Tag: ethics

The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny: Some Notes on Wearables

Posted on by Gary Borjesson

by Gary Borjesson

If you don’t have a plan, you’ll become part of someone else’s plan. —Terence McKenna

1. Wearables

This morning I headed outside first thing with my dog Theila for our daily short morning walk in the woods around our home, to stretch our legs, sniff around, and get some morning light. I looked at my new Garmin Forerunner 165 smartwatch, which I’d just started wearing the afternoon before. The first thing I saw was my sleep score, which was 67, and in case there was any confusion about the meaning of this, above the 67 was the word ‘Poor.’

Humans as batteries in the Matrix

I felt resentment at getting such harsh feedback first thing in the morning. Then I asked myself whether I agreed with its blunt assessment. Not really. I’d have given my sleep a score of 85. Was I missing something? Was the watch missing something? Whom should I trust? This tension raises a key theme of this essay. Put as a question: what authority should we give such feedback? How do we weigh it against the authority of our self-experience? A related question is whether we want to adopt its proposed terms of discourse in the first place. For example, the watch measures the charge of my “body battery.” Is this a playful nod to the Matrix, or are we encouraged to reduce our aliveness to the same terms we use for our phones?

I have come to admire the watch’s straightforward, metric-driven honesty. Even that first morning, it felt like I was being challenged in a useful way. The watch wasn’t tiptoeing around my feelings but calling it like it computes it, the way a tough-love coach might.

I soon realized, however, that I didn’t understand how the feedback was calculated, and what exactly it meant. For instance, take two key data points used in a range of assessments, V02 max and Heart Rate Variability (HRV). V02 max measures overall aerobic conditioning, while more variability is a sign of a rested, adaptable nervous system, and less signals stress or fatigue. The watch could meaningfully help me improve my health and fitness if I prepared myself by getting to know all this. It offers real-time, cumulative, data-crunched biofeedback that gets more accurate as the adaptive AI gets to know me. For example, the watch gathers data about your HRV for three weeks before determining your baseline score against which further scores are measured. The biofeedback can help us become more sensitive and attuned to ourselves, or it can become a substitute for this, depending on how we use it.

In any event, the technology is here to stay, it’s getting better fast, and it’s being widely adopted. Read more »

Monday, June 22, 2026

Quantum Ethics: Technological Transformation And Social Structure

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

Contrary to expectations, quantum ethics is not concerned with the treatment of animals in thought experiments. Image credit: Dhatfield, own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, via wikimedia commons

In my day job, when I’m not regaling the readers here at 3 Quarks Daily with rash ruminations on free will, power and politics, or why people sometimes erect huge stones for no apparent reason, I work on finding prospective applications of quantum computing for the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, DLR). With the timelines on useful quantum computation widely seen as contracting (at least according to those entities that stand to profit the most from this belief), I’m suddenly faced with an awkward question for a theorist: what does it mean for society at large if my area of expertise suddenly makes the leap from the page into the real world? And what are my own responsibilities in shaping this transition?

It’s probably not a hot take to suggest that humanity might not have the greatest track record in shepherding the rollout of new technology in such a way as to minimally disrupt, much less aid, social progress. Sure: technological marvels are instrumental in having brought about a revolution in wealth, health, and knowledge. But in fingering such easily-tracked metrics, we must be careful not to lose touch with more difficult to quantify markers of human flourishing, like meaning, community, joy, or kindness. As argued previously, each selection of greedily optimized KPIs for the human project relegates what falls beyond their ambit to mere externalities, hidden from view—often literally by exporting unwanted byproducts, material and ideological, to countries less able to make their concerns heard on the world stage. While it’s great that ‘we’ in the sense of a fictitious ‘average person’ enjoy greater wealth than ever, if this comes at the prize of exploiting 5 times the resources our planet generates per year, we’re not looking at a great long-term strategy.

The creed of the modern tech entrepeneur has long been ‘move fast and break things’. But with technological capabilities that encompass anything up to the wholesale destruction of a livable ecosystem, and a sixth mass extinction already underway, we should perhaps slow down a little before breaking any (more) things that can’t be fixed. Read more »

Sunday, May 24, 2026

Gandhi and the Move from Micro to Macro-morality

Posted on by Daniel Gauss

by Daniel Gauss

Raj Ghat in New Delhi, India (all photos by Dan Gauss)

Standing at Raj Ghat, the memorial for Gandhi in New Delhi, near where his corpse was cremated, I began to think about a problem I’ve been grappling with for a long time. With all the good, kind-hearted and sincere people in the world, why is the world not becoming a substantially more humane place?

