Author Archives: simonings

What about vice?

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Reading Rat City by Jon Adams & Edmund Ramsden and Dr. Calhoun’s Mousery by Lee Alan Dugatkin for the Spectator

The peculiar career of John Bumpass Calhoun (1917-1995, psychologist, philosopher, economist, mathematician, sociologist, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and subject of a glowing article in Good Housekeeping) comes accompanied with more than its fair share of red flags.

Calhoun studied how rodents adapted to different environments; and more specificallly, how the density of a population effects an individual’s behaviour.

He collected reams of data, but published little, and rarely in mainstream scientific journals. He courted publicity, inviting journalists to draw, from his studies of rats and mice, apocalyptic conclusions about the future of urban humanity.

Calhoun wasn’t a “maverick” scientist (not an egoist, not a loner, not a shouter-at-clouds). Better to say that he was, well, odd. He had a knack for asking the counter-intuitive question, an eye for the unanticipated result. Charged in 1946 with a reducing the rat population of Baltimore, he wondered what would happen to a community if he added more rats. So he did — and rodent numbers fell to 60 per cent of their original level. Who would have guessed?

The general assumption about population, lifted mostly from the 18th-century economist Thomas Malthus, is that species expand to consume whatever resources are available to them, then die off once they exceed the environment’s carrying capacity.

But Malthus himself knew that wasn’t the whole story. He said that there were two checks on population growth: misery and vice. Misery, in its various forms (predation, disease, famine…) has been well studied. But what, Calhoun asked, in a 1962 Scientific American article, of vice? In less loaded language: “what are the effects of the social behaviour of a species on population growth — and of population density on social behaviour?”

Among rodents, a rising population induces stress, and stress reduces the birth-rate. Push the overcrowding too far, though (further than would be likely to happen in nature), and stress starts to trigger all manner of weird and frightening effects. The rodents start to pack together, abandoning all sense of personal space. Violence and homosexuality skyrocket. Females cease to nurture and suckle their young; abandoned, these offspring become food for any passing male. The only way out of this hell is complete voluntary isolation. A generation of “beautiful ones” arises, that knows only to groom itself and avoid social contact. Without sex, the population collapses. The few Methusalehs who remain have no social skills to speak of. They’re not aggressive. They’re not anything. They barely exist.

What do you do with findings like that? Calhoun hardly needed to promote his work; the press came flocking to him. Der Spiegel. Johnny Carson. He achieved his greatest notoriety months before he shared the results of his most devastating experiment. The mice in an enclosure dubbed “Universe 25” were never allowed to get sick or run out of food. Once they reached a certain density, vice wiped them out.

Only publishing, a manufacturing industry run by arts graduates, could contrive to drop two excellent books about Dr Calhoun’s life and work into the same publishing cycle. No one but a reviewer or an obsessive is likely to find room for both on their autumn reading pile.

Historians Edmund Ramsden and Jon Adams have written the better book. Rat City puts Calhoun’s work in a rich historical and political context. Calhoun took a lot of flak for his glib anthropomorphic terminology: he once told a reporter from Japan’s oldest newspaper, Mainichi Shimbun, that the last rats of Universe 25 “represent the human being on the limited space called the earth.” But whether we behave exactly like rats in conditions of overcrowding and/or social isolation is not the point.

The point is that, given the sheer commonality between mammal species, something might happen to humans in like conditions, and it behoves us to find out what that something might be, before we foist any more hopeful urban planning on the prolitariat. Calhoun, who got us to think seriously about how we design our cities, is Rat City’s visionary hero, to the point where I started to hear him. For instance, observing some gormless waifs, staring into their smartphones at the bottom of the escalator, I recalled his prediction that “we might one day see the human equivalent” of his mice, pathologically crammed together “in a sort of withdrawal — in which they would behave as if they were not aware of each other.”

Dr Calhoun’s Mousery is the simpler book of the two and, as Lee Dugatkin cheerfully concedes, it owes something to Adams and Ramsden’s years of prolific research. I prefer it. Its narrative is more straightforward, and Dugatkin gives greater weight to Calhoun’s later career.

The divided mouse communities of Universe 34, Calhoun’s last great experiment, had to learn to collaborate to obtain all their resources. As their culture of collaboration developed, their birth rate stabilised, and individuals grew healthier and lived longer.

So here’s a question worthy of good doctor: did culture evolve the shield us from vice?

“Don’t let them know you’re awake”

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Watching Michael Tyburski’s Turn Me On for New Scientist

An eccentric visionary has created a commune centered around a pharmaceutical — a “vitamin” — that suppresses human emotion. The venture promises contentment to its followers, and to ensure their contentment, all memory of their lives before they join the cult is erased.

A cult member’s cancer treatment requires she miss her vitamin dose for just one day. So here she is, a young woman called Joy, played with exquisite precision by the young British actress Bel Powley, staring into her bathroom mirror, waiting for the affective life to roll over her like a tidal wave.

Nothing.

Still nothing.

And then a giggle. Not a sinister, half-hysterical giggle. Not an experimental, off-centre giggle. A genuinely delighted giggle, at finding herself alive.

Bel goes off on a beach holiday with her friends, still within the the project’s property line. (At the border, a sign planted in the gravel warns of “Unknown Dangers” in the world beyond). And a drab old time they have of it, too, playing the exciting-sounding VR game WOAH, which turns out to stand for “World Of Average Humans”. Joy’s friend Samantha (Nesta Cooper) breathlessly explains: “In real life I’m a wellness engineer, but in the game, I play an assistant wellness engineer.”

