Cuttings: October 2024

The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think – article by Shannon Vallor on Noema, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “At a machine learning conference in September of 2023, I asked the Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio why we keep hearing about ‘superhuman‘ AI when the products available are so far from what a human is, much less superhuman…. I asked him, isn’t this rhetoric ultimately unhelpful and misleading given that the AI systems that we so desperately need to control lack the most fundamental capabilities and features of a human mind? How, I asked, does an AI system without the human capacity for conscious self-reflection, empathy or moral intelligence become superhuman merely by being a faster problem-solver? Aren’t we more than that? And doesn’t granting the label ‘superhuman‘ to machines that lack the most vital dimensions of humanity end up obscuring from our view the very things about being human that we care about?… I was trying to get Bengio to acknowledge that there is a huge difference between superhuman computational speed or accuracy — and being superhuman, i.e., more than human. … Bengio refused to grant the premise. Before I could even finish the question, he demanded: ‘You don’t think that your brain is a machine?’ …Our disagreement was not about the capabilities of machine learning models at all. It was about the capabilities of human beings, and what descriptions of those capabilities we can and should license….For decades, the AI research community’s holy grail of artificial general intelligence (AGI) was defined by equivalence with human minds — not just the tasks they complete….But OpenAI and researchers like Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio are now telling us a different story. A self-aware machine that is ‘indistinguishable from the human mind‘ is no longer the defining ambition for AGI. A machine that matches or outperforms us on a vast array of economically valuable tasks is the latest target…. OpenAI’s AGI bait-and-switch wipes anything that does not count as economically valuable work from the definition of intelligence. That’s a massive erasure of our human capacity and a reduction of ourselves that we should resist. Are you no more than the work you completed today? Are you any less human or less intelligent if you spent your waking hours doing things that do not have well-defined ‘solutions,‘ that are not tasks that can be checked off a list, and that have no market price?… The struggle against this reductive and cynical ideology has been hard-fought for a few hundred years thanks to vigorous resistance from labor and human rights movements that have articulated and defended humane, nonmechanical, noneconomic standards for the treatment and valuation of human beings — standards like dignity, justice, autonomy and respect. Yet to finally convince us that humans are no more than mechanical generators of economically valuable outputs, it seems to have only required machine tools that generate such outputs in our primary currencies of human meaning: language and vision. … The battle is not lost, however. As the philosopher Albert Borgmann wrote in his 1984 book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, it is precisely when a technology has nearly supplanted a vital domain of human meaning that we are able to feel and mourn what has been taken from us. It is at that moment that we often begin to resist, reclaim and rededicate ourselves to its value.… We are in danger of sleepwalking our way into a future where all we do is fail more miserably at being those machines ourselves. Might we be ready to wake ourselves up? In an era that rewards and recognizes only mechanical thinking, can humans still remember and reclaim what we are? I don’t think it is too late. I think now may be exactly the time.“

The Enduring Influence of Marx’s Masterpiece – article by Wendy Brown in The Nation, from her forward to a new English translation of Marx's Capital, listed by John Naughton in his Observer column. ”Marx knew that [capitalism’s] unprecedented order of production and destruction, extraction and exploitation was not easy to see or understand. This was especially so because it took place under the sign of freedom—free markets, free humans, and the free circulation of labor, capital, and commodities. Grasping capital’s power and reach thus necessitated broadening and deepening the scope of political economy, departing from economists’ calculative economic frameworks for historical, philosophical, social-theoretical, and even theological ones. It requires leaving what he called the ‘noisy sphere’ of the market not only to enter the factory (posted with its sign, ‘No admittance except on business’) to see where wealth was produced, but to adopt a framework that accounts for the perversity and illusion of markets coming to stand for the whole. It requires understanding why capital’s complex and distributed workings are less visible to the eye than previous modes of political economy, how its freedoms obscure the drives and effects that make it the greatest system of domination ever made or inhabited by humans. All of these requirements are counterintuitive to those who equate capitalism with markets, where buyers and sellers, supply and demand, money and price, are the only things elemental and visible. What was necessary to capture and analyze capital’s vastness, power, complexity, and opacity, then, was not merely a new description of it but ‘a critique of political economy,‘ Capital’s subtitle. Political economy itself has a dual venue and meaning for Marx: It refers to practical arrangements, to practices of knowledge and, as we shall see, to their complex cogeneration and entwining. Critique of the practical arrangements entailed discerning both how capitalism worked and did not work, its engines and drives, its structural crises, and its wide ramifications and effects beyond markets. Critique of knowledge practices related to political economy included both its popular and erudite forms—the language of capitalists, the language of scholars, and the language of those in between such as that of left polemicists and journalists. Critique of erudite knowledge in turn comprised scope, method, and conceptualization as well as content. Marx’s task in Capital was enormous.“

