Tag Archives: New Scientist

“So off we go to the future”

Posted on by

Watching Alastair Evans’s A Crack in the Mountain for New Scientist, 17 May 2023

“Everyone on a bicycle wants to be on a motorbike. Everyone on a motorbike wants to be in a car. And everyone in a car wants to be in a helicopter.” A wry smiles creeps across the face of local business owner David “multi” English: “So off we go to the future.”

Ten years ago Phong Nha in Quang Binh province was arguably the poorest region in Vietnam. English arrived during the 2010 floods and remembers the region’s air of despondency. People fished the rivers and grew a little rice. Hunger was commonplace.

But the arrival of British caving expedition the previous April already signalled a big change. They had arrived to explore a cave system known to local farmers since 1991 but very remote, and up until then, entirely ignored.

Following a 5 kilometre-long fault through limestone, they discovered chambers that could each quite happily contain an entire city block. In places the ceilings are 200 metres high. Here and there, where the roof has fallen in, there are sunken forests boasting unique species of tree fern and other plants.

With its two jungles, two rivers and a waterfall, Hang So Doong is not just the largest dry cave in the world; “it doesn’t feel like you’re on planet Earth any more.” So says Meredith Harvey, who visited the cave in 2017.

Now the local government wants to put a cable-car through the site, opening it up to 1000 tourists per hour. Conversations with UNESCO have won a reprieve to 2030, but no-one seriously believes the site will remain pristine forever. Jonathan Drake, who visited in 2019, puts it this way: “Just imagine if the Grand Canyon was just discovered this week and it didn’t belong to anyone… how would that go?”

Alastair Evans’s documentary tells a story we have heard before, many times. In 1968 biologist Garrett Hardin coined the expression “tragedy of the commons” to describe a situation in which individuals use a shared resource in their own self-interest, leading to its eventual depletion. Will this happen to So Doong?

Certainly. It’s impossible to imagine the rulers of an Asian Tiger economy simply writing off their most potentially lucrative natural wonder, just so that a handful of wealthy foreign tourists can continue to enjoy its untouched charm.

It is not unreasonable to want an adventure. It is not unreasonable to make the most of one’s birthplace. It is not that unreasonable, after a lifetime riding to work on a motorbike, to want your children to be able to afford a car. This is what makes the tragedy of the commons a actual tragedy.

Of course, it is still possible to watch A Crack in the Mountain simply for its beauty, and for this, some credit must go to the local expeditions company Oxalis Adventure, founded by businessman Chau A Nguyen to put considerable sums (enough to buy schools, anyway) back into the local economy. The production values on show here are extraordinarily high. The expeditions through the cave appear very well managed. One might wish that Nguyen and his kind could simply be left alone to tailor the region’s development according to the needs of local people.

But then, that’s to forget the ravages of Covid-19, that closed down 90 per cent of Phong Nha’s small businesses, not to mention a series of recent floods that brought what little activity that remained in the region to a standstill. Big government, big finance and big engineering can weather such storms — but their activities come at a price.

This is a film about a wicked problem, sure to despoil a wonderful location, if not today then tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that. By then, if a way to square this impossible equation ever does present itself, it will surely have been inspired by films as intelligent and passionate as this one.

On not being a horrible person

Posted on by

Reading The Human Mind by Paul Bloom for New Scientist, 11 May 2023

Inspired, he tells us, by The Origin of the Universe, John Barrow’s 1994 survey of what was then known about cosmology, the Canadian American psychologist Paul Bloom set about writing an introductory tome of his own: a brief yet comprehensive guide to the human mind.

Emulating Barrow’s superb survey has been hard because, as Bloom cheekily points out, “the mysteries of space and time turn out to be easier for our minds to grasp than those of consciousness and choice.”

The first thing to say — though hardly the most interesting — is that Bloom nevertheless succeeds, covering everything from perception and behaviour to language and development; there’s even a small but very worthwhile foray into abnormal psychology. It’s an account that is positive, but never self-serving. Problems in reproducing some key studies, the field’s sometimes scandalous manipulation of statistics, and the once prevailing assumption that undergrad volunteers could accurately represent the diversity of the entire human species, are serious problems, dealt with seriously.

