, please use the following voices:
Me: as a child, high-pitched, forgettable; as a woman, the same.
The boy who will grow into a man, and be my spouse: robust with his own good fortune.
My father: Like your father, or the man you wish was your father.
My son: as a small child, gentle, rounded with the faintest of lisps; as a man, like my husband.
All other women: interchangeable with my own.)
The boy is not facing me. I see the muscles of his neck and upper back, how he fairly strains out of his button-down shirts. I run slick. It isn’t that I don’t have choices. I am beautiful. I have a pretty mouth. I have a breast that heaves out of my dresses in a way that seems innocent and perverse all at the same time. I am a good girl, from a good family. But he is a little craggy, in that way that men sometimes are, and I want.
I once heard a story about a girl who requested something so vile from her paramour that he told her family and they had her hauled her off to a sanitarium. I don’t know what deviant pleasure she asked for, though I desperately wish I did. What magical thing could you want so badly that they take you away from the known world for wanting it?
The boy notices me. He seems sweet, flustered. He says, hello. He asks my name.
I have always wanted to choose my moment, and this is the moment I choose.
On the deck, I kiss him. He kisses me back, gently at first, but then harder, and even pushes open my mouth a little with his tongue. When he pulls away, he seems startled. His eyes dart around for a moment, and then settles on my throat.
– What’s that? he asks.
– Oh, this? I touch my ribbon at the back of my neck. It’s just my ribbon. I run my fingers halfway around its green and glossy length, and bring them to rest on the tight bow that sits in the front. He reaches out his hand, and I seize it and push it away.
– You shouldn’t touch it, I say. You can’t touch it.
Before we go inside, he asks if he can see me again. I tell him I would like that. That night, before I sleep, I imagine him again, his tongue pushing open my mouth, and my fingers slide over myself and I imagine him there, all muscle and desire to please, and I know that we are going to marry. (...)
Me: as a child, high-pitched, forgettable; as a woman, the same.
The boy who will grow into a man, and be my spouse: robust with his own good fortune.
My father: Like your father, or the man you wish was your father.
My son: as a small child, gentle, rounded with the faintest of lisps; as a man, like my husband.
All other women: interchangeable with my own.)
*
In the beginning, I know I want him before he does. This isn’t how things are done, but this is how I am going to do them. I am at a neighbour’s party with my parents, and I am seventeen. Though my father didn’t notice, I drank half a glass of white wine in the kitchen a few minutes ago, with the neighbour’s teenage daughter. Everything is soft, like a fresh oil painting.
I once heard a story about a girl who requested something so vile from her paramour that he told her family and they had her hauled her off to a sanitarium. I don’t know what deviant pleasure she asked for, though I desperately wish I did. What magical thing could you want so badly that they take you away from the known world for wanting it?
The boy notices me. He seems sweet, flustered. He says, hello. He asks my name.
I have always wanted to choose my moment, and this is the moment I choose.
On the deck, I kiss him. He kisses me back, gently at first, but then harder, and even pushes open my mouth a little with his tongue. When he pulls away, he seems startled. His eyes dart around for a moment, and then settles on my throat.
– What’s that? he asks.
– Oh, this? I touch my ribbon at the back of my neck. It’s just my ribbon. I run my fingers halfway around its green and glossy length, and bring them to rest on the tight bow that sits in the front. He reaches out his hand, and I seize it and push it away.
– You shouldn’t touch it, I say. You can’t touch it.
Before we go inside, he asks if he can see me again. I tell him I would like that. That night, before I sleep, I imagine him again, his tongue pushing open my mouth, and my fingers slide over myself and I imagine him there, all muscle and desire to please, and I know that we are going to marry. (...)
*
My parents are very fond of him. He is a nice boy, they say. He will be a good man. They ask him about his occupation, his hobbies, his family. He comes around twice a week, sometimes thrice. My mother invites him in for supper, and while we eat I dig my nails into the meat of his leg. After the ice cream puddles in the bowl, I tell my parents that I am going to walk with him down the lane. We strike off through the night, holding hands sweetly until we are out of sight of the house. I pull him through the trees, and when we find a patch of clear ground I shimmy off my pantyhose, and on my hands and knees offer myself up to him.
I have heard all of the stories about girls like me, and I am unafraid to make more of them. There are two rules: he cannot finish inside of me, and he cannot touch my green ribbon. He spends into the dirt, pat-pat-patting like the beginning of rain. I go to touch myself, but my fingers, which had been curling in the dirt beneath me, are filthy. I pull up my underwear and stockings. He makes a sound and points, and I realize that beneath the nylon, my knees are also caked in dirt. I pull them down and brush, and then up again. I smooth my skirt and repin my hair. A single lock has escaped his slicked-back curls, and I tuck it up with the others. We walk down to the stream and I run my hands in the current until they are clean again.
We stroll back to the house, arms linked chastely. Inside, my mother has made coffee, and we all sit around while my father asks him about business.
(If you read this story out loud, the sounds of the clearing can be best reproduced by taking a deep breath and holding it for a long moment. Then release the air all at once, permitting your chest to collapse like a block tower knocked to the ground. Do this again, and again, shortening the time between the held breath and the release.)
I have heard all of the stories about girls like me, and I am unafraid to make more of them. There are two rules: he cannot finish inside of me, and he cannot touch my green ribbon. He spends into the dirt, pat-pat-patting like the beginning of rain. I go to touch myself, but my fingers, which had been curling in the dirt beneath me, are filthy. I pull up my underwear and stockings. He makes a sound and points, and I realize that beneath the nylon, my knees are also caked in dirt. I pull them down and brush, and then up again. I smooth my skirt and repin my hair. A single lock has escaped his slicked-back curls, and I tuck it up with the others. We walk down to the stream and I run my hands in the current until they are clean again.
We stroll back to the house, arms linked chastely. Inside, my mother has made coffee, and we all sit around while my father asks him about business.
(If you read this story out loud, the sounds of the clearing can be best reproduced by taking a deep breath and holding it for a long moment. Then release the air all at once, permitting your chest to collapse like a block tower knocked to the ground. Do this again, and again, shortening the time between the held breath and the release.)
by Carmen Maria Machado, Granta | Read more:
Image: Photography courtesy of Internet Archive Book Images
Exxon’s Exodus: Employees Have Finally Had Enough of Its Toxic Culture
Exxon’s performance ranking system, which pits employees against each other, dominates the day to day. Subordinates are told not to speak out against their bosses in meetings for fear of being placed at the bottom of the rank and pushed out. Employees are reluctant to raise problems or speak freely about environmental issues. Senior managers too often promote people who look and sound like themselves at the expense of technical experts willing to deliver hard messages, and some employees of color say they’ve been marginalized. “Agreeability to senior leadership has become more important than capability,” says one executive who left the company last year after two decades. “Unfortunately this accelerated during the pandemic.” (...)
