by Ali Minai

Among all the fascinating mythical creatures that populate the folklore of various cultures, one that stands out is the golem – an artificial, half-formed human-like creature that comes to us from Jewish folklore. Though the idea goes back much further, the most famous golem is the one said to have been created and brought to life by the great Rabbi Loew of Prague in the 16^th century. Stories of various other golems have also come down through history, each with its own peculiarities. Most of them, however, share some common themes. First, the golem is created to perform some specific function. For example, the golem of Prague was created to protect the Jews of the city from pogroms. Second, the golem is capable of purposive behavior, but in a limited way. And third, the golem is activated by a human master by tagging it with a word (or words), and can be deactivated by removing or changing the word.

The golem has made many appearances in literature – especially in science fiction and fantasy – and its linkage with artificial intelligence is implicit in many of these instances. Though the golem is often portrayed as not particularly intelligent, the analogy with AI is clear in that the golem can act autonomously. More pertinent here, though, is another aspect of the golem’s behavior: Obedience. The golem has no purposes of its own, and is obedient to the desires of its master – though, interestingly, golems do rebel in some stories, which makes the analogy with AI even more apt.

The End of AI

The present time is seen by many as the golden age of AI, despite the fact that other “golden ages” have come and gone up in smoke in the past. The thinking is that this time AI has truly arrived because it is more grounded and has infiltrated down to the very core of modern human life. No aspect of life today – from medicine and finance to education and entertainment – remains unaffected in some fundamental way by AI. It is built into cars, cameras, and refrigerators. It analyzes investment portfolios and consumer preferences. It recognizes faces for security and for logging into digital devices. It lies at the core of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, and many of the other technology and consumer giants that shape our lives. In these last fourteen months of the COVID pandemic, tools enabled by AI have been used extensively in data analysis, clinical practice, and pharmaceutical innovation. Indeed, so pervasive has AI become that, in many cases, it is not even noticed. We take it for granted that things in our lives – phones, watches, cameras, cars, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, and even homes – will be “smart”. Increasingly, we expect things to understand what we are saying, and in the near future, we may expect them to understand our thoughts as well. The time is also at hand when more and more of the complicated things we do, from driving to writing legal briefs, will be left to AI. In a real sense, we humans are outsourcing our minds and bodies to algorithms. No wonder some very smart people are worried that AI may make slaves of us all, while others seem to be relishing the prospect of merging with smarter machines to become gods. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Beech Bark Landscape. June, 2021.

Digital photograph.

by Charlie Huenemann

Suppose you are Father God, or Mother Nature, or Mother God, or Father Nature — doesn’t matter — and you want to raise up a crop of mammals who can reason well about what’s true. At first you think, “No problem! I’ll just ex nihilo some up in a jiffy!” but then you remember that you have resolved to build everything through the painstaking process of evolution by natural selection, which requires small random shifts over time, with every step toward your target resulting in some sort of reproductive advantage for the mammal in question. Okay; this is going to be hard.

Given what you know about reasoning and truth, the mammal is going to have to have access to some way of abstractly representing the world to itself, or language. That in turn will require a community of language users; and that will require a community of beings who fare better through cooperation. This immediately raises the problem of how to evolve beings who are both selfish and social. Selfishness requires cheating whenever you can get away with it, but sociability requires trustworthiness. Striking a workable balance between selfishness and sociability is tricky, but not impossible, as anyone who has worked in corporate knows.

As if that tension isn’t hard enough: if what you want in the end are mammals who can reason well about what’s true, that raises even more problems. Reasoning well about what is true profiteth a mammal little. It does not reliably help a mammal in its selfish strivings, since it is often better for the mammal to believe all sorts of falsehoods that give it undue confidence (hope), or steer it clear of dangers (superstition), or hate its competitors (envy and jealousy). Nor does reasoning well about what is true help the mammal in terms of sociability, since a mammal is often more sociable by being stubbornly loyal to its clan (tribalism), or by taking on risks or burdens on behalf of the group (altruism), or caring for those who offer it no advantage (selfless love). Selfishness, sociability, and rationality: pick two, but you can’t have all three. Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

