Posts Tagged ‘history’
“… preferring their own ease and sloth before the general improvement of their country”*…
Dónal Gill, a college professor grappling with AI, looks to Jonathan Swift for guidance. Three hundred years ago, the satirist warned of a world in which reading and writing are replaced by the flashy simulation of human knowledge…
I have spent a significant portion of my life studying the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift — and in particular, studying Gulliver’s Travels, which turns 300 this year. While working on my Ph.D. dissertation, I was primarily interested in what Swift had to say about the politics of travel. Now, as a college professor teaching Canadian politics and battling to keep generative artificial intelligence out of my classrooms, I’m thinking a lot about what Swift had to say about technology. In his day, as in ours, a dominant narrative portrayed scientific development as both benevolent and inevitable. Swift’s skepticism about that narrative exposes some of our own most deeply held assumptions about the meaning of progress.
Born in Dublin in 1667, Swift is frequently described as the greatest satirist in the English language. This reputation is tied to the biting wit and unruly imagination found across his prose, poetry and political writings. In “A Modest Proposal” (1729), he notoriously suggests that the Irish poor should eat their own children for subsistence. Swift was born into the Anglo-Irish Protestant elite, and the text satires both the callousness of his class and a then-ascendant approach to morality and politics that held that all aspects of life could be cooked down to a pure numerical value. That this approach ended up predominating in the boardroom and halls of government is one reason why the brisk and shocking “Modest Proposal” still speaks to readers today.
Gulliver’s Travels is a much lengthier work. Over the course of Gulliver’s four voyages to fantastical lands, Swift gives the reader wild and varied depictions of political corruption and human hubris. Gulliver’s third voyage takes him to the flying island of Laputa, which rules tyrannically over several territories situated below. On his visit to one of these territories, Gulliver tours the “Academy of Lagado,” where scientific experimentation and deciphering the patterns of mathematics and music are valued above all else. The scientists he meets are profoundly unconcerned with whether their experiments have any useful outcome.
At the time Swift was writing, the experimental scientific method as we know it today — data collection and the development of hypotheses from empirical evidence — was becoming prominent, thanks to the work of Sir Isaac Newton and the Royal Society. Critics and readers have often viewed Gulliver’s third voyage as a moment when Swift chose the wrong subject to satire. The achievements of Newton and the Royal Society are, after all, still celebrated today. But I think Swift knew exactly what he was doing. Far from merely raising a reactionary fist in the air at the new science, Swift identified an attitude that is still around today — and one that has created many of the greatest challenges now facing educators.
Centuries before the internet infiltrated almost every aspect of daily life, Swift described how scientific and technological advances could lead to chronic distraction by producing an obsession with what could be rather than what is. At the heart of Swift’s diagnosis is the idea of speculation, or as Gulliver describes it, “speculative learning.” Gulliver sees a society totally consumed by impractical and abstract scientific interrogation. This plays out in bizarre and frequently doomed projects and experiments: Gulliver incredulously witnesses people attempting to extract sunbeams from cucumbers and turn excrement back into edible food.
Not all the scientific projects in the territories of Laputa fail to achieve their purpose. Gulliver is shown a large wooden contraption that allows “the most ignorant person … [to] write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.” [See the illustration above.] Swift, who was deeply learned, was envisaging a nightmare world in which reading and writing — the essential foundation of wit and wisdom — are replaced by a flashy simulation of human knowledge. Since the advent of ChatGPT, this scenario has become all too familiar. The device Gulliver encounters is massive, requiring 40 individuals to rotate iron handles attached to multiple words, which are then assembled into sentence fragments and called out to a scribe. Reading Swift’s description, I think both of the autocomplete nature of modern large language models and of the underclass of precarious workers whose labor is necessary for the seemingly lean, seemingly all-digital process of generative AI to work.
There are also many Laputans who are given over to a strange life of the mind, “so taken up with intense speculations, that they neither can speak, nor attend to the discourses of others, without being roused by some external taction upon the organs of speech and hearing.” Servants called flappers are required to shake rattles in their ears to keep them from falling or bumping into things. A quick rattle might also be used to rouse them from the somnambulant abyss of speculative abstraction, if conversation is necessary. Again, sounds rather familiar. Sure, people today wandering the streets head down in the infinite distractions of their phones are hardly absorbed in the life of the mind — but they are still absent from the things and the people around them. And isn’t the addiction to scrolling predicated on speculation of sorts? What will come next? What will I find if I look at just one more post?