Of course Bloom does more than simply set out the contents of the stall (with the odd rotten apple here and there); he also explores psychology’s evolving values. He recalls his early behaviourist training, in a climate hostile to (then rather woolly) questions about consciousness. “If we were asked to defend our dismissal of consciousness,” he recalls, “we would point out that intelligence does not require sentience.”

Intelligence is no longer the field’s only grail, and consciousness is now front and centre in the science of the mind. This is not only a technical advance; it’s an ethical one. In 1789 Jeremy Bentham asked whether the law could ever refuse its protection to “any sensitive being”, and pointed out that “The question is not, Can [certain beings] reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

Suffering requires consciousness, says Bloom; understanding one enables us to tackle the other; so the shift in interest to consciousness itself is a welcome and humanising move.

This strong belief in the humanitarian potential of psychology allows Bloom to defend aspects of his discipline that often discomfort outside observers. He handles issues of environmental and genetic influences on the mind very well, and offers a welcome and robust defence of Alfred Binet’s 1905 invention, the measure of general intelligence or “intelligence quotient”. Bloom shows that the IQ test is as robust a metric as anything in social science. We know that a full half of us score less than 100 on that test; should this knowledge not fill us with humility and compassion? (Actually our responses tend to be more ambiguous. Bloom points out that Nazi commentators hated the idea of IQ because they thought Jews would score better than they would.)

Bloom is concerned to demonstrate that minds do more than think. The privileging of thinking over feeling and intuiting and suffering is a mistake. “A lot depends on what is meant by ‘rational.’ Bloom writes. If you’re stepping outside and it’s raining and you don’t want to get wet, it’s rational to bring an umbrella. But rationality defined in this manner is separate from goodness. “Kidnapping a rich person’s child might be a rational way to achieve the goal of getting a lot of money quickly,” Bloom observes, “so long as you don’t have other goals, such as obeying the law and not being a horrible person.”

Bloom’s ultimate purpose is to explain how a robustly materialistic view of the mind is fully compatible with the existence of choice and morality and responsibility. This middle-of-the-road approach may disappoint intellectual storm-chasers, but the rest of us can can be assured of an up-to-the-minute snapshot of the field, full of unknowns and uncertainties, yes, and speculations, and controversies — but guided by an ever-more rounded idea of what it is to be human.

The mind unlocked

Posted on by

Reading The Battle for Your Brain by Nita Farahany for New Scientist, 19 April 2023

Iranian-American ethicist and lawyer Nita Farahany is no stranger to neurological intervention. She has sought relief from her chronic migraines in “triptans, anti-seizure drugs, antidepressants, brain enhancers, and brain diminishers. I’ve had neurotoxins injected into my head, my temples, my neck, and my shoulders; undergone electrical stimulation, transcranial direct current stimulation, MRIs, EEGs, fMRIs, and more.”

Few know better than Farahany what neurotechnology can do for people’s betterment, and this lends weight to her sombre and troubling account of a field whose speed of expansion alone should give us pause.

Companies like Myontec, Athos, Delsys and Noraxon already offer electromyography-generated insights to athletes and sports therapists. Control Bionics sells NeuroNode, a wearable EMG device for patients with degenerative neurological disorders, enabling them to control a computer, tablet, or motorised device. Neurable promises “the mind unlocked” with its “smart headphones for smarter focus.” And that’s before we even turn to the fast-growing interest in implantable devices; Synchron, Blackrock Neurotech and Elon Musk’s Neuralink all have prototypes in advanced stages of development.

Set aside the legitimate medical applications for a moment; Farahany is concerned that neurotech applications that used to let us play video games, meditate, or improve our focus have opened the way to a future of brain transparency “in which scientists, doctors, governments, and companies may peer into our brains and minds at will.”

Think it can’t be done? Think again. In 2017 A research team led by UC Berkeley computer scientist Dawn Song reported an experiment in which videogamers used a neural interface to control a video game. As they played, the researchers inserted subliminal images into the game and watched for unconscious recognition signals. This game of neurological Battleships netted them one player’s credit card PIN code — and their home address.

