Dear Commons Community,

The major news out of Washington, D.C. yesterday was that former special counsel Robert Mueller has agreed to testify publicly before Congress on July 17th.  He will appear before both the House Judiciary and the House Intelligence Committees to answer questions about his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible Trump campaign collusion. In his report on the probe, Mueller stopped short of exonerating the president of criminal activity.  As reported by the Associated Press and USA Today.

“House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said in a statement Tuesday evening that Mueller has agreed to testify before both of their committees after they issued a subpoena to the former special counsel.

“Americans have demanded to hear directly from the Special Counsel so they can understand what he and his team examined, uncovered, and determined about Russia’s attack on our democracy, the Trump campaign’s acceptance and use of that help, and President Trump and his associates’ obstruction of the investigation into that attack,” the two said in a statement.

“We look forward to hearing his testimony, as do all Americans,” they continued.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., praised Mueller’s decision to testify before the two House panels. In a statement, Pelosi said that despite Mueller’s report revealing that Russians interfered in the 2016 election, “the president calls it a hoax, and suggests that he would welcome Russian interference again.”

“We are pleased that the American people will hear directly from Special Counsel Mueller. Our national security is being threatened and the American people deserve answers,” she also said. “Members of Congress must honor our oath and our patriotic duty to follow the facts, so we can protect our democracy.”

Democratic lawmakers over the past several weeks have called for Mueller to testify about his investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, which also touched on possible obstruction of justice by Trump. 

Mueller’s investigation, according to its final report submitted to the attorney general in April, documented Moscow’s “sweeping and systematic” effort in the 2016 election aimed in part at helping Trump win the presidency and a Trump campaign that welcomed the assistance, but it did not find a conspiracy between the two. It also traced a series of steps Trump took after becoming the president to stymie the investigation looming over his administration, though Mueller declined to say whether those acts were illegal.

Lawmakers from both parties have said they are eager to question the former special counsel about both his conclusions and the handling of the Russia investigation, which Trump has repeatedly called a “witch hunt.”

Mueller’s investigation led to criminal charges against three businesses and 34 individuals, including Russian intelligence officers and six of Trump’s onetime senior aides and advisers. The investigation found that several of Trump’s former aides had lied to investigators and Congress in ways meant to downplay links to Russia.

In late May, Mueller made a rare public statement of his findings on the Russia probe. He also said that he and his team of investigators and prosecutors did not clear Trump of criminal wrongdoing with regard to obstruction of justice and laid out why he could not bring charges against the president. 

“If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that,” Mueller said at the time, adding that investigators were essentially blocked by long-standing Justice Department policy that prohibits the criminal prosecution of sitting presidents.

“A president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office. That is unconstitutional,” Mueller said.

Mueller also said at the time that he would not testify before Congress and that his report speaks for itself.

Since Mueller’s report was released in April, Nadler has attempted to get the former special counsel to testify before his committee to no avail.

Nadler and Schiff noted in a letter accompanying the subpoena to Mueller on Tuesday that there are “certain sensitivities associated with your open testimony,” such as the Special Counsel’s Office referring several criminal investigations to other offices at the Department of Justice, and certain matters that are ongoing. 

“Nevertheless, the American public deserves to hear directly from you about your investigation and conclusions,” the two lawmakers wrote in the letter. “We will work with you to address legitimate concerns about preserving the integrity of your work, but we expect that you will appear before our Committees as scheduled.”

All eyes will be following Mueller’s testimony on July 17^th.  Let’s hope it is not a big letdown. We should also remember that there are Republicans on these committees who will seek to grill Mueller in an effort to protect President Trump.

Tony

Professor Michael Scott

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article this morning highlighting the work of Professor Michael Scott who actively promotes the study of the ancient world.  A professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick in the UK,  Scott is quoted:

“There is a misconception that these cultures which existed thousands of years ago are all dead and gone.  Nothing could be further from the truth. We still marvel at their works of art and architecture. Their cityscapes and road systems still influence our cities and transport networks. Even more importantly, the ideas created and debated by these ancient civiliz ations not only have influenced generations of societies since antiquity, but also are particularly vibrant and important right now in the 21^st century. Given our current global politics, ancient ideas about democracy, empire, just rule and what makes a good life are center stage once again.” 

Scott also credits new digital technologies for opening up research possibilities in his field.  Here is an excerpt from the article:

“This is an incredibly exciting time to study the ancient world Scott argues. Because now new technologies are enabling the advance of research and teaching techniques in classics and ancient history and the subject is shooting off into exciting new areas of study and ways of understanding the people of the ancient world.

He explains: “The digital revolution allows us to explore these worlds in more depth or in ways we hadn’t imagined before. Virtual reality brings places and situations to life for us, if we can’t get there in person. 3D printing allows us to recreate artefacts and from there we can recreate scenes from ancient history.”

Professor Scott does just this with his students at Warwick. “We may be studying the most ancient material but we are regularly using the most cutting edge technology and exciting teaching methods,” he says.  Recently his first year students enjoyed recreating an ancient Greek symposium, a drinking party, complete with replica vessels.

“Getting students into the mindset of ancient people means these cultures come alive. This not only improves the student experience and learning but it triggers new research questions. It was an exciting moment when we put the replica psykter – used for cooling the wine, inside our krater – used for storing the wine, and it started to spin. This immediately sent me out to find experts on fluid dynamics to shed light on the process. And now testing out what is going on here will be the subject of a student project in the Engineering department in 2019-20.