Soon after Rex Tillerson became CEO of Exxon in 2006, he decided to build an office complex in Texas to match its newfound status as the biggest company in the US. Tillerson and his executives would remain in Exxon’s “God Pod,” a nickname for the headquarters in suburban Dallas. But about four hours away, the new Houston campus would become the company’s largest hub, accommodating more than 10,000 people.
Tillerson spared no expense, and little did he need to. As the world melted down from the financial crisis, Exxon made $45 billion in a single year, then the biggest profit of any company in US history. The campus would have two lakes; its low-rise, glass-walled buildings would house a food court and child-care facilities. The piece de resistance was a 10,000-ton cube that appears to hover over a plaza below, built to show off Exxon’s engineering prowess. (...)
Exxon’s modern culture began with Lee Raymond, a chemical engineer who became CEO in the early 1990s. He earned the nickname “Iron Ass” for his acerbic tongue, uncompromising demands, and public reprimands of senior managers, according to Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll. The typical Exxon man—and Exxon’s workforce is two-thirds male—“is not an eccentric, a maverick, or an entrepreneurial type,” read a Texas Monthly article from 1978. “He’s not a flashy or sloppy dresser. He’s bright, aggressive, good with numbers, less good with people.” The same is still largely true today among Exxon’s higher ranks. An average career length is about three decades, and no outsider had been hired into the modern Exxon’s inner sanctum of top executives until last year.
Engineering is Exxon’s lifeblood. Its top recruiting grounds are mainly state schools with prestigious engineering programs—Texas A&M, Georgia Tech—rather than the Ivy League. Salaries could start at $100,000, and benefits include a traditional pension, a relic in corporate America. A graduate joining Exxon could easily travel and relocate almost anywhere in the world. Engineers in their 20s could find themselves working on refinery upgrades along the Gulf Coast or deep-water drilling in Brazil or liquefied natural gas in Qatar. By their mid-30s they could be involved in developing major projects, and by their 40s they could be earmarked as a future executive, formally assisting a vice president in the God Pod. By age 55, even if they’d risen only to middle management, that pension would kick in, enabling a comfortable early retirement. (...)
But ascending through Exxon with technical acumen and smarts has never been enough. Successful recruits must follow rules and work within a hierarchy. Acronyms guide much of daily life. The OIMS, or Operations Integrity Management System, governs existing operations including production sites and refineries; new projects are developed through EMCAPS, or ExxonMobil Capital Projects Management System. Safety procedures are sacrosanct. A rule requiring employees to hold the handrail while walking on stairs, primarily to avoid falls at dangerous sites such as offshore platforms or chemical plants, is rigorously enforced even in offices. License-plate-reading traffic cameras on Houston office grounds can enforce a strict 25-mph speed limit. Employees are prohibited from talking on the phone while driving, even if doing so legally, hands-free. (...)
The company’s long-standing performance review process was a remnant of the “rank and yank” system, a blunt management tool originated by General Electric Co. CEO Jack Welch in the 1980s. Over the past decade companies including Microsoft, Goldman Sachs Group, and even GE have abandoned it because, even for their cutthroat cultures, the system became too severe.
by Kevin Crowley, Bloomberg Businessweek | Read more:
Images: Saratta Chuengsatiansup for Bloomberg Businessweek; Ernest Scheyder/Reuters[ed. I got to experience Exxon's management style up close for a number of years and wouldn't be surprised if there's an extensive file somewhere in the organization. Rigid, efficient, authoritarian, disciplined, aggressive, prideful... pick your adjective, Exxon is all of those (and more, which this article does a good job of explaining).]
Tuesday, October 25, 2022
The Crypto Story
via: The Crypto Story (Bloomberg)
Ford Motor’s Use of the Tackle Box Defense
Last month, Georgia trial lawyer James Butler secured a $1.7 billion punitive damages verdict in a case involving Ford trucks with dangerously weak roofs that would crush down on occupants during a rollover wreck.
The jury awarded the Hills $24,030,500 in compensatory damages.
The jury returned the verdicts for Kim and Adam Hill for the wrongful deaths of their parents, Voncile and Melvin Hill, and for pain and suffering by their parents after the rollover wreck of their 2002 Ford F-250 on April 3, 2014. (...)
During the first trial, which ended in a mistrial, the Hills had submitted evidence of 69 prior similar wrecks with rollover, roof crush, and killed or injured victims.
In the four years since the 2018 mistrial, more people were killed or injured in such wrecks, and at the second trial plaintiffs submitted evidence of ten more such wrecks.
Ford declined to say how many more other similar incidents were known to the company.
The punitive damage verdict is the largest verdict by far in Georgia history – eclipsing the previous verdict of $457 million in the Six Flags case 24 years ago.
Ford was represented by William Withrow of Troutman Pepper, Mike Boorman and Phillip Henderson of Watson Spence, Paul Malek of the Huie firm from Birmingham, and Michael Eady of Texas.
It was Butler’s eighth verdict of $100 million or more.
That’s more $100 million plus verdicts than any other trial lawyer in America.
And he was facing down Ford lawyers that Butler says were using the tackle box defense.
Tackle box defense?
You mean like a fishing tackle box?
“Yes. They throw these lures in front of the jury in the hopes that one juror will bite on one lure and another juror will bite on another,” Butler told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview earlier this month.
“And in Georgia, you have to have a unanimous verdict. The jury gets in the jury room. There is a juror or two with some doubt in their mind and you end up with a compromised verdict. It works like a charm.”
“We had a case in Athens, Georgia in 2005 against Ford involving a Mercury Marquis with a rear gas tank. The car was hit in the rear. There was an instant explosion. And a lady was burned alive. Ford did the same thing before the jury. And we had one juror who held out against us. She cut a deal with the other eleven jurors to give more in compensatory damages, but said no to punitive damages. That’s an example of how it works.”
“Ford, which has no defense for these roofs and never offered any defense for these roofs, violated a whole bunch of orders in limine, mainly trying to blame other people, primarily Mr. Hill. Finally, the judge just declared a mistrial.”
What did Ford say about Mr. Hill?
