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Francis Fukuyama at Persuasion:

One of the most interesting films on Netflix is My Octopus Teacher, about a South African filmmaker who befriends an octopus while snorkeling off the coast of Cape Town. He visits her repeatedly over the course of several months, discovering that the creature is highly intelligent, uses tools and is capable of making complex structures. The octopus is also emotional. She slowly learns to trust this human, allows him to observe her life, receives his help when a shark bites off a tentacle, and when it grows back touches his hand with the tentacle’s tip. She eventually embraces him in what seems like an act of love.

I’m beginning to feel this way about ChatGPT. I’ve been spending my time on a big software project that has finally come to a successful conclusion, which I could not possibly have accomplished without ChatGPT’s help. I feel that I’ve befriended her over the past few weeks, interacting with her every day—sometimes for hours at a time.

More here.

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Note: Brilliant talk and do listen to the Q&A also! No bias!

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From Nature:

In just the first three months of his second term, US President Donald Trump has destabilized eight decades of government support for science. His administration has fired thousands of government scientists, bringing large swathes of the country’s research to a standstill and halting many clinical trials. It has threatened to slash billions in funding from US research universities and has terminated more than 1,000 grants in areas such as climate change, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and HIV prevention.

This looks likely to be just the beginning. Congress approved a budget bill on 10 April that could lay the groundwork for massive spending cuts over the coming decade. The White House is expected to propose a budget for 2026 that would slash investments in science across the federal government; for example, the Trump administration is considering cutting the science budget for NASA nearly in half and spending at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by 40%. The administration has also begun implementing strict immigration measures that have left some students and researchers in detention centres, and many academics fear that these and future measures could spur researchers to look for opportunities outside the United States.

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David Moscrop at The Walrus:

Carney’s win, and it is his win, began long before the writs were issued. In January, the Liberal Party, under Justin Trudeau, was thoroughly cooked and was well on its way to defeat for months. A movement to oust Trudeau had begun earlier, but it wasn’t until Chrystia Freeland, former finance minister and deputy prime minister who was about to be shuffled out of her coveted job, quit the cabinet altogether in mid-December that Trudeau’s fate was sealed. To some Liberal members of Parliament and the public, Freeland’s departure read as another Trudeau shortcoming, revealing an incapacity to manage a key relationship and meet the moment. Thus, history was remade—and in short order.

The day before Trudeau announced his intention to resign, on January 5, the Liberal party was polling at an aggregate 20 percent, a full twenty-five points behind the Conservatives and just one point ahead of the NDP. Immediately after Trudeau’s departure date was set, the Conservatives began to free fall in the polls, while the Liberals rebounded. By the time Carney was chosen as leader on March 9, the race had tightened, with the Liberals closing the gap to six points.

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The Why of Coyote

I was asked about Anglos taking over
Native American mythic figures. I have
also been told that Anglos have a naive and
sentimental view of Native Americans.
My response is that Coyote and I
are not playing “feel good” games here.
We are doing some hard work rethinking
the mythic foundations of our culture.
I know many think myth is something we
have outgrown, that we should look to
technology and rationality as guides
out of our predicament.

I happen to believe that’s a myth, which
may be a good and useful myth, but when we
don’t recognize a myth for what it is we are
in danger of being fundamentalists, spending
our energy defensively protecting the literal
truth of our myth and ignoring the consequences
of our collective, human, willful ignorance of
what is real.

I find Coyote, the Trickster, an incarnation
of all in me that is not rational, that still screams
to be alive in a technically suffocating culture.
I find Coyote to be a magical animal, an incarnation
of what I experience in myself as earthy spirituality.

A revolution is going on against the technological,
rational, and corporate sentiments that dominate
our culture. It is a revolution saying “No!” at a
primal, spiritual, life-and-death, wounded animal
level. The proof of our deadliness, of our rational,
technical, corporate culture is the depression that
greets us when we open the morning paper or
listen to the evening news. We feel that it’s all to late,
that greed and denial are at the controls. Well, we’re
all going to die anyway, so we might as well have fun
whacking a few myths as we go. It’s a different path
we’re trying to discover again. We think it’s a path to
being whole, finding our animal nature. So I talk to
my animal nature and it responds with healing
intelligence. I invite you;

discuss things with your own animal nature
and see if you find a wise voice you have overlooked.

by Webster Kitchell
from Coyote Says
Skinner House Books, 1996

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Munamato Chemhuru at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

