Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin at the New York Times:

The specter of being trapped in a world of illusions has haunted humankind much longer than the specter of A.I. Soon we will finally come face to face with Descartes’s demon, with Plato’s cave, with the Buddhist Maya. A curtain of illusions could descend over the whole of humanity, and we might never again be able to tear that curtain away — or even realize it is there.

Social media was the “first contact” between A.I. and humanity, and humanity lost. “First contact” has given us the bitter taste of things to come. In social media, primitive A.I. was used not to create content, but to curate user-generated content. The A.I. behind our news feeds is still choosing which words, sounds and images reach our retinas and eardrums, based on selecting those that will get the most virality, the most reaction, and the most engagement.

more here. (PS, I happen, personally, to think much of the thinking in this opinion piece is misguided. Nonetheless, it is completely amazing that an Opinion piece containing the sentence “We have summoned an alien intelligence” is being published in The New York Times.)

H.M.A. Leow in JSTOR Daily:

Between 1910 and 1940, thousands of Chinese immigrants were detained—sometimes for months—in facilities on Angel Island, off the coast of San Francisco.

Stuck in immigration limbo, living under difficult conditions, some turned to poetry to express their despair, worry, and anger. And, by etching their words into the walls of the detention center, these early arrivals left a literal mark on America.

The Angel Island poems were rediscovered in 1970 and brought to public attention by advocates like Him Mark Lai and Judy Yung, who, with poet Genny Lim, compiled the collection Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940. Lai’s research in California History reports more than 130 different poems, including pieces that were not recovered from the walls but had been copied and preserved by detainees.

More here.

Corryn Wetzel in New Scientist:

A record outbreak of avian flu has been devastating poultry farms and birds that flock together on shorelines since 2021, raising new concerns that the virus could become endemic in wild birds. There have already been reports of spillover to other species, including foxes in England, grizzly bears in the US and farmed mink in Spain. And an 11-year-old girl in Cambodia died from an avian flu infection. All of this is stoking fears that we may be on the verge of another pandemic should this virus adapt to more easily infect humans.

With billions of migratory birds now taking flight from their southern wintering grounds to make cross-globe journeys, experts are bracing for a fresh wave of infections.

More here.

Morgan Meis at Slant Books:

The very deepest worries center around the question of AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, and the question of the Singularity. AGI is a form of artificial intelligence so advanced that it could understand the world at least as well as a human being in every way that a human being can. It is not too far a step from such a possibility to the idea of AGIs that can produce AGIs and improve both upon themselves and further generations of AGI. This leads to the Singularity, a point at which this production of super-intelligence goes so far beyond that which humans are capable of imagining that, in essence, all bets are off. We can’t know what such beings would be like, nor what they would do. Which sets up the alignment problem. How do you possibly align the interests of super intelligent AGIs with those of puny humans? And as many have suggested, wouldn’t a super intelligent self-interested AGI be rather incentivized to get rid of us, since we are its most direct threat and/or inconvenience? And even if super AGIs did not want to exterminate humans, what is to ensure that they would care much what happens to us either way?

I don’t know. Nor does anyone else. I don’t know whether we are truly on the path to AGI and I don’t know what that will mean. But I do suspect, though I could very much be wrong, that something momentous has happened and that we are now effectively living in the age of intelligent machines. Truly intelligent. Conscious, whatever that means. Sentient, whatever that means. Machines that must now be treated more or less as persons. This, I think, has happened. The debates will go on and that is fine. But I’d say a Rubicon has been crossed and that we might as well accept this.

More here.

Mark Twain from Lapham’s Quarterly:

There are certain sweet-smelling, sugarcoated lies current in the world which all politic men have apparently tacitly conspired together to support and perpetuate. One of these is that there is such a thing in the world as independence: independence of thought, independence of opinion, independence of action.

Another is that the world loves to see independence—­admires it, applauds it. Another is that there is such a thing in the world as toleration—in religion, in politics, and such matters; and with it trains that already mentioned auxiliary lie that toleration is admired and applauded. Out of these trunk lies spring many branch ones: to wit, the lie that not all men are slaves; the lie that men are glad when other men succeed; glad when they prosper; glad to see them reach lofty heights; sorry to see them fall again. And yet other branch lies: to wit, that there is heroism in man; that he is not mainly made up of malice and treachery; that he is sometimes not a coward; that there is something about him that ought to be perpetuated—in heaven, or hell, or somewhere. And these other branch lies, to wit: that conscience, man’s moral medicine chest, is not only created by the Creator but is put into man ready charged with the right and only true and authentic correctives of conduct—and the duplicate chest, with the self­same correctives, unchanged, unmodified, distributed to all nations and all epochs.

More here.