Modern technology, and AI in particular, has created another Laputa: a society characterized by rampant speculation, blind faith in technology manipulated by cynical charlatans, and the casual disregard of old-fashioned virtues like truth, beauty, imagination and knowledge acquired the hard way. In many cases, the presence of AI in the classroom is a solution in search of a problem — just like the ludicrous, pointless innovations by the Laputan scientists. Swift’s sharp diagnosis of Laputa’s ills is motivating me to push back against the encroachment of AI into the work of education — and to instill in my students the belief that they, rather than the forces of technology, can determine the future…
Do read on for more: “Jonathan Swift v. AI,” from @donalgill.bsky.social in @thedialmag.bsky.social.
* Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Part III (“A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib and Japan”)
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As we shape our tools, we might recall that it was on this date in 1870 that a patent was granted to Daniel C. Stillson for the modern adjustible pipe wrench (an adaptation of/improvement to the monkey wrench) that he had invented the prior year.
“Let us leave a splendid legacy for our children… guard it well, for it is far more precious than money… and once destroyed, nature’s beauty cannot be repurchased at any price.”*…
From the National Archives, an extraordinary collection of Ansel Adams‘ photos of National Parks in the U.S…
In 1941 the National Park Service commissioned noted photographer Ansel Adams to create a photo mural for the Department of the Interior Building in Washington, DC. The theme was to be nature as exemplified and protected in the U.S. National Parks. The mural project was halted because of World War II and never resumed, however the photographs remained.
Much later in 1962 the photographs were accessioned into the holdings of the Still Picture Branch at the National Archives and Records Administration. The original prints created for the project now reside within the series 79-AA: Ansel Adams Photographs of National Parks and Monuments, 1941 – 1942, while the negatives were originally retained by Adams at the time. Ansel Adams would later visit the Still Picture Branch and review his photographic prints in 1979.
The holdings of the National Archives’ Still Picture Branch include 226 photographs taken for this project, most of them signed and captioned by Adams. They were taken between 1941 and 1942 at the Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Kings Canyon, Mesa Verde, Rocky Mountain, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Carlsbad Caverns, Glacier, and Zion National Parks; Death Valley, Saguaro, and Canyon de Chelly National Monuments. Other pictures were taken at the Boulder Dam; Acoma Pueblo, NM; San Idelfonso, NM; Taos Pueblo, NM; Tuba City, AZ; Walpi, AZ; and Owens Valley, CA. Many of the latter locations show Navajo and Pueblo Indians, their homes and activities.
The Kings Canyon photographs were taken in 1936 when the establishment of the park was being proposed. These prints were added by Adams to the mural project. The one photograph of Yosemite (79-AAU-1) was a gift from Adams to the head of the Park Service, Horace Albright, in 1933.
In addition, there are eight photographs taken by Adams of Yosemite in the General Photographic Files of the National Park Service (79-G)…
Many, many more at: “Ansel Adams Photographs of National Parks.”
“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment” – Ansel Adams
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As we wonder, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940 that an ancestor of the art featured above was discovered: a teenager named Marcel Ravidat found the entrance to cs in southwest France when his dog investigated a hole left by an uprooted tree. Ravidat collected three friends, then followed his dog down what turned out to be the narrow entrance into a cavern, where they came upon (part of) the now-storied collection of wall markings— 15,000- to 17,000-year-old paintings, consisting mostly of animal representations– that are among the world’s finest examples of art from the Upper Paleolithic period.
See also: “To practice any art, no matter how well or how badly, is a way to make your soul grow.”
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”*…
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote a 75 page book in his twenties, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, that he thought solved philosophy, then stepped away from the field. Years later, he came back and spent the rest of his life dismantling and reconstructing many of his own ideas (as reflected in his second book, Philosophical Investigations).
Marco Giancotti has created a new way to read the famously-difficult Tractatus…
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote most of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while fighting in World War I. When he was done, he believed this book made philosophy obsolete, so he found a job as an elementary school teacher. While he would later change his mind on its finality, the Tractatus remains one of the most important works of philosophy to this day.
The Tractatus has an unusual shape: it is not a sequence of chapters but a tree of statements and sub-statements and sub-sub-statements. At its root, it is made of only seven brief statements. In other words, it is not a linear read but a branching set of rabbit-holes.
This page is an attempt at making that tree maximally traversable and interactive. Use the tools available to explore, make cross-sections, annotate, fold and sculpt the book the way you prefer. Save any set of pins as a named thread in the control panel, or bookmark the page in your browser. Export the result as a Markdown or PDF file to keep, or share a special link that reopens your annotated version of the book in someone else’s browser...
A new way into Wittgenstein: “The Foldable Tractatus,” from @marcogiancotti.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy.
Read (Wittgenstein’s mentor, then later, antagonist) Bertrand Russell‘s introduction to the Tractatus on Project Gutenberg.
* Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
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As we fumble with philosophy, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Theodor Adorno; he was born on this date in 1903. A philosopher, cultural, and music critic, he was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, he authored numerous works—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia, and Negative Dialectics—that strongly influenced the European New Left.