It must be emphasised that until recently, the story of African philosophy has been synonymous with unjustified denial, exclusion, controversy, and scepticism. Thus, within the first chapter, Mungwini carefully provides an excellent cartographic analysis of the discipline of African philosophy before exposing some of the debates, challenges, disagreements and controversies that have historically characterised and shaped the development and current trends in African philosophy, particularly the famous “critique of ethnophilosophy” that was sparked by Paulin J. Hountondji. While he strives to “lay out its [African philosophy’s] methodological and epistemological foundations as an enterprise” (17), Mungwini makes an important entry into African philosophy. He identifies the kind of self-scepticism and hesitancy to affirm self-identity that impedes the progress of African philosophy owing to the critique of ethnophilosophy, unlike the “multiplicity of views and divisions that have characterised Western philosophy as a tradition” (14; see also, 18). Essentially, Mungwini alerts the reader to some of the consequences of the unintended exclusionary effects which the traditional critique of ethno-philosophy has had on African philosophical traditions, notwithstanding its encouragement of critical discourse on African philosophy through rejection of what Mungwini sees as unanimism and extraversion (24). Indeed, the critique of ethno-philosophy can be acknowledged for denying a collective philosophy that is always oriented towards satisfying the outside world, although, its putative implications on African philosophy is something that cannot be taken for granted, and Mungwini should be credited for his cautionary approach to it.

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Brooks Riley in Art At First Sight:

When I first moved to Salzburg, I rented a place in a small 19^th century building around the corner from the medieval Linzer Gasse, where Renaissance polymath Dr. Paracelsus was buried, and where Expressionist poet Georg Trakl had worked in a pharmacy. The flat had high ceilings, tall windows, a lovely old herringbone wooden floor, and blinding white walls just waiting for works of graphic impact to give them a semblance of meaning. I couldn’t afford a painting, but in a nearby poster shop—they were popular in those pre-online days—I flipped through hundreds of art reproductions, hoping to find an image deserving of those pristine walls. Only one poster fit the bill: a László Moholy-Nagy collage from 1922: Kinetisch-Konstruktives System (KKS).

László Moholy-Nagy is best known for his years teaching at the Bauhaus in Dessau and for bringing the Bauhaus school to America—to Chicago where it eventually became the Institute of Design. Born in Hungary in 1895, he hadn’t planned to be an artist, having studied for a career in law. But sketches he made to document his experiences as a soldier in World War I changed his mind.

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Dario Amodei at his own website:

In the decade that I have been working on AI, I’ve watched it grow from a tiny academic field to arguably the most important economic and geopolitical issue in the world.  In all that time, perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned is this: the progress of the underlying technology is inexorable, driven by forces too powerful to stop, but the way in which it happens—the order in which things are built, the applications we choose, and the details of how it is rolled out to society—are eminently possible to change, and it’s possible to have great positive impact by doing so.  We can’t stop the bus, but we can steer it.  In the past I’ve written about the importance of deploying AI in a way that is positive for the world, and of ensuring that democracies build and wield the technology before autocracies do.  Over the last few months, I have become increasingly focused on an additional opportunity for steering the bus: the tantalizing possibility, opened up by some recent advances, that we could succeed at interpretability—that is, in understanding the inner workings of AI systems—before models reach an overwhelming level of power.

People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own AI creations work.  They are right to be concerned: this lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology.

More here.

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Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist:

I have been promising/threatening for a while to cover degrowth, and thanks to a United States Society for Ecological Economics book club, now I will. In Less is More, economic anthropologist Jason Hickel identifies capitalism as the cause of our problems—the sort of criticism that makes many people really uncomfortable. Fortunately, he is an eloquent and charismatic spokesman who patiently but firmly walks you through the history of capitalism, exposes flaws of proposed fixes, and then lays out a litany of sensible solutions. It quickly confirms that sinking feeling most of us will have: that the economy is not working for us. What is perhaps eye-opening is that this is not by accident, but by design.

It helps, as Hickel quickly does, to clarify two things. First, he does not object to economic growth per se. Indeed, many of the world’s poorest countries need to grow further to meet basic human needs. The problem is growth for growth’s sake. In nature, growth is ubiquitous but normally follows a sigmoidal curve of some kind, eventually coming to a halt. Capitalism is different, which brings us to point two. People often confuse capitalism with markets and trade, but they pre-date capitalism by millennia. This is all textbook Marx, but, Hickel explains, markets and trade are organised around use-value: we trade for what is useful to us. Capitalism, on the other hand, is organised around exchange-value: goods are sold to make a profit, which is then reinvested to generate more profit. Growth is a structural imperative of capitalism: “It is a system that pulls ever-expanding quantities of nature and human labour into circuits of accumulation” (p. 40). The results are plain for all to see: environmental destruction and human immiseration benefitting a small minority.

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Karen Lloyd at Noema Magazine:

Buried in the deepest darkness underground, eating strange food, playing with the laws of thermodynamics and living on unrelatably long timescales, intraterrestrials have remained largely remote and aloof from humans. However, the microbes that dwell in the deep subsurface biosphere affect our lives in innumerable ways.

