Randy Sparkman at Literary Hub:

By now, we’ve seen the ChatGPT parlor tricks. We’re past the novelty of a cake recipe in the style of Walt Whitman or a weather report by painter Bob Ross. For the one-hundredth time, we understand the current incarnation of large language models make mistakes. We’ve done our best to strike a studied balance between doomers and evangelists. And, we’ve become less skeptical of “emergent” flashes of insight from the aptly-named foundational models. At the same time, Google, Meta and a list of hopeful giant swatters have released credible competitors to ChatGPT.

For all those reasons, global use of ChatGPT recently declined for the first time since its November 2022 release. Perhaps now we’re ready to get to more elemental questions about what generative language artificial intelligence can or cannot do for us in the everyday.

I come to this discussion from a long career managing IT systems in large enterprises, where, as MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte predicted in 1995, everything that could be digitized was digitized. I’m not a cognitive scientist, but I understand enough of how large language models work and how humans separate digital wheat from chaff to begin to think about what they might do with software with an opinion of its own.

More here.

Bruce Robbins [and others] at n + 1:

I MAY HAVE BEEN INVITED because I can speak as a Jew. That’s fine with me, though there are a lot more Jews speaking out against Israel these days, which means I get less credit than I used to. Getting less credit makes me happy and, at least on the discursive level, somewhat optimistic. For a number of reasons—one reason is Bernie Sanders, another is Jewish Voice for Peace—it’s now possible for us to say many things that used to be unsayable. Mainstream media coverage of Gaza is still nauseating in its double standards and its callousness toward Palestinian lives. But now and then you can see glimmers of moral common sense in it.

I’m not going to speak as a Jew, however, but as the son of a World War II veteran.

More here.

Alex Blasdel in The Guardian:

Andrew Wylie, the world’s most renowned – and for a long time its most reviled – literary agent, is 76 years old. Over the past four decades, he has reshaped the business of publishing in profound and, some say, insalubrious ways. He has been a champion of highbrow books and unabashed commerce, making many great writers famous and many famous writers rich. In the process, he has helped to define the global literary canon. His critics argue that he has also hastened the demise of the literary culture he claims to defend. Wylie is largely untroubled by such criticisms. What preoccupies him, instead, are the deals to be made in China.

Wylie’s fervour for China began in 2008, when a bidding war broke out among Chinese publishers for the collected works of Jorge Luis Borges.

More here.

Sometimes

Sometimes, when a bird cries out,
Or the wind sweeps through a tree,
Or a dog howls in a far off farm,
I hold still and listen a long time.

My soul turns and goes back to the place
Where, a thousand forgotten years ago,
The bird and the blowing wind
Were like me, and we were brothers.

My soul turns into a tree,
And an animal, and a cloud bank.
Then changed and odd it comes home
And asks me questions. What should I reply?

by Herman Hesse
from News of the Universe
translation: Robert Bly
Sierra Club Books, 1995

Veronique Greenwood in Harvard Magazine:

IN THE LATE 2000s, Rachel Carmody was spending a lot of time counting calories. An anthropology graduate student at Harvard, she was studying whether cooking changed the number of calories the gut can extract from food. When humans invented cooking thousands of years ago, she and her advisor Richard Wrangham wondered, had they opened the door to a new source of energy?

To find out, she’d fed raw or cooked food to mice and humans. She’d checked on the food in mice as it traveled through the stomach, the small intestine, and the large intestine. She’d even recruited people whose colon, a portion of the large intestine, had been removed, to take samples from their ileostomy bags so she could see what the food was like. She compared the energy that went into their bodies with what came out. And she and Wrangham discovered something extraordinary.

Cooking dramatically increased the calories humans and mice got from food. Cooked meat yielded 10 to 15 percent more calories than raw. Cooked sweet potatoes were a whopping 30 percent more caloric than uncooked ones. Now, in her office in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Carmody, an assistant professor of human evolutionary biology, recalls her hunt to understand why.

Here’s part of what she found: cooking jump-starts digestion. With chemical bonds and cellular structures already broken down, it’s easier for digestive enzymes to make the energy in food available to an animal. But she could account for only a portion of the energy boost cooking produced. “I was panicking that my dissertation was going to be terrible,” she says. Something was missing.

More here.

Jeremy Horpedahl in The City Journal:

The Federal Reserve’s latest Survey of Consumer Finances contains several revelations about the state of the American economy.

First, it found that the average American household’s net worth is over $1 million. Outliers can distort averages, of course, but even median household wealth is at the Fed’s highest level ever recorded. In 2019, it was still stuck below pre-Great Recession levels. By 2022, however, it had reached $192,000, eclipsing the 2007 mark by more than 10 percent, and almost doubling the post-Great Recession 2010 figure. (These and all subsequent data are adjusted for inflation.)

Income data complicate this rosy picture. The Census Bureau found that median household income has declined by almost 5 percent since 2019. That raises a question: How can median household wealth be up by 37 percent since 2019 at the same time median household income declined?

More here.