I’ve always loved the name Sinus Iridum (Bay of Rainbows), which describes a beautiful semicircular dark feature on the face of the Moon. Browsing a lunar map reveals other names equally beautiful or evocative: Sinus Concordiae (Bay of Harmony) and Sinus Aestuum (Seething Bay), for example. Other lunar plains with watery names include Mare Anguis (Serpent Sea), Palus Somni (Marsh of Sleep), and Mare Imbrium (Sea of Showers). Montes Harbinger is a group of mountains in Mare Imbrium; when they’re lit by the rising sun, they herald the approach of sunrise to Aristarchus crater.

Alexander von Humboldt, who is remembered in place names all over Earth, is also recognized on the Moon. Mare Humboldtianum lies on the divide between the near and far sides of the Moon; in the 1830s, Johann Heinrich von Mädler named this lunar sea for Humboldt because it extends from the known into the unknown.

The Moon has a lake for every season (literally—Lacus Autumni and so on) and lakes for many moods: lakes of happiness, fear, dreams, hatred, and hope; also the lake of forgetfulness (who doesn’t sometimes want to take a swim there?), the lake of time, the lake of solitude.

We’ve cast a net of words over the Moon for as long as we’ve had words. Before we could see individual features in any detail, the enigmatic markings on the Moon provided a Rorschach test of sorts, a space onto which we projected our imagination. To me, the man in the Moon has always meant the sort-of face that you can see on the Moon (and its many stylized representations), but the traditional stories about the man in the Moon in Western culture often involve punishment or banishment. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mark Harvey

Mormons and Indians of the old west don’t have a nice history. In 1865, just as the Civil War ended, Ute Indians and Mormons began their own version of a seven-year war near Manti, Utah, over land, grass, cattle, and survival. It was called The Black Hawk War, named after a particularly capable Ute warrior. When the war finally ended, some 75 Mormons and several hundred Indians had been killed. The Indians put up a ferocious fight, but ultimately the Mormons prevailed and settled vast parts of Utah and Nevada.

So it’s not always easy to bring Mormons and Native Americans to the same side of a fight, but the city of Las Vegas managed to do so when it made an aggressive water grab on ranch lands and sacred grounds to its north a few years ago. With the explosive growth of the city, drought, and a limited water supply from the Colorado River, the town’s elders went looking for precious groundwater hundreds of miles to the north. What entailed was a thirty-year quest that involved big money, lots of lawyers, questionable science, wildlife biology, and sacred Indian grounds. When the Las Vegas water authority began that quest, little did they know they’d meet the wrath and fast war footing of Mormons and Indians. Ultimately the plan failed.

Las Vegas was once a tiny town in a vast desert where there lived but a few farmers and their families. The town wasn’t always short of water, primarily because at its beginning there were far fewer people and the valley where it sits had productive artesian wells. The very name, Las Vegas, means “The Meadows” in Spanish and was coined by a Spanish trading party in 1829 as it traveled to Los Angeles on the Old Spanish Trail. The party actually stopped there for water. Archeological evidence shows that Native Americans lived in the area beginning over ten thousand years ago. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

A very bad man once said that essence of politics is constituted by the distinction between friends and enemies, with enemies being the more important of the two. A very silly man later turned that around and articulated a politics of friendship. But let’s not indulge silliness.

The sense of enmity imagined by the very bad man was carefully distinguished from other kinds of opposition. It was not the rivalry of contestants trying to win a competition bounded by rules. It was not the opprobrium of judging some other to be morally unworthy. It was not the animosity bred by personal or parochial vendetta.

Pure enmity, which frames an opposition of properly Political character, consists in this: that in order for one’s enemy to create the world they desire, they must preclude the creation of the world which one desires oneself. And vice-versa. One may even like one’s enemy on a personal level, and attribute no moral fault or ill will to them. One may imagine that one’s enemy has no idea that they are an enemy. No matter. If, in realizing her ends, Alice (or the Republic of Alice) is likely to deny Bob (or the Commonwealth of Bob) the possibility of realizing his ends, they are politically oriented towards each other as enemies.

