Hal Hodson in 1843 Magazine:

One afternoon in August 2010, in a conference hall perched on the edge of San Francisco Bay, a 34-year-old Londoner called Demis Hassabis took to the stage. Walking to the podium with the deliberate gait of a man trying to control his nerves, he pursed his lips into a brief smile and began to speak: “So today I’m going to be talking about different approaches to building…” He stalled, as though just realising that he was stating his momentous ambition out loud. And then he said it: “AGI”. AGI stands for artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical computer program that can perform intellectual tasks as well as, or better than, a human. AGI will be able to complete discrete tasks, such as recognising photos or translating languages, which are the single-minded focus of the multitude of artificial intelligences (AIs) that inhabit our phones and computers. But it will also add, subtract, play chess and speak French. It will also understand physics papers, compose novels, devise investment strategies and make delightful conversation with strangers. It will monitor nuclear reactions, manage electricity grids and traffic flow, and effortlessly succeed at everything else. AGI will make today’s most advanced AIs look like pocket calculators.

The only intelligence that can currently attempt all these tasks is the kind that humans are endowed with. But human intelligence is limited by the size of the skull that houses the brain. Its power is restricted by the puny amount of energy that the body is able to provide. Because AGI will run on computers, it will suffer none of these constraints. Its intelligence will be limited only by the number of processors available. AGI may start by monitoring nuclear reactions. But soon enough it will discover new sources of energy by digesting more physics papers in a second than a human could in a thousand lifetimes. Human-level intelligence, coupled with the speed and scalability of computers, will make problems that currently appear insoluble disappear. Hassabis told the Observer, a British newspaper, that he expected AGI to master, among other disciplines, “cancer, climate change, energy, genomics, macro-economics [and] financial systems”.

More here.

Geoffrey Wildanger in the Boston Review:

The essence of Arendt’s disagreement with Marx is the importance she places on the question of political rights above social ones. She develops this priority most extensively in On Revolution (1963). Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, her biographer, cites a review by Michael Harrington, who would go on to found the Democratic Socialists of America, as representative of the Marxist reception. Though he accepts the arguments of the latter half of the book, with its praise of Rosa Luxemburg’s “council communism,” Harrington rejects the argument upon which Arendt’s praise rests: the priority of political rights over social amelioration. In our post-Occupy era, the starkness of Arendt’s dichotomy may strike us as exaggerated, yet she stuck to it. Late in life, when her friend Mary McCarthy asked her why certain social matters could not simply be defined as rights (health care, say), she dodged the question. For Arendt, the fundamental distinction is between the private and the public spheres. Attempting to politicize the private, she believes, will more likely subjugate politics to economics than vice versa.

As in her conversation, Arendt’s writing on social concerns is often characterized by defensiveness, yet she does criticize capitalism. This volume is a boon to those interested in her idiosyncratic thought on economic matters, in particular her distance from both socialist and free market thinkers. According to his dialectical model of history, Marx thought capitalism would create its own gravediggers. Arendt doubts any such tendency to self-destruction, and thus she finds nothing dialectically redeemable about the violence of the marketplace. While a free market would totally colonize the space of political action, Arendt also argues that total expropriation is “hell.”

More here.

James Meadway in Novara Media:

New research from US business think tank Conference Board shows that the rush into the digital economy is doing nothing for capitalism’s global woes.

Far from spurring the system to greater and greater heights, digital technology seems to be having no impact on the growth in productivity that is crucial to the system’s long-term future. Measured as output per worker, global productivity has risen just 2% a year in the past few years, compared to 2.9% a year in the decade before the 2008 crash. Strikingly, Conference Board reckons almost none of this productivity growth has emerged because new technology has made work more efficient. And with sick man of Europe Britain leading the way, the productivity slowdown here has been worst out of all the so-called ‘advanced economies’.

One traditional culprit for low productivity is low investment, which continues to falter. Business investment in Britain has been falling for some time, but this is about more than just the uncertainty induced by the government’s Brexit failures, since investment is also weak across the advanced economies, including the US and Germany.

