by Chris Horner

The question of how to program AI to behave morally has exercised a lot of people, for a long time. Most famous, perhaps, are the three rules for robots that Isaac Asimov introduced in his SF stories: (1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; (2) A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; (3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. These have been discussed, amended, extended and criticised at great length ever since Asimov published them in 1942, and with the current interest in ‘intelligent AI’ it seems they will be subject for debate for some time to come.  But I think the difficulties of coming up with effective rules of this kind are more interesting for what they tell us about the difficulties of any rule or duty based morality for humans than they are for the question of ‘AI morality’. 

Duty based – the jargon term is ‘deontological’ – morality seem to run into problems as soon as we imagine them being applied. Duties can easily seem to clash or lead to unwelcome outcomes – one might think that lying would be justified if it meant protecting an innocent person from a violent person set on harming them, for instance. So which duties should take precedence in the infinite number of future situations in which they might be applied? Answering a question like that involves more than coming up with a sequence of rules, as there seems to be something one needs to add to any would-be moral agent for them to really exercise an adequate moral judgment. Considering the problems around this is more than a philosophical parlour game as it should lead us into more realistic ways of thinking about what it takes to act well in the real world. What we are looking for, I think, is an approach that takes into account the need for genuinely autonomous moral thinking, but also connects the moral agent to the the complicated social world in which we live. Read more »

On the tarmac at Innsbruck airport just before boarding this Airbus A320 jet to Berlin last week. It is always exciting to land at or takeoff from Innsbruck because of the surrounding high mountains.

by Adele A Wilby

It is unlikely that any of us will escape the experience of grief during the course of our lifetime. Throughout that experience, many of us will struggle to find the words that adequately convey what happens to us during that period, and the disruption to our lives that grief brings will be understood as normal in the circumstances. Unable to console the bereaved, and with good intentions, ‘time’ they reassure us, ‘is a great healer’, and there is some truth in that adage.  But ‘time’ itself can also be the very source of confusion in grief, although most of us fail to recognise it as such throughout a bereavement, and we are left wondering what it is about that feeling of being out of the world that I, for one, experienced following the death of my husband. Why, apart from all the other manifestations of grief, did I feel ‘suspended’ from life, yet still alive and living, as I stood and stared out the window of my sitting room, and watched the world go by? I considered myself to be a competent person capable of ordering my life, yet I was impotent in my ability to change what was happening to me. Why did I find it so impossible to act, and get back ‘into’ the world? Read more »

by Tim Sommers

We are all in some sense equal. Aren’t we? The Declaration of American Independence says that, “We hold these Truths [with a capital ‘T’!] to be self-evident” – number one being “that all Men are created equal.” Immediately, you probably want to amend that. Maybe, not “created”, and surely not only “Men” – and, of course, there’s the painful irony of a group of landed-gentry proclaiming the equality of all men, while also holding (at that point) over 300,000 slaves. But don’t we still believe, all that aside, that all people are, in some sense, equal? Isn’t this a central and orienting principle of our social and political world? What should we say, then, about what equality is for us now?

In September, Professor Elizabeth Anderson was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, a so-called “genius grant”, for her work in political philosophy. Though the Foundation specially cited the way she applies her views, pragmatically, to “problems of practical importance and urgency” (most recently with books on race, “The Imperative of Integration”, and work, “Private Government”), the theoretical backbone of her view is a new, original account of social equality – relational or democratic egalitarianism. In a seminal 1999 article, “What is the Point of Equality?”, Anderson asked rhetorically, “If much recent academic work defending equality had been secretly penned by conservatives, could the results be more embarrassing for egalitarians?” Her point was that at the same time that new egalitarian social movements, or at least newly reinvigorated egalitarian movements, focused on race, gender, class, disability, sexual orientation, and gender expression, the dominant form of academic egalitarian political philosophy (“luck egalitarianism”) spent a lot of time arguing about lazy surfers, people “temperamentally gloomy, or incurably bored by inexpensive hobbies”, and those who couldn’t afford the expensive religious ceremonies they wanted to perform. Granted, the characters that inhabit philosophical hypotheticals are bound to be a quirky lot, nonetheless, Anderson wondered what had happened to oppression as the main subject of political philosophy?