Now Massachusetts-based Brainwave Science is selling a technology called iCognative, which can extract information from people’s brains. At least, suspects are shown pictures related to crimes and cannot help but recognise whatever they happen to recognise. For example, a murder weapon. Emirati authorities have already successfully prosecuted two cases using this technology.

This so-called “brain fingerprinting” technique is as popular with governments (Bangladesh, India, Singapore, Australia) as it is derided by many scientists.

More worrying are the efforts of companies, in the post-Covid era, to use neurotech in their continuing effort to control the home-working environment. So-called “bossware” programmes already take regular screenshots of employees’ work, monitor their keystrokes and web usage, and photograph them at (or not at) their desks. San Francisco bioinformatics company Emotiv now offers to help manage your employees’ attention with its MN8 earbuds. These can indeed be used to listen to music or participate in conference calls — and also, with just two electrodes, one in each ear, they claim to be able to record employees’ emotional and cognitive functions in real time.

It’ll come as no surprise if neurotech becomes a requirement in modern workplaces: no earbuds, no job. This sort of thing has happened many times already.

“As soon as [factory] workers get used to the new system their pay is cut to the former level,” complained Vladimir Lenin in 1912. “The capitalist attains an enormous profit for the workers toil four times as hard as before and wear down their nerves and muscles four times as fast as before.”

Six years later, he approved funding for a Taylorist research institute. Say what you like about industrial capitalism, its logic is ungainsayable.

Farahany has no quick fixes to offer for this latest technological assault on the mind — “the one place of solace to which we could safely and privately retreat”. Her book left me wondering what to be more afraid of: the devices themselves, or the glee with which powerful institutions seize upon them.

Not our Battle of Britain

Posted on by

Watching Andrew Legge’s film Lola for New Scientist, 12 April 2023

Two sisters, orphans, play among the leavings of their parents’ experiments in radio, and by 1938 the one who’s a genius, Thomasina (Emma Appleton), is listening to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on a ceiling-high television set that can tune in to the future.

The politics of the day being what it is, Thom’s sister Martha (Stefanie Martini) decides that this invention (named Lola after their dead mother) cannot remain their personal plaything — it belongs to the world. With the help of Sebastian, a sympathetic army officer (soon enough Martha falls in love with him) the sisters are soon collaborating with British intelligence to fox Nazi operations a day before they happen.

Drunk on success, Thom lets her ambition get the better of her, and starts sacrificing the civilians of tomorrow in order to draw out the Wehrmacht. When a horrified President Roosevelt catches wind of this, it spells the end of Churchill’s efforts to draw the US into the war against Hitler.

Good intentions, ambitious plans and unintended consequences usher the world into Hell in this often stunning piece of micro-budget science fiction. As high concept movie ideas go, Lola’s counterfactual 20th-century history is up there with Memento and Primer and Source Code.

Attentive readers will feel a “but” hovering here. For some reason the director and co-writer Andrew Legge took a day of rest after fleshing out this winning idea; he seems neither to have finished the script, nor given his actors much directorial guidance. Lola is more a short story narrated to a visual accompaniment than a fully fledged film. Thom and Mars are supposed to be nice 1930s gals transfigured by their access to glimpses of 1960s pop culture — but it’s impossible not to see them for what they are, personable young actors from the 2020s let loose to do their thing in front of the camera.

This makes Lola a good movie, rather than a great one — and it’s a shame. Some extra scriptwork and a spot of voice coaching would have added hardly anything to Lola’s admittedly tight budget. In 2009, Legge made The Chronoscope, a 20-minute foray into the same territory. Lola is more solemn than that short outing, but no more serious, as though Legge were intimidated, rather than inspired, by the possibilities offered by the feature format.

Elsewhere, the film’s resources are deployed with flair and ingenuity. The film is an historically and technologically impossible but highly convincing assembly of found footage and home movie. (Among Thom’s other incidental inventions is a hand-held camera that records sound.) Famous radio broadcasts of the period are repurposed to chilling effect. (Lola’s “Battle of Britain” is not our battle of Britain). The Zelig-like manipulations of newsreel footage are fairly crude in purely technical terms, but I defy you not to gasp at the sight of Nazi invaders waving their Swastika over a bombed-out London, or Adolf Hitler being driven in state down the Mall. And Neil Hannon (the maverick musical talent behind The Divine Comedy, not to mention Father Ted’s “My Lovely Horse” song) has a quite indecent amount of fun here, cooking up the beats of a counterfactual 1970s fascist Top 10.

