Annette Zimmermann, Elena Di Rosa, and Hochan Kim in the Boston Review:

A great deal of recent public debate about artificial intelligence has been driven by apocalyptic visions of the future. Humanity, we are told, is engaged in an existential struggle against its own creation. Such worries are fueled in large part by tech industry leaders and futurists, who anticipate systems so sophisticated that they can perform general tasks and operate autonomously, without human control. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates have all publicly expressed their concerns about the advent of this kind of “strong” (or “general”) AI—and the associated existential risk that it may pose for humanity. In Hawking’s words, the development of strong AI “could spell the end of the human race.”

These are legitimate long-term worries. But they are not all we have to worry about, and placing them center stage distracts from ethical questions that AI is raising here and now. Some contend that strong AI may be only decades away, but this focus obscures the reality that “weak” (or “narrow”) AI is already reshaping existing social and political institutions. Algorithmic decision making and decision support systems are currently being deployed in many high-stakes domains, from criminal justice, law enforcement, and employment decisions to credit scoring, school assignment mechanisms, health care, and public benefits eligibility assessments. Never mind the far-off specter of doomsday; AI is already here, working behind the scenes of many of our social systems.

More here.

Lorelei Lee in n + 1:

I didn’t know it at the time, but that fall my body was the site of international debate about sex, work, poverty, and consent. In 2000, two pieces of legislation were passed that marked a new era in the criminalization of sex work: the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) and the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children.

Feminists stood on both sides of the debate. Radical feminists and the religious right insisted that “voluntary prostitution” was an oxymoron and fought for both the UN Protocol and the TVPA to legally define all sex trading as nonconsensual sex trafficking. Liberal feminists and human rights organizations pushed to maintain a legal divide between voluntary and involuntary sex work. In the end, the liberal feminists won at the UN, but the TVPA offered a sweeping definition of sex trafficking as “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act.” The definition included both voluntary and involuntary commercial sex, but, as a compromise, only criminalized “severe forms of trafficking in persons.” Severe forms were defined as circumstances in which “force, fraud, or coercion” were used.

More here.

Fritz Stern in Lapham’s Quarterly:

The great French historian and resistance martyr, Marc Bloch, is supposed to have said that history was like a knife: You can cut bread with it, but you could also kill. This is even more true of historical derivatives like analogies; they can provide either illumination or poisonous polemic. The first requirement for an acceptable historical analogy is plausibility; the two situations compared must have striking similarities, and the image of the historic antecedent must be as clearly understood as possible. This becomes an unlikely presupposition when the analogy is proposed by partisans working in an age of stunning historical ignorance. Nowadays, politicians and partisans use analogies instead of arguments, convenient shorthand for their defenses of dubious policies.

It was beneficial that President Kennedy was conscious of historical analogies. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, he remembered how easily nations had slipped into World War I in 1914, and how important it was to give an adversary a chance to back down while saving face.

More here.

Jennifer Egan in The Guardian:

On its surface, The House of Mirth reads like a 19th-century novel. Although the 20th century’s defining technologies had all been invented by the time it was published in 1905, they had yet to substantially alter even the affluent world of the novel’s protagonist, Lily Bart. Cars were exotic playthings; telephones hadn’t supplanted visiting cards; electric light was a harsher alternative to candles. The first world war was inconceivable. And there is, too, a lingering 19th-century feel to Wharton’s disembodied approach to human physicality – especially striking in a novel whose central conundrum is sexual: Lily, a pedigreed virgin without fortune, craves the sensual pleasures of life among the very rich but cannot bring herself to marry a wealthy man, her only means of securing those pleasures for life.

Where The House of Mirth is decidedly 20th century is in its frank depiction of the changing sexual mores around the behaviour of married women. Wives have begun to divorce their husbands. And married women like Lily’s nemesis, Bertha Dorset, can commit serial adultery with impunity so long as their husbands don’t make a fuss. Wharton lays out this rule explicitly: “The code of Lily’s world decreed that a woman’s husband should be the only judge of her conduct; she was technically above suspicion while she had the shelter of his approval, or even of his indifference.”