The long and the short of our confidence in AI – review by Rob Nelson of AI Snake Oil (by Arvind Narayanan and Sayesh Kapoor) and The Ordinal Society (by Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy) on AI Log, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “[Since their book project was announced in 2022, their Substack] has established Narayanan and Kapoor as among the most visible skeptics of Silicon Valley’s bullshit. They dismantle the misleading claims of technology companies, journalists, and academics by writing clearly about how the technology should be understood and evaluated. Crucially, they provide social context, not just technical insight, to make sense of how genuine technological progress, as well as ballyhoo and fraud, have shaped the market in products ‘powered by AI.’ That market changed dramatically just as the two started writing. One of Narayanan’s early posts about students turning in machine-generated essays anticipated what happened in late 2022 when OpenAI hooked up GPT-3.5 to a chatbot interface and accidentally created The Homework Machine. ... As Narayanan and Kapoor observe [from their concise re-telling of the 80-year story of computing], the goal of generality in computing is connected to efficiency and ‘is a special case of the fact that capitalist means of production strongly gravitate toward more automation in general.’ The idea of automating knowledge work has produced much excitement among technology barons and concern among the newly attentive public. This helps explain why discussions of AGI are so often conducted using the vocabularies of dystopian science fiction and eschatological religion.... The Ordinal Society explains something often missing from critical accounts about internet technology and AI.… Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy show that [consumer behaviors play a major role in] the degradation of the Internet. It is not simply the brothers of technology and greedy corporations who have made these markets in snake oil. Our own, often unexamined, desires are the foundation for the digital world we find ourselves inhabiting.... Fourcade and Healy, both social scientists, are concerned about Silicon Valley’s demand for and control of data….This data imperative, turning our digital waste into profitable commodities, has been ‘a cultural and political accomplishment,’ as well as an economic triumph for Google and the other increasingly giant technology companies. The Ordinal Society surveys how academic social science has responded to these developments in ways that are useful for anyone who wants to understand how social theory explains digital capitalism. It offers two insights that help explain markets in AI snake oil. The first is the danger the data imperative poses for social science.… [Tech companies] have asserted control over ’the production of social-scientific knowledge by way of their domination over the data economy.’ This has left social scientists outside looking in as ’what previously was a free flow of data easily scraped from the web can suddenly disappear into walled gardens or behind an application programming interface (API) that is exorbitantly expensive to access.' As Narayanan and Kapoor also make clear, the data theft and lack of transparency associated with training the largest AI models have made this problem worse.,,, The other insight is that this new world of measurement presented in algorithms has enormous appeal for individuals. Knowing our numbers … gives us a sense of who we are and a way to measure who we might become. These ordinal scales use data about our past to tell us what we desperately want to know: our future. In an uncertain world, these numbers fix us.… We compare our numbers to the average or to the scores of our classmates or neighbors. Like the bureaucracies that manage these predictive systems, individuals can use their outputs to understand their risk of dying of heart disease or getting diabetes, or their chances of getting a car loan or being admitted to or hired by an elite college. The rankings pioneered by US News serve a similar purpose for administrators of universities and hospitals.For both individuals and institutions, the ordinal processes of digital capitalism answer the questions ‘Where do I fit?‘ and ‘How do I improve my position?‘ with numbers, models, and methods. The Ordinal Society is, so far, the most interesting analysis of the social world we have created out of our ‘desire to cast the world into a more rational shape in our minds.‘“