“Everything you can think of. The worst was when Ford’s lawyer got before a jury holding a toxicology report, which he highlighted and put notes all over. And he was showing that to a jury. He was insinuating that Mr. Hill was under the influence of alcohol. The toxicology report said he was negative for alcohol. Mr. Hill was a Baptist teetotaler. He never had a sip of alcohol in his life. But Ford got up in front of a jury and insinuated he was DUI.” (...)
Was there any cost-benefit memo in this case?
“Ford hasn’t done a written cost-benefit analysis since that experience in the Pinto case. But you don’t have to put it in writing. The math is real simple. You can do it in your head or you can verbalize it.”
“They made 5.2 million of these trucks. When they first designed the roof, beginning in about 1994, they did a full design of the roof. And then they had a cost containment directive to cut costs. And they then took metal out of the roof. They admitted they saved $100 per truck. Right there, you have $520 million in added profit.”
“The calculation is real simple. There is no way that settling all of the cases brought by victims is going to cost more than $520 million. The cost benefit analysis is very simple.”
“How long did it take me to say it? Thirty seconds? And that’s just the $520 million. They probably saved a lot more than that. By 2005, Ford engineers in the Enhanced Roof Strength Program (ERSP) for the Super Duty trucks came up with a roof that was four and a half times stronger and cheaper to build. And Ford didn’t use that until 2017.”
The jury awarded the Hills $24,030,500 in compensatory damages.
The jury returned the verdicts for Kim and Adam Hill for the wrongful deaths of their parents, Voncile and Melvin Hill, and for pain and suffering by their parents after the rollover wreck of their 2002 Ford F-250 on April 3, 2014. (...)
In the four years since the 2018 mistrial, more people were killed or injured in such wrecks, and at the second trial plaintiffs submitted evidence of ten more such wrecks.
Ford declined to say how many more other similar incidents were known to the company.
The punitive damage verdict is the largest verdict by far in Georgia history – eclipsing the previous verdict of $457 million in the Six Flags case 24 years ago.
Ford was represented by William Withrow of Troutman Pepper, Mike Boorman and Phillip Henderson of Watson Spence, Paul Malek of the Huie firm from Birmingham, and Michael Eady of Texas.
It was Butler’s eighth verdict of $100 million or more.
That’s more $100 million plus verdicts than any other trial lawyer in America.
And he was facing down Ford lawyers that Butler says were using the tackle box defense.
Tackle box defense?
You mean like a fishing tackle box?
“Yes. They throw these lures in front of the jury in the hopes that one juror will bite on one lure and another juror will bite on another,” Butler told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview earlier this month.
“And in Georgia, you have to have a unanimous verdict. The jury gets in the jury room. There is a juror or two with some doubt in their mind and you end up with a compromised verdict. It works like a charm.”
“We had a case in Athens, Georgia in 2005 against Ford involving a Mercury Marquis with a rear gas tank. The car was hit in the rear. There was an instant explosion. And a lady was burned alive. Ford did the same thing before the jury. And we had one juror who held out against us. She cut a deal with the other eleven jurors to give more in compensatory damages, but said no to punitive damages. That’s an example of how it works.”
“Ford, which has no defense for these roofs and never offered any defense for these roofs, violated a whole bunch of orders in limine, mainly trying to blame other people, primarily Mr. Hill. Finally, the judge just declared a mistrial.”
What did Ford say about Mr. Hill?
“Everything you can think of. The worst was when Ford’s lawyer got before a jury holding a toxicology report, which he highlighted and put notes all over. And he was showing that to a jury. He was insinuating that Mr. Hill was under the influence of alcohol. The toxicology report said he was negative for alcohol. Mr. Hill was a Baptist teetotaler. He never had a sip of alcohol in his life. But Ford got up in front of a jury and insinuated he was DUI.” (...)
Was there any cost-benefit memo in this case?
“Ford hasn’t done a written cost-benefit analysis since that experience in the Pinto case. But you don’t have to put it in writing. The math is real simple. You can do it in your head or you can verbalize it.”
“They made 5.2 million of these trucks. When they first designed the roof, beginning in about 1994, they did a full design of the roof. And then they had a cost containment directive to cut costs. And they then took metal out of the roof. They admitted they saved $100 per truck. Right there, you have $520 million in added profit.”
“The calculation is real simple. There is no way that settling all of the cases brought by victims is going to cost more than $520 million. The cost benefit analysis is very simple.”
“How long did it take me to say it? Thirty seconds? And that’s just the $520 million. They probably saved a lot more than that. By 2005, Ford engineers in the Enhanced Roof Strength Program (ERSP) for the Super Duty trucks came up with a roof that was four and a half times stronger and cheaper to build. And Ford didn’t use that until 2017.”
by Editor, Corporate Crime Reporter | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: How lawyers became sadists (Pluralistic); David Enrich on Big Law Jones Day and the Corruption of Justice; and, Justice Department to Announce Change in Corporate Crime Enforcement (CCR).]
Monday, October 24, 2022
America and the Promised Land
From an American perspective, the Israel-Palestine conflict has largely exited center stage in recent years. And yet, comprehending the evolving interests, sentiments, and coalitions behind the US-Israel alliance may be the best way to understand the fundamentals that define America’s foreign policy more broadly.
Shlomo Ben-Ami, Prophets without Honor: The 2000 Camp David Summit and the End of the Two-State Solution, Oxford University Press, 2022.
Though it has dragged on for three-quarters of a century, the metaphysics of Israel’s role in the international relations and the centrality of Israel-Palestine conflict in global politics continue to befuddle onlookers. How could this speck of land inspire such emotional intensity and command such outsize influence over US foreign policy?
In The Arc of a Covenant, Walter Russell Mead, a celebrated American diplomatic historian who has written widely on foreign policy in the idiom of grand strategy, uses this lacuna as his point of departure. The result of a decade-long project to reinterpret Jewish and Israeli history in the United States, the book offers a broad-tent analysis that smashes cherished conceits and challenges long-held assumptions. Rather than placing all the customary figures at the head of the table, Mead rearranges the chairs to give us a glimpse of something new.
In an earlier book, Special Providence, he established himself as the rarest kind of foreign-policy thinker, playing the part of the responsible iconoclast who seeks to educate Americans about the deeper roots of their foreign policy. There, Mead described four foreign-policy traditions that have at times defined America’s national interest: the Wilsonian, which seeks a world safe for democracy; the Hamiltonian, which prioritizes America’s economic interests; the Jeffersonian, which aims to protect America from the corrupting influences of the outside world; and the Jacksonian, which envisions an America so powerful that it can avoid foreign entanglements and focus on the home front.
