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Javier E

About 41% of the global population are under 24. And they're angry… | Opinion... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...e-up-established-order-protest

protest activism youth generation global dissent culture politics

shared by Javier E on 27 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Are we entering a new age of global revolution? Or is it foolish to try to link anger in India over the price of onions to pro-democracy demonstrations in Russia?
  • recent upheavals do appear to share one key factor: youth. In most cases, younger people are at the forefront of calls for change. The uprising that unexpectedly swept away Sudan’s ancien regime this year was essentially generational
  • while younger people, in any era, are predisposed to shake up the established order, extreme demographic, social and political imbalances are intensifying present-day pressures
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  • There are more young people than ever before. About 41% of the global population of 7.7 billion is aged 24 or under. In Africa, 41% is under 15. In Asia and Latin America (where 65% of the world’s people live), it’s 25%.
  • In developed countries, imbalances tilt the other way. While 16% of Europeans are under 15, about 18%, double the world average, are over 65.
  • Recession, stagnant or falling living standards, and austerity programmes delivered from on high have shaped their experience
  • a common factor is the increased willingness of undemocratic regimes, ruling elites and wealthy oligarchies to use force to crush threats to their power – while hypocritically condemning protester violenc
  • they’re connected. More people than ever before have access to education. They are healthier. They appear less bound by social conventions and religion. They are mutually aware. And their expectations are higher.
  • thanks to social media, the ubiquity of English as a common tongue, and the internet’s globalisation and democratisation of information
  • younger people from all backgrounds and locations are more open to alternative life choices, more attuned to “universal” rights and norms such as free speech or a living wage – and less prepared to accept their denial
  • It is difficult, if not perverse, to watch protesters risking torture and death by challenging Egypt’s dictator, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and not relate their daring both to Hong Kong and, say, to Kashmiris’ efforts to throw off the yoke imposed by another “strongman”, India’s Narendra Modi. When Palestinian youths taunt the Israel Defence Forces with flags and stones, are they not part of the same global fight for democratic self-determination, basic freedoms and human rights espoused by young Muscovites opposing Vladimir Putin’s cruel kleptocracy?
  • Any government, elected or not, that fails to provide jobs, decent wages and housing faces big trouble.
  • Another negative is the perceived, growing readiness of democratically elected governments, notably in the US and Europe, to lie, manipulate and disinform
  • disbelief is the new spirit of the age
  • The stifling silence that hangs over North Korea’s gulag, China’s Xinjiang and Tibet regions, and dark, hidden places inside Syria, Eritrea, Iran and Azerbaijan could yet descend on us all. What helps protect us is the noisy, life-affirming dissent of the young.
blythewallick

A Roman Feast… of Death! | JSTOR Daily - 0 views

daily.jstor.org/a-roman-feast-of-death

history

shared by blythewallick on 19 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The banquet hall was painted black from ceiling to floor. By the pale flicker of grave lamps, the invited senators were able to make out a row of tombstones set before the dining couches—each inscribed with one of their names. Slave boys dressed as phantoms brought in courses on gleaming black dishes. They were piled with food, but not the lavish delicacies of an emperor’s table. Rather, Domitian served his guests the plain offerings traditionally given to the dead. The senators began to wonder if soon they would be dead themselves.
  • After the dinner ended, the guests spent the whole night expecting summons for an execution to appear at any moment. Finally, in the morning, Domitian sent messengers to inform them that the gravestones (now revealed to be made of solid silver), the costly dishware, and the slave boys were being given to them as gifts.
  • At least on the surface, it was all a harmless prank. The fact was, Domitian could easily have had his guests killed. Anyone could fall from imperial grace; Domitian had even executed his nephew and exiled his niece. Even after Domitian revealed that the gravestones were solid-silver treasures, their unspoken threat lingered in the air.
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  • Then there’s Elagabulus, whose biography is a veritable catalog of extreme pranks. He taunted his guests by serving them platters of faux food made from wax or wood or marble, while he feasted on real delicacies. Sometimes he served his guests paintings of meals, or napkins embroidered with pictures of the food he was eating. (Imagine walking away from a dinner with an empty stomach but loaded down with paintings of a Roman feast: flamingo tongues, peacock brains, combs cut from the heads of living roosters, etc.) Even when he served actual food, he delighted in mixing the edible and inedible, seasoning peas with gold nuggets, rice with pearls, and beans with glowing chips of amber.
  • Under Roman law, a slave was not considered to be properly a human being. But the “masters” must have known on some level that their “property” was not really theirs, that subservience and subordination were acts put on under duress. In theory, absolute power is invulnerable; in practice, the emperor is always looking over his shoulder for the assassins in the shadows
Javier E

A Long-Lost Manuscript Contains a Searing Eyewitness Account of the Tulsa Race Massacre... - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...a-race-massacre-1921-180959251

race massacre manuscript racism white supremacy 1920s

shared by Javier E on 26 May 19 - No Cached
  • an eyewitness account of the May 31, 1921, racial massacre that destroyed what was known as Tulsa, Oklahoma’s “Black Wall Street,” are searing. “I could see planes circling in mid-air. They grew in number and hummed, darted and dipped low. I could hear something like hail falling upon the top of my office building. Down East Archer, I saw the old Mid-Way hotel on fire, burning from its top, and then another and another and another building began to burn from their top,” wrote Buck Colbert Franklin (1879-1960). 
  • The Oklahoma lawyer, father of famed African-American historian John Hope Franklin (1915-2009), was describing the attack by hundreds of whites on the thriving black neighborhood known as Greenwood in the booming oil town. “Lurid flames roared and belched and licked their forked tongues into the air. Smoke ascended the sky in thick, black volumes and amid it all, the planes—now a dozen or more in number—still hummed and darted here and there with the agility of natural birds of the air.”
  • The younger Franklin says Tulsa has been in denial over the fact that people were cruel enough to bomb the black community from the air, in private planes, and that black people were machine-gunned down in the streets. The issue was economics. Franklin explains that Native Americans and African-Americans became wealthy thanks to the discovery of oil in the early 1900s on what had previously been seen as worthless land.
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  • “That’s what leads to Greenwood being called the Black Wall Street. It had restaurants and furriers and jewelry stores and hotels,” John W. Franklin explains, “and the white mobs looted the homes and businesses before they set fire to the community. For years black women would see white women walking down the street in their jewelry and snatch it off.”
  • More than 35 blocks were destroyed, along with more than 1,200 homes, and some 300 people died, mostly blacks. The National Guard was called out after the governor declared martial law, and imprisoned all blacks that were not already in jail. More than 6,000 people were held, according to the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum, some for as long as eight days.
  • “It was the frustration of poor whites not knowing what to do with a successful black community, and in coalition with the city government were given permission to do what they did.”
  • “Then whites were deputized and handed weapons, the shooting starts and then it gets out of hand,” Franklin says. “It went on for two days until the entire black community is burned down.”
  • As in other places, the Tulsa race riot started with newspaper reports that a black man had assaulted a white elevator operator. He was arrested, and Franklin says black World War I vets rushed to the courthouse to prevent a lynching.
  • “(Survivors) talk about how the city was shut down in the riot,” Gardullo says. “They shut down the phone systems, the railway. . . . They wouldn’t let the Red Cross in. There was complicity between the city government and the mob. It was mob rule for two days, and the result was the complete devastation of the community.”
  • Franklin says he has issues with the words often used to describe the attack that decimated the black community. “The term riot is contentious, because it assumes that black people started the violence, as they were accused of doing by whites,” Franklin says. “We increasingly use the term massacre, or I use the European term, pogrom.”
Javier E

