The responses to Edge.org's Annual Question for 2015 have been published. Here is my answer:

The Values Of Artificial Intelligence

The rumors of the enslavement or death of the human species at the hands of an Artificial Intelligence are highly exaggerated because they assume that an AI will have a teleological autonomy akin to our own. I don't think anything less than a fully Darwinian process of evolution can give any creature that.

There are basically two ways in which we could produce an AI: the first is by trying to write a comprehensive set of programs which can perform specific tasks that human minds can perform, perhaps even faster and better than we can, without worrying about exactly how humans perform those tasks, and then bringing those modules together into an integrated intelligence. We have already started this project and succeeded in some areas. For example, computers can play chess better than humans. One can imagine that with some effort it may well be possible to program computers to also perform even more creative tasks such as writing beautiful (to us) music or poetry with some clever heuristics and built-in knowledge.

But here's the problem with this approach: we deploy our capabilities according to values and constraints programmed into us by billions of years of evolution (and some learned during our lifetimes as well) and we share some of these values with the earliest life-forms including, most importantly, the need to survive and reproduce. Without these values, we would not be here, and we would not have the very finely tuned (to our environment) emotions that allow us not only to survive but to cooperate with others in a purposive manner. The importance of this value-laden emotional side of our minds is made obvious by, among other things, the many examples of individuals who are perfectly “rational” but unable to function in society because of damage to the emotional centers of their brains. So what values and emotions will an AI have?

More here. And the rest of the responses are here.

Robert Pinsky in Slate:

Here is a love poem, clear-eyed yet passionate, personal and impersonal in ways I admire: “Cascando” by Samuel Beckett.

The poem’s intensity and misgivings are epitomized by the invented word at the end of its first stanza. “Wordshed,” on the model of “bloodshed,” generates associations of violent conflict; from another associated word, “woodshed,” gush other associations: drudgery, storage, punishment, and (maybe anachronistically) the jazz musician’s verb for practicing one’s art, woodshedding. And opposite to that practice-time in art, the simple meaning of shedding words: falling silent.

The poem’s erratic, doubling progress follows those conflicted energies as it oscillates, I think frantically, between the two magnetic attractions of abundance and of silence. The traditional lover’s uncertainty or agony has, in this poem, a rhetorical counterpart in the struggle between embracing traditional eloquence and rejecting it. For instance, “the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want” is a line of iambic pentameter as regular as anything in Shakespeare. The reckless, hyperbolic eloquence of the images—those eye-sockets and the “black want splashing their faces”—collides with the flatly corrosive, meaning-dispersing, adverbial “all always is it better too soon than never.”

For me, that hovering, back-and-forth movement between passion and reservations, need and doubt, images and disavowals, creates a strong emotion. The feeling gathers force from the poem’s argument with itself.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

A team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them.

“We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” said Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an author of the new research, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

But there is still time to avert catastrophe, Dr. McCauley and his colleagues also found. Compared with the continents, the oceans are mostly intact, still wild enough to bounce back to ecological health.

“We’re lucky in many ways,” said Malin L. Pinsky, a marine biologist at Rutgers University and another author of the new report. “The impacts are accelerating, but they’re not so bad we can’t reverse them.”

Scientific assessments of the oceans’ health are dogged by uncertainty: It’s much harder for researchers to judge the well-being of a species living underwater, over thousands of miles, than to track the health of a species on land. And changes that scientists observe in particular ocean ecosystems may not reflect trends across the planet.

Dr. Pinsky, Dr. McCauley and their colleagues sought a clearer picture of the oceans’ health by pulling together data from an enormous range of sources, from discoveries in the fossil record to statistics on modern container shipping, fish catches and seabed mining.

More here.

Jeffrey D. Sachs in Project Syndicate:

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls was not speaking metaphorically when he said that France is at war with radical Islam. There is, indeed, a full-fledged war underway, and the heinous terrorist attacks in Paris were part of it. Yet, like most wars, this one is about more than religion, fanaticism, and ideology. It is also about geopolitics, and its ultimate solution lies in geopolitics as well.

Crimes like those in Paris, New York, London, and Madrid – attacks on countless cafes, malls, buses, trains, and nightclubs – affront our most basic human values, because they involve the deliberate murder of innocents and seek to spread fear throughout society. We are wont to declare them the work of lunatics and sociopaths, and we feel repulsed by the very idea that they may have an explanation beyond the insanity of their perpetrators.

