by Rachel Robison-Greene

We spend much of our lives—perhaps more time than we realize—interacting with non-persons online. We ask for help from artificial customer service representatives. Some of us accept friend requests from bots and are, thereafter, influenced by the content they post. This is a momentous change to the nature of the public square. For most of human existence, discourse occurred between persons. That is no longer true. Philosophers spend much of their time thinking about whether it will ever be possible for artificial intelligence to be conscious. For many purposes, however, the question of whether artificial intelligence exhibits or could ever exhibit personhood is a much more important question.

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt has much to say about what it is to be a person. Persons are beings who use their second order volitions to guide their first order desires. To see how this works, consider the case of a woman who desires a slice of cake. Suppose that she is avoiding sugar. Accordingly, she has a second order desire to refrain from eating the cake. When she is successful in getting her second order, reflective desires and volitions to guide her first order desires, she exhibits personhood. That is, when she does what she wants to do because the wants to want to do it, her will is free and she acts as a person. A being that never used second order desires to guide first order desires would be what Frankfurt calls a wanton. Frankfurt imagines a wanton as a being who merely acts as their impulses dictate, never reflective on whether they’d like those impulses to be different or whether they should attempt to modify their impulses. He says,

I shall use the term “wanton” to refer to agents who have first-order desires but who are not persons because, whether or not they have desires of the second order, they have no second-order volitions. The essential characteristic of a wanton is that he does not care about his will. His desires move him to do certain things, without its being true of him either that he wants to be moved by those desires or that he prefers to be moved by other desires. (Frankfurt 1988, 16)

Frankfurt offers non-human animals and very young children as examples of wantons, acknowledging that there may be others. This new virtual type of wanton isn’t a being swept away by impulse. The “first order impulses” of an algorithm are simply to do what it is programmed to do. There is nothing seductive or addictive about these impulses that make them irresistible. The impulses simply must be unreflectively followed. This makes the virtual wanton a special kind of hazard in the public square. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

In a world in which anyone can create fake sexually explicit images of anyone else, we should not be surprised when it happens, and we should not get especially upset if it happens to us.

Synopsis of my argument

Premise 1: It is now trivially easy to use a generative AI image apps to produce realistic looking deepfake nudes and explicit pornographic videos of anyone without their consent

Premise 2: P1 is, or should be, common knowledge (everyone knows it, and that everyone knows that everyone knows it)

Conclusion 1: Therefore, everyone knows that everyone knows that sexually explicit pictures of non-porn stars are almost certainly deepfakes created without that person’s consent

Premise 3: Privacy is the right to be mysterious to others: to determine for yourself what different people know, or think they know, about you.

Premise 4: If the deepfake images circulated of you were considered real by those friends and strangers who might find them then that would be a grave violation of your privacy and it would be reasonable to feel very upset about it

Premise 5: However, by C1, everyone knows that everyone knows that these sexualised images are not real

Conclusion 2: Therefore, it is not reasonable to get upset about finding deepfake nudes of ourselves circulating on the internet. The correct response is more of a shrug. Read more »

by Sauleha Kamal

“This is the mentality of our society. If someone is speaking English, he or she is really good, he or she is from a very good background,” one subaltern English learner tells the researchers in this study. “When someone speaks good English, Shah says, people assume that person is educated, knows how to carry himself, and is, crucially, ‘a good person’,” notes another.

The Identity Reconstruction of Subaltern English Learners by Aamir Hasan and Nadeem Hussain is an ambitious book that draws on a qualitative study of language learners in South Asia to make connections between social mobility, leadership development and English acquisition. Through this data, and a detailed theoretical and historical analysis of the position of English in South Asia, it endeavors to fill a crucial gap in the area of English studies.

English occupies a distinctive place in former British colonies, and in South Asia in particular. Its significance extends to everything from communication to shaping access, credibility, and self-perception in ways that are difficult to disentangle from class. This book takes that relationship seriously, treating English as a social determinant whose effects are felt across education, leadership, and everyday dignity. In doing so, it offers a careful and largely persuasive account of how this language mediates power in the region. Read more »

Leaves pressed into a dirt road by passing vehicles and/or people in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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Dear Reader,

Here’s your chance to say what you want to the large number of highly educated readers that make up 3QD’s international audience. Several of our regular columnists have had to cut back or even completely quit their columns for 3QD because of other personal and professional commitments and so we are looking for a few new voices. We do not pay, but it is a good chance to draw attention to subjects you are interested in, and to get feedback from us and from our readers.