Kill Lists – article by Sophia Goodfriend in the London Review of Books, referenced in The Guardian First Edition newsletter 18 October 2024. "The IDF doesn’t always advertise its new capabilities. In April, the Israeli/Palestinian website +972 Magazine and other outlets reported that Israeli intelligence units are using algorithmically generated kill lists to determine targets for missile strikes across the Gaza Strip. ‘I have much more trust in a statistical mechanism,’ one of the soldiers interviewed said. ‘The machine did it coldly.’ ... The IDF has a number of AI-assisted systems. Aviv Kohavi, its chief of staff until early last year, gave an interview about the new technology to Israel’s largest daily paper, Yedioth Ahronoth.... Three tools in particular have been widely used across Gaza over the last two years: Lavender, Gospel and Where’s Daddy. Lavender provides a list of people to be approved for assassination. Gospel tries to determine where they live, or where they store weapons and plan military operations. Where’s Daddy sends alerts when the targets enter their family homes, so that the air force knows when to strike. All of these tools rely on machine learning systems to trawl through masses of data from a variety of sources, including drone and satellite reconnaissance, location monitoring, social media scraping and transcripts from phone calls, text messages and encrypted messaging applications. Algorithms determine patterns based on where someone went, at what time, to whom they talked and how often. These systems allow the military to bypass the many intelligence analysts, munitions experts and lawyers who were once required to determine valid targets and authorise attacks. Kohavi b0asted that the new tools are capable of supplying twice as many targets in a day – at least a hundred – as intelligence units used to come up with in a year."

How to use your senses to help beat depression – article by Norman Farb and Zindel Segal in The Guardian. "Modern life seems designed to stop us from being alone with our thoughts and feelings. Our days are built from the bricks of work and play, mortared by media and intoxicants.... Most people would agree that we need an occasional break from constant activity, but we seem unable to take advantage of our time off; rumination rushes in, spoiling what should be a period of respite.... The problem is that keeping our brains busy isn’t an effective form of relief. Instead, sensing the world – the sunlight on your skin, a gurgle in your belly, the thump of your heartbeat – without rushing back into thought and judgment, is what enriches and restores us. Before you label that emotion that seems to be bubbling up, ask: what does it feel like? Because when we are unable to stay with raw sensation, defaulting instead to ideas about those sensations, it can actually have disastrous consequences for our mental health. That’s what we’ve found in our research, which explored how the balance between thinking and sensing impacts wellbeing.... So keeping in touch with sensation, particularly in times of stress, may be a potent but overlooked resource for mental health. What we call 'sense foraging', purposely shifting attention to the sensory world with a willingness to be surprised, is one way of practising doing this, and it’s a skill that almost anyone can develop. If staying busy and distracting ourselves are both modes of largely automatic thinking, to truly give ourselves a break – and reduce the risk of becoming depressed – we need to switch into sensing, a fundamentally different mode that is receptive rather than agenda driven. By developing sensory 'muscles', we get better at taking in new information, which stimulates new trains of thought. This provides relief from rumination, potentially bouncing you out of the mental rut you’re stuck in."

I see the worrying consequences of assisted dying in other countries. Britain’s bill needs a radical rethink – article by Lucy Thomas (palliative care and public health doctor) in The Guardian. "In [Lord Falconer's] bill [soon to be debated in the House of Lords], as long as someone has mental capacity and is likely to have less than an arbitrarily chosen six months to live, they can receive assistance to end their life. There is no requirement that the causes of their suffering be explored, let alone addressed, nor that they receive care or support of any kind.... [It] implies that such patients are primarily motivated by uncontrollable pain or other intractable symptoms, and are fundamentally different to anyone else with suicidal thoughts. This is not my experience. The terminally ill patients I’ve cared for who’ve considered ending their lives have had the same complex range of concerns as other suicidal patients and, most importantly, have been equally responsive to care and support.... The implications of using terminal illness to determine eligibility for assisted dying extend far beyond those who actively want to end their lives. Once assisted dying is normalised as a healthcare option for terminally ill people, everyone with a terminal illness would have to consider whether they, too, should opt for it.... Why, then, is this medicalised approach supported by many who consider themselves compassionate and progressive? Few seem to realise that there is nothing inevitable about basing access to assisted dying on medical conditions, nor requiring doctors to provide it... If our motivation is compassion, and our aim is to relieve intractable suffering, then surely eligibility should be based on an assessment that someone’s suffering is intractable – not whether or not they have a particular illness, disability or life expectancy, nor any other external judgment about what makes a life worth living. Assisting someone to die would then be an option of last resort, to be used only if all other options to support them and address their suffering had been tried."

