by David Hoyt

It’s hard to love the prairie. If you love it, you tend to be loving a memory of something you’ve hardly known, or a vision of something you dream might return some day, like the American Bison. Or maybe your love is more profound, in that you love it for what is beneath the surface – the oceanic swell of the ground, the large simplicity of the horizon, or the wild solitude of its winters. Here and there it pulses with a latent sense of life, thrumming beneath the emptiness of regimented fields, giant grain elevators, and wind turbines – like a flooded spring field that attracts a thousand ducks from out of nowhere.

It’s hard to love the prairie because there’s almost nothing left of it. Few landscapes of continental scale have been so quickly and comprehensively dismantled. In European colonial settler imaginations, hardly had the prairie appeared before them than it was plowed under. Some of those who were fortunate enough to encounter it in its wild state, such as Audubon, reported a sort of ecological Stendhal syndrome, a prairie-induced aesthetic exhaustion from exposure to boundless forbs, grasses, and wildlife. Despite this powerful effect, there simply wasn’t sufficient time for the landscape to seep into the collective settler consciousness before it was harnessed to agriculture, taking any passing familiarity with its flora and fauna and rhythms of life away with it. Within little more than a generation of settlement came the plow, then barbed wire, and little more than a generation after that, the Dust Bowl. There really is little sense of what it was like before all the corn.

What remains, at least in the Corn Belt states, are remnants. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Malcolm Murray

In forecasting the evolution of AI, we are rapidly losing the middle. The outcomes are diverging to the extent that it no longer makes sense to think about “an average timeline” or “average outcomes”. Many people are now tracking prediction markets for when “AGI” will arrive. The current Metaculus prediction is for July 2032. But nothing will happen in July 2032 specifically. The median is irrelevant. Similarly, the average outcome on the economy from advanced AI might be an increase in GDP growth by 8%. But it is looking much more likely that we will either have unprecedented 15% annual growth or continue on the long-term trajectory of 2%. Averaging across two worlds that cannot exist does not create a realistic world. It is like the old joke of how the average income changes when Bill Gates walks into the bar. The average income might have gone to a billion each, but that does not mean that any one specific person in the bar has one billion.

What matters is the distribution, not point estimates. Toby Ord recently took a step in this direction and discussed using broad timelines for transformative AI (instead of short or long ones), and plan for all potential outcomes across those timelines. We should probably go even further. It might not even be enough to look at one probability distribution for advanced AI, even one that is very bimodal. The outcomes might be distinct enough that we should be looking at several, completely different distributions. When one of the possible worlds includes hitherto-unimaginable characteristics such as the world economy doubling every few years, it has very little in common with other worlds.

World forecasts and object forecasts

This means we should stop looking only at median forecasts, such as the AI 2027 scenario from last year. Its authors have been at pains lately to try to explain that 2027 was the median, not the key prediction. There is no median AGI. What we should do instead is to start forecasting on two distinct levels. First, we need to forecast which world we are in, and only then, conditional on that, we forecast within each world. We can call these world forecasts and object forecasts.

This is something that LEAP does very well. This is a longitudinal AI forecasting study that I am part of. It is run by the Forecasting Research Institute. They often start with positioning different worlds (e.g. slow, medium or rapid AI evolution) and only then, conditional on that being the world we are in, we do forecasts on the relevant characteristics of that world. For example, in a rapid AI evolution world, what share of total income will go to labor vs capital, a hotly debated question. Read more »

by Laurie Sheck

1.

In his 1980 essay Walking in the City, Michel de Certeau describes looking out at Manhattan from the 110^th floor of the World Trade Center. Viewed from above, the city is “a wave of verticals. Its agitation momentarily arrested…The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes.” From that vantage point, the city lies still, unimpeded, its extremes of wealth and poverty coinciding in the vast landscape below. “To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city’s grasp. One’s body is no longer clasped by the streets.” The viewer becomes Icarus in flight or a solar Eye, in thrall of “this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more.”

But the walker in the city is subject to all sorts of contradictions and surprises. Immersed and vulnerable, they move through seemingly-endless inversions, displacements, accumulations. Footsteps unfold within time, making possible new meanings and directions.

This immersion is a form of love.

2.

Walter Benjamin put it this way: “The power of a country road is different when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by airplane….The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands.”

3.

