by William Benzon

I have been thinking about the culture of AI existential risk (AI Doom) for some time now. I have already written about it as a cult phenomenon, nor am I the only one. But I that’s rather thin. While I still believe it to be true, it explains nothing. It’s just a matter of slapping on a label and letting it go at that.

While I am still unable to explain the phenomenon – culture and society are enormously complex: Just what would it take to explain AI Doom culture? – I now believe that “counter culture” is a much more accurate label than “cult.” In using that label I am deliberately evoking the counter culture of the 1960s and 1970s: LSD, Timothy Leary, rock and roll (The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, and on and on), happenings and be-ins, bell bottoms and love beads, the Maharishi, patchouli, communes…all of it, the whole glorious, confused gaggle of humanity. I was an eager observer and fellow traveler. While I did tune in and turn on, I never dropped out. I became a ronin scholar with broad interests in the human mind and culture.

I suppose that “Rationalist” is the closest thing this community has as a name for itself. Where psychedelic experience was at the heart of the old counter culture, Bayesian reasoning seems to be at the heart of this counter culture. Where the old counter culture dreamed of a coming Aquarian Age of peace, love, and happiness, this one fears the destruction of humanity by a super-intelligent AI and seeks to prevent it by figuring out how to align AIs with human values.

I’ll leave Bayesian reasoning to others. I’m interested in AI Doom. But to begin understanding that we must investigate what a post-structuralist culture critic would call the discourse or perhaps the ideology of intelligence. To that end I begin with a look at Adrian Monk, a fictional detective who exemplifies a certain trope through which our culture struggles with extreme brilliance. Then I take up the emergence of intelligence testing in the late 19th century and the reification of intelligence in a number, one’s IQ. In the middle of the 20th century the discourse of intelligence moved to the quest for artificial intelligence. With that we are at last ready to think about artificial x-risk (as it is called, “x” for “existential”).

This is going to take a while. Pull up a comfortable chair, turn on a reading light, perhaps get a plate of nachos and some tea, or scotch – heck, maybe roll a joint, it’s legal these days, at least in some places – and read.

Read more »

by R. Passov

In 2010, the company for which I was then Treasurer was invited to send me to China. The purpose of the trip was to meet with senior members of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) as well as the Shanghai stock exchange as a prelude to becoming the first US company to issue bonds to be traded on the Shanghai exchange.

Before discovering that there were numerous companies in line to be ‘first’ I met with a senior official of the NDRC. Along with my travel companion, a Chinese national who had relocated to New Jersey and worked on my team, I arrived at a palatial office exactly at the right time, only to wait perhaps as along as 45 minutes, maybe longer.

Eventually my companion and I were escorted into a cavernous conference room, in the center of which was an impossibly long table surrounded by as many as 40 high-backed, elaborately upholstered chairs. We were instructed to take seats away from the table against a far wall. After more waiting, a senior official entered the room followed by two assistants and proceeded to a chair at the very center of the table.

After the official was comfortably seated we were instructed by his assistants to move to the table and occupy the two seats directly across. One of the assistants left and our host began the meeting.

Introductions were short. The NDRC official knew who we were, and perhaps a lot more. I only knew that he was a Vice Chairman and according to my colleague ‘very, very senior.’ The Vice Chairman was politely condescending and direct: When, he wanted to know, would my company be able to commit to a securities offering. Read more »

by Bill Murray

This month’s travel column includes suspiciously little travel – just two short walks, to a courthouse and a jailhouse. I live in Atlanta, where quite a bit of national politics has happened in those two buildings these last few weeks.

I walked downtown a couple of weeks ago when things were going on down there that you wouldn’t call festive, August is too hot for festive, but they were purposeful, and expectations ran high. Peoples’ opinions diverge, don’t they, but until the Trump indictments were actually handed up August 14, everybody at least agreed something important was coming and that it would shape events.

To walk from my part of town, Atlanta’s big busy Midtown, to the sprawling government complex downtown, is to walk “right down Peachtree,” as much loved Atlanta Braves baseball announcer Ernie Johnson used to say when describing a pitch right down the middle.

From Midtown you walk Atlanta’s main street a couple of miles south. There’s a dodgy block or two and then a positively anti-human overpass where noise, grit and gridlock coalesce over a squeezed together forced marriage between interstates 75 and 85. We call that the Downtown Connector.

Once that’s over you forge alongside Woodruff Park (for sixty years Robert W. Woodruff personified Coca-Cola); you are now in the heart of downtown, and continue beyond an iconic neon Coca-Cola sign and through the disused entrance to what has been, on and off again, Underground Atlanta.

After that barriers were up, roads were shut and cadres of traffic cops moved about. TV trucks staked out the Lewis R. Slayton Courthouse for a couple of weeks down there and everybody with a supporting role in presenting the Donald Trump drama, TV techs, cops, drivers, caterers, couriers and a few protesters deserved hazardous duty pay for managing in the 100 degree-plus daily heat.

Out here in the provinces these felt like important events; it seemed like purposeful people were busy with weighty affairs, even if it was only all in the service of getting one man and his associates in trouble with the law. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Shredder Self-portrait, NYC, August 2023.