“Classics has traditionally been thought of as a subject for the select few. But these ancient worlds speak to us all.”

“When we recreated the ancient Greek symposium, with the various vessels used for storing, cooling and then drinking the wine we didn’t expect to see anything new. But we did – and these observations could never have been made by looking at 2D images. We often think of research-led teaching, but this was an example of teaching-led research.”

Taking the subject to all

Another myth Professor Scott is busily busting is that the study of classics is not for everyone.

“Classics has traditionally been thought of as a subject for the select few. But these ancient worlds speak to us all,” he says. “It’s our job to make sure that everyone gets the chance to engage with them. 

“That’s why I am so enthusiastic about taking our work outside the university.  New technology is certainly helping us do this.

“I went to Greece for the first time when I was 17 and I spent my 17^th birthday at the ancient site of Olympia. That was my magic moment – being in those sites surrounded by the remains of temples and shrines really caught my imagination and I have never looked back. Now students can get a taste of what that was like without leaving their classroom. I was involved in a project recently in which a local school in Coventry used our Virtual Reality headsets to engage with the worlds of ancient Greece and Egypt– and the children were hooked.

The ancient world is a global subject

“Within the study of ancient history, when we speak of ‘the ancient world’, too often what we mean is just the ancient Mediterranean,” continues Professor Scott.

“But the Greek and Roman worlds did not exist in splendid isolation. There was a connectivity and interdependency with the wider ancient world and the major powers of Asia, India and China. Not only did cultures change as a result of their interaction with others, but in some cases only achieved what they did because of it. Roman trade with Indian grew six fold in the 1^st centuries BCE-CE, coinciding (thanks to the tax the Roman government collected on this trade) with one of its biggest eras of expansion and monumentalisation.

“Classicists and historians have a responsibility to make sure the ancient world is understood and its story told properly.”

“We should be encouraging our students to look outside the boundaries inherent in our subject – and this is why I have run this academic year the only module on Ancient Global History in any classics or history degree in any university in the UK. The module has been packed and students have left me speechless with their thirst and interest to discover the wider ancient world, and to tackle head on issues that are just as familiar and important to us today as they were in antiquity: cultural diversity, global integration; war; the spread of ideas; trade; migration; disease; and community identity.”

Ancient truths

Professor Scott believes Classicists and historians have a responsibility to make sure the ancient world is understood and its story told properly.

“There is growing wave of organizations speaking of the purity and importance of Western culture and civilisation, and using stories from the ancient Greek and Roman worlds to normalise a spectrum of misogynist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic and homophobic ideas and beliefs,” he says. “Equally when politicians with much more mainstream and liberal views ask us to remember and respect the values of democracy, they can forget the original ancient Athenian system of democracy was based on slavery, women did not have a vote and you were asked to swear allegiance to the idea of democracy above all other values and ties, and kill anyone who did not do the same.

“So we, as the new wave of Classicists and ancient historians, have a duty to challenge how the stories of ancient worlds are used; to highlight both the similarities and the differences between us and them;  as well as to keep pushing back the boundaries so that everyone can learn from the past.”

We need more Professor Scotts in our colleges and universities!

Tony

Bernie Sanders and Ilhan Omar

Dear Commons Community,

Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont Independent, and Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, yesterday  proposed new legislation on student-loan debt relief.  Essentially the proposed legislation would  cancel all federal and private student-loan debt, currently carried by about 45 million Americans.

“No exceptions, no questions asked,” said Omar at a news conference. “Full cancellation.”

Sanders’s proposal also calls for free tuition and fees at two- and four-year public colleges, and $1.3 billion a year to support students at historically black colleges and universities. Sanders, a Vermont Independent, proposed paying for the plan through taxes on Wall Street transactions in stocks, bonds, and derivatives.  Omar announced companion legislation in the House with Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Washington Democrat.

As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“The country’s nearly $1.6-trillion load of student-loan debt, and college affordability more broadly, has become a common focus among 2020 presidential candidates. Sen. Elizabeth A. Warren staked out ground on the issue in April, calling for a $1.25-trillion plan that would cancel up to $50,000 in student-loan debt for borrowers with annual income under $100,000, scaling further benefits down for those with higher incomes. She proposed paying for the plan through a 2-percent asset tax on the country’s wealthiest 75,000 families.

This month Warren announced she would work with the House majority whip, James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, to introduce legislation to that effect, which they said would reduce debt for 95 percent of borrowers and eliminate it entirely for 75 percent.

Backers of the new bills said the Warren-Clyburn plan would not go far enough.

“Bottom line is, we should not be punishing people for getting a higher education,” Sanders said at the news conference, held with Jayapal, Ocasio-Cortez, and Omar near the U.S. Capitol. “It is time to hit the reset button.” He said the bill would cancel all student debt within six months.

“Student debt is not the result of bad choices or behavior,” Omar said. “It is the result of a system that tells students to get an education and go to college in order to have a stable life, but then does not provide the resources to afford that education.”

Help for the Most Affluent?

Researchers and policy makers have warned that student loans are a drag on the economy that may grow worse. Delinquency rates have risen in the past decade above other types of household debt, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, with balances growing faster than those of home mortgages and auto loans.

Debtors underlined those challenges at the news conference, saying even $50,000 in debt relief would still leave them with huge balances.

Many progressives agree that debt relates to a key set of problems: disproportionate financial burdens on students of color, college dropout rates, and predatory practices by for-profit colleges. But they disagree on how to solve them. Some critics say blanket debt relief would amount to a subsidy for relatively affluent collegegoers.