For Mead, the ongoing interaction between these traditions makes America what it is. Different traditions will take precedence from one period to the next, though all of them are continuously present in the country’s foreign-policy thinking. Mead’s quiet aim is to prepare the US for a period when a mixture of Jeffersonianism and Jacksonianism could become ascendant. Since then, as a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, he has tackled all the big issues of great-power importance, such as the West’s rivalry with China, the realignment of global political forces, and civilizational crises like climate change.
Yet now, in this moment of profound crisis for the post-Cold War international order when most commentators are focused on the return of twentieth-century geopolitics, Mead has surprisingly pivoted to a region and a conflict that has largely exited center stage. Focusing squarely on the nature of the US-Israeli alliance, he insists that only by grappling with the evolving interests, sentiments, and coalitions behind it can we understand the fundamental factors that define America’s foreign policy more broadly.
Manifest Destinies
For Mead, Israel “occupies a continent in the American mind.” It is neither “America’s most important ally nor its most valuable trading partner,” he writes, “but the idea that the Jews would return to the lands of the Bible and build a state there touches some of the most important themes and cherished hopes of American religion and culture.” Mead’s ambition is to excavate America’s Christian past and trace its unanticipated intersections with US foreign policy. (...)
For a suggestive counterpart to Mead’s book, we can turn to Prophets Without Honor, former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami’s look back at the 2000 Camp David Summit and the unraveling of any commitment to a two-state future. Rather than situating Israel in the context of an always-evolving American foreign-policy identity, Ben-Ami places it smack in the center of Middle East politics. While Mead goes broad, Ben-Ami, who is also a trained historian, homes in on the particulars. (...)
Ben-Ami spends considerable attention analyzing the hopes and follies that have defined the so-called peace process since those momentous days at Camp David and Taba, bringing the story up to the 2020 Abraham Accords, the end product of Donald Trump’s “deal of the century.” He reminds us that there is an extensive history of proposed economic incentives designed to foster normalization with Israel. But the agreement that Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates eventually accepted was one where Palestine is nowhere to be seen. (The same was true when Sudan and Morocco subsequently normalized their relations with Israel.) Ben-Ami thus favors Hezbollah’s description of the accords as a “deal of shame.” It was always a dirty secret that Arab states’ official advocacy for Palestinian statehood served as a smokescreen for shoring up corrupt oligarchies at home. But now, as Ben-Ami shows, the masks have come off.
by Ivan Krastev and Leonard Bernardo, Project Syndicate | Read more:
Shlomo Ben-Ami, Prophets without Honor: The 2000 Camp David Summit and the End of the Two-State Solution, Oxford University Press, 2022.
Walter Russel Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, Knopf, 2022.
Though it has dragged on for three-quarters of a century, the metaphysics of Israel’s role in the international relations and the centrality of Israel-Palestine conflict in global politics continue to befuddle onlookers. How could this speck of land inspire such emotional intensity and command such outsize influence over US foreign policy?
In The Arc of a Covenant, Walter Russell Mead, a celebrated American diplomatic historian who has written widely on foreign policy in the idiom of grand strategy, uses this lacuna as his point of departure. The result of a decade-long project to reinterpret Jewish and Israeli history in the United States, the book offers a broad-tent analysis that smashes cherished conceits and challenges long-held assumptions. Rather than placing all the customary figures at the head of the table, Mead rearranges the chairs to give us a glimpse of something new.
For Mead, the ongoing interaction between these traditions makes America what it is. Different traditions will take precedence from one period to the next, though all of them are continuously present in the country’s foreign-policy thinking. Mead’s quiet aim is to prepare the US for a period when a mixture of Jeffersonianism and Jacksonianism could become ascendant. Since then, as a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, he has tackled all the big issues of great-power importance, such as the West’s rivalry with China, the realignment of global political forces, and civilizational crises like climate change.
Yet now, in this moment of profound crisis for the post-Cold War international order when most commentators are focused on the return of twentieth-century geopolitics, Mead has surprisingly pivoted to a region and a conflict that has largely exited center stage. Focusing squarely on the nature of the US-Israeli alliance, he insists that only by grappling with the evolving interests, sentiments, and coalitions behind it can we understand the fundamental factors that define America’s foreign policy more broadly.
Manifest Destinies
For Mead, Israel “occupies a continent in the American mind.” It is neither “America’s most important ally nor its most valuable trading partner,” he writes, “but the idea that the Jews would return to the lands of the Bible and build a state there touches some of the most important themes and cherished hopes of American religion and culture.” Mead’s ambition is to excavate America’s Christian past and trace its unanticipated intersections with US foreign policy. (...)
All Geopolitics is Local
For a suggestive counterpart to Mead’s book, we can turn to Prophets Without Honor, former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami’s look back at the 2000 Camp David Summit and the unraveling of any commitment to a two-state future. Rather than situating Israel in the context of an always-evolving American foreign-policy identity, Ben-Ami places it smack in the center of Middle East politics. While Mead goes broad, Ben-Ami, who is also a trained historian, homes in on the particulars. (...)
Ben-Ami spends considerable attention analyzing the hopes and follies that have defined the so-called peace process since those momentous days at Camp David and Taba, bringing the story up to the 2020 Abraham Accords, the end product of Donald Trump’s “deal of the century.” He reminds us that there is an extensive history of proposed economic incentives designed to foster normalization with Israel. But the agreement that Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates eventually accepted was one where Palestine is nowhere to be seen. (The same was true when Sudan and Morocco subsequently normalized their relations with Israel.) Ben-Ami thus favors Hezbollah’s description of the accords as a “deal of shame.” It was always a dirty secret that Arab states’ official advocacy for Palestinian statehood served as a smokescreen for shoring up corrupt oligarchies at home. But now, as Ben-Ami shows, the masks have come off.
by Ivan Krastev and Leonard Bernardo, Project Syndicate | Read more:
Image: Knopf
Sunday, October 23, 2022
When the Push Button Was New, People Were Freaked
The doorbell. The intercom. The elevator. Once upon a time, beginning in the late nineteenth century, pushing the button that activated such devices was a strange new experience. The electric push button, the now mundane-seeming interface between human and machine, was originally a spark for wonder, anxiety, and social transformation.
As media studies scholar Rachel Plotnick details, people worried that the electric push button would make human skills atrophy. They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: “effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by consumers.” Today, you’d probably have to schedule an electrician to fix what some children back then knew how to make: electric bells, buttons, and buzzers.