Bel finally takes matters in hand and throws away the house’s supply of vitamin. And after all, “it’s just for one day”.

The strange and wonderful thing about Michael Tyburski’s second feature (after 2019’s excellent The Sound of Silence) is that it is a dystopia built upon an essentially comic view of the human condition. Screenwriter Angela Bourassa creates revealing rules for this tyranny. You don’t have to take its vitamin. That’s entirely up to you. But heaven help you if you miss day of work. This hyper-utilitarian cult isn’t robbing its victims of their potentiality or their dignity. The crime here is that it’s stealing away all their fun and friendship. People are supposed to goof off, is the message here. This is what people are for.

When Joy and her friends discover sex, things get more fraught. Joy’s uncomplicated and public coupling with her friend Christopher (Justin Min) knocks him for a loop and makes her officially appointed partner William (Nick Robinson) sick to his stomach. Who could have predicted that?

One by one, as they confront the emotional consequences of their actions, the friends decide to go back on the vitamin. Alone again, Joy is taken aside and told she has what it takes to be an overseer of this place. All she has to do is never see William again, though its clear enough the two are falling in love. Will Joy accept this Mephistophelian bargain?

The superbly sardonic D’Arcy Carden is the nearest thing the cult has to an authority figure: essentially, she’s reprising her role in the sitcom The Good Place, to which Turn Me On bears a certain resemblance. Fairer to say, perhaps, that Turn Me On is a worthy addition to that small but admired genre that includes The Good Place, 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Apple’s ongoing TV show Severance.

The target is, as usual, utilitarianism. The pursuit of the greatest good for the greatest number works well on paper but falls foul, very quickly, of the Kantian imperative not to use people as a means to fulfil your ends. There’s a reason “For the greater good” is the go-to excuse for tyrants and killers.

What will the cult will do to Joy if she refuses to join their upper echelon? It’s almost certain to be unpleasant.

“Leave me a alone”, says a neighbour who came off her vitamins earlier in the movie, “and don’t let them know you’re awake.”

A robust sausage sandwich

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Reading Alan Moore’s The Great When for the Telegraph

Londoners! There is another city behind your city, or above it, or within it. This other place, known as Long London, belongs to the Great When, a super-real realm that lurks behind your common-or-garden reality. Whenever there are shenanigans over there – caused by Jungian archetypes called Arcana, who jockey for esoteric advantage – it stirs mundane events over here. An artist-magician called Austin Spare puts it this way: “If this London is what they call the Smoke, then that place is the Fire, you follow me?” A bruiser called Jack “Spot” Comer is more forthright: “This other London, that’s the organ grinder, an’ our London’s just the fackin’ monkey.”

Sometimes one of these Arcana even stumbles from Long London into the real. In 1936, the Beauty of Riots – think Eugène Delacroix’s bare-breasted Liberty Leading the People, only 10 feet tall – finds herself picking through the battle of Cable Street. Sometimes a visit is arranged across the divide. In 1949, Harry Lud, “the red-handed soul of crime itself”, comes at Spot’s beckoning to sort out some bother with the gangster Billy Hill.

If Spare, Spot and the rest – in fact, everything I’ve written above – are unfamiliar to you, look the names up. Alan Moore obsessives, of whom there are many, will be used to how his wildest yarns emerge from the mouths of London’s more colourful historical figures. Yes, this is the oldest, cheapest trick in the arsenal of the London novelist – but, as The Great When proves, Moore keeps getting away with it.

The plot: a few years after the Second World War, underachieving Dennis Knuckleyard has been effectively adopted by Coffin Ada, the nastiest second-hand book-dealer in Shoreditch. Having accidentally purchased a book that doesn’t exist – at least, not in this realm – Dennis finds himself caught between worlds. Can he return the book to Long London and its severed, vitrine-dwelling City Heads, and maintain the wall between the realms? Will his adventures make a man of him? Will he win the favours of tart-with-a-heart Grace Shilling?

Moore’s not doing anything new here. Readers of urban fantasy – and I’m among them – have fallen or forced our way along so many Diagon Alleys over the years, have waited so very long for that bus to Viriconium, or Neverwhere, or Un Lun Dun, that it’s a wonder we have an appetite for (ahem) more. In this, the first of a promised series, what does Moore bring to what is by now a familiar itinerary? More Moore for a start, which is to say characters as if by Dickens, and set dressing as if by Iain Sinclair. It’s a heady brew. His esoteric Long London, when Dennis runs into it at last, is rendered in language so unhinged it teeters on the unreadable, so sure is Moore that the reader will be hooked. His maximalist prose isn’t for everyone. Will you join Dennis as he “glories in a robust sausage sandwich – slabs of fresh bread, soft and baked to flaking umber at the edges, soaking up the hot grease of the bangers”? I did not, though I admit that the “glossy chunks” of chip-shop cod “that slid apart like pages in a poorly stapled magazine” were nicely done.

More impressive is the control Moore has over his architecture. His straightforward story harbours a surprising degree of pathos: when the plot around the misplaced book resolves unexpectedly, halfway through, it leaves Dennis with a couple of hundred pages in which to make ordinary human mistakes, chiefly mistaking friends for enemies, and friendliness for sexual attraction. So our uncomplicated young hero grows up as kinked and keeled-over as the rest of us, while the war, long over, continues to unhinge the world, financing its criminal class and normalising its violence.