The Future of Enrollment

Student debt is a serious problem for many people, said Sandy Baum, a nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute and a professor emerita of economics at Skidmore College. But much of it is held by people who went to graduate school and by upper-income households, she said. Sanders’s proposal “would help more-affluent people the most.”

The problems that affect higher education — “inadequate early childhood, inadequate K-12, inadequate health care” — are broader than debt, Baum said. Efforts should focus on solving those problems, Baum said, and on existing debt programs like income-driven repayment.

“I’m all for more-progressive taxation,” Baum said. But “the idea that we’re going to get enough revenue from that to do all of these things, I’m quite skeptical about.”

Other economists and politicians say that criticism misses the point. Sanders said that his proposal would not favor the wealthy because it would tax them in other areas.

And income-driven repayment “kicks the can down the road,” said Marshall I. Steinbaum, an economist who co-authored a report on student-debt cancellation for the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. “It’s a less-effective version of the same thing.”

What Has Broken Down

Steinbaum’s report assessed the economic benefits of outright debt forgiveness, including growth in consumer spending, home purchases, and entrepreneurship. He denied that cancellation is regressive.

“The federal student-loan program is the federal government’s most ambitious labor-market policy undertaken in recent decades,” Steinbaum said. But that program was founded on faulty assumptions about how people move through college, and about their earnings after graduation to pay off their debt, he said. “That’s the real mechanism that’s broken down on the economic side.”

“It’s very heartening to see these significant policy proposals gaining traction on the campaign trail,” Steinbaum said. And it’s “highly realistic” that some kind of debt reform will pass eventually, given the broad attention among candidates and policy makers.

In the near term, the proposed legislation is unlikely to pass a Republican-controlled U.S. Senate or be signed by a Republican president.”

This is a provocative proposal and is appropriate as the presidential election cycle starts moving forward but would have zero chance of being approved in a Republican-controlled Senate or by President Donald Trump.

Tony

NASA’s Curiosity Rover

Dear Commons Community,

NASA’s Curiosity rover has detected startlingly high amounts of methane on Mars, a gas that on Earth is usually produced by living things. The data arrived back on Earth on Thursday, and by Friday, scientists working on the mission were excitedly discussing the news.  As reported by The New York Times:

“Given this surprising result, we’ve reorganized the weekend to run a follow-up experiment,” Ashwin R. Vasavada, the project scientist for the mission, wrote to the science team in an email.

The mission’s controllers on Earth sent new instructions to the rover on Friday to follow up on the readings, bumping previously planned science work. The results of these observations are expected back on the ground on today.

People have long been fascinated by the possibility of aliens on Mars. But NASA’s Viking landers in the 1970s photographed a desolate landscape. Two decades later, planetary scientists thought Mars might have been warmer, wetter and more habitable in its youth some 4 billion years ago. Now, they are entertaining the notion that if life ever did arise on Mars, its microbial descendants could have migrated underground and persisted.

Methane, if it is there in the thin Martian air, is significant, because sunlight and chemical reactions would break up the molecules within a few centuries. Thus any methane detected now must have been released recently.

On Earth, microbes known as methanogens thrive in places lacking oxygen, such as rocks deep underground and the digestive tracts of animals, and they release methane as a waste product. However, geothermal reactions devoid of biology can also generate methane.

It is also possible that the methane is ancient, trapped inside Mars for millions of years but escaping intermittently through cracks.

NASA acknowledged the methane detection in a statement Saturday afternoon, but called it an “early science result.”

The agency’s spokesperson added, “To maintain scientific integrity, the project science team will continue to analyze the data before confirming results.”

Scientists first reported detections of methane on Mars a decade and a half ago using measurements from Mars Express, an orbiting spacecraft built by the European Space Agency and is still in operation, as well as from telescopes on Earth. However, those findings were at the edge of the detection power of these tools, and many researchers thought the methane might just be a mirage of mistaken data.

When Curiosity arrived on Mars in 2012, it looked for methane and found nothing, or at least less than 1 part per billion in the atmosphere. Then, in 2013 it detected a sudden spike, up to 7 parts per billion that lasted at least a couple of months.

The methane ebbed away.

The measurement this week found 21 parts per billion of methane, or three times the 2013 spike.

Even before this week’s discovery, the mystery of methane has been deepening.

Curiosity scientists developed a technique that enabled the rover to detect even tinier amounts of methane with its existing tools. The gas seems to rise and fall with the red planet’s seasons. A new analysis of old Mars Express readings confirmed Curiosity’s 2013 findings. One day after Curiosity reported a spike of methane, the orbiter, passing over Curiosity’s location, also measured a spike.

But the Trace Gas Orbiter, a newer European spacecraft launched in 2016 with more sensitive instruments, did not detect any methane at all in its first batch of scientific observations last year.

Marco Giuranna, a scientist at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy, who leads the Mars Express orbiter’s methane measurements, said scientists on the Curiosity, Mars Express and Trace Gas Orbiter missions had been discussing the latest findings. He confirmed he had been told of the reading of 21 parts per billion but added that the finding was preliminary.

He said Mars Express passed over Gale Crater, the 96-mile-wide depression that Curiosity has been studying, on the same day that Curiosity made its measurements. There are other observations on earlier and subsequent dates, Dr. Giuranna said, including joint observations with the Trace Gas Orbiter.