I am surrounded by incredibly sweet people. I’m often deeply moved, and genuinely amazed, by how generous and compassionate they are, and the lengths they go to in order to be helpful. If you were to judge the world solely by these folks, you would think it to be a gentle, caring place. Comedian Patton Oswalt wrote (after the Boston Marathon bombing), in regard to those causing harm in the world, “The good outnumber you, and we always will.” So, then, why are the good people losing?

It’s pretty clear that the world is not a gentle, caring place. There are at least 50 state-based armed conflicts right now, corruption and duplicity thrive, greed runs unquestioned and unchecked and our climate is deteriorating. In the USA our prisons are full, children struggle to read, income inequality is outrageous and people are barely scraping by paycheck to paycheck. We are in another war. Many of our cities are still racially segregated and class divisions cause unjust treatment and disparate life opportunities and outcomes. Our cities are filled with homeless. The news seems like an unending sequence of cruelty and incompetence.

Standing in silence before the eternal flame at Raj Ghat, reflecting on all that this man did, I felt that his determined effort not only to become more humane, but also to challenge the larger systems that produce suffering, provided the beginning of an answer for me.

After visiting Raj Ghat, and wandering through the nearby Gandhi museum, which traces his life from infancy to death, my big theory now involves what might be called “micro-morality” and “macro-morality.” I think most people shoot for and are largely satisfied with micro-morality…politeness, kindness, volunteering, controlling their temper, forgiving, being nice.

Gandhi demonstrated that micro-morality is essential, but not good enough. Read more »

Sunday, May 3, 2026

Sorry Kiddos, We’re Not In Wonderland Anymore. We’re Not Even In Kansas

Posted on by Bonnie McCune

by Bonnie McCune

Much worse. Evidently, we’re in a country that’s gone mad. Bonkers. Off its rockers.

At first, I thought the problem was me. I’ve never felt like I fit in. Even as young as age six, I noticed that I didn’t act or react the way my peers did. Bullying or bragging or doing dangerous stunts held no appeal. By the time I reached the age of reason, which is 12 according to experts, I was accustomed to being the outsider, different, and by college, I prided myself on being unusual.  Many things people took for granted as normal, I thought were weird

It wasn’t until the current leader of this country achieved power again that I realized I’m not the crazy one. We’re inhabiting a completely irrational world. Perhaps it’s always been that way, and I simply was too naïve or slow to realize it.  Evidently, we live in a country where its leader can openly mock other religions, leaders, and countries with impunity.  He feels no hesitation in making fun of people with handicaps or who don’t agree with him. He delivers mind-blowing threats with nary a blink.

Is there anything more unreal than a nation in which the leader has been found guilty of lying under oath, stealing/theft, and numerous other charges without a twitch from a number of authorities. Donald Trump has been adjudged liable, or indicted in numerous criminal and civil cases covering a wide range of legal violations, including falsifying business records, mishandling classified documents, sexual abuse, defamation, and attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

All with complete impunity. Read more »

Tuesday, April 21, 2026

Compassion and Responsibility, the Moral Architecture of the Mind

Posted on by Herbert Harris

by Herbert Harris

Adam Smith

Why should we care about each other? Is it disguised self-interest? Is altruism a “selfish gene” that gives the species a survival advantage? Is responsibility an illusion?

Economist Adam Smith took on these questions at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Better known for his foundational economic theories, Smith is remembered as one of the patron saints of the modern free market. Milton Friedman famously idolized him by wearing neckties featuring Smith’s image. But it is very hard to imagine Smith being pleased with today’s “utility monster” economy. This is because Smith’s other foundational contribution was a moral philosophy that placed sympathy at the center of our moral lives.

Smith’s approach drew from David Hume, who argued that we can’t derive moral truths from simple statements of fact. There is always a leap from talking about what is to saying what ought to be. Moral statements were seen as matters of feeling rather than facts. Smith used this starting point to construct a theory of moral sentiment grounded in the natural sympathy we feel for our fellow human beings. Could mere feelings ground a sturdy, compelling moral system? Philosophers have long sought alternative foundations, but the barrier between is and ought is formidable.