…Wharton had already written books including a novel set in 18th-century Italy and a volume on interior design when she began drafting a novel set in the rarefied world of moneyed New York. The challenge, she recalls in A Backward Glance, was to find the gravitas in such a world. “The answer was that a frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys. Its tragic implication lies in its power of debasing people and ideals. The answer, in short, was my heroine, Lily Bart.”

More here.

Dyani Lewis in Nature:

Australia is in the grip of its worst wildfire season on record. The human death toll stands at 27, and some 2,000 homes have been destroyed across more than 10 million hectares of land — an area larger than Portugal. An estimated 1 billion wild mammals, birds and reptiles have perished. Michael Clarke, an ecologist at La Trobe University in Bundoora, Melbourne, has been studying the effect of fires on native ecosystems — and how they recover — ever since a fire tore through his field site 15 years ago. Clarke spoke to Nature about how animals fare in the wake of wildfires, and why this season’s fires could prove particularly devastating.

What happens in the aftermath of a wildfire?

It is deathly silent when you go into a forest after a fire. Apart from the ‘undertakers’ — the carrion eaters like currawongs, ravens and shrike-thrushes — picking off the dead bodies, there’s nothing much left in the forest. It’s a chilling experience. For survivors, it’s a perilous existence in the months that follow. Any animal that manages to make it through the fire uninjured faces three major challenges. One is finding shelter from climatic extremes — places they can hide from bad weather, like a hollow tree or a hole in the ground. The second is the risk of starvation. And third, they’ve got to avoid predators like feral cats and foxes. They’re exposed; there’s nowhere to hide in a barren landscape. Even if an animal makes it to an unburnt patch, the density of organisms trying to eke out a living will be way beyond the area’s carrying capacity. After fires in 2003, one unburnt patch I visited in the Mallee [a region in the far north of Victoria] was literally crawling with birds, all chasing one another, trying to work out who owned the last little bit of turf. It was clearly insufficient to sustain them all.

More here.

Wise 1

WHYS (Nobody Knows
The Trouble I Seen)
—Traditional

If you ever find
yourself, some where
lost and surrounded
by enemies
who won’t let you
speak in your own language
who destroy your statues
& instruments, who ban
your omm bomm ba boom
then you are in trouble
deep trouble
they ban your
own boom ba boom
you in deep deep
trouble

humph!

probably take you several hundred years
to get
out!

Amiri Baraka
From Wise, Whys, Y’s
The Norton Anthology

David G. Stork in The MIT Press Reader:

Last month at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art I saw “2001: A Space Odyssey” on the big screen for my 47th time. The fact that this masterpiece remains on nearly every relevant list of “top ten films” and is shown and discussed over a half-century after its 1968 release is a testament to the cultural achievement of its director Stanley Kubrick, writer Arthur C. Clarke, and their team of expert filmmakers.

As with each viewing, I discovered or appreciated new details. But three iconic scenes — HAL’s silent murder of astronaut Frank Poole in the vacuum of outer space, HAL’s silent medical murder of the three hibernating crewmen, and the poignant sorrowful “death” of HAL — prompted deeper reflection, this time about the ethical conundrums of murder by a machine and of a machine. In the past few years experimental autonomous cars have led to the death of pedestrians and passengers alike. AI-powered bots, meanwhile, are infecting networks and influencing national elections. Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Sam Harris, and many other leading AI researchers have sounded the alarm: Unchecked, they say, AI may progress beyond our control and pose significant dangers to society.

And what about the converse: humans “killing” future computers by disconnection?

More here.

John Pavlus in Quanta:

Computers can now drive cars, beat world champions at board games like chess and Go, and even write prose. The revolution in artificial intelligence stems in large part from the power of one particular kind of artificial neural network, whose design is inspired by the connected layers of neurons in the mammalian visual cortex. These “convolutional neural networks” (CNNs) have proved surprisingly adept at learning patterns in two-dimensional data — especially in computer vision tasks like recognizing handwritten words and objects in digital images.

