by Bill Benzon

As I am writing this (September 11, 2022) the Metaculus prediction site sets arrival of AGI – aka artificial general intelligence – as early as July 25, 2029, though a more rigorous setting of the question indicates that our incipient machine overlords won’t appear until May 26, 2042.[1] As people are interested in and excited by the technology, their imaginations run ahead of their reality-testing. Alas, a significant percentage of those people also believe that, once it emerges, AGI technology will somehow amplify itself into a superintelligence and proceed to eliminate the human race, either inadvertently – as a side effect of some other project, such as creating paper clips (a standard example), or deliberately.

This strikes me as being wildly implausible. The history of artificial intelligence dates back to the early 1950s, when the first chess program was created and work on machine translation began and is so irregular that I don’t see how any reasonable predictions can be made.[2] The future of AI is MOSTLY UNKNOWN.

I conclude, then, that belief in AI Doom is best thought of as a millennial cult. It may not have a charismatic leader like Jim Jones of the Peoples Temple, much less be located in an isolated jungle compound. But its belief system closes it off from the world. Its vision of AI is a fantasy that is useless as a guide to the future. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Marie Snyder

A student asked, “How many bad actions does a good person have to do before becoming a bad person?”

The notion of good and bad people raises the image of final judgment at the pearly gates. We have a scale somewhere with our actions added incrementally to one side or the other until there’s a tipping point, or sometimes there’s just that one unspeakable act that slams one pan to the ground requiring an inconceivable effort to budge it.

It’s possible that an infinite number of bad actions doesn’t make a person bad. I like to think that we’re all greater than the sum of our worst actions. We’re all just works in progress doing our best in this world, and it’s never too late to change our path. It sounds nice. But then I started to consider some real people who appear to have unlimited selfishness as well as a cold indifference to the suffering they cause to others. Can we call them bad people until we see some movement towards redemption? Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

About eight years ago, I was in downtown Manhattan and went into a Warby Parker store, an eyewear retailer. I didn’t post anything on social media about it, but I did have location services enabled on Facebook. Later that day, Facebook started showing me ads for eyewear (something it had never done before.) How and why it did that wasn’t a giant leap of understanding, and I immediately turned location services off for Facebook. But of course, this was sticking one thumb in the crumbling dam that is my data privacy. I own an Alexa, and I have an iPhone, an Apple watch, and an iPad. And that’s just for starters. I use Google all day long, subscribe to multiple online publications, use Amazon regularly, have used Instacart in the past, and the list goes on.

My husband, who doesn’t use any social media, tells himself the lie that he’s protecting his privacy. But he uses a Chinese Huawei phone, and I like to tease him that he prefers the Chinese government to know where he is and what he’s doing than the US one. He’s not off the grid; he has online subscriptions and credit cards and uses Google and Amazon. Maybe his data is marginally more private than mine, but if it is, it’s minimal.

This New York Times article says, “Reconciling the idea of privacy with our digital world demands embracing a profound cognitive dissonance. To exist in 2022 is to be surveilled, tracked, tagged and monitored — most often for profit. Short of going off the grid, there’s no way around it.” The article continues, “Step back, and what we’re looking at is a world where privacy simply doesn’t exist anymore. Instead of talking about old notions of privacy and how to defend or get back to that ideal state, we should start talking about what comes next.” Read more »

Cloud at sunset seen from my window a few days ago.

by Jim Britell

Wise words from 50 years of managing political and environmental campaigns, and doing staff work in all kinds of settings from a Cabinet secretary’s front office to local planning boards.

Work

Always bring doughnuts to important meetings, but never eat them.

Bosses never forget attacks on their self-image so never tell them what you think of them.

An experienced analyst only needs one point to spot a trend.

You can’t manage anything well if you hate it.

Never hire anyone until you check references back to their pediatrician.

The devil’s in the details because that’s where the real policy is.

To grasp email’s limitations, inflect sequentially the words; “Her, you should
marry?”