A strong contender having a recent resurgence is virtue ethics. Traditionally associated with Aristotle, it views moral life as a product of virtuous character. What is a virtuous character, and how do you get one? For centuries, there were no solid answers. The recent resurgence of interest had a number of champions, including Philippa Foot, who argued that the virtues can be grounded in the biology of what it means for a human being to flourish. A naturalistic foundation for moral philosophy seemed a promising new approach, but psychology and neuroscience have been generally indifferent to concepts like normativity or flourishing, which are essentially “oughts.”  However, recent developments in computational neuroscience may offer points of alignment between the brain’s predictive architecture and the language of moral philosophy. Read more »

Tuesday, March 10, 2026

Scoundrels and Scriveners: How the West Was Really Won

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

All the territorial possessions of all the political establishments in the earth–including America, of course–consist of pilferings from other people’s wash. —Mark Twain, Following the Equator

“Me and My Partner”, Puck Magazine, CJ Taylor, 1887

There’s a wonderful story from Paul Bunyan Swings His Ax about how a heat wave in Iowa made all the field corn pop until the whole state was covered in ten feet of popcorn. Then a terrific wind blew all the popcorn over to Kansas, where cattle mistook it for snow and froze to death. Somehow that story captures the absurd myths about the West that drew settlers into a dry forsaken land. Myths about the West and how it was “won” abound and some of them were meant for the movies before movies existed. But much of western mythology has to do with square-jawed cowboys fighting for what’s right, and one day meeting a bonneted school mistress transplanted from the east. After a gunfight or two defending the lass’s honor, a golden life on the prairie begins.

The real history of the West is far more colorful and much less savory. It has a lot of graft, fraudulent misrepresentation, speculative puffery, and truly clever schemes to outwit the government and the gullible. If cinema truly captured the Wild West, it would be less John Ford and more Steven Soderberg. Where to begin?

The tools of western conquest in the cinematic version are six shooters, covered wagons, and fleet horses. There was some of that, but much of what moved thousands of people to the western states and made some men rich and others desperate had more to do with stuffy laws written in Washington, The General Land Office, survey chains, and crooked speculators. Start with the Homestead Act of 1862.

The Homestead Act promised a simple bargain: any adult citizen could claim 160 acres of public land, and after living on it for five years the property was theirs. In a progressive twist for the time, the law allowed women and Black Americans to claim land alongside white men. The act had stalled in Congress for years because Southern legislators feared it would create new abolitionist states and upset the balance of power in the Senate. It finally passed only after the South seceded from the Union. Read more »

Tuesday, March 3, 2026

Permeable: The Monetization of Human Fragility

Posted on by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

“Amongst Men” by Haroon Gunn-Salie

There is a particular moment of weakness that most of us recognize without needing to name it. You are lying in your bed, it is late at night. The light from the phone is brighter than the background in the room. The day has thinned your patience as well as your judgment. You click on posts and stories what you would otherwise have ignored. You may even be tempted to buy what you do not need. In other words, your guard is down. You read for a few seconds and then doom scroll to the next story and then the next.  You feel like going to sleep but then you lie to yourself, one more scroll.” Welcome to the world of attention economy. It is basically a system in which human focus is treated as a scarce resource to be captured, measured, and monetized by digital platforms. The attention economy began with a relatively simple goal i.e., capture and hold the gaze. Over time, that ambition evolved into not just focusing on what you like but also focusing on when you are least able to resist. Timing, not just taste, has become the new frontier that these algorithms focus on. While it is true that these platforms were informed by decades of research on human psychology, they do not need to understand us in any deep, human sense. What they do need to do is to predict when you are tired, lonely, bored, anxious, or depleted. It is precisely in these states of vulnerability that it is easier to influence people and steal their attention.

Behavioral science has long recognized that cognition is not constrained by what else is going on in one’s life. Decision fatigue is real. Cognitive depletion makes us more suggestible. Our skepticism varies with sleep, stress, and emotional load. What has changed is that our devices now emit a steady exhaust of behavioral signals that correlate with these states. The phone does not know that you are lonely. It does not need to. It only needs to register that your scrolling pattern has slowed, that you are lingering on certain kinds of content, that the hour is late, that your interactions look different from your baseline. Correlation at scale does not need understanding. The use of human vulnerability is not a rhetorical device, it is anchored in behavioral research. Read more »

Sunday, June 15, 2025

Being Good After Hegel and Nietzsche

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Chris Horner

What does it mean to live a Good Life in the secular west? Good can mean more than one thing, of course: apart from moral good – doing the right or ‘good’ thing, there is the idea of ‘good’ as flourishing, being happy, fulfilled. The latter matters to us a lot, judging by all the self-help books, YouTube influencers, Rules for Life and so on. For very many lucky enough not to have to worry about poverty or war there still seems a grinding anxiety about how to achieve a happy life. That life seems to be Elsewhere. But why? Some would argue that the angst is due a loss of a shared way of life, one grounded in a conception of human purpose. So, we get nihilism and sense of anomie. Yet lost wallets are returned, and courtesy is still exhibited in everyday situations. If this is moral anarchy, it is not as chaotic as one might expect. Nevertheless. I think something has changed for moderns.

