Anniversary night
Cal Newton’s distinction between additive and extractive technologies is fine, but Ursula Franklin made the same distinction long ago, using the terms holistic and prescriptive; ditto Ivan Illich, using the terms convivial and manipulatory. As I argue in this essay, we keep offering the same diagnoses without changing anyone’s behavior.
I married this wonderful life-giving life-preserving woman forty-five years ago today. The best thing that ever happened to me.
I remember quite vividly the day in 1974 when this showed up in the mail, a selection of the Science Fiction Book Club. It was my introduction to Le Guin and anarchism.
Humans may have also evolved a unique hardwired instinct to ask questions to inquire about the inner simulations of others. Even Kanzi and the other apes that acquired impressively sophisticated language abilities never asked even the simplest questions about others. They would request food and play but would not inquire about another’s inner mental world. Even before human children can construct grammatical sentences, they will ask others questions: “Want this?” “Hungry?” All languages use the same rising intonation when asking yes/no questions. When you hear someone speak in a language you do not understand, you can still identify when you are being asked a question. This instinct to understand how to designate a question may also be a key part of our language curriculum.
Every Scientific Empire Comes to an End - The Atlantic:
Three-fourths of American scientists who responded to a recent poll by the journal Nature said they are considering leaving the country. They don’t lack for suitors. China is aggressively recruiting them, and the European Union has set aside a €500 million slush fund to do the same. National governments in Norway, Denmark, and France—nice places to live, all—have green-lighted spending sprees on disillusioned American scientists. The Max Planck Society, Germany’s elite research organization, recently launched a poaching campaign in the U.S., and last month, France’s Aix-Marseille University held a press conference announcing the arrival of eight American “science refugees.”
The MIT scientist who is thinking about leaving the U.S. told me that the Swiss scientific powerhouse ETH Zurich had already reached out about relocating her lab to its picturesque campus with a view of the Alps. A top Canadian university had also been in touch. These institutions are salivating over American talent, and so are others. Not since [Roald] Sagdeev and other elite Soviet researchers were looking to get out of Moscow has there been a mass-recruiting opportunity like this.
My family were strangely unreceptive when I told them what I want for my birthday. It’s a bargain!
The state of Alabama in 1832 (from the David Rumsey Map Collection). My home town of Birmingham did not yet exist, but the village of Elyton was the county seat of Jefferson County, and eventually that became a neighborhood of Birmingham. From fifth through seventh grade I attended Elyton Elementary School, which was closed long ago but still stands, abandoned.
I explained to my Buy Me a Coffee supporters why I ask them to buy me dragons.
One of the best tags on my big blog is drawing — though the formatting gets wonky when you get back to 2016 or so, apologies for that. (Side-effects of an import from Tumblr that can only be fixed one post at a time. Sigh.)
I wrote about Thomas Flanagan’s Irish historical novels — which I love.
Re: David Brooks’s column on the good and bad sides of ambition, I once told David that I thought my work is insufficiently ambitious. “Well,” he said, “you did write a book called How to Think.”
The great director Howard Hawks told a story about a time when he invited two friends, who had never met, to go hunting with him: “Bill, this is Clark Gable; Clark, this is Bill Faulkner.” At one point during the trip Gable asked who the best living writers were. Faulkner named a few of the usual suspects and then added: “and myself.”
Gable: “Oh, do you write, Mr. Faulkner?”
Faulkner: “Yes. And what do you do, Mr. Gable?”
A great unanswered question for the age of AI, should the technology eventually prove capable of generating entire books and movies, is how audiences will respond to the true absence of thought or intentionality behind a story or performance. My guess and hope is that the idea that you’re communing with another self — whether the actor performing the part or the writer putting words on the page — is powerful enough to let real art survive the artificially generated competition.
But the millions of people buying tickets for movies like Superman are already being sold something that feels like a proof of a different concept, in which stories are simply programmed instead of being told.