Tim Rogan in New Statesman:

Will the robots of the future be able to replicate human thought? Most engineers assume so with a casual fatalism: the rate of advance in artificial intelligence (AI) is so rapid that it is only a matter of time before robots indistinguishable from human beings are built. Will the robots of the future surpass and then subordinate their creators? Some of the initiated believe so. This impending apocalypse has a name – “the singularity” – and is confidently expected in some quarters as soon as 2045.

Most existing AI systems have a narrow remit. They are task-focused, designed to perform some specific function – recognising speech, say, or diagnosing melanoma. Driven by the aggregation of huge data sets and explosive increases in computer processing power, “machine learning” – a newly effective technique for designing algorithms – is facilitating impressive advances in the capabilities of these systems. Machine learning-trained algorithms now outperform human specialists across a range of applications. But artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems that can imitate human thought, like the robot Hal in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey– which experts have been claiming are “just around the corner” since about 1956 – remain the stuff of science fiction.

Jamie Susskind does not think the distinction between the two forms of artificial intelligence – the specific AI and the human-like AGI – matters much. Specific AIs will be hard enough to handle, creating “vast new opportunities and risks worthy of careful attention in their own right”. If you integrate enough specific AIs into a single interface you might well end up with something so good at giving “the impression of general intelligence” that it is functionally indistinguishable from the AGIs of the engineering imagination. Whether or not AGI fictions like Hal become reality does not matter, Susskind insists. We need to stop debating such distinctions and  knuckle down to the hard work of adapting our politics to a world reshaped by AI.

More here.

From Simons Foundation:

At each instant, our senses gather oodles of sensory information, yet somehow our brains reduce that fire hose of input to simple realities: A car is honking. A bluebird is flying.

How does this happen?

One part of simplifying visual information is ‘dimensionality reduction.’ The brain, for instance, takes in an image made up of thousands of pixels and labels it ‘teapot.’ One such simplification strategy shows up repeatedly in the brain, and recent work from a team led by Dmitri Chklovskii, group leader for neuroscience at the Center for Computational Biology, suggests the strategy may be no accident.

Consider color. In the brain, one neuron may fire when a person looks at a green teapot, whereas another fires at a blue teapot. Neuroscientists say that these cells have localized receptive fields, as each neuron responds strongly to one hue, collectively spanning the entire rainbow. Similar setups allow us to distinguish aural pitches. Conventional artificial neural networks accomplish similar tasks, such as classifying images, but these algorithms work completely differently from those in the brain. Many artificial networks, for instance, tweak the connections between neurons by using information from distant neurons. In a real brain, however, the strength of a connection predominantly depends only on nearby neurons. However, by extending a tradition of emulating biological learning, Chklovskii and his collaborators developed an approach that is not only biologically plausible but also powerful.

More here.

Rachel Connolly in The Baffler:

RECENTLY, some of my friends have started using their faces to pay for things. Not by charming strangers in bars, but instead by using the iPhone Face ID feature, which has users “glance” at their phone to make a contactless payment. The glance is, in reality, usually a close encounter of phone and face.

Face ID uses Automated Facial Recognition (AFR): every time you use it to make a payment, the Apple TrueDepth camera takes a picture of your face, creates a two-dimensional “map” of it by charting the position of facial features over thirty thousand data points, and then compares this to Apple’s stored image of your face. This means every time you use Face ID, Apple anonymously collects data including, but not limited to: the product purchased, the approximate price paid, where and when you bought it, and your facial expression while doing so. You might have preferred to keep using your fingerprint, since the “glance” is inconvenient, but on the new, home buttonless iPhones, Face ID is the default way to use Apple Pay.

I thought of this during the start of an ongoing UK court case, taken by a man named Ed Bridges against South Wales police for their use of AFR. Bridges says he was photographed without warning by a police patrol conducting a trial on a street in Cardiff; UK police have been conducting these unregulated trials, during which they photograph members of the public and compare them to watch lists, for several years. The process is opaque and their criteria for putting together watch lists questionable. Bridges’s legal team has argued that the way police use the technology breaks data protection and equality rules. The verdict will be decided later this year.

More here.

Nicholas Christakis in Quillette:

Survivor camps established after shipwrecks provide fascinating data about the societies that groups of people make when it’s left up to them, about how and why social order might vary, and about what arrangements are the most conducive to peace and survival. An archipelago of shipwrecks, formed over centuries, more or less at random, has resulted in people participating, unintentionally, in multiple trials of this experiment.

Shipwreck survivors have had a special hold on the human imagination for thousands of years, beginning at least since Homer crafted the Odyssey and stretching through when Shakespeare penned The Tempest, Cervantes described Don Quixote’s marooning, and more modern authors wrote Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, and Lord of the Flies. In fiction, the castaway narrative tends to feature an idyllic state of nature, following Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or a state of anarchy and violence, following Thomas Hobbes—two philosophers with rather conflicting ideas about human nature.