Pioneering aerial photographer’s pictures show England of the 1930s – article by Steven Morris in The Guardian. "They are not yet a century old but a collection of black and white photographs taken by a pioneering aerial photographer shows how very different aspects of everyday life are for Britons today. The images, taken by Arthur William Hobart in the 1930s as he leant out of a biplane, capture people moving about on horse-drawn vehicles as well as in motorised ones, and rivers teeming with working boats. There are striking images of industrial sites hemmed in by the terraces that housed their employees, and scenes of the British seaside that look a lot more genteel and less crowded than some of today’s brash resorts. Historic England is releasing pictures from Hobart’s Air Pictures Portleven collection after organising and digitising them. The collection features 242 images showing national landmarks, towns and cities, industrial sites, construction projects, cliffs and beaches, documenting the era between the two world wars."

How artificial intelligence is changing the reports US police write – article by Sukey Lewis in The Guardian. "A handful of California departments ... have started to use or test ... AI-powered software developed by Axon, an industry leader in body cameras and tasers. Axon said the program can help officers produce more objective reports in less time. But as more agencies adopt these kinds of tools, some experts wonder if they give artificial intelligence too big a part in the criminal justice system. 'We forget that that document plays a really central role in decisions that change people’s lives,' said Andrew Ferguson, a criminal law professor at American University Washington College of Law who wrote the first law review article on AI-assisted police reports, which he expects to publish next year.... Prosecutors make charging decisions, judges make bail decisions and people make decisions about their own defense based – at least in part – on what is on this initial piece of paper. 'If part of that is being shaped by AI, it raises some real concerns about whether we can rely on it,' Ferguson said. The potential for error or bias introduced by AI is still being studied. But, he added, law enforcement leaders have an understandable desire to improve efficiency. ... [Officer Wendy] Venegas in East Palo Alto said the program helped her overcome writer’s block, especially after a long day on patrol. She can just push the Draft One button on her computer, and a narrative based on the audio transcript of her bodycam footage appears within seconds.... Draft One is also changing the way she works in the field. Because the report is based on the audio transcript, Venegas said she will purposefully talk about what is happening during an incident. 'I’ll be like, "Did you see that? The mirror is broken,"' Venegas said. '"Did you see that? There’s stuff on the floor. The knife, the bloody knife, is on the floor."' An Axon product designer, Noah Spitzer-Williams, said this was one of the most surprising and fascinating side-effects of the software: it incentivizes officers to be more verbal overall, even talking into their camera’s microphone to provide context – like the parole status of a subject or whether a weapon has been reported before arriving at a scene – so the audio transcript contains key details that Draft One puts in the report. 'Then, during the interaction, the officer is asking more questions,' Spitzer-Williams said. 'They’re echoing back statements like, "OK, Jimmy. You’re giving me consent to search your backpack."' Spitzer-Williams said this also helps community relations because officers are explaining what they’re doing and why. But research by the American Civil Liberties Union shows the ways officers’ real-time narration has also been used to manipulate evidence. A common example is when officers shout 'stop resisting' to justify use of force even when the individual is complying. Axon’s Spitzer-Williams said he did not believe Draft One will make this 'real concern' any worse."