As discussed in my previous column, in the place of investment, companies (especially large companies) are hoarding cash at record levels, with British companies holding nearly £700bn unused in their bank accounts, and paying out record amounts to shareholders, often using share buybacks. IMF figures show US corporations making payouts worth 0.9% of their assets to shareholders last year, but making investments worth just 0.7%. At the same time, financial chicanery has become routine for non-financial corporations, with the growth in the use of dubious debt instruments like collateralised loan obligations piggybacking the wider expansion of corporate debt.

More here.

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman in The National Interest:

THREE DECADES ago, a German history professor listed 210 proposed explanations for the fall of the Roman Empire. The remarkable array included such fanciful causes as Bolshevism, public baths, hedonism, the pressure of terrorism and, most famously, lead poisoning.

The last explanation has been discredited. It is highly unlikely that lead water pipes caused the empire to collapse in a tumult of brain damage, gout and madness. Yet exploded theories can point towards important truths. Like classical Rome, America’s empire today depends less on pomp than on plumbing. Instead of roads, aqueducts and seaports, it relies on pipelines conveying financial flows and torrents of data, as well as vast distributed supply chains. These look like a global public infrastructure, but can readily be redirected to private national strategic advantage. America’s domination of obscure, seeming technical structures is generating its own forms of hubristic folly among imperial administrators, who have begun to think that there is nothing they cannot do with it.

Far beneath the boastful speeches, petty insults and spiteful feuds; the fights over NATO and Russian influence operations; the subterranean conduits of empire are failing. If America’s empire is indeed headed towards expiry, many future historians will blame the obvious problems: the rise of China, overextension in the Middle East, the defection of allies. Yet some might trace the beginnings of decay back to two more quotidian crises: America’s botched decision to sanction the Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE Corporation, and Europe’s creation of an apparently innocuous technical arrangement—the “Special Purpose Vehicle”—purportedly to facilitate humanitarian exchange with Iran.

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Francisco Goldman in the NYT:

It is the late 1970s and Carolyn Forché is a 27-year-old poet with one published book of poetry, teaching at a university in Southern California. One day Leonel Gómez Vides, 37, arrives at her door with his two young daughters, claiming that he’s driven all the way from El Salvador just to talk to her. Forché has never met Gómez, though he’s a cousin of Claribel Alegría, whose poetry Forché, despite her rudimentary Spanish, wants to translate, and whose home in Mallorca she has visited. (Alegría’s daughter is a close friend.) There she heard Gómez warily described as a man involved in dangerous things, possibly even working with the C.I.A.

Gómez’s plan is to spend just a few days in California, and then drive home. It’s unclear to Forché why he’s come. He gives her a crash course on Salvadoran history from the pre-Columbian era to the present, when the tiny country, marked by staggering economic inequality, is ruled by a corrupt military that steals millions of dollars every year in United States aid, murders priests and political opponents, and tosses disappeared torture victims, including an American, from helicopters into the Pacific. It’s a country also increasingly terrorized by the right-wing death squads of Mano Blanco, the White Hand.

Looking back on Gómez’s visit in “What You Have Heard Is True,” a memoir of the consequences of that encounter, Forché reflects that he was translating “not only between languages, but also from one constellation of understanding and perception to another.”

More here.

Nathan Robinson in Current Affairs:

Tonight, “philosopher” Slavoj Žižek will debate “psychologist” Jordan Peterson in Toronto, ostensibly on the subject of Capitalism vs. Marxism. It has been said of the debate that “nothing is a greater waste of time.” Tickets to the livestream are $14.95, and admission to the venue itself was running as high as $1,500. By popular demand, our editor has been instructed to stare into the abyss and report on what he sees. Those grateful for his sacrifice should consider purchasing a subscription or making a donation as a means of supporting his recovery expenses, which are sure to be considerable. …

8:27 P.M. — Now a recitation of the familiar pro-capitalist arguments: poor people today have iPhones, poverty is going away, etc. He cites the familiar statistic that there are many fewer people living on extremely small amounts of money. This the usual dodge: the question has always been “Why is there so much deprivation that could be alleviated and is not being?” not “Is there less deprivation?” If you adopt the “Have things gotten better?” approach, as Peterson and Steven Pinker do, then you could make the same argument in 1900: oh look, we’re better off than the Middle Ages, therefore things must be great and nobody has any legitimate objections.

8:30 P.M. — Zizek begins by whining about how he has been marginalized by the academy and says he is disowned by the left. Inexplicable. And annoying. Pity poor Zizek.