Well, here is one way, probably the dominant way in political philosophy, of thinking about equality before Anderson. The notion of equality seems to demand a quantitative comparison. To be equal is to have an equal amount of something. An egalitarian society, then, is one where (certain) things are distributed equally. Call this distributive justice. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

Einstein had called nationalism ‘an infantile disease, the measles of mankind’. Many contemporary cosmopolitan liberals are similarly skeptical, contemptuous or dismissive, as its current epidemic rages all around the world particularly in the form of right-wing extremist or populist movements. While I understand the liberal attitude, I think it’ll be irresponsible of us to let the illiberals meanwhile hijack the idea of nationalism for their nefarious purpose. Nationalism is too passionate and historically explosive an issue to be left to their tender mercies. It is important to fight the virulent forms of the disease with an appropriate antidote and try to vaccinate as many as possible particularly in the younger generations.

Populists advocate a culturally narrow, narcissistic, nostalgic, xenophobic form of ethnic nationalism—from the Christian nationalism of evangelicals in the US or the Catholics in Poland or the Slavic Orthodox-church followers in Russia to the Islamic nationalism in Turkey or Indonesia to the Hindu nationalism in India. The alternative, more inclusive, form of nationalism often counterposed to this is some variant of what is called ‘civic’ nationalism.

But first a brief historical note. As a form of community bonding on the basis of some tribal or ethnic-territorial roots proto-nationalisms of different kinds have been quite old and durable in different societies. But as Ernest Gellner, one of the foremost theorists of nationalism, pointed out, nationalism in the form as we know it is of relatively recent origin. Of course, historical memories and myths (mythology is often blurred into historical facts and legends), symbols and traditions are constantly invoked in the name of ethnic nationalism, even though, as the distinguished historian, Eric Hobsbawm famously pointed out, many of the so-called traditions are actually of recent ‘invention’. The influential 19^th-century French scholar, Ernest Renan had pointed out how ‘historical error’ is used in the creation of a nation. Gellner even points to cases of nationalism based on not a great deal of history: “The Estonians created nationalism out of thin air in the course of the 19^th century”.

But it is often overlooked that there is a clear distinction between nationalism based on some social bonding principle and the nation-state that became a predominant political unit, at least in Europe since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). The former refers to a sociological community based on some homogeneous binding element like religion, language, ethnicity or culture, whereas the latter is a political community which need not contain a singular sociological nationality. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Power in The Sky.

Digital photograph, Porto Alegre, 2014.

by Joan Harvey

Nightfall. Outside a low elongated cave entrance a small group of humans sit waiting on stone ledges facing the dark aperture. Kestrels begin to soar close in the late evening sky. Snakes too are gathering below, we’re told, but they aren’t in view. This is Bracken Cave, 20 miles from San Antonio, where 20 million bats, females and their pups, literally hang out. We’ve come from Austin, through miles of pick-up truck dealerships and mini-malls. At first our driver couldn’t find the cave, which is not open to the public, but eventually, guided by people from Bat Conservation International, the nonprofit that owns and protects the cave, we arrived. At dinner we were filled with Texas barbecue and many bat facts, and now everyone is quiet. Waiting. A strong odor permeates the air. Slowly small dark beings emerge, then more and then more, thousands shooting off, darkening the sky. So many they can be seen on radar, and a nearby Air Force base has to shut down each evening as the bats would interfere with flights. We watch the procession very quietly, each feeling in their own way this strange life form that is connected to us and yet so different, familiar and yet unfamiliar, this webbed mammal, this flying thing that has so engaged our imaginations.