In 1980, de Certeau could not have known the crumbled ruin the World Trade Center would become. How what seemed a place of safety and remove would become its exact opposite. In the hours after the towers were hit, I watched from my window as hundreds of people, their clothes covered in white ash, walked in a ragged line on the sidewalk below, heading to whatever home they were trying to get back to. Even now in my mind’s eye they are like sleepwalkers, everything happening in silence, as if, as I watched them, I had lost my sense of hearing. As if my senses no longer knew how to be in the world; what to do with the world. They walked holding their useless cell phones, their briefcases, their ashen coats.

In the days and weeks that followed, the air smelled of a mixture of blood and burning computers. Office papers drifted weirdly down like delicate white wings, unhurt, otherworldly. There were no cars on the streets, no mail delivery, no airplanes overhead. Each day, walking my daughter to school, we passed the checkpoint at 14^th street where at that boundary the world of cars and daily life would suddenly reappear, though tentative, furtive, estranged.

Xeroxed faces of the missing and the dead stared from lampposts and graffitied walls. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Esplanade Walks As Days Get Longer. Boston, March 2022.

Digital photograph.

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by Martin Butler

In contemporary political debate, particularly with regard to economic relations, the idea of ‘individual responsibility’ has come to encapsulate the standard critique of state regulation or state intervention. The argument goes that citizens should not be overly protected from their lack of responsibility, and that however humane a society becomes, as individuals we should live with the consequences of our actions, good or bad. According to this argument, an overly generous welfare system undermines individual responsibility: human beings have agency and should not be insulated from the real consequences of their lack of ambition, laziness or bad choices. Those that do show individual responsibility and do the right thing should be rewarded.

On the other side is the argument that individual responsibility, although real, plays a minor part in an individual’s success or failure, at least in modern western societies. Other factors, none of which are chosen, such as family background, inherited wealth, social class, upbringing, educational opportunities, generational factors, innate abilities or disabilities, luck, and so on also play their parts. According to this side of the debate it is up to society to level up an intrinsically unlevel playing field. Kant’s categorical imperative can cast light on this debate, pointing to the minimum requirements a society should work towards that would allow us to invoke the notion of individual responsibility in good faith.

Kant’s categorical imperative (first formulation) is a principle which he claims captures the essence of what it is to act ethically. It states that you should “act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law”. A ‘maxim’ here is simply a personal principle of action. For my action to be ethical I must accept that anyone else could also chose to perform this action. This outlaws what we intuitively think of as the epitome of unfair or unethical behaviour, i.e. making an exception for yourself. It cannot be one rule for you and a different rule for everyone else. An action is wrong if it cannot be universalised. A thief’s maxim of action might be ‘whenever something is needed, I steal it.’ If this was universalised, the very notion of theft itself would dissolve, since theft depends on a notion of property and ownership. If theft was universal, property rights would become meaningless, so there is something deeply self-contradictory in the idea of theft. This is the essence of its immorality. According to Kant immorality is just irrationality.

The categorical imperative is normally thought of exclusively in terms of individual moral decisions, but it can be applied to the wider issue of political and social policy. How does it relate to the question of individual responsibility? Read more »

by Azra Raza

I recently read about a man who arrived in the United States from India with just thirty dollars in his pocket and, three decades later, had become a billionaire. When asked about the most important lesson of his journey, he answered without hesitation: money matters.

Tara, the protagonist of A Splintering by Dur e Aziz Amna, learns that lesson early, though under far harsher conditions. She grows up in the soul-destroying poverty of a lower middle class family of four sisters and a brother somewhere in a remote Pakistani village, surrounded by brutality, superstition, ignorance, and a rigid patriarchal social order that consigns girls to early marriages and lives of numbing domestic repetition. Cleaning, cooking, washing, bearing children—these are not choices but destinies.

Her mother, one of the novel’s most striking figures, senses something different in Tara and insists on educating her, sparing her from household labor. It is an act of quiet rebellion. But Tara, sharp and observant, has her own ambitions. Education, for her, is not enlightenment or self-empowerment. It is escape.

With it, she secures a proposal from a middle-class urban family and seizes the opportunity. The village, with its suffocation and grime, is left behind. In the city, Tara learns quickly; watching television, studying the women around her, absorbing codes of behavior and aspiration. She adapts with startling ease.

Though she finds neither intellectual companionship nor emotional fulfillment in her husband, she builds the life she had envisioned: two children, financial stability, independence from her in-laws. She has her ugly, protruding teeth fixed, gets her tubes tied, learns to drive, finds a job and moves her nuclear family to a home of their own.

The village girl, it seems, has arrived.