You can catch a glimpse of where Moore’s new series is going. His London is too complicated to explain simply. Simple reasons have become a thing of the past, “and we shan’t be seeing ’em again.” Magical thinking is not just possible for Moore’s characters; it’s reasonable. It’s inconceivable that the writer of the 1990s comic sensation From Hell won’t find himself wandering through Victorian Whitechapel at some point. Still, I would like to think that The Great When is edging away from Ripper territory into a wider and more generous vision of what London was, is, and may become.

What about the unknown knowns?

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Reading Nate Silver’s On the Edge and The Art of Uncertainty by David Spiegelhalter for the Spectator

The Italian actuary Bruno de Finetti, writing in 1931, was explicit: “Probability,” he wrote, “does not exist.”

Probability, it’s true, is simply the measure of an observer’s uncertainty, and in The Art of Uncertainty British statistician David Spiegelhalter explains how his extraordinary and much-derided science has evolved to the point where it is even able to say useful things about why things have turned out the way they have, based purely on present evidence. Spiegelhalter was a member of the Statistical Expert Group of the 2018 UK Infected Blood Inquiry, and you know his book’s a winner the moment he tells you that between 650 and 3,320 people nationwide died from tainted transfusions. By this late point, along with the pity and the horror, you have a pretty good sense of the labour and ingenuity that went into those peculiarly specific, peculiarly wide-spread numbers.

At the heart of Spiegelhalter’s maze, of course, squats Donald Rumsfeld, once pilloried for his convoluted syntax at a 2002 Department of Defense news briefing, and now immortalised for what came out of it: the best ever description of what it’s like to act under conditions of uncertainty. Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” weren’t the last word, however; Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek (it had to be Žižek) pointed out that there are also “unknown knowns” — “all the unconscious beliefs and prejudices that determine how we perceive reality.”

In statistics, something called Cromwell’s Rule cautions us never to bed absolute certainties (probabilities of 0 or 1) into our models. Still, “unknown knowns” fly easily under the radar, usually in the form of natural language. Spiegelhalter tells how, in 1961, John F Kennedy authorised the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, quite unaware of the minatory statistics underpinning the phrase “fair chance” in an intelligence briefing.

From this, you could draw a questionable moral: that the more we quantify the world, the better our decisions will be. Nate Silver — poker player, political pundit and author of 2012’s The Signal and the Noise — finds much to value in this idea. On the Edge, though, is more about the unforeseen consequences that follow.

There is a sprawling social ecosystem out there that Silver dubs “the River”, which includes “everyone from low-stakes poker pros just trying to grind out a living to crypto kings and adventure-capital billionaires.” On the Edge is, among many other things, a cracking piece of popular anthropology.

Riverians accept that it is very hard to be certain about anything; they abandon certainty for games of chance; and they end up treating everything as a market to be played.

Remember those chippy, cheeky chancers immortalised in films like 21 (2008: MIT’s Blackjack Team takes on Las Vegas) and Moneyball (2011: a young economist up-ends baseball)?

More than a decade has passed, and they’re not buccaneers any more. Today, says Silver, “the Riverian mindset is coming from inside the house.”

You don’t need to be a David Spiegelhalter to be a Riverian. All you need is the willingness to take bets on very long odds.

Professional gamblers learn when and how how to do this, and this is why that subset of gamblers called Silicon Valley venture capitalists are willing to back wilful contrarians like Elon Musk (on a good day) and (on a bad day) Ponzi-scheming crypto-crooks like Sam Bankman-Fried.

Success as a Riverian isn’t guaranteed. As Silver points out, “a lot of the people who play poker for a living would be better off — at least financially — doing something else.” Then again, those who make it in the VC game expect to double their money every four years. And those who find they’ve backed a Google or a SpaceX can find themselves living in a very odd world indeed.

Recently the billionaire set has been taking an interest and investing in “effective altruism”, a hyper-utilitarian dish cooked up by Oxford philosopher Will MacAskill. “EA” promises to multiply the effectiveness of acts of charity by studying their long-term effectiveness — a approach that naturally appeals to minds focused on quantification. Silver describes the state of the current movement, “stuck in the uncanny valley between being abstractly principled and ruthlessly pragmatic, with the sense that you can kind of make it up as you go along”. Who here didn’t see that one coming? Most of the original EA set now spend their time agonising over the apocalyptic potential of artificial intelligence.

The trick to Riverian thinking is to decouple things, in order to measure their value. Rather than say, “The Chick-fil-A CEO’s views on gay marriage have put me off my lunch,” you say, “the CEO’s views are off-putting, but this is a damn fine sandwich — I’ll invest.”

That such pragmatism might occasionally ding your reputation, we’ll take as read. But what happens when you do the opposite, glomming context after context onto every phenomenon in pursuit of some higher truth? Soon everything becomes morally equivalent to everything else and thinking becomes impossible.

Silver mentions a December 2023 congressional hearing in which the tone-deaf presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT, in their sophomoric efforts to be right about all things all at once all the time, managed to argue their way into anti-Semitism. (It’s on YouTube if you haven’t seen it already. The only thing I can compare it to is how The Fast Show’s unlucky Alf used to totter invariably toward the street’s only open manhole.) No wonder that the left-leaning, non-Riverian establishment in politics and education is becoming, in Silver’s words, “a small island threatened by a rising tide of disapproval.”