With the decline of an Authority often associated with the Christian church in the West, many people experience the question of what one should do as a burden. As an unlamented Paternal Authority wanes, anxiety about happiness and fulfilment takes its place. The new Superego command is to enjoy oneself, be the best one can be, stay fit, be loved, and be attractive. Consequently, we turn to an army of experts and coaches eager to provide us with ‘rules for living’. And the appetite for moral judgment hasn’t left us either: yet more rules about what one ought to say or not say (rather than action that might change anything).

Modernity—however we define it—follows the Enlightenment. Kant described Enlightenment as the end of tutelage and the accession to maturity, with the responsibilities that come with freedom. Freedom is understood as the end of the tyranny of princes and prelates, the chance to fulfil one’s desires. However, greater knowledge of the self leads to greater doubts about those desires, and the causes of Desire itself. The  autonomy promised by Enlightenment seems compromised from the start. While Nietzsche, along with Freud, is regularly cited as the key figure in this creeping sense that the subject isn’t master in their own house, Hegel foreshadows both. For Hegel, too, there are no simple, undivided identities: we are divided subjects. Read more »

Thursday, April 10, 2025

With Apologies to Canada

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies. Those whom God has so joined together, let no man put asunder.  —John F. Kennedy addressing the Canadian Parliament, 1961

If you had to design the perfect neighbor to the United States, it would be hard to do better than Canada. Canadians speak the same language, subscribe to the ideals of democracy and human rights, have been good trading partners, and almost always support us on the international stage. Watching our foolish president try to destroy that relationship has been embarrassing and maddening. In case you’ve entirely tuned out the news—and I wouldn’t blame you if you have—Trump has threatened to make Canada the 51st state and took to calling Prime Minister Trudeau, Governor Trudeau.

I’ve always loved Canada. My first visit there was as an eleven-year old when my mother sent me up to Vancouver to live with a friend’s family for the summer. Vancouver is such a jewel of a city and Canadians are such nice people that even at that age I was appreciative of our northern neighbor.

Getting your arms around the Canadian character is not easy. There are a few stereotypes, one of them being that Canadians are polite. Guess what: in general, they are polite. But I have a sense that Canadians have two very different sides to their character, one being the pleasant law-abiding citizen, and the other represented by their raging hockey fans or their certifiably crazy world cup ski racers, once called The Crazy Canucks. To their credit, Canadians keep these two parts of their personalities in separate vaults and usually don’t mix the two. But have no doubt: behind the good manners and friendly dispositions, Canadians have a fierce side and iron will not to be trifled with. Read more »

Tuesday, March 18, 2025

How to Avoid the Eugenics Wars: Principles for Enhancement Alignment

Posted on by Kyle Munkittrick

by Kyle Munkittrick

Gemini’s “60s Psychedelic Poster of The Culture”

We’re on the cusp of The Culture. This Iain M. Banks series has recently replaced Star Trek as the lodestar for The Future We Want. Why? Because it shows us how good the future can be with AI. Critically, both fictions also offer key lessons about the threat and promise of human enhancement: it is coming, it could be amazing, but first it will be contentious, and if we’re not ready, we’ll suffer its worst harms and get few of its best benefits. We want The Culture and to get there, we need to take Star Trek seriously.

In his excellent essay for Arena Dean Ball asked, in essence, “Where are the clearly articulated benefits of a world with AI? Why is it worth all this risk?” The answer to Ball is, “Go read The Culture. Start with The Player of Games.” Imagining a peaceful, prosperous, and pluralistic post-scarcity utopia that is that way because it is run by benevolent ASI (called ‘Minds’) is difficult. Imagining a world where AI has so ‘solved’ biological and medical science so completely that its citizens are fundamentally post-human is even more so. The vision of The Culture is so grand and so alien that it takes a series of novels, following the daily lives of the protagonists, to begin to grasp just how incredible the future with AI could be.

In Star Trek, however, though we can reach the stars, medical technology seems not much advanced beyond that of the 20th century. It’s not due to a limitation of science, but of society. Before reaching the stars, humans endured the Eugenics Wars—a global conflict arising from first the reckless pursuit of, then catastrophic backlash to and banning of, human enhancement technologies. Think, ‘The Butlerian Jihad, but for biology.’

Both pieces of fiction are important because of what is very likely about to happen. In his 15,000-word manifesto Machines of Loving Grace, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei bolds one, and only one, paragraph:

“[M]y basic prediction is that AI-enabled biology and medicine will allow us to compress the progress that human biologists would have achieved over the next 50-100 years into 5-10 years. I’ll refer to this as the “compressed 21st century”: the idea that after powerful AI is developed, we will in a few years make all the progress in biology and medicine that we would have made in the whole 21st century.”

