Life Imitates Art

 In a new video essay published yesterday for the New York Times, Ezra Klein points out that many of the people currently building AI—the people who are now telling us that they believe their own creation might kill all humanity within the next decade—also believed that AI posed an existential threat to humankind even before they started building it. 

Indeed, they started building it precisely because they thought that someone would eventually build it, and they thought they needed to be the ones to build it in order to ensure it was safe and would serve human interests, because they thought that otherwise it certainly would lead to human extinction. 

In Every Land He Slayeth

 Everyone knows that European nations brutally colonized and subjugated much of the rest of humanity from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century and—through a combination of disease, war, enslavement, dispossession and deliberate genocide—pushed many human communities around the globe to the point of near-extinction. 

Everyone knows this—so what's the point of thinking about it now? What's the point, specifically, of revisiting Sven Lindqvist's 1992 book, "Exterminate All the Brutes"—about the history of European colonial genocides? 

Newts and Abundance

 The other day, Matt Yglesias was complaining about environmentalist NIMBY voters in Britain who were blocking some new housing development because it would imperil an endangered variety of newts. "Who cares about newts???" he demanded to know. 

Another writer called him out for this comment, and Yglesias writes in a follow-up post that he was perhaps being a bit glib when he wrote that. He was "mouth[ing] off," he admits, and it was bad form. 

Compromises

 The recent hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship has been dominating the news all week—and doubtless it is prompting many Americans to question whether it was really such a wise choice for us to dismantle our world-class public health system and appoint in its place a bunch of ideological hacks who appear not to even believe in the germ theory of disease. 

In particular—an opinion piece in the New York Times notes yesterday—Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana may be regretting his choice to vote in favor of Kennedy's nomination—seeing that public health was, for a time, the one issue most dear to him.

The Moon's Full Gaze

 As the Artemis II astronauts completed their loop around the moon this weekend, the news reports were full of descriptions of the sheer awe and wonder the lunar travelers experienced as they beheld the Earth's natural satellite up close. 

One astronaut, in her amazement, even coined a new term for the feeling, which quickly went viral: "moon joy." 

Copernican Revolutions

 A friend was saying to me the other day that AI appears destined to create another "Copernican Revolution." 

He wasn't saying this in the sense that it would be a scientific breakthrough. Rather, he had in mind the sense of psychological homelessness and estrangement it would produce. 

Recall that before Copernicus, Galileo, and the rest dethroned the Earth from the center of the universe—our cosmos seemed like a cozy, womb-like environment build to humankind's needs and specifications. 

Last Call for the AI Ark?

 There is an odd disconnect right now in the public's attitude to AI. On the one hand, the era of hype and fear about the new technology appears to have peaked around 2023 and to have been on a downward slope ever since. We've all gotten used to the presence of chatbots now. And however impressive they are—and I do indeed continue to be wowed that we have built a robot brain that can convincingly mimic human conversation—they also seem to be transforming our lives rather less than we had either hoped or dreaded. In daily life, they often provide little more to us than a variant on the old-fashioned search engine experience—a handy way to gather information from the internet quickly. 

Generative AI is in many ways so extraordinary compared to prior generations of information technology that I think we all assumed it would have to change the world. But sometimes, it may in fact be possible to build something amazing that nonetheless has little discernible impact on our daily lives. A few years into this collective social experiment, and jobs have not been systematically displaced by the new tech. The chatbots have proved most adept at drafting unwanted discussion posts or term papers for lazy college students; but any writing or creating that requires going beyond the most generic, mediocre, statistically-average boilerplate still requires a human touch. 

The Weirdest Psychoanalyst

 Wilhelm Reich is surely one of the nuttiest figures ever to achieve a degree of mainstream respectability in psychiatry. I suspect the explanation lies in the fact that the entire field of Freudian psychoanalysis always lent itself to a certain degree of madness—particularly in the form of delusions of grandeur—with its arrogant reductionism—its conviction that it had found a single key to unlock all human mysteries. And so, a genuine monomaniac could easily find shelter in its ranks for decades before pushing his theories to such extremes that even his colleagues started to raise an eyebrow. 

Many of Reich's weirdest traits, after all, seem like mere amplifications and magnifications of the worst aspects of Freud. If you thought Freud had a one-track mind, after all—wait until you get a load of his wayward disciple Reich. The Viennese master may have reduced all of dream symbolism to sexuality. It was left to Reich to do him one better, and reduce all of matter and the universe to the same subject. 

Nothing Whatever to Say

 Philip Roth's The Anatomy Lesson—the third novel in the original "Zuckerman Bound" trilogy about Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman—is a book about a writer trying to escape the curse of writing. 

It's really not so unusual. Writing is not the sort of activity you enjoy. It's a compulsion, in which a small dose of reward chemicals that comes from having written is bookended by long periods of agony: first, there's the period in which you have an idea you want to express. It builds inside you until you can't tolerate the inward "pressure of clauses and sentences" (George Eliot) any longer. 

The End, The Beginning

 In his novel Zuckerman Unbound—the second in the original "Zuckerman Bound" trilogy—Philip Roth portrays a typically tragicomic episode in which the eponymous author (and Roth alter ego) Nathan Zuckerman tries to find words of comfort for his dying father. 

Zuckerman is regarded as something of a traitor by his family—for depicting them in crude satirical terms in his scandalous bestseller Carnovsky (the fictional counterpart to Roth's own Portnoy's Complaint). 

On My Own

 Last month, I wrote a post on this blog sharing Samuel Butler's delightful, if pseudo-scientific, theory that each life-form comes into the world equipped with an unconscious memory of the accumulated experiences of all the beings that came before it—and that this vast heap of prior experience is what goes to make up the peculiar form of unconscious knowledge we call "instinct." 