Between two job offers, take the one with the smartest boss. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

In the middle 1990’s my friend from the September Group, Sam Bowles, and I were invited by the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation to form an inter-disciplinary and international research network to study the effects of Economic Inequality, with the two of us as co-Directors. I have known Sam for nearly four decades now. He is one of the brightest economists I know, with a large vision and wide-ranging interests that are often lacking in many bright economists. His landmark 2013 book Cooperative Species with his frequent co-author Herb Gintis uses experimental data and evolutionary science to show how genetic and cultural evolution has produced a human species where large numbers make sacrifices to uphold cooperative social norms. He himself has been socially alert and active in public causes all through his life, starting from writing background papers for Martin Luther King’s 1968 Poor People’s March to most recently providing leadership in the revamping of undergraduate Economics curriculum to include upfront non-standard issues like inequality, the environment and reciprocity and altruism in human behavior, and making it available free online worldwide. He is also one of the most generous and genial people I know.

When his father was US Ambassador to India, his parents sent him to a local Indian school, which at that time did not even have a building, only a large tent. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, his father’s friend, once invited the family to tea in the garden at his home, and encouraged him and his siblings to explore the interior of the house. At that time he discovered in Nehru’s bedside table a framed passage from Robert Frost’s poem (“I have promises to keep/And miles to go before I sleep”), which the 11-year old immediately recognized, as Frost was a fellow New Englander he knew about. He says he was pretty average in his Delhi school, and there were some Indian kids who were smarter, and yet, he asked his mother one day, why were most Indians so poor? (In his small Connecticut hometown where he had grown up there were only two people who were really poor, one was an alcoholic, the other had mental problems). The same question kept on bugging him when about a decade later, after his undergraduate education at Yale, he started teaching in a school in northern Nigeria. Read more »

Editor’s Note: Frans de Waal’s new book, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, has generated some controversy and misunderstanding. He will address these issues in a series of short essays which will be published at 3QD and can all be seen in one place here. More comments on these essays can also be seen at Frans de Waal’s Facebook page.

by Frans de Waal

This weekend, the New York Times had an opinion piece by Chelsea Conaboy arguing that the maternal instinct is a myth invented by men.

In a way it’s true, but not in the way the journalist intended.

It is true that we don’t use the term instinct much anymore, certainly not for humans, but also not for other animals. This is because the term suggests that a behavior is simple and automatically comes up in every member of the species, which is rarely true. This applies particularly to maternal care, which is complex behavior and requires example and training. A gorilla female at a zoo who is pregnant and has never watched other mothers care for babies is bound to fail with hers. She has missed opportunities to learn. Her baby is likely to die from starvation or mishandling.

Young female primates are extremely eager to learn, though, and far more attracted to babies and dolls than are males.

They actively seek the maternity training they need. As soon as a mother primate arrives with a newborn she will be surrounded by young females, not males, who all want to hold and cuddle the infant. When these young females grow older, they will turn into babysitters. And when they are adult, they will know what to do with a baby and how to bring it close to their nipples.

The immense female attraction to infants extends to dolls. When experimenters have introduced toys to monkey groups, the movable objects (like balls, cars) ended up with the young males, the plush toys, such as dolls and teddy bears, with the young females. In the wild, young female chimpanzees pick up wooden logs to carry them on their back or belly like an infant. They make their own dolls. Our children are similar. When experimenters have left them alone in a room with an infant, girls show a lot more interest and care than boys. Read more »

Ambedo— n. a kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details . . . which lead to a dawning awareness of the fragility of life . . . —The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Ambedo

I am a boy, my brain’s transfixed,
not seized like a spent engine
whose cams are suddenly stopped —no,
more fluid than that, gentler, smoother,
touched by grace,
………………………….. nothing is stopped,
it goes on, but with a languid intensity,
caught in a peculiar freedom,
dreamlike, but not a dream,
and not melancholic,
………………………….. emphatically not,
but a new real, a joy! in which
everything has slowed to that still point
in which attention is the only rule,
in which the veins of this leaf
have become the sole objects
in the universe, their reaches from
the singular backbone of this leaf,
their extensions on both sides
along the length of a spine,
regular as ladder rungs,
fine and delicate as angel hair,
their branchings of branchings tinier still,
like fractals, like new thoughts, as if
………………………….. this is the only meaning,
the one meaning afloat in a chlorophyl sea
still as the space between breaths,
an emerald ocean in deep space as if this instant
is all that is

Jim Culleny, 9/1/22

by Tim Sommers

When I ask students what they were most interested in, or at least what they remember most, from their “Introduction to Ethics” or “Intro to Philosophy” class, it’s remarkable how many offer the same answer. It seems they all remember Robert Nozick’s “Experience Machine.” Here it is.

