Davide Castelvecchi in Nature:

Four years ago, physicists at Google claimed their quantum computer could outperform classical machines — although only at a niche calculation with no practical applications. Now their counterparts at IBM say they have evidence that quantum computers will soon beat ordinary ones at useful tasks, such as calculating properties of materials or the interactions of elementary particles.

In a proof-of-principle experiment described in Nature on 14 June¹, the researchers simulated the behaviour of a magnetic material on IBM’s Eagle quantum processor. Crucially, they managed to work around quantum noise — the main obstacle for this technology because it introduces errors in calculations — to get reliable results.

More here.

Heidi Fantasia in The Conversation:

The Dobbs v. Jackson ruling returned decisions regarding abortion to individual states. This has led to a patchwork of laws that span the entire range from complete bans and tight restrictions to full state protection for abortion.

In some states, such as Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, abortion is banned beginning at six weeks gestational age, when very few women even know they are pregnant. Other states, such as Massachusetts, Vermont, New York and Oregon, have enacted state-level protections for abortion.

The patchwork of state laws also results in a great deal of confusion.

More here.

Jules Evans in The Guardian:

There’s no more powerful mind-altering substance than a book. Five years ago, Michael Pollan wrote How to Change Your Mind, in which he described new research on psychedelic drugs, and how they can heal depression and anxiety while giving people the ultimate mystical experience. He tried the drugs himself, loved them and, thanks to the book’s phenomenal success, millions turned to psychedelics for relief and revelation. It was called “the Pollan effect”.

These days, psychedelic therapy has been legalised in Australia and the US states of Oregon and Colorado (with California poised to follow suit). Possession of psychedelics has been decriminalised in 20 US cities and municipalities, and the Food and Drug Administration appears to be on the verge of legalising the use of MDMA (ecstasy) and magic mushrooms in psychotherapy. Hundreds of psychedelic startups have launched, and dozens of books have been published. Most have flopped, like most of the startups.

More here.

From Science:

The capabilities of a new class of tools, colloquially known as generative artificial intelligence (AI), is a topic of much debate. One prominent application thus far is the production of high-quality artistic media for visual arts, concept art, music, and literature, as well as video and animation. For example, diffusion models can synthesize high-quality images (1), and large language models (LLMs) can produce sensible-sounding and impressive prose and verse in a wide range of contexts (2). The generative capabilities of these tools are likely to fundamentally alter the creative processes by which creators formulate ideas and put them into production. As creativity is reimagined, so too may be many sectors of society. Understanding the impact of generative AI—and making policy decisions around it—requires new interdisciplinary scientific inquiry into culture, economics, law, algorithms, and the interaction of technology and creativity.

Julian Baggini in Prospect:

Parfit never became a well-known public intellectual, but within English-speaking academe he is acknowledged as one of the most important philosophers of the late 20th century. He made his name with a single journal paper that breathed new life into an old problem that had drifted into obscurity, mainly because no one had anything new to say about it. The problem was: what needs to be true to correctly identify a person as the same person at two different times?

One obvious answer is something like: do a DNA test. But if having the same body is what makes us the same person, then it doesn’t make sense to conceive of life after death or of uploading ourselves into an AI world, as transhumanists look forward to doing. Nor does it account for the feeling we have that we are, in important senses, not the same person as our toddler selves, or that people in late stages of dementia are not the people they once were.

More here.

Jerry A. Coyne and Luana S. Maroja in Skeptical Inquirer:

Biology faces a grave threat from “progressive” politics that are changing the way our work is done, delimiting areas of biology that are taboo and will not be funded by the government or published in scientific journals, stipulating what words biologists must avoid in their writing, and decreeing how biology is taught to students and communicated to other scientists and the public through the technical and popular press. We wrote this article not to argue that biology is dead, but to show how ideology is poisoning it. The science that has brought us so much progress and understanding—from the structure of DNA to the green revolution and the design of COVID-19 vaccines—is endangered by political dogma strangling our essential tradition of open research and scientific communication. And because much of what we discuss occurs within academic science, where many scientists are too cowed to speak their minds, the public is largely unfamiliar with these issues. Sadly, by the time they become apparent to everyone, it might be too late.