Yet, in most cases, terrorism is not rooted in insanity. It is more often an act of war, albeit war by the weak rather than by organized states and their armies. Islamist terrorism is a reflection, indeed an extension, of today’s wars in the Middle East. And with the meddling of outside powers, those wars are becoming a single regional war – one that is continually morphing, expanding, and becoming increasingly violent.

From the jihadist perspective – the one that American or French Muslims, for example, may pick up in training camps in Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen – daily life is ultra-violent.

More here. [Thanks to Syed Tasnim Raza.]

S. Abu Rizvi in Education Week:

Fifteen years ago, my colleagues and I observed that most economics undergraduates we taught quickly lost a third to half of their knowledge. “A” students turned into “C” students in a matter of weeks, right after final exams. For those of us who wanted disciplinary understanding to be useful to students well after they left college, this and similar findings were sobering. They spurred us to revamp how and what we teach while keeping an eye on why: to prepare students to use their understanding of the disciplines in other times and places.

Let's begin where we want to end up, with an example of the successful and flexible use of disciplinary understanding. As we consider the activities of two professional economists, Atif Mian and Amir Sufi, we should keep in mind that the concepts they employ are taught in introductory economics classes.

Mian and Sufi's intervention arose from the Great Recession at the end of the last decade. Economic turmoil left many homeowners “underwater,” with homes worth less than what was owed on mortgages. Federal debt relief was a policy that was considered. But Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of Treasury at the time, claimed that the impact of relief on the economy would be tiny. By freeing overburdened homeowners to spend, even a large program of $700 billion “would have increased annual personal consumption by just 0.1 to 0.2 percent.” Mian and Sufi thought this figure was too low. They used the concept of the marginal propensity to consume (MPC), “a very well-researched question,” to show that relief this big would have had an impact six to thirteen times higher than Geithner claimed. His figure for the policy's economic impact was far too small. Their argument, made at the right time, could have carried the day against Geithner's proposal.

More here.

Ross Perlin in Dissent:

Every language has a complex grammar—an almost invisible glue between words that enables meaning-making—and new vocabulary can always be borrowed or coined. Some languages may specialize in melancholy, or seaweed, or atomic structure, or religious ritual; some grammars may glory in conjugating verbs while others bristle with syntactic invention. Hawaiian has just thirteen phonemes (meaningful sounds) while the Caucasian language Ubykh, extinct as of 1992, had eighty-four. “English” (with all its technical varieties) is said to be adding up to 8,500 words per year, more than many Australian aboriginal languages have to begin with. But these are surface inequalities—questions of personality.

Perceptions of linguistic superiority or inferiority are instead based on power, class, and social status. Historically, it was languages that were swept in with strong political, economic, or religious backing—Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, and Chinese in the Eurasian core—that were held to be the oldest, the holiest, and the most perfect in structure, their “classical” status cemented by the received weight of canonical tradition. By the nineteenth century, the imperial nation-states of Europe were politely shunting them off to the museum and imposing their own equivalents: newly standardized “modern” languages like English and French. Johann Gottfried Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772) inspired would-be nation-builders to document, restore, and develop their own neglected vernaculars. One by one, the nationalists of Central and Eastern Europe adopted Herder’s program, as has virtually every modern nation-state sooner or later: warding off imperial languages from without by establishing a dominant standardized language within, at the expense of minority languages and local varieties.

More here.

The QPP

The quietly pacifist peaceful
always die
to make room for men
who shout. Who tell lies to
children, and crush the corners
off of old men's dreams.
And now I find your name,
scrawled large in someone's
blood, on this survival list.
.

by Alice Walker
from Her Blue Body Everything We Know
Harvest Books, 1991

A Roundtable on The History Manifesto: The Role of History and the Humanities in a Digital Age from Heyman Center/Society of Fellows on Vimeo.

From the introduction of The History Manifesto, “a call to arms to historians and everyone interested in the role of history in contemporary society. Leading historians David Armitage and Jo Guldi identify a recent shift back to longer-term narratives, following many decades of increasing specialization, which they argue is vital for the future of historical scholarship and how it is communicated.”

A spectre is haunting our time: the spectre of the short term.