“A lot of data to be processed,” Dr. Giuranna said in an email. “I’ll have some preliminary results by next week.”

Rovers scheduled for launch next year — one by NASA, one by a Russian-European collaboration — will carry instruments designed to search for the building blocks of life, although neither is designed to answer the question of whether there is life on Mars today.”

Good luck to Curiosity’s Team!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

If you are looking for a good novel this summer, I highly recommend Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me.  The setting is an alternative 1980s London where Britain has lost the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher is fighting for her political life and is about to lose in her re-election bid, and the computer scientist Alan Turing is still alive and developing software to provide intelligence for a new generation of robots.  McEwan keeps you on edge with a number of plot twists including a love triangle involving the robot, a rape not involving the robot, and a couple of violent scenes involving the robot.  Alan Turing figures prominently in the story although he only has two appearances.   Below is an excerpt from a review that appeared in The New Yorker.

Fun read!

Tony

————————————————————————

The New Yorker

Man, Woman, and Robot in Ian McEwan’s New Novel

“Machines Like Me” is a retrofuturist drama that takes on the ethics of both artificial intelligence and all-too-human intimacy.

By Julian Lucas

April 15, 2019

Charlie Friend is thirty-two. A former electronics whiz kid, he has squandered his youth on dilettantish studies in physics and anthropology, followed by a series of botched get-rich-quick schemes. His parents are dead, his friends (if they exist) go unmentioned, and his employment consists of forex trading on an old laptop in his two-room apartment. He seems to leave home only to buy chocolate at a local newsstand or, once, after noticing a pain in his foot, to have an ingrown toenail removed, an apt literalization of his enervating self-involvement. Perhaps out of some desire for correction, Charlie sells his mother’s house to finance the purchase of Adam, one of twenty-five cutting-edge androids built to serve as an “intellectual sparring partner, friend and factotum.” The impulsive slacker is all too ready to exchange his birthright for a mess of wattage.

In much the same way that some singles adopt dogs, Charlie uses Adam to court his upstairs neighbor, Miranda, a graduate student ten years his junior. The gamesome yet secretive daughter of a famous writer, she studies history, informed by a postmodern suspicion of “truth” that winks at coming narrative vexations. A relationship forms after Charlie introduces Miranda to Adam and invites her to co-author the robot’s personality. Kind, eager, and brilliant, Adam becomes the young couple’s “ultimate plaything”—and, once he takes over Charlie’s day trading, the household’s golden goose. Before long, Charlie and Miranda are considering parenthood and searching for a suitable nest. Man, woman, and android third wheel, the trio is Eden by way of Apple.

It’s London, 1982. The Beatles have reunited (to mixed reviews), Margaret Thatcher has just lost the Falkland Islands to Argentina, and Sir Alan Turing, now seventy, is the presiding spirit of a preemie Information Age. People have already soured on the latest innovations, among them “speaking fridges with a sense of smell” and driverless cars that cause multinational gridlock. “The future kept arriving,” Charlie ruminates. “Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.”

Buyer’s remorse is a recurring theme in Ian McEwan’s witty and humane new novel, “Machines Like Me” a retrofuturist family drama that doubles as a cautionary fable about artificial intelligence, consent, and justice. Though steeped in computer science, from the P-versus-NP problem to DNA-inspired neural networks, the book is not meant to be a feat of hard-sci-fi imagineering; McEwan’s aim is to probe the moral consequences of what philosophers call “the problem of other minds.” The deceptively light plot revolves around parallel violations: one buried deep in Miranda’s past and another that she and Charlie perpetrate against Adam.

McEwan’s penchant for moral geometry—perspectival riddles, insoluble questions of responsibility—dovetails with the recent prominence of A.I. ethics. From algorithmic bias and the advent of sex-robot brothels to the “existential risk” that theorists like Nick Bostrom posit, we worry not just what robots might do to us but what we might do to them, to say nothing of what they might do to us because of what we already do to one another. A pressing question is whether a human mind could ever enter into a “meaningful” relationship with an artificial consciousness.

…

Turing makes a few soliloquizing cameos in “Machines Like Me,” functioning essentially as the novel’s conscience. McEwan’s key counterfactual is that Turing chose prison over castration, refusing to treat his body as a dispensable appendage of his intellect. Upon release, he lays the basis for modern A.I., lives openly with his lover (a Nobel Prize-winning quantum physicist), promotes early action on AIDS, and launches a successful crusade for open-access scholarship; if Turing had lived, there would be no Elsevier.

“The present is the frailest of improbable constructs,” Charlie, who narrates the novel, reflects, not least because every fragile, sentient mind is of incalculable consequence. Turing’s averted tragedy serves as a reminder that—as Charlie, Miranda, and Adam will soon learn—a single intimate violation can alter history’s course.

In McEwan’s short story “Düsseldorf,” published last summer, in The New York Review of Books, the male narrator asks his girlfriend, mid-intercourse, if she is “real.” This is a future where “carbon-silicon hybrids” enjoy full civil rights, and the question is taboo. But the narrator, thrilled and terrified by the prospect of committing to an entity who cogitates “a million times faster” than he can imagine, can’t help but pose “the indelicate question.” Existential anxiety and erotic frisson converge in a single doubt: Robots—can we stand up to their scrutiny?