I am not giving away any of the plot as all this is essentially told within the first three pages and this is where the novel truly begins. Read more »

Current Tally:

I’m out here stacking days as if it were a sport,
I’m up to twenty thousand six hundred eight.
I sweat memory. I’ve taken off my shirt,
I’m feeling great, but as I stack them up
time is growing short.

I tally what till now I’ve done.

Not far from a stack of stones
I eye the spot where I’d begun
near an arbor vitae hedge
in a shade of catalpa.

I’m looking for bona fide antiques
scented and yellow as old books.

On spines of days my curate hands
feel to find the ones with bliss-laced hours
stitched with epiphanic seams.
I come upon a few, they’re few
and far between.

The sun’s past high. The pallid moon’s
a perfect ghost of round, sentinel-still
upon a mountain ridge. I think
it might roll down.

I breathe honeysuckle and see wisteria
clutch its pole twist up and round.

I’d placed the pile with care
so as never to occlude the sun
yet carelessly have thrown
some days upon a previous one
then, too late, gone back to
square them up trying
to undo the done

by Jim Culleny
January 2010

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by Eric Feigenbaum

In a city-state that fines spitting in public, requires stores to check identification and log purchasers of chewing gum, heavily taxes alcohol and tobacco and bans durian from public transportation, one could easily think there’s little tolerance for vice.

In many ways, there’s not. Illegal gambling rings have been busted and faces severe punishments. Many a drug runner has been put to death.

But on the quiet, residential streets of the Geylang neighborhood, there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye. It would be easy to think that the relatively central neighborhood has lower property values because of its aging housing or that it wasn’t as well planned as subsequently developed parts of Singapore. In reality, prostitution explains it better.

Singapore’s moral overtones are undergirded by a certain pragmatism. Singapore’s founders decided that being a major international seaport meant prostitution could never be eradicated. And like so many vices, if they are allowed to exist in a black market, then crime and an underworld follow.

There are essentially two ways to prevent a black market: strict and intense deterrents or legalize the vice. America’s experiment with Prohibition led it to abhor the effects of a black market more than the harm mitigation strategy of keeping alcohol legal and holding people responsible for their behaviors under the influence.

Singapore decided from the get-go to go the harm mitigation route as founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew explained in his memoir, From Third World to First:

We were candid about the problems we could not solve. Vices like prostitution, gambling, drug addiction and alcoholism could only be controlled, not eradicated. Singapore’s history as a seaport meant prostitution had to be managed and confined to certain areas of the city where the women were given regular health checks. Gambling was impossible to suppress. It was an addiction Chinese migrants had carried with them wherever they settled. But we had eliminated the triads or secret societies and broken up organized crime.

So quiet Geylang became the almost invisible epicenter of prostitution. There are no ladies of the night on the street, no neon signs, certainly no pimps. Just unmarked doorways with blackout film – similar to an Asian massage parlor. Not only is it not seedy, if you didn’t know, you probably would never notice. Read more »

by William Benzon

OpenAI released GPT-3 in June of 2020, though not to the general public. Those who had access to it were variously impressed or stunned: Is this it? Is AI really coming at long last? Though I was not in the direct access circle, I had indirect access and was deeply impressed, using that access in an interview with Hollis Robbins that I published in 3QD on July 20, 2020: An Electric Conversation with Hollis Robbins on the Black Sonnet Tradition, Progress, and AI, with Guest Appearances by Marcus Christian and GPT-3. That August I issued a working paper: GPT-3: Waterloo or Rubicon? Here be Dragons. I stuck this at the top of the first page:

GPT-3 is a significant achievement.

But I fear the community that has created it may, like other communities have done before – machine translation in the mid-1960s, symbolic computing in the mid-1980s – triumphantly walk over the edge of a cliff and find itself standing proudly in mid-air.

This is not necessary and certainly not inevitable.

As far as I can tell, the AI industry is now well out over the edge of that cliff. While I see prospects for a brilliant and productive long-term future, I fear that the next decade or two will be chaotic.

Here’s how ChatGPT put it to me in a recent dialog:

The engineering success is real. LLMs [large language models] and related systems have given us access to a new conceptual continent. They work, and at extraordinary scale. But the institutional failure lies in the monoculture: too much intellectual, financial, and training-path dependence on one family of architectures and one style of thought about intelligence. The result is that we are building out the utility before we have adequately explored the space of possible successor technologies or developed the conceptual tools needed to understand what these systems are revealing about language, cognition, and cultural structure.