But when applied to data sets without a built-in planar geometry — say, models of irregular shapes used in 3D computer animation, or the point clouds generated by self-driving cars to map their surroundings — this powerful machine learning architecture doesn’t work well. Around 2016, a new discipline called geometric deep learning emerged with the goal of lifting CNNs out of flatland.

Now, researchers have delivered, with a new theoretical framework for building neural networks that can learn patterns on any kind of geometric surface.

More here.

Arjun Appadurai in The Wire:

We are witnessing India’s first mass movement since the movement for national Independence, which began in the 1880s and ended in 1947. At no time since 1947 have we seen such an inspiring show of democratic dissent, bringing together students and workers, old and young, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Christians, Parsis and other faiths, Marxists, liberals and traditional nationalists, government servants and corporate leaders, men and women.

In this mass movement, women, students and youth in general are the leaders, with Muslims speaking their minds with a courage born out of the sense that other options are non-existent. The Emergency had some of these features, but the broad opposition to Indira Gandhi then recognised that she had some ability to listen, learn and respond, by comparison to the current regime.

At a time when many of us are on the barricades, either physically or politically, it is easy to be caught up in the news of the day, the week or the month. At such times, we need to bear India’s long history in mind and put our apocalyptic moment in long-term perspective. In this light, I have three observations to offer.

More here.

[Thanks to David Schneider.]

Eric Banks at Bookforum:

Neiman’s book comprises two parts. The first is dedicated to the historical underpinnings of the German reckoning with Nazism and the Holocaust beginning in the early ’60s, with television broadcasts of the Eichmann and Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, which led a younger generation to ask, for seemingly the first time, about the complacency and complicity of teachers, politicians, and above all fathers. (“Being German in my generation,” the author Carolin Emcke, born in 1967, tells Neiman, “means distrusting yourself.”) Learning from the Germans narrates the subsequent political and cultural evolution, including Willy Brandt’s 1970 Kniefall in penance to the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Historians Debate of the 1980s, and the 2003–2005 construction of Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial, a site Neiman dislikes for the vagueness of its abstract form but whose gestation was admittedly long and difficult. Reunification posed a particular set of challenges to how Nazism and the Holocaust were publicly remembered; she contrasts the record of the former East Germany with that of West Germany and largely defends the avowed antifascist state from the charge that it failed to address the German past with anything comparable to Western efforts. Three decades after reunification, the extremist AfD party explicitly frames what it calls a “guilt cult” and threatens the success of the postwar project. Yet no other country (at least in Europe or North America) has made anything like the strides Germany has toward facing the legacy of national evils, whether colonialism in Britain and France or slavery and Jim Crow in America. Only in 2009 did the US Senate approve a resolution apologizing to black Americans for slavery.

more here.

Susanna Forrest at The Paris Review:

The glamour of both types of horsewoman was impeccable, their skill and bravery vertiginous. These long-dead performers became celebrities to me, fleshed out beyond the Impressionist postcards: Elvira Guerra, the first woman to compete against men at the Olympics in 1900; Caroline Loyo, “the diva of the crop” whose black eyes and disciplinaire riding brought the Jockey Club boys to the Paris circuses; and Suzanne Valadon, the acrobat of Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings who went on to be an artist herself after an injury cost her her career in the ring.

The modern circus was born in England in the late 1760s when a former soldier called Philip Astley pioneered the first recognizable circuses, centering on the horse. His wife, Patty Jones, became the first woman performer, standing on the backs of three horses as they cantered around the ring. Later she took to riding with her hands covered in bees.

more here.