Bats are beings who go too high, shooting up into the air — the species from this cave, the Mexican free-tailed bat, can fly at altitudes over 10,000 feet— but also too low, swooping down to face level, or, when they return from their nocturnal hunt, diving like furry missiles into the low entry of the cave to avoid the waiting predators. They’re fast, faster than birds, holding the horizontal speed record at over 160 kilometers (99 miles) per hour. As mammals they’re more closely related to us than birds, and they live almost everywhere we live, yet we rarely see them, and most of us know almost nothing about them. They’re nocturnal, dusty, silent, though when they fly by us in the thousands we can hear a low rush of wings like the rumble of water over rocks. Read more »

Dr Bruce Chabner has had immense experience in the discipline of cancer drug discovery and development. During his career at the National Cancer Institute, he worked as a Senior Investigator in the Laboratory of Chemical Pharmacology, Chief of the Clinical Pharmacology Branch, Director of the Clinical Oncology Program, and Director of the Division of Cancer Treatment. His research significantly added to the development of high dose chemotherapy regimens and standard therapies for lymphoma. Additionally, his research led to the development of Taxol. He currently serves as a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of Clinical Research at the MGH Cancer Center at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Azra Raza, author of The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, oncologist and professor of medicine at Columbia University, and 3QD editor, decided to speak to more than 20 leading cancer investigators and ask each of them the same five questions listed below. She videotaped the interviews and over the next months we will be posting them here one at a time each Monday. Please keep in mind that Azra and the rest of us at 3QD neither endorse nor oppose any of the answers given by the researchers as part of this project. Their views are their own. One can browse all previous interviews here.

1. We were treating acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with 7+3 (7 days of the drug cytosine arabinoside and 3 days of daunomycin) in 1977. We are still doing the same in 2019. What is the best way forward to change it by 2028?

2. There are 3.5 million papers on cancer, 135,000 in 2017 alone. There is a staggering disconnect between great scientific insights and translation to improved therapy. What are we doing wrong?

3. The fact that children respond to the same treatment better than adults seems to suggest that the cancer biology is different and also that the host is different. Since most cancers increase with age, even having good therapy may not matter as the host is decrepit. Solution?

4. You have great knowledge and experience in the field. If you were given limitless resources to plan a cure for cancer, what will you do?

5. Offering patients with advanced stage non-curable cancer, palliative but toxic treatments is a service or disservice in the current therapeutic landscape?

Driving Lolita in the World’s Most Militarized Zone

A boy, I hid
in grandpa’s study.

An art dealer
he loved books

with gilded edges,
Aristotle to Zola

all stuck together
in the humidity.

I snuck Lo out
to his black Chevy

rifled for the dirty bits
(should ’ve looked harder, I guess),

drove her away for a spin
teen tunes swirling in my head

I Want to Hold Your Hand.
A crackdown in downtown ‑—

mothers hid their young sons.
“We fear they’ll take them away.”

A soldier rained pellets
on a nymphet’s face,

light of her mother’s eye.
“Moji,” nymphet said,

“Nothing can be seen,
as far as the eye can see.” Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

The roof of Notre-Dame de Paris, lost in the fire of April 15, 2019, was nicknamed The Forest because it used to be one. It contained the wood of around 1300 oaks, which would have covered more than 52 acres. They were felled from 1160 to 1170, when they were likely several hundred years old. It has been estimated that there is no similar stand of oak trees anywhere on the planet today.

Even in the twelfth century, sourcing the wood for cathedral construction was not always easy. When the Basilica of Saint-Denis was under construction in the mid-twelfth century, it was assumed that the nearby forests could not supply the wood needed for the project because they were depleted. Abbot Suger reportedly found a local stand of timber suitable for the job and attributed his discovery to faith and divine intervention. Causes of medieval deforestation include clearing of land for agriculture and the expansion of urban areas. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Jeroen Bouterse

For better or worse, Dutch 20^th-century postwar literature comes with a canon of three authors: Gerard Reve, Harry Mulisch, and W.F. Hermans. There, you learned something today. Other than this factoid, however, this post is not going to be a lecture about the landscape of Dutch literature, or even the literary qualities of these authors. I am introducing them because I am going to use two of them, and one in particular, to illustrate a point about discourse involving the landscape of science – that is, the distinction between the sciences and humanities.

