George Soros and others at Project Syndicate:

Rapid progress in the development of artificial intelligence has been too rapid for many, including pioneers of the technology, who are now issuing dire warnings about the future of our economies, democracies, and humanity itself. But AI is hardly the first technological advance that has been portrayed as an existential threat.

George Soros, Chairman of Soros Fund Management and the Open Society Foundations, thinks that AI is different. Not only is it “impossible for ordinary human intelligence” fully to comprehend AI; the technology will be virtually impossible to regulate. Powerful incentives to cheat mean that regulations would have to be “globally enforceable” – an “unattainable” goal at a time of conflict between “open” and “closed” societies.

More here.

Aubade: The Morning Beast

Maybe she’s the dew-crystalled web
and the great furred spider inside it.
Maybe she’s bus exhaust and sirens.

You don’t need to know. For certain
she is not worried about haircuts or lists
or televised debates. She is not worried

about certainty. She isn’t here to smooth
anything over. She isn’t here to judge
or forgive. She has fog. She has seven deer

and a massive growling garbage truck.
She does not care about the research
you’ve done. She does not notice

your mouth. She herself doesn’t need one.
She herself doesn’t speak because
speaking goes one way only, is non-

dimensional, air-colored and leafless.
She is all leaves. She is all cisterns
of stone. She towers when she wants to.

Other times she mists-and-murmurs.
She sees you wanting her to absolve you.
She sees you making your sunrise resolutions:

good morning, restraint and improvement!
She finds you sweet, the way you might
find a vole or a small ceramic cactus sweet.

by Catherine Pierce
from Ecotheo Review

Steven Poole in The Guardian:

So are we really essentially the same animals as the early Homo sapiens hunting and gathering on the savannahs? Dartnell thinks so. “The fundamental aspects of what it means to be human – the hardware of our bodies and the software of our minds – haven’t changed.” This is, indeed, the assumption behind evolutionary psychology, which seeks to explain modern human behaviour in terms of what is hypothesised to have been adaptive for our cave-dwelling ancestors. But his mainframe-age metaphor of hardware and software is old hat and inaccurate. We now know that the human brain exhibits substantial neuroplasticity: in other words, the “software” can change the “hardware” it’s running on, as is not the case for any actual computer.

This “software” can also correct itself, which is to say that our thinking is corrigible: a fact that seems obvious in light of the history of disciplines such as mathematics, engineering, or indeed biology itself. Yet Dartnell, despite accepting the facts of cultural evolution, still avers that our “cognitive operating system has not had an update”, and worse, that we can’t do anything about many of its most characteristic errors.

This is the burden of his penultimate chapter about the familiar subject of cognitive biases. Deducing from news reports about violent crime that humans are unusually violent primates, for example, would be a case of “availability bias” – we attach more importance to examples of nastiness we can easily think of (those more “available” to memory) than to the untold examples of people being nice to each other that don’t make the headlines.

More here.

Brian Gallagher in Nautilus:

No, it’s not. Participants in our studies tell us that people are less kind, less nice, less honest, less good, that this has been happening their whole lives, that it’s been happening recently, and that it’s been happening everywhere. Which should make it pretty easy to find some evidence of this somewhere, and we find no evidence of it anywhere. In fact, we find pretty good evidence that it hasn’t happened. A big collection of archival data, going back all the way to 1949, suggests people believe morality is declining. People are asked questions like, “Do you think morality is declining?” and “Do you think people are less honest today than they were 50 years ago?” in 100 different ways, in dozens of different countries. And over and over again, people say, “Yes, people are less kind than they used to be. No, I’m not just saying that. This isn’t just nostalgia. This really happened.”

What’s the evidence that their perception is off? The answers to big “M” moral items—things like, “Do people kill each other as often as they used to?” or “Are people as likely to abuse their children?”—are no. That’s Steven Pinker’s work. But that’s also not primarily what people mean when they say that morality has declined. What they really mean is, “People don’t treat each other with respect anymore.” They’ll say things like, “It used to be you could leave your door unlocked at night, but now you can’t.”

More here.

Dear Reader,

Here’s your chance to say what you want to the large number of highly educated readers that make up 3QD’s international audience. Several of our regular columnists have had to cut back or even completely quit their columns for 3QD because of other personal and professional commitments and so we are looking for a few new voices. We do not pay, but it is a good chance to draw attention to subjects you are interested in, and to get feedback from us and from our readers.