Sanam Maher at the TLS:

Much has been said about the burqa’s ability to conceal. In 2006, speaking to Reuters, the then Prime Minister of Italy Romano Prodi insisted, “You must be seen. This is common sense, I think. It is important for our society”. In Britain that same year, Muslims accounted for only 3 per cent of the population, and the number of burqa wearers was a fraction of that. When Jack Straw, as leader of the House of Commons, wrote, in a column for the Lancashire Telegraph, that he asked Muslim women to take off their coverings in meetings because “so many of the judgments we all make about other people come from seeing their faces”, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, chimed in with support. “It is a mark of separation”, and it makes non-Muslims “feel uncomfortable”. The Shadow Home Secretary David Davis went further: by insisting on such practices, Muslims were enacting “voluntary apartheid”. In 2011 France became the first European country to make it illegal to wear a face-covering veil in public. The country is home to an estimated 5 million Muslims (the largest Muslim population in western Europe), and it has long been suggested that reactions to the veil mask deeper concerns about the growing minority.

The veil, face-covering or otherwise, has become a central component in the Western understanding of Muslim women – and, indeed, men.

more here.

Kate Wagner in The Baffler:

WHEN I WAS an eleven-year-old child struggling with nascent mental illness, I received some perhaps ill-considered advice from one of many therapists: “Knowledge is power.” The idea was that by learning more about the things I feared, I would become less scared about them. In some ways, this worked. Researching the murder rate for our small town (zero murders) and the statistics of prepubescent heart attacks (extraordinarily rare) quelled some of my more ungrounded fears. This prescription for knowledge, however, was contraindicated by an existing condition of mine: morbid fascination. Why someone with clinical anxiety would spend a great deal of their time reading about the abject man-made horrors of the world—from industrial accidents to engineering catastrophes, from transportation accidents to public health crises—is a question I have asked myself for years. While perhaps less popular than horror movies and true-crime podcasts, the spectacle of catastrophe is nonetheless fascinating to the millions of people who spend their evenings binging Seconds from Disaster or Chernobyl.

A special subset of disaster porn is what we might call infrastructural tragedy: bridge collapses, oil spills, toxic waste dumps, nuclear meltdowns, industrial accidents of all stripes, and, on a slower timescale, the left-behind, dystopian landscapes of post-industrial decay and blight. From William Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” to Koyaanisqatsi, from the photography of Margaret Bourke-White, Richard Misrach, and David T. Hanson to Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier’s fascination with grain elevators, the impact on the arts made by the horrors of production and the landscapes they’ve left behind—arguably necessary evils that make our contemporary way of life possible—spans disciplines and centuries.

More here.

Naomi Fry in The New Yorker:

The thought-provoking Israeli documentary “Advocate,” from the directors Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaïche, opens with its subject, the human-rights lawyer Lea Tsemel, making her way resolutely toward the elevators at the district court in Tel Aviv. A short and solidly built woman in her seventies, with a mop of dark hair and kohl-rimmed eyes, Tsemel is on her way to the courthouse’s detention cells to meet with a client. “Is it going down?” she asks as she approaches the elevator’s nearly closed doors, before sticking her leg between them and muscling her way in. “Lea, what will become of you? When will you mend your ways?” a man inside the elevator asks her. “Who, me? I’m a lost cause,” she answers.

The exchange is joshing, but Tsemel, an Israeli Jew who has been practicing human-rights law since 1972, is a controversial figure in her country—one whose determination to thrust a tenacious leg forward and crack open the doors of the uniform Zionist narrative has often been met with her compatriots’ deep anger. In her first trial, she defended members of the Arab-Jewish cell Red Front. Their leader, Udi Adiv, a politically radicalized former I.D.F. paratrooper, was charged with treason for delivering classified information to Syria. (Adiv claimed that he was attempting to work toward the liberation of the Palestinian people.) Over the past four-and-a-half decades, Tsemel has focussed her practice on defending Palestinians who, as she explains in a TV interview from the nineties that is included in the documentary, “you call terrorists, but that the average person in the world would call freedom fighters.”

More here.

