Accelerating to Where? The future ain’t what it used to be

Robert Bellafiore in The New Atlantis:

From John Maynard Keynes’s prediction of a fifteen-hour workweek to Walt Disney’s Tomorrowland to 2001: A Space Odyssey’s interplanetary waltzing, many futurists and crystal-ball seers of the twentieth century assured us that, thanks to the wonders of technology, things were looking up for the human race. And remarkably, they were often justified in their buoyancy: President Kennedy explained in 1962 why we chose to go to the Moon, and seven years later there we were. Surely the 2000s would be a whole century of roaring twenties.

Instead, we got … this. A damaged earth, a pandemic, a housing crisis, and a deep sense that we all got played. “There’s no U.S. economy running on clean nuclear fusion or superdeep geothermal energy,” James Pethokoukis bemoans, “no universal antivirus vaccine, no driverless flying electric taxis, no suborbital hypersonic flights from New York to Paris, no booming space economy.” What gives?

In The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised, Pethokoukis, a policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, sets out to explain what happened, and how we can return to the future as it used to be.

More here.



Thursday Poem

The Cat

While you read
the sleepmoth begins
to circle your eyes
and then—
a hail of claws
lands the cat
in your lap.
The little motor
in his throat
is how a cat says
Me. He rasps the soft
file of his tongue
along the inside
of your wrist.
He licks himself.
He’s building
a pebble of fur
in his stomach.
And now he pulls
his body in a circle
around the fire of sleep.

by William Matthews
from Sleek For the Long Flight
White Pine Press, 1998

The Tiny Ant and the Mighty Lion

Summer Rylander in Nautilus:

Few animals are more synonymous with the African savannah than the lion. With its muscular stride and ferocious roar, it has long been a symbol of strength, courage, and nobility. As an apex predator, it sits at the top of the food chain—the only real predator it must fear is the human. But recently, one of the savannah’s tiniest inhabitants, one that is barely visible, has fundamentally reshaped the fortunes of the lion, as well as those of a number of other magnificent beasts: zebras, elephants, and buffalo.

This real-life fable begins with the iconic umbrella-shaped acacia tree, also known as the whistling thorn tree. Graceful and resilient, the acacia tree dominates the savannah landscape and often provides most of the tree cover for thousands of square miles. Hidden in the branches of this tree are great numbers of tiny acacia ants, which make their home there and act as protectors. With their painful stings and bites, the ants ward off large herbivores such as elephants and giraffes, and allow the trees to thrive.

More here.

Toni Morrison on why ‘writing for black people is tough’

Myles Burke in BBC:

One of the great 20th-Century novelists, Morrison consciously aimed her work at black American readers.

In a 2003 interview, she told the BBC about why that made her writing sing. At the start of her career, Toni Morrison determined that she would write for her “neighbourhood”. And so began the remarkable literary career of an author whose work tackles the complexities of identity, race and history with beguiling language and deep humanity. By identifying herself as a black writer, and consciously writing for a black American audience, author Toni Morrison felt freed to find her voice, she said.

“When I began to write, I was thinking, suppose I just wrote for my neighbourhood and just that, and it just opened up everything. It was clearer, it was pointed,” she told the BBC’s Kirsty Wark in November 2003. But with that framing came an added responsibility: a need for the stories, rhythms and phrasing to sound true and authentic to readers from those communities. “You know it was like listening to jazz musicians, black people in music were very, very critical. They hated the mediocre. So I wanted it to be like that. I wanted it to be so good, where the judgement of people who knew the community was so powerful, that I could not play.

“I knew how to play up to a white reader, I knew how to manipulate that, that was easy but writing for black people is tough. Really tough, if they take you seriously.”

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2024  theme of “African Americans and the Arts” throughout the month of February)

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology

Emmanuel Faye at Notre Dame Philosophical Review:

Wolin’s project can be summarized as follows: After the recent publication of Heidegger’s seminars, lectures, correspondence, and the Black Notebooks has revealed the Heideggerian edifice to be in ruins, Wolin wants to show that Heidegger’s writings can nonetheless provide philosophy with valuable material that can be re-used. Should we conclude that Wolin—like Trawny, Nancy, and di Cesare before him—seeks to salvage the seemingly valuable philosophical remains of Heideggerian thought following the publication of the Black Notebooks? And that this rescue operation is carried out in the face of opposition from mysterious and anonymous critical “commentators”? Or are these statements rhetorical, designed to safeguard the project against potential attacks by the most uncompromising of Heideggerians? It is in any case striking that Wolin places his project under the aegis of Nietzsche, given his previous unsparing criticism of this figure. He might argue that this is merely ironic. Yet the methodological fact remains that the Nietzsche citation fits with Wolin’s aim of re-evaluating the Heideggerian material.

more here.

Daido Moriyama: The Photographers’ Gallery

Meara Sharma at Artforum:

To encounter the work of Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama is to see the world not through his eyes but through his whole being. His angles are dizzyingly extreme, as if shot from the perspective of his knees, his toes, the back of his head. His subjects are blurred and warped, conjuring a sense of frenetic movement through space. His images—mostly black-and-white—are intensely high contrast, evocative of the sun’s unforgiving glare or the heightened realm of dreams. Rather than proposing an artfully constructed vision of the world, his photographs (whether of television screens or thronging beaches or fishnet-sheathed legs or discarded dolls) attempt to embody the fragmented experience of existence: its chaos, its precariousness, its fundamental inscrutability.