We’d be foolish in the extreme to throw in our lot with the Riverians, though: people whose economic model reduces to: Bet long odds on the hobby-horses of contrarian asshats and never mind what gets broken in the process.

If we want a fairer, more equally apportioned world, these books should convince us that we should be spending less time worrying about what people are thinking, and concern ourselves more with how people are thinking.

We cannot afford to be ridden by unknown knowns.

 

“Fears about technology are fears about capitalism”

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Reading How AI Will Change Your Life by Patrick Dixon and AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, for the Telegraph

According to Patrick Dixon, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, artificial intelligence will not bring about the end of the world. It isn’t even going to bring about the end of human civilisation. It’ll struggle even to take over our jobs. (If anything, signs point to a decrease in unemployment.)

Am I alone in feeling cheated here? In 2014, Stephen Hawking said we were doomed. A decade later, Elon Musk is saying much the same. Last year, Musk and other CEOs and scientists signed an open letter from the Future of Life Institute, demanding a pause on giant AI experiments.

But why listen to fiery warnings from the tech industry? Of 5,400 large IT projects (for instance, creating a large data warehouse for a bank) recorded by 2012 in a rolling database maintained by McKinsey, nearly half went over budget, and over half under-delivered. In How AI Will Change Your Life, author and business consultant Dixon remarks, “Such consistent failures on such a massive scale would never be tolerated in any other area of business.” Narayanan and Kapoor, both computer scientists, say that academics in this field are no better. “We probably shouldn’t care too much about what AI experts think about artificial general intelligence,” they write. “AI researchers have often spectacularly underestimated the difficulty of achieving AI milestones.”

These two very different books want you to see AI from inside the business. Dixon gives us plenty to think about: AI’s role in surveillance; AI’s role in intellectual freedom and copyright; AI’s role in warfare; AI’s role in human obsolescence – his exhaustive list runs to over two dozen chapters. Each of these debates matter, but we would be wrong to think that they are driven by, or were even about, technology at all. Again and again, they are issues of money: about how production gravitates towards automation to save labour costs; or about how AI tools are more often than not used to achieve imaginary efficiencies at the expense of the poor and the vulnerable. Why go to the trouble of policing poor neighbourhoods if the AI can simply round up the usual suspects? As the science-fiction writer Ted Chiang summed up in June 2023, “Fears about technology are fears about capitalism.”

As both books explain, there are three main flavours of artificial intelligence. Large language models power chatbots, of which GPT-4, Gemini and the like will be most familiar to readers. They are bullshitters, in the sense that they’re trained to produce plausible text, not accurate information, and so fall under philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit as speech that is intended to persuade without regard for the truth. At the moment they work quite well, but wait a year or two: as the internet fills with AI-generated content, chatbots and their ilk will begin to regurgitate their own pabulum, and the human-facing internet will decouple from truth entirely.

Second, there are AI systems whose superior pattern-matching spots otherwise invisible correlations in large datasets. This ability is handy, going on miraculous, if you’re tackling significant, human problems. According to Dixon, for example, Klick Labs in Canada has developed a test that can diagnose Type 2 diabetes with over 85 per cent accuracy using just a few seconds of the patient’s voice. Such systems have proved less helpful, however, in Chicago. Narayanan and Kapoor report how, lured by promises of instant alerts to gun violence, the city poured nearly 49 million dollars into ShotSpotter, a system that has been questioned for its effectiveness after police fatally shot a 13-year-old boy in 2021.

Last of the three types is predictive AI: the least discussed, least successful, and – in the hands of the authors of AI Snake Oil (4 STARS) – by some way the most interesting. So far, we’ve encountered problems with AI’s proper working that are fixable, at least in principle. With bigger, better datasets – this is the promise – we can train AI to do better. Predictive AI systems are different. These are the ones that promise to find you the best new hires, flag students for dismissal before they start to flounder, and identify criminals before they commit criminal acts.

They won’t, however, because they can’t. Drawing broad conclusions about general populations is often the stuff of social science, and social science datasets tend to be small. But were you to have a big dataset about a group of people, would AI’s ability to say things about the group let it predict the behaviour of one of its individuals? The short answer is no. Individuals are chaotic in the same way as earthquakes are. It doesn’t matter how much you know about earthquakes; the one thing you’ll never know is where and when the next one will hit.

How AI Will Change Your Life is not so much a book as a digest of bullet points for a PowerPoint presentation. Business types will enjoy Dixon’s meticulous lists and his willingness to argue both sides against the middle. If you need to acquire instant AI mastery in time for your next board meeting, Dixon’s your man. Being a dilettante, I will stick with Narayanan and Kapoor, if only for this one-liner, which neatly captures our confused enthusiasm for little black boxes that promise the world. “It is,” they say, “as if everyone in the world has been given the equivalent of a free buzzsaw.”

 

 

Doing an Elizabeth

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Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance inspired this Telegraph article about copies and clones

Hollywood has-been Elisabeth Sparkle didn’t look where she was going, and got badly shaken about in a traffic accident. Now she’s in the emergency room, and an unfeasibly handsome young male nurse is running his fingers down her spine. Nothing’s wrong. On the contrary: Elisabeth (played by Demi Moore) is, she’s told, “a perfect candidate”.