A classically-trained musician (who studied composition with Alban Berg), Adorno devoted his final (and posthumously-published) book, Aesthetic Theory, which he had planned to dedicate to Samuel Beckett, to arguing against the “fatal separation” of feeling and understanding long demanded by the history of philosophy and to exploding the privilege aesthetics accords to content over form and contemplation over immersion.
Adorno critiqued all forms of positivism as responsible for technocracy and disenchantment and sought to produce a theory that both rejected positivism and avoided reinstating traditional metaphysics. He has been criticized for over-applying the term “positivism,” especially in his interpretations of Wittgenstein (and Karl Popper) as positivist.
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro”*…
Philip K. Dick, whose work appeared from the 1950s into the early 1980s, is one of those too-rare writers whose deep questions–and the mind-bending ideas they spawned– are at least as relevant today as then. Jared Shurin offers a path in…
Philip K. Dick is a persistent, iconic cultural presence. His work has given us Blade Runner, Minority Report, The Man in the High Castle, A Scanner Darkly and a pair of Total Recall movies (one of which is an undisputed cinematic classic, the other of which has Colin Farrell). Like all adaptations, these all have a strained (and occasionally distant) relationship with the source material. But however bastardised they are, they demonstrate the greatest strength of PKD’s work: the big idea.
Science fiction’s history is filled with big ideas. But Philip K. Dick had an exceptional, if not unmatched, ability to think about the biggest ideas of them all. What if we are not who we think we are? What are memories if they are not our own? What if reality itself were not, in any sense, real? His work is unbothered with how we make fusion energy or break light speed or maintain life on the moon. The ‘how’ and the ‘what’ are often taken for granted; traditional science fiction platforms used as launch pads for deeper, more provocative expeditions into perception, interpretation, and the nature of truth itself.
Big Ideas are great for inspiring Big Movies, even if something gets lost in translation along the way. Why have Arnie wrestle with existential angst when he can pull a giant metal booger out of his brain instead? With that ease in mind, it is hardly a surprise that Dick thrives in adaptation while his fiction, I’m sorry to say, remains (relatively, at least) unappreciated.
This is not entirely Hollywood’s fault. Dick is inspirational. He’s exciting! He is challenging and surprising, always finding ways to push ideas forward; often beyond the point of exhaustion. His books can twist like a child’s tangled Slinky, and be—frankly—just as infuriating to unwind. In short, and I say this in full transparency: PKD’s works can be hard to read. Especially if one goes in expecting the film.
They are, however, well worth reading. Below, you’ll find a few suggestions on where to start, and why. I’m a believer in not plunging into the deep end, which, with Dick, can be outright abyssal. Instead, there’s merit in starting with some of the slightly more straightforward (for him) works, which riff off recognisable tropes and scenarios, but in a uniquely Dickian way. (I’m sure there are many brilliant readers out there that read VALIS when they were ten and think I’m a big weenie. I look forward to hearing from you in the comments.)…
There follows a path into the extraordinary works of PKD.
A reader’s guide: “Jump in the Deep End With Philip K. Dick,” from @reactorsff.bsky.social.
FWIW, your correspondent, while agreeing that VALIS (and The Divine Invasion) are titles to hold until one is acclimated, would include Time Out of Joint (1959) as one of the novels with which to start… but then, that’s the point of lists like this :)
* Hunter S. Thompson
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As we wrestle with reality, we might recall that it was on this date in 1993 (on the anniversary of the introduction of the first “TV dinner” about 40 years earlier) that the The X-Files, created by Chris Carter, premiered on Fox. The series– which followed FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) as they investigated unsolved cases involving paranormal phenomena, government conspiracies, and extraterrestrial life– spawned two feature films, multiple spin-offs, a revival series, and a dedicated fanbase known as “X-Philes.” The show’s tagline, “The Truth Is Out There,” has, of course, become an enduring phrase in popular culture.
“It is entirely possible that you get unpredictable behavior out of predictable rules”*…
For centuries, the hypnotic winter flights of starlings were thought to be telepathy. Today, science reveals a much darker reality. Behind one of nature’s most breathtaking visual displays lies a mathematical masterpiece built entirely on fear. From The Great Planet…
During the autumn and winter months, if you look to the skies over Europe and North America about an hour before sunset, you might witness one of nature’s most breathtaking visual spectacles. These massive black clouds of tens of thousands of European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris)—constantly shifting into spheres, planes, and waves—are known in the scientific community as a “murmuration.” Named after the deep, resonant sound produced by thousands of wings beating in unison, the phenomenon looks from afar like a colossal calligraphy brushstroke across the sky or a ball of fire flickering in the wind. Yet, beyond this aesthetic illusion lies a ruthless and flawless algorithm for survival.