We would certainly love for our pool of writers to reflect the diversity of our readers in every way, including gender, age, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, etc., and we encourage people of all kinds to apply. And we like unusual voices and varied viewpoints. So please send us something. What have you got to lose? Click on “Read more” below…

NEW POSTS BELOW

Read more »

Catherine Shoard in The Guardian:

The actor, 90, has long harboured the desire to write a thriller, and was inspired to do so by a news item, says his UK publisher, Hodder’s Rowena Webb, about “the discovery of uranium by workers on a dump in London’s East End”. The novel’s lead character is DCI Harry Taylor, who, according to the synopsis, is “called in when just such a package is found, mysteriously abandoned in Stepney and stolen before the police can reclaim it. As security agencies around the world go to red alert, it is former SAS man Harry and his small team from the Met who must race against time to find who has the nuclear material and what they plan to do with it.”

More here.

Leon Vlieger in The Inquisitive Biologist:

From the absurdist Terry-Gilliam-style cover to the provocative subtitle to my enjoyment of his previous book Are Dolphins Really Smart?—I had high hopes for this book. Justin Gregg is an Adjunct Professor lecturing on animal behaviour and cognition, and a Senior Research Associate with the Dolphin Communication Project, betraying his particular interest in marine mammals and animal language. Holding forth the provocative idea that our intelligence is a burden rather than a boon and that animals do it better, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal combines well-aimed philosophical potshots at human exceptionalism with a gentle introduction to animal cognition. A blissfully easy read, this book had me in stitches more than once.

More here.

Dwarkesh Patel at The Lunar Society:

Marc Andreessen published a new essay about why AI will save the world. I had Marc on my podcast a few months ago (YouTube, Audio), and he was, as he is usually, very thoughtful and interesting. But in the case of AI, he fails to engage with the worries about AI misalignment. Instead, he substitutes aphorisms for arguments. He calls safety worriers cultists, questions their motives, and conflates their concerns with those of the woke “trust and safety” people.

I agree with his essay on a lot:

• • People grossly overstate the risks AI poses via misinformation and inequality.
  • Regulation is often counterproductive, and naively “regulating AI” is more likely to cause harm than good.
  • It would be really bad if China outpaces America in AI.
  • Technological progress throughout history has dramatically improved our quality of life. If we solve alignment, we can look forward to material and cultural abundance.

But Marc dismisses the concern that we may fail to control models, especially as they reach human level and beyond. And that’s where I disagree.

More here.

From Time Magazine:

Cormac McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of often grisly, hypermasculine fiction died Tuesday at 89, in his Santa Fe, N.M. home. One of the most acclaimed—if reclusive—American writers of the last 50 years, McCarthy’s dark and devastating fiction centered on outsiders attempting to survive their often violent worlds.

…Here, the essential books to celebrate and understand McCarthy’s contributions to the literary canon.

Blood Meridian (1985)

Violence is the seeming lifeblood of Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s fifth novel, which is a macabre epic of the American West. Published in 1985, it centers on the harrowing experiences of a ruthless runaway known only as “the kid.” McCarthy’s protagonist comes of age as part of the Glanton gang, a group of outlaws who were notorious in the mid-19th century for murdering Indigenous peoples across Texas and Mexico. The result is a nightmarish fever dream of gang violence and robberies, scalp hunting and cold-blooded killings—one that disrupts any heroic or romantic fantasies of the frontier.

More here.

Norman Doidge in Tablet:

An Old Woman

An old woman grabs
hold of your sleeve
and tags along.

She wants a fifty paise coin.
She says she will take you
to the horseshoe shrine.

You’ve seen it already.
She hobbles along anyway
and tightens her grip on your shirt.

She won’t let you go.
You know how old women are.
They stick to you like a burr.

You turn around and Face her
with an air of finality.
You want to end the farse.

When you hear her say,
“What else can an old woman do
on hills as wretched as these?”

You look right at the sky
clear through the bullet holes
she has for her eyes.

And as you look on
the cracks that begin around her eyes
spread beyond her skin.

And the hills crack.
And the temples crack.
And the sky falls

with a plateglass clatter
around the shatter-proof crone
who stands alone.