8:31 P.M. — Zizek correctly begins with China: if capitalism is the force lifting people out of poverty, then why did the greatest reduction of poverty occur in an authoritarian state that intervenes extensively in its market? But he then raises the question that the debate is ostensibly about: what is happiness? Peterson didn’t really talk about this. He just talked about why Marx was wrong about things. I don’t even think happiness came up.

8:34 P.M. — I turned away for a minute and now I have no idea what Zizek is talking about. “Trump is the ultimate postmodern president.” I don’t know where happiness went. Zizek was doing so well at staying on topic… for about ten seconds.

More here.

Alex Preston at The Guardian:

The American novelist John Barth claimed that rather than the traditional “what happened next?”, the real question that every reader is asking him or herself as they read is “the essential question of identity – the personal, professional, cultural, even species-specific ‘Who Am I?’” Stories are ordering, sense-making machines, helping our brains to render the frantic incoherence of chaotic existence into comprehensible narratives. These narratives, as Peter Brooks showed in his classic critical work Reading for the Plot, “follow the internal logic of the discourse of mortality” – stories have beginnings, middles and ends because our lives do. Every time we read a novel, we’re giving ourselves a new way of thinking about the shape and structure of our own lives. And even in the age of AI, the novel remains our most subtle and sophisticated piece of technology when it comes to answering these deep, existential questions.

more here.

Kate Stanley at the LARB:

CAN POEMS TEACH US how to live? What does it mean to approach poetry as a source of self-help? It’s not hard to call to mind examples of poetry that rouse or soothe or refocus a reader, lifting or quieting the mind like a deep breath. Yet much of the poetry encountered in literature classrooms and canonical anthologies may not readily reflect the self that is reading it, and therefore may not readily become a tool of self-improvement. The work of many modernist poets in particular is placed under the banner of “art for art’s sake,” a motto meant to explicitly free such poetry from the responsibility of serving a didactic or utilitarian function. The poems of Wallace Stevens, for instance, are frequently taken to epitomize the kind of high modernist difficulty that in its slippery symbology and ambiguous affect would seemingly resist being reliably employed for any useful purpose.

more here.

Michael Griffin at Literary Review:

Who are the real Kazakhs? Even by the end of Joanna Lillis’s wide-ranging survey of Central Asia’s wealthiest dictatorship, it’s hard to tell. The livestock-breeding culture of the Kazakh Khanate, a successor to the Mongol Golden Horde, was driven into the ground after its annexation by Russia in the mid-19th century as a result of successive waves of immigration and the Soviet policy of bringing its sprawling herds under state control.

Among the first to arrive, following the abolition of serfdom in 1861, were 400,000 Russian peasants. They were followed by nearly two and a half million farmers from Ukraine and central Russia and then a tragic procession of Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Germans, Turks and Poles, forcibly relocated for suspected disloyalty to Stalin. An 85-year-old Tatar, originally from Crimea, recalled, ‘My mother ran up to me and said: “You may be taken to dark places.” … So she gave me two light bulbs.’ 

more here.

Tim Adams in The Guardian:

There is a scene toward the end of Ian McEwan’s new novel, Machines Like Me, when the narrator, Charlie, is pushing his lifelike prototype robot, Adam, in a wheelchair through a demonstration in Trafalgar Square. The demonstrators are protesting about everything under the sun – “poverty, unemployment, housing, healthcare, education, crime, race, gender, climate, opportunity”. The suggestion being presented by McEwan and his narrator, however, is that here, unnoticed in their midst, is the one thing they should be most concerned about: a man-made intelligence greater than their own. There is a Cassandra tendency in McEwan’s fiction. His domestic dramas routinely play out against a backdrop of threatened doom. Since the portent-laden meditation on war and terrorism, Saturday, in 2005, he has also turned his gimlet attention to climate change in Solar. The opening lines of that novel – “He was running out of time. Everyone was, it was the general condition…” – have sometimes sounded like his fiction’s statement of intent. The New Yorker called his work “the art of unease”.

It was perhaps, I suggested to him one afternoon a couple of weeks ago, therefore only a matter of time before he got around to the looming ethical anxieties of artificial intelligence. McEwan smiled at this idea and explained that he had been enthralled by the possibility of man-made consciousness for just about as long as he could remember.