The next day she gets a box through the post. Inside is a kit that will enable her to duplicate herself. The instructions couldn’t be clearer. Even when fully separated, Elisabeth and the younger, better version of herself who’s just spilled amniotically out of her back (Sue, played by Margaret Qualley) are one. While one of them gets to play in the sun for a week, the other must lie in semi-coma, feeding off an intravenous drip. Each week, they swap roles.

Writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s script for The Substance is one of those super-lucid cinematic fun-rides that can’t help but put you in mind of other, admittedly rather better movies. In Joe Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), an actress’s personal assistant plots to steal her career. In John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966), Rock Hudson gets his youth back and quickly learns to hate it. In David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) biologist Seth Brundle’s experiment in gene splicing is a none-too-subtle metaphor for the ageing process.

Recently, I ran into a biotechnology company called StoreGene. They sent me a blood sample kit in a little box and promised me a lifetime of personalised medicine, so long as I let them read my entire genetic code.

I’m older than Elisabeth Sparkle (sacked from her daytime TV fitness show on her 50th birthday) and a sight less fit than Demi Moore, and so I seized StoreGene’s offer with both palsied, liver-spotted hands.

Now, somewhere in what we call the Cloud (some anonymous data centre outside Chicago, more like) I have a double. Unlike Elizabeth’s Sue, though, my double won’t resent the fact that I am using him as a means. He is not going to flinch, or feel violated in any way, as his virtual self is put through trial after trial.

Every year, more than a million medical research papers are published. It’s impossible to know what this deluge of new discovery means to me personally – but now my GP can find out, at the push of a button, what it means for my genetic data-double.

Should I take this medicine, or that? Should I take more of it, or less of it? What treatment will work; what won’t? No more uncertainty for me: now I am guaranteed to receive treatments that are tailored to me, forever. I’ve just landed, bang, in the middle of a new era of personalised medicine.

Now that there’s a digital clone of me floating around, I have even less reason to want to “do an Elisabeth” and make a flesh-and-blood copy of myself. This will come as a relief to anyone who’s read Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go, and can’t shake off the horror occasioned by that school assembly: “If you’re going to have decent lives,” Miss Lucy tells the children in her care, “then you’ve got to know and know properly… You’ll become adults, then before you’re old, before you’re even middle-aged, you’ll start to donate your vital organs.”

Might we one day farm clones of ourselves to provide our ageing, misused bodies with spare parts? This is by far the best of the straw-man arguments that have been mounted over the years against the idea of human cloning. (Most of the others involve Hitler.)

It at least focuses our minds on a key ethical question: are we ever entitled to use other people as means to an end? But it’s still a straw-man argument, not least because we’re a long way into figuring out how to grow our spare organs in other animals. No ethical worries there! (though the pigs may disagree).

And while such xenotransplantation and other technologies advance by leaps and bounds, reproductive cloning languishes – a rather baroque solution to biomedical problems solved more easily by other means.

Famously, In 1996 Ian Wilmut and colleagues at the Roslin Institute in Scotland successfully cloned Dolly the sheep from the udder cells of a ewe. Dolly was their 277th attempt. She died young. No-one can really say whether this had anything to do with her being a clone, since her creation conspicuously did not open the floodgates to further experimentation. Two decades went by before the first primates were successfully cloned – two crab-eating macaques named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua. These days it’s possible to clone your pet (Barbara Streisand famously cloned her dog), but my strong advice is, don’t bother: around 96 per cent of all cloning attempts end in failure.

Science-fiction stories, from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) to Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca (1997), have conjured up hyper-utilitarian nightmares in which manipulations of the human genome work all too well. This is what made David Cronenberg’s early body horror so compelling and, in retrospect, so visionary: in films such as 1977’s Rabid (a biker develops a blood-sucking orifice) and 1979’s The Brood (ectopic pregnancies manifest a divorcée’s rage), the body doesn’t give a stuff about anyone’s PhD; it has its own ideas about what it wants to be.

And so it has proved. Not only does cloning rarely succeed; the clone that manages to survive to term will most likely be deformed, or die of cancer, or keel over for some other more or less mysterious reason. After cloning Dolly the sheep, Wilmut and his team tried to clone another lamb; it hyperventilated so much it kept passing out.

***

It is conceivable, I suppose, that hundreds of years from now, alien intelligences will dust off StoreGene’s recording of my genome and, in a fit of misplaced enthusiasm, set about growing a copy of me in a modishly lit plexiglass tank. Much good may it do them: the clone they’re growing will bear only a passing physical resemblance to me, and he and I will share only the very broadest psychological and emotional similarity. Genes make a big contribution to the development process, but they’re not in overall charge of it. Even identical twins, nature’s own clones, are easy to tell apart, especially when they start speaking.

Call me naive, but I’m not too worried about vast and cool and unsympathetic intellects, alien or otherwise, getting hold of my genetic data. It’s the thought of what all my other data may be up to that keeps me up at night.

Swedish political scientist Carl Öhman’s The Afterlife of Data, published earlier this year, recounts the experiences of a young man who, having lost his father ten years previously, finds that they can still compete against each other on an old XBox racing game. That is, he can play against his father’s saved games, again and again. (Of course he’s now living in dread of the day the XBox eventually breaks and his dad dies a second time.)

The digital world has been part of our lives for most of our lives, if not all of them. We are each of us mirrored there. And there’s this in common between exploring digital technology and exploring the Moon: no wind will come along to blow away our footprints.