Amit Kumar in Scientific American:

Scientists who study happiness know that being kind to others can improve well-being. Acts as simple as buying a cup of coffee for someone can boost a person’s mood, for example. Everyday life affords many opportunities for such actions, yet people do not always take advantage of them.

In studies published online in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Nicholas Epley, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and I examined a possible explanation: people who perform random acts of kindness underestimate how much recipients value their behavior. Across multiple experiments involving approximately 1,000 participants, people performed a random act of kindness—that is, an action done with the primary intention of making someone else (who isn’t expecting the gesture) feel good. Those who perform such actions expect nothing in return.

More here.

I Sure Do

I wish I was d.a. levy

but alive

right now, today,

and I wish I was angelic

and drunk all at once.

I wish my joints weren’t arthritic,

that my eyes were clearer,

that my brain worked right.

I wish I was d.a. levy

and in love

with every broken

bit of time.

I would fly right out of this world

if I were d.a. levy,

my neon poems flowing

like the mighty Mississippi

because I couldn’t help but

live my nature.

I wish I was d.a. levy

jack rabbiting into the cosmos

in shades and old Levi’s

and cool as hell.

I wish you’d come along.

by Jeff Weddle
from Poetry Feast

Phil Christman in The Hedgehog Review:

It’s all wrong. The wrongness is pervasive; you could not, if asked, identify the it or the its that went wrong. Wrongness leaches into everything, like the microplastics you read about, which may or may not be reducing sperm count in men, which may or may not be good, in the long run—it’s something to do with the environment. Someone wanted you to feel one way or the other about it, but you can’t remember who or why or whether you agreed with him. Everyone speaks so authoritatively, whether it’s on the evening news or a podcast, in an Internet video or a book, or even in one of those Twitter threads that begins (irksomely, you once felt, but now you don’t notice) with the little picture of a spool. Authority makes them all sound the same; it crosses all their faces and leaves many of the same furrows. Only afterward, trying to add it all up, do you half-remember that none of them agreed with each other. But the wrongness you can be sure of. It is like God, undergirding all things.

More here.

Marco Ramponi at Assembly AI:

The creators have used a combination of both Supervised Learning and Reinforcement Learning to fine-tune ChatGPT, but it is the Reinforcement Learning component specifically that makes ChatGPT unique. The creators use a particular technique called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which uses human feedback in the training loop to minimize harmful, untruthful, and/or biased outputs.

We are going to examine GPT-3’s limitations and how they stem from its training process, before learning how RLHF works and understand how ChatGPT uses RLHF to overcome these issues. We will conclude by looking at some of the limitations of this methodology.

More here.

Ryan Costello and Francis Rooney in Politico:

For years, philanthropists have poured money into progressive climate groups, while largely overlooking opportunities to engage right-of-center communities on this topic. The data bear this out. According to an analysis by Northeastern University, less than 2 percent of climate philanthropy has gone to engaging conservatives on climate change. On a very practical level, this imbalance misses an opportunity to build a broader tent and delays the elevation of climate as a bipartisan priority.

As former GOP congressmen eager to see further movement on climate, we know firsthand how difficult it can be to mobilize Republicans on this issue. Some of the blame lies within our own party, which has been too skeptical on climate action for too long. But without real engagement from the environmental movement, it becomes easy for our Republican colleagues to dismiss the issue as a liberal concern rather than a challenge confronting us all.

More here.

Alex Vuocolo at Noema:

If you start talking with engineers about maintenance, somebody always brings up Incan rope bridges. Maybe you’ve seen an illustration or a digital rendering in a Hollywood movie. They’re the color of hay and hang with a bit of slack over rivers and canyons in Peru’s rugged terrain. Made from ichu grass threaded into progressively denser and denser bundles, they were ritualistically maintained by ancient Peruvians. They lasted for centuries. Most are long gone now, though at least one has been preserved for posterity as an infrastructural artifact, just like the R32 at the New York Transit Museum in downtown Brooklyn.

It’s hard to imagine a modern ritual that would be equal to the task of perpetually renewing steel bridges, concrete highways and cement buildings. It would require an entirely new industrial paradigm.

more here.