The notion of a separation between the sciences and humanities usually revolves (again, for better or worse) around C.P. Snow’s famous Rede lecture. In this lecture, Snow tentatively suggests that what he calls the ‘scientific culture’ is probably more left-wing than the ‘literary culture’, as well as more progressive (scientists “have the future in their bones”). In his time, he saw his technocratic ideals represented best by the Labour party, to which he served as scientific advisor. In the 1970s, however, Snow (as chronicled by historian Guy Ortolano)[1] would drift away from the Labour party, and express himself in increasingly negative terms about all the nonsense one had to put up with as a liberal these days. Before his death in 1980, he expressed his sympathy for neo-conservative ideas.

According to Ortolano, Snow was one of multiple Anglophone intellectuals who reconsidered their political alignments in the 1970s. Nor does this necessarily imply that Snow betrayed or radically revised his own previous opinions. These, it seems, remained technocratic and meritocratic, and precisely therefore problematic in the face of a more egalitarian and anti-elitist ‘New Left’. Read more »

Ivy on a large concrete wall in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol in October, 2019.

by Marie Gaglione

I’m freaking out almost all the time, I’d say. I wouldn’t even limit my angst to my waking hours, because lately my dreamscapes have been rife with post-apocalyptic battle royale scenarios. I’m not writing this with any kind of proposed solution or discernible purpose beyond adding another frightened voice to the void, I just don’t think I can write about anything else until I work through some of this. I find that crafting my fears into essays works as a kind of filing system: I’m still afraid of the thing, but now there is a title and and my thoughts are at least ordered by paragraphs. 

This essay is about technology, probably. I waffle on the theme only because I think blaming existential panic on cell phones is stale, but I’m pretty sure it’s accurate! Let me make my case. I’ve opened Mario Kart Mobile Tour on my phone three times since starting to write this and I’m not yet on my third paragraph. And I’ve already raced all the races and gotten enough stars to pass each cup. And I still keep opening the app. This week it’s Mario Kart, but before that it was Love Island The Game and before that it was Tamagotchi (and Solitaire and Candy Crush and and and). I don’t have a Twitter and I rarely open Instagram so presumably the games are just the most enticing apps I have, but it’s still gross how long I spend with my shoulders tightened, neck tensed, and thumbs exercising. I feel like a loser. And I justify all the time, pretending like I’m having such deep thoughts in the background as I throw red turtle shells. I try to map life onto the racing track; I look for metaphors as I complete a lap and am satisfied with exercising the poetic side of my brain for the day. 

We’re living in a world of infinite content. I tire of one game, there are eight hundred more with subtle variations. I finish a TV show, the streaming network has thirty more recommendations. Every movie, every show, every clip or song or soundbite – it’s all within reach if you can connect to the internet. Which now you can do even on an airplane. I’m worried about it. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Fantasy politics starts from the expectation that wishes should come true, that the best outcome imaginable is not just possible but overwhelmingly likely. Brexit is classic fantasy politics, premised on the delightful optimism that if the UK were only freed of its shackles it would easily be able to negotiate the best deals imaginable.

The great appeal of fantasy politics is that you it puts you in complete control. Using the power of your imagination, you get to control not only what you will do but also how everyone else will react. Sometimes you also control laws of nature, such as economics or even physics. Unsurprisingly, this kind of politics tends to go your way. Decisiveness is the only quality needed for your actions to succeed. Everyone recognises your awesomeness and competes to serve your interests, whether motivated by admiration or fear.

Why is fantasy politics so popular these days? One reason is that it is so much easier than real politics. In real politics we try to address multiple, intersecting, complicated collective action problems – like the high cost of housing or sexism in the labour market – while at the same time grappling with the deep diversity of beliefs, values, and interests within and between societies. Real politics is a difficult and time-consuming activity that usually requires dissatisfactory compromise with reality and what other people want. It is much easier to make-believe our way to our favoured outcomes, i.e. as Boris Johnson put it after the 2016 Brexit referendum, “Our policy is having our cake and eating it.” Read more »