Amor Mundi

Milan Kundera and the Slow Life of Complexity

Roger Berkowitz
Milan Kundera died last week at the age of 94. His major novels include The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a thoughtful meditation on Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return of the same. Robin Ashenden writes an intellectual obituary. 

AI-Tocracy

Roger Berkowitz
Does AI fundamentally support autocratic government? This is the question Martin Beraja, Andrew Kao, David Yang, and Noam Yuchtman ask in their paper AI-tocracy. 

Humanity in the Nuclear and AI Ages

Roger Berkowitz
To think how to respond to the challenge AI poses to humanity, David Nirenberg turns back and asks how the pioneers of the nuclear bomb set about to think about the future of man. J. Robert Oppenheimer helped bequeath humanity not only the nuclear bomb, but also the means to think about how to live as human beings in the nuclear age. After his work on the bomb as the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, Oppenheimer served 20 years as director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.. home to some of the world’s leading scientists, including Albert Einstein.

Samuel Delany

Roger Berkowitz
Julian Lucas profiles Samuel Delany, one of  the most vibrant and extraordinary writers of our era. I first encountered Delany’s Babel 17 in a college course. I was obsessed with the “Return to Nevèrÿon” series in graduate school, and his books Mad Man  and Times Square Red, Times Square Blue provoked me in the most profound ways. I regularly recommend or gift his memoir The Motion of Light on Water. There are few personalities, writers, and intellectuals with the capacity to surprise and provoke that Delany possesses. His independence of mind and impartiality against the world are extraordinary, something that to my mind unites him with Hannah Arendt.

The Joy of Being In a Rageful Movement

Roger Berkowitz
David French captures something essential about the endurance of the Trump MAGA movement. So many outside the movement see these MAGA voters as angry, enraged, violent, and racist. And one must admit that the movement is all of those things, at times. But what outsiders forget, or what they are unable or unwilling to see, is that the movement is not built on rage.

Digital Humanism Summit on Generative AI and Democratic Sustainability

Roger Berkowitz
I spent last week at the Digital Humanism Initiative Summit on Generative AI and Democratic Sustainability in Vienna. Over fifty scholars, computer scientists, regulators, and activists from more than 20 countries met for two full days to think together about the threat AI poses to democracy. Watch the recorded public presentation and read our provisional statement.

Power and Authority

The last 10 days have seen the Supreme Court reject the dangerous Independent State Legislature theory that would have allowed, amongst other things, state legislatures to deny the will of the voters and direct their electors on whom to cast that state’s electoral college votes. The Court also ended affirmative action in colleges and universities calling it a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, said that the effort to use an emergency authorization law passed in the wake of 9/11 does not give the Secretary of Education the right to administratively forgive student debt, and decided that a web designer does not have to take on clients whose views violate her firmly held religious beliefs. While the decision denying the State Legislature theory has been praised by liberals and some conservatives, the decisions on affirmative action, student debt, and the conflict between free speech and equal protection have been wildly unpopular amongst liberals. The result is that many on the left are once again calling for reform of the Supreme Court. 

The Age of Constant Change

Roger Berkowitz
That AI is an engine that affirms our lying world does not mean the world is static; on the contrary, the world that AI above all reflects back to us is the world created by academics, journalists, writers, artists and those content producers—those members of the cultural elite that N.S. Lyons calls “Virtuals.” Virtuals make their living, Lyons writes,  “by manipulating, categorizing, and interpreting symbolic information and narrative. “Manipulate” is an important verb here, and not merely in the sense of deviousness. Such an individual’s job is to take existing information and change it into new forms, present it in new ways, or use it to tell new stories. This is what I am attempting to do as a writer in shaping this article, for example.” In this way, Virtuals bring about a world that is in constant change, a world of “fast culture” and unending progress. 

The Seductiveness of AI’s Coherent Fiction

Roger Berkowitz
Babette Babich turns to Nietzsche to think about the question of why we are enthusiastic about AI. One reason, of course, is the belief that AI will "solve" our social problems. Diseases will be cured, welfare reorganized, poverty overcome. AI will solve the irresolvable social problems that we humans have not been able to. Of course, this belief in the power of AI to solve problems of human organization depends, first, on our willingness to outsource human challenges to inhuman logic, and, second, to our willingness to actually implement solutions to human problems that we humans can't understand.