These days the choice confronting British and Irish filmmakers is stark: do you want to make your movie as quickly as possible, on the lowest possible budget, get it seen, and generate interest? Or do you want to spend twenty years in development hell, working with overseas production companies who don’t know whether they can trust you, and — with many millions of dollars on the line — are likely to homogenise your project out of all recognition?

I wish Lola had impressed me less and involved me more. But in a business as precarious as this one, Legge’s choices make sense, and Lola is an effective and enjoyable industry calling card.

The sirens of overstatement

Posted on by

Visiting David Blandy’s installation Atomic Light at John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton, for New Scientist, 22 March 2023

The Edge of Forever, one of four short films by Brighton-based video and installation artist David Blandy, opens with an elegaic pan of Cuckmere Haven in Sussex. A less apocalyptic landscape it would be hard to imagine. Cuckmere is one of the most ravishing spots in the Home Counties. Still, the voiceover insists that we contemplate “a ravaged Earth” and “forgotten peoples” as we watch two children exploring their post-human future. The only sign of former human habitation is a deserted observatory (the former Royal Observatory at Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex). The children enter and study the leavings of dead technologies and abandoned ambitions, steeped all the while in refracted sunlight: Claire Barrett’s elegiac camerawork is superb.

The films in Blandy’s installation “Atomic Light” connect three different kinds of fire: the fire of the sun; the wildfires that break out naturally all over the earth, but which are gathering force and frequency as the Earth’s climate warms; and the atomic blast that consumed the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.

There’s a personal dimension to all this, beyond Blandy’s vaunted concern for the environment: his grandfather was a prisoner of the Japanese in Singapore during the second World War, and afterwards lived with the knowledge that, had upwards of 100,000 civilians not perished in Hiroshima blast, he almost certainly would not have survived.

Bringing this lot together is a job of work. In Empire of the Swamp
a man wanders through the mangrove swamps at the edge of Singapore, while Blandy reads out a short story by playwright Joel Tan. The enviro-political opinions of a postcolonial crocodile are as good a premise for a short story as any, I suppose, but the film isn’t particularly well integrated with the rest of the show.

Soil, Sinew and Bone, a visually arresting game of digital mirrors composed of rural footage from Screen Archive South East, equates modern agriculture and warfare. That there is an historical connection is undeniable: the chemist Franz Haber received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his invention of the Haber–Bosch process, a method of synthesising ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen. That ammonia, a fertiliser, can be used in the manufacture of explosives, is an irony familiar to any GCSE student, though it’s by no means obvious why agriculture should be left morally tainted by it.

Alas, Blandy can’t resist the sirens of overstatement. We eat, he says “while others scratch for existence in the baked earth.” Never mind that since 1970, hunger in the developing world has more than halved, and that China saw its hunger level fall from a quarter of its vast population to less than a tenth by 2016 — all overwhelmingly thanks to Haber-Bosch.

Defenders of the artist’s right to be miserable in face of history will complain that I am taking “Atomic Light” far to literally — to which I would respond that I’m taking it seriously. Bad faith is bad faith whichever way you cut it. If in your voiceover you dub Walt Disney’s Mickey “this mouse of empire”, if you describe some poor soul’s carefully tended English garden as the “pursuit of an unnatural perfection wreathed in poisons”, if you use footage of a children’s tea party to hector your audience about wheat and sugar, and if you cut words and images together to suggest that some jobbing farmer out shooting rabbits was a landowner on the lookout for absconding workers, then you are simply piling straws on the camel’s back.

Thank goodness, then, for Sunspot, Blandy’s fourth, visually much simpler film, that juxtaposes the lives and observations of two real-life solar astronomers, Joseph Hiscox in Los Angeles and Yukiaki Tanaka in Tokyo, who each made drawings of the sun on the day the Hiroshima bomb dropped.