Let’s call this ~60% year-over-year acceleration of progress the “BOOM (Biological Orders of Magnitude) Decade” (2025-2035). To ‘feel the BOOM’, imagine going from discovering antibiotics (~1930) to all the medical technology we have today (IVF, MRI, GLP-1s) by 1940. People would freak out, to put it mildly. Society needs frameworks and mental models to be able to absorb and adjust to change at that speed. Just as AI alignment principles guided AI development, we urgently need enhancement alignment principles to guide the coming biological revolution. Without AI alignment, we risked creating Skynet or the Paperclip Optimizer; without enhancement alignment, we risk the Eugenics Wars—either through reckless implementation or through panicked prohibition that prevents beneficial technologies.

In preparation for the BOOM, I propose a set of principles for human enhancement technologies (HETs) as a starting point for the conversation and as fodder for consideration by both the humans and the AI who will be building these biological and medical technologies. Read more »

Friday, March 14, 2025

Salting the Earth and the Vandalism of America

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Elon Musk

To tear something down is infinitely easier than building something of benefit or beauty. Constructing an elegant house that will last through the ages, can take years.  From a dream, to design, to approvals, to construction means gobs of money, skilled designers, and dedicated builders. When you see that handsome house perched just so on a hill, with its cedar siding, cased windows, and tidy balconies, know that dozens of men and women labored and strove to get it just right—hundreds of mornings planning, sawing, hammering, painting, plumbing and polishing.

But give me a forty-ton excavator and a couple of dump trucks, and I will demolish that house and clear the site in one day. To a person of evil intent and ill mind, tearing down so much effort in so little time will be a thrill.

That’s what makes vandalism so attractive to people with festering resentments. Destroying something precious to someone else in the dark of the night is the sort of sugar rush that thrills degenerates.

When the richest man in the world takes hammer and tongs to our government and delights in tearing down agencies central to our economy, farms, public health, environment, and foreign policy—when a man-child of his accidental consequence recklessly fires thousands of public employees without knowing the first thing about government, it’s time for anyone who does love this country to stand up and call out a flat NO!

Watching Elon Musk with his strange gothic uniforms of black jackets, t-shirts and ball caps, and reading his inane tweets sprinkled with juvenile humor, brings to mind a deeply insecure adolescent. And yet, that puffed-up adolescent is tearing apart the lives of thousands of Americans directly, and millions of people worldwide as a consequence. Read more »

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Lickspittles, Bootlickers, and Heroes: Our National Journey

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Most of the “better sort” were not genuine Sons of Liberty at all, but timid sycophants, pliant instruments of despotism… —Carl Lotus Becker

It doesn’t take a lot of effort to be a bootlicker. Find a boss or someone with the personality of a petty tyrant, sidle up to them, subjugate yourself, and find something flattering to say. Tell them they’re handsome or pretty, strong or smart, and make sweet noises when they trot out their ideas. Literature and history are riddled with bootlickers: Thomas Cromwell, the advisor to Henry VIII, Polonius in Hamlet, Mr. Collins in Pride and Predjudice, and of course Uriah Heep in David Copperfield.

There are some good words to describe these traits: sycophant, kiss-ass, toady, lackey, yes-man. One of my favorites is the word oleaginous, derived from oleum. It means oily and one of the best examples of this quality is the senator from the oil state, Ted Cruz. That man is oilier than the Permian Basin—oilier than thou!

There is something repulsive about lickspittles, especially when all the licking is being done for political purposes. It’s repulsive when we see it in others and it’s repulsive when we see it in ourselves It has to do with the lack of sincerity and the self-abasement required to really butter someone up. In the animal world, it’s rolling onto your back and exposing the vulnerable stomach and throat—saying I am not a threat.

We have a political class nowadays that is more subservient and submissive than the most beta dogs in a pack of golden retrievers. Most of them live in Washington DC and are Republicans. They are fully grown men and women, some in their autumnal years, still desperately yearning for a pat on the head or a chuck under the chin by President Trump. You see them crowding around him when he signs a bill, straining forward like children and batting their eyes with pick-me, pick-me smiles.

There are dozens of theories about a nation as a whole and individuals as separate beings willing to bow and scrape to an authoritarian figure. Hannah Arendt suggested that loneliness had a lot to do with it. She distinguished loneliness from solitude, the former being isolating and disempowering, the latter being a desirable state to think and reflect and meditate on things. Most of us know the paradox of feeling very lonely in certain crowds or with certain people and not lonely at all on our own in the right setting. Read more »

Thursday, February 6, 2025

Why Summer Camp Matters, Even In Winter, Part Two—The Memoir Continues

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

The place where I learned the most about diversity, equity and inclusion was not at my liberal summer camp in New York’s Catskills mountains—but at a pig farm in northern Kansas. To be fair, if it wasn’t for camp, I never would have pitched a tent under the big sky of the Jensby farm.