We would certainly love for our pool of writers to reflect the diversity of our readers in every way, including gender, age, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, etc., and we encourage people of all kinds to apply. And we like unusual voices and varied viewpoints. So please send us something. What have you got to lose? Click on “Read more »” below…

NEW POSTS BELOW THIS ONE

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by Barry Goldman

Two books came out recently in the field of decision-making. Baruch Fischhoff published Decisions: Studying and Supporting People Facing Hard Choices, and Barry Schwartz and Richard Schuldenfrei published Choose Wisely: Rationality, Ethics, and the Art of Decision-Making. The two books take very different approaches. In a word, Fischhoff represents the science of decision-making. Schwartz represents the art.

We are all in favor of rational decision-making. We want public policy decisions to be made by reasonable people following orderly procedures designed to give appropriate consideration to relevant factors and to maximize the probability of success. How could we possibly not want that? And the same is true of personal decisions. We may not have the patience or the attention span to work through the literature and pick the best health insurance plan for our family. But we have to agree it would be better if that choice were made on some rational basis rather than randomly or on the basis of the relative attractiveness of the models in the company brochures. We may conclude that any improvement in health insurance coverage is not worth the effort required to identify it. That’s fine. Some decisions are not worth thinking about. But even the decision that something is not worth thinking about is better if it is made according to some rational process.

At the same time, there is a false precision conveyed by the matrix of factors, weights and probabilities involved in rational choice theory. And there is something missing. If you’re trying to decide whether to uproot your family and move across the country or whether to start a war with, say, Venezuela, an algorithm and a spreadsheet are not what you need. As the saying goes, not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

Baruch Fischhoff was present at the inception. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman jointly advised his dissertation. He was at Hebrew University in Jerusalem with Kahneman and Tversky when they began creating the universe of judgment and decision-making, biases and heuristics, and what became behavioral economics. His name is most closely associated with hindsight bias, our tendency to think we knew it all along and to be “insufficiently surprised” by events. For the past 50 years Fischhoff has been applying Bayesian inference, game theory, measure theory and signal detection theory to an extraordinary array of real-world decision problems. Read more »

by Derek Neal

The town had only one grocery store, and Steve wondered where the locals did their shopping. Certainly not here, but perhaps in a supermarket outside of town, one that required a car. Along with Julia, he picked up some Italian cheese, prosciutto, grapes, and a bottle of local wine, and they made their way up the hill to the house they’d rented for the week.

The two friends from college were proud of themselves. They weren’t staying next to the sea with the rest of the tourists, but in a different village altogether, one that required a short bus ride and where no other passengers got off. In the village, the few streets that existed were carved into the hillside, each one so narrow that they were forced to walk behind one another, instead of side by side.

It had been a long day, and they felt they deserved to indulge. They’d gone hiking high above the town, starting early and rising with the sun. The trail followed the curve of the hills, the open sea to one side, vineyards to the other. What lay before them not visible beyond a few yards. They heard fellow hikers before seeing them, but rarely was any Italian heard. When two groups passed each other, each group always smiled and let out a garbled “Buongiorno,” before reverting to their respective languages. Steve complied and mumbled “Ciao” a few times, but soon he began to feel like an imposter, playing at being Italian, or playing at being whatever it was people thought being Italian meant, and he resigned himself to nodding politely in response to the other travelers. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Malcolm Murray

Back when I worked for large corporations, people would often talk of being in “period of change” or how they could “see the light at the end of the tunnel” after a period of heavy restructuring or similar. These days, you might be forgiven for wondering where the tunnel went. Change is incessant and showing no signs of slowing down. In fact, it is quite the opposite. We are entering a period when change might in fact actually be speeding up, even from its currently historically high levels. While not the majority view, nor the most likely scenario in my estimation, there is still a nonzero likelihood that we are in fact in the last few years of an era. Through the development of AGI – artificial general intelligence – the world could become unrecognizable in just a few years.