Digital photograph.

by Lydia Stryk

Riding the train to the small city of Darmstadt to sleep over with a friend after a day spent at the Frankfurt Book Fair, I observed an impeccably dressed elderly gentleman sitting several rows away from me across the aisle.

He wore an elegant calf-length overcoat which men of a certain class in Germany are partial to wearing. His shoes were fine leather and shining. He was tall, with excellent posture, a full mane of white hair and the bluest of eyes, which I noted because they reminded me of my father’s eyes and because they were staring into the beyond behind me. He was in possession of a large expensive-looking wrist watch to which he turned his attention occasionally. And though I could see no evidence of a briefcase, his would have been top of the line.

He had, in fact, the air of a publisher of tasteful literary titles on his way home from a successful but tiring day at the fair. And I pictured him the sort who would have attended the fair every year without exception until the pandemic temporarily shut it down and would continue to attend, out of habit, for as long as he was able. Perhaps, he was the scion of a publishing empire, I told myself, a fitting story.

It had been a long day, and I was happy to be on the train. Nothing else about the day had been happy, so eventually my mind wandered away from the old man to my own state of affairs. I was cold and hungry and admittedly forlorn, none of this conducive to conjecture and true curiosity. I closed my eyes.

And that is when a certain commotion broke out on the until-that-moment quiet and peaceable train. Concerned women’s voices could be heard, and I opened my eyes to find the concern centered around the elegant elderly man. My station was approaching and though readying to disembark, I was able to make out the following: The elderly gentleman had apparently turned to his seat companion and asked her where the train was heading and if she could tell him where he was. Upon questioning, it became clear that he did not know where he wanted to go. The literary lion of my imagination had presumably boarded a train with no direction or purpose and was lost. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Tim Sommers

Back in June, Dr. Peter J. Hotez, an expert on neglected tropical diseases and vaccines, made a splash when he categorically refused to participate in a public debate on vaccines with vaccine-denier Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

Dr. Hotez had been on Rogan’s show before, more than once, and said he would go on again – but not to debate. Among those “urging” him (to put it politely) to do so were Rogan (who offered him $100,000 dollars), Elon Musk (the richest man in the world) who said that Dr. Hotez is “afraid of a public debate because he knows he’s wrong,” a social media mob of thousands, and finally a pair of stalkers arrested outside his home.

Why didn’t Dr. Hotez just do the debate? I don’t know. But I think it’s because he knows that experts should not participate in public debates against nonexperts.

Maybe, I should mention why I feel qualified to address this topic. I participated in competitive academic and public debates, of various sorts, as a debater, a judge, and a coach for ten years. I have used debate to teach philosophy courses, and have written four academic papers on how to make academic debate more relevant to teaching and scholarship.

So, here we go. Top ten reasons experts should not debate nonexperts in public debates. Read more »

by Joseph Carter Milholland

In my last column, I wrote about the interconnectedness of the literary canon. My argument was that canonical books are best read in the context of other canonical books – that we only fully appreciate a great work of literature when we also appreciate the other great works it is inextricably bound to – both the books that influenced it, and the books it influenced.

I will admit that this argument can lead one astray: if applied improperly, we lose sight of individual authors and individual works, and only focus on the narrative of literary history. Worse yet, we will arbitrarily force certain books to conform to our expectations of the canon, instead of reading them on their own terms. I do not think that there is anything in what I proposed that would necessarily lead to this kind of reading, but it is a very easy mistake to make (and one I will confess to having made in the past). To avoid making this mistake, I will now propose a complementary method for reading the canon: to seek out and understand the difference between what I call the “mainstream” and the “marginal.”

I am using the terms mainstream and the marginal to denote two types of literary artistry. Whenever we read a great book, there is a wide spectrum of ways in which we enjoy it: on the right end of this spectrum, we have the kinds of enjoyment that we can find in almost every great book, no matter where or when it was written; in the center is the ways in which the book reflects the finest features of a specific genre or literary tradition; and on the far left is the way in which that particular book gives us its own unique pleasures. The literary artistry that falls in the right hand end of this spectrum I call the mainstream, and the artistry on the left hand side I call the marginal. I realize this definition is abstract and somewhat cumbersome, so throughout this essay I will supply examples that I think better illuminate what I am getting at. My first example: the catharsis we experience at the end of great tragedy is an example of mainstream artistry; the caesura in Anglo-Saxon verse is an example of marginal artistry.

Some more clarifications are in order. Read more »

Shadow of red wine on tablecloth.

by Steve Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan

Harry Frankfurt, who died of congestive heart failure this July, was a rare academic philosopher whose work managed to shape popular discourse. During the Trump years, his explication of bullshit became a much used lens through which to view Trump’s post-truth political rhetoric, eventually becoming deeply associated with liberal politics.

Ironically, the original target of Frankfurt’s argument was an earlier “post-truth” movement: postmodernism, which became the heart of liberal political correctness in the 1980s and 1990s. Interestingly, that shift from a liberal to a conservative target illustrates the way in which postmodern machinery has infiltrated politics.