Here’s a salutary and saving reminder that, to make art, you’re best off letting the truth speak for itself.

A finite body in space

Posted on by

Reading Carlo Rovelli’s Anaximander and the Nature of Science for New Scientist, 8 March 2023

Astronomy was conducted at Chinese government institutions for more than 20 centuries, before Jesuit missionaries turned up and, somewhat bemused, pointed out that the Earth is round.

Why, after so much close observation and meticulous record-keeping did seventeenth-century Chinese astronomers still think the Earth was flat?

The theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, writing in 2007 (this is an able and lively translation of his first book) can be certain of one thing: “that the observation of celestial phenomena over many centuries, with the full support of political authorities, is not sufficient to lead to clear advances in understanding the structure of the world.”

So what gave Europe its preternaturally clear-eyed idea of how physical reality works? Rovelli’s ties his several answers — covering history, philosophy, politics and religion — to the life and thought and work of Anaximander, who was born 26 centuries ago in the cosmopolitan city (population 100,000) of Miletus, on the coast of present-day Turkey.

We learn about Anaximander, born 610 BCE, mostly through Aristotle. The only treatise of his we know about is now lost, aside from a tantalising fragment that reveals Anaximander’s notion that there exist natural laws that organise phenomena through time. He also figured out where wind and rain came from, and deduced, from observation, that all animals originally came from the sea, and must have arisen from fish or fish-like creatures.

Rovelli is not interested in startling examples of apparent prescience. Even a stopped watch is correct twice a day. He is positively enchanted, though, by the quality of Anaximander’s thought.

Consider the philosopher’s most famous observation — that the Earth is a finite body of rock floating freely in space.

Anaximander grasps that there is a void beneath the Earth through which heavenly bodies (the sun, to take an obvious example) must travel when they roll out of sight. This is really saying not much more than that, when a man walks behind a house, he’ll eventually reappear on the other side.

What makes this “obvious” observation so radical is that, applied to heavenly bodies, it contradicts our everyday experience.

In everyday life, objects fall in one direction. The idea that space does not have a privileged direction in which objects fall runs against common sense.

So Anaximander arrives at a concept of gravity: he calls it “domination”. Earth hangs in space without falling because does not have any particular direction in which to fall, and that is because there’s nothing around big enough to dominate it. You and I are much smaller than the earth, and so we fall towards it. “Up” and “down” are no longer absolutes. They are relative.

The second half of Rovelli’s book (less thrilling, and more trenchant, perhaps to compensate for the fact that it covers more familiar territory) explains how science, evolving out of Anaximander’s constructive yet critical attitude towards his teacher Thales, developed a really quite unnatural way of thinking.

Thales, says Anaximander, was a wise man who was wrong about everything being made of water. The idea that we can be wise and wrong at the same time, Rovelli says, can come only from a sophisticated theory of knowledge “according to which truth is accessible but only gradually, by means of successive refinements.”

All Rovelli’s wit and intellectual dexterity are in evidence in this thrilling early work, and almost all his charm, as he explains how Copernicus perfects Ptolemy, by applying Ptolemy’s mathematics to a better-framed question, and how Einstein perfected Newton by pushing Newton’s mathematics past certain a priori assumptions.

Nothing is thrown away in such scientific “revolutions”. Everything is repurposed.

Wandering off into a blizzard for no reason

Posted on by

Watching Creature, directed by Asif Kapadia, for New Scientist, 5 March 2023

In an isolated research station, lost amid snow and ice, a highly disciplined team of would-be astronauts are putting an experimental animal through its paces. Will their Creature survive the tests they throw at it? The cold, the isolation, the asphyxia? A punctilious Doctor (Stina Quagebeur) palpates and measures the creature, summons handlers and equipment and calls for urgent aid when it looks as though an experiment has gone too far. She is meticulous, not malevolent, and when the Major in charge tears the creature from its one source of comfort, the station cleaner Marie (Erina Takahashi), and abuses her, the Doctor fears for the whole team.

It’s up to the captain to calm his superior officer down, and goodness knows he tries. Since this is a ballet loosely based on 19th-century dramatist Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck — about the mental deterioration of a soldier so utterly beholden to his commanding officers, he agrees to medical experiments — it’s not likely that things will end well.