John Banville at The Guardian:

If letter writing is an art form, then Seamus Heaney was one of its master practitioners. Christopher Reid’s 800-page selection from what he assures us was an “enormous output” – “I have had to cut back severely to make a book of publishable proportions” – is a trove of delights as much as it is a literary testament.

Heaney was as fluent in prose as he was sublime in verse, as readers will know from his essays and articles, and his extensive memoir, Stepping Stones, compiled in interview form with the poet Dennis O’Driscoll. Yet the style in the letters, many of them obviously composed at breakneck speed, is astonishing in its quality and unflagging grace. As one of his correspondents said of Heaney: “He makes the simplest words shine.” Despite occasional asperities, his generosity and enthusiasm for the work of others are remarkable. Here he is writing in 2006 to Ted Hughes’s widow, Carol, about the poet’s posthumous Selected Translations – and note the beautifully sustained oceanic metaphor: “The delights are dolphin-like, the mighty talent rising again and showing his back above the elements … I got [the book] and swam in and out of the different coves and caves, safe havens (few) and strange strands. A strong sense of being lifted on the tide of it all.”

more here.

Jennifer Szalai at the New York Times:

Witold Szablowski describes a number of surprising dishes in his entertaining yet unnerving new book, “What’s Cooking in the Kremlin,” which explores the last century of Russian history through its food. But none is as surreal as the recipe for one of Lenin’s favorites. The instructions for making his “scrambled eggs using three eggs” orders you to break the eggs but not to beat them. What Lenin called “scrambled eggs” were actually fried eggs, with their yolks and whites intact — not scrambled at all.

Szablowski’s previous books include “How to Feed a Dictator” and “Dancing Bears”; as a Polish journalist born in 1980, he doesn’t have much nostalgia for the Soviet Union, though he has spent considerable time talking to people who do. The chapter about Lenin is mostly narrated by a Moscow tour guide who speaks wistfully of what might have happened if Lenin’s “dreams had come true.”

more here.

Enigmas

You asked me what the lobster is weaving there with his
…. golden feet?
I reply, the ocean knows this.
You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent bell?
…. What is it waiting for?
I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.
You ask me whom the Macrocystis hugs in its arms?
Study, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.
You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal, and I
…. reply by describing
how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.
You inquire about the kingfisher’s feathers,
which tremble in the pure springs of the southern tide?
Or you’ve found in the cards a new question touching on the
…. crystal architecture
of the sea anemone, and you’ll deal that to me now?
You want to understand the electric Nature of the ocean spines?
…. The armored stalactite that breaks as it walks?
…. The hook of the angler fish, the music stretched out in the
…. deep places like a thread in the water?

I want to tell you the ocean knows this, that life in its
…. jewel boxes
is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure,
and among the blood-colored grapes time has made the petal
hard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of light
and untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall
from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.

Read more »

Pia Malaney over at INET:

In markets hungry for the next big breakthrough the latest generation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies has emerged as a potentially revolutionary force, offering a wide array of transformative benefits to humanity. With capabilities in processing data, making predictions, and automating tasks that would once have seemed like science fiction, AI is already altering the ways we live, work, and interact.

What does it mean for a doctor in an underserved area with limited resources to have access to AI systems that facilitate diagnoses based on symptoms and streamline care recommendations? For surgeons to have AI analyze a brain tumor in real-time so that they can decide how much to remove? Big data is already playing a significant role in drug discovery and development; researchers in many areas of academia, including economics, find analysis simplified and expedited.

There is increasing evidence that we are already seeing transformative changes in industries ranging from healthcare to finance. As AI can personalize cancer treatments, identify and diagnose tumors mid-surgery, and rapidly increase the discovery of new molecules that form the basis of drug discovery, its lifesaving impacts are already being felt. In financial markets, it is being used to drive data analytics, data retrieval, predictions, and forecasting. Innovation, often spearheaded by AI and machine learning, has given rise to new products, services, and business models. In education, the possibility of tailoring a curriculum to the needs and pace of each individual student could perhaps transform learning.

Even areas most associated with human creativity are tapping into the productivity benefits of AI.

More here.

Fred Block in Dissent:

In 1980, Margaret Thatcher made her fateful statement that “there is no alternative” to the free market economics that she claimed would revitalize the UK economy. While her policies did not produce the promised results, it remains true that in most places, advocates of more egalitarian and inclusive public policies have been unable to win national office for more than a single consecutive election cycle. Despite frequent claims of its imminent demise, neoliberalism still exerts considerable power in the global economy.

Why is it that efforts to generate broad, durable majority support for egalitarian economic policies have so far failed? Part of the explanation is that advocates of alternative economic policies have continued to operate within the confines of existing economic theories. For the most part, the core analytic framework for economists on the left has not really changed since the 1930s and ’40s.

This is a problem because the economy has changed radically. We need a new paradigm to make sense of our current economy—and to offer a persuasive policy agenda that gives those at the local level the resources and mechanisms they need to shape what they consume and produce.

More here.