Öhman’s book is mostly an exploration of the unstable but fast-growing sector of “grieving technologies” which create – from our digital footprints – chatbots, which our grieving loved ones can interrogate on those long lonely winter evenings. Rather more uncanny, to my mind, are those chatbots of us that stalk the internet while we’re still alive, causing trouble on our behalf. How long will it be before my wife starts ringing me up out of the blue to ask me the PIN for our joint debit card?

Answer: in no time at all, at least according to a note on “human machine teaming” published six (six!) years ago by the Ministry of Defence. Its prediction that “forgeries are likely to constitute a large proportion of online content” was stuffily phrased, but accurate enough: in 2023 nearly half of all internet traffic came from bots.

At what point does a picture of yourself acquire its own reality? At what point does that picture’s existence start ruining your life? Oscar Wilde took a stab at what in 1891 must have seemed a very noodly question with his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. 130-odd years later, Sarah Snook’s one-woman take on the story at London’s Haymarket Theatre employed digital beauty filters and mutiple screens in what felt less like an updating of Wilde’s story, more its apocalyptic restatement: all lives end, and a life wholly given over to the pursuit of beauty and pleasure is not going to end well.

In 2021, users of TikTok noticed that the platform’s default front-facing camera was slimming down their faces, smoothing their skin, whitening their teeth and altering the size of their eyes and noses. (You couldn’t disable this feature, either.) When you play with these apps, you begin to appreciate their uncanny pull. I remember the first time TikTok’s “Bold Glamour” filter, released last year, mapped itself over my image with an absolute seamlessness. Quite simply, a better me appeared in the phone’s digital mirror. When I gurned, it gurned. When I laughed, it laughed. It had me fixated for days and, for heaven’s sake, I’m a middle-aged bloke. Girls, you’re the target audience here. If you want to know what your better selves are up to, all you have to do is look into your smartphone.

Better yet, head to a clinic near you (while there are still appointments available), get your fill of fillers, and while your face is swelling like an Aardman Animations outtake, listen in as practitioners of variable experience and capacity talk glibly of “Zoom-face dysphoria”.
That this self-transfiguring trend has disfigured a generation is not really the worry. The Kardashian visage (tan by Baywatch, brows and eye shape by Bollywood, lips from Atlanta, cheeks from Pocahontas, nose from Gwyneth Paltrow) is a mostly non-surgical artefact – a hyaluronic-acid trip that will melt away in six months to a year, once people come to their senses. What really matters is that among school-age girls, rates of depression and self-harm are through the roof. I had a whale of a time at that screening of The Substance. But the terrifying reality is that the film isn’t for me; it’s for them.

Malleable meat

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Watching Carey Born’s Cyborg: A Documentary for New Scientist

Neil Harbisson grew up in Barcelona and studied music composition at Dartington College of Arts in the UK. He lives with achromatism: he is unable to perceive colour of any kind. Not one to ignore a challenge, in 2003 Harbisson recruited product designer Adam Montandon to build him a head-mounted rig that would turn colours into musical notes that he could listen to through earphones. Now in his forties, Harbisson has evolved. The camera on its pencil-thin stalk and the sound generator are permanently fused to the back of his skull: he hears the colours around him through bone conduction.

If “hears” is quite the word: Watching Carey Born’s Cyborg: A Documentary, we occasionally catch Harbisson thinking seriously and intelligently about how the senses operate. He doesn’t hear colour so much as see it. His unconventional colour organ is startling to outsiders — what is that chap doing with an antenna springing out the back of his head? But Harbisson’s brain is long used to the antenna’s input, and treats it like any other visual information. Harbisson says he knew his experiment was a success when he started to dream in colour.

Body modification in art has a long history, albeit a rather vexed one. I can remember the Australian performance artist Stelarc hanging from flesh hooks, pronouncing on the obscolescence of the body. (My date did not go well.) Stelarc doesn’t do that sort of thing any more. Next year he celebrates his eightieth birthday. You can declare victory over the flesh as much as you like: time gets the last laugh.

The way Harbisson has hacked his own perceptions leaves him with very little to do but talk about his experiences. He can’t really demonstrate them the way his partner Moon Ribos can. The dancer-choreographer has had an internet-enabled vibrating doo-dad fitted in her left arm which, when she’s dancing, tells her when and how vigorously to respond to earthquakes.

Harbisson meanwhile is stuck in radio studios and behind lecterns explaining what it’s like to have a friends send the colours of Australian sunset to the back of his skull — to which a radio talk-show guest objects: Wouldn’t receiving a postcard of an Australian sunset amount to the same thing?

Born’s uncritical approach to her subject never really digs in to this perfectly sensible question — and this is a pity. Harbisson says he has weathered months-long headaches and episodes of depression in an effort to extend his senses, but all outsiders ever care about is the tech, and what it can do.

One recent wheeze from Harbisson and his collaborators is a headband that tells you the time by heating spots on your skull. Obviously a watch offers a more accurate measure. Less obviously, the headband is supposed to create a new sense in the wearer: an embodied, pre-conscious awareness of solar-planetary motion. The technology is fun, but what really matters is what new senses may be out there for us to enjoy.