A dining hall at a Web-Met Camp
A dining hall at a Wel-Met Camp.

I was there because, as my last chapter noted, Wel-Met, my summer sleep away camp, had a free-range philosophy. Campers planned their own activities, hiked into the woods for sleepovers and—when older—lived in tents rather than bunks. This was a preparation for the next step: Cross-country camping trips. Wel-Met ran six of these each summer and in the 1960s they all stopped at the farm of Clarence and Florence Jensby. The Jensbys welcomed all with open arms—campers and returning counselors alike. (I arrived three times). On the surface, we could not have been more different. Or in today’s lingo, more diverse. Most of us were Jewish New Yorkers. The Jensbys were Christian midwesterners.

It did not matter. With great panache, the Jensbys introduced us to their operation and their pigs who, well, smelled like pigs. This came as a surprise to the city slickers. Mrs. Jensby demonstrated, with schoolteacher-like skills, how to prepare a live chicken for dinner. Trip after trip, year after year, she showed city kids how she would break the chicken’s neck, pluck the feathers, yank out the guts and prepare it for cooking. Some campers were horrified. I saw her humanity. I saw her as a farmer who worked quickly to minimize suffering. Today, when I view pictures of chickens raised in crowded coops, not free-range—or hormone or antibiotic free—I think of how Mrs. Jensby did it better.

I also have a memory of Mrs. Jensby dressed up, wearing her good shoes and leaving the farm—perhaps for church. I wondered how she did this without stepping on any animal droppings. I wondered how she had transformed herself so quickly from farm wife in a blood-stained apron to a “proper” lady. A lifelong lesson: there is more to a person than you see at first. Read more »

Monday, January 13, 2025

Hard Times and The Forgotten Man: Remembering the 1930s

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
—Langston Hughes

Dust Bowl, Oklahoma

The years from 1930 to 1945 were some of the most trying times in American history. Our forebears suffered close to ten years of The Great Depression and then, with next to no pause, were thrust into five years of World War II. It’s no wonder that so many men and women of that generation who survived those struggles came away with a quiet stoicism and other-worldly courage. I have a nostalgia for a time I never saw because I knew many of the people who were shaped by those times, and I miss them.

George Orwell said, “Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” That’s one affliction I don’t suffer from. I consider the generation that weathered The Great Depression and World War II to be, for the most part, a cut above any generation since. I don’t think it was necessarily their innate character, but rather their mettle shaped by the age.

Having read a number of letters written to the White House during The Great Depression (from a wonderful collection in Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man by Robert S. McElvaine), I know that the times led to much bitterness and suffering. How could it not? But a tender humility and reserve also runs through much of the correspondence. Many of the writers address the president or first lady as if they were intimate family who might somehow wrangle them a job or free them from their desperate situation. One thirty-one-year-old woman expecting a baby writes,

Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: I know you are overburdened with requests for help and if my plea cannot be recognized, I’ll understand it is because you have so many others, all of them worthy…. We thought surely our dreams of a family could come true. Then the work ended and like “The best laid plans of mice and men” our hopes were crushed again.

A widow with a fourteen-year-old son writes to Eleanor Roosevelt asking if she has a spare coat to get through the winter and even offers to pay for postage if the first lady will send her one. A woman with seven children and just sixty-five cents to her name writes to Franklin Roosevelt asking for help to feed children too proud to beg for lunch.

In reading these letters, it’s clear that many of the writers truly believed Eleanor or Franklin would actually send them a winter coat or give them a job. Read more »

Monday, December 9, 2024

Why Summer Camp Matters, Even In Winter, Part One—The Memoir Continues

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin
Photo from https://wel-metcamps.com/

by Barbara Fischkin

People who have never been to sleepaway camp, don’t get it. They tease me when I speak about memories that are decades old, as if I am recalling a past life that never happened. They find it strange that I view my many years at camp as not merely summer vacations but as forces that helped to make me who I am. These camp memories visit me more deeply when the winter sky sets early, fooling me into believing that 4:30 pm is really past midnight. If I am roaming, I wonder if it is already time to go home. I linger. Yes, my summer camp taught me to roam physically—and in my imagination. It was free and free-range.

I’ll tarry briefly where many good tales begin. In the middle: My teenage years, as a camp clerk and then as babysitter for a camp director and finally, as a counselor. These summer jobs were woefully underpaid. But the fringe benefits were great: Opportunities to break rules that were often not enforced, anyway.