Edd Gent in Singularity Hub:

Our ability to manipulate the genes of living organisms has expanded dramatically in recent years. Now, researchers are a step closer to building genomes from scratch after unveiling a strain of yeast with more than 50 percent synthetic DNA.

Since 2006, an international consortium of researchers called the Synthetic Yeast Genome Project has been attempting to rewrite the entire genome of brewer’s yeast. The organism is an attractive target because it’s a eukaryote like us, and it’s also widely used in the biotechnology industry to produce biofuels, pharmaceuticals, and other high-value chemicals.

While researchers have previously rewritten the genomes of viruses and bacteria, yeast is more challenging because its DNA is split across 16 chromosomes. To speed up progress, the research groups involved each focused on rewriting a different chromosome, before trying to combine them. The team has now successfully synthesized new versions of all 16 chromosomes and created an entirely novel chromosome. In a series of papers in Cell and Cell Genomics, the team also reports the successful combination of seven of these synthetic chromosomes, plus a fragment of another, in a single cell. Altogether, they account for more than 50 percent of the cell’s DNA.

More here.

Tim Sahay interviews Guy Laron in Polycrisis:

TIM SAHAY: Bibi Netenyahu is Israel’s longest serving prime minister, surviving many corruption scandals and public protests. In a tweet you said: “the Bibi doctrine has collapsed: it created a Hamas monster, Apartheid in the West Bank, and a hollow state. But he’s not letting go of his efforts to create a personalist dictatorship.” What is the Netanyahu doctrine? What are its bases of domestic support?

GUY LARON: It started in 2009, when Netanyahu came back to power. Nobody then thought that he would be in power this long. The starting point of the Bibi doctrine is neoliberalism. From that you can derive all other aspects of his policy. The doctrine is upheld by his domestic coalition. That is where his foreign policy begins. What he cares about is getting the support of two demographically ascending sectors of Israel’s society: the ultra-Orthodox and the settlers in the West Bank.

The ultra-Orthodox are not that important for his foreign policy, but they are important for his domestic policy. While the rest of society suffers cuts in spending for public health, public education, and public transport, the ultra-Orthodox are exempt from cuts.

Next is support for settlers in the West Bank. It’s an open secret that there is a welfare state in Israel, which exists only in the West Bank, and only for Jews. Each time Netanyahu wrote new legislation—to make the state smaller, the budget smaller, the taxes lighter—parties representing the ultra-Orthodox and the settlers supported him. In everything he does, then, Netanyahu needs to show settlers in the West Bank that he is meeting their needs.

This is where Hamas comes in.

More here.

Jamie Ducharme in Time Magazine:

It’s unusual for a medication to become a household name; even more uncommon for its branding to become, like Advil, shorthand for an entire class of products; and rarest of all, for it to change not just U.S. medicine, but U.S. culture. Ozempic has done all three.

Approved in 2017 as a type 2 diabetes medication, Ozempic has largely made its name—and a fortune for its manufacturer, Novo Nordisk—as a weight-loss aid. Novo Nordisk knew early on that diabetes patients often lost weight on the drug, but even company executives couldn’t have guessed how widely it would eventually take off as both an off-label anti-obesity treatment and a vanity-driven status symbol for those simply looking to shed a few pounds. Its runaway success mirrors that of similar medications, including Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro and Wegovy, another Novo Nordisk product and the only one in the trio technically approved for weight loss. Prescriptions for all of them are flying off the pad at an eye-popping rate. Novo Nordisk sold around $14 billion of its various diabetes and obesity drugs in the first half of 2023, and Eli Lilly sold almost $1 billion worth of Mounjaro in a single quarter this year.

More here.

Justin Smith-Ruiu in his Substack Newsletter:

We are coming up the seventh anniversary of my grandfather-in-law’s death. Traditionally, in the Orthodox church, this occasion would be marked by a ritual that involves digging up the bones of the deceased, washing them white and clean, and then reburying them forever. In the period prior to that significant anniversary, there is ongoing exchange, both ritual and spontaneous, with the dead. Whenever food or drink is accidentally spilled from the table, it is said to be shared with the dead. The candles lit for the dead outside of churches are another effective way of initiating exchange. Food, fire, and prayer continue to pass across the boundary that death has made impermeable to ordinary speech and action.

It was only when my father died in 2016 that this deep truth of human existence hit me: there are two basic categories of people, the living and the dead, and the members of both categories are equally people. Some people are dead people, in other words.

More here.

Viren Jain in Nature:

Can a computer be programmed to simulate a brain? It’s a question mathematicians, theoreticians and experimentalists have long been asking — whether spurred by a desire to create artificial intelligence (AI) or by the idea that a complex system such as the brain can be understood only when mathematics or a computer can reproduce its behaviour. To try to answer it, investigators have been developing simplified models of brain neural networks since the 1940s¹. In fact, today’s explosion in machine learning can be traced back to early work inspired by biological systems.

However, the fruits of these efforts are now enabling investigators to ask a slightly different question: could machine learning be used to build computational models that simulate the activity of brains?

More here.