Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Over the last year, AI large-language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have demonstrated a remarkable ability to carry on human-like conversations in a variety of different concepts. But the way these LLMs “learn” is very different from how human beings learn, and the same can be said for how they “reason.” It’s reasonable to ask, do these AI programs really understand the world they are talking about? Do they possess a common-sense picture of reality, or can they just string together words in convincing ways without any underlying understanding? Computer scientist Yejin Choi is a leader in trying to understand the sense in which AIs are actually intelligent, and why in some ways they’re still shockingly stupid.

More here.

Richard V Reeves in Persuasion:

One hundred and fifty years ago, John Stuart Mill died in his home in Avignon. His last words were to his step-daughter, Helen Taylor: “You know that I have done my work.”

He certainly had. During his 66 years of life, Mill became the preeminent public intellectual of the century, producing definitive works of logic and political economy, founding and editing journals, serving in Parliament, and churning out book reviews, journalism and essays, most famously his 1859 masterpiece, On Liberty. Oh, and he had a day job, too: as one of the most senior bureaucrats in the East India Company.

What is too often forgotten about Mill is that he was as much an activist as an academic. Benjamin Franklin exhorted his followers to “either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” Mill, like Franklin himself, is among the very few who managed to do both.

More here.

Attention Everyone

Gloom is the enemy, even to the end.
The parodies of self-knowledge were embossed by
Gloom inside our eyelids, and the abrasion makes us
weep, for no reason, like a new bride disconsolate in the
nightgown she had sewn so carefully.

The dog comes back from the fields, lumpy with burrs.
I put down my pen and pull them out; it is care
I have taught him to expect. I’ve always said
it would be difficult.

I’m declaring a new regime. Its flag is woven loam.
Its motto is: Love is worth even its own disasters.
Its totem is the worm. We eat our way through grief
and make it richer. We don’t blunt ourselves against stones
—their borders go all the way through. We go around them.
In my new regime Gloom dances by itself, like a sad poet.

Also I will be sending out some letters:
Dear Friends, please come to the party for my new life.
The dog will meet you at the road, barking,
running stiff-legged circles. Pluck one of his burrs and
follow him here. I’ve got lots of good wine. I’m in love,
my new poems are better than my old poems. It’s been
too long since we started over.

The new regime will start when you lift your eyes
from this page. Here it comes.

by William Matthews
from Sleek for the Long Flight
White Pine Press 1972

(Note: For dear friend Kevin Ham)

Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

We often think of proteins as immutable 3D sculptures. That’s not quite right. Many proteins are transformers that twist and change their shapes depending on biological needs. One configuration may propagate damaging signals from a stroke or heart attack. Another may block the resulting molecular cascade and limit harm.

In a way, proteins act like biological transistors—on-off switches at the root of the body’s molecular “computer” determining how it reacts to external and internal forces and feedback. Scientists have long studied these shape-shifting proteins to decipher how our bodies function. But why rely on nature alone? Can we create biological “transistors,” unknown to the biological universe, from scratch? Enter AI. Multiple deep learning methods can already accurately predict protein structures—a breakthrough half a century in the making. Subsequent studies using increasingly powerful algorithms have hallucinated protein structures untethered by the forces of evolution. Yet these AI-generated structures have a downfall: although highly intricate, most are completely static—essentially, a sort of digital protein sculpture frozen in time.

A new study in Science this month broke the mold by adding flexibility to designer proteins. The new structures aren’t contortionists without limits. However, the designer proteins can stabilize into two different forms—think a hinge in either an open or closed configuration—depending on an external biological “lock.” Each state is analogous to a computer’s “0” or “1,” which subsequently controls the cell’s output. “Before, we could only create proteins that had one stable configuration,” said study author Dr. Florian Praetorius at the University of Washington. “Now, we can finally create proteins that move, which should open up an extraordinary range of applications.” Lead author Dr. David Baker has ideas: “From forming nanostructures that respond to chemicals in the environment to applications in drug delivery, we’re just starting to tap into their potential.”

More here.

James Steichen at The Nation:

It’s fitting that choreographer George Balanchine is experiencing a cultural moment around the 40th anniversary of his death. In the ephemeral realm of dance, the longevity of his influence is unique and it shows no signs of waning. Balanchine’s ballets—beloved for their sophisticated abstraction and musicality—have become staples of the repertoire for ballet companies in the United States and beyond, and they have been performed more often since his death than during his lifetime. Two institutions jointly founded by Balanchine and impresario Lincoln Kirstein—the New York City Ballet (NYCB) and the School of American Ballet (SAB)—continue to cultivate his artistic legacy on the stages and in the classrooms of Lincoln Center. Among his other accomplishments, Balanchine made The Nutcracker a Christmas classic in the United States, and for many ballet enthusiasts it would be as difficult to conceive of ballet without Balanchine as it would be to spend the holidays without the Mouse King and the Sugar Plum Fairy.