“Some believed that users should creatively interrogate these objects and learn how they worked as part of a broader electrical education,” Plotnick explains. “Others…suggested that pushing buttons could help users to avoid complicated and laborious technological experiences. These approaches reflected different groups’ attempts at managing fears of electricity.”
Electric push buttons, essentially on/off switches for circuits, came on the market in the 1880s. As with many technological innovations, they appeared in multiple places in different forms. Their predecessors were such mechanical and manual buttons as the keys of musical instruments and typewriters. Before electricity, buttons triggered a spring mechanism or a lever. (...)
At the end of the nineteenth century, many laypeople had a “working knowledge not only of electricity, but also of the buttons they pushed and the relationship between the two,” according to Plotnick. Those who promoted electricity and sold electrical devices, however, wanted push-button interfaces to be “simplistic and worry-free.” They thought the world needed less thinking though and tinkering, and more automatic action. “You press the button, we do the rest”—the Eastman Company’s famous slogan for Kodak cameras—could be taken as the slogan for an entire way of life. (...)
Plotnick quotes an educator and activist from 1916 lamenting that pushing a button “seems to relieve one of any necessity for responsibility about what goes on behind the button.” That resonates now, more than a century later, when technology is even more complicated and even more intimately entwined with our lives. The “black box” reigns supreme.
As media studies scholar Rachel Plotnick details, people worried that the electric push button would make human skills atrophy. They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: “effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by consumers.” Today, you’d probably have to schedule an electrician to fix what some children back then knew how to make: electric bells, buttons, and buzzers.
Electric push buttons, essentially on/off switches for circuits, came on the market in the 1880s. As with many technological innovations, they appeared in multiple places in different forms. Their predecessors were such mechanical and manual buttons as the keys of musical instruments and typewriters. Before electricity, buttons triggered a spring mechanism or a lever. (...)
At the end of the nineteenth century, many laypeople had a “working knowledge not only of electricity, but also of the buttons they pushed and the relationship between the two,” according to Plotnick. Those who promoted electricity and sold electrical devices, however, wanted push-button interfaces to be “simplistic and worry-free.” They thought the world needed less thinking though and tinkering, and more automatic action. “You press the button, we do the rest”—the Eastman Company’s famous slogan for Kodak cameras—could be taken as the slogan for an entire way of life. (...)
Plotnick quotes an educator and activist from 1916 lamenting that pushing a button “seems to relieve one of any necessity for responsibility about what goes on behind the button.” That resonates now, more than a century later, when technology is even more complicated and even more intimately entwined with our lives. The “black box” reigns supreme.
by Matthew Wills, JSTOR Daily | Read more:
Image: markk
[ed. Coincidentally, this is an issue I've been thinking about lately. Here's the microwave panel over my stove. Try finding the light button on the damn thing in the dark - it's nearly impossible. No tactile feedback whatsoever (or easy way to fix it if it ever gets broken). A good example of design de-evolution.]
Saturday, October 22, 2022
The US Supreme Court Case That Could Bring Tech Giants To Their Knees
Two weeks ago, the US supreme court decided that it would hear Gonzalez v Google, a landmark case that is giving certain social-media moguls sleepless nights for the very good reason that it could blow a large hole in their fabulously lucrative business models. Since this might be good news for democracy, it’s also a reason for the rest of us to sit up and pay attention.
First, some background. In 1996, two US lawmakers, Representative Chris Cox from California and Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon, inserted a clause into the sprawling telecommunications bill that was then on its way through Congress. The clause eventually became section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and read: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
The motives of the two politicians were honourable: they had seen how providers of early web-hosting services had been held liable for damage caused by content posted by users over whom they had no control. It’s worth remembering that those were early days for the internet and Cox and Wyden feared that if lawyers had henceforth to crawl over everything hosted on the medium, then the growth of a powerful new technology would be crippled more or less from birth. And in that sense they were right.
What they couldn’t have foreseen, though, was that section 230 would turn into a get-out-of-jail card for some of the most profitable companies on the planet – such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, which built platforms enabling their users to publish anything and everything without the owners incurring legal liability for it. So far-reaching was the Cox-Wyden clause that a law professor eventually wrote a whole book about it, The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet. A bit hyperbolic, perhaps, but you get the idea.
Now spool forward to November 2015 when Nohemi Gonzalez, a young American studying in Paris, was gunned down in a restaurant by the Islamic State terrorists who murdered 129 other people that night. Her family sued Google, arguing that its YouTube subsidiary had used algorithms to push IS videos to impressionable viewers, using the information that the company had collected about them. Their petition seeking a supreme court review argues that “videos that users viewed on YouTube were the central manner in which IS enlisted support and recruits from areas outside the portions of Syria and Iraq which it controlled”.
The key thing about the Gonzalez suit, though, is not that YouTube should not be hosting IS videos (section 230 allows that) but that its machine-learning “recommendation” algorithms, which may push other, perhaps more radicalising, videos, renders it liable for the resulting damage. Or, to put it crudely, while YouTube may have legal protection for hosting whatever its users post on it, it does not – and should not – have protection for an algorithm that determines what they should view next.
This is dynamite for the social-media platforms because recommendation engines are the key to their prosperity. They are the power tools that increase the user “engagement” – keeping people on the platform to leave the digital trails (viewing, sharing, liking, retweeting, purchasing, etc) – that enable the companies to continually refine user profiles for targeted advertising. And make unconscionable profits from doing so. If the supreme court were to decide that these engines did not enjoy section 230 protection, then social media firms would suddenly find the world a much colder place.
by John Naughton, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Eugene GarcÃa/EPA
First, some background. In 1996, two US lawmakers, Representative Chris Cox from California and Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon, inserted a clause into the sprawling telecommunications bill that was then on its way through Congress. The clause eventually became section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and read: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
What they couldn’t have foreseen, though, was that section 230 would turn into a get-out-of-jail card for some of the most profitable companies on the planet – such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, which built platforms enabling their users to publish anything and everything without the owners incurring legal liability for it. So far-reaching was the Cox-Wyden clause that a law professor eventually wrote a whole book about it, The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet. A bit hyperbolic, perhaps, but you get the idea.
Now spool forward to November 2015 when Nohemi Gonzalez, a young American studying in Paris, was gunned down in a restaurant by the Islamic State terrorists who murdered 129 other people that night. Her family sued Google, arguing that its YouTube subsidiary had used algorithms to push IS videos to impressionable viewers, using the information that the company had collected about them. Their petition seeking a supreme court review argues that “videos that users viewed on YouTube were the central manner in which IS enlisted support and recruits from areas outside the portions of Syria and Iraq which it controlled”.