And you are reduced
to so much small change
in her hand.

by Arun Kolatkar
from Jejuri
New York Review Books, 1974

Abe Silberstein in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

In theory, a fundamentalist religious dictatorship should not be a hospitable environment for an extraordinary artistic flowering whose treasures continue—four decades later—to please, confound, and reinvent themselves to audiences around the world. Yet this seems to be exactly the case with Iran’s cinematic output since 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his followers consolidated power in the wake of the Shah’s departure. (The Shah was himself a tyrant, but of the kind who sought to project a modern and art-friendly image.) We are all familiar with artists, writers, and filmmakers circumventing official and de facto censors to produce subversive masterpieces. But the consistency of Iranian cinema’s march across the world stage over the last 30-plus years suggests that something more powerful than individual creativity is at play—rather, a kind of relentless cultural force inexorably punching through whatever obstacles an authoritarian government places in its way.

More here.

Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag in Public:

After years of official pronouncements to the contrary, significant new evidence has emerged that strengthens the case that the SARS-CoV-2 virus accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

According to multiple U.S. government officials interviewed as part of a lengthy investigation by Public and Racket, the first people infected by the virus, “patients zero,” included Ben Hu, a researcher who led the WIV’s “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses, which increases the infectiousness of viruses.

More than three years after the pandemic’s outbreak, many around the world had given up on learning the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the highly infectious respiratory virus that has killed millions, and the response to which shut down businesses and schools, upended societies, and caused enormous collateral damage.

More here.

Jonathan B Losos in The Guardian:

Few people would mistake a wolf for a dog. But if you saw the ancestor of the domestic cat in your backyard, your first thought would likely be “What a cool-looking housecat!” rather than “What’s an African wildcat doing in Manchester?” That’s how little they’ve changed, earning them the tag “barely” or “semi-domesticated”. There have been some minor anatomical shifts – domestic cats have longer intestines and smaller brains, for example – but very few genetic ones (and certainly many fewer than separate dogs from their wild ancestors). What about behaviour, then? Which of the traits we commonly associate with our furry friends are the result of domestication, and which do they share with their wild relatives?

More here.

We All Gotta Eat

even ants go to war.
been thinking about it all summer, what it means…
i mean how human. or maybe how ant.
maybe nature begets violence because we all gotta eat.

yo i was on trains all weekend.
and lord, got sick on an empty stomach.
acid tides creeping up my throat.
but no, i didn’t eat the train food.

on the hill, in the college,
we poured gallons of slop into buckets for the pigs’ feast.
gross chunks, all fresh waste, an unholy stew…
and so much of it.

they’re looking at the port again.
Southside stays loud saying they don’t want it.
but y’know, folks can’t hear colored voices and well…
garbage needs a place to go.

every member of my family has mentioned my belly to me this year.
as if she doesn’t wake up with me every morning.
as if i don’t gaze at her lovingly in the mirror.
as if i should worry if she looks full…

call me callow, i just don’t think something living should go hungry…
not when we’ve made so much to eat,
with armageddon’s gas stove,
on a table we’ve slaughtered the world to build.

by Justice Ameer
from Split This Rock

Amanda Taub in The New York Times:

Did you watch the finale of “Succession” on HBO this week? If so, did the final shot of Tom and Shiv in their car make you think of “Bargaining With Patriarchy,” Deniz Kandiyoti’s 1988 article that is a classic feminist text?

Me too! And not just because “Bargaining With Patriarchy” would make an extremely literal three-word summary of the entire series. For while “Succession” was not overtly about the patriarchy, it is unquestionably about a patriarchy. “Succession,” for those unfamiliar, follows the exploits of the Roy family: literal patriarch Logan, an aging media baron in the mold of Rupert Murdoch, and his adult children. Most of the show’s plot was driven by his son Kendall’s various failed efforts to dethrone or succeed him, some of which roped in Kendall’s sister, Shiv, and/or his brother Roman. Which brings me to Kandiyoti, the feminist theorist whose groundbreaking work is surprisingly helpful for understanding today’s HBO hit.

More here.

Iris Kulbatski in The Scientist:

Scent is a powerful time portal, reviving long-forgotten memories in stark detail. The human brain begins to build a library of smells in infancy, which grows into adulthood. For people with hereditary hyperosmia—a rare, heightened ability to detect and discern scents—this smell repository can be vast and remarkably fine-tuned. Joy Milne, a retired nurse, patient advocate, researcher, and grandmother, discovered this superpower as a child.¹ Milne’s grandmother—also a super sniffer—trained her to identify scent signatures, as her own mother had taught her. As a nurse, Milne acquired an extensive clinical scent library, recognizing patterns between disease symptoms and diagnoses. After her late husband’s Parkinson’s disease (PD) diagnosis, she realized that the musky smell he wore at the nape of his neck for over a decade was an early warning sign and that she could detect it in other PD patients.

More here.