More here.

Rebecca Renner in Literary Hub:

In 1956, Sergio D’Angelo made a journey by train from Moscow southwest to the Soviet-made writers’ colony Peredelkino. He was there to meet the rock-star famous writer Boris Pasternak, whose poetry was so beloved that, if he paused during a reading, audiences would shout the missing words. But Pasternak’s original work hadn’t seen daylight in years; the Soviet government didn’t possess quite the same warm feeling toward Pasternak as his fans, doubting his loyalty to the Communist Party, which controlled the publishing industry. He’d been translating classic works of literature, such as Shakespeare’s plays, into Russian instead since the 1940s.

D’Angelo hadn’t ventured from the city to pay homage, though—he had a proposition for Pasternak. When he arrived at Pasternak’s dacha, a brown two-story house nestled among green birches and fir trees, D’Angelo found Pasternak waiting for him at the garden gate. Pasternak was 66 years old but still spry. He was dressed comfortably to work in his garden, including a pair of Wellington boots. From Pasternak’s bright smile and enthusiastic handshake, D’Angelo could see it was a joy for him to receive visitors, especially ones from outside the Soviet Union who brought news of the world.

More here.

From the New York Times:

In just over an hour, a fire spread through the wooden attic of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris and toppled its 300-foot spire on Monday.

Around 6:30 p.m., Paris time, smoke began to pour out of the cathedral’s roof, near scaffolding that had been put up over the last few months to conduct renovations on the spire.

The fire started in the cathedral’s attic, said Jean-Claude Gallet, commander of the Paris firefighters.

The attic is an oddly shaped space, seldom visited, that lies above the soaring stone arches visible from the floor of old European cathedrals. Diagrams of Notre-Dame and official descriptions of the space indicate that it is crisscrossed by giant, timber trusses that add structural integrity to the cathedral.

More here.

Mary Soon Lee in Science:

A review of the Periodic Table composed of 119 science haiku, one for each element, plus a closing haiku for element 119 (not yet synthesized). The haiku encompass astronomy, biology, chemistry, history, physics, and a bit of whimsical flair. Click or hover over an element on the Periodic Table to read the haiku.

Click here to try it.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books:

Israel’s legislative elections on 9 April were a tribute to Binyamin Netanyahu’s transformation of the political landscape. At no point were they discussed in terms of which candidates might be persuaded by (non-existent) American pressure, or the ‘international community’, to end the occupation. This time it was a question of which party leader could be trusted by Israeli Jews – Palestinian citizens of Israel are now officially second-class – to manage the occupation, and to expedite the various tasks that the Jewish state has mastered: killing Gazans, bulldozing homes, combatting the scourge of BDS, and conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. With his promise to annex the West Bank, Netanyahu had won even before the election was held. It wasn’t simply Trump’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights that sped the incumbent on his way; it was the nature of the conversation – and the fact that the leader of the opposition was Benny Gantz, the IDF commander who presided over the 2014 ‘Operation Protection Edge’, in which more than 2000 Gazans were killed.

Illusions about the ‘peace process’ – and Israel’s ‘search for peace’ – die hard. The hopes invested in ‘peace’ were once immense, but it has never looked so shaky, even in America, which has underwritten these fictions for decades and rewarded Israel handsomely for paying lip service to them. American liberals no longer lament the fact that Netanyahu has taken Israel off its preordained, conciliatory course, and hope that ‘the left’ might steer it back. There is no left in Israel aside from a few heroic groupuscules. Netanyahu’s Israel – illiberal, exclusionary, racist – is now the political centre.

More here.

Mike Spies in The New Yorker:

This winter, members of the National Rifle Association—elk hunters in Montana, skeet shooters in upstate New York, concealed-carry enthusiasts in Jacksonville—might have noticed a desperate tone in the organization’s fund-raising efforts. In a letter from early March, Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A.’s top executive, warned that liberal regulators were threatening to destroy the organization. “We’re facing an attack that’s unprecedented not just in the history of the N.R.A. but in the entire history of our country,” he wrote. “The Second Amendment cannot survive without the N.R.A., and the N.R.A. cannot survive without your help right now.”