Danielle Celermajer at the ABC (Australia):

As the full extent of the devastation of the Holocaust became apparent, a Polish Jew whose entire family had been killed, Raphael Lemkin, came to realise that there was no word for the distinctive crime that had been committed: the murder of a people. His life work became finding a word to name the crime and then convincing the world to use it and condemn it: genocide. Today, not only has genocide become a dreadful part of our lexicon. We recognise it as perhaps the gravest of all crimes.

During these first days of the third decade of the twenty-first century, as we watch humans, animals, trees, insects, fungi, ecosystems, forests, rivers (and on and on) being killed, we find ourselves without a word to name what is happening. True, in recent years, environmentalists have coined the term ecocide, the killing of ecosystems — but this is something more. This is the killing of everything. Omnicide.

Some will object, no doubt, that this does not count as a “cide” — a murder or killing — but is rather a natural phenomenon, albeit an unspeakably regrettable one. Where is the murderous intent? Difficult to locate, admittedly, but a new crime also requires a new understanding of culpability.

More here.

Fionnuala McHugh in the South China Morning Post:

On a Sunday night, exactly 22 weeks after the protests against an extradition bill had begun on June 9, prize-winning Pakistani journalist and novelist Mohammed Hanif checked into his room at Robert Black College, on the University of Hong Kong campus. Until then, the city’s social unrest had usually been confined to weekends; but, two days earlier, Chow Tsz-lok, a student from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, had died in unexplain­ed circum­stances while police were dispersing a crowd with tear gas. The Monday morning after Hanif’s arrival, a traffic policeman shot a protester at 7.20am during disturbances in Sai Wan Ho. Matters escalated.

Hanif, who lives in Karachi, had been invited last year to give the 2019 PEN Hong Kong Literature & Human Rights lecture at HKU. PEN, which stood for Poets, Essayists, Novelists but now embraces all literary forms in its role as human-rights watchdog, planned for Hanif to take part in an evening with local writers titled “We Still Laugh: Humour as a Literary Relief Valve”. By lunchtime on his first day in Hong Kong, however, student outrage had been ignited, tear gas was seeping through Central and no one was laughing.

More here.

Claire Lehmann in Quillette:

In 2019, short-term weather fluctuations in the Indian Ocean—the Indian Ocean Dipole, as scientists call it—pushed moist ocean air away from Australia’s shores, causing a severe drought, and drying out the leaves, sticks and soil on the bush floor.

This has come in tandem with unusually strong and sustained winds associated with a separate phenomenon known as the Antarctic Oscillation, which have pushed fires in all directions, turning isolated local crises into regional disasters. And of course all of this comes amid a steady increase in average temperatures across Australia, a phenomenon that climate scientists have warned us about for decades. They also have correctly predicted that long-term climate-change trends will increasingly interact disastrously with short-term climate phenomena in a way that catalyses and exacerbates extreme weather events.

Unfortunately, successive Australian governments have failed to adequately heed these warnings. A more aggressive use of controlled burns might have given firefighters a chance to control this season’s bushfires. But, as has been the case in other nations, climate policy in Australia has been mired in partisan politics, with both sides using the issue to score points instead of implementing sensible and pragmatic policies.

More here.

Gillian Osborne in the Boston Review:

The Library of America edition of Herman Melville’s Complete Poems collects, for the first time, all of Melville’s known poetry. This includes collections published during his lifetime and reviewed widely, such as Battle-Pieces (1866), completed in the aftermath of the Civil War. In addition, the book collects work largely unknown by—and unavailable to—general readers until now. This latter category includes the epic poem Clarel (1876), notable both for being the longest American poem to date, and for having most of its first edition burned by the publisher to clear out warehouse space. Library of America is billing the Complete Poems as a resuscitation of one of the United States’ greatest nineteenth-century poets, establishing Melville within the company of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. But while the collection has the potential to change popular understanding of the kind of writer Melville was, the pleasures of reading Melville as a poet are ambiguous, as is the urge to classify him as great.

More here.