Moriyama’s signature style—known as arebureboke, which translates as “grainy, blurry, out of focus”—stems from a lifelong suspicion of photography’s capacity to capture reality, evident in the eighty-five-year-old artist’s potent retrospective at the Photographers’ Gallery.

more here.

Between Risk and Control: How Mark Rothko Discovered His Signature Style

Adam Greenhalgh at Literary Hub:

In the summer of 1933, Mark Rothko, who was then still known as Markus Rothkowitz, hitchhiked nearly three thousand miles from New York City to his hometown of Portland, Oregon. He had done this several times in recent years, having moved east in 1921 to attend Yale University before withdrawing and settling in New York in 1923.

But 1933 was different for two reasons. First, he was accompanied by his wife, Edith Sachar. They had married the previous November, and the ostensible purpose of the trip was to introduce Edith to Rothko’s mother. Second, Rothko had his first solo exhibition, at the Museum of Art, Portland, in July and August. So the trip marked both a personal and a professional milestone for the aspiring artist.

Rothko’s Portland relatives were unable to host the newlyweds, so they set up camp in the hills overlooking the city. According to Rothko’s brother Moise (later known as Maurice Roth), “with canvas or whatever they had, they built themselves a hut there and lived with no facilities of any kind.” Canvas was suitable for a tent in the woods, but for painting outdoors Rothko favored paper. Lightweight and portable, paper was a logical choice for a peripatetic summer.

More here.

Can Humanity Survive AI?

Garrison Lovely in Jacobin:

Google cofounder Larry Page thinks superintelligent AI is “just the next step in evolution.” In fact, Page, who’s worth about $120 billion, has reportedly argued that efforts to prevent AI-driven extinction and protect human consciousness are “speciesist” and “sentimental nonsense.”

In July, former Google DeepMind senior scientist Richard Sutton — one of the pioneers of reinforcement learning, a major subfield of AI — said that the technology “could displace us from existence,” and that “we should not resist succession.” In a 2015 talk, Sutton said, suppose “everything fails” and AI “kill[s] us all”; he asked, “Is it so bad that humans are not the final form of intelligent life in the universe?”

“Biological extinction, that’s not the point,” Sutton, sixty-six, told me. “The light of humanity and our understanding, our intelligence — our consciousness, if you will — can go on without meat humans.”

Yoshua Bengio, fifty-nine, is the second-most cited living scientist, noted for his foundational work on deep learning. Responding to Page and Sutton, Bengio told me, “What they want, I think it’s playing dice with humanity’s future. I personally think this should be criminalized.”

More here.

The lower middle class isn’t middle-class anymore

Jeroen van Baar at An Educated Guess:

Obviously, there already were differences between the lower and upper middle class in 1994—otherwise you couldn’t separate the two groups. But existing differences grew by a lot between 1994 and 2018. For the upper middle class, things generally got better in that timeframe: their wealth, health, and life expectancy improved. For the lower middle class, however,

    • Annual pretax resources declined by 18% between 1994 and 2018, controlling for inflation;
    • Home ownership declined by 31% between 1994 and 2018;
    • Health insurance coverage declined by 11% from 87% in 1994 to 78% in 2018. This means that almost 1 in 4 middle-aged adults in the lower middle class didn’t have health insurance in 2018.

These data make clear that the security offered by middle-class life—exemplified by homeownership and health insurance—is no longer within reach for millions of people in the lower half of the middle class.

More here.

The future of precision cancer therapy might be to try everything

Elie Dolgin in Nature:

The blood cancer had returned, and Kevin Sander was running out of treatment options. A stem-cell transplant would offer the best chance for long-term survival, but to qualify for the procedure he would first need to reduce the extent of his tumour — a seemingly insurmountable goal, because successive treatments had all failed to keep the disease in check. As a last throw of the dice, he joined a landmark clinical trial. Led by haematologist Philipp Staber at the Medical University of Vienna, the study is exploring an innovative treatment strategy in which drugs are tested on the patient’s own cancer cells, cultured outside the body. In February 2022, researchers tried 130 compounds on cells grown from Sander’s cancer — essentially trying everything at their disposal to see what might work.

One option looked promising. It was a type of kinase inhibitor that is approved to treat thyroid cancer, but it is seldom, if ever, used for the rare subtype of lymphoma that Sander had. Physicians prescribed him a treatment regimen that included the drug, and it worked. The cancer receded, enabling him to undergo the stem-cell transplant. He has been in remission ever since. “I’m a bit more free now,” says Sander, a 38-year-old procurement manager living in Podersdorf am See, Austria. ”I do not fear death any more,” he adds. “I try to enjoy my life.” His story is a testament to this kind of intensive and highly personalized drug-screening method, referred to as functional precision medicine. Like all precision medicine, it aims to match treatments to patients, but it differs from the genomics-guided paradigm that has come to dominate the field. Instead of relying on genetic data and the best available understanding of tumour biology to select a treatment, clinicians throw everything they’ve got at cancer cells in the laboratory and see what sticks.