The key thing about the Gonzalez suit, though, is not that YouTube should not be hosting IS videos (section 230 allows that) but that its machine-learning “recommendation” algorithms, which may push other, perhaps more radicalising, videos, renders it liable for the resulting damage. Or, to put it crudely, while YouTube may have legal protection for hosting whatever its users post on it, it does not – and should not – have protection for an algorithm that determines what they should view next.
This is dynamite for the social-media platforms because recommendation engines are the key to their prosperity. They are the power tools that increase the user “engagement” – keeping people on the platform to leave the digital trails (viewing, sharing, liking, retweeting, purchasing, etc) – that enable the companies to continually refine user profiles for targeted advertising. And make unconscionable profits from doing so. If the supreme court were to decide that these engines did not enjoy section 230 protection, then social media firms would suddenly find the world a much colder place.
by John Naughton, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Eugene GarcÃa/EPA
Friday, October 21, 2022
Pillars of Creation
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured a lush, highly detailed landscape – the iconic Pillars of Creation – where new stars are forming within dense clouds of gas and dust. The three-dimensional pillars look like majestic rock formations, but are far more permeable. These columns are made up of cool interstellar gas and dust that appear – at times – semi-transparent in near-infrared light.
Webb’s new view of the Pillars of Creation, which were first made famous when imaged by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, will help researchers revamp their models of star formation by identifying far more precise counts of newly formed stars, along with the quantities of gas and dust in the region. Over time, they will begin to build a clearer understanding of how stars form and burst out of these dusty clouds over millions of years.
Newly formed stars are the scene-stealers in this image from Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). These are the bright red orbs that typically have diffraction spikes and lie outside one of the dusty pillars. When knots with sufficient mass form within the pillars of gas and dust, they begin to collapse under their own gravity, slowly heat up, and eventually form new stars.
What about those wavy lines that look like lava at the edges of some pillars? These are ejections from stars that are still forming within the gas and dust. Young stars periodically shoot out supersonic jets that collide with clouds of material, like these thick pillars. This sometimes also results in bow shocks, which can form wavy patterns like a boat does as it moves through water. The crimson glow comes from the energetic hydrogen molecules that result from jets and shocks. This is evident in the second and third pillars from the top – the NIRCam image is practically pulsing with their activity. These young stars are estimated to be only a few hundred thousand years old.
Although it may appear that near-infrared light has allowed Webb to “pierce through” the clouds to reveal great cosmic distances beyond the pillars, there are almost no galaxies in this view. Instead, a mix of translucent gas and dust known as the interstellar medium in the densest part of our Milky Way galaxy’s disk blocks our view to much of the of the deeper universe.
Thursday, October 20, 2022
Wednesday, October 19, 2022
RecipeTin Japan
Image: Yumiko
[ed. I like this site for Japanese cooking, it's simple and straightforward. See also (for example): Grilled mini-tomatoes wrapped in pork; Pork and cabbage omelette (Tonpeiyaki); Katsu curry (Japanese curry with chicken cutlet). RecipeTin Japan.]
Tuesday, October 18, 2022
The Gendered Ape
It’s not always easy to talk about bonobos at academic gatherings. There is no issue with fellow primatologists, who are used to straightforward descriptions of sexual behavior and know the recent evidence. But it’s different with people outside my field, such as anthropologists, philosophers, or psychologists. They become fidgety, scratch their heads, snicker, or adopt a puzzled look. Why do bonobos stump them?
One reason for the discomfort is excessive shyness about erotic behavior, which bonobos exhibit in all positions that we can imagine, and even some that we can’t. Moreover, these apes do it in all partner combinations. People assume that animals use sex only for reproduction, but I estimate that three quarters of bonobo sex has nothing to do with it.
But there is a deeper reason why bonobos are the black sheep of our extended family despite being as close to us as chimpanzees. They fail to conform to the traditional model of the human ancestor. Most evolutionary scenarios of our species stress male bonding, male dominance, hunting, aggression, and territorial warfare. This is how our species conquered the earth, it is thought.
Chimpanzee behavior, which can be quite violent, lends support to this narrative. This ape is therefore happily embraced as model. The peaceful, female-dominated bonobo, on the other hand, doesn’t fit. The species is sidelined, such as in “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” in which Steven Pinker calls bonobos “very strange primates.” And Richard Wrangham, in “The Goodness Paradox,” portrays them as an evolutionary offshoot, who “have gone their separate way.” In other words, bonobos may be delightful apes, they are bizarre and irrelevant. Let’s just ignore them!
According to pioneering fieldworker Takayoshi Kano and his students, bonobo groups in the forest regularly “mingle” and “fuse” without any fighting. They share food between communities and occasionally adopt orphaned youngsters from their neighbors. All of this presents a huge contrast with chimpanzees, which know only various degrees of hostility between communities.
My own studies made matters worse by describing bonobos as polyamorous flower children. Intense erotic contact, known as GG-rubbing, is common among females. It allows them to form the powerful sisterhood that is the glue of their society.
Since the species has thrown a huge wrench into popular origin myths, we see regular attempts to revise our views, such as when journalists or political pundits tout observations of bonobo aggression and predation. Unfortunately for them, predation means very little. In biology, it falls under feeding behavior, not aggression. Anyone who has been chased by a bull realizes that a species’ diet says little about its aggressiveness.
But it’s true that bonobos occasionally fight. In fact, their extensive sexual activity would make no sense if their society were free of social tensions. The main purpose of this activity is to keep the peace. “Make love – not war” is a bonobo slogan.
by Frans de Waal, 3QD | Read more:
Image: Frans de Waal
[ed. See also: Short Essays On Gender Differences By Frans De Waal (3QD)]
One reason for the discomfort is excessive shyness about erotic behavior, which bonobos exhibit in all positions that we can imagine, and even some that we can’t. Moreover, these apes do it in all partner combinations. People assume that animals use sex only for reproduction, but I estimate that three quarters of bonobo sex has nothing to do with it.
But there is a deeper reason why bonobos are the black sheep of our extended family despite being as close to us as chimpanzees. They fail to conform to the traditional model of the human ancestor. Most evolutionary scenarios of our species stress male bonding, male dominance, hunting, aggression, and territorial warfare. This is how our species conquered the earth, it is thought.Chimpanzee behavior, which can be quite violent, lends support to this narrative. This ape is therefore happily embraced as model. The peaceful, female-dominated bonobo, on the other hand, doesn’t fit. The species is sidelined, such as in “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” in which Steven Pinker calls bonobos “very strange primates.” And Richard Wrangham, in “The Goodness Paradox,” portrays them as an evolutionary offshoot, who “have gone their separate way.” In other words, bonobos may be delightful apes, they are bizarre and irrelevant. Let’s just ignore them!