LaPierre is right that the N.R.A. is troubled; in recent years, it has run annual deficits of as much as forty million dollars. It is not unusual for nonprofits to ask prospective donors to help forestall disaster. What is unusual is the extent to which such warnings have become the central activity of the N.R.A. Even as the association has reduced spending on its avowed core mission—gun education, safety, and training—to less than ten per cent of its total budget, it has substantially increased its spending on messaging. The N.R.A. is now mainly a media company, promoting a life style built around loving guns and hating anyone who might take them away.

On NRATV, the organization’s programming network, the popular host Grant Stinchfield might appear in a “Socialist Tears” T-shirt, taking a sledgehammer to a television set cycling through liberal news shows. The platform’s Twitter account circulates videos of the spokesperson Dana Loesch, a former Breitbart News editor who has said that mainstream journalists are “the rat bastards of the earth” and deserve to be “curb-stomped.” Over menacing images of masked rioters, she asserts that the only way to stop the left is to “fight its violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.” A lawyer and activist called Colion Noir, whose real name is Collins Idehen, Jr., also has a large following. After the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, Noir appeared in a video chiding “all the kids from Parkland getting ready to use your First Amendment to attack everyone else’s Second Amendment.”

More here.

Ziba Kashef in Phys.Org:

The human gut harbors trillions of invisible microbial inhabitants, referred to as the microbiota, that collectively produce thousands of unique small molecules. The sources and biological functions of the vast majority of these molecules are unknown. Yale researchers recently applied a new technology to uncover microbiota-derived chemicals that affect human physiology, revealing a complex network of interactions with potentially broad-reaching impacts on human health.

Led by immunobiologist Noah Palm, the research team used a chemical screening technology, known as PRESTO-Tango, that simultaneously tests thousands of human receptors at once. With it, they identified human gut bacteria that release small molecules that activate a specific group of receptors. Since these receptors regulate a wide range of physiological functions, the authors reasoned that the small-molecule-producing bacteria would also impact various aspects of human biology.

The team cultured and screened over 100 diverse gut bacteria for production of molecules that activated host receptors, and uncovered multiple chemical interactions between microbes and their human hosts.

More here.

Jenny Harrington in Human Parts:

At 3 p.m. on a Monday afternoon, death announced it was coming for him. He was only eight years old; his cancer cells were not responding to treatment anymore. His body’s leukemic blast cell counts were doubling daily. Bone marrow was no longer making red or white blood cells, not even platelets. The marrow was only churning out cancer cells. In a process similar to churning butter, his blood was thickening with homogenous, malicious content: cancer. And like churning butter, it was exhausting work. The battered remnants of his healthy self were beaten down by chemo. And yet, every fiber pressed on.

He was so very tired. You could see it in his eyes. At the same time, you could see his love. His love for life was front and center. His love for sweetness crystalized on his tongue in the taste of sun-soaked strawberries. His love for satisfaction could be heard in the snapping sound of a puzzle piece set in place. His love for the simple, soothing smells of lavender emanating from a medicine ball was cherished, as was the fact that he could still hold a ball in his hands. He loved life down to the core, as only an eight-year-old can, and he was doing everything he could to stay alive.

Death was easy to detect. It was right under our eyes, sending the simplest of signals. No appetite. Breathing strained. Cold hands and feet, meaning compromised blood flow. Ankles swollen. Standing up was becoming nearly impossible. His body was shutting down.

More here.

Joseph Curtin and Max Münchmeyer in Foreign Policy:

Even as international efforts to address climate change have gathered momentum, emissions of heat-trapping gasses have risen, reaching a new peak last year. The next major opportunity to reverse the trend will be the United Nations’ Climate Action Summit in New York this coming September. But a necessary element that could break the deadlock—U.S. leadership—will be absent.

Back in 2016, at the end of U.S. President Barack Obama’s tenure, the United States formally joined the Paris agreement, which he believed was the “most ambitious climate change agreement in history.” By signing on, Obama argued, the United States had become a global leader in the fight against climate change. He was right—at that time, the United States was on track to cut carbon emissions by up to 26 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, in line with the objective it had set under the agreement.

But that moment has passed. In 2018, emissions growth resumed as the Trump administration rolled back the Obama-era environmental protections. This wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened. In fact, the cycle is relatively well established.

More here.