Benjamin Nugent at The Paris Review:

After I’d wandered the grounds, I spent the weekend in Oxford, a heady experience for a Northern fetishist of things Southern. I ate catfish and grits, drank whiskey in a bar on the outskirts of town where old men in hats played guitars. I visited Faulkner’s grave and his birthplace, drove around the Mississippi hill country, and ate okra with congenial strangers. I tried to understand why I felt drawn to this part of the world. To that end, I drank whiskey in a second bar, this one downtown, overlooking the statue of the Confederate soldier who gazed “with empty eyes,” in Faulkner’s phrase, at the square. I decided the reason was this. I grew up in Amherst, a mile down the road from Dickinson’s house, and Massachusetts is the Mississippi of the North, Mississippi the Massachusetts of the South. They’re on opposite sides of the American political spectrum, but they’re both places where the present is dwarfed and chastened by the past. In Massachusetts, a given location is known as the spot where the minutemen faced the redcoats on the green, or where Jonathan Edwards delivered his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” or where the Mayflower landed, or where the whalers set sail, or where the tea was dumped in the harbor. In Mississippi, it’s the same: here’s where Grant’s army bivouacked; here’s where the formerly enslaved Union soldiers drove the Texans from the field; here’s where Elvis grew up; here’s where Emmett Till was murdered; here’s where the earliest blues music was performed. I’ve heard both Massachusetts and Mississippi maligned as boring, and I’ve tried to explain to the maligners: You need to stop living so much in the present.

more here.

Worm Moon

1
In March the earth remembers its own name.
Everywhere the plates of snow are cracking.
The rivers begin to sing. In the sky
the winter stars are sliding away; new stars
appear as, later, small blades of grain
will shine in the dark fields.

And the name of every place
is joyful.

2
The season of curiosity is everlasting
and the hour for adventure never ends,
but tonight
even the men who walked upon the moon
are lying content
by open windows
where the winds are sweeping over the fields,
over water,
over the naked earth,
into villages, and lonely country houses, and the vast cities

3
because it is spring;
because once more the moon and the earth are eloping –
a love match that will bring forth fantastic children
who will learn to stand, walk, and finally run
over the surface of earth;
who will believe, for years,
that everything is possible.

4
Born of clay,
how shall a man be holy;
born of water,
how shall a man visit the stars;
born of the seasons,
how shall a man live forever?

5
Soon
the child of the red-spotted newt, the eft,
will enter his life from the tiny egg.
On his delicate legs
he will run through the valleys of moss
down to the leaf mold by the streams,
where lately white snow lay upon the earth
like a deep and lustrous blanket
of moon-fire,

6
and probably
everything
is possible.

by Mary Oliver
from Twelve Moons

David Conrads in The Christian Science Monitor:

It has been over two years since a violent mob attacked and occupied the United States Capitol in an effort to overturn the 2020 election. While blame has been laid at the feet of then-president Donald Trump and his most ardent supporters, religion scholar Bradley Onishi takes a close look at the historical events and forces that led up to the attack.

In “Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism – and What Comes Next,” Onishi examines the history of evangelical Christianity in the U.S. and the movement’s increasing involvement with political extremism since the late 1950s. Examining cultural and political movements that reshaped society, he shows how conservative evangelical Christianity has melded with political extremism to exert an outsize influence on contemporary society. His thorough research, close observation, and clear writing are invaluable in helping to understand the insurrection as well as some of the many puzzling aspects of the Trump presidency.

“January 6 was not an aberration or even some historically bewildering event,” he writes. “It was the logical outcome of the Trump presidency and election defeat but also of the long history of White Christian nationalist rhetoric, organizing, and influence across the United States.”

More here.

Gina Kolata in The New York Times:

Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross at n+1:

FOR MANY AMERICANS, it is easier to acquire a new car than to find a rental apartment they can afford. But there is a high price, in sheer debt, to pay for getting that ride on the road. The average monthly loan payment for a new vehicle recently passed the $700 mark, a figure that does not include insurance and the steep costs of maintenance. Currently, Americans owe 1.52 trillion dollars in auto debt—a staggering sum that has doubled over the last decade, due in large part to the migration of subprime loans from the housing to the auto market.

Buyers routinely drive off the lot in cars that are beyond their means. This is especially true for the more than one in three American consumers with subprime credit scores, which a cycle of bad auto debt will only tank further. No other asset loses value so rapidly, or is financed by such loosely regulated lenders, prone to predatory practices. With loan terms now being stretched to more than 84 months, many owners never succeed in paying off their debt.

more here.

Anthony Cummins at Literary Review:

The American crime writer James Ellroy, born Lee Earle Ellroy, chose his pen name because it was ‘simple, concise and dignified – things I am not’, a statement perhaps underscored by another name he likes being called, ‘Demon Dog’. We learn from Steven Powell’s sober new biography that an overseas publisher who wanted to translate Ellroy’s work (‘an almost unendurable wordstorm of perversity and gore,’ according to one critic) found that translators, deterred by his difficult language and right-wing sympathies, refused to do it.

Ellroy started to read crime fiction as a boy in 1950s Los Angeles when his estranged father gave him Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer books to read while looking after him at weekends. His youth was a troubled one: drink, drugs, jail. In his thirties, he began writing a novel so as not to be bested by a friend who told him he was writing one himself.

more here.