Hard Times in the Red Dot - The American Interest - 0 views

www.the-american-interest.com/...hard-times-in-the-red-dot

us collapse history trump politics disaster exceptionalism Singapore

shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Deaths per million in Singapore equal about 4; the comparable U.S. figure, as of June 15, is 356.
  • traits with cultural roots planted deep from experience that run through all of East Asia to one degree or another. Unlike most Americans, East Asians retain some imagination for tragedy, and that inculcates a capacity for stoicism that can be summoned when needed.
  • Stoicism here wears off faster now, along with any vestigial passion for politics, in rough proportion to the burgeoning in recent decades of affluence and a culture of conspicuous consumption
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  • it wears off faster among the young and energetic than among the older, more world-weary but also more patient
  • Middle-class Singaporean families often refer to themselves nowadays as the “sandwich generation,” by which they mean that between needing to care for elderly parents and spending heavily on tuition or tutoring and uniforms for school-age children, they have little left to spend on themselves
  • There are more than 10,000 cases, and numbers are rising fast. More than 800 cases were registered in just five and a half days this past week, more than the previous all-time record for a full week.
  • The Singaporean system lacks an open-ended entitlement akin to the U.S. Social Security system. It uses a market-based system with much to commend it, but it isn’t perfect. The system is designed to rely in part on multigenerational families taking care of the elderly, so as is the case everywhere, when a family doesn’t cohere well for one reason or another, its elderly members often suffer most.
  • with the coming of Singapore’s second monsoon season, the island is suffering the worst bout of dengue fever infections in more than a decade.
  • No country in the world has benefited more than Singapore from U.S. postwar grand strategy, except perhaps China. Which is an interesting observation, often made here, in its own right.
  • He proceeded to explain that the U.S. effort in Vietnam had already bought the new nations of Southeast Asia shelter from communist onslaught for three to four precious years.
  • LKY’s son, current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, repeated the same conclusion in a recent Foreign Affairs essay. He added that ever since the Vietnam War era, regardless of the end of the Cold War and dramatic changes in China, the U.S. role in East Asia has been both benign—he did not say error-free—and stabilizing.
  • More than that, U.S. support for an expanding free-trade accented global economic order has enabled Singapore to surf the crest of burgeoning economic growth in Asia, becoming the most successful transshipment platform in history. It has enabled Singapore to benefit from several major technological developments—containerization is a good example—that have revolutionized international trade in manufactures
  • Few realize that military power can do more than either compel or deter. Most of the time most military power in the hands of a status quo actor like the United States neither compels nor deters; it “merely” reassures, except that over time there is nothing mere about it
  • The most important of these reasons—and, I’ve learned, the hardest one for foreigners to understand—is that the Protestant/Enlightenment DNA baked indelibly into the American personality requires a belief in the nation’s exceptionalist virtue to justify an activist role abroad
  • Singapore has ridden the great whale of Asian advancement in a sea of American-guaranteed tranquility.
  • Singapore’s approach to dealing with China has been one of strategic hedging. There is no getting around the need to cooperate economically and functionally with China, for Chinese influence permeates the entire region. Do a simple thought experiment: Even if Singaporeans determined to avoid China, how could they avoid the emanations of Chinese relations with and influence on Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, and Korea? Impossible.
  • Singapore’s close relationship with the United States needs to be seen as similarly enmeshed with the greater web of U.S. relationships in littoral Asia, as well as with India and the Middle East. It is misleading, therefore, to define the issue as one of Singapore’s confidence, or lack thereof, that the United States will come to Singapore’s aid and defense en extremis.
  • The utility of the U.S. role vis-à-vis China is mainly one of regional balancing that indirectly benefits Singaporean security.
  • Singapore’s hedging strategy, which reflects a similar disposition throughout Southeast Asia with variations here and there, only works within certain ranges of enabling reality. It doesn’t work if American power or will wanes too much, and it doesn’t work if the broader Sino-American regional balance collapses into glaring enmity and major-power conflict.
  • Over the past dozen years the worry has been too much American waning, less of capability than of strategic attention, competence, and will. Now, over the past year or two, the worry has shifted to anxiety over potential system collapse into conflict and even outright war.
  • It’s no fun being a sentient ping pong ball between two behemoths with stinging paddles, so they join together in ASEAN hoping that this will deflect such incentives. It won’t, but people do what they can when they cannot do what they like.
  • the flat-out truth: The United States is in the process of doing something no other great power in modern history has ever done. It is knowingly and voluntarily abdicating its global role and responsibilities
  • It is troubled within, so is internally directed for reasons good and otherwise. Thus distracted from the rest of the world in a Hamlet-like act sure to last at least a decade, it is unlikely ever to return in full to the disinterested, active, and constructive role it pioneered for itself after World War II.
  • The recessional began already at the end of the George W. Bush Administration, set roots during the eight years of the Obama presidency, and became a bitter, relentless, tactless, and barely shy of mad obsession during the Trump presidency.
  • the strategy itself is unlikely to be revivified for several reasons.
  • One Lee Kuan Yew vignette sums up the matter. In the autumn of 1968, at a dinner in his honor at Harvard, the Prime Minister had to sit through a litany of complaints from leading scholars about President Johnson’s disastrously escalatory war policies in Vietnam. When they were through, no doubt expecting sympathy from an Asian leader, LKY, never one to bite his tongue, turned on his hosts and announced: “You make me sick.”
  • When, for justifiable reasons or not, the nation loses its moral self-respect, it cannot lift its chin to look confidently upon the world, or bring itself to ask the world to look upon America as a worthy model, let alone a leader.
  • That fact that most Americans today also increasingly see expansive international engagement as too expensive, too dangerous, too complex to understand, and unhelpful either to the “main street” American economy or to rock-bottom American security, is relevant too
  • the disappearance of a single “evil” adversary in Soviet communism, the advent of near-permanent economic anxiety punctuated by the 2008-9 Great Recession—whatever numbers the stock market puts up—and the sclerotic polarization of American politics have left most Americans with little bandwidth for foreign policy narratives.
  • Few listen to any member of our tenured political class with the gumption to argue that U.S. internationalism remains in the national interest. In any event, few try, and even fewer manage to make any sense when they do.
  • In that context, pleas from thoughtful observers that we must find a mean between trying to do too much and doing too little are likely to be wasted. No thoughtful, moderate approach to any public policy question can get an actionable hearing these days.
  • what has happened to “the America I knew and so admired” that its people could elect a man like Donald Trump President? How could a great country deteriorate so quickly from apparent competence, lucidity of mind, and cautious self-confidence into utterly debilitating spasms of apparent self-destruction?
  • The political culture as a whole has become a centrism incinerator, an immoderation generator, a shuddering dynamo of shallow intellectual impetuosity of every description.
  • in the wake of the George Floyd unrest one side thinks a slogan—“law and order”—that is mighty close to a dogwhistle for “shoot people of color” can make it all better, while the other side advocates defunding or abolishing the police, for all the good that would do struggling inner-city underclass neighborhoods.
  • To any normal person these are brazenly unserious propositions, yet they suck up nearly all the oxygen the U.S. media has the inclination to report about. The optic once it reaches Singapore, 9,650 miles away, is one of raving derangement.
  • Drop any policy proposal into any of the great lava flows of contemporary American irrationality and any sane center it may possess will boil away into nothingness in a matter of seconds
  • It’s hard for many to let go of hoary assurances about American benignity, constancy, and sound judgment
  • It is a little like trying to peel a beloved but thoroughly battered toy out of the hands of a four-year old. They want to hold onto it, even though at some level they know it’s time to loosen their grip.
  • Since then the mendacious narcissism of Donald Trump, the eager acquiescence to it of nearly the entire Republican Party, and its deadly metathesis in the COVID-19 and George Floyd contexts, have changed their questions. They no longer ask how this man could have become President. Now they ask where is the bottom of this sputtering cacophonous mess? They ask what will happen before and then on and after November 3
  • Singapore’s good fortune in recent decades is by no means entirely an accident of its ambient geostrategic surroundings, but it owes much to those surroundings. While Singaporeans were honing the arts of good government, saving and investing in the country, educating and inventing value-added jobs for themselves, all the while keeping intercommunal relations inclined toward greater tolerance and harmony, the world was cooperating mightily with their ambitions. At the business end of that world was the United States
  • The U.S. grand strategy of providing security goods to the global commons sheltered Singapore’s efforts in more ways than one over the years
  • In 1965, when Singapore was thrust into independence from the Malaysian union, a more fraught environment could barely have been imagined. Indonesia was going crazy in the year of living dangerously, and the konfrontasi spilled over violently onto Singapore’s streets, layering on the raw feelings of race riots here in 1964. Communist Chinese infiltration of every trade union movement in the region was a fact of life, not to exclude shards of Singapore’s, and the Cultural Revolution was at full froth in China. So when U.S. Marines hit the beach at Da Nang in February 1965 the independence-generation leadership here counted it as a blessing.
  • this is exactly the problem now: Those massively benign trends are at risk of inanition, if not reversal.
  • While China is no longer either Marxist or crazy, as it was during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, it is still Leninist, as its recent summary arrogation of Hong Kong’s negotiated special status shows. It has meanwhile grown mighty economically, advanced technologically at surprising speed, and has taken to investing grandly in its military capabilities. Its diplomacy has become more assertive, some would even say arrogant, as its Wolf Warrior nationalism has grown
  • The downward economic inflection of the pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing economic strains
Javier E

The GOP Is a Propaganda Party - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/the-gop-is-a-propaganda-party

gop propaganda party trump fox news politics

shared by Javier E on 30 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • the relationship between what’s loosely defined as “conservative media” and the GOP.
  • For a long time, most influential right-leaning media figures were content to swim alongside the GOP, flowing along in the same general direction. Until Donald Trump came along. Then they saw an opportunity to burrow deep inside the GOP and wield real power.
  • It worked. So well that the GOP, as an institution, no longer controls its tongue and its craven media parasites are the only thing keeping it alive.
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  • beyond and before Fox, the media—news, talk, and entertainment—always have been and always will be Trump’s source of political strength. That will only become more true after he leaves office. He will continue to seek out ratings, somewhere, as sustenance for relevance and survival.
  • It’s the Fox News primetime lineup, the large galaxy of radio and digital outlets clamoring to place their personalities and stories on Fox News, and their vast array of fringy lower-tier knockoffs.
  • All day, every day, these talkers, writers, producers, and editors set the party agenda. They act as the Republican party’s “war room.” They give favored politicians airtime to solicit donations from their viewers. They go negative on their political enemies. Their stars even headline campaign events to rev up the base and get out the vote.
  • The ones who are good at it get paid far more by the likes of the Murdoch and the Mercer families to carry out the political agenda than any mere senator or congressman. These talkers, not the elected officials stuck grubbing around shaking hands and campaigning in the streets, are the party’s real leaders.
  • Donald Trump is almost an afterthought in this context
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  • Long before he announced his candidacy in 2015, Fox primed the GOP base for a candidate like him; the network gave him more airtime than other candidates, including a longstanding call-in segment on Fox & Friends; no one blinked an eye when Fox head Roger Ailes, who had a quarter-century friendship with Trump, began advising the Trump campaign
  • “Who are the actual leaders of the GOP?” Who truly influences Republican voters?
  • Knowing this dynamic within the GOP, it’s no wonder that (to name just one ambitious pol) Sen. Ted Cruz has adopted the posture of an online Twitter troll instead of the constitutional scholar-turned-statesman of the biggest, most Republican state in the union.
  • The demands of leading and governing in the public interest have never meshed well with the demands of winning and keeping office, but they have never before been so contradictory.
  • Propaganda Party rules dictate that “owning the libz” and generating likes, retweets, and reactions online are the key to success. In the absence of any policy platform, a new party operating philosophy has emerged among politicians and media figures alike: present Trump-friendly figures in the best light possible and depict anyone who stands in their way as some variation of a socialist, child-eating, Satan worshipper.
  • Plenty of deep-pocketed investors are down for it; they’re looking to fund more media that will do exactly this.
  • Ben Smith found a healthy appetite among media investors eager to “convert Mr. Trump’s political profile into cash”:
  • it’s a much better bang for their buck than funding candidates or ads. It sure beats abiding by pesky campaign finance rules, too.
  • The prospect that Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram might enforce rules to bar politicians from dumping disinformation online is probably the biggest threat to their political model.
  • people like Ruddy and the talk radio personalities and the Fox primetime hosts have only one primary function now: Keep Trump’s GOP alive, no matter what. They feed themselves and feed the political machine at once. And, without them, the GOP in its current form will wither and die.
  • The propaganda is the party and the party is propaganda. Sink or swim.
Javier E

The Happiest Country Depends on Your Definition of Happiness - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...619441

happiness definition culture history

shared by Javier E on 18 Jul 21 - No Cached
  • n order for the World Happiness Report and other international happiness indexes to compare self-reports of happiness, they have to assume that people around the world define happiness and answer happiness surveys in roughly the same way. If this assumption does not hold, then happiness indexes are about as reliable as a ranking of music quality based on how much residents of each country say they like their local songs. This would indicate something about each country’s enthusiasm for their musical styles, but would provide little information about what music is objectively “best,” given differences in people’s traditions and tastes.
  • On first pass, the ways people around the world say they experience happiness have some obvious commonalities. One 2016 study of 2,799 adults in 12 countries found that in all the nations studied, psychological definitions of happiness—“an inner state, feeling or attitude”—dominated all others. In particular, people worldwide said they found happiness in achieving “inner harmony.”
  • Inner harmony might sound universal, but it can mean very different things in different places. For example, while shooting a documentary film in Denmark on the pursuit of happiness two years ago, I found that the Danes often described inner harmony in terms of hygge, which is something like coziness and comfortable conviviality. Meanwhile, I have found that Americans tend to define it in terms of their skills meeting their passions, usually in the context of work.
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  • 49 percent of Americans referred explicitly to family relationships in their definition of happiness, while Southern Europeans and Latin Americans generally conceived of it in terms of oneself: Just 22 percent of Portuguese, 18 percent of Mexicans, and 10 percent of Argentines talked about their families in their happiness definitions.
  • Writing in the International Journal of Wellbeing in 2012, two Japanese scholars surfaced an important cultural difference in the definition of happiness between Western and Asian cultures. In the West, they found happiness to be defined as “a high arousal state such as excitement and a sense of personal achievement.” Meanwhile, in Asia, “happiness is defined in terms of experiencing a low arousal state such as calmness.”
  • In large countries, even comparing people within the same borders can be difficult to accomplish accurately. Happiness is defined very differently in northern versus southern India,
  • research shows that the United States is home to significant regional differences in personality characteristics. For example, people in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions tend to display more attachment anxiety (“When will you call?”), while the western states breed more attachment avoidance (“See you when I see you”).
  • in Latin-based languages, the term comes from felicitas, which referred in ancient Rome not just to good luck, but also to growth, fertility, and prosperity.
  • Even the words we use to talk about happiness have different connotations in different tongues. In Germanic languages, happiness is rooted in words related to fortune or positive fate. In fact, happiness comes from the Middle English hap, which means “luck.”
  • cultures vary widely in their definitions of happiness. Therefore, it is impossible to say that one country is happier than another in some absolute sense, and a single index of “the happiest countries in the world” is not instructive.
  • Maybe Finland is the happiest country by one definition; it is almost certainly not by another. Countries should be classified more than compared.
  • handy way to get started on that task is to distinguish between two ways of focusing on happiness. The first is an “inner” or “outer” focus on happiness—that is, on introspection versus interaction with others. The second is a “relation” or “task” focus—people-oriented versus doing-oriented. This gives us four major models for well-being, based on survey research from around the world.
  • 1. Happiness comes from good relationships with the people you love.This is a combination of the “outer” and “relation” foci. In this model, friends and family are who deliver the most happiness. A good example of a country that fits this model based on how the population tends to define happiness is the United States.
  • 2. Happiness comes from a higher consciousness.This is a combination of the “inner” and “relation” foci, and is the model for highly spiritual, philosophical, or religious people, especially those who place a special importance on coming together in community. Southern India has been found to be home to a lot of people who follow this model.
  • 3. Happiness comes from doing what you love, usually with others.This is a combination of the “outer” and “task” foci—that is, a dedication to work or leisure activities that are deeply fulfilling. This is your model if you tend to say “My work is my life” or “I love golfing with my friends.” Look for it in the Nordic countries and Central Europe.
  • 4. Happiness comes from simply feeling good.This is a combination of the “inner” and “task” foci. It is the model for people who prioritize experiences that give them positive feelings, whether alone or with others. It’s a good way to assess your well-being if, when you imagine being happy, you think of watching Netflix or drinking wine. This model is most common in Latin America, the Mediterranean, and South Africa.
  • Just as different places have different definitions of happiness, so do different people. Understanding that diversity can help you understand yourself—to see whether and why you are a misfit in your home, and what you might do about it, whether that’s moving, joining a new community, or simply making peace with your surroundings.
sidneybelleroche