The paradox we are facing, then, is that the unexpected and extravagant success of the transformer technology has resulted in a furious maelstrom of entrepreneurial, investment, and commercial activity that may inhibit the further development of that technology. Read more »

by Michael Liss

For several centuries, as we moved from farm to city, the human ear has engaged in a ceaseless battle against the noise caused by human ingenuity.

The ears are losing. It is loud out there, even in my bucolic and serene New York City. Just getting around can be sonically disruptive. Trucks, especially the multi-axel ones that go through 10 forward gears while they bang-bang-bang over winter-roughed asphalt. Buses, whether newer ones with their air brakes, pneumatic doors, and kneels, or the older version tricked out with diesel engines that sound like an aging warthog with catarrh. Cars—the ones driven by those whose keen sense of anticipation allows them to lean on their horns before the light turns green or who have retrofitted their sound or exhaust system to resemble either a mobile disco or a shooting gallery (and sometimes both).

Want to see New Yorkers come together? Place on the ballot a referendum mandating three days in the stocks for the worst of the worst. Second offenders must limit themselves to Smart Cars with dealer-installed elevator music.

What about our glorious Central Park? Surely, it’s largely carless (except for the odd official vehicle or ambulance)? Yes, it is a place where my running buddies and I can thock-thock, scrape-scrape, wheeze-wheeze to our ears’ delight, but that doesn’t make it intrusion free. Not only does it harbor lurking delivery guys in spacesuits and oven mitts, but it’s also home to high-speed pelotons shouting out the occasional “ON YOUR RIGHT!!!” Those guys flashing the upscale gear and first-class lungpower don’t have a lot of patience for the hapless pedestrian or runner in or out of his designated lane.

OK, that’s way too much complaining about a place that gives me so much satisfaction. The fact is we need quiet, and we need sound. Most of all, we need to communicate. It’s a human thing to do. It also may be a Neanderthalic thing to do. According to the all-knowing AI, musical instruments like the flute have been around for at least 40,000 to 50,000 years.

What’s the perfect “pH” for sound and silence? Surely, it’s based on the idiosyncratic needs of both the person and the community.

The play (and movie) Children of a Lesser God gets at this. Read more »

One end of the new pedestrian bridge across the river Eisack in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Rafaël Newman

Zurich’s electorate went to the polls earlier this month on an Abstimmungstag, or “voting day”, to choose its new city parliament, the Gemeinderat; its new city council, the Stadtrat; and its new mayor, known in Zurich as the Stadtpräsident*in, or Stapi. The Gemeinderat, with 125 seats, is the largest municipal legislature in Switzerland, since Zurich is the country’s largest city; the Stadtrat, made up of nine members, each the head of a Departement or ministry, is Zurich’s government; and the Stapi, who is also a member of the Stadtrat, presides over meetings of the council, manages the city’s administration, and represents Zurich in the Swiss capital, and internationally.

The voters this month returned a Stadtrat with a composition much like that of the outgoing, already left-leaning executive, in which Zurich’s main parties were represented roughly in proportion to their citywide share of support, now however with a slight further shift to the political left. Of the nine newly elected (or re-elected) members, four belong to the Socialist Party (SP), three to the Greens, who are traditionally allies of the SP, one to the Green Liberal Party (GLP), representatives of a more business-oriented ecological movement, and one to the Free Democratic Party (FDP), the center-right party that usually views itself as the generator of Switzerland’s “natural” leaders, having formed governments at the national level from the Confederation’s earliest days. Zurich’s leftward shift this cycle came with one of the two seats on the city council held by the FDP in the previous period being won by the Greens, who had brought in a candidate with name recognition and considerable experience in Bern explicitly to “attack” that FDP seat. The Bürgerliche or center-right parties—the FDP and GLP—have thus now had their minority in Zurich’s government further eroded, from three to two seats out of nine.

The Gemeinderat also saw an increase in seats for parties on the left of the spectrum, with the SP the big winner in virtually all city districts, and the SVP, Switzerland’s reactionary right-wingers and the country’s most popular party, remaining very much in the minority at the Zurich city level.

As for the Stapi, Raphael Golta, the SP candidate, was comfortably elected to the Stadtrat as an incumbent (he had headed the Sozialdepartement during the previous legislature) but faces a runoff election for mayor in May, having failed to achieve the required absolute majority in the mayoral race. But unless another member of the Stadtrat chooses to run against him—an unlikely scenario—Golta’s election as Stapi, and the maintenance of the mayor’s office in SP hands, is all but certain Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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