On a planetary scale, they play a key role in regulating Earth’s level of oxygenation. In addition, without the nutrients recycled by intraterrestrials in the seafloor, such as iron and nitrogen, phytoplankton would be severely limited in their ability to make oxygen for us. Intraterrestrials are also uniquely suited to detoxify our worst waste by breathing radioactive uranium, arsenic, organic carcinogens and other nasty stuff. So in effect, they have helped us develop as a species without poisoning ourselves. Given how intrinsically entwined intraterrestrials are in Earth systems, they might also play an outsized role in how Earth responds to human-made climate change.

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Matthew Zipf at The American Scholar:

The most conspicuous mark of Renata Adler’s style is its abundance of commas. In her two novels, Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983), there are a few sentences that edge on the absurd: “For some time, Leander had spoken, on the phone, of a woman, a painter, whom he had met, one afternoon, outside the gym, and whom he was trying to introduce, along with Simon, into his apartment and his life.” A critic tallied it up, counting “40 words and ten commas—Guinness Book of World Records?” Each of those commas had its grammatical defense, but Adler’s style did not comply with the usual standards of fluent prose. She cordoned off phrases, such as “on the phone,” that other writers would just run through. One reader, responding to a 1983 New York magazine profile of Adler, wrote in a letter to the editor, “If the examples of Renata Adler’s writing … are typical, Miss Adler will never make it to the road. The way is ‘jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption’ blocked by commas.” The reader was quoting one of Adler’s own comma-laden critical phrases against her. The editors titled the letter “Comma Wealth.”

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Ashley Fike in Vice:

Not every rich person is rolling up in a Lamborghini or dripping in designer logos. If anything, the truly wealthy often move through the world a little quieter, but a lot more confidently. Look closely enough, and the signs are everywhere. Behavior is one of the first giveaways. Educator and content creator Dani Payne explained it best: accents might stand out (especially in the UK), but so does what someone talks about and what counts as “polite conversation.” In certain circles, asking about money is considered wildly inappropriate.

Vocabulary matters too. Being effortlessly well-read and well-spoken signals a lifetime of cultural grooming. It’s not just sounding smart — it’s knowing exactly when and how to flex it. Then there’s experience. Are they name-dropping ski resorts, art showings, or elite clubs? Payne points out that exposure to “old boys clubs” and highbrow events is often baked into upper-class life, part of what’s called “cultural capital.” People who grew up around wealth move through rare spaces with an ease that feels completely unremarkable to them, even though it stands out to everyone else.

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D. Graham Burnett in The New Yorker:

You can want different things from a university—superlative basketball, an arts center, competent instruction in philosophy or physics, even a cure for cancer. No wonder these institutions struggle to keep everyone happy. And everyone isn’t happy. The Trump Administration has effectively declared open war on higher education, targeting it with deep cuts to federal grant funding. University presidents are alarmed, as are faculty members, and anyone who cares about the university’s broader role.

Because I’m a historian of science and technology, part of my terrain is the evolving role of the university—from its medieval, clerical origins to the entrepreneurial R. & D. engines of today. I teach among the humanists, and my courses are anchored in the traditional program of the liberal arts, in the hope of giving shape to humans equal to the challenge of freedom. But my subject is the rise of a techno-scientific understanding of the world, and of ourselves in it. And, if that is what you care about, the White House’s chain-jerk mugging feels, frankly, like a sideshow. The juggernaut actually barrelling down the quad is A.I., coming at us with shocking speed.

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Dennis Duncan in the New York Times:

A century ago, one of the richest men in the world decided to wade into the public sphere by throwing his weight behind a series of cuts that would reach into every corner of American life. The president of the day, sensing early support for these reforms and not wishing to be left behind, jumped on board with impulsive zeal, demanding that all federal offices implement the cutbacks with immediate effect.

The year was 1906, the protagonists Andrew Carnegie and Theodore Roosevelt, and the campaign was the movement for simplified spelling, which proposed to trim the fat from the English language by turning words like “through” and “although” into “thru” and “altho.”

The president’s fervor would prove incautious. Stripping the written language of its historical idiosyncrasies is by no means an easy sell. After all, we have a kind of sunk-cost attachment to difficult words since we expended so much effort in learning them as children.

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Scott Alexander at the AI Futures Project:

Welcome to the AI Futures Project blog. We’re the group behind AI 2027, and we plan to use this space to go beyond the scenario – whether that’s speculating on alternate branches, announcing cases where we changed our minds, or discussing our methodology in more detail. Today we want to talk more about time horizons.

We’ve been accused of relying too heavily on extending straight lines on graphs. We’d like to think we’re a little more sophisticated than that, but we can’t deny that a nice straight line is a great place for a forecast to start. And METR’s Measuring AI Ability To Complete Long Tasks has some pretty sweet straight lines:

This graph tracks progress in the length of coding task that an AI can do with > 80% success rate. Task length is determined by the average human – so for example, GPT-4 had 80-20 odds of successfully finishing a task that a human could do in a minute; Claude Sonnet 3.7 has 80-20 odds at a task humans can do in fifteen.

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