On “On Bullshit”

Frankfurt had an illustrious career as a philosopher, but his immortality rests on a cute and clever argument he published in his most famous piece, “On Bullshit.” In it, Frankfurt distinguishes between lying and bullshitting. Liars intentionally deceive, believing they know the truth and working to keep ownership of it to themselves. Bullshitters, on the other hand, are perfectly happy to convey the truth… as long as doing so serves their pragmatic rhetorical goals. Bullshitters want you to believe something and are comfortable using either truth OR lies to shape your views. Read more »

by Richard Farr

Early in life, when a child’s tender ear is supposed to be protected from blasphemy, I must have overheard someone say it’s only a game. 

I went to the kind of English boarding school at which rugby, patriotism and Christianity were serious business, competed with each other for our attention, and sometimes threatened to blur. You sensed that on any damp Wednesday afternoon, just before we hoofed it down to the games fields, a gowned Master might seek to ramp up our enthusiasm by reminding us of Jesus Christ’s game-winning try against the Zulus at Rorke’s Drift. Or that on Sunday the chaplain in his pulpit (we were High Church Anglican, very smells and bells) might decide to hold forth interminably on the significance of the Archangel Gabriel’s surprise appearance in the changing rooms after that excellent match against the Germans at El Alamein. 

Whether in chapel or on the sideline it was all about unity, the team, the sense of heartfelt belonging. That was what mattered. And I’m not complaining. OK, I am complaining, because I hated it. But perhaps that really is a good way to socialize adolescent boys. Certainly most of them seemed to take to it like ducks or pigs to their proverbial substances. But I knew early on that I didn’t want the team, or respect it, or feel that I belonged. Unluckily for me, or perhaps not, the more they insisted the more alienated I felt from the whole scheme. Luckily for me, there were other heroic misfits.  Read more »

by David J. Lobina

So, what is the role and place of Bustan Qaraaqa within the community they are based in? What connections have they made there? What volunteering, if any, have they promoted in other farms, or in general in the West Bank? And what is their place within the worldwide permaculture network, and of course, to begin with, within the occupation of the Palestinian territories?

In last month’s entry, part of another series of articles of mine, though this time there is only two pieces, I framed the discussion in terms of the conflicts an international volunteer has to face when undertaking an activity, or indeed, an activism, in a place such as Palestine. One important conflict immediately arises, in fact, and this has to do with the realisation of the possible and very serious repercussions that one’s action may have on the native population, perhaps slightly counter-intuitively for some volunteers – they are there to be there to help by definition, are they not?

More often than not, as a matter of fact, a volunteer will be based overseas for a limited amount of time, and they will eventually return to the safety of their own country. The sort of activism that many carry out in Palestine, however, such as marching, attempts to stop demolitions and evictions, etc., whilst constituting cases that might indeed derive into serious consequences for the volunteer (police or army beatings, even gassing, sometimes arrest followed by criminal charges, and typically deportation), often pale in comparison with the repercussions for the population one is trying to assist.

It is doubtless the case that the Palestinians are particularly aware of this, and even though they do sometimes choose to encourage the participation of foreign volunteers anyway – their presence may limit the actions of the occupying forces, at least for the time they are there – this is not a choice that is taken lightly. Volunteering in a permaculture farm, with the aim to create a more sustainable and independent scenario, may appear to be world away from the more direct action activism I have just described, but some of the choices one faces in this case are not exempt of the clash between goals and visions that concerns me here, as we shall see. Read more »

Mithu Sen. Untitled, 2007.

Water color on paper.

More here, here, and here.

by Oliver Waters 

Part I of this series argued that transferring your personal identity to an artificial brain should be possible. It’s one thing however to preserve the informational content of your identity, and quite another for that content to be conscious. It would be a real shame if your new artificial self was getting about town as a zombified version of you: spending your wages, high fiving your friends – all with no inner subjective awareness.

In her book Artificial You (2019), the philosopher Susan Schneider entertains the possibility that entire alien civilisations may have taken the reckless gamble of transitioning to artificial brains and in the process inadvertently killed off their conscious minds. We would obviously prefer to avoid this nightmarish fate, and our best defence is a proper scientific theory of how consciousness works.

Many doubt that such a theory will arrive any time soon, with some claiming that consciousness is simply beyond our capacity to ever understand. There is also an intuitively compelling and popular notion that a scientific understanding of consciousness is impossible because we only have direct access to our own conscious minds. This view is largely motivated by a mistaken epistemology. Namely, an ‘empiricist’ view that the scientific process consists of building up a theoretical understanding of the world out of the components of raw, direct, sensory inputs. If you think of scientific knowledge as emerging this way, as a systematic reorganisation of what is available to your senses, then the realm of other conscious minds must forever remain out of reach.

But as the philosopher Karl Popper pointed out, ‘sensory inputs’ actually have no meaning unless they are part of a theoretical construct: observation is inextricably ‘theory-laden’. The theory doesn’t have to be a formal scientific theory, by the way. Your intuitive conception of what is going on in front of you (perceiving a sunset, for instance) counts perfectly well as ‘theorising’ in this context. Read more »