It need not be quite that dire. Many conflicts of interest and disputes can be resolved, or mitigated by some compromise. That is the stuff of much small “p” politics, the transactional and procedural grind of jockeying and brokering. It is infused with a logic of procedure and careerist ambition, and often some good faith attempts at governance. But such “normal” politics, the grist of political gabfests, is not a matter of existential or transcendental importance, despite histrionic appeals to the rubes about how some fiscal tweak will precipitate the end of civilization.

But some matters really don’t admit of compromise, at least between those people who take them to be the issue of their Political existence. Read more »

Kasheer

Saleem morukh
Salaam morukh
Habeeb morukh
Heshaam morukh

Ye shahar morukh
Ye ghaam morukh
Kasheer hund
Subh o shaam morukh

Kashmir

They killed Saleem
They killed Salaam
They killed Habeeb
They killed Heshaam

They killed this city
That town they killed —
All of Kashmir’s blood
They spilled

***

By Abdur Rehman Rahi (b. 1926), a Kashmiri poet and critic. He was awarded the Indian Sahitya Akademi Award in 1961. Translated from the original Kashmiri by Rafiq Kathwari.

by Philip Graham

It’s the middle of July, 2020, the middle of a heat wave in the middle of the pandemic, and my first day in the radiation room. I stand in socks and starchy hospital gown before the Star Trek-ish linear accelerator, waiting for the technicians to fit me on the machine’s bed-like tray for best positioning. But in my mind I’m standing four years ago in the kitchen of my new home in Rhode Island, where beside me a cable company worker tapped in a phone number for advice about how to maneuver spotty Internet service into a happy ending. While he waited for his boss to call back, he mentioned, with a hint of wonder in his voice, “Y’know, this is my first day on the job after four months.”

“Oh,” I replied, startled by this sudden personal offering. “Were you injured?”

“Yeah, my foot. So bad that the doctors said I might not walk on it again.”

“But here you are,” I observed. Then I asked the question he clearly wanted to answer. “How’d you get better?”

“Well, I read that a cat’s purr vibrates at just the right hertz cycles per second to be a healing vibration.”

This was news to me. Wondering if this fellow was simply a feline obsessive, I tested that theory by asking, “Hmm, how many cats do you own?”

“None! I don’t like cats much. So I thought, maybe there’s another way. If the vibrations of a cat’s purring can heal you, why not the vibrations of music? I set up stereo speakers on either side of my foot, and sat there all day, day after day.”

“It really worked?”

He grinned. “Here I am.” Read more »

Part of the platform at the train station in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. Photo taken in May, 2021.

by Mindy Clegg

Just a note that some might find the material in my post this month upsetting and triggering, as it deals with forms of abuse.

In 2012, Ashley Diamond, convicted of burglary after her then boyfriend convinced her to pawn a stolen saw, arrived in the custody of the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) to begin serving a ten-year term. Unlike other women, Diamond was taken to a men’s penitentiary, where she suffered several years of violence, sexual assault, crass indifference to her plight, and lack of adequate medical care. After smuggling out a video, the Southern Poverty Law Center worked with Diamond to file a lawsuit against the GDC and to get her paroled and to receive compensation for the abuse she suffered.

After struggling to make ends meet and deal with the trauma she experienced, Diamond managed to get treatment in Florida, a technical violation of her parole. As of now, Ashley Diamond is right back where she started—in prison, suffering horrific abuse, and pleading for just treatment from the GDC. But why did this happen? How could this obvious ongoing human rights violation continue in full view of the public? This is primarily happening because when Ashley tells us who she is, some refuse to believe her. She’s a Black trans woman from a small-town, of a working class background. In other words, Ashley’s race, gender identity, and class led some to view her as less worthy of equity and safety. Read more »

by Thomas Wells

Climate change is such a terrifying large problem that it is hard to think sensibly about. On the one hand this makes many people prefer denial. On the other hand it can exert a warping effect on the reasoning of even those who do take it seriously. In particular, many confuse the power we have over what the lives of future generations will be like – and the moral responsibility that follows from that – with the idea that we are better off than them. These people seem to have taken the idea of the world as finite and combined it with the idea that this generation is behaving selfishly to produce a picture of us as gluttons whose overconsumption will reduce future generations to penury. But this completely misrepresents the challenge of climate change.