Jeffrey Aaron Snyder reviews Lani Guinier's The Tyranny of Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America in Boston Review (Image: zaveqna):

“The world . . . provides us with more than one correct answer to most questions,” Guinier says, and nods to Bard College President Leon Botstein who tells us that no professional “pursues her vocation” by choosing the “right” answer from “a set of prescribed alternatives that trivialize complexity and ambiguity.” Incisive points, to be sure, but there are alternatives to the multiple-choice format. Many standardized tests, for instance, now include “open-response” items, which require students to fashion their own answers rather than simply choosing the one “correct” answer from a ready-made list. In my view, however, the limitations of standardized testing with respect to prefabricated questions are far more important than the shortcomings associated with prefabricated answers. The ability to formulate a significant question is a hugely important skill, especially for college-level work, and one that no standardized test even attempts to measure. Standardized tests, then, too often reinforce the dreary lesson taught by many schools that it is the job of students to answer rather than to ask questions.

I never thought I would feel compelled to defend the integrity of the College Board or the number-crunchers at U.S. News and World Report, but a few corrections of the kind of fanciful exaggerations favored by anti-testing crusaders are in order. It has been over twenty years since the SAT ceased to be an acronym but it seems the SAT will always be known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test in the popular imagination, forever associated with the attempt to measure native intellectual ability. Guinier only reinforces this common misconception, stating that the SAT “doesn’t even pretend to measure achievement.” But as the College Board website explains, the SAT “doesn’t test logic or abstract reasoning.” Rather, “it tests the skills you’re learning in school: reading, writing and math.” In other words, today’s SAT is meant to be an achievement rather than an aptitude test.

Guinier, like many critics of the SAT, is dismissive of the test’s predictive power, claiming that the correlation between SAT scores and first-year college grade-point-average is “very, very slight.” In fact, most studies put the figure in the neighborhood of .45, which is a shade higher than the correlation between rates of smoking and incidences of lung cancer. It is also only a tad lower than the correlation between cumulative high school GPA and first-year college GPA.

Finally, according to Guinier, the U.S. News annual college rankings “rely heavily on SAT scores for their calculations.” Admissions test scores actually account for just over 8 percent of a school’s ranking.

More here.

Marilynne Robinson in the NYRB (photo from Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore):

In the last year of his life he wrote a prose poem, Eureka, which would have established this fact beyond doubt—if it had not been so full of intuitive insight that neither his contemporaries nor subsequent generations, at least until the late twentieth century, could make any sense of it. Its very brilliance made it an object of ridicule, an instance of affectation and delusion, and so it is regarded to this day among readers and critics who are not at all abreast of contemporary physics. Eureka describes the origins of the universe in a single particle, from which “radiated” the atoms of which all matter is made. Minute dissimilarities of size and distribution among these atoms meant that the effects of gravity caused them to accumulate as matter, forming the physical universe.

This by itself would be a startling anticipation of modern cosmology, if Poe had not also drawn striking conclusions from it, for example that space and “duration” are one thing, that there might be stars that emit no light, that there is a repulsive force that in some degree counteracts the force of gravity, that there could be any number of universes with different laws simultaneous with ours, that our universe might collapse to its original state and another universe erupt from the particle it would have become, that our present universe may be one in a series.

All this is perfectly sound as observation, hypothesis, or speculation by the lights of science in the twenty-first century. And of course Poe had neither evidence nor authority for any of it. It was the product, he said, of a kind of aesthetic reasoning—therefore, he insisted, a poem. He was absolutely sincere about the truth of the account he had made of cosmic origins, and he was ridiculed for his sincerity. Eureka is important because it indicates the scale and the seriousness of Poe’s thinking, and its remarkable integrity. It demonstrates his use of his aesthetic sense as a particularly rigorous method of inquiry.

More here.

Francis Beckett in New Humanist:

Betrayed: The English Catholic Church and the Sex Abuse Crisis (Biteback) by Richard Scorer.

The Devil’s Advocate: Child Abuse and the Men in Black (Devil’s Advocate Library) by Graham Wilmer

Priestly sex abuse has done far more harm to the Catholic Church in the USA, Canada, Ireland and Australia than it has in Britain, which leads some British Catholics to the comforting conclusion that there is less of it here. But at least 61 Catholic priests have been convicted of sexual offences in the criminal courts of England and Wales since 1990, and there may well be more, for the church still has no single centralised record of known offenders. However, American courts award much higher sums in compensation to victims, which is why American dioceses have been ruined. And the English Catholic Church has been ruthless in its efforts to keep the lid on the scandal, to silence victims, and to protect priests who use young children for their own sexual gratification.