The Experience Machine

Suppose you were offered the choice between continuing on in your life just as it is, or being plugged into a machine which would give you whatever sensations or experiences you prefer, while also causing you to forget that these experiences are caused by the machine and not the real world. Would you plug in?

Independent of their philosophical significance, such thought experiments are just fun. So, I thought, sometimes you just want the frosting and not the whole cake; and I designed and taught a course I called, “Life’s a Puzzle: Philosophy’s Greatest Paradoxes, Thought Experiments, Counter-Intuitive Arguments, and Counter Examples.”

Here I present a few examples. I am not going to comment much or offer my – or anyone’s – proposed solutions (for the most part). It’s just the carnival ride without the line. (But keep in mind there are a variety of ways all of these can be presented and some of the differences are substantive.)

Let’s start with another from Nozick, since he was a modern master of the genre.

The Department for the Redistribution of Eyes

Imagine that, roughly half of the time, people are born without eyes and, roughly half of the time, people are born with two eyes. Suppose eye transplants are cheap and relatively painless. Would a compulsory eye redistribution program run by the government, that forced people with two eyes to give one to someone with none, be morally permissible?

Nozick says it would be wrong because we own ourselves. If it is wrong, are there any other plausible explanations – other than self-ownership – for why such an eye redistribution scheme is wrong? Or is there some version of such a scheme that might not be unethical? (Robert Nozick) Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

In May of 2020 we lost John Conway [0]. We discussed some of his mathematical accomplishments here at 3QD. He was a true original.

At the time, I deliberately avoided discussing Conway’s most famous work: the Game of Life. Like a 60s rock band, Conway had mixed feelings about his most famous hit. But like hits that stand the test of time, it deserves its reputation. The Game of Life still has surprises and mysteries for us nearly sixty years after its invention. I thought it’d be worth talking about some of the latest discoveries.

Conway invented the rules of Life in the late sixties. According to Wikipedia, Conway was simultaneously motivated by Stanislaw Ulam’s work on the growth of crystals and by parallel investigations by John von Neumann on self-replicating systems. For the former, I highly recommend the Crystalverse website for instructions on growing your own crystals. For the latter, think of robots who can build more copies of themself like these Xenobots.

Ulam and von Neumann worked at the Los Alamos National Lab in the 1940s and 50s. They could only dream of Xenobots. Instead, as a simplified model, both assumed that they were working in two dimensions, and both space and time could be chopped up into discrete, irreducible parts. They were interested in what sorts of dynamical, self-organizing processes could happen in such a world. Read more »

Kon Trubkovich. The Antepenultimate End, 2019.

Oil on canvas.

More here and here.

Thanks to Alia Raza for the introduction.

by Brooks Riley

‘Every situation in life, indeed every moment, is of infinite value, because it represents an entire eternity.’  –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It seems we’re always tinkering with those eternities, not just to cherish their value or find their meaning, but to transform them into something else. Maybe that’s what creative writing ultimately is—momentary eternities arranged so that they somehow move the reader the way a perfect arrangement of musical notes might do. Reading is a compelling pastime for millions because words function as artfully selected indicators of events and images that readers will complete in their own minds, as they follow verbal guideposts for the imagination to begin to do its work.

‘The dog is brown’ will evoke as many different brown dogs as there are readers of that sentence. But even a more exacting description of a short brown dog with silky fur that catches the light will conjure up a variety of imagined brown canines with silky fur, enough to fill a kennel. In every piece of writing, there will always be ellipses that can be filled in only by the reader’s imagination, which acts like spilled water, spreading into every dry nook and cranny along its path, its wetness both a nourishment and an added dimension. A book is a writer’s covenant with the reader’s imagination. Together they complete the work.

What authors create for their readers are metaverses. They’ve been carefully fashioned and made accessible to anyone who cares to traverse them, in the same way that the viewer of a movie enters a carefully prepared visual environment. Whether content plays out on a monitor or in the mind’s eye, the second-life reality of an invented world has already been here for a long time. For non-readers, movies and television offer the same kind of metaversal immersion. Read more »

by David Oates

I was trying to get at something about living in the Pacific Northwest, something about the past and the future merging, blending. The way a forest can be that and can stand for that, both reality and symbol. A walk in deep woods, its distant past present as soil underfoot, as an actual springy feel, as redolence; its recent downfalls or hundred-year-old nurse logs killing and nurturing life on every side – like a metaphor for something. The cool uncanniness of time. Fear of the future. Ignorance of the past blended with selective recollection.