In a recent Astral Codex Ten piece, Scott Alexander referenced several examples of people seeing the clock as ticking down to a near-term singularity-level change, which would leave permanent patterns locked in. In one of the most talked-about AI forecasts from last year – AI 2027 – 2026 is not far from where the hockey stick starts to get seriously steep. This scenario, of humanity facing a potential precipice in our near future, makes for an interesting exercise in examining the varying levels of comfort people have in entertaining this possibility. We can name it “Future Comfort”. The degree to which people accept this possibility, fight against it, deny it, or even embrace it. Especially now at the turning of the year, with everyone making predictions, this seems like a useful lens for examining the world right now.

Let’s first look at the varying schools on the Future Comfort spectrum. On one far end, we have people who are deeply uncomfortable with this notion. They are actively fighting against the future and are actively and quixotically trying to bring back the past. We have seen this in some of the main political strands over the past years, driving everything from Brexit to MAGA to Soviet nostalgia. A little bit towards the center of the spectrum, instead of active resistance, you could place the groups exercising passive resistance. This would include people choosing to go “off the grid” or “back to nature” or other variants of the Amish lifestyle.

On the other far end of the spectrum, we have those who are deeply comfortable with a radically different future. Here, we find groups such as transhumanists and effective accelerationists. They are looking to bring the future closer, not further and long to merge with the machine, becoming cyborgs. Moving slightly toward the center, we find the libertarian techno-optimists such as Marc Andreesen, who want to let technology rip loose, in a wild Schumpeterian dance of creative destruction. It would be easy to dismiss these end points as fringe fanatics, were it not for the fact that they win elections in major Western democracies and have their own Super PACs with millions of funding. Read more »

Marco A Castillo. Mangle I, 2025.

Bronze.

More here, here and here.

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Dear Readers and Writers,

Five years ago, I wrote a note here to acknowledge and appreciate Akim Reinhardt for his amazing consistency in having written an excellent essay every four weeks for 3QD for 10 years, without missing his turn even once. Well, this week Akim has how completed 15 years at 3QD and has still maintained his record of solid dependability! He has now written 208 essays for us in a row and is still going strong.

But there is another contributor with an equally impressive record of reliability: Brooks Riley published her first “Catspeak” cartoon at 3QD in the first week of October, 2013, and has never missed a single week in the more than 12 years since then. This week, somewhat unbelievably, she will contribute her 624th “Catspeak” in a row on Wednesday! You can see them all here.

Please join me in applauding Akim and Brooks!

With very best wishes for the new year,

Abbas

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by Laurie Sheck

1.

It has been almost 58 years since astronaut William Anders lifted his Hasselblad camera toward the window of Apollo 8 and captured the now-iconic image of Earth hovering beyond the gray, desolate edge of the moon, blue-white and small and fragile, hanging in the pure blackness of space. How beautiful it looked, how vulnerable and unprotected. As if emptied of political borders and human strife. As if we had never touched it after all. Unbuilt, unpolluted. Familiar and strange at the same time.

“We came all this way to explore the Moon,” Anders said, “and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”

And yet how secretive it looks from a distance, how beyond human knowing.

My online searches tell me there are now over 942,562 CCTV surveillance cameras in London; in Shanghai there are 12,825, 589; in Hyderabad, 900,000; that in a single day a human being in London could expect to be captured on CCTV an average of 70 times.

But in Anders’ photo the Earth looks mysterious, un-warlike, uninhabited, unpoliced.

2.

In the astronauts’ descriptions of Earth, the word fragile recurs often.

“It looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart”—this from James Irwin, crew member of Apollo 15. Lauren Acton spoke of seeing it “contained in the thin, moving, incredibly fragile shell of the biosphere.”

To Alexi Leonov, the first person to walk in space, Earth looked “touchingly alone.”

When cosmonaut Vitali Sevastyanov was asked by ground control what he saw, he replied, “Half a world to the left, half a world to the right. I can see it all. The Earth is so small.” And Neil Armstrong remarked, “I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”

Ulf Merbold said: “For the first time in my life I saw the horizon line as curved, accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light. I was terrified by its fragile appearance.”