I smoked my first joint, out in the open, sitting with friends on a large rock by the lake, right after a late summer sunset. If caught by a camp director, we would have been fired. I don’t think they wanted to catch us. They were somewhere else, smoking their own joints. Romance, along with pot, seemed to be part of the plan for young employees, particularly in regard to the kitchen boys over whom we swooned. My camp, socialist at its core and run by lefty social workers, did not believe in waiters. To check out a kitchen boy, campers and staff had to go to one of several pantries to pick up or deliver food, plates and utensils. A chore made joyful.

 In regard to specific romance, I remember the night I spent with a slightly older male counselor, sleeping with him in his tent—and not doing much more than sleeping. (Maybe it was the pot). Before dawn I shoved him awake and said: “I have to go, I will get into trouble.” He laughed a sleepy laugh, perhaps a stoner laugh and said: “Barbara,  this is Wel-Met. Nobody gets in trouble for sleeping with someone.” Read more »

Monday, November 4, 2024

The Line: AI And The Future Of Personhood

Posted on by Mark DeLong

by Mark R. DeLong

The cover of The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood by James Boyle shows a human head-shaped form in deep blue with a lattice of white lines connecting white dots, like a net or a network. A turquoise background with vertical white lines glows behind the featureless head. In the middle of the image, the title and the author's name are listed in horizontal yellow bars. The typeface is sans serif, with the title spelled in all capital letters.
Cover of The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood by James Boyle. The MIT Press and the Duke University TOME program have released the book using a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA license. The book is free to download and to reissue, augment, or alter following the license requirements. It can be downloaded here: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15408.001.0001.

Duke law professor James Boyle said an article on AI personhood gave him some trouble. When he circulated it over a decade ago, he recalled, “Most of the law professors and judges who read it were polite enough to say the arguments were thought provoking, but they clearly thought the topic was the purest kind of science fiction, idle speculation devoid of any practical implication in our lifetimes.” Written in 2010, the article, “Endowed by Their Creator?: The Future of Constitutional Personhood,” made its way online in March 2011 and appeared in print later that year. Now, thirteen years later, Boyle’s “science fiction” of personhood has shed enough fiction and fantasy to become worryingly plausible, and Boyle has refined and expanded his ideas in that 2011 article into a new thoughtful and compelling book.

In the garb of Large Language Models and Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence has shocked us with their uncanny fluency, even though we “know” that under the hood the sentences come from clanky computerized mechanisms, a twenty-first century version of the Mechanical Turk. ChatGPT’s language displays only the utterance of a “stochastic parrot,” to use Emily Bender’s label. Yet, despite knowing the absence of a GPT’ed self or computerized consciousness, we can’t help but be amazed or even a tad threatened when an amiable ChatGPT, Gemini, or other chatbot responds to our “prompt” with (mostly) clear prose. We might even fantasize that there’s a person in there, somewhere.

Boyle’s new book, The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood (The MIT Press, 2024) forecasts contours of arguments, both legal and moral, that are likely to trace new boundaries of personhood. “There is a line,” he writes in his introduction. “It is a line that separates persons—entities with moral and legal rights—from nonpersons, things, animals, machines—stuff we can buy, sell, or destroy. In moral and legal terms, it is the line between subject and object.”

The line, Boyle claims, will be redrawn. Freshly, probably incessantly, argued. Messily plotted and retraced. Read more »

Monday, July 29, 2024

Chess, Greasy Pigs, and American Politics

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

When eating an elephant take one bite at a time. ––Creighton Abrams

In the game of chess, some of the greats will concede their most valuable pieces for a superior position on the board. In a 1994 game against the grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik, Gary Kasparov sacrificed his queen early in the game with a move that made no sense to a middling chess player like me. But a few moves later Kasparov won control of the center board and marched his pieces into an unstoppable array. Despite some desperate work to evade Kasparov’s scheme, Kramnik’s king was isolated and then trapped into checkmate by a rook and a knight.

I like to think that President Biden played a bit of Kasparovian chess in delaying his withdrawal from the November election until after the Republican convention in Milwaukee. I don’t know if there’s any truth to my fantasy, but in many ways the timing was perfect. The entire Trump campaign was centered around defeating an aging president who was showing alarming signs of mental decline. Despite some real accomplishments like the passage of the infrastructure bill and multiple wins for conservation of the natural world, Biden appeared to be headed for defeat. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump galvanized an already cultish following and the Democratic Party was in the doldrums—vanquished and confused.

Oh what a difference a week makes!