More here.

Paul Scharre in Foreign Policy:

New technologies can change the global balance of power. Nuclear weapons divided the world into haves and have-nots. The Industrial Revolution allowed Europe to race ahead in economic and military power, spurring a wave of colonial expansion. A central question in the artificial intelligence revolution is who will benefit: Who will be able to access this powerful new technology, and who will be left behind?

Until recently, AI has been a diffuse technology that rapidly proliferates. Open-source AI models are readily available online. The recent shift to large models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is concentrating power in the hands of large tech companies that can afford the computing hardware needed to train these systems. The balance of global AI power will hinge on whether AI concentrates power in the hands of a few actors, as nuclear weapons did, or proliferates widely, as smartphones have.

More here.

Emily Watlington at Art in America:

In “Monet/Mitchell: Painting the French Landscape,” on view at the St. Louis Art Museum through June 25, the enduring impact of Monet’s vision hits hard. I mean both his literal and artistic vision—these were inextricable for the plein air painter. The show highlights the rhymes between his work and that of the American Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell (1925–1992), focusing specifically on works both artists made in the gardens of Vétheuil, in northern France.

In the catalogue, curator Simon Kelly notes that Monet’s late work had a profound impact on Abstract Expressionism more broadly, prompting painter and critic Elaine de Kooning to coin the term “Abstract Impressionism.” The AbEx movement took off across the pond a couple decades after Monet’s death, and it’s clear that Monet charted some kind of path for the movement.

more here.

Sophie Haigney and others at The Paris Review:

Cormac McCarthy’s work means a lot to me, though when I try to explain exactly what, I find myself unusually stymied; my affinity for him doesn’t make all that much sense to me. What connection do I have with the landscapes he conjures? What knowledge do I have of the kind of violence that is the subject and the fabric of many of his books? What place do I find in a world that is, among other things, nearly entirely masculine, hostile, rife with true desperation? The answer is none—unlike with much of my reading, I do not seek a mirror in McCarthy’s worldview—and yet there is something in its aesthetic articulation that has always resonated with me. (I have a curious memory of reading The Road over my mom’s shoulder when I must have been about ten.) I have a passage from All The Pretty Horses saved on my desktop, which I have revisited often and send around now and again, and which I cannot quote in full here but which ends:

The water was black and warm and he turned in the lake and spread his arms in the water and the water was so dark and so silky and he watched across the still black surface to where she stood on the shore with the horse and he watched where she stepped from her pooled clothing so pale, so pale, like a chrysalis emerging, and walked into the water.

more here.

O, Western Democracy

I praise you,

who takes us to Gleneagles
in a warm coach,
so we can stage our protest
against the butcher of Ethiopia.

You drop us by an empty field
two miles from the hotel,
so even though the Butcher cannot hear,
we are free to hurl our slogans
into the wind:

“Political plurality!” we shout
“Human Rights!” we cry

The sun is low and it is rather cold.
Policemen stamp their boots.
Some crows hear what we say
and look surprised, they undertake

to carry messages into your conference
where every beak laps up
the sweetness of your words,
jabbing at your shortbread promises.
So in the dark I praise you,

for your glistening motorways
of free expression,
your empty fields and willing crows,
for the dry biscuits you feed to monsters.

by Alemu Tebeje
from Songs We Learn From Trees
© Translation: 2020, Chris Beckett and Alemu Tebeje
Publisher: Carcanet Classics, Manchester, 2020

Asad Raza in The Fence:

You, a sensitive ingénue freshly arrived from the subcontinent, face the gleaming metropolis for the first time. Having hardened yourself to the feelings of your family, you have abandoned a prospective career as clerk in a lawyer’s office and a stable relationship with your third cousin, Padma, for a life of self-actualisation.