How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war – article by Naomi Klein in The Guardian. "What is the line between commemorating trauma and cynically exploiting it? Between memorialization and weaponization? What does it mean to perform collective grief when the collective is not universal, but rather tightly bound by ethnicity?... In Israel’s case, there was a near instant move to graphically re-create the events of 7 October as mediated experiences, sometimes with the goal of countering false claims that deny any atrocities occurred, but often with the explicit goal of reducing sympathy for Palestinians and generating support for Israel’s rapidly expanding wars. Before the one-year mark, there was already an off-Broadway “verbatim play”, called October 7, drawn from witness testimony; several art exhibitions, and at least two 7 October-themed fashion shows... Then there are the 7 October films, already an emerging subgenre. First came the Israeli military’s Bearing Witness, which compiled the most graphic and horrific moments captured on video that day. Within weeks of the attacks, it was being screened to curated audiences of politicians, business leaders and journalists everywhere from Davos to the Museum of Tolerance in LA.... With very few exceptions, the primary goal of these diverse works seems to be the transference of trauma to the audience: re-creating terrifying events with such vividness and intimacy that a viewer or visitor experiences a kind of identity merger, as if they themselves have been violated.... All efforts at commemoration aim to touch the hearts of people who were not there. But there is a difference between inspiring an emotional connection and deliberately putting people into a shellshocked, traumatized state. Achieving the latter result is why so much 7 October memorialization boasts that it is “immersive” – offering viewers and participants the chance to crawl inside the pain of others, based on a guiding assumption that the more people there are who experience the trauma of 7 October as if it was their own, the better off the world will be. Or rather, the better off Israel will be....There is a difference between understanding an event, which preserves the mind’s analytic capacity as well as one’s sense of self, and feeling like you are personally living through it. The latter produces not understanding but what [sociologist Amy] Sodaro has called a 'prosthetic trauma', which, she writes, is highly conducive to 'a simplistic dualism between good and evil that has important political implications'. Consumers of these experiences are encouraged to feel a distilled bond with the victims, who are the essence of good, and a distilled hatred for their aggressors, who are the essence of evil. The traumatized state is pure feeling, pure reaction. Vision is narrowed, tunneled. In this state, we do not ask what isn’t included in the frame of the immersive experience. And in the case of the deluge of immersive art being produced to commemorate 7 October, what is not included is Palestine, specifically Gaza. Not the decades of strangled conditions of life on the other side of the wall that led up to the attacks – and not the tens of thousands of Palestinian people, including wrenching numbers of infants and children, whom Israel has killed and maimed since 7 October. And that is precisely the point."

Anxiety can make you fear the worst, but don’t let it ruin your life – article by Anna Mathur in The Guardian. "Has anyone ever told you to 'stop worrying' or that 'it will all work out in the end'? It doesn’t really help, does it? After more than 10 years of working with clients as a psychotherapist, I am so aware of the headspace that worry and anxiety consumes.... As a child, I was full of worry, having lived through one of my own worst-case scenarios: losing a sibling. No matter how many times someone told me not to worry, it never silenced the thoughts and fears in my mind. How can someone reassure me that the worst probably won’t happen when, in one way, it already has?... Instead of doing everything I could to ease and avoid life’s uncomfortable truths, I sought a deeper acceptance of them. Through using this approach, I discovered that anxiety finally began to loosen its grip. In researching my book I discovered 10 uncomfortable realities that many of us are afraid to face – ways you can thrive amid these uncertainties and embrace more of life’s joy, despite full awareness of what’s at stake. (1) Some people don't like me.... (2) I am going to fail... (3) Life isn't fair.... (4) I will hurt people I love... (5) I can't always be fully present.... (6) People misunderstand me.... (7) I am not good enough.... (8) Bad things will happen.... (9) I will lose people I love.... (10) I am going to die. ... There is an African proverb that captures my motivation behind seeking more acceptance of these truths. It goes: 'When death finds you, may it find you alive.' I don’t want to wait until a curveball trauma forces me to be grateful for the joys in my life and the limited opportunity I have to embrace them, nor do I want to wait until I’m older and (more) grey to care less what others think. I don’t want to live a half-life blighted by fear of failure or bad things happening, and I don’t want you to have that either."

Hew Locke’s British Museum looting exposé: ‘inescapably, deeply shocking’ – review by Adrian Searle in The Guardian. "Part history lesson, part crime scene, Hew Locke’s What Have We Here? is filled with beauty and horror. At the heart of the show, in the Great Court Gallery of the British Museum in London, are looting and vandalism, the destruction of societies, the erasure of cultures and the enslavement of their peoples. All are embedded in the British Museum’s own history and holdings. And that’s without even touching on the frieze of sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens, and the sorry story of their acquisition, or to whom exactly many of the other objects in the museum might be returned, even if there was a will to do so. Where are the pre-Columbian Caribbean Taino people now, whose hardwood spirit-figures of a birdman and of Boinayel the Rain Giver were found in a cave in Jamaica in 1792. The sculptures entered the British Museum’s collection, while the Taino were mostly wiped out, if not by murder then by diseases to which they had no immunity, following the arrival of the Europeans. ... Locke’s terse little notes are placed beside many of the exhibits he has chosen from the collection. Working with his partner, curator Indra Khanna, and with the curators of the British Museum, Locke has done much more than set his own sculptures and images among works in the museum’s collection. He has also borrowed from the Royal collection, the British Library and elsewhere to make an exhibition that is inescapably, deeply shocking. This is an exhibition that looks not only at works in the collection themselves, but also at what they once meant and the further meanings and resonances they have accrued in their journeys here. The show’s title appears plain enough. After that, everything is complicated."