At this writing, no one yet knows who the Democratic nominee will be now that Biden has withdrawn from the race, and frankly a lot of us aren’t that choosy as long as he or she has a pulse and beats Donald Trump in November. It appears that Kamala Harris will be chosen and money—the singular expression of enthusiasm in American politics—is rushing in like a storm. Harris raised more than $80 million in just 24 hours. Read more »

Monday, April 8, 2024

Third Places and American Libraries

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book…  —President Dwight Eisenhower, 1953

Andrew Carnegie

The other day I stopped in at one of those coworking spaces to see if it would be worth joining in an effort to increase my productivity. Productivity, in my case, is a fancy word to describe getting my taxes done on time, answering a few emails, staying atop some small businesses, and doing a little writing. I’m not exactly a threat to mainland China.

Unfortunately the place I visited had all the charm of a gulag in far east Russia, with poor lighting, and about four pale characters staring at their computer screens as if they could see the eternal void in the universe and had a longing to visit. No thanks.

It did get me thinking about “third places,” and libraries in particular. I believe the term, third place, was coined by the writer Ray Oldenburg in his book The Great Good Place. First places are our homes, second places are where we work, and third places are where we go to get relief from the first and second places. They include churches, libraries, pubs, cafes, parks, gyms, and clubs.

My second place is a beautiful ranch in Colorado, so I have little to complain about, but when it comes to the close work of being on a computer, I really value third places. Scholars have described Oldenburg’s third place as having eight features including neutrality, leveling qualities, accommodation, a low profile, and a sense of home. In short, it’s a place that is welcoming, not fancy, free of social hierarchies, free of dues, and imparts no obligation to be there. That perfectly describes American libraries, one of our greatest institutions. Read more »

Monday, March 4, 2024

On War: A St. Patrick’s Day Offering

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

My 1985 photo of the priest who helped me to sneak into Armagh Jail, Father Raymond Murray: Jail chaplain, with former inmate Catherine Moore.

I arrived in Ireland in the mid-1980s to cover the seemingly intractable bloody conflict colloquially known as “The Troubles.” I studied up on materiel: Armalite rifles, homemade fertilizer bombs, the plastic bullets protestors ducked. And on the glossary of local politics: Loyalists were mostly Protestants who wanted to remain British citizens; Republicans were mostly Catholics who yearned for a united Irish nation. I interviewed people on both sides of the conflict but more women than men. I wanted to make their voices heard in the United States.

I was taken by one issue that had already created international headlines—the strip searches of female political prisoners.

But the stories I read did not quote the women who were being strip searched. They quoted politicians and  sociologists instead of the women themselves. The stories said the policy was routine, part of the process of getting inmates out of civilian clothes and into prisoner uniforms. Not true. This was actually a well-conceived British military psychological operation to humiliate the women, a technique intended to “break” the women.

I decided that the only way to write about this was to getting inside the 100-year-old stone walls of Her Majesty’s Prison Armagh—and to talk to the women directly.

But to get in, even to speak to only one woman, I had to lie. I could not say I was a reporter. I had to say I was a cousin, visiting from the states. The Northern Ireland Office, run by dutiful Protestant colonists controlled by the British, kept the press out. Perpetrators of abuse do not like publicity. Now, as St. Patrick’s Day approaches, and two larger wars rage—wars that unlike the one in Ireland threaten us all—my mind keeps racing back to what is better known as “Armagh Jail.” Read more »

Monday, February 12, 2024

Orange Creamsicles: Facing the Idiotic Within our Borders

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Trump Rally

In fiction, there is one story that never gets old: the good man or good woman who is imprisoned or abused, but through strength of character and the force of justice retakes their rightful place in the world. It can be the story of a woman violated by a man or degraded by her envious sisters, a giant of a man lashed down by Lilliputians, a patriot wrongly accused of a crime he didn’t commit or an entire town poisoned by the effluence of a shameless company.

What we love about these stories is the painful sense of injustice followed by a courageous walk to redemption. The dirtier the crime against our hero, the more delicious his or her comeback.

America is deep in the midst of this story. What we love about this country—its possibility to reinvent itself, its original aspiring words about freedom and equality, its grand universities, its thousands of life-changing inventions, its artists and scientists—is in the midst of being degraded and defiled by a bunch of craven, shrill, fake patriots. They’re called MAGATS.

Like many Americans, I tried hard to understand their complaints about the world after Donald Trump got elected in 2016. I read books and articles about how America’s rural states were ignored, about how the flyover states were being left behind, and about how the coastal elites were conspiring to create socialism under a deep state. I’m a bit of an empath so I really tried to walk in the MAGAT moccasins.

I took consideration of the fact that it’s really hard, if not impossible, to lead the old American life of raising a family on one income. I took consideration of the increasing disparities of income between the bottom quintile and the top one percent. Some of the complaints are legitimate, but MAGAT politicians show little interest in alleviating those things and mostly bring forth legislation that makes things worse. Read more »