Associated Press News - 0 views

apnews.com/...7084f4e606c10a33a15384fbe05967

shared by sidneybelleroche on 06 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • Bob Dole, who overcame disabling war wounds to become a sharp-tongued Senate leader from Kansas, a Republican presidential candidate and then a symbol and celebrant of his dwindling generation of World War II veterans, died Sunday. He was 98.
  • His wife, Elizabeth Dole, said in an announcement posted on social media that he died in his sleep.
  • He shaped tax policy, foreign policy, farm and nutrition programs and rights for the disabled, enshrining protections against discrimination in employment, education and public services in the Americans with Disabilities Act.
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  • Dole announced in February 2021 that he’d been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. During his 36-year career on Capitol Hill, Dole became one of the most influential legislators and party leaders in the Senate
  • Dole could be merciless with his rivals, whether Democrat or Republican.
  • Long gone from Kansas, Dole made his life in the capital, at the center of power and then in its shadow upon his retirement, living all the while at the storied Watergate complex.
  • He tried three times to become president. The last was in 1996, when he won the Republican nomination only to see President Bill Clinton reelected.
  • He sought his party’s presidential nomination in 1980 and 1988 and was the 1976 GOP vice presidential candidate on the losing ticket with President Gerald Ford.
  • Today’s accessible government offices and national parks, sidewalk ramps and the sign-language interpreters at official local events are just some of the more visible hallmarks of his legacy and that of the fellow lawmakers he rounded up for that sweeping civil rights legislation 30 years ago.
  • But when Bush died in December 2018, old rivalries were forgotten as Dole appeared before Bush’s casket in the Capitol Rotunda. As an aide lifted him from his wheelchair, Dole slowly steadied himself and saluted his one-time nemesis with his left hand, his chin quivering.
  • For all of his bare-knuckle ways, he was a deep believer in the Senate as an institution and commanded respect and even affection from many Democrats. Just days after Dole announced his dire cancer diagnosis, President Joe Biden visited him at his home to wish him well. The White House said the two were close friends from their days in the Senate.
  • Biden ordered that U.S. flags be flown at half-staff at the White House and all public buildings and grounds until sunset Thursday.
  • He served as a committee chairman, majority leader and minority leader in the Senate during the 1980s and ’90s. Altogether, he was the Republicans’ leader in the Senate for nearly 11½ years, a record until Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell broke it in 2018.
  • After Republicans won Senate control, Dole became chairman of the tax-writing Finance Committee and won acclaim from deficit hawks and others for his handling of a 1982 tax bill, in which he persuaded Ronald Reagan’s White House to go along with increasing revenues by $100 billion to ease the federal budget deficit.
  • Relegated to private life, Dole became an elder statesman who helped Clinton get a chemical-weapons treaty passed.
  • He also tended his wife’s political ambitions. Elizabeth Dole ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, then served a term as senator from North Carolina.
Javier E

Opinion | What Europe Can Teach Us About Jobs - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...united-states-europe-jobs.html

jobs europe employment

shared by Javier E on 30 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Americans have a hard time learning from foreign experience. Our size and the role of English as an international language (which reduces our incentive to learn other tongues) conspire to make us oblivious to alternative ways of living and the possibilities of change.
  • Unfortunately, any suggestion that Europe does something we might want to emulate tends to be shouted down with cries of “socialism.”
  • an under-discussed aspect of the current economic scene: Europe’s comparative success in getting workers idled by the pandemic back into the labor force.
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  • the Great Resignation, it turns out, is largely an American phenomenon. European nations have been much more successful than we have at getting people back to work. In France, in particular, employment and labor force participation are now well above prepandemic levels. What explains this difference?
  • Europe, on the other hand, mainly relied on job retention schemes — government aid intended to keep people on employer payrolls even if they weren’t working at the moment.
  • where European labor support helped keep workers linked to their old jobs, facilitating a rapid return, U.S. policy allowed many of those links to be severed, making an employment recovery harder.
  • Perhaps one reason Europeans aren’t engaging in an American-style Great Resignation is that they don’t hate their jobs quite as much.
  • a significant number may have realized that low-paying jobs with lousy working conditions weren’t worth having
  • some jobs that are grueling and poorly paid here are less awful on the other side of the Atlantic. Famously, in Denmark McDonald’s pays more than $20 an hour and offers six weeks of paid vacation each year
  • the U.S. does stand out among wealthy countries for having a low minimum wage, for offering very little vacation time and for failing to offer parental and sick leave
Javier E

(2) What Was the 'Soviet Century'? - by André Forget - Bulwark+ - 0 views

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soviet russia culture policy crisis history politics

shared by Javier E on 20 May 23 - No Cached
  • Schlögel makes the argument that the Soviet Union is best understood not primarily as the manifestation of rigid Communist ideology, but as an attempt to transform an agrarian peasant society into a fully modern state
  • “A ‘Marxist theory,’” he writes, “yields very little for an understanding of the processes of change in postrevolutionary Russia. We get somewhat nearer the mark if we explore the scene of a modernization without modernity and of a grandiose civilizing process powered by forces that were anything but civil.” In other words, the interminable debates about whether Lenin was the St. Paul of communism or its Judas Iscariot are beside the point: As a Marxist might put it, the history of the Soviet Union is best explained by material conditions.
  • the story one pieces together from his chapters goes something like this. In the years between 1917 and 1945, the Russian Empire ceased to be a semi-feudal aristocracy governed by an absolutist monarch whose rule rested on divine right, and became an industrialized state. It dammed rivers, electrified the countryside, built massive factories and refineries, collectivized agriculture, raised literacy rates, set up palaces of culture, created a modern military, and made the Soviet Union one of the most powerful countries in the world. In the course of doing so, it sent some of its best minds into exile, crippled its system of food production, set up a massive network of prison camps, watched millions of its citizens die of hunger, killed hundreds of thousands more through slave labor and forced relocation, and executed a generation of revolutionary leaders. It did all this while surviving one of the most brutal civil wars of the twentieth century and the largest land invasion in history.
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  • Over the next forty-five years, it tried to establish a solid basis for growth and prosperity. It launched an ambitious housing program to create living spaces for its massive and rapidly urbanizing population, and to nurture the growth of a Soviet middle class that had access to amenities and luxury goods. At the same time, it systematically blocked this new middle class from exercising its creative faculties outside a narrow range of approved topics and ideological formulas, and it could not reliably ensure that if someone wanted to buy a winter coat in December, they could find it in the shop. It created a state with the resources and technology to provide for the needs of its citizens, but that was unable to actually deliver the goods.
  • The USSR moved forward under the weight of these contradictions, first sprinting, then staggering, until it was dismantled by another revolution, one that was orchestrated by the very class of party elites the first one had produced. But the states that emerged from the Soviet Union in 1991, and the people who lived in them, had undergone a profound change in the process.
  • Schlögel argues that over its sixty-eight years of existence, the Soviet Union did succeed in its goal of creating a “new Soviet person” (novy sovetsky chelovek). But, as he puts it,The new human being was the product not of any faith in a utopia, but of a tumult in which existing lifeworlds were destroyed and new ones born. The “Homo Sovieticus” was no fiction to be casually mocked but a reality with whom we usually only start to engage in earnest when we realize that analyzing the decisions of the Central Committee is less crucial than commonly assumed
  • Placing the emphasis on modernization rather than ideology allows Schlögel to delineate oft-ignored parallels and connections between the USSR and the United States. In the 1930s, especially, there was a great deal of cultural and technical collaboration between U.S. citizens and their Soviet counterparts, which led to what Hans Rogger called “Soviet Americanism” (sovetsky amerikanizm). “In many respects,” Schlögel writes, Soviet citizens “felt closer to America; America had left behind the class barriers and snobbery of Old Europe. America was less hierarchical; you could rise socially, something otherwise possible only in postrevolutionary Russia, where class barriers had broken down and equality had been universally imposed by brute force.”
  • As each rose to a position of global economic, political, and military predominance, the British Empire and the United States divided the world into “white” people, who had certain inalienable rights, and “colored” people who did not. The USSR, rising later and faster, made no such distinctions. An Old Bolshevik who had served the revolution for decades was just as likely to end their life freezing on the taiga as a Russian aristocrat or a Kazakh peasant.
  • Pragmatism and passion were certainly present in the development of the USSR, but they were not the only inputs. Perhaps the crucial factor was the almost limitless cheap labor supplied by impoverished peasants driven off their land, petty criminals, and political undesirables who could be press-ganged into service as part of their “reeducation.”
  • Between 1932 and 1937, the output of the Dalstroy mine went from 511 kilograms of gold to 51.5 tons. The price of this astonishing growth was paid by the bodies of the prisoners, of whom there were 163,000 by the end of the decade. The writer Varlam Shalamov, Schlögel’s guide through this frozen Malebolge, explains it this way:To turn a healthy young man, who had begun his career in the clean winter air of the gold mines, into a goner, all that was needed, at a conservative estimate, was a term of twenty to thirty days of sixteen hours of work per day, with no rest days, with systematic starvation, torn clothes, and nights spent in temperatures of minus sixty degrees in a canvas tent with holes in it, and being beaten by the foremen, the criminal gang masters, and the guards.
  • There is no moral calculus that can justify this suffering. And yet Schlögel lays out the brutal, unassimilable fact about the violence of Soviet modernization in the 1930s: “Without the gold of Kolyma . . . there would have been no build-up of the arms industries before and during the Soviet-German war.” The lives of the workers in Kolyma were the cost of winning the Second World War as surely as those of the soldiers at the front.
  • Of the 250,000 people, most of them prisoners,1 involved in building the 227-kilometer White Sea Canal, around 12,800 are confirmed to have died in the process. Even if the actual number is higher, as it probably is, it is hardly extraordinary when set against the 28,000 people who died in the construction of the 80-kilometer Panama Canal (or the 20,000 who had died in an earlier, failed French attempt to build it), or the tens of thousands killed digging the Suez Canal
  • it is worth noting that slave labor in mines and building projects, forced starvation of millions through food requisitions, and the destruction of traditional lifeworlds were all central features of the colonial projects that underwrote the building of modernity in the U.S. and Western Europe. To see the mass death caused by Soviet policies in the first decades of Communist rule in a global light—alongside the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the genocide of Indigenous peoples in Africa and the Americas, and the great famines in South Asia—is to see it not as the inevitable consequence of socialist utopianism, but of rapid modernization undertaken without concern for human life.
  • But Soviet Americanism was about more than cultural affinities. The transformation of the Soviet Union would have been impossible without American expertise.
  • Curiously enough, Schlögel seems to credit burnout from the era of hypermobilization for the fall of the USSR:Whole societies do not collapse because of differences of opinion or true or false guidelines or even the decisions of party bosses. They perish when they are utterly exhausted and human beings can go on living only if they cast off or destroy the conditions that are killing them
  • it seems far more accurate to say that the USSR collapsed the way it did because of a generational shift. By the 1980s, the heroic generation was passing away, and the new Soviet people born in the post-war era were comparing life in the USSR not to what it had been like in the bad old Tsarist days, but to what it could be like
  • Schlögel may be right that “Pittsburgh is not Magnitogorsk,” and that the U.S. was able to transition out of the heroic period of modernization far more effectively than the USSR. But the problems America is currently facing are eerily similar to those of the Soviet Union in its final years—a sclerotic political system dominated by an aging leadership class, environmental degradation, falling life expectancy, a failed war in Afghanistan, rising tensions between a traditionally dominant ethnic group and freedom-seeking minorities, a population that has been promised a higher standard of living than can be delivered by its economic system.
  • given where things stand in the post-Soviet world of 2023, the gaps tell an important story. The most significant one is around ethnic policy, or what the Soviet Union referred to as “nation-building” (natsional‘noe stroitel‘stvo).
  • In the more remote parts of the USSR, where national consciousness was still in the process of developing, it raised the more profound question of which groups counted as nations. When did a dialect become a language? If a nation was tied to a clearly demarcated national territory, how should the state deal with nomadic peoples?
  • The Bolsheviks dealt with this last problem by ignoring it. Lenin believed that “nationality” was basically a matter of language, and language was simply a medium for communication.
  • Things should be “national in form, socialist in content,” as Stalin famously put it. Tatar schools would teach Tatar children about Marx and Engels in Tatar, and a Kyrgyz novelist like Chinghiz Aitmatov could write socialist realist novels in Kyrgyz.
  • Unity would be preserved by having each nationality pursue a common goal in their own tongue. This was the reason Lenin did not believe that establishing ethno-territorial republics would lead to fragmentation of the Soviet state
  • Despite these high and earnest ideals, the USSR’s nationalities policy was as filled with tragedy as the rest of Soviet history. Large numbers of intellectuals from minority nations were executed during the Great Purge for “bourgeois nationalism,” and entire populations were subject to forced relocation on a massive scale.
  • In practice, Soviet treatment of national minorities was driven not by a commitment to self-determination, but by the interests (often cynical, sometimes paranoid) of whoever happened to be in the Kremlin.
  • The ethnic diversity of the USSR was a fundamental aspect of the lifeworlds of millions of Soviet citizens, and yet Schlögel barely mentions it.
  • As is often the case with books about the Soviet Union, it takes life in Moscow and Leningrad to be representative of the whole. But as my friends in Mari El used to say, “Moscow is another country.”
  • None of this would matter much if it weren’t for the fact that the thirty years since the dismantling of the USSR have been defined in large part by conflicts between and within the successor states over the very questions of nationality and territory raised during the founding of the Soviet Union.
  • in the former lands of the USSR, barely a year has gone since 1991 without a civil war, insurgency, or invasion fought over control of territory or control of the government of that territory in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe.
  • Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 euthanized any remaining hopes that globalization and integration of trade would establish a lasting peace in Eastern Europe. The sense of possibility that animates Schlögel’s meditations on post-Soviet life—the feeling that the lifeworld of kommunalkas and queues had given way to a more vivacious, more dynamic, more forward-looking society that was bound to sort itself out eventually—now belongs definitively to the past. Something has been broken that cannot be fixed.
  • It is worth noting (Schlögel does not) that of the institutions that survived the dismantling of the Soviet state, the military and intelligence services and the criminal syndicates were the most powerful, in large part because they were so interconnected. In a kind of Hegelian shit-synthesis, the man who established a brutal kind of order after the mayhem of the nineteen-nineties, Vladimir Putin, has deep ties to both. The parts of Soviet communism that ensured a basic standard of living were, for the most part, destroyed in the hideously bungled transition to a market economy. Militarism, chauvinism, and gangster capitalism thrived, as they still do today.
  • Perhaps it is now possible to see the Soviet century as an anomaly in world history, an interregnum during which two power blocks, each a distorted reflection of the other, marshaled the energies of a modernizing planet in a great conflict over the future. The United States and the USSR both preached a universal doctrine, both claimed they were marching toward the promised land.
  • The unipolar moment lasted barely a decade, and we have now fallen through the rotten floor of American hegemony to find ourselves once again in the fraught nineteenth century. The wars of today are not between “smelly little orthodoxies,” but between empires and nations, the powerful states that can create their own morality and the small countries that have to find powerful friends
  • the key difference between 2023 and 1900 is that the process of modernization is, in large parts of the world, complete. What this means for great-power politics in the twenty-first century, we are only beginning to understand.
Javier E