Here is a thought experiment that may help. Suppose you have a one-shot time machine that will take you 200 years into the past. Suppose further that Dr. Who time travel rules apply: you can change the past without paradox. If you are brave enough to make the trip, what would you take with you?

After some reflection, most people would opt for things which would be useful to people living in 1820, or useful to you if you had to live in that time. For example, technological products such as antibiotics (and the recipes to make more) and knowledge about science and history that would make you well placed to help those living then, or help you to have a very successful life amongst them.

Now consider what you would take with you if you were travelling 200 years into the future instead of into the past. Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

One of the tropes of the Covid-19 era is to revisit predictions made earlier in the pandemic, either to issue a mea culpa or to issue a self-congratulatory reminder to oneself or one’s readers about a successful prediction.

The past week or so has witnessed a flood of those sorts of posts centered around the question of whether Covid-19 might have escaped from a laboratory rather than from a “local seafood market” in Wuhan, China.

Given the fact that this was only the most recent example in which some prominent scientific figures seemed to retract what had previously been treated as consensus, I nervously revisited my 3QD post from May 4, 2020, “Let’s Not Allow Our Renewing Trust in Science to Become the Latest Victim of Covid 19”.

In particular, I was concerned that my pushback against appeals to “Trust the Science” would not fit well with this additional evidence of the way in which scientists sometimes arrive at tentative results that are later called into question.

For example, I was critical of the worry that appeals to “Trust the Science” might

… set the stage for shifting blame onto scientific experts should the political decisions lead to poor outcomes. For example, [an article in The Guardian quotes] University of Edinburgh political scientist Prof Christina Boswell as worrying that, “If things go wrong … it will be [painted as being] the scientific advice that is to blame.”

Having reread that May 4 post, however, I have to admit that I think it has aged pretty well. In order to say why, though, I’ll have to dig a bit deeper into the current “Lab-Leak Controversy”. Read more »

Helen Marden. Raja Ampat, 2018.

Resin, acrylic, powered paint, and abalone shells on linen.

More here and here.

by Raji Jayaraman

I know someone—I’ll call him by his initials, KR—who is a Modi supporter. I have known KR for as long as I can remember. He is an intelligent, well-educated, well-travelled man. Now retired, he has a successful career behind him. He is Hindu, but he actively participated in the traditions and practices of other religions. Personally, I have great affection for him. Politically, we are now like oil and water. I usually avoid discussing politics with him because it inevitably ends in an argument: his view of Prime Minister Modi couldn’t be further from mine. In order to understand why people like him continue to support Modi—even now, as India is ravaged by the pandemic—I did something that I hadn’t done before. I asked him, and I listened without arguing.

I have struggled to organize our hours-long conversation, but I think it can be distilled into three broad themes. The first is extraordinary reverence for Modi, which results in almost unconditional support for his policies. The second is visceral contempt for the opposition Congress party. The third is a suspicion of Muslims in today’s India. Although I mention this third theme, I will not discuss it in this essay because its perplexity warrants a separate treatment. Here, I focus on the first two themes.

First, the man himself: “People support Modi because of his honesty, integrity, and nationalism. Modi is not corrupt. He is not interested in personal wealth. He is a man of integrity and he expects that of the people around him. Modi is a shrewd politician too. He has extraordinary oratory capacity and his level of absorption of facts is amazing. When I say he is a nationalist, I mean that he is interested in the nation as a whole. He is interested in India’s welfare. He has powerful ideas. His policies [such as providing latrines and bank accounts] are aimed at development for the whole nation. Everything he has done, he has done for all Indians.” Even Modi’s fiercest critics would probably agree that he is not interested in amassing personal riches, and is a gifted politician and orator. Read more »

by Brooks Riley