For those of us who’ve never been to space, the reality of Earth’s vulnerability can be harder to hold onto. The way its beauty is inseparable from its vulnerability. How in a sense they are the same thing. Read more »

American New Year 2026

Just because the old year has
drifted out of sight because —well,
time is like that,
……………………… doesn’t mean
it’s disappeared, any more than
a rush of unbound river rolling over
dams assures that it is safely past
and gone.

It should be clear —as long as gravity
does its thing, and an unbound river
still moves on, its path is still surely
being written, its past will certainly
not be gone. 

Upstream, a bridge, raked down, still
sits, busted girders resting on the riverbed,
pylons angled toward sky, wrecked,
debris of busted pilings that mattered
reminding us, a way’s been shattered,
behind it, battered remnants of its past
build-up, collect. And if, below the dam, 
river’s banks are still weak and weary,
waters out of bounds, still running freely,

well, ,,,what else should we expect?

Jim Culleny, 1/1/26 

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by Charles Siegel

Last week I learned of the recent death of Roberto Chaves Chavarria, of San José, Costa Rica, aged 90. His work benefited thousands upon thousands of his countrymen, and many thousands in other countries as well, who will never know his name. And he had a profound effect on my career as a lawyer, and on the direction of my life as a whole.

Chaves was a forensic toxicologist, and the first head of the Department of Forensic Sciences, an office in the Costa Rican “Poder Judicial,” or judicial branch. In the Costa Rican legal system, as in that of most Latin American countries, judges and other judicial officers often conduct their own factual investigations into cases before them.

In the late 1970s, Chaves learned of a large group of workers, on a banana plantation near the small town of Rio Frio, who were sterile. Over the course of many investigative trips, he interviewed workers and their wives, plantation managers, doctors and others. Chaves eventually concluded that the men had been sterilized through contact with a pesticide they applied to the roots of the banana plants. This pesticide, known as “DBCP,” was used to kill worms that infested the soil beneath the plants.

DBCP was invented by scientists at Shell Chemical Co., a subsidiary of the oil giant, and originally tested on pineapple plants in Hawaii. It proved to be very effective, and was used on pineapple and banana plantations around the world. DBCP-based pesticides were manufactured by several American companies, including Dow Chemical  and Occidental Chemical as well as Shell.

The cluster of sterile banana workers that Chaves discovered in Rio Frio was not the first such group. A few years earlier, men who worked in the Occidental factory making the stuff in Lathrop, California, had also been found to be sterile. This eventually led to a ban on DBCP use in the United States, but Dow and another smaller company continued to sell it overseas.

Meanwhile, Chaves continued his work in Costa Rica, and learned about the American developments. Read more »

by Eric Feigenbaum

The assertion that religion is a tool for preserving social order and for organizing large-scale cooperation may vex many people for whom it represents first and foremost a spiritual path. However, just as the gap between religion and science is smaller than we commonly think, so the gap between religion and spirituality is much bigger. Religion is a deal, whereas spirituality is a journey. Religion gives a complete description of the world, and offers us a well-defined contract with predetermined goals. ‘God exists. He told us to behave in certain ways. If you obey God, you’ll be admitted to heaven. If you disobey Him, you’ll burn in hell.’ The very clarity of this deal allows society to define common norms and values that regulate human behavior. —Yuval Noah Harari in Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tomorrow, 2015

In his books Sapiens, Homo Deus, 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century and Nexus, celebrated author and Professor of History Harari goes further positing spirituality is an altogether different thing. The spiritual path involves an individual quest. Seeking, learning and experiencing are part and parcel to someone finding their way to the divine.

In Harari’s view, religion was a form of governance – in essence the creation of a common platform – before secular government came about. Religion is present in hunter-gatherer societies whereas true secular government doesn’t really begin until a society reaches the agrarian stage.

Even as societies create secular governments, they don’t usually abandon religion. In fact, the most successful liberal democracies including the United States have protected freedom of religion, recognizing that the moral core and social cohesion offered by various religions benefits society as a whole. Countries that have banned religion altogether – such as the Soviet Union – found repression their only tool for keeping social order. Not the recipe for thriving or longevity.

Forty years before Homo Deus, the founders of Singapore were wrestling with how religion would impact their society. The goal was how to harness the benefits of religion without opening the door to the volatile tribalism that can also go with it. Read more »