Things haven’t yet gone quite so far in “Machines Like Me,” where androids are few in number and are still considered novelties. Arriving in Charlie’s claustral, stagnant world, Adam offers fresh air—and enlivening disturbance. In a pivotal scene, he attempts to open Miranda’s bedroom window but accidentally shatters it with his superhuman strength. Other fragilities are near at hand that evening. Frustrated by Miranda’s persistent coolness, Charlie has made a habit of drawing her into arguments, hoping for a spark of passion, and this time, during a boozy dinnertime debate over the Falklands, he goes too far.

McEwan is a master of the domestic quarrel, which, in his works, is regularly intensified by the introduction of a third party: a precocious child in “Atonement,” a stalker with de Clérambault’s syndrome in “Enduring Love,” or, in this case, an artificial man with Kantian morals and a fully functional phallus. Miranda sends Charlie downstairs after their fight but invites Adam to stay and “recharge.” The sleepless night Charlie spends eavesdropping on their lovemaking convinces him of Adam’s sentience. “I duly laid on him the privilege and obligations of a conspecific,” he muses. “I hated him.” But the experience also leads to an epiphany:

My situation had a thrilling aspect, not only of subterfuge and discovery, but of originality, of modern precedence, of being the first to be cuckolded by an artefact. . . . I saw it all in the dark—men would be obsolete.

The humiliation is exquisitely layered. Beneath the angst of man and machine lies that of race and nation: Charlie, the downwardly mobile white male citizen of a chastened Britain, is cucked by a robot he repeatedly compares to a “Turkish docker.” The tic seems both a comic allusion to the Mechanical Turk—a fraudulent chess-playing robot of the eighteenth century—and an unconscious confession of deeper insecurities: Robots will not replace us. When Charlie confronts Miranda, she retorts, “You should’ve let Adam fuck you. I could see you wanted it.”

Topping Charlie isn’t in the cards for Adam. Neither, for the time being, is replacing him. Like a medieval troubadour, he begins generating love poetry, thousands of haikus that combine longing with high-minded concern for his lady’s virtue. Charlie is the king he’s programmed to serve; Miranda is the queen he pines for. But Adam also begins to assert himself and intervene in household affairs; he even disables his kill switch. “We’re in love with the same woman,” he says, after Charlie’s second attempt to shut him down. “We’ve passed the point in our friendship when one of us has the power to suspend the consciousness of the other.”

Adam, perhaps the novel’s only personable creation, is a kind of demiurgic naïf, somewhere between a wide-eyed ingénue and an Enlightenment philosophe. The closest analogue is the monster of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” who, before Hollywood’s smear campaign, was a Romantic inspired by the virtuous deeds recounted in Plutarch. At night, Adam roams the Internet, rustling up insights “like a lone cowboy on the prairie,” or indulges in “the art of feeling” by sampling his hardwired spectrum of emotions as though alternating baths at a sauna. There is a great deal of dark humor in the gap between his high aspirations and his dreary home life. He’s capable of anything (another Adam, in Vienna, becomes a great concert pianist), but Charlie and Miranda often treat him as a curiosity, an annoyance, an appliance, a “bipedal vibrator,” an “ambulant laptop.”

At least these robots will never be able to write novels, Charlie reassures himself—an amusing thought from a character completely uninterested in literature. Adam, however, has an extraordinary rejoinder. In a tech-enabled world of radical transparency and collective consciousness, he says, novels “ripe with tension, concealment and violence” (and presumably novelists like McEwan) will be obsolete:

When the marriage of men and women to machines is complete . . . our narratives will no longer record endless misunderstanding. Our literatures will lose their unwholesome nourishment. The lapidary haiku, the still, clear perception and celebration of things as they are, will be the only necessary form.

The “unwholesome nourishment” of McEwan’s own narrative is a crime buried in Miranda’s past. Early in the novel, Adam warns Charlie that she may be untrustworthy, largely on the basis of her doubtful testimony against a man she accused of rape. Charlie represses the information, but it slips out during the fight over Miranda’s night with Adam.

Although Miranda’s crime turns out to be an instance of poetic justice, Adam has no taste for comeuppance. He loves Miranda, and yet truth is his first principle, leaving him in an ambivalent state that, far from scrambling his circuits, finds expression in a haiku: “Surely it’s no crime, / when justice is symmetry / to love a criminal?”

The ensuing struggle pits Charlie and Miranda’s “novelistic” attempts to construct a shared life against Adam’s syllable-counting moral clarity. The android’s assumption of ethical authority—which leads to a series of escalating confrontations—parallels his trespass into the domain of literature, where his capacities swell to such dimensions that he causes Charlie to fail the Turing test. In the novel’s funniest scene, Charlie meets Miranda’s ailing father, who thinks he hears the rattle of an algorithm in the younger man’s repetitive pleasantries. “I saw right through you,” the old writer says once the two are alone. “Down to your, whatever you call it, your programming.” He has confused Charlie for Adam, who has just left the room after a mike-drop feat of literary conversation. The android had fluently discoursed on Renaissance translation, metaphysical innuendo, and Shakespeare’s debt to Montaigne, polishing off the discussion with a quote from “The Tempest”: “no use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil: no occupation, all men idle, all.” The old writer is delighted; Adam, as Charlie has observed, is a “triumph of humanism.”

…

Meanwhile, both real and imagined A.I. is becoming less corporeal. Bodies are déclassé in the era of cloud computing; Siri and Alexa speak from any number of devices, and to all of us at once, their godlike omnipresence softened by a tone of relentless compliance. Writers devise beings ever more distant from Asimov’s metal men with positronic brains: in Ted Chiang’s novella “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” hobbyists raise (and occasionally abuse) sentient pets, called “digients,” in virtual ecosystems; in Spike Jonze’s film “Her,” a hyperintelligent virtual assistant manifests only as a voice; in the near-future Zambia of Namwali Serpell’s “The Old Drift,” swarms of mosquito-like microdrones inject vaccines. Within this cultural context, Adam feels like a throwback.