Hobbesian examples abound in real-world shipwreck situations. Consider the crew of the Batavia, who in 1629 systematically planned the mass murder of women and children to conserve resources.

More here.

Andy Fitch in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

ANDY FITCH: A New Foreign Policy takes the sustainable-development framework (prioritizing smart-infrastructure investments, significantly expanded renewable-energy production, more equitable income distribution, tech-fostering education) that you have outlined for various domestic contexts, and applies this to a broader international arena. Could you introduce that sustainable-development approach here by sketching how its basic principles might overlap whether one adopts a domestic- or global-policy vantage — and also by pointing to where this new book might need to provide a slightly different emphasis, argument, agenda? Specifically picking up this book’s subtitle, could you start to sketch how the follies of American-exceptionalist approaches (both at present, and amid a longer arc of US history) might contribute both to the necessity and to the difficulty of adopting this sustainable-development model as a guiding frame for today’s foreign policy?

JEFFREY D. SACHS: Sustainable development applies to each individual country, and also applies globally. In our economic, social, and political life, it aims for prosperous, fair, and environmentally minded societies. Within a United Nations context, most of the world already has accepted these basic principles — dating back to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, and then with the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, and the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. Of course we haven’t yet fulfilled those goals within our own country, much less globally. So this book (and my writing more generally in recent years) emphasizes the danger we have put ourselves in by not heading in a more sustainable direction. In fact, we seem to have displayed a collective tendency to head away from these goals, towards increased inequality and self-destructive habits ruining the planet.

More here.

Alexandra Schwartz at The New Yorker:

There’s no way to know, of course, if all this happened as Gilot says it did. (Lake said that she had “total recall,” a claim that tends to raise rather than allay suspicions.) She has the memoirist’s prerogative—this is how I remember it—and Picasso’s tyranny and brilliance are hardly in dispute. The bigger mystery is Gilot; the self in her self-portrait can be hard to see behind the lacquered irony and reserve. She goes along with Picasso’s more outlandish demands and schemes, but, she tells us, “not at all for his reasons.” Her dissent is withering and sarcastic rather than furious; like other women of her generation who pointedly overlooked the bad behavior of their husbands, she is concerned with preserving her own dignity. When she is seven months pregnant with Paloma, her doctor (an obstetrician this time) tells her that she is in danger; the labor has to be induced immediately. Alas, this is inconvenient for Picasso, who is due to be at a World Peace Conference elsewhere in Paris the same day.

more here.

Jenni Quilter at the TLS:

Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women charts the rise of five female Abstract Expressionist painters in New York – Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler – which is a bold move, since all of these women expressed vehement dislike of critics who used their gender as an ordering conceit. To be labelled a “lady painter” or the “wife of the artist” was an exoticization at best, a dismissal at worst. In 1957, Hartigan, Mitchell and Frankenthaler were featured in Life magazine’s feature “Women Artists in Ascendance”, photographed in their studios with their work. Each looks steadily at the camera. They knew the possible benefits of exposure, but they didn’t have to smile. In her introduction, Gabriel tells us that what she has written, “through the biographies of five remarkable women, is the story of a cultural revolution that occurred between the years of 1929 and 1959 as it arose out of the Depression and the Second World War, developed amid the Cold War and McCarthyism, and declined through the early boom years of America’s consumer culture”. Well, yes, but beyond these larger, sweeping assessments of society and gender there is a lot more.

more here.

Musa Okwonga at The New Statesman:

At a time where politicians across the world are calling for ever more secure borders, there are books whose mere existence feels radical. Afropean: Notes from Black Europe, by Johny Pitts, feels like one such publication. It is the story of the Sheffield-born author’s travel from his home town across the Continent, visiting several of its major cities and connecting – or not – with people of African heritage as he goes. Crucially, it is also the story of Pitts’s internal journey, to find where he, a working-class, mixed-race man from the north of England, might fit most comfortably within Europe’s complex past and its possibly chaotic future.

It is this constant self-interrogation that elevates the book. “Did ‘Afropean’ include only beautiful, economically successful (and often light-skinned) black people?” he asks himself at the outset.

more here.

Selina Todd in The Guardian:

Remember when everyone left doors unlocked and borrowed cups of sugar? No? Then this richly researched history of community may well appeal. Jon Lawrence uncovers the reality behind romantic cliches of our postwar past. He convincingly suggests that the real history of community is one in which people have combined solidarity with self-reliance and privacy.