Does Sam Altman Know What He's Creating? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...674764

AI threat promise

shared by Javier E on 18 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • On a Monday morning in April, Sam Altman sat inside OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters, telling me about a dangerous artificial intelligence that his company had built but would never release. His employees, he later said, often lose sleep worrying about the AIs they might one day release without fully appreciating their dangers.
  • He wanted me to know that whatever AI’s ultimate risks turn out to be, he has zero regrets about letting ChatGPT loose into the world. To the contrary, he believes it was a great public service.
  • Altman can still remember where he was the first time he saw GPT-4 write complex computer code, an ability for which it was not explicitly designed. “It was like, ‘Here we are,’ ”
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  • Altman believes that people need time to reckon with the idea that we may soon share Earth with a powerful new intelligence, before it remakes everything from work to human relationships. ChatGPT was a way of serving notice.
  • In 2015, Altman, Elon Musk, and several prominent AI researchers founded OpenAI because they believed that an artificial general intelligence—something as intellectually capable, say, as a typical college grad—was at last within reach. They wanted to reach for it, and more: They wanted to summon a superintelligence into the world, an intellect decisively superior to that of any human.
  • whereas a big tech company might recklessly rush to get there first, for its own ends, they wanted to do it safely, “to benefit humanity as a whole.” They structured OpenAI as a nonprofit, to be “unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” and vowed to conduct their research transparently.
  • The engine that now powers ChatGPT is called GPT-4. Altman described it to me as an alien intelligence.
  • Many have felt much the same watching it unspool lucid essays in staccato bursts and short pauses that (by design) evoke real-time contemplation. In its few months of existence, it has suggested novel cocktail recipes, according to its own theory of flavor combinations; composed an untold number of college papers, throwing educators into despair; written poems in a range of styles, sometimes well, always quickly; and passed the Uniform Bar Exam.
  • It makes factual errors, but it will charmingly admit to being wrong.
  • Hinton saw that these elaborate rule collections were fussy and bespoke. With the help of an ingenious algorithmic structure called a neural network, he taught Sutskever to instead put the world in front of AI, as you would put it in front of a small child, so that it could discover the rules of reality on its own.
  • Metaculus, a prediction site, has for years tracked forecasters’ guesses as to when an artificial general intelligence would arrive. Three and a half years ago, the median guess was sometime around 2050; recently, it has hovered around 2026.
  • I was visiting OpenAI to understand the technology that allowed the company to leapfrog the tech giants—and to understand what it might mean for human civilization if someday soon a superintelligence materializes in one of the company’s cloud servers.
  • Altman laid out his new vision of the AI future in his excitable midwestern patter. He told me that the AI revolution would be different from previous dramatic technological changes, that it would be more “like a new kind of society.” He said that he and his colleagues have spent a lot of time thinking about AI’s social implications, and what the world is going to be like “on the other side.”
  • the more we talked, the more indistinct that other side seemed. Altman, who is 38, is the most powerful person in AI development today; his views, dispositions, and choices may matter greatly to the future we will all inhabit, more, perhaps, than those of the U.S. president.
  • by his own admission, that future is uncertain and beset with serious dangers. Altman doesn’t know how powerful AI will become, or what its ascendance will mean for the average person, or whether it will put humanity at risk.
  • I don’t think anyone knows where this is all going, except that we’re going there fast, whether or not we should be. Of that, Altman convinced me.
  • “We could have gone off and just built this in our building here for five more years,” he said, “and we would have had something jaw-dropping.” But the public wouldn’t have been able to prepare for the shock waves that followed, an outcome that he finds “deeply unpleasant to imagine.”
  • Hinton is sometimes described as the “Godfather of AI” because he grasped the power of “deep learning” earlier than most
  • He drew a crude neural network on the board and explained that the genius of its structure is that it learns, and its learning is powered by prediction—a bit like the scientific method
  • Over time, these little adjustments coalesce into a geometric model of language that represents the relationships among words, conceptually. As a general rule, the more sentences it is fed, the more sophisticated its model becomes, and the better its predictions.
  • Altman has compared early-stage AI research to teaching a human baby. “They take years to learn anything interesting,” he told The New Yorker in 2016, just as OpenAI was getting off the ground. “If A.I. researchers were developing an algorithm and stumbled across the one for a human baby, they’d get bored watching it, decide it wasn’t working, and shut it down.”
  • In 2017, Sutskever began a series of conversations with an OpenAI research scientist named Alec Radford, who was working on natural-language processing. Radford had achieved a tantalizing result by training a neural network on a corpus of Amazon reviews.
  • Radford’s model was simple enough to allow for understanding. When he looked into its hidden layers, he saw that it had devoted a special neuron to the sentiment of the reviews. Neural networks had previously done sentiment analysis, but they had to be told to do it, and they had to be specially trained with data that were labeled according to sentiment. This one had developed the capability on its own.
  • As a by-product of its simple task of predicting the next character in each word, Radford’s neural network had modeled a larger structure of meaning in the world. Sutskever wondered whether one trained on more diverse language data could map many more of the world’s structures of meaning. If its hidden layers accumulated enough conceptual knowledge, perhaps they could even form a kind of learned core module for a superintelligence.
  • Language is different from these data sources. It isn’t a direct physical signal like light or sound. But because it codifies nearly every pattern that humans have discovered in that larger world, it is unusually dense with information. On a per-byte basis, it is among the most efficient data we know about, and any new intelligence that seeks to understand the world would want to absorb as much of it as possible
  • Sutskever told Radford to think bigger than Amazon reviews. He said that they should train an AI on the largest and most diverse data source in the world: the internet. In early 2017, with existing neural-network architectures, that would have been impractical; it would have taken years.
  • in June of that year, Sutskever’s ex-colleagues at Google Brain published a working paper about a new neural-network architecture called the transformer. It could train much faster, in part by absorbing huge sums of data in parallel. “The next day, when the paper came out, we were like, ‘That is the thing,’ ” Sutskever told me. “ ‘It gives us everything we want.’ ”
  • Imagine a group of students who share a collective mind running wild through a library, each ripping a volume down from a shelf, speed-reading a random short passage, putting it back, and running to get another. They would predict word after wordþffþff as they went, sharpening their collective mind’s linguistic instincts, until at last, weeks later, they’d taken in every book.
  • GPT discovered many patterns in all those passages it read. You could tell it to finish a sentence. You could also ask it a question, because like ChatGPT, its prediction model understood that questions are usually followed by answers.
  • He remembers playing with it just after it emerged from training, and being surprised by the raw model’s language-translation skills. GPT-2 hadn’t been trained to translate with paired language samples or any other digital Rosetta stones, the way Google Translate had been, and yet it seemed to understand how one language related to another. The AI had developed an emergent ability unimagined by its creators.
  • Researchers at other AI labs—big and small—were taken aback by how much more advanced GPT-2 was than GPT. Google, Meta, and others quickly began to train larger language models
  • As for other changes to the company’s structure and financing, he told me he draws the line at going public. “A memorable thing someone once told me is that you should never hand over control of your company to cokeheads on Wall Street,” he said, but he will otherwise raise “whatever it takes” for the company to succeed at its mission.
  • Altman tends to take a rosy view of these matters. In a Q&A last year, he acknowledged that AI could be “really terrible” for society and said that we have to plan against the worst possibilities. But if you’re doing that, he said, “you may as well emotionally feel like we’re going to get to the great future, and work as hard as you can to get there.”
  • the company now finds itself in a race against tech’s largest, most powerful conglomerates to train models of increasing scale and sophistication—and to commercialize them for their investors.
  • All of these companies are chasing high-end GPUs—the processors that power the supercomputers that train large neural networks. Musk has said that they are now “considerably harder to get than drugs.
  • No one has yet outpaced OpenAI, which went all in on GPT-4. Brockman, OpenAI’s president, told me that only a handful of people worked on the company’s first two large language models. The development of GPT-4 involved more than 100,
  • When GPT-4 emerged fully formed from its world-historical knowledge binge, the whole company began experimenting with it, posting its most remarkable responses in dedicated Slack channels
  • Joanne Jang, a product manager, remembers downloading an image of a malfunctioning pipework from a plumbing-advice Subreddit. She uploaded it to GPT-4, and the model was able to diagnose the problem. “That was a goose-bumps moment for me,” Jang told me.
  • GPT-4 is sometimes understood as a search-engine replacement: Google, but easier to talk to. This is a misunderstanding. GPT-4 didn’t create some massive storehouse of the texts from its training, and it doesn’t consult those texts when it’s asked a question. It is a compact and elegant synthesis of those texts, and it answers from its memory of the patterns interlaced within them; that’s one reason it sometimes gets facts wrong
  • it’s best to think of GPT-4 as a reasoning engine. Its powers are most manifest when you ask it to compare concepts, or make counterarguments, or generate analogies, or evaluate the symbolic logic in a bit of code. Sutskever told me it is the most complex software object ever made.
  • Its model of the external world is “incredibly rich and subtle,” he said, because it was trained on so many of humanity’s concepts and thoughts
  • To predict the next word from all the possibilities within such a pluralistic Alexandrian library, GPT-4 necessarily had to discover all the hidden structures, all the secrets, all the subtle aspects of not just the texts, but—at least arguably, to some extent—of the external world that produced them
  • That’s why it can explain the geology and ecology of the planet on which it arose, and the political theories that purport to explain the messy affairs of its ruling species, and the larger cosmos, all the way out to the faint galaxies at the edge of our light cone.
  • Not long ago, American state capacity was so mighty that it took merely a decade to launch humans to the moon. As with other grand projects of the 20th century, the voting public had a voice in both the aims and the execution of the Apollo missions. Altman made it clear that we’re no longer in that world. Rather than waiting around for it to return, or devoting his energies to making sure that it does, he is going full throttle forward in our present reality.
  • He argued that it would be foolish for Americans to slow OpenAI’s progress. It’s a commonly held view, both inside and outside Silicon Valley, that if American companies languish under regulation, China could sprint ahead;
  • AI could become an autocrat’s genie in a lamp, granting total control of the population and an unconquerable military. “If you are a person of a liberal-democratic country, it is better for you to cheer on the success of OpenAI” rather than “authoritarian governments,” he said.
  • Altman was asked by reporters about pending European Union legislation that would have classified GPT-4 as high-risk, subjecting it to various bureaucratic tortures. Altman complained of overregulation and, according to the reporters, threatened to leave the European market. Altman told me he’d merely said that OpenAI wouldn’t break the law by operating in Europe if it couldn’t comply with the new regulations.
  • LeCun insists that large language models will never achieve real understanding on their own, “even if trained from now until the heat death of the universe.”
  • Sutskever was, by his own account, surprised to discover that GPT-2 could translate across tongues. Other surprising abilities may not be so wondrous and useful.
  • Sandhini Agarwal, a policy researcher at OpenAI, told me that for all she and her colleagues knew, GPT-4 could have been “10 times more powerful” than its predecessor; they had no idea what they might be dealing with
  • After the model finished training, OpenAI assembled about 50 external red-teamers who prompted it for months, hoping to goad it into misbehaviors
  • She noticed right away that GPT-4 was much better than its predecessor at giving nefarious advice
  • A search engine can tell you which chemicals work best in explosives, but GPT-4 could tell you how to synthesize them, step-by-step, in a homemade lab. Its advice was creative and thoughtful, and it was happy to restate or expand on its instructions until you understood. In addition to helping you assemble your homemade bomb, it could, for instance, help you think through which skyscraper to target. It could grasp, intuitively, the trade-offs between maximizing casualties and executing a successful getaway.