Jeffrey Cirio plays the Creature in this unusual project from English National Ballet — a collaboration between choreographer Asif Kapadia and filmmaker Akram Khan, best known for the documentaries Senna (2010) Amy (2015) and Diego Maradona (2019).

It’s a grim fable of human ambition and ruthlessness, superbly performed, and shot in a way that draws the audience fully into the action, capturing moments of private emotion and the subtlest of gestures without losing any of the spectacle of an ensemble piece.

For almost its entire length (the last five minutes are rotten) Creature explores its extreme set-up with tenderness and intelligence, slowly eroding the distinction between a somewhat simian test subject and its hardly less simian handlers. The Creature wants to copy its masters. We don’t have very long to wait, however, before its masters are learning to copy the Creature. Though the hierarchies of this isolated, militaristic society are clear, and the Creature’s expendability is never in doubt, the piece holds out the possibility of real communication here, and even trust, and even love.

And then, out of nowhere, all that subtle, clever, sensitive work gets thrown away. The Captain (Ken Saruhashi), who’s been keeping the Major contained, wanders off into a blizzard for no reason, and the Major (a jaw-droppingly arrogant turn by the dashing Fabian
Reimair) makes merry hell and gets away with whatever he likes.

Creature wants to be an indictment of cruelty, obedience and power, but its central metaphor will not hold. First, astronauts are notoriously disobedient. Second, space agencies are chronically underfunded. Really, only the point about cruelty might stick, and even here, I have my reservations. Do we sacrifice experimental animals to further our research goals? Certainly, though much less than we used to. And even in the bad old days, these creatures were honoured. Look at the statues to the space dog Laika (I know of at least two), or the remains of NASA’s chimp Ham, interred at the International Space Hall of Fame in New Mexico. You can argue that these gestures were insufficient, but you can’t say they were empty.

By the end, did Creature leave me impressed? Thrilled? Moved?

Yes, all three. It also left me aggrieved.

Here I was, preparing to sing the praises of a science-fiction ballet about our difficult relationship with other primates, and what I was left with, at the end, was a by-the-numbers glimpse of how horrid people can be.

It may be that expanding human efforts into outer space is a silly idea, but the show’s censoriousness left me cold. A shame, because the dancing — ironically enough — was out of this world.

 

“Our trained mediums are standing by”

Posted on by

Watching Mali Elfman’s Next Exit for New Scientist, 22 February 2023

From out of nowhere, a chink of light appears. With painful slowness, the light grows stronger: we are inching towards a half-open door. Beyond the door, everything seems normal. A little boy is playing a game of pretend. At least, that’s what we think. Soon enough, we learn what’s really going on: the boy is playing cards with his dead father.

Nothing else in Mali Elfman’s debut feature lives up to this unsettling opening sequence (though there’s a sight gag — two would-be suicides renting a car from Charon Vehicle Rental — that comes close).

Rahul Kohli and Katie Parker — actors who turn up regularly in work by horror director Mike Flanagan — play Teddy and Rose, driving across the US to an appointment with Dr Stevensen (Karen Gillan) who has promised them a clinically managed euthanasia. Teddy, a Londoner, has spent ten years trying and failing to make it in the United States, and figures that being turned into a pioneer ghost (his transition from life to death monitored with all the latest gear) will at least give his life some meaning. Rose is weighed down with guilty secrets, and just wants to be done with it all.

Mind you, even Rose is not as nihilistic as the man who, early on in the film, wonders in front of their hire car, and under their wheels, with a note pinned to his chest: “Thanks for the help”.

Suicides and homicides are common now, as Heaven beckons (or whatever passes as Heaven), and our hardscrabble lives on this ordinary Earth lose their preciousness and meaning. “Our trained mediums are standing by,” a radio advert announces, offering contact with the newly visible dead. This is a world lost to itself, snared by fantasies of the hereafter.

