AI: what is to be done? – newsletter from Katherine Viner, The Guardian Editor-in-Chief. "For months we have been grappling with [this question]. A working group of our journalists and digital experts has been considering how the Guardian responds to the risks and opportunities of the AI era. Recently, we set out our thoughts in a statement of principles. Broadly, there are three. First, any use of genAI must have human oversight. The Guardian will remain a champion of journalism by people, about people, for people. Gen AI tools will only be used when there is a clear and obvious case for them, and only with the express permission of a senior editor. We will be open with our readers when we do this. Second, any use of genAI will focus on situations where it can improve the quality, not the quantity, of our work, for example helping interrogate vast datasets containing important revealing insights, or assisting our commercial teams in certain business processes. Third, to avoid exploiting the intellectual property of creators, a guiding principle for the Guardian will be the degree to which genAI systems have considered copyright permissioning and fair reward. Like other technologies before it, generative artificial intelligence will create risks and challenges, but this isn’t a reason to reject it out of hand. Nor can we ignore the impact it will have on society. We want to work with engineers who seek to design and build these technologies in a responsible and cautious way."
Industrial Revolution iron method ‘was taken from Jamaica by Briton’ – article by Hannah Devlin in The Guardian. "The Cort process, which allowed wrought iron to be mass-produced from scrap iron for the first time, has long been attributed to the British financier turned ironmaster Henry Cort. It helped launch Britain as an economic superpower and transformed the face of the country with 'iron palaces', including Crystal Palace, Kew Gardens’ Temperate House and the arches at St Pancras train station. Now, an analysis of correspondence, shipping records and contemporary newspaper reports reveals the innovation was first developed by 76 black Jamaican metallurgists at an ironworks near Morant Bay, Jamaica. Many of these metalworkers were enslaved people trafficked from west and central Africa, which had thriving iron-working industries at the time. Dr Jenny Bulstrode, a lecturer in history of science and technology at University College London (UCL) and author of the paper, said: 'This innovation kicks off Britain as a major iron producer and … was one of the most important innovations in the making of the modern world.'”
The Guardian view on Blaise Pascal: a thinker for our times – editorial in The Guardian. "Amid rising concern over the future impact of artificial intelligence, and fears of digital overload, Pascal’s passions and preoccupations speak to our times as well as his. In his youth, the mathematical prodigy from the Auvergne was a tech bro avant la lettre, before later becoming a supreme analyst of the human condition. Pascal was responsible for innovations that paved the way for some of the possibilities of AI. In his 20s, at the request of a gambling acquaintance who couldn’t break a losing run at dice, he undertook groundbreaking studies in probability theory. Before that, he invented the world’s first mechanical calculator – the snazzily named Pascaline. But mastery of tech didn’t assuage a sense of angst. Pascal’s 'arithmetical machine', as he puts it in the Pensées, 'produces effects which approach nearer to thought than all the actions of animals'. But human reason was something altogether more splendid and problematic, because it was bound up with a soul, a mortal body and a will. Unlike both animals and machines, humans were condemned to worry about the meaning of life. But as finite beings, seeing through a glass darkly, they were hopelessly ill-equipped to find a satisfactory explanation.... Pascal berated the tendency of his contemporaries to park the problem by seeking distraction in sport, sex and other ways to pass the time. 'All of humanity’s problems,' he wrote, 'stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.'”
Tom Cruise, anti-imperialism and zero body-fat: Bruce Lee’s legacy 50 years after his death – article by Steve Rose in The Guardian. "Lee is one of those rare stars who is bigger than his movies. Despite leaving a slim body of work – just four complete films – he practically spawned a whole genre, and wrote the book for Hollywood action to this day. Lee runs through the DNA of global culture: video games, hip-hop and mixed martial arts, not to mention the general rise of the super-fit, zero-body-fat masculine physical ideal. The fact that he died young, in perplexingly banal circumstances (a reaction to a painkiller) only burnishes his myth. Lee also built a unique persona – intense, disciplined, physical yet cerebral – light years away from western stereotypes of Asian masculinity that were very much in play when he first came to Hollywood in the mid-1960s.... Despite training a roster of celebrity students in the martial arts ..., Lee realised the US was not ready to accept an Asian leading man. The final insult came with the 1970s TV series Kung Fu. Lee’s involvement in developing the show, which followed a Shaolin monk in the old west, is contested. Either way, he auditioned for the lead role, only to be passed over in favour of David Carradine, who had neither Chinese ancestry nor any knowledge of martial arts.... The success of [his Hong Kong] films caught Hollywood’s attention at last, but, even with his classic Enter The Dragon (released a month after his death), Lee wasn’t trusted to carry the movie alone, so Jim Kelly and John Saxon were cast alongside him. The 70s kung fu craze fed into everything from comic books (Marvel’s Stan Lee once described Lee as 'a superhero without a costume') to pop music. By that time, Lee had also reinvigorated the Hong Kong film industry, which has sent a flow of actors westwards ever since: Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Maggie Cheung and, of course, Michelle Yeoh."