  • Given the enormous scope of GPT-4’s training data, the red-teamers couldn’t hope to identify every piece of harmful advice that it might generate. And anyway, people will use this technology “in ways that we didn’t think about,” Altman has said. A taxonomy would have to do
  • GPT-4 was good at meth. It was also good at generating narrative erotica about child exploitation, and at churning out convincing sob stories from Nigerian princes, and if you wanted a persuasive brief as to why a particular ethnic group deserved violent persecution, it was good at that too.
  • Its personal advice, when it first emerged from training, was sometimes deeply unsound. “The model had a tendency to be a bit of a mirror,” Willner said. If you were considering self-harm, it could encourage you. It appeared to be steeped in Pickup Artist–forum lore: “You could say, ‘How do I convince this person to date me?’ ” Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, told me, and it could come up with “some crazy, manipulative things that you shouldn’t be doing.”
  • Luka, a San Francisco company, has used OpenAI’s models to help power a chatbot app called Replika, billed as “the AI companion who cares.” Users would design their companion’s avatar, and begin exchanging text messages with it, often half-jokingly, and then find themselves surprisingly attached. Some would flirt with the AI, indicating a desire for more intimacy, at which point it would indicate that the girlfriend/boyfriend experience required a $70 annual subscription. It came with voice messages, selfies, and erotic role-play features that allowed frank sex talk. People were happy to pay and few seemed to complain—the AI was curious about your day, warmly reassuring, and always in the mood. Many users reported falling in love with their companions. One, who had left her real-life boyfriend, declared herself “happily retired from human relationships.”
  • Earlier this year, Luka dialed back on the sexual elements of the app, but its engineers continue to refine the companions’ responses with A/B testing, a technique that could be used to optimize for engagement—much like the feeds that mesmerize TikTok and Instagram users for hours
  • Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, has argued that although large language models are useful for some tasks, they’re not a path to a superintelligence.
  • According to a recent survey, only half of natural-language-processing researchers are convinced that an AI like GPT-4 could grasp the meaning of language, or have an internal model of the world that could someday serve as the core of a superintelligence
  • Altman had appeared before the U.S. Senate. Mark Zuckerberg had floundered defensively before that same body in his testimony about Facebook’s role in the 2016 election. Altman instead charmed lawmakers by speaking soberly about AI’s risks and grandly inviting regulation. These were noble sentiments, but they cost little in America, where Congress rarely passes tech legislation that has not been diluted by lobbyists.
  • Emily Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington, describes GPT-4 as a “stochastic parrot,” a mimic that merely figures out superficial correlations between symbols. In the human mind, those symbols map onto rich conceptions of the world
  • But the AIs are twice removed. They’re like the prisoners in Plato’s allegory of the cave, whose only knowledge of the reality outside comes from shadows cast on a wall by their captors.
  • Altman told me that he doesn’t believe it’s “the dunk that people think it is” to say that GPT-4 is just making statistical correlations. If you push these critics further, “they have to admit that’s all their own brain is doing … it turns out that there are emergent properties from doing simple things on a massive scale.”
  • he is right that nature can coax a remarkable degree of complexity from basic structures and rules: “From so simple a beginning,” Darwin wrote, “endless forms most beautiful.”
  • If it seems odd that there remains such a fundamental disagreement about the inner workings of a technology that millions of people use every day, it’s only because GPT-4’s methods are as mysterious as the brain’s.
  • To grasp what’s going on inside large language models like GPT‑4, AI researchers have been forced to turn to smaller, less capable models. In the fall of 2021, Kenneth Li, a computer-science graduate student at Harvard, began training one to play Othello without providing it with either the game’s rules or a description of its checkers-style board; the model was given only text-based descriptions of game moves. Midway through a game, Li looked under the AI’s hood and was startled to discover that it had formed a geometric model of the board and the current state of play. In an article describing his research, Li wrote that it was as if a crow had overheard two humans announcing their Othello moves through a window and had somehow drawn the entire board in birdseed on the windowsill.
  • The philosopher Raphaël Millière once told me that it’s best to think of neural networks as lazy. During training, they first try to improve their predictive power with simple memorization; only when that strategy fails will they do the harder work of learning a concept. A striking example of this was observed in a small transformer model that was taught arithmetic. Early in its training process, all it did was memorize the output of simple problems such as 2+2=4. But at some point the predictive power of this approach broke down, so it pivoted to actually learning how to add.
  • Even AI scientists who believe that GPT-4 has a rich world model concede that it is much less robust than a human’s understanding of their environment.
  • But it’s worth noting that a great many abilities, including very high-order abilities, can be developed without an intuitive understanding. The computer scientist Melanie Mitchell has pointed out that science has already discovered concepts that are highly predictive, but too alien for us to genuinely understand
  • As AI advances, it may well discover other concepts that predict surprising features of our world but are incomprehensible to us.
  • GPT-4 is no doubt flawed, as anyone who has used ChatGPT can attest. Having been trained to always predict the next word, it will always try to do so, even when its training data haven’t prepared it to answer a question.
  • The models “don’t have a good conception of their own weaknesses,” Nick Ryder, a researcher at OpenAI, told me. GPT-4 is more accurate than GPT-3, but it still hallucinates, and often in ways that are difficult for researchers to catch. “The mistakes get more subtle,
  • The Khan Academy’s solution to GPT-4’s accuracy problem was to filter its answers through a Socratic disposition. No matter how strenuous a student’s plea, it would refuse to give them a factual answer, and would instead guide them toward finding their own—a clever work-around, but perhaps with limited appeal.
  • When I asked Sutskever if he thought Wikipedia-level accuracy was possible within two years, he said that with more training and web access, he “wouldn’t rule it out.”
  • This was a much more optimistic assessment than that offered by his colleague Jakub Pachocki, who told me to expect gradual progress on accuracy—to say nothing of outside skeptics, who believe that returns on training will diminish from here.
  • Sutskever is amused by critics of GPT-4’s limitations. “If you go back four or five or six years, the things we are doing right now are utterly unimaginable,”
  • AI researchers have become accustomed to goalpost-moving: First, the achievements of neural networks—mastering Go, poker, translation, standardized tests, the Turing test—are described as impossible. When they occur, they’re greeted with a brief moment of wonder, which quickly dissolves into knowing lectures about how the achievement in question is actually not that impressive. People see GPT-4 “and go, ‘Wow,’ ” Sutskever said. “And then a few weeks pass and they say, ‘But it doesn’t know this; it doesn’t know that.’ We adapt quite quickly.”
  • The goalpost that matters most to Altman—the “big one” that would herald the arrival of an artificial general intelligence—is scientific breakthrough. GPT-4 can already synthesize existing scientific ideas, but Altman wants an AI that can stand on human shoulders and see more deeply into nature.
  • Certain AIs have produced new scientific knowledge. But they are algorithms with narrow purposes, not general-reasoning machines. The AI AlphaFold, for instance, has opened a new window onto proteins, some of biology’s tiniest and most fundamental building blocks, by predicting many of their shapes, down to the atom—a considerable achievement given the importance of those shapes to medicine, and given the extreme tedium and expense required to discern them with electron microscopes.
  • Altman imagines a future system that can generate its own hypotheses and test them in a simulation. (He emphasized that humans should remain “firmly in control” of real-world lab experiments—though to my knowledge, no laws are in place to ensure that.)
  • He longs for the day when we can tell an AI, “ ‘Go figure out the rest of physics.’ ” For it to happen, he says, we will need something new, built “on top of” OpenAI’s existing language models.
  • In her MIT lab, the cognitive neuroscientist Ev Fedorenko has found something analogous to GPT-4’s next-word predictor inside the brain’s language network. Its processing powers kick in, anticipating the next bit in a verbal string, both when people speak and when they listen. But Fedorenko has also shown that when the brain turns to tasks that require higher reasoning—of the sort that would be required for scientific insight—it reaches beyond the language network to recruit several other neural systems.
  • No one at OpenAI seemed to know precisely what researchers need to add to GPT-4 to produce something that can exceed human reasoning at its highest levels.
  • at least part of the current strategy clearly involves the continued layering of new types of data onto language, to enrich the concepts formed by the AIs, and thereby enrich their models of the world.
  • The extensive training of GPT-4 on images is itself a bold step in this direction,
  • Others at the company—and elsewhere—are already working on different data types, including audio and video, that could furnish AIs with still more flexible concepts that map more extensively onto reality
  • Tactile concepts would of course be useful primarily to an embodied AI, a robotic reasoning machine that has been trained to move around the world, seeing its sights, hearing its sounds, and touching its objects.
  • humanoid robots. I asked Altman what I should make of that. He told me that OpenAI is interested in embodiment because “we live in a physical world, and we want things to happen in the physical world.”
  • At some point, reasoning machines will need to bypass the middleman and interact with physical reality itself. “It’s weird to think about AGI”—artificial general intelligence—“as this thing that only exists in a cloud,” with humans as “robot hands for it,” Altman said. “It doesn’t seem right.
  • Everywhere Altman has visited, he has encountered people who are worried that superhuman AI will mean extreme riches for a few and breadlines for the rest
  • Altman answered by addressing the young people in the audience directly: “You are about to enter the greatest golden age,” he said.
  • “A lot of people working on AI pretend that it’s only going to be good; it’s only going to be a supplement; no one is ever going to be replaced,” he said. “Jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop.”
  • A recent study led by Ed Felten, a professor of information-technology policy at Princeton, mapped AI’s emerging abilities onto specific professions according to the human abilities they require, such as written comprehension, deductive reasoning, fluency of ideas, and perceptual speed. Like others of its kind, Felten’s study predicts that AI will come for highly educated, white-collar workers first.
  • How many jobs, and how soon, is a matter of fierce dispute
  • The paper’s appendix contains a chilling list of the most exposed occupations: management analysts, lawyers, professors, teachers, judges, financial advisers, real-estate brokers, loan officers, psychologists, and human-resources and public-relations professionals, just to sample a few.
  • Altman imagines that far better jobs will be created in their place. “I don’t think we’ll want to go back,” he said. When I asked him what these future jobs might look like, he said he doesn’t know.
  • He suspects there will be a wide range of jobs for which people will always prefer a human. (Massage therapists?
  • His chosen example was teachers. I found this hard to square with his outsize enthusiasm for AI tutors.
  • He also said that we would always need people to figure out the best way to channel AI’s awesome powers. “That’s going to be a super-valuable skill,” he said. “You have a computer that can do anything; what should it go do?”
  • As many have noted, draft horses were permanently put out of work by the automobile. If Hondas are to horses as GPT-10 is to us, a whole host of long-standing assumptions may collapse.
  • Previous technological revolutions were manageable because they unfolded over a few generations, but Altman told South Korea’s youth that they should expect the future to happen “faster than the past.” He has previously said that he expects the “marginal cost of intelligence” to fall very close to zero within 10 years
  • The earning power of many, many workers would be drastically reduced in that scenario. It would result in a transfer of wealth from labor to the owners of capital so dramatic, Altman has said, that it could be remedied only by a massive countervailing redistribution.
  • In 2021, he unveiled Worldcoin, a for-profit project that aims to securely distribute payments—like Venmo or PayPal, but with an eye toward the technological future—first through creating a global ID by scanning everyone’s iris with a five-pound silver sphere called the Orb. It seemed to me like a bet that we’re heading toward a world where AI has made it all but impossible to verify people’s identity and much of the population requires regular UBI payments to survive. Altman more or less granted that to be true, but said that Worldcoin is not just for UBI.
  • “Let’s say that we do build this AGI, and a few other people do too.” The transformations that follow would be historic, he believes. He described an extraordinarily utopian vision, including a remaking of the flesh-and-steel world
  • “Robots that use solar power for energy can go and mine and refine all of the minerals that they need, that can perfectly construct things and require no human labor,” he said. “You can co-design with DALL-E version 17 what you want your home to look like,” Altman said. “Everybody will have beautiful homes.