I find it slighly irksome to be having to explain Harbisson’s work, since Harbisson hardly bothers. The lecture, the talk-show, the panel and the photoshoot are his gallery and stage, and for over twenty years now, the man with the stalk coming out of his head has been giving his audience what they have come to expect: a ringing endorsement of transhumanism, the philosophy that would have us treat our bodies as so much malleable meat. In 2010 he co-founded the Cyborg Foundation to defend cyborg rights. In 2017, he co-founded the Transpecies Society to give a voice to people with non-human identities. It’s all very idealistic and also quite endearingly old-fashioned in its otherworldliness — as though the plasticity or otherwise of the body were not already a burning social issue, and staple ordnance in today’s culture wars.

I wish Born had gone to the bother of challenging her subject. Penetrate their shell of schooled narcissism and you occasionally find that conceptual artists have something to say.

Not even wrong

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Reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus for the Telegraph

In his memoirs, the German-British physicist Rudolf Peierls recalls the sighing response his colleague Wolfgang Pauli once gave to a scientific paper: “It is not even wrong.”

Some ideas are so incomplete, or so vague, that they can’t even be judged. Yuval Noah Harari’s books are notoriously full of such ideas. But then, given what Harari is trying to do, this may not matter very much.

Take this latest offering: a “brief history” that still finds room for viruses and Neanderthals, The Talmud and Elon Musk’s Neuralink and the Thirty Years’ War. Has Harari found a single rubric, under which to combine all human wisdom and not a little of its folly? Many a pub bore has entertained the same conceit. And Harari is tireless: “To appreciate the political ramifications of the mind–body problem,” Harari writes, “let’s briefly revisit the history of Christianity.” Harari is a writer who’s never off-topic but only because his topic is everything.

Root your criticism of Harari in this, and you’ve missed the point, which is that he’s writing this way on purpose. His single goal is to give you a taste of the links between things, without worrying too much about the things themselves. Any reader old enough to remember James Burke’s idiosyncratic BBC series Connections will recognise the formula, and know how much sheer joy and exhilaration it can bring to an audience that isn’t otherwise spending every waking hour grazing the “smart thinking” shelf at Waterstone’s.

Well-read people don’t need Harari.

Nexus’s argument goes like this: civilisations are (among other things) information networks. Totalitarian states centralise their information, which grows stale as a consequence. Democracies distribute their information, with checks and balances to keep the information fresh.

Harari’s key point here is that in neither case does the information have to be true. A great deal of it is not true. At best it’s intersubjectively true (Santa Claus, human rights and money are real by consensus: they have no basis in the material world.) Quite a lot of our information is fiction, and a fraction of that fiction is downright malicious falsehood.

It doesn’t matter to the network, which uses that information more or less agnostically, to establish order. Nor is this necessarily a problem, since an order based on truth is likely to be a lot more resilient and pleasant to live under than an order based on cultish blather.

This typology gives Harari the chance to wax lyrical over various social and cultural arrangements, historical and contemporary. Marxism and populism both get short shrift, in passages that are memorable, pithy, and, dare I say it, wise.

In the second half of the book, Harari invites us to stare like rabbits into the lights of the on-coming AI juggernaut. Artificial intelligence changes everything, Harari says, because just as human’s create inter-subjective realities, computers create inter-computer realities. Pokemon Go is an example of an intercomputer reality. So — rather more concerningly — are the money markets.

Humans disagree with each other all the time, and we’ve had millennia to practice thinking our way into other heads. The problem is that computers don’t have any heads. Their intelligence is quite unlike our own. We don’t know what They’re thinking because, by any reasonable measure, “thinking” does not describe what They are doing.

Even this might not be a problem, if only They would stop pretending to be human. Harari cites a 2022 study showing that the 5 per cent of Twitter users that are bots are generating between 20 and 30 per cent of the site’s content.

Harari quotes Daniel Dennett’s blindingly obvious point that, in a society where information is the new currency, we should ban fake humans the way we once banned fake coins.

And that is that, aside from the shouting — and there’s a fair bit of that in the last pages, futurology being a sinecure for people who are not even wrong.

Harari’s iconoclastic intellectual reputation is wholly undeserved, not because he does a bad job, but because he does such a superb job of being the opposite of an iconoclast. Harari sticks the world together in a gleaming shape that inspires and excites. If it holds only for as long as it takes to read the book, still, dazzled readers should feel themselves well served.

Just which bits of the world feel human to you?

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Reading Animals, Robots, Gods by Webb Keane for New Scientist

No society we know of ever lived without morals. Roughly the same ethical ideas arise, again and again, in the most diverse societies. Where do these ideas of right and wrong come from? Might there be one ideal way to live?

Michigan-based anthropologist Webb Keane argues that morality does not arise from universal principles, but from the human imagination. Moral ideas are sparked in the friction between objectivity, when we think about the world as if it were a story, and subjectivity, in which we’re in some sort of conversation with the world.

A classic trolley problem eludicates Keane’s point. If you saw an out-of-control trolley (tram car) hurtling towards five people, and could pull a switch that sent the trolley down a different track, killing only one innocent bystander, you would more than likely choose to pull the lever. If, on the other hand, you could save five people by pushing an innocent bystander into the path of the trolley (using him, in Keane’s delicious phrase, “as an ad hoc trolley brake”), you’d more than likely choose not to interfere. The difference in your reaction turns on whether you are looking at the situation objectively, at some mechanical remove, or whether you subjectively imagine yourself in the thick of the action.

What moral attitude we adopt to situations depends on how socially charged we think they are. I’d happily kick a stone down the road; I’d never kick a dog. Where, though, are the boundaries of this social world? If you can have a social relationship with your pet dog, can you have one with your decorticate child? Your cancer tumour? Your god?