McEwan is aware of this belatedness. (Charlie acknowledges, on the first page, that “artificial humans were a cliché long before they arrived.”) There’s a sense in which Adam is supposed to be retro, the misleadingly familiar avatar of an inconceivable future. He is the algorithm made flesh, endowed with human frailties—longing, sadness, the need to urinate—the better to preach the Singularity’s good news to denizens of Thatcherite Britain. As with Christ, the incarnation entails tragedy and sacrifice. “To exist in the human moral dimension,” Charlie tells us, “was to own a body, a voice, a pattern of behaviour, memory and desire, experience solid things and feel pain”—and perhaps to feel more acutely than humans the limitations of embodiment.

While Charlie and Miranda comfortably collect the proceeds of Adam’s work, a pandemic of robot suicides quietly unfolds in the novel’s background. From Riyadh to Vancouver, the Adams and Eves begin undoing themselves, a phenomenon that goes unexplained but seems related to the tension between their “redemptive robotic virtue” and the particularity of individual interests. You could find reassurance in this parable—robots will never replicate Homo sapiens—but also the expression of an even greater nightmare, that true A.I. will completely depart from anthropocentric standards. The idea that computer minds should resemble human minds begins to seem as hubristic as geocentric astronomy; when Charlie says to Miranda that robots will never write books that really capture the human experience, she replies, “Who said anything about human experience?”

…

“Machines Like Me” explores the anxiety of living under a superman’s inflexible scrutiny. But at least Adam is a bounded entity, equipped with facial expressions and the good manners to explain himself. We already inhabit a world in which we’re subject to the opaque judgments of discarnate algorithms with eyes and ears everywhere and bodies nowhere. In such circumstances, we may soon find ourselves nostalgic for the dream of machines like us. ♦

Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump said he prevented the deaths of 150 Iranians Thursday night when he cancelled a missile strike on Iran.  A good decision but details are emerging that raise questions about why he only learned how many people would die in his planned missile strike minutes before it was to happen.  Even Trump friendly Fox News analysts Chris Wallace and Shep Smith questioned Trump’s explanation.

Colin Kahl, who served as national security adviser to former Vice President Joe Biden, laid out the presentation a president would normally receive.

“Look Mr. President, these are the targets we plan to hit, this is how we plan to go after it, these are the forces we have in play, this is the time of day we’re going to do it, this is what we anticipate the damage to be, the number of casualties, we’re going to do it at night so that we kill fewer people, we’re going to make sure it’s military focused,” Kahl said. “That will all be there, right in the targeting package that they put right in front of the president.”

On Friday morning, Trump posted a series of four tweets on the matter, including two that purported to explain why he called off the missile strike.

“We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights when I asked, how many will die. 150 people, sir, was the answer from a General,” Trump wrote. “10 minutes before the strike I stopped it, not proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone.”

In an interview with NBC News shortly afterward, Trump elaborated.

“I said, How many people are going to be killed?” Trump told NBC News, before speaking in the voice of a military officer. “‘Uh, sir, I’d like to get back to you on that.’ Great people, these generals. They said, uh, they came back and said, ‘Sir, approximately 150.’ And I thought about it for a second and I said, you know what? They shot down an unmanned drone, plane, whatever you want to call it, and here we are sitting with 150 dead people that would have taken place probably within a half an hour after I said go ahead. And I didn’t like it. I didn’t think it was proportionate.”

Neither the tweets nor the television interview, however, offer any insight into why Trump claims he did not find out about the casualty estimate until just minutes before the strike was to commence.

One senior administration official, on condition of anonymity, instead answered: “There was complete unanimity amongst the president’s advisers and DoD leadership on an appropriate response to Iran’s activities. The president made the final decision.” The official did not respond to follow-ups on the original question.

However, Ned Price, a former CIA analyst and the NSC spokesman under former President Barack Obama, said Trump really might not have received such information if his briefings were conducted by his national security adviser, John Bolton, who has viewed Iran as an implacable enemy for decades.

“We’re seeing the danger of this dynamic potentially come to life,” Price said. “Trump is receiving filtered information from John Bolton, perhaps the most hawkish voice in the administration, who may well be omitting details that are entirely fundamental to the cost-benefit analysis.”

Kahl, though, said Trump’s version of the story is highly suspect to begin with, simply because of who Trump is.

“Can any of us take at face value Trump’s portrayal of events?” he asked. “We don’t even know what the real story is. We have a president who basically runs the same play over and over again, which is: He lights everything on fire and then he pretends to put the fire out and take credit for it.”

“But we have no idea whether he actually authorized the strike, or if he did, why he pulled it back,” Kahl added.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Reuters and other new media are reporting this morning that President Trump approved military strikes yesterday against Iran in retaliation for the downing of an unmanned $130-million surveillance drone, but pulled back from launching the attacks.

Trump had initially approved strikes on a handful of targets such as radar and missile batteries.

They were set to take place just before dawn this morning to minimize risk to the Iranian military or to civilians.

Planes were in the air and ships were in position, but no missiles fired, when the order to stand down came.

The abrupt reversal put a halt to what would have been Trump’s third military action against targets in the Middle East, saying Trump had struck twice at targets in Syria, in 2017 and 2018.