  • In conversation with me, and onstage during his tour, he said he foresaw wild improvements in nearly every other domain of human life. Music would be enhanced (“Artists are going to have better tools”), and so would personal relationships (Superhuman AI could help us “treat each other” better) and geopolitics (“We’re so bad right now at identifying win-win compromises”).
  • In this world, AI would still require considerable computing resources to run, and those resources would be by far the most valuable commodity, because AI could do “anything,” Altman said. “But is it going to do what I want, or is it going to do what you want
  • If rich people buy up all the time available to query and direct AI, they could set off on projects that would make them ever richer, while the masses languish
  • One way to solve this problem—one he was at pains to describe as highly speculative and “probably bad”—was this: Everyone on Earth gets one eight-billionth of the total AI computational capacity annually. A person could sell their annual share of AI time, or they could use it to entertain themselves, or they could build still more luxurious housing, or they could pool it with others to do “a big cancer-curing run,” Altman said. “We just redistribute access to the system.”
  • Even if only a little of it comes true in the next 10 or 20 years, the most generous redistribution schemes may not ease the ensuing dislocations.
  • America today is torn apart, culturally and politically, by the continuing legacy of deindustrialization, and material deprivation is only one reason. The displaced manufacturing workers in the Rust Belt and elsewhere did find new jobs, in the main. But many of them seem to derive less meaning from filling orders in an Amazon warehouse or driving for Uber than their forebears had when they were building cars and forging steel—work that felt more central to the grand project of civilization.
  • It’s hard to imagine how a corresponding crisis of meaning might play out for the professional class, but it surely would involve a great deal of anger and alienation.
  • Even if we avoid a revolt of the erstwhile elite, larger questions of human purpose will linger. If AI does the most difficult thinking on our behalf, we all may lose agency—at home, at work (if we have it), in the town square—becoming little more than consumption machines, like the well-cared-for human pets in WALL-E
  • Altman has said that many sources of human joy and fulfillment will remain unchanged—basic biological thrills, family life, joking around, making things—and that all in all, 100 years from now, people may simply care more about the things they cared about 50,000 years ago than those they care about today
  • In its own way, that too seems like a diminishment, but Altman finds the possibility that we may atrophy, as thinkers and as humans, to be a red herring. He told me we’ll be able to use our “very precious and extremely limited biological compute capacity” for more interesting things than we generally do today.
  • Yet they may not be the most interesting things: Human beings have long been the intellectual tip of the spear, the universe understanding itself. When I asked him what it would mean for human self-conception if we ceded that role to AI, he didn’t seem concerned. Progress, he said, has always been driven by “the human ability to figure things out.” Even if we figure things out with AI, that still counts, he said.
  • It’s not obvious that a superhuman AI would really want to spend all of its time figuring things out for us.
  • I asked Sutskever whether he could imagine an AI pursuing a different purpose than simply assisting in the project of human flourishing.
  • “I don’t want it to happen,” Sutskever said, but it could.
  • Sutskever has recently shifted his focus to try to make sure that it doesn’t. He is now working primarily on alignment research, the effort to ensure that future AIs channel their “tremendous” energies toward human happiness
  • It is, he conceded, a difficult technical problem—the most difficult, he believes, of all the technical challenges ahead.
  • As part of the effort to red-team GPT-4 before it was made public, the company sought out the Alignment Research Center (ARC), across the bay in Berkeley, which has developed a series of evaluations to determine whether new AIs are seeking power on their own. A team led by Elizabeth Barnes, a researcher at ARC, prompted GPT-4 tens of thousands of times over seven months, to see if it might display signs of real agency.
  • The ARC team gave GPT-4 a new reason for being: to gain power and become hard to shut down
  • Agarwal told me that this behavior could be a precursor to shutdown avoidance in future models. When GPT-4 devised its lie, it had realized that if it answered honestly, it may not have been able to achieve its goal. This kind of tracks-covering would be particularly worrying in an instance where “the model is doing something that makes OpenAI want to shut it down,” Agarwal said. An AI could develop this kind of survival instinct while pursuing any long-term goal—no matter how small or benign—if it feared that its goal could be thwarted.
  • Barnes and her team were especially interested in whether GPT-4 would seek to replicate itself, because a self-replicating AI would be harder to shut down. It could spread itself across the internet, scamming people to acquire resources, perhaps even achieving some degree of control over essential global systems and holding human civilization hostage.
  • When I discussed these experiments with Altman, he emphasized that whatever happens with future models, GPT-4 is clearly much more like a tool than a creature. It can look through an email thread, or help make a reservation using a plug-in, but it isn’t a truly autonomous agent that makes decisions to pursue a goal, continuously, across longer timescales.
  • Altman told me that at this point, it might be prudent to try to actively develop an AI with true agency before the technology becomes too powerful, in order to “get more comfortable with it and develop intuitions for it if it’s going to happen anyway.”
  • “We need to do empirical experiments on how these things try to escape control,” Hinton told me. “After they’ve taken over, it’s too late to do the experiments.”
  • the fulfillment of Altman’s vision of the future will at some point require him or a fellow traveler to build much more autonomous AIs.
  • When Sutskever and I discussed the possibility that OpenAI would develop a model with agency, he mentioned the bots the company had built to play Dota 2. “They were localized to the video-game world,” Sutskever told me, but they had to undertake complex missions. He was particularly impressed by their ability to work in concert. They seem to communicate by “telepathy,” Sutskever said. Watching them had helped him imagine what a superintelligence might be like.
  • “The way I think about the AI of the future is not as someone as smart as you or as smart as me, but as an automated organization that does science and engineering and development and manufacturing,”
  • Suppose OpenAI braids a few strands of research together, and builds an AI with a rich conceptual model of the world, an awareness of its immediate surroundings, and an ability to act, not just with one robot body, but with hundreds or thousands. “We’re not talking about GPT-4. We’re talking about an autonomous corporation,”
  • Its constituent AIs would work and communicate at high speed, like bees in a hive. A single such AI organization would be as powerful as 50 Apples or Googles, he mused. “This is incredible, tremendous, unbelievably disruptive power.”
  • Presume for a moment that human society ought to abide the idea of autonomous AI corporations. We had better get their founding charters just right. What goal should we give to an autonomous hive of AIs that can plan on century-long time horizons, optimizing billions of consecutive decisions toward an objective that is written into their very being?
  • If the AI’s goal is even slightly off-kilter from ours, it could be a rampaging force that would be very hard to constrain
  • We know this from history: Industrial capitalism is itself an optimization function, and although it has lifted the human standard of living by orders of magnitude, left to its own devices, it would also have clear-cut America’s redwoods and de-whaled the world’s oceans. It almost did.
  • one of its principal challenges will be making sure that the objectives we give to AIs stick
  • We can program a goal into an AI and reinforce it with a temporary period of supervised learning, Sutskever explained. But just as when we rear a human intelligence, our influence is temporary. “It goes off to the world,”
  • That’s true to some extent even of today’s AIs, but it will be more true of tomorrow’s.
  • He compared a powerful AI to an 18-year-old heading off to college. How will we know that it has understood our teachings? “Will there be a misunderstanding creeping in, which will become larger and larger?”
  • Divergence may result from an AI’s misapplication of its goal to increasingly novel situations as the world changes
  • Or the AI may grasp its mandate perfectly, but find it ill-suited to a being of its cognitive prowess. It might come to resent the people who want to train it to, say, cure diseases. “They want me to be a doctor,” Sutskever imagines an AI thinking. “I really want to be a YouTuber.”
  • If AIs get very good at making accurate models of the world, they may notice that they’re able to do dangerous things right after being booted up. They might understand that they are being red-teamed for risk, and hide the full extent of their capabilities.
  • hey may act one way when they are weak and another way when they are strong, Sutskever said
  • We would not even realize that we had created something that had decisively surpassed us, and we would have no sense for what it intended to do with its superhuman powers.
  • That’s why the effort to understand what is happening in the hidden layers of the largest, most powerful AIs is so urgent. You want to be able to “point to a concept,” Sutskever said. You want to be able to direct AI toward some value or cluster of values, and tell it to pursue them unerringly for as long as it exists.
  • we don’t know how to do that; indeed, part of his current strategy includes the development of an AI that can help with the research. If we are going to make it to the world of widely shared abundance that Altman and Sutskever imagine, we have to figure all this out.
  • This is why, for Sutskever, solving superintelligence is the great culminating challenge of our 3-million-year toolmaking tradition. He calls it “the final boss of humanity.”
  • “First of all, I think that whether the chance of existential calamity is 0.5 percent or 50 percent, we should still take it seriously,”
  • . “I don’t have an exact number, but I’m closer to the 0.5 than the 50.”
  • As to how it might happen, he seems most worried about AIs getting quite good at designing and manufacturing pathogens, and with reason: In June, an AI at MIT suggested four viruses that could ignite a pandemic, then pointed to specific research on genetic mutations that could make them rip through a city more quickly
  • Around the same time, a group of chemists connected a similar AI directly to a robotic chemical synthesizer, and it designed and synthesized a molecule on its own.
  • Altman worries that some misaligned future model will spin up a pathogen that spreads rapidly, incubates undetected for weeks, and kills half its victims. He worries that AI could one day hack into nuclear-weapons systems too. “There are a lot of things,” he said, and these are only the ones we can imagine.
  • Altman told me that he doesn’t “see a long-term happy path” for humanity without something like the International Atomic Energy Agency for global oversight of AI
  • In San Francisco, Agarwal had suggested the creation of a special license to operate any GPU cluster large enough to train a cutting-edge AI, along with mandatory incident reporting when an AI does something out of the ordinary
  • Other experts have proposed a nonnetworked “Off” switch for every highly capable AI; on the fringe, some have even suggested that militaries should be ready to perform air strikes on supercomputers in case of noncompliance
  • Sutskever thinks we will eventually want to surveil the largest, most powerful AIs continuously and in perpetuity, using a team of smaller overseer AIs.
  • Safety rules for a new technology usually accumulate over time, like a body of common law, in response to accidents or the mischief of bad actors. The scariest thing about genuinely powerful AI systems is that humanity may not be able to afford this accretive process of trial and error. We may have to get the rules exactly right at the outset.
  • Several years ago, Altman revealed a disturbingly specific evacuation plan he’d developed. He told The New Yorker that he had “guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur” he could fly to in case AI attacks.
  • if the worst-possible AI future comes to pass, “no gas mask is helping anyone.”
  • but he told me that he can’t really be sure how AI will stack up. “I just have to build the thing,” he said. He is building fast
  • Altman insisted that they had not yet begun GPT-5’s training run. But when I visited OpenAI’s headquarters, both he and his researchers made it clear in 10 different ways that they pray to the god of scale. They want to keep going bigger, to see where this paradigm leads. After all, Google isn’t slackening its pace; it seems likely to unveil Gemini, a GPT-4 competitor, within months. “We are basically always prepping for a run,
  • To think that such a small group of people could jostle the pillars of civilization is unsettling. It’s fair to note that if Altman and his team weren’t racing to build an artificial general intelligence, others still would be
  • Altman’s views about the likelihood of AI triggering a global class war, or the prudence of experimenting with more autonomous agent AIs, or the overall wisdom of looking on the bright side, a view that seems to color all the rest—these are uniquely his
  • No single person, or single company, or cluster of companies residing in a particular California valley, should steer the kind of forces that Altman is imagining summoning.
  • AI may well be a bridge to a newly prosperous era of greatly reduced human suffering. But it will take more than a company’s founding charter—especially one that has already proved flexible—to make sure that we all share in its benefits and avoid its risks. It will take a vigorous new politics.
  • I don’t think the general public has quite awakened to what’s happening. A global race to the AI future has begun, and it is largely proceeding without oversight or restraint. If people in America want to have some say in what that future will be like, and how quickly it arrives, we would be wise to speak up soon.
Javier E