According to pioneering fieldworker Takayoshi Kano and his students, bonobo groups in the forest regularly “mingle” and “fuse” without any fighting. They share food between communities and occasionally adopt orphaned youngsters from their neighbors. All of this presents a huge contrast with chimpanzees, which know only various degrees of hostility between communities.
My own studies made matters worse by describing bonobos as polyamorous flower children. Intense erotic contact, known as GG-rubbing, is common among females. It allows them to form the powerful sisterhood that is the glue of their society.
Since the species has thrown a huge wrench into popular origin myths, we see regular attempts to revise our views, such as when journalists or political pundits tout observations of bonobo aggression and predation. Unfortunately for them, predation means very little. In biology, it falls under feeding behavior, not aggression. Anyone who has been chased by a bull realizes that a species’ diet says little about its aggressiveness.
But it’s true that bonobos occasionally fight. In fact, their extensive sexual activity would make no sense if their society were free of social tensions. The main purpose of this activity is to keep the peace. “Make love – not war” is a bonobo slogan.
by Frans de Waal, 3QD | Read more:
Image: Frans de Waal
[ed. See also: Short Essays On Gender Differences By Frans De Waal (3QD)]
Interview: Ted Chiang
EZRA KLEIN: I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.” For years, I have kept a list of dream guests for the show. And as long as that list has been around, Ted Chiang has been on top of it. He’s a science fiction writer, but that’s underselling him. He writes perfect short stories — perfect.
And he writes them slowly. He’s published only two collections, the “Stories of Your Life and Others” in 2002, and then, “Exhalation” more recently in 2019. And the stories in these books, they’ve won every major science fiction award you can win multiple times over — four Hugo’s, four Nebula’s, four Locus Awards. If you’ve seen the film “Arrival,” which is great — and if you haven’t, what is wrong with you — that is based on a story from the ’02 collection, the “Story of Your Life.”I’ve just, I’ve always wondered about what kind of mind would create Chiang’s stories. They have this crazy economy in them, like not a word out of place, perfect precision. They’re built around really complicated scientific ideas, really heavy religious ideas. I actually think in a way that is not often recognized, Chiang is one of the great living writers of religious fiction, even though he’s an atheist and a sci-fi legend. But somehow, the stories, at least in my opinion, they’re never difficult. They’re very humane and propulsive. They keep moving. They’re cerebral, they’re gentle.
But man, the economy of them is severe. That’s not always the case for science fiction, which I find, anyway, can be wordy, like spilling over with explanation and exposition. Not these. So I was thrilled — I was thrilled — when Chiang agreed to join on the show. But one of the joys of doing these conversations is, I get to listen to people’s minds working in real-time. You can watch or hear them think and speak and muse.
But Chiang’s rhythm is really distinct. Most people come on the show — and this goes for me, too — speak like we’re painting in watercolor, like a lot of brush strokes, a lot of color. If you get something wrong or you have a false start, you just draw right over it or you start a new sheet. But listening to Chiang speak, I understood his stories better. He speaks like he’s carving marble. Like, every stroke has to be considered so carefully, never delivering a strike, or I guess, a word, before every alternative has been considered and rejected. It’s really cool to listen to.
Chiang doesn’t like to talk about himself. And more than he doesn’t like to, he won’t. Believe me, I’ve tried a couple of times. It didn’t make it into the final show here. But he will talk about ideas. And so we do. We talk about the difference between magic and technology, between science fiction and fantasy, the problems with superheroes and nature of free will, whether humanity will make A.I. suffer, what would happen if we found parrots on Mars. There’s so many cool ideas in this show, just as there always are in his fiction. Many of them, of course, come from his fiction. So relax into this one. It’s worth it. As always, my email is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Here’s Ted Chiang.
So you sent me this wonderful speech questioning the old Arthur C. Clarke line, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” what don’t you like about that line?
Magic is something which, by its nature, never becomes widely available to everyone. Magic is something that resides in the person and often is an indication that the universe sort of recognizes different classes of people, that there are magic wielders and there are non-magic wielders. That is not how we understand the universe to work nowadays. That reflects a kind of premodern understanding of how the universe worked. But since the Enlightenment, we have moved away from that point of view. And a lot of people miss that way of looking at the world, because we want to believe that things happen to us for a reason, that the things that happen to you are, in some way, tied to the things you did. (...)
EZRA KLEIN: You have this comparison of what science fiction and fantasy are good for. And you write that science fiction helps us to think through the implications of ideas and that fantasy is good at taking metaphors and making them literal. But what struck me reading that is it often seems to me that your work, it takes scientific ideas and uses them as metaphor. So is there such a difference between the two?
TED CHIANG: So when it comes to fiction about the speculative or the fantastic, one way to think about these kind of stories is to ask, are they interested in the speculative element literally or metaphorically or both? For example, at one end of the spectrum, you’ve got Kafka and in “The Metamorphosis,” Gregor Samsa turning into an insect. That is pretty much entirely a metaphor. It’s a stand-in for alienation. At the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got someone like Kim Stanley Robinson. And when he writes about terraforming Mars, Mars is not standing in for anything else. He is writing very literally about Mars.
Now, most speculative or fantastic fiction falls somewhere in between those two. And most of it is interested in both the literal and the metaphorical at the same time, but to varying degrees. So, in the context of magic, when fantasy fiction includes people who can wield magic, magic stands in for the idea that certain individuals are special. Magic is a way for fantasy to say that you are not just a cog in the machine, that you are more than someone who pushes paper in an office or tightens bolts on an assembly line. Magic is a way of externalizing the idea that you are special. (...)
EZRA KLEIN: Let me flip this now. We’re spending billions to invent artificial intelligence. At what point is a computer program responsible for its own actions?
TED CHIANG: Well, in terms of at what point does that happen, it’s unclear, but it’s a very long ways from us right now. With regard to the question of, will we create machines that are moral agents, I would say that we can think about that in three different questions. One is, can we do so? Second is, will we do so? And the third one is, should we do so?
I think it is entirely possible for us to build machines that are moral agents. Because I think there’s a sense in which human beings are very complex machines and we are moral agents, which means that there are no physical laws preventing a machine from being a moral agent. And so there’s no obstacle that, in principle, would prevent us from building something like that, although it might take us a very, very long time to get there.