Keane says that it’s only by asking such questions that we acquire morals in the first place. And we are constantly trying to tell the difference between the social and the non-social, testing connections and experimenting with boundaries, because the question “just what is a human being, anyway?” lies at the heart of all morality.

Readers of Animals, Robots, Gods will encounter a wide range of non-humans, from sacrificial horses to chatbots, with whom they might conceivably establish a social relationship. Frankly, it’s too much content for so short a book. Readers interested in the ethics of artifical intelligence, for instance, won’t find much new insight here. On the other hand, I found Keane’s distillation of fieldwork into the ethics of hunting and animal sacrifice both gripping and provoking.

We also meet humans enhanced and maintained by technology. Keane reports a study by anthropologist Cheryl Mattingly in which devout Los Angles-based Christians Andrew and Darlene refuse to turn off the machines keeping their brain-dead daughter alive. The doctors believe that, in the effort to save her, their science has at last cyborgised the girl to the point at which she is no longer a person. The parents believe that, medically maintained or not, cognate or not, their child’s being alive is significant, and sufficient to make her a person. This is hardly some simplistic “battle between religion and science”. Rather, it’s an argument about where we set the boundaries within which we apply moral imperatives like the one telling us not to kill.

Morals don’t just guide lived experience: they arise from lived experience. There can be no trolley problems without trolleys. This, Keane argues, is why morality and ethics are best approached from an anthropological perspective. “We cannot make sense of ethics, or expect them of others, without understanding what makes them inhabitable, possible ways to live,” he writes. “And we should neither expect, nor, I think, hope that the diversity of ways of life will somehow converge onto one ‘best’ way of living.”

We communicate best with strangers when we accept them as moral beings. A western animal rights activist would never hunt an animal. A Chewong hunter from Malaysia wouldn’t dream of laughing at one. And if these strangers really want to get the measure of each other, they should each ask the same, devastatingly simple question:

Just which bits of the world feel human to you?

A citadel beset by germs

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Watching Mariam Ghani’s Dis-Ease for New Scientist

There aren’t many laugh-out-loud moments in Mariam Ghani’s long documentary about our war on germs. The sight of two British colonial hunters in Ceylon bringing down a gigantic papier maché mosquito is a highlight.

Ghani intercuts public information films (a rich source of sometimes inadvertent comedy) with monster movies, documentaries, thrillers, newreel and histology lab footage to tell the story of an abiding medical metaphor: the body as citadel, beset by germs.

Dis-Ease, which began life as an artistic residency at the Wellcome Institute, is a visual feast, with a strong internal logic. Had it been left to stand on its own feet, then it might have borne comparison with Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi and Simon Pummell’s Bodysong: films which convey their ideas in purely visual terms.

But the Afghan-American photographer Ghani is as devoted to the power of words. Interviews and voice-overs abound. The result is a messy collision of two otherwise perfectly valid documentary styles.

There’s little in Dis-Ease’s narrative to take exception to. Humoral theory (in which the sick body falls out of internal balance) was a central principle in Western medicine from antiquity into the 19th century. It was eventually superseded by germ theory, in which the sick body is assailed by pathogens. Germ theory enabled globally transformative advances in public health, but it was most effectively conveyed through military metaphors, and these quickly acquired a life of their own. In its brief foray into the history of eugenics, Dis-Ease reveals, in stark terms, how “wars on disease” mutate into wars on groups of people.

A “war on disease” also preserves and accentuates social inequities, the prevailing assumption being that outbreaks spread from the developing south to the developed north, and the north then responds by deploying technological fixes in the opposite direction.

At its very founding in 1948, the World Health Organisation argued against this idea, and the eradication of smallpox in 1980 was achieved through international consensus, by funding primary health care across the globe. The attempted eradication of polio, begun in 1988, has been a deal more problematic, and the film argues that this is down to the developed world’s imposition by fiat of a very narrow medical brief, even as health care services in even the poorest countries were coming under pressure to privitise.

Ecosystems are being eroded, and zoonotic diseases are emerging with ever greater frequency. Increasingly robust and well-coördinated military responses to frightening outbreaks are understandable and they can, in the short term, be quite effective. For example: to criticise the way British and Sierra Leonean militaries intervened in Sierra Leone in 2014 to establish a National Ebola Response Centre would be to put ideology in the way of common sense.

Still, the film argues, such actions may worsen problems on the ground, since they absorb all the money and political will that might have been spent on public health necessities like housing and sanitation (and a note to Bond villians here: the surest way to trigger a global pandemic is to undermine the health of some small exposed population).

In interview, the sociologist Hannah Landecker points out that since adopting germ theory, we have been managing life with death. (Indeed, that is pretty much exactly what the word “antibiotic” means.) Knowing what we know now about the sheer complexity and vastness of the microbial world, we should now be looking to manage life with life, collaborating with the microbiome, ensuring health rather than combating disease.

What this means exactly is beyond the scope of Ghani’s film, and some of the gestures here towards a “one health” model of medicine — as when a hippy couple start repeating the refrain “life and death are one” — caused this reviewer some moral discomfort.

Anthropologists and sociologists dominate Dis-Ease’s discourse, making it a snapshot of what today’s generation of desk-bound academics think about disease. Many speak sense, though a special circle of Hell is being reserved for the one who, having read too much science fiction, glibly asserts that we can be cured “by becoming something else entirely”.