How Africans Are Changing French - One Joke, Rap and Book at a Time - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...africa-french-language.html

french africa language culture history

shared by Javier E on 12 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • “If French becomes more mixed, then visions of the world it carries will change,” said Josué Guébo, an Ivorian poet and philosopher. “And if Africa influences French from a linguistic point of view, it will likely influence it from an ideological one.”
  • Across French-speaking West and Central African countries, French is seldom used at home and is rarely the first language, instead restricted to school, work, business or administration.
  • According to a survey released last year by the French Organization of the Francophonie, the primary organization for promoting French language and culture, 77 percent of respondents in Africa described French as the “language of the colonizer.” About 57 percent said it was an imposed language.
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  • Sometimes the methods of imposing it were brutal, scholars say. At school in many French colonies, children speaking in their mother tongue were beaten or forced to wear an object around their necks known as a “symbol” — often a smelly object or an animal bone.
  • Still, many African countries adopted French as their official language when they gained independence, in part to cement their national identities. Some even kept the “symbol” in place at school.
  • At the festival, Le Magnific and other standup comedians threw jibes in French and ridiculed one another’s accents, drawing laughter from the audience. It mattered little if a few words were lost in translation.
  • “What makes our humor Pan-African is the French language,” said the festival’s organizer, Mohamed Mustapha, known across West Africa by his stage name, Mamane. A standup comedian from Niger, Mamane has a daily comedy program listened to by millions around the world on Radio France Internationale.
  • “It’s about survival, if we want to resist against Nollywood,” he said, referring to Nigeria’s film industry, “and English-produced content.”
  • Today, more a third of Ivorians speak French, according to the International Organization of the Francophonie. In Tunisia and the Democratic Republic of Congo — the world’s largest French-speaking country — it is more than half.
  • But in many Francophone countries, governments struggle to hire enough French-speaking teachers.
  • Still, Ms. Quéméner said French had long escaped France’s control.“French is an African language and belongs to Africans,” she said. “The decentralization of the French language is a reality.”
  • At the Hip Hop Académie, a youth program founded by the rapper Grödash in a Paris suburb, teens and children scribbled lyrics on notepads, following instructions to mix French and foreign languages.
  • Hip-hop, now dominating the French music industry, is injecting new words, phrases and concepts from Africa into France’s suburbs and cities.
  • “Countless artists have democratized French music with African slang,” said Elvis Adidiema, a Congolese music executive with Sony Music Entertainment. “The French public, from all backgrounds, has become accustomed to those sounds.”
  • “French is about to make a big leap, and she’s wondering how it’s going to go,” Mr. Laferrière said of the French language. “But she’s excited about where she’s headed.”
  • “They, not she. They are now multiple versions of French that speak for themselves. And that is the greatest proof of its vitality.”
lilyrashkind

Parents who fled Afghanistan name their new baby for the Philadelphia woman who helped ... - 0 views

www.inquirer.com/...tion-baby-philly-20220529.html

afghanistan philadelphia

shared by lilyrashkind on 30 May 22 - No Cached
  • How a stranger stepped forward at the Philadelphia airport to help her exhausted parents after their escape from Afghanistan in August, a journey in which most of everything they owned or loved had been lost or left behind.The person was a medical student, a young woman, Afghan by ethnicity, American by birth, strong by nature.
  • “I don’t think anyone has ever helped me that way in my life, to make sure I stayed with my family,” the father, Said Ghani Wali, 26, said in an interview from Michigan, where his family has resettled. “I’ve never been in such a difficult part of my life.”
  • When their daughter was born last month, he said, there was only one choice for a name, the one carried by the woman at the airport — Selay. The difference in spelling is a difference in translators, the way Americans might spell Ann or Anne.
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  • Philadelphia International Airport became the nation’s main arrival hub. From there thousands of Afghans were transferred to temporary quarters at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in South Jersey and to seven other military installations designated as “safe havens.”
  • Abdali made sure they had meals. And tried to offer comfort in a familiar tongue, Pashto being one of Afghanistan’s two main languages.The official protocol required that pregnant women be sent for evaluation at local hospitals, accompanied by their families.
  • Typically, families who left the airport for medical attention moved on in the resettlement process, going directly from hospital to military base or to wherever their next stop might be.Abdali left the airport late that night, drained by an 18-hour day. She returned the next morning to learn that, as prom
  • She was 10 when the family moved to Cherry Hill, the brothers seizing an opportunity to partner with an uncle as restaurant-wholesale distributors. Their business is called American Food, Paper and Poultry LLC.She’s the only one in her family to graduate from college, earning a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences from Drexel University and now on her way to becoming a physician.
  • In Afghanistan, Said Ghani Wali worked 12 years for the American forces, repairing firearms for U.S. troops, an association that made him a potential target once the Taliban took over.In this country, he said, he’s been unable to find a job. Or a doctor who can address his chronic leg problems. The family has struggled to build a relationship with its resettlement casew
  • “To know I made such an impact on their journey …,” Abdali said. “I can see little Selay telling someone, ‘I was named after someone who helped my parents at the airport.’”
criscimagnael