More here.

Wednesday Poem

The Leash

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to
say: Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still
something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.
But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
my living limbs into the world without too much
pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight
toward the pickup trucks break-necking down
the road, because she thinks she loves them,
because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud
roaring things will love her back, her soft small self
alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,
until I yank the leash back to save her because
I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say,
and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings
high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay
her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.
Perhaps we are always hurtling our body towards
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe,
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.

by Ada Limón
from The Carrying
Milkweed Editions, 2018

Tuesday, February 13, 2024

The Soliloquies of the Lambs

Charles Foster in Literary Review:

If a cow said, ‘Don’t eat me’, we wouldn’t. We seem to regard the capacity for language (by which we mean our kind of language) as evidence of moral significance. But do animals talk? Many traditions assume they do, and understanding animal talk has sometimes been thought to indicate great human wisdom. The proverbially wise Solomon understood the language of the birds, and St Francis preached to them. Most of us have asked what a crow’s squawk or a dog’s whine means. Perhaps we ask because we feel that animals can tell us something we don’t know about the sort of place this world is.

For much of the last four hundred years, enquiries of this kind have been disreputable. Descartes declared that animals were automatons and Enlightenment thinkers duly reconceived the cosmos and everything in it, apart from humans, as a machine. We humans hung on to our souls for a while, but now we are machines too. The study of animal behaviour has long been merely the study of how animals react to stimuli. Ask what they were thinking and the journals would reject your article.

But things are changing, as Arik Kershenbaum’s splendid book shows.

More here.

Scott Aaronson: The Problem of Human Specialness in the Age of AI

Scott Aaronson at Shtetl-Optimized:

Now, as far as I can tell, the empirical questions of whether AI will achieve and surpass human performance at all tasks, take over civilization from us, threaten human existence, etc. are logically distinct from the philosophical question of whether AIs will ever “truly think,” or whether they’ll only ever “appear” to think.  You could answer “yes” to all the empirical questions and “no” to the philosophical question, or vice versa.  But to my lifelong chagrin, people constantly munge the two questions together!

A major way they do so, is with what we could call the religion of Justaism.

    • GPT is justa next-token predictor.
    • It’s justa function approximator.
    • It’s justa gigantic autocomplete.
    • It’s justa stochastic parrot.
    • And, it “follows,” the idea of AI taking over from humanity is justa science-fiction fantasy, or maybe a cynical attempt to distract people from AI’s near-term harms.

As someone once expressed this religion on my blog: GPT doesn’t interpret sentences, it only seems-to-interpret them.  It doesn’t learn, it only seems-to-learn.  It doesn’t judge moral questions, it only seems-to-judge. I replied: that’s great, and it won’t change civilization, it’ll only seem-to-change it!

More here.

Making Fascism Work for Moderates

Alex Bronzini-Vender at Public Books:

The epigraph of Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints is a quote from the British expatriate novelist and travel writer Lawrence Durrell: “My spirit turns more and more toward the West, toward the old heritage. There are, perhaps, some treasures to retrieve among its ruins … I don’t know.”

Raspail, a lifelong anti-immigration activist, was never assured of the white West’s innate virtue. It was “civilized,” yes, but the true judge of a civilization’s right to exist was whether it could defend itself. In our obsession with “rights” and “international law,” we’d lost sight of the world’s real moral logic: kill or be killed. In doing so, we’d consigned ourselves to the latter fate—to be killed—and worse, we would deserve it.

This is the logic of The Camp of the Saints, published fifty years ago in France.

More here.

Early dementia diagnosis: blood proteins reveal at-risk people

Miryam Naddaf in Nature:

An analysis of around 1,500 blood proteins has identified biomarkers that can be used to predict the risk of developing dementia up to 15 years before diagnosis.

The findings, reported today in Nature Aging1, are a step towards a tool that scientists have been in search of for decades: blood tests that can detect Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia at a very early, pre-symptomatic stage. Researchers screened blood samples from more than 50,000 healthy adults in the UK Biobank, 1,417 of whom developed dementia in a 14-year period. They found that high blood levels of four proteins — GFAP, NEFL, GDF15 and LTBP2 — were strongly associated with dementia. “Studies such as this are required if we are to intervene with disease-modifying therapies at the very earliest stage of dementia,” said Amanda Heslegrave, a neuroscientist at University College London, in a statement to the Science Media Centre in London.

…By screening 1,463 proteins in blood samples from 52,645 people, the authors found that increased levels of GFAP, NEFL, GDF15 and LTBP2 were associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. For some participants who developed dementia, blood levels of these proteins were outside normal ranges more than ten years before symptom onset. GFAP, a protein that provides structural support to nerve cells called astrocytes, has already been proposed as a diagnostic marker for Alzheimer’s disease2as has GDF15. The latest study finds that people with high levels of GFAP in their blood are more than twice as likely as people with normal levels to develop dementia, and are nearly three times as likely to develop Alzheimer’s.

More here.