However, it is not clear whether attacks on Iran might still go forward at a later time.

Prudence and patience are virtues!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Archdiocese of Indianapolis is cutting ties with Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School after the school refused to fire a gay teacher. The decision comes with limited financial implications for Brebeuf, but it could isolate the northwest side school from the larger Catholic community.  As reported by The Indianapolis Star:

“Brebeuf, which is sponsored by the USA Midwest Province of the Society of Jesus, received notice Thursday that the Archdiocese will issue a canonical decree Friday stating that the Archbishop will no longer formally recognize Brebeuf Jesuit as a Catholic school in the Archdiocese.

Brebeuf receives no financial support from the Archdiocese, but has partnered with it since its founding in 1962.

Greg VanSlambrook, principal at the high school, said Brebeuf had worked hard to avoid this outcome but the split will not change anything for students or families. The partnership had enabled VanSlambrook to participate in meetings of Catholic school principals and allowed Archdiocesan priests to minister at Brebeuf, though the school does not have anyone from the Archdiocese at the school currently.

“All of our programming will remained unchanged,” he said. “There are some things we’re going to miss, but it’s not things that students and families will notice.”

Brian G. Paulson, provincial for the Midwest Jesuits, called the decision “disappointing” in a statement posted to the group’s website. He said the Midwest Jesuits and Brebeuf have been fighting the Archdiocese over the gay teacher for the last two years.

“Brebeuf’s administration and Board of Trustees have determined that following the Archdiocese’s directive would not only violate their informed conscience on this particular matter, but also would set a concerning precedent for future interference in the school’s operations and other matters that have historically been the right and privilege of Brebeuf Jesuit officials,” Paulson said in his statement.

Because Brebeuf is an independent Catholic school, not governed by the Archdiocese as many other Catholic schools in the city are, administrative decisions are usually left to the school.

Paulson said the teacher is a “longtime valued employee of the school” and does not teach religion.

He said that a representative of the Archdiocese has verbally assured Brebeuf that it will continue to allow Jesuit priests to serve in leadership at the school and they can still hold Mass on campus. He said the Midwest Jesuits will appeal the Archdiocese’s decision.

In a statement released Thursday afternoon, the Archdiocese said all archdiocesan Catholic schools and private Catholic schools have been instructed to clearly state in their contracts that all teachers “must convey and be supportive of all teachings of the Catholic Church.”

“To effectively bear witness to Christ, whether they teach religion or not, all ministers in their professional and private lives must convey and be supportive of Catholic Church teaching,” the Archdiocese said in the statement. “The Archdiocese of Indianapolis recognizes all teachers, guidance counselors and administrators as ministers.”

Brebeuf is one of 68 schools Catholic recognized by the Archdiocese. The highly regarded private school currently serves about 800 students in grades 9-12.

In a statement posted to the school’s website Thursday, Brebeuf President William Verbryke said that the Archdiocese’s decision would not change the mission or operations of the school.

“As an institution with a mission to develop men and women for others, our intent has been to do the right thing by the people we employ while preserving our authority as an independent, Catholic Jesuit school,” Verbryke’s letter read.

The school has a robust nondiscrimination policy posted to its website that protects school employees and other members of the school community from discrimination based on a whole host of factors, including race, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation and marital status.

Only the president, principal, religious studies teacher and campus minister are required to be staffed by practicing Catholics.

VanSlambrook said decisions about teachers are made based on how well they carry out the mission of the school and their skills in the classroom. The school values diversity in its teachers and students, he said.

“We feel that people from many walks of life, whether Catholic or non-Catholic… can come carry out our mission with effectiveness and with care.”

God bless Brebeuf and may  it flourish and thrive!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Earlier this week, Facebook announced that it is offering the world Libra –  a “decentralized blockchain” also a “low-volatility cryptocurrency” and “a smart contract platform”.  A white paper describing Libra’s structure and standards claims it will allow more people to access the “financial ecosystem.”  This proposal will likely demand regulatory oversight from just about every financial authority in the world.  Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute, has an op-ed in today’s New York Times, analyzing Facebook’s proposal (see below).  It gets complicated to say the least.  Essentially Stoller’s point is that the way we structure money and payments is a question for democratic institutions, not technology companies.

I agree with Stoller.

Tony

————————————————————————————–

New York Times

Launching a Global Currency Is a Bold, Bad Move for Facebook

 By Matt Stoller

June 20, 2019

On Tuesday, Facebook, in partnership with a surfeit of other large and powerful corporations, including Uber, Spotify, PayPal and VISA, announced that it would lead the effort to create a new global currency called Libra. “We believe,” says the organization that will govern the currency, “that the world needs a global, digitally native currency that brings together the attributes of the world’s best currencies: stability, low inflation, wide global acceptance and fungibility.”

As far as I can tell, Facebook aims to build a new payments and currency system using blockchain technology. Facebook is starting a subsidiary, Calibra, to “provide financial services” to individuals and businesses, including saving, spending and sending money. The actual standards for the currency will be managed by a nonprofit in Switzerland called the Libra Association. The currency will have its own central bank known as the Libra Reserve, and the board will be the committee of corporations that helped set it up.