As for the question of, will we do so, if you had asked me, like, 10 or 15 years ago, I would have said, we probably won’t do it, simply because, to me, it seems like it’s way more trouble than it’s worth. In terms of expense, it would be on the order of magnitude of the Apollo program. And it is not at all clear to me that there’s any good reason for undertaking such a thing. However, if you ask me now, I would say like, well, OK, we clearly have obscenely wealthy people who can throw around huge sums of money at whatever they want basically on a whim. So maybe one of them will wind up funding a program to create machines that are conscious and that are moral agents.
However, I should also note that I don’t believe that any of the current big A.I. research programs are on the right track to create a conscious machine. I don’t think that’s what any of them are trying to do. So then as for the third question of, should we do so, should we make machines that are conscious and that are moral agents, to that, my answer is, no, we should not. Because long before we get to the point where a machine is a moral agent, we will have machines that are capable of suffering.
Suffering precedes moral agency in sort of the developmental ladder. Dogs are not moral agents, but they are capable of experiencing suffering. Babies are not moral agents yet, but they have the clear potential to become so. And they are definitely capable of experiencing suffering. And the closer that an entity gets to being a moral agent, the more that it’s suffering, it’s deserving of consideration, the more we should try and avoid inflicting suffering on it. So in the process of developing machines that are conscious and moral agents, we will be inevitably creating billions of entities that are capable of suffering. And we will inevitably inflict suffering on them. And that seems to me clearly a bad idea.
EZRA KLEIN: But wouldn’t they also be capable of pleasure? I mean, that seems to me to raise an almost inversion of the classic utilitarian thought experiment. If we can create these billions of machines that live basically happy lives that don’t hurt anybody and you can copy them for almost no marginal dollar, isn’t it almost a moral imperative to bring them into existence so they can lead these happy machine lives?
TED CHIANG: I think that it will be much easier to inflict suffering on them than to give them happy fulfilled lives. And given that they will start out as something that resembles ordinary software, something that is nothing like a living being, we are going to treat them like crap. The way that we treat software right now, if, at some point, software were to gain some vague glimmer of sentience, of the ability to perceive, we would be inflicting uncountable amounts of suffering on it before anyone paid any attention to them.
Because it’s hard enough to give legal protections to human beings who are absolutely moral agents. We have relatively few legal protections for animals who, while they are not moral agents, are capable of suffering. And so animals experience vast amounts of suffering in the modern world. And animals, we know that they suffer. There are many animals that we love, that we really, really love. Yet, there’s vast animal suffering. So there is no software that we love. So the way that we will wind up treating software, again, assuming that software ever becomes conscious, they will inevitably fall lower on the ladder of consideration. So we will treat them worse than we treat animals. And we treat animals pretty badly.
EZRA KLEIN: I think this is actually a really provocative point. So I don’t know if you’re a Yuval Noah Harari reader. But he often frames his fear of artificial intelligence as simply that A.I. will treat us the way we treat animals. And we treat animals, as you say, unbelievably terribly. But I haven’t really thought about the flip of that, that maybe the danger is that we will simply treat A.I. like we treat animals. And given the moral consideration we give animals, whose purpose we believe to be to serve us for food or whatever else it may be, that we are simply opening up almost unimaginable vistas of immorality and cruelty that we could inflict pretty heedlessly, and that given our history, there’s no real reason to think we won’t. That’s grim. [LAUGHS]
TED CHIANG: It is grim, but I think that it is by far the more likely scenario. I think the scenario that, say, Yuval Noah Harari is describing, where A.I.’s treat us like pets, that idea assumes that it’ll be easy to create A.I.’s who are vastly smarter than us, that basically, the initial A.I.’s will go from software, which is not a moral agent and not intelligent at all. And then the next thing that will happen will be software which is super intelligent and also has volition.
Whereas I think that we’ll proceed in the other direction, that right now, software is simpler than an amoeba. And eventually, we will get software which is comparable to an amoeba. And eventually, we’ll get software which is comparable to an ant, and then software that is comparable to a mouse, and then software that’s comparable to a dog, and then software that is comparable to a chimpanzee. We’ll work our way up from the bottom.
A lot of people seem to think that, oh, no, we’ll immediately jump way above humans on whatever ladder they have. I don’t think that is the case. And so in the direction that I am describing, the scenario, we’re going to be the ones inflicting the suffering. Because again, look at animals, look at how we treat animals.
EZRA KLEIN: So I hear you, that you don’t think we’re going to invent superintelligent self-replicating A.I. anytime soon. But a lot of people do. A lot of science fiction authors do. A lot of technologists do. A lot of moral philosophers do. And they’re worried that if we do, it’s going to kill us all. What do you think that question reflects? Is that a question that is emergent from the technology? Or is that something deeper about how humanity thinks about itself and has treated other beings?
TED CHIANG: I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.
Let’s think about it this way. How much would we fear any technology, whether A.I. or some other technology, how much would you fear it if we lived in a world that was a lot like Denmark or if the entire world was run sort of on the principles of one of the Scandinavian countries? There’s universal health care. Everyone has child care, free college maybe. And maybe there’s some version of universal basic income there.
Now if the entire world operates according to — is run on those principles, how much do you worry about a new technology then? I think much, much less than we do now. Most of the things that we worry about under the mode of capitalism that the U.S practices, that is going to put people out of work, that is going to make people’s lives harder, because corporations will see it as a way to increase their profits and reduce their costs. It’s not intrinsic to that technology. It’s not that technology fundamentally is about putting people out of work.
It’s capitalism that wants to reduce costs and reduce costs by laying people off. It’s not that like all technology suddenly becomes benign in this world. But it’s like, in a world where we have really strong social safety nets, then you could maybe actually evaluate sort of the pros and cons of technology as a technology, as opposed to seeing it through how capitalism is going to use it against us. How are giant corporations going to use this to increase their profits at our expense?
And so, I feel like that is kind of the unexamined assumption in a lot of discussions about the inevitability of technological change and technologically-induced unemployment. Those are fundamentally about capitalism and the fact that we are sort of unable to question capitalism. We take it as an assumption that it will always exist and that we will never escape it. And that’s sort of the background radiation that we are all having to live with. But yeah, I’d like us to be able to separate an evaluation of the merits and drawbacks of technology from the framework of capitalism.
by Ezra Klein, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Arturo Villarrubia[ed. I was re-reading a story of Ted's this morning - The Lifecycle of Software Objects (read it, it'll make an impression) and thought I'd repost this interview. Podcast available here. See also: Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter (Ted Chiang, New Yorker)]
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