Over and over again, the princes of the church have silently and cynically moved a priest from one school or parish where he was discovered to be abusing children, to another where he was unknown and could find more children to abuse. Of course children were abused in many institutions, not just Catholic ones, but the fact, though Catholics refuse to face it, is that the church had a culture of abuse like no other organisation. If there was ever any doubt about that, two new books have dispelled it. Richard Scorer is a lawyer who has represented many victims of priestly sexual abuse. He has written Betrayal in clear, luminous prose, telling us only what he has heard and seen. He avoids conjecture, does not seem to be anti-Catholic and does not editorialise. The result is compulsive reading.

More here.

Alexis Forss at The Guardian:

Seven years have passed since the death of Norman Mailer, and a campaign is being waged in his name on several fronts. The publication late last year of J Michael Lennon’s authorised biography asked us to contemplate what its title referred to as a double life. A series of Random House reissues shifts attention to the essays and novels. With the release of the selected letters the most congenial approach to Mailer is illuminated: one in which the works and days are understood as marching, like his “armies of the night”, in lockstep. If John Updike’s larger body of work somehow seems a less of a vertiginous challenge than Mailer’s 44 books, it is because Updike’s chief legacy is his style: the profusion of opiate sentences that delivers us hit after euphoric hit. Mailer bequeathed us no style. What he wanted to do was to save our souls, and that was a battle to be fought in a variety of guises: General Marijuana, Aquarius, the Prisoner, and, of course, the Great Illeist – someone who refers to themselves in the third person – Norman Mailer himself. Selected Letters of Norman Mailergrants us access to the dressing room.

Lennon’s role as custodian of Mailer’s literary estate may seem redundant: after all, acting as his own curator was part of Mailer’s addiction to self‑dramatisation. Commencing with the taming and recontextualisation of the juvenilia and marginalia in 1959’s Advertisements for Myself, he was determined to frame his own works and set the parameters within which they were to be considered. However, his executor’s pruning proves indispensable: having given himself over to the fanatical labour of making a selection from more than 45,000 letters, Lennon presents us with 716 key missives, dating from 1940 to Mailer’s death in 2007.

more here.

Franklin Foer at The New York Times:

“A Voice Still Heard” appears at a relatively inert moment in American intellectual life and, therefore, at just the right time. Though Howe’s reputation dissipated quickly after his death in 1993, he was an American Orwell: our most thrilling dissident, a socialist with conservative cultural sympathies, a scything polemicist capable of the most tender, patient literary explication. Unlike Orwell, Howe never went on great foreign adventures — there was no journalism in him. And his standing will never be buoyed by his novels, because there aren’t any. But Orwell and Howe shared a romantic vision of their chosen path in life, and it’s that ­marrow-deep commitment to heterodoxy that makes the current climate feel uninspired and careerist by contrast.

Howe grew up in what Paul Goodman called decent poverty in the immigrant Bronx, although his family couldn’t even afford to hold his bar mitzvah in his neighborhood synagogue. It was socialism, with its radiant dialectics and its universalist promise of shared bonds with a world beyond the ghetto, that excited his young mind. (Not that he was alone in this obsession, especially not in the outer boroughs in the thick of the Depression.) He gravitated to the figure of the warrior-essayist Leon Trotsky.

Socialism did plenty to distort his young mind.

more here.

Mark Mazower at the Financial Times:

Tony Judt was a historian whose journalism includes some of the finest things he wrote. At the time of his death from motor neurone disease in 2010 at the age of 62, he was a fixture of the Manhattan intellectual scene and his regular platform in the New York Review of Books allowed him to excoriate the follies of politicians and pundits alike. He was no stranger to controversy. But the essays collected in When the Facts Change remind us that he was much more than a controversialist. Composed during the last 15 years of Judt’s life, they chart the gradual souring of hope across the west that took place once the cold war’s euphoric end disappeared from view, and the feel-good Clinton era gave way to George W Bush and the everlasting war on terror.

When he came to teach in New York, Judt was chiefly known for a series of scholarly works on French socialism. If one precondition for his emergence as a public intellectual was the Manhattan cultural scene, another was his own response to the fall of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath. Better and faster than anyone else, Judt realised that in order to rethink Europe’s future, it was necessary to rethink its past. In the early 1990s, he turned himself into a genuine Europeanist, forging links with scholars in central and eastern Europe, hosting conferences and seminars at which he presided with characteristically self-deprecating energy.

more here.