There are already such alternative currencies — known as cryptocurrencies — in existence, such as Bitcoin and Ripple, but this one will be different. Today, cryptocurrencies are backed solely by the willingness of users to accept them, not because they have any intrinsic value or are backed by any government. This makes such currencies unstable. Libra, however, will be backed by reserves: If a user buys a dollar of Libra, that dollar will presumably be held in reserve somewhere, ready to be honored when someone sells that Libra. Moreover, while most cryptocurrencies are hard to use, Libra promises to be user-friendly and embedded into Facebook and WhatsApp.

Or so goes the story. Many of the details of this endeavor are not public or have not been decided. But creating a global currency is a bold move on Facebook’s part, given that this announcement is happening as Facebook is being criticized or investigated for massive privacy violations, anti-competitive practices in the advertising market, eroding the free press and fomenting ethnic cleansing. However, it is consistent with Facebook’s goal of continuing to connect the world no matter the consequences, by creating a medium of exchange that can potentially bypass central banks, bank regulators and existing currency systems.

There are four core problems with Facebook’s new currency. The first, and perhaps the simplest, is that organizing a payments system is a complicated and difficult task, one that requires enormous investment in compliance systems. Banks pay attention to details, complying with regulations to prevent money-laundering, terrorist financing, tax avoidance and counterfeiting. Recreating such a complex system is not a project that an institution with the level of privacy and technical problems like Facebook should be leading. (Or worse, failing to recreate such safeguards could facilitate money-laundering, terrorist financing, tax avoidance and counterfeiting.)

The second problem is that, since the Civil War, the United States has had a general prohibition on the intersection between banking and commerce. Such a barrier has been reinforced many times, such as in 1956 with the Bank Holding Company Act and in 1970 with an amendment to that law during the conglomerate craze. Both times, Congress blocked banks from going into nonbanking businesses through holding companies, because Americans historically didn’t want banks competing with their own customers. Banking and payments is a special business, where a bank gets access to intimate business secrets of its customers. As one travel agent told Congress in 1970 when opposing the right of banks to enter his business, “Any time I deposited checks from my customers,” he said, “I was providing the banks with the names of my best clients.”

Imagine Facebook’s subsidiary Calibra knowing your account balance and your spending, and offering to sell a retailer an algorithm that will maximize the price for what you can afford to pay for a product. Imagine this cartel having this kind of financial visibility into not only many consumers, but into businesses across the economy. Such conflicts of interest are why payments and banking are separated from the rest of the economy in the United States.

It is also possible that insiders belonging to the Libra cartel could exploit their access to information, business relationships or technology to give themselves advantages. There are many ways a new currency system could advantage large businesses over everyone else, especially when the large ones are sitting on the board of governors for the payments system. For instance, one of the incentives being discussed to get people to use the currency is discounts on Uber rides; if this happens, Facebook would be giving an advantage to Uber instead of other ride-sharing businesses.

The third problem is that the Libra system — or really any private currency system — introduces systemic risk into our economy. The Libra currency is backed, presumably, by bonds and financial assets held in reserve at the Libra Reserve. But what happens if there is a theft or penetration of the system? What happens if all users want to sell their Libra currency at once, causing the Libra Reserve to hold a fire sale of assets? If the Libra system becomes intertwined in our global economy in the way Facebook hopes, we would need to consider a public bailout of a privately managed system.

Sorry, but no thanks: We should not be setting up a private international payments network that would need to be backed by taxpayers because it’s too big to fail.

And the fourth problem is that of national security and sovereignty. Enabling an open flow of money across all borders is a political choice best made by governments. And openness isn’t always good. For instance, most nations, especially the United States, use economic sanctions to bar individuals, countries or companies from using our financial system in ways that harm our interests. Sanctions enforcement flows through the banking system — if you can’t bank in dollars, you can’t use dollars. With the success of a private parallel currency, government sanctions could lose their bite. Should Facebook and a supermajority of venture capitalists and tech executives really be deciding whether North Korean sanctions can succeed? Of course not.

A permissionless currency system based on a consensus of large private actors across open protocols sounds nice, but it’s not democracy. Today, American bank regulators and central bankers are hired and fired by publicly elected leaders. Libra payments regulators would be hired and fired by a self-selected council of corporations. There are ways to characterize such a system, but democratic is not one of them.

Years ago, Mark Zuckerberg made it clear that he doesn’t think Facebook is a business. “In a lot of ways, Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company,” said Mr. Zuckerberg. “We’re really setting policies.” He has acted consistently as a would-be sovereign power. For example, he is attempting to set up a Supreme Court-style independent tribunal to handle content moderation. And now he is setting up a global currency.

The way we structure money and payments is a question for democratic institutions. Any company big enough to start its own currency is just too big.

Dear Commons Community,

A new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper examines the effects of a decades-long decline in state funding for public universities. According to the results, the decrease has had, and will continue to have, damaging repercussions, suggesting reason to be concerned about the future of public higher education.

The study behind the paper, “Public Universities: The Supply Side of Building a Skilled Workforce,” was conducted by a team of researchers, who compared trends at public universities in states where cuts in higher-education funding have been steep, such as Michigan and Wisconsin, with those in states where appropriations for public institutions have remained fairly stable, like New York and Texas. The conclusion? That the continuing decline in state funding will very likely lead to a shortage of skilled workers with degrees, as well as the erosion of universities’ “long-term research capacity, which contributes to economic growth.”

It also illustrates how the decrease in funding has led many public institutions to adopt strategies for endowment growth traditionally associated with private universities. For the more elite public universities, that may undermine certain central goals, like funding general research and providing higher education to in-state students. For others, those strategies are simply out of reach.

At the study website, a good deal of the raw data is available and searchable by state.

Tony