For centuries, researchers were baffled by how tens of thousands of birds could fly at speeds of around 45 kilometers per hour without a single collision. This coordination was so inconceivable that in 1931, prominent ornithologist Edmund Selous described it as “a madness in the sky.” To Selous, there was only one logical explanation for this complex behavior: telepathy. “They must think collectively, all at the same time,” he wrote.
Like many others, Selous assumed that complex behavior must stem from equally complex origins. However, groundbreaking observations made in 2005 by the married physicists Andrea Cavagna and Irene Giardina from the rooftop of the Palazzo Massimo in Rome revealed a truth far more striking than telepathy. Over three years of chilly evenings, the team used pairs of cameras to reconstruct the 3D positions of more than 4,000 birds in a single flock, proving that there is no overarching plan and no leader. Each starling in the flock interacts exclusively with its seven closest neighbors—a number researchers suggest might be the maximum capacity their brains can handle. The starlings do not keep track of these constantly changing alliances; they simply align their flight path with whichever seven birds are nearest, remaining close, but never too close.
The birds do not need to engage in complex communication to navigate their massive trajectories. When Charlotte Hemelrijk of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands plugged just three simple rules—avoidance, alignment, and attraction—along with basic aerodynamics into a computer model, the resulting virtual murmuration perfectly matched the real-world data gathered in Rome.
Physicists explain this vast web of interaction through the concept of “scale-free correlation.” When a starling turns, this new alignment influences its neighbors, who in turn influence theirs. Yet, unlike a children’s game of telephone, this transfer of information does not degrade with errors; instead, the errors are entirely washed away in the movement. No matter how large the flock becomes, the information arrives at the furthest edge completely uncorrupted. Even though each bird only pays attention to seven neighbors, its senses effectively extend across the entire murmuration, allowing it to instantly react to a movement hundreds of birds away. The reason the flock looks like a single entity from the outside is that, physically, it truly behaves like one.
Why do starlings expend such an immense amount of energy to constantly shift shape in the sky? For a long time, the scientific consensus leaned toward the “warmer together” hypothesis, assuming the displays served to advertise a roosting site and gather more birds for thermal benefits on cold nights. However, an analysis of over 3,000 murmurations across 23 countries, gathered through citizen science, revealed only a weak negative correlation between temperature and flock duration. The true determining factor was the “safer together” principle: defense against predators.
In approximately 30% of the recorded murmurations, birds of prey such as hawks, falcons, or harriers were present. As predators approached or actively engaged the flock, both the duration and the size of the murmuration increased…
… Millions of years of evolution have granted starlings this colossal collective intelligence, allowing them to outmaneuver even nature’s most apex aerial predators. Yet, the primary threat they face today comes not from the sky, but from human activity on the ground. While European starlings are omnivorous, they rely heavily on insect larvae, such as leatherjackets, that live in the soil beneath grasslands; as these grassy areas vanish, so does their food supply. Their habitats are rapidly shrinking due to urbanization and changing farming practices, such as moving livestock feed indoors…
… For a species to merely exist within an ecosystem, narrowly avoiding physical extinction, does not mean it has truly been saved. Earth’s most beautiful phenomena only emerge when living things can act together in great, thriving numbers. You can evolve a flawless biological algorithm based on scale-free correlation to outwit nature’s most ruthless predators, but when your habitat is suddenly paved over with concrete, evolution affords you no time to design a new defense mechanism. The fact that we have finally decoded the mathematical secret of the starling murmuration just as we are on the verge of losing it forever remains one of the most haunting questions suspended in our skies—a stark reflection of modern human hubris and our destructive relationship with the planet…
A flawless algorithm is fading from our skies: “The Mathematics of Fear: Why Starlings Murmurate.”
See also: “The brain has corridors surpassing / Material place.”
* Frank Heppner (an ornihologist who helped create the first computer simulations of bird flocks in flight)
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As we fly, we might send beautifully-plumed birthday greetings to Elliott Coues; he was born on this date in 1842. An army surgeon, historian, writer, and geographer, he led surveys of the Arizona Territory, first in his army posting there and later as secretary of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories.
But we remember him here for his lifelong pursuit of his boyhood passion for birds. As a teen, he met many naturalists at the Smithsonian Institution and published his first ornithological paper in 1859, at age 19. As his army assignments took him to various locations throughout the West, he continued studying the bird life in each new area, and found new species. His Key to North American Birds (1872) was the first work of its kind to present a taxonomic classification of birds according to an artificial key and promoted the systematic study of wild fowl in North America. He founded the American Ornithological Union in 1883, and was editor of its publication, The Auk.
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