A bookish sort of fellow, praised in your Commonwealth public school for your poise and intelligence, you dream of writing a novel. A proper one, full of lengthy digressions and state-of-the-nation screeds. You want to convey the psychic disruption and emotional tumult of the postcolonial condition. You suffer from double vision, blurred vision, seeing triple of everything, but one thing you do see clearly, though, is the glory. Your book will sweep the Booker, the Whitbread and any other prestigious bauble you could think of. You imagine the valley of tears from critics and fans alike, the letters of gratitude, the visiting professorships and the honorary doctorates. It’ll be the greatest novel ever written about the continent – if only you could just get past the first line.

You need a guide.

More here.

Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

Last year I wrote about Open Philanthropy’s Biological Anchors, a math-heavy model of when AI might arrive. It calculated how fast the amount of compute available for AI training runs was increasing, how much compute a human-level AI might take, and estimated when we might get human level AI (originally ~2050; an update says ~2040).

Compute-Centric Framework (from here on CCF) update Bio Anchors to include feedback loops: what happens when AIs start helping with AI research?

In some sense, AIs already help with this. Probably some people at OpenAI use Codex or other programmer-assisting-AIs to help write their software. That means they finish their software a little faster, which makes the OpenAI product cycle a little faster. Let’s say Codex “does 1% of the work” in creating a new AI.

Maybe some more advanced AI could do 2%, 5%, or 50%. And by definition, an AGI – one that can do anything humans do – could do 100%. AI works a lot faster than humans. And you can spin up millions of instances much cheaper than you can train millions of employees. What happens when this feedback loop starts kicking in?

More here.

Branko Milanovic in Foreign Affairs:

We live in an age of inequality—or so we’re frequently told. Across the globe, but especially in the wealthy economies of the West, the gap between the rich and the rest has widened year after year and become a chasm, spreading anxiety, stoking resentment, and roiling politics. It is to blame for everything from the rise of former U.S. President Donald Trump and the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom to the “yellow vest” movement in France and the recent protests of retirees in China, which has one of the world’s highest rates of income inequality. Globalization, the argument goes, may have enriched certain elites, but it hurt many other people, ravaging one-time industrial heartlands and making people susceptible to populist politics.

There is much that is true about such narratives—if you look only at each country on its own. Zoom out beyond the level of the nation-state to the entire globe, and the picture looks different.

More here.

Harold Bloom at Lit Hub:

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) seems to me the authentic American apocalyptic novel, more relevant now than when it was written. The fulfilled renown of Moby-Dick and of As I Lay Dying is augmented by Blood Meridian, since Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and of Faulkner. I venture that no other living American novelist, not even Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable as Blood Meridian, much as I appreciate his Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Mason & Dixon. McCarthy himself has not matched Blood Meridian, but it is the ultimate Western, not to be surpassed.

My concern being the reader, I will begin by confessing that my first two attempts to read through Blood Meridian failed, because I flinched from the overwhelming carnage that McCarthy portrays.

more here.

Richard Brody at The New Yorker:

History is filled with secret heroes whose behind-the-scenes actions are essential to the exploits of public-facing heroes. Bringing these figures out of the shadows is a key role of historians. Helen Scott is one of those hidden heroines. Scott was the American film publicist, then translator, best known as François Truffaut’s collaborator on his book of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock. Her extraordinary, lifelong range of activities, in and out of movies, is matched by her literary depth of character. The writer who brought Scott’s life and work to light is one of Truffaut’s biographers, Serge Toubiana, who wrote a fascinating, fervently researched biography of Scott, titled “L’amie Américaine” (“The American Friend”), published in 2020. Toubiana also edited “Mon Petit Truffe, Ma Grande Scottie,” a collection of the correspondence between Scott and Truffaut, from 1960 to 1965, that came out in May.

more here.