Just as Balanchine towers over ballet, a recent biographical portrait of him looms larger than the rest: Jennifer Homans’s long-awaited Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century.

more here.

Mayukh Sen at The New Yorker:

In March, 1929, when the twenty-four-year-old Chinese American actress Anna May Wong made her London stage début on the city’s West End, in a play called “The Circle of Chalk,” critics took issue with one aspect of her performance: her voice. Up to this point, Wong, five foot seven with dreamy eyes, had appeared primarily in American silent films that pandered to stereotypes of docile Asian women. Her live audience may have expected a dulcet trill. What she gave them instead was, to the ears of reviewers, “squeaky” and “uncultivated.” Wong was reared around Los Angeles’s Chinatown and had grown up speaking both Cantonese and English; she had an accent that was pure California. After the eight-week run of “The Circle of Chalk” concluded, Wong lunched with some journalists who probed her about her bad reviews. At first, she answered their questions in English. Then, catching them by surprise, she switched to Cantonese.

This episode arrives about halfway through the academic Yunte Huang’s searching new biography of the star, “Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History,” as evidence of what Huang calls Wong’s “defiance and playfulness.”

more here.

Michael Wood at Literary Hub:

Among the many dolls mentioned in Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie there is one associated with time and memory and literally named after Marcel Proust. It didn’t sell well. Perhaps Mattel got the wrong writer. They could have gone for the same Marcel, but as a comedian, a French, philosophical, disguised partner of Dickens. Critics have been finding Proust funny since 1928—he died in 1922. Christopher Prendergast’s Mirages and Mad Beliefs (2013) has a chapter on Proust’s jokes, and in 2015 Elizabeth Ladenson published a marvelous essay called “Proust and the Marx Brothers.”

And yet. This claim for comedy in Proust always comes as a surprise and is instantly forgotten. Why is this? I don’t know the answer to the question, but a guess or two about its grounds may help us to understand it a little better.

More here.

Mariana Lenharo in Nature:

Science fiction has long entertained the idea of artificial intelligence becoming conscious — think of HAL 9000, the supercomputer-turned-villain in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. With the rapid progress of artificial intelligence (AI), that possibility is becoming less and less fantastical, and has even been acknowledged by leaders in AI. Last year, for instance, Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist at OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot ChatGPT, tweeted that some of the most cutting-edge AI networks might be “slightly conscious”.

Many researchers say that AI systems aren’t yet at the point of consciousness, but that the pace of AI evolution has got them pondering: how would we know if they were?

To answer this, a group of 19 neuroscientists, philosophers and computer scientists have come up with a checklist of criteria that, if met, would indicate that a system has a high chance of being conscious.

More here.

Jared Starr in The Conversation:

About 10 years ago, a very thick book written by a French economist became a surprising bestseller. It was called “Capital in the 21st Century.” In it, Thomas Piketty traces the history of income and wealth inequality over the past couple of hundred years.

The book’s insights struck a chord with people who felt a growing sense of economic inequality but didn’t have the data to back it up. I was one of them. It made me wonder, how much carbon pollution is being generated to create wealth for a small group of extremely rich households? Two kids, 10 years and a Ph.D. later, I finally have some answers.

In a new study, colleagues and I investigated U.S. households’ personal responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 to 2019. We previously studied emissions tied to consumption – the stuff people buy. This time, we looked at emissions used in generating people’s incomes, including investment income.

More here.

From Time Magazine:

As Borat, the first fake news journalist, I interviewed some college students—three young white men in their ballcaps and polo shirts. It only took a few drinks, and soon they were telling me what they really believed. They asked if, in my country, women are slaves. They talked about how, here in the U.S., “the Jews” have “the upper hand.” When I asked, do you have slaves in America?, they replied, “we wish!” “We should have slaves,” one said, “it would be a better country.” Those young men made a choice. They chose to believe some of the oldest and most vile lies that are at the root of all hate. And so it pains me that we have to say it yet again. The idea that people of color are inferior is a lie. The idea that Jews are dangerous and all-powerful is a lie. The idea that women are not equal to men is a lie. The idea that queer people are a threat to our children is a lie.

At other times, I’ve seen people make a different choice. As Borat, I once got an entire bar in Arizona to sing, “Throw the Jew down the well”—which revealed people’s indifference to anti-Semitism. But when I tried to film that same exact scene at a bar in Nashville, something different happened. People started to boo. And then they chased me right out of that bar. Those people made the choice that brings us all here today—they chose to belief the truth: the truth that we are all deserving of respect, dignity, and equality, no matter who we are, what we look like, how we pray, or who we love.