One consequence of the theory (which Butler spells out) is that we can only inherit the memories that our parents possessed at the age they had us. Until we reach the age our parents were at our conception, then—we can safely depend upon the backstop of accumulated habit and experience to guide us safely through life. After we cross that invisible threshold, however (age 32, in my case)—then we are on our own. 

Florida's Potent Quack

 Yesterday, the governor and surgeon general of my home state—Florida—decided to eliminate vaccination requirements in public schools for some of the most common childhood illnesses. 

As a result, ancient enemies of humankind—horrors we thought he had vanquished decades ago—may soon be stalking the halls of our public schools again. Think: measles, mumps, rubella. 

Another Dr. Stockmann

 The Trump administration's new CDC director now has to fight for her position—after no more than a month on the job—seemingly for no other reason than because she took seriously the responsibilities of her office: such as providing sound evidence-based public health advice to the public. 

Dr. Monarez appears to have clashed with RFK Jr. over his attempts to undermine vaccines. The news of her struggle with senior administration officials—after all—comes the same day Trump's FDA announced unprecedented new restrictions on access for the latest round of the COVID boosters. 

Prometheus

 The Trump administration is turning out martyrs to science these days at a near-daily clip. Many of them will forever remain nameless in the media coverage—the countless people who developed the mRNA vaccine, for instance—the victims of the most recent episode in Trump's war on science. 

The work of these researchers saved millions of lives around the world; and spared countless Americans from being hooked to a ventilator in an emergency room—but for their efforts they are now being punished with funding cuts, and their work is to be undone for the crudest culture war reasons. 

Life and Habit

 Samuel Butler was a crankish intellectual who devoted his life to erecting an anti-intellectual, anti-crank ideal. 

In book after book, he argued that the type of person one really ought to be is a "gentleman" of the old school—one who does not hold any belief too literally or firmly or uncharitably; who does not think about or examine anything in his life too consciously; one for whom, as he puts it in The Way of All Flesh, the great questions of life "have already passed into the unconscious stage"—where they belong. 

And Butler wrote a long series of tomes chasing down intellectual hares, riding crankish hobbyhorses, and exploring contrarian pedantic theories, in order to convince us of the beauty and nobility of this unselfconscious, unreflective, anti-intellectual type. 

The Plastocene

 In an essay published early this week in the New York Times, the science writer David Wallace-Wells rattled through some of the more disturbing recent empirical studies about the omnipresence of microplastics in the human environment. 

Wallace-Wells notes that some researchers are now re-examining their laboratory equipment to make sure it is not itself contaminated with microplastics—because, if we take their findings at face value, they show an almost inconceivably high quantity of plastic content in the human brain. 

The Evolution of Ideas

 In his famous book on the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn tries at one point to acquit himself of the charge of relativism. It's not—he argues—that he believes scientific advances bear no relationship to truth; it's more that they change through a process akin to natural selection. He encourages us to think of the evolution of thought as much like the evolution of species. 

In much the same way as we have had to jettison the idea of any teleological "evolution" in the natural environment—so too, we should no longer think of ideas as moving along a linear vector of progress. But they do adapt over time through a process of trial-and-error, such that they eventually become more viable—workable—adapted, that is to say—to whatever it is that scientific ideas do. 

Catastrophism

 In the midst of another brutally hot summer (Tampa—where I've been all week—just experienced its hottest day on record), the Trump administration is making another move to undermine the government's ability to mitigate global warming. Specifically, the administration is reportedly eliminating the EPA's "endangerment" finding vis-a-vis climate change. As I understand it, this change will effectively make it all-but impossible for the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions on a large scale. 

In order to justify this destructive move, the administration released a report reiterating the contrarian right-wing position on climate change—which has evolved, in recent years, from denying the existence of global warming outright, to now saying—yes, it's happening; but it's no big deal. I'm reminded of Schopenhauer's line—about the long journey that every idea takes from being condemned as paradoxical to being deprecated as trivial. We have reached the "climate change is real but insignificant" stage. 

Nicholson Baker's "Baseless": A Review

 Nicholson Baker's book Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, had a somewhat uncanny quality when I found it in a local bookstore, sometime during the first two years of the pandemic. Here was a then-new release that took an obsessive deep dive into the history of biological and chemical warfare—including the deliberate manipulation of viruses to make them more deadly and transmissible to humans. But it did not say anything about the COVID-19 pandemic—mostly because it hadn't yet reached the United States at the time the book was published. 

The timing of the book is therefore downright eerie. It mostly deals with a three-month period in 2019, which Baker records in the form of a personal diary. The final version of the book appears to have gone to press in early March 2020—right on the eve of the COVID lockdowns. So, here is a book that dwells relentlessly on the subject of artificial pandemics and germ research gone wrong. And it appears just days before the start of a global pandemic that would spark an ongoing debate—still raging—over whether it could have been triggered by an accidental spill-over from a lab engaged in gain-of-function research. 

Byron Among the Megafauna

 Lord Byron in his Cain: A Mystery puzzles through many of the classic moral and theological problems of the Book of Genesis. Why was it fair—for instance—for Yahweh to plant the Tree of Knowledge within easy grasp of Eve and Adam, if he never intended for them to eat of it? 

In the classic version of the theological problem: if Adam and Eve were tempted to sin by eating of the tree—why then did God create in them a proclivity to temptation? And if they were not tempted to sin, then they acted out of mere randomness or curiosity—so it cannot have been a guilty act.