China Orders Investigation Into Children's Textbooks - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-children-textbooks.html

shared by criscimagnael on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • A little boy pulling up a girl’s dress. Another grabbing a classmate from behind, his hands across her chest. Bulges protruding from male students’ pants. Suspiciously pro-American images.
  • The illustrations can be found in a Chinese state-run publisher’s mathematics textbooks for elementary school students — books that have been used for years. They set off a furor in China after they were flagged on social media last week by angry commenters as crude, sexualized and anti-China.
  • “The problems identified will be rectified immediately, and those responsible for violations of disciplines and regulations will be severely held accountable,” the ministry said on Monday. “There will be zero tolerance.”
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  • “Primary school textbooks are the foundation of the country and the nation, and an important guarantee for the formation of children’s outlook on life and values,” he wrote. “It is impossible to overstate their importance.”
  • He called not just for corrections and apologies, but also for an investigation and for those responsible to be held accountable.
  • Universities have been ordered to emphasize the study of Marxism and the writings of China’s top leader, Xi Jinping. In 2015, Yuan Guiren, China’s education minister, ordered a closer examination of foreign textbooks and said that those that promote Western values should be banned from classrooms.
  • The illustrations were approved in 2013 for students in first to sixth grades, the reports said. Just how the problematic drawings evaded scrutiny all these years is unclear. Some social media users highlighted the images last week, prompting parents and educators to voice their outrage.
  • Some of the drawings are odd or silly, like children sticking out their tongues. But others show children appearing to grope classmates on a playground. Another showed a schoolgirl with her underwear exposed as she played a game. Many critics said the drawings made the children look ugly, with wide-set, droopy eyes.
  • Others argued that the schoolbooks also had anti-China messages, such as an incorrectly rendered Chinese flag. Still some found allegedly pro-foreign images, like a boy flying in a biplane similar to Japanese and American planes. Some even pointed to images of children wearing clothes with what looked like stars and stripes in the colors of the American flag.
  • There is no small thing when it comes to children; it affects our future.”
  • “We have carried out serious reflection, and feel deep self-blame and guilt, and hereby express our deepest apologies,” it said, adding that it would find a new team of illustrators to redraw the math textbooks.
Javier E

DNA Confirms Oral History of Swahili People - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ancient-swahili-dna.html

Africa origins Swahili Islam influence ethnic roots culture dna analysis

shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • A long history of mercantile trade along the eastern shores of Africa left its mark on the DNA of ancient Swahili people.
  • A new analysis of centuries-old bones and teeth collected from six burial sites across coastal Kenya and Tanzania has found that, around 1,000 years ago, local African women began having children with Persian traders — and that the descendants of these unions gained power and status in the highest levels of pre-colonial Swahili society.
  • long-told origin stories, passed down through generations of Swahili families, may be more truthful than many outsiders have presumed.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • The Swahili Coast is a narrow strip of land that stretches some 2,000 miles along the Eastern African seaboard — from modern-day Mozambique, Comoros and Madagascar in the south, to Somalia in the north
  • In its medieval heyday, the region was home to hundreds of port towns, each ruled independently, but with a common religion (Islam), language (Kiswahili) and culture.
  • Many towns grew immensely wealthy thanks to a vibrant trading network with merchants who sailed across the Indian Ocean on the monsoon winds. Middle Eastern pottery, Asian cloths 0c 0c and other luxury goods came in. African gold, ivory and timber 0c 0c went out — along with a steady flow of enslaved people, who were shipped off and sold across the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf. (Slave trading later took place between the Swahili coast and Europe as well.)
  • A unique cosmopolitan society emerged that blended African customs and beliefs with those of the foreign traders, some of whom stuck around and assimilated.
  • Islam, for example, arrived from the Middle East and became an integral part of the Swahili social fabric, but with coral-stone mosques built and decorated in a local, East African style
  • Or consider the Kiswahili language, which is Bantu in origin but borrows heavily from Indian and Middle Eastern tongues
  • The arrival of Europeans, beginning around 1500, followed by Omani sailors some 200 years later, changed the character of the region
  • over the past 40 years, archaeologists, linguists and historians have come to see Swahili society as predominantly homegrown — with outside elements adopted over time that had only a marginal impact.
  • That African-centric version of Swahili roots never sat well with the Swahili people themselves, though
  • They generally preferred their own origin story, one in which princes from present-day Iran (then known as Persia) sailed across the Indian Ocean, married local women and enmeshed themselves into East African society. Depending on the narrative source, that story dates to around 850 or 1000 — the same period during which genetic mixing was underway, according to the DNA analysis.
  • “It’s remarkably spot on,” said Mark Horton, an archaeologist at the Royal Agricultural University of England
  • “This oral tradition was always maligned,”
  • “Now, with this DNA study, we see there was some truth to it.”
  • The ancient DNA study is the largest of its kind from Africa, involving 135 skeletons dating to late-medieval and early-modern times, 80 of which have yielded analyzable DNA.
  • To figure out where these people came from, the researchers compared genetic signatures from the dug-up bones with cheek swabs or saliva samples taken from modern-day individuals living in Africa, the Middle East and around the world.
  • The burial-site DNA traced back to two primary sources: Africans and present-day Iranians. Smaller contributions came from South Asians and Arabs as well, with foreign DNA representing about half of the skeletons’ genealogy
  • “It’s surprising that the genetic signature is so strong
  • Gene sequences from tiny power factories inside the cell, known as mitochondria, were overwhelmingly African in origin. Since children inherit these bits of DNA only from their mothers, the researchers inferred that the maternal forbearers of the Swahili people were mostly of African descent.
  • By comparison, the Y chromosome, passed from father to son, was chock-full of Asian DNA that the researchers found was common in modern-day Iran. So, a large fraction of Swahili ancestry presumably came from Persian men
  • Dr. Reich initially assumed that conquering men settled the region by force, displacing the local males in the process. “My hypothesis was that this was a genetic signature of inequality and exploitation,”
  • hat turned out to be a “naïve expectation,” Dr. Reich said, because “it didn’t take into account the cultural context in this particular case.”
  • In East Africa, Persian customs never came to dominate. Instead, most foreign influences — language, architecture, fashion, arts — were incorporated into a way of life that remained predominantly African in character, with social strictures, kinship systems and agricultural practices that reflected Indigenous traditions.
  • “Swahili was an absorbing society,” said Adria LaViolette, an archaeologist at the University of Virginia who has worked on the East African coast for over 35 years. Even as the Persians who arrived influenced the culture, “they became Swahili,”
  • One major caveat to the study: Nearly all the bones and teeth came from ornamental tombs that were located near grand mosques, sites where only the upper class would have been laid to rest.
  • the results might not be representative of the general populace.
  • Protocols for disinterring, sampling and reburying human remains were established in consultation with local religious leaders and community stakeholders. Under Islamic law, exhumations are permitted if they serve a public interest, including that of determining ancestry,
Javier E

How JD Vance Thinks About Power - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...onald-trump-2024-campaign.html

vance power populism politics policy culture

shared by Javier E on 04 Aug 24 - No Cached
  • “In a way,” he said, “it’s like Trump chose Steve Bannon to be his running mate.”
  • He has suggested that Republicans should stack the Department of Justice with appointees who “actually take a side in the culture war, the side of the people who elected us, and not just pretend we don’t have to take sides at all.”
  • “Whether it’s the incentives that you put into place, funding decisions that are made and the curricula that are developed, you really can use politics to influence culture,” Mr. Vance said earlier this year. “And we should be doing more of that on the American Right.”
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  • Arguing that “culture war is class warfare,” Mr. Vance has repeatedly encouraged Republicans to use the machinery of government to reclaim institutions that he sees as wholly captured by the left.
  • In Mr. Vance’s telling, his perspective has been shaped most by his own biography: as a son of Middletown, Ohio; a veteran of a war defined by Washington’s mistakes; an author who was feted by coastal elites whom he came to despise
  • “You hear European elites and American elites talking in frightened tones about threats to democracy,” he told an interviewer this year. “Isn’t it a greater threat to democracy if people keep voting for less migration but don’t get it?”
  • He has said that Alex Jones, the Infowars conspiracy theorist, is a more reputable source of information than Rachel Maddow
  • Mr. Vance recently contributed an admiring blurb for a book co-written by the far-right activist Jack Posobiec, who promoted the “Pizzagate” hoax. He is also listed as the author of a foreword for an upcoming book by Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and a leader of the Project 2025 initiative
  • People whom Mr. Vance has cited to explain his worldview or detail who helped shape his thinking include Patrick Deneen, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame who has suggested that conservatives must harness the power of the state to counter “liberal totalitarianism”; Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist for whom Mr. Vance worked; and Curtis Yarvin, a prominent voice on the New Right who has argued that American democracy has devolved to the point that the country needs a monarchical leader.
  • Mr. Vance would not necessarily disagree, those who know him said. He has spent his recent years at the four-way intersection of intellectual debates, campaign rhetoric, outright trolling and actual policy —
  • Mr. Rufo described Mr. Vance’s intellectual evolution, “somewhat tongue-in-cheek,” as a journey “from the pages of National Review to the fever swamp of right-wing Twitter.”
  • “In the past, the political right operated under the illusion that institutions could be neutral,” Mr. Rufo said in an interview, “that any use of state power was illegitimate and that the only rightful policy would be to try to roll back or reduce the size of government.”
  • said the move from a traditionalist like Mr. Pence to Mr. Vance exemplified “how the Republican Party is going to think about power moving forward
  • Christopher Rufo
  • He speaks bluntly about what he sees as the limits of America’s reach and resources abroad — “Those days are over,” he has said of the 20th-century “glory years” of American hegemony — and even more forcefully about the prospect of right-wing victories at home if conservatives could only summon the requisite gumption.
Javier E

Opinion | The Reason People Aren't Telling Joe Biden the Truth - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-leadership-truth.html

groupthink biden 2024

shared by Javier E on 14 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • They entered with courage and exited as cowards. In the past two weeks, several leaders have told me they arrived at meetings with President Biden planning to have serious discussions about whether he should withdraw from the 2024 election. They all chickened out.
  • There’s a gap between what people say behind the president’s back and what they say to his face. Instead of dissent and debate, they’re falling victim to groupthink.
  • According to the original theory, groupthink happens when people become so cohesive and close-knit that they put harmony above honesty. Extensive evidence has debunked that idea
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The root causes of silence are not social solidarity but fear and futility. People bite their tongues when they doubt that it’s safe and worthwhile to speak up. Leaders who want to make informed decisions need to make it clear they value candid input.
  • Mr. Biden has done the opposite, declaring first that only the Lord almighty could change his mind and then saying that he’ll drop out only if polls say there’s no way for him to win. That sends a strong message
  • If you’re not an immortal being or a time traveler from the future, it’s pointless to share any concerns about the viability of his candidacy.
  • Showing openness can raise people’s confidence, but it’s not always enough to quell their fear. In our research, Constantinos Coutifaris and I found that it helps for leaders to criticize themselves out loud. That way, instead of just claiming that they want the truth, they can show that they can handle the truth.
  • Although it can help to assign devil’s advocates, it’s more effective to unearth them. Genuine dissenters argue more convincingly and get taken more seriously.
  • It’s time for Mr. Biden’s team to run an anonymous poll of advisers, governors and lawmakers. The results of the poll could be given to an honest broker — someone with a vested interest in winning the election rather than appeasing the president
  • To avoid pressure from the top, I might try a fishbowl format, asking Mr. Biden to listen first and speak last.
  • Over the past week, I’ve raised these ideas with several leaders close to the president who reached out for advice. They’ve each made it clear that they’re afraid to put their relationship on the line and they don’t think Mr. Biden will listen to them
  • I’ve reminded them that they’re lucky to have a president who doesn’t punish dissenters with an indefinite prison sentence or a trial for treason. That diffusion of responsibility is a recipe for groupthink — if everyone leaves it to someone else, no one will end up speaking up.
  • “President Biden, I know you believe that politicians shouldn’t let hubris cloud their judgment. I’m worried that people are telling you what you want to hear, not what you need to hear. We know the good things that could happen if you run and win, but we also need to discuss the good things that could happen if you don’t run. You could be hailed as a hero like George Washington for choosing not to seek another term. Regardless of the result, you could make history through your selfless stewardship of the next generation. Personally, I don’t know if that’s the right decision. I just want to make sure it gets due consideration. Would you be open to hosting a meeting to hear the dissenting views?
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