But what do these newly discovered ghosts really want, as they stream into our world through every available screen? Not every haunting is as touching as that of the boy and his dead parent. Rose guzzles bourbon by the bottle so as not to see her mother watching her from inside the motel pay-per-view. A friendly cop, caught up in a drinking game, confesses to a thoughtless on-duty prank that killed a family of five; not surprising then, that he thinks “they’re here to hurt us.” Karma, a hitchhiker Teddy and Rose pick up out in the desert, has her own doubts: ”Just because we can see them,” she points out, “doesn’t mean we understand them”.

It’s at this point, about half way into the movie, that the viewer’s heart, if it does not immediately sink, certainly begins to tip: surely this film has bitten off way more than it can possibly chew?

Teddy admits that what he really wants out of his own managed death is for the news to get back to his absentee father: “I’d rather kill myself than live the life you gave me.” This is not a bad line, but what follows is horrific, and not in any intended way: a stage-managed confrontation with Teddy’s dad; an impromptu psychodynamic therapy session in a filling station car lot. The script rights itself, but having lost all confidence after this compound pratfall, it delivers, in the end, only a low-key retread of Joel Schumacher’s 1990 flick Flatliners. (Judgement waits for us all; struggle gives life its meaning; you know the rest.)

Next Exit is a promising film, but not a good film. It warps the world into a very strange shape, to ask some valid — indeed, pressing — questions about where the value of life resides. But it loses its way. If the writing had exhibited half as much commitment as the acting, we might have had a hit on our hands.

“The solutions are not even in the works”

Posted on by

Reading Pegasus by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud for New Scientist, 1 February 2023.

“Fifty thousand?”

Edward Snowden’s 2013 leaks from the US National Security Agency had triggered a global debate around state surveillance — and even he couldn’t quite believe the scale of the story as it was described to him in the summer of 2021.

Whistle-blowers had handed French investigative journalists Laurent Richard and and Sandrine Rigaud a list of 50,000 phone numbers. These belonged to people flagged for attack by a cybersurveillance software package called Pegasus.

The journalistic investigation that followed is the subject of this non-fiction thriller: a must-read for anyone remotely interested in cryptography and communications, and a dreadful warning for the rest of us. “Regular civilians being targeted with military-grade surveillance weapons — against their will, against their knowledge, and with no recourse — is a dystopian future we really are careening toward,” the authors warn, “if we don’t understand this threat and move to stop it.”

Pegasus offers a fascinating insight into how journalism has evolved to tackle a hyper-connected world. Eye witnesses and whistle-blowers have better access than ever before to sympathetic campaigning journalists from all over the world. But of course, this advantage is shared with the very governments and corporations and organised crime networks that want to silence them.

To drag Pegasus into the light, Laurent’s Forbidden Stories consortium choreographed the activities of more than eighty investigative journalists from seventeen media organisations across four continents and eight languages.

The consortium got together in March 2021 knowing full well that they would have to conclude their investigation by June, by which time Pegasus’ creators at the Israeli company NSO were bound to twig that their brainchild was being hacked.

The bigger the names on that phone list, the harder it would be to keep any investigation under wraps. Early on the name of Jorge Carrasco cropped up: the lead partner in Forbidden Stories’ massive cross-border collaboration to finish the investigations of murdered Mexican journalist Regina Martínez. Then things just got silly: a son of Turkish president Recep Erdogan turned up; and then the names of half the French cabinet. Also the cell number for Emmanuel Macron, the president of France. Laurent Richard recalls, “Macron was the name that made me realise how truly dangerous it was to have access to this list.”

In a pulse-accelerating account that’s never afraid to dip into well-crafted technical detail, the authors explain how Pegasus gains free rein on a mobile device, without ever tipping off the owner to its presence. Needless to say it evolved out of software designed to serve baffled consumers waiting in long queues on tech support call lines. Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie, who would go on to found NSO and create Pegasus, cut their teeth developing programmes that allowed support technicians to take charge of the caller’s phone.

It was not long before a European intelligence service came calling. Sold and maintained for more than sixty clients in more than forty countries, Pegasus gave security services an edge over terrorists, criminal gangs and paedophiles — and also, as it’s turned out, over whistleblowers, campaigners, political opponents, journalists, and at least one Emirati princess trying to get custody of her children. This book is not a diatribe against the necessary (or at any rate ubiquitous) business of government surveillance and espionage. It is about how, in the contest between ordinary people and the powerful, software is tilting the field wildly in the latter’s favour.