We always have a choice.

More here.

Liam Drew in Nature:

Ten years ago, a tech-savvy group of people with type 1 diabetes (T1D) decided to pursue a DIY approach to their own treatment. They knew that a fairly straightforward piece of software could make their lives much easier, but no companies were developing it quickly enough. What this software promised was freedom from having to constantly measure and control their blood-glucose levels. In people without T1D, when glucose levels rise, cells in the pancreas release insulin, a hormone that helps tissues to absorb that glucose. In T1D, these cells are killed by the immune system, leaving people with the condition to manage their blood sugar by taking insulin. “It is almost inhumane,” says Shane O’Donnell, a medical sociologist at University College Dublin, who, like everyone quoted in this article, lives with T1D. “You’re constantly having to think about diabetes in order to survive.”

Members of the nascent DIY community were using the most sophisticated technology available: insulin pumps and wearable devices called constant glucose monitors. But they still had to read the monitor’s data, forecast their diet and exercise and then calculate the appropriate insulin dose. What they wanted was automation — an algorithm that would analyse glucose data and program the pump itself. Coalescing around this aim in 2013, the community debuted a hashtag: #WeAreNotWaiting. Then, in February 2015, group member Dana Lewis shared the code for an algorithm that she and two collaborators had developed and tested.

More here.

Judith Finell at the LARB:

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG (1874–1951) was a pivotal figure in the development of 20th-century music. Of the thousands of composers who came before and after him, he stood alone both as the embodiment of the high Romanticism of the 19th and early 20th centuries led by Gustav Mahler, Richard Wagner, and Richard Strauss, and as a rebel who broke down the gates of traditions that had ruled music composition for three centuries. After he spent his childhood in pre–World War I Vienna in a Jewish ghetto, Nazi antisemitism drove him from Europe, eventually to land in Los Angeles, where he stayed to the end of his life, teaching first at USC and then UCLA.

A generational original, Schoenberg forged an entirely new path and language for musical expression. He called it the 12-tone or dodecaphonic system, built on all 12 pitches in the Western scale, rather than the traditional hierarchical seven. Ironically, his impact even on his most ardent disciples, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, was so provocative that they built on his techniques in divergent directions.

more here.

Mario Barbatti at Aeon:

The camera zooms in on the person’s arm to reveal the cells, then a cell nucleus. A DNA strand grows on the screen. The camera focuses on a single atom within the strand, dives into a frenetic cloud of rocketing particles, crosses it, and leaves us in oppressive darkness. An initially imperceptible tiny dot grows smoothly, revealing the atomic nucleus. The narrator lectures that the nucleus of an atom is tens of thousands of times smaller than the atom itself, and poetically concludes that we are made from emptiness.

How often have you seen such a scene or read something equivalent to it in popular science? I am sure plenty, if you are fans of this genre like me. However, the narrative is wrong. Atomic nuclei in a molecule are not tiny dots, and there are no empty spaces within the atom.

The empty atom picture is likely the most repeated mistake in popular science.

more here.

The Long Boat

When his boat snapped loose
from its mooring, under
the screaking of the gulls,
he tried at first to wave
to his dear ones on shore,
but in the rolling fog
they had already lost their faces.
Too tired even to choose
between jumping and calling,
somehow he felt absolved and free
of his burdens, those mottoes
stamped on his name-tag:
conscience, ambition, and all
that caring.
He was content to lie down
with the family ghosts
in the slop of his cradle,
buffeted by the storm,
endlessly drifting.
Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didn’t matter
which way was home;
as if he didn’t know
he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever.

by Stanley Kunitz
from Poetic Outlaws

David Marchese in the New York Times:

For more than 50 years, Daniel C. Dennett has been right in the thick of some of humankind’s most meaningful arguments: the nature and function of consciousness and religion, the development and dangers of artificial intelligence and the relationship between science and philosophy, to name a few. For Dennett, an éminence grise of American philosophy who is nonetheless perhaps best known as one of the “four horsemen” of modern atheism alongside Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, there are no metaphysical mysteries at the heart of human existence, no magic nor God that makes us who we are. Instead, it’s science and Darwinian evolution all the way down. In his new memoir, “I’ve Been Thinking,” Dennett, a professor emeritus at Tufts University and author of multiple books for popular audiences, traces the development of his worldview, which he is keen to point out is no less full of awe or gratitude than that of those more inclined to the supernatural. “I want people to see what a meaningful, happy life I’ve had with these beliefs,” says Dennett, who is 81. “I don’t need mystery.”

More here.