Tech
Fresh audio product: Yanis Varoufakis on being banned in Germany, and on the rise of technofeudalism
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):
April 18, 2024 Yanis Varoufakis talks about being banned in Germany for supporting the Palestinian cause, and then about the transformation he analyzes in his new book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
Nuclear frisson: On Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer
The best scene in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer comes towards the end of the movie. The titular physicist is talking to Einstein, recalling a previous conversation in which they’d discussed the possibility that an atomic bomb would ignite the Earth’s atmosphere. ‘When I came to you with those calculations’, Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) reflects, ‘we thought we might start a chain reaction that could destroy the entire world’. ‘What of it?’ asks Einstein, as the rain begins to fall. ‘I believe we did’, says Oppenheimer. Cue the movie’s final, surreal sequence: a fusillade of nuclear missiles spearing upwards through a canopy of cloud, shooting through space as Oppenheimer looks on from the fuselage of a military aircraft, and—the movie’s closing image—a tsunami of fire spreading over the Earth. The logic of nuclear proliferation rendered as apocalypse. [More here.]
Chess, nostalgia and AI: Two recent essays for Griffith Review
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The defence: Chess vs artificial intelligence
Nostalgia on demand: Streaming memories in the experience machine
The eighth day of creation: how the new cultural technologies take us into the posthuman
In Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2018), the British writer Aaron Bastani puts a leftist spin on the Promethean view of technological development. While noting the revolutionary potential of recent genetic innovations, he insists that the latter are no different in kind from the selective breeding practices of the past: they are simply another great leap forward in humankind’s mastery over unruly nature. Referring to the movie Elysium (2013), which depicts a world where biotechnologies are only available to the very rich, Bastani’s only political concern is whether the new genetic technologies will be privately or socially owned. All other questions are beside the point, at least as far as he is concerned. As he puts it, with alarming insouciance: ‘Before editing the human genome at scale such efforts should be subject to vigorous public debate. But how much difference is there between improving nutrition for health outcomes and optimising our biological programming? Not much’. [More here.]
Big Tech goes ballistic
A month or so out from Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated biopic Oppenheimer, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community is having its own Oppenheimer moment. Like the director of the Manhattan Project and Los Alamos Laboratory, who famously came to regret his part in the development of the atomic bomb, the Big Tech Titans are falling over each other to declare themselves ‘the destroyer of worlds’. Open letters and statements, high-profile resignations, and appearances before the US Senate are just a few manifestations of this collective show of soul-searching. The tech bros have unleashed their creations on the world, and now they are demanding to be put on the leash. [More here.]
Here Be Media
A talk to the Economic Society of Australia: Monsters in the Machine, Technology, Growth & Human Flourishing
An Author Talk with Goldfields Libraries
An appearance on the Breaking the Spell podcast
Cartoon: Using the First Amendment to end the First Amendment
In recent years, the First Amendment has been shoddily invoked to justify decisions that ultimately diminish its very raison d'être, quite possibly leading us to fascism.
Alarmingly, we're now seeing state-level absurdities such as Florida removing sociology as a core course in its college curriculum and replacing it with a course teaching the “historically accurate account of America’s founding.” Indiana's Attorney General Todd Rokita has launched the creepily-named "Eyes on Education" portal for the public to report "indoctrination" in classrooms. The West Virginia House just passed a bill allowing for the prosecution of librarians if an "obscene" item falls into a minor's hands.
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Cartoon: Future veterans of the information wars
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