The international journalistic collaboration that was the Pegasus Project sparked the biggest global surveillance scandal since Snowden; it’s led to a European Parliament inquiry into government spyware, legal action from major technology companies, government sanctions against the NSO Group and countless individual legal complaints. But the authors spend little time sitting in their laurels. Pegasus may be dead, but demand for a successor is only growing. In the gap left by NSO, certain governments are making offers to certain tech companies that add zeroes to the fees NSO enjoyed. Nor do the authors expect much to come out of the public debate that has followed their investigation: “The issues… might have been raised,” they concede, “but the solutions are not even in the works.”

We’ve learned a valuable lesson today

Posted on by

Watching M3gan, directed by Gerard Johnstone, for New Scientist, 25 January 2023

Having done something unspeakable to a school bully’s ear, chased him through the forest like a wolf, and driven him under the wheels of a passing car, M3gan, the world’s first “Model 3 Generative Android”, returns to comfort Cady, its inventor’s niece. “We’ve learned a valuable lesson today,” she whispers.

So has the audience, between all their squealing and cheering. Before you ask a learning machine to do something for you, it helps if you know what that thing actually is.

M3gan has been tasked by its inventor Gemma (Allison Williams, in her second Blumfield-produced movie since the company’s 2017 smash Get Out) with looking after her niece Cady (Violet McGraw), recently orphaned when her parents — arguing over who should police her screen time — drove them all under a snow truck.

M3gan is told to protect Cady from physical and emotional harm. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Quite a lot, it turns out. Gemma works for toy company Funki, whose CEO David (comedian Ronny Chieng) is looking for a way — any way — to “kick Hasbro right in the d—.” In a rush to succeed, Gemma ends up creating a care robot that (to paraphrase Terminator) absolutely will not stop caring. M3gan takes very personally indeed the ordinary knocks that life dishes out to a kid.

The robot — a low-budget concoction of masks and CGI, performed by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis — is an uncanny glory. But the signature quality of Blumfield’s films is not so much their skill with low budgets, as the company’s willingness to invest time and money on scripts. In developing M3gan, James Wan (who directed the 2004 horror film Saw) and Akela Cooper (whose first-draft screenplay was, by her own admission, “way gorier”) discovered in the end that there was more currency in mischief than in mayhem. This is the most sheerly gleeful horror movie since The Lost Boys.

Caring for a child involves more than distracting them. Alas M3gan, evolving from Funki’s “Purrfect Petz” (fuzzballs that quote Wikipedia while evacuating plastic pellets from their bowels) cannot possibly understand this distinction.

The point of parenting is to manage your own failure, leaving behind a child capable of handling the world on their own. M3gan, on the contrary, has absolutely no intention of letting Cady grow up. As far as M3gan is concerned, experience is the enemy.

In this war against the world M3gan transforms, naturally enough, into a hyperarticulated killing machine (and the audience cheers: this is a film built on anticipation, not surprise).

M3gan’s charge, poor orphaned Cady, is a far more frightening creation: a bundle of hurt and horror afforded no real guidance, adrift without explanations in a world where (let’s face it) everything will eventually die and everything will eventually go wrong. The sight of a screaming nine-year-old Cady slapping her well-intentioned but workaholic aunt across the face is infinitely more disturbing than any scene involving M3gan.

“Robotic companionship may seem a sweet deal,” wrote the social scientist Sherry Turkle back in 2011, “but it consigns us to a closed world — the loveable as safe and made to measure.”

Cady, born into a world of fatuous care robots, eventually learns that the only way to get through life is to grow up.

But the real lesson here is for parents. The robot exists to do what we can imagine doing, but would rather not do. And that’s fine, except that it assumes that we always know what’s in our own best interests.

I remember in 2014, at a conference on human-machine interaction, I watched a a video starring Nao, a charming “educational robot”. It took a while before someone in the audience (not me, to my shame) spotted the film’s obvious flaw: how come it shows a mother sweating away in the kitchen while a robot is enjoying quality time with her child?