I wrote, “A thousand years from now, some timber-lame Charlemagne might make Portland his capital.” I played with that for a few sentences, and then asked: “And this imaginary king, this petty emperor – what will he remember of us?”

As I wrote the first line, I knew I was making trouble for us – for Juliane, my translator over in Heidelberg. And for Lotte, my Austrian friend, a Portlander who will struggle with me in the second stage, the “translation editing” wherein the Anglophone with his limited German asks the native speaker – a talented translator herself – about passages in Juliane’s proffered version. He asks if the German translation really gets it, captures it, in feel as well as in fact. Whether it has fun where I have had fun, or sets up paradox or complicated feeling where the English has done so.

After many decades of being a writer, it is working on translation this way that has taught me that feel counts as much as plot or evidence or logic or any of the other more linear dimensions of writing. That choosing tone and register, sometimes playing with contrast of high and low – these create the actual word-by-word experience of reading. The springy duff underfoot, the redolence, the emotion, the surprise. Step by step.

Humans are weird mixtures of nobility and baseness, and our daily experience is of starry-sky contemplations while the foot lands on a turd. And the art of translation shares this challenge with the art of writing: the challenge of capturing the full range. Of being true to the blending nuances, the irrational irreducibility. The laughable, unbearable feel of it. Of getting that texture into the text.

Indeed, it could be said that all writing is translation. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Ethan Seavey

My last night in the house on Euclid Avenue will go one of two ways:

A. When I climb through a window in my bedroom (which will no longer be my bedroom tomorrow) and onto the flat roof outside in order to smoke the very last bowl of cannabis in my home (which will no longer be my home tomorrow), a moth will seize the opportunity to fly into the room.

B. Scenario A won’t happen.

The chances of scenario A occurring can be described as somewhat unlikely but certainly possible. This possibility is mostly blamed on the size and age of the window. It is about thirty square feet in total. This is a blessing in the fact that I can fit through the window easily and even sit in the frame comfortably if it’s raining. But in August its great size becomes a problem. A greater surface area gives moths a greater chance of entering my room. Moths are rather persistent when they’re around, but they’re often exploring other lights. So, they’re rare but not uncommon. I saw one a few days ago, but I haven’t seen one since. When I do see moths, I see them in August. It is August. It is August 26. I leave for New York in late August, August 27, the 27th, August 27, I’ll fly from Chicago to New York on August 27, which is tomorrow, it’s already here. Read more »

by Eric Bies

Jean-François Millet, a Frenchman, frowned beneath his full beard as he lay dying in Barbizon. It was 1875, and he was not to be confused with Claude Monet—not yet—who would later paint water lilies and haystacks but wasn’t, in 1875, rich and famous; on the contrary—and in spite of Édouard Manet’s having just painted him painting from the vantage of a covered paddle boat, appearing pretty well-to-do in the process—he was barely getting by. Meanwhile, Millet had already painted some haystacks. And though the stubbier English word his name renovates—the one that rhymes with skillet—happens to be a grain that is rather good for making hay, painters have tended to tend toward other stock. The snow-capped haystacks that we see in Grant Wood, for instance, were in all likelihood made with the same Midwestern alfalfa Verlyn Klinkenborg celebrates and dissects in Making Hay. We know that van Gogh painted a golden haystack or two—probably of wheat—and though the Vermeer Corporation of Pella, Iowa is one of the market leaders in modern hay baling technology, the closest the Dutchman Johannes ever came to a haystack was when he ensconced a common milkmaid in the daylight of a well-windowed kitchen.

Whose haystacks won out? It was only a matter of time for Monet. By now his station in the popular imagination has practically eclipsed those of Millet, Wood, and Vermeer, if not van Gogh. We recognize his water lilies as readily as Picasso’s women, Warhol’s soup cans, and, lately, Kusama’s spotted tentacles. It is true that Millet’s Angelus, an apotheosis of peasant soil, shattered art-market records in 1890, exchanging hands Atlanticly for an astonishing 750,000 French francs. Yet the work itself has gradually absconded into what relative obscurity remains feasible for a canvas hanging in the Musée d’Orsay. Read more »

Moonrise from my office window some days ago.