Should we confront the toxic legacy of blackface … or just forget it? – article by David Olusoga in The Guardian. "As we try to show in [the television documentary] David Harewood on Blackface, the transatlantic history of blackface minstrelsy can broadly be divided into two chapters. The first ended and the second began one day in the spring of 1896, when the French camera operator and projectionist Charles Moisson took a walk down Rupert Street in Soho [and] stumbled across a group of blackface minstrels. The short film Moisson produced is called Nègres dansant dans la rue. Filmed more than 60 years after the first minstrel shows had arrived in London, it captures a group of white men in blackface performing a dance routine in front of a small crowd. By 1896, three generations of British men had applied burnt cork to their faces and made their living through racial impersonation – presenting audiences with what was by then a highly ritualised image of African Americans – a people about whom they knew little and who lived in a nation they had never visited. I’ve watched Moisson’s film dozens of times, and what captivates me most are the young boys lined up on Rupert Street: they are as captivated by the unfamiliar sight of a movie camera as by the far more familiar image of street performers in blackface. Those boys will have been in their late 50s and 60s by the time the Windrush arrived in that same city half a century later. In their formative years, this is the image of black people that was presented to them.... Making a documentary about a forgotten aspect of a forgotten history is always challenging. What has made the production of this documentary so difficult – and led to me to keep changing the scripts and tweaking the final version – is the issue of language. Minstrelsy was one of the delivery systems through which stereotypes and racial slurs were transmitted from the US into British English.... Is it possible to reveal how horrific minstrelsy was without discussing such language? Would removing those terms play into the hands of those who seek to minimise the history of race and racism? Can the warnings we make throughout the documentary be enough to protect those who – for entirely understandable reasons – would rather avoid hearing those words and seeing those images? Are there some subjects that are better left entombed in the archives?"
The Visionaries review – seers who were shaped by the shadow of war – review by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. "The Visionaries is about four contemporaries [Simone Weil, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt and Ayn Rand] working independently of one another. They had little in common but the fact that they were women and were writing and thinking as what Auden called the low, dishonest decade of the 1930s gave way to the horrors of the second world war – each finding very different ways of responding in their writings to a world turned upside down by the Holocaust and Hiroshima.... In 1939, as 5 million troops faced one another in western Europe, [Weil] wrote the profoundly timely essay The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, arguing war petrifies souls into a blindness to the consequences of one’s own actions... 'To define force – it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as to its victims: the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.' Simone de Beauvoir ... only met the other Simone once, but [when they did] inevitably they clashed. Weil announced the only thing that mattered in the world was a revolution to feed the world’s starving. 'I retorted that the problem was not to make men happy but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down. "It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry", she snapped. Our relations ended right there.' And yet the story that Eilenberger threads through the book is of De Beauvoir emerging from the influence of her lover and fellow existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre to find, not just her own polymorphous sexuality, but a philosophy not trapped in the intellectual prison of the solitary ego, as his was.... The example of Hannah Arendt, on the run throughout this decade from fascist murderers first to Paris then Lisbon and eventually New York, is particularly salutary in this context: from early on her writing was profoundly engaged with geopolitical realities in a manner as yet beyond Sartre. Her developing thinking, Eilenberger relates, led Arendt to doubt universal declarations of human rights. There’s nothing that would make one more sceptical about France’s human rights tradition than seeing fellow Jews delivered by gendarmes to Nazi killers.... A few streets away in New York, ... Ayn Rand was developing philosophy very different from Arendt’s generous humanism. Personally, I find it ridiculous that Eilenberger gives this sophomoric pseudo-Nietzschean space in a book devoted mostly to much more subtle women. Her endless blethering in the imperative mood like Jordan Peterson on a bad day, about will, selfishness, the worthlessness of altruism and the moral foundation of capitalism, is very hard to take. And yet, I suppose, it is important to realise that Rand, though the feeblest of the thinkers here, was the most successful... Former British cabinet minister Sajid Javid, he of the 'Tory power stance', is a fan." See also review by Caroline Moorehead: The Visionaries by Wolfram Eilenberger review – four women who changed the world
Looking for Eileen: how George Orwell wrote his wife out of his story – article by Anna Funder in The Guardian, derived from her book Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life. "The newlyweds were living in a tiny cottage in Wallington, 30 miles from London, with no electricity, one tap and an outdoor privy. According to some of [his biographers], he’s 'the happiest he’s ever been….'... Orwell’s 'combination of elements and circumstances' are, apparently, happy accidents rather than a situation tailor-made for him by Eileen. These conditions appear to exist without a creator, because the passive voice has made her disappear. For mysterious reasons the biographers don’t directly attribute to Eileen, his writing suddenly got much better.... Eileen had taken the word “obey” out of her marriage vows: the first radical act of the editing genius – she wrote 'emendations' on his drafts, and they worked very closely together on Animal Farm – that would define her marriage. But Eileen was there, working, dealing with his correspondence, organising their social lives, doing all the shopping (involving a bus ride to a village three miles away) and much of the cleaning (there is, intermittently, a 'char'), tackling the occasional flood, the cesspit, the house, the garden, his illnesses, the chickens, the goat and the visitors. And managing her impulses towards murder or separation when George doesn’t want his work interrupted by life. (He 'complained bitterly when we’d been married a week that he’d only done two good days’ work out of seven,' Eileen wrote to Norah.)... As I came to recognise the methods of omission, they fascinated me. When women can’t be left out, they are doubted, trivialised, or reduced to footnotes in eight-point type. Other times, chronology is manipulated to conceal. But the most insidious way the actions of women are omitted is by using the passive voice. Manuscripts are typed without typists, idyllic circumstances exist without creators, an escape from Stalinist pursuers is achieved, by the passports being 'in order'. Every time I saw [in the biographies of Orwell] 'it was arranged that' or 'nobody was hurt' I became sensitised – who arranged it? Who might have been hurt? I didn’t want to take Orwell, or his work, down in any way. I worried he might risk being 'cancelled' by the story I’m telling. Though she, of course, has been cancelled already – by patriarchy. I needed to find a way to hold them all – work, man and wife – in a constellation in my mind, each part keeping the other in place. I was fortunate to obtain permission to use the six letters from Eileen to Norah, and from them I created a counterfiction, to exist alongside the fiction of omission in the biographies."