This isn’t a new conclusion, as Lawrence acknowledges – his copious notes are a valuable guide for anyone interested in the social histories he draws on. But Me, Me, Me? takes an intriguing route to explore how the myth of community was constructed, and how it might be dismantled. The book revisits several social investigations – ranging from an inner-city area designated for slum clearance to a former mining village – conducted between the 1950s and the 2000s. One of Lawrence’s most vital points is that policymakers and journalists derive their nostalgic notions of “community” from a partial understanding of these studies. A closer reading reveals discontent with overcrowded conditions, frustration at prying neighbours and the hopelessness of poverty. Ambitions were real, people were active and many welcomed the chance to move to spacious housing in the suburbs.

More here.

Bob Grant in The Scientist:

Personalized medicine. Precision medicine. Genomic medicine. Individualized medicine. All of these phrases strive to express a similar vision—a reality where physicians treat based on each patient’s unique biology. The concept is poised to revolutionize clinical and preventive care. But even as the technologies helping to birth this new breed of medicine mature, the semantics surrounding the phenomenon are still experiencing growing pains. So, what should we call it? For a long time, “personalized medicine” was the preferred nomenclature. In the popular press especially, this was (and often still is) the go-to phrase to describe the medical paradigm shift that is underway. But about eight years ago, a committee convened by the director of the National Institutes of Health recommended jettisoning “personalized medicine” and replacing it with “precision medicine.” This term, the committee argued, “is less likely to be misinterpreted as meaning that each patient will be treated differently from every other patient.”

For now, the closest we’ve gotten to the distant goal has been bucketing patients into subgroups, most often on the basis of their genetics. “Genomic medicine” characterizes this current state of affairs most directly, but the term seems to ignore other unique characteristics—environ­mental factors, lifestyle, microbiomes, etc.—that can also be used to tailor a treatment to a particular patient.

This month’s Reading Frames author Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, wrote in a 2014 Cell review article that all of these phrases should be left in the dust, advocating for the use of “individualized medicine” in their place. The individual, he argued, is at the epicenter of this new approach to clinical care. “Be it a genome sequence on a tablet or the results of a biosensor for blood pressure or another physiologic metric displayed on a smartphone,” Topol wrote, “the digital convergence with biology will definitively anchor the individual as a source of salient data, the conduit of information flow, and a—if not the—principal driver of medicine in the future.”

More here.

Dream Journal

… —excerpts

Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker:

Two and a half years ago, feeling existentially adrift about the future of the planet, I sent a letter to Wendell Berry, hoping he might have answers. Berry has published more than eighty books of poetry, fiction, essays, and criticism, but he’s perhaps best known for “The Unsettling of America,” a book-length polemic, from 1977, which argues that responsible, small-scale agriculture is essential to the preservation of the land and the culture. The book felt radical in its day; to a contemporary reader, it is almost absurdly prescient. Berry, who is now eighty-four, does not own a computer or a cell phone, and his landline is not connected to an answering machine. We corresponded by mail for a year, and in November, 2018, he invited me to visit him at his farmhouse, in Port Royal, a small community in Henry County, Kentucky, with a population of less than a hundred.

Berry and his wife, Tanya, received me with exceptional kindness, and fed me well. Berry takes conversation seriously, and our talks in his book-lined parlor were extensive and occasionally vulnerable. One afternoon, he offered to drive me around Port Royal in his pickup truck to show me a few sights: the encroachment of cash crops like soybeans and corn on nearby farms, the small cemetery where his parents are buried, his writing studio, on the Kentucky River. Berry’s connection to his home is profound—several of his novels and short stories are set in “Port William,” a semi-fictionalized version of Port Royal—and his children now run the Berry Center, a nonprofit dedicated to educating local communities about sustainable agriculture.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

As you may have heard, I have a new book coming out in September, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime. To celebrate, we’re going to have more than the usual number of podcasts about quantum mechanics over the next couple of months. Today is an experimental flipped podcast, in which I’m being interviewed by Rob Reid. Rob is the host of the After On podcast, of which this is also an episode. We talk about quantum mechanics generally and my favorite Many-Worlds approach in particular, homing in on the motivation for believing in all those worlds and the potential puzzles that this perspective raises.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

Officials eyeing you with contempt. Police treating you as scum. A sense of being constantly watched and judged by professionals. Living in fear of benefit sanctions. A lack of community facilities.

Such is likely to be your experience if you are working class. Such is also likely to be your experience if you are of black or minority ethnic origin.

But here’s the odd thing: people from the working class and minorities are rarely seen as facing the same kinds of issues. Instead, in political debates from Brexit to welfare benefits, minorities and the working class are seen as having conflicting interests and often set against each other. We are Ghosts: Race, Class and Institutional Prejudice, a report published last week by the thinktanks Class and the Runnymede Trust, attempts to address this this issue of common experiences yet conflicting perceived interests. Based on interviews and focus groups, almost entirely in London, the sample may not be statistically valid but the subjective experiences of the interviewees are revealing.

More here.

James Lord at The New Criterion:

What a surprise to discover that modernism starts with Degas! And all the while we’d thought that Cézanne, van Gogh, Monet, Seurat, even Gauguin were the ones who readied the diving board for the great plunge. They had the obvious influences, of course, but a radically original, authentically modern means of making images into works of art was already fully formed in the creations of Degas while all the others were still testing their talents. To be sure, he was older, far more precocious. He also had a gift for modesty and the wit to know that artistic consummation is not to be had through technical virtuosity. Above all, he had the strength of character to measure his progress according to the pitiless standard of tradition. No innovator of the modern era has known better than Degas what full resources for future originality could be gleaned from self-effacing concentration upon great attainments of the past. It was his luck, perhaps, to come along at just the right time; it was his genius to make the rightness of the time hinge upon his own imperious and fleeting vision of a world real to him only because his pictures looked like it.

more here.

Karen Van Dyck at the Paris Review:

“That summer we bought big straw hats. Maria’s had cherries around the rim, Infanta’s had forget-me-nots, and mine had poppies as red as fire. When we lay in the hayfield wearing them, the sky, the wildflowers, and the three of us all melted into one.” The beginning of Margarita Liberaki’s Three Summers, at once vivid and hazy, evokes the season and the story of adolescent girlhood that the book will unfold. The novel tells the story of three sisters living outside Athens: Maria, Infanta, and Katerina, the youngest, who tells the tale. The house where they live with their mother, aunt, and grandfather is in the countryside. Focusing on the sisters’ daily life and first loves, as well as on a secret about their Polish grandmother, the novel is about growing up and how strange and exciting it is to discover the curious moods and desires that constitute you and your difference from other people. It also features a stable cast of friends and neighbors, all with their own unexpected opinions: the self-involved Laura Parigori; the studious astronomer David and his Jewish mother, Ruth, from England; and the carefree Captain Andreas. The book is adventurous, fantastical, romantic, down to earth, earthy, and, above all, warm. Its only season, after all, is summer.

more here.

Seamus Perry at the LRB:

Many poets end up having a hard life but W.S. Graham went out of his way to have one. His dedication to poetry, about which he seems never to have had a second thought, was remorseless, and his instinct, surely a peculiarly modern one, was that the way to nurture his creativity was to have a really bad time. ‘The poet or painter steers his life to maim//Himself somehow for the job,’ he wrote in a posthumous address to the painter Peter Lanyon. Apart from a brief and incongruous spell as an advertising copywriter and the occasional stint on fishing boats, he refused to succumb to the distraction of a day job; he didn’t write reviews or journalism; and as his books of verse were very far from bestsellers he had no money for most of his life until, in his mid-fifties, he was awarded a Civil List pension. ‘I am completely broke just now and the people I might borrow from are also broke,’ he wrote in an early letter, striking a wholly characteristic note. Twenty-five years later he was still writing to friends saying things like, ‘How terrible to think I never get in touch with you but to ask you for money. Can you please let us have £5?’ The letters convey a persistent sense of want which makes for sorry reading, as he runs out of paraffin again or makes omelettes with seagull eggs, though you often detect a flicker of stoic comedy: ‘I get on making tea and putting a sheep’s head on the hob to simmer – the beginning of a good graham broth’; ‘I’m terribly desperate for a pair of shoes or boots … I keep thinking there must be lots of men with old army boots they’ll never use’; ‘I’ve never been broker in all my life, ridiculously so … What a carry-on it certainly is.’​

more here.

Sam Jordison in The Guardian:

Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find our strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.” So Primo Levi describes the beginning of the process of “the demolition of a man”, the “offence” that Auschwitz inflicted on so many people. “Häftling,” he writes in If This Is a Man, using the German word for prisoner, “I have learned that I am a Häftling. My name is 174517.” Throughout If This Is a Man, Levi reiterates that survival was mainly a matter of random events, coincidences and fortune. But it also required stubborn resistance. As Levi explains an afterword, he remained “determined to recognise always, even in the darkest days, in my companions and in myself, men, not things.”

Levi holds on to this humanity until the camp is liberated. But he has been hollowed out by hunger, toil and unremitting horror. His sense of self has been undermined by mental and bodily weakness and the moral compromises needed for survival. If This Is a Man finishes with Levi in a kind of perilous limbo. He hasn’t “drowned”, as he terms it, but nor does he show us much about salvation. The last pages are strange and abrupt. The Russians arrive as Levi and a companion – Charles – are carrying a corpse outside their hut. They tip over the stretcher. Charles takes off his beret; Levi regrets he doesn’t have one too. We get a hint that Levi has resumed life, because he tells us he’s been writing letters to other survivors. And that’s it.

It’s in the sequel The Truce that Levi tells us how he rebuilt his humanity after it was demolished in Auschwitz. It’s a long climb into the light and – remarkably – it’s frequently beautiful. More than that, it’s funny.

More here.