Millionaire business owners urge Rachel Reeves to raise £14bn from rise in capital gains tax – article by Richard Partington in The Guardian. "Rachel Reeves has been urged by a group of millionaire business owners to raise £14bn from an increase in capital gains tax at this month’s budget, arguing it would have no impact on investment in Britain. Ahead of the chancellor’s set-piece event on 30 October, the group of wealthy investors said increasing the tax rate on asset disposals would help to raise vital funds for public services and would not lead to slower economic growth. In a report by the centre-left IPPR thinktank, which carries influence with the Treasury, the millionaire entrepreneurs said they would welcome an increase in the rate levied on capital gains to match the higher rate of income tax. The report showed that capital gains tax (CGT) was not a primary driver of investment decisions, with entrepreneurs more focused on issues including access to financing, market opportunities, and broader economic conditions. Mark Campbell, the millionaire co-founder of Higgidy pies, said higher rates of CGT would not 'scare away real investors' in Britain. 'Entrepreneurs don’t think about [it] when they create businesses. [It] would not have stopped us investing in Higgidy,' he said."

When I delivered the worst of news to my dying patient, she cried, but not about her prognosis – article by Ranjana Srivastava in The Guardian. "When [oncologists like me are] called to see a patient at the tail end of an admission, it’s to deliver the worst kind of bad news. Or more accurately, to collect the fragments of bad news into a cogent explanation and confirm what everyone has hinted at: the illness is serious and the prognosis grave. [One patient] is a wife, mother and the kind of amicable person one could readily imagine delivering just-baked cookies to a friend or offering to mind a neighbour’s baby. After weeks of investigations for recurrent cancer, she is despondent. One surgeon places her on the operating list. A second, junior surgeon isn’t convinced but holds his tongue. A third surgeon, who was scheduled to perform the operation, cancels it and I see why: while surgery is technically feasible, the most predictable outcome would be to prolong hospitalisation at the risk of wasting what precious time remains of her life. She has a clear-eyed understanding of her impossible situation but still, filling in the gaps feels punitive. I tell her the surgeon was right to spare her the futile surgery. We discuss that chemotherapy would be unhelpful. She asks how long, then adds she figures time is short. I touch her arm, swallow and nod. And then she is crying. The teardrops are plunging from her eyes, sliding down her cheeks and into the back of her sleeve. I look around for tissues; she tearfully jokes that we are in a public hospital. But here is the thing. She isn’t crying because I have just admired her unrivalled poise. She is not even crying about her prognosis or that she won’t see the grandchildren growing up. She is crying, she says, because kindness melts her.... Her account underlines an important attitude among patients that is often missed by doctors. We like to think patients judge us for our medical acumen but, in fact, they observe the words we say, the empathy we show and the kindness we offer. This is a lesson as abundantly available as it is hard to absorb. It illustrates the continuing gap between how doctors and patients view what really matters in medicine. Doctors are trained to think too much and feel too little. Our patients know we think enough but want us to feel more. As technology, machinery and bureaucracy overwhelm us, the essence of good medicine remains an open secret. Days after we meet, the loose ends are tied and the patient is preparing to go home for the last time. She reassures me that she is leaving with a light heart, which feels impossible under the circumstances but is a testament to her character. She reflects that she will always remember the warmth that I and others showed her. How telling it is that we came nowhere near extending her life and yet her prevailing response is one of gratitude."

Why our ideas about protest and mob psychology are dangerously wrong – article by Dan Hancox in The Guardian. "Our politics, media and pop culture have always been stacked with these myths – with people in power decrying mindless mobs, madding crowds, unthinking masses, stampeding hordes and herd mentalities.... Le Bon’s seminal work [of 1895], The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, is one of the bestselling nonfiction books of all time....He is still regularly cited by columnists and politicians in 2024 to condemn the mania of the mob. But there are two problems with this pervasive received wisdom about crowd psychology and behaviour. The first problem – and it’s quite a big one – is that the work is verifiably, scientifically, nonsense. Le Bon was an eccentric, war-traumatised eugenicist and proto-fascist, terrified by the growing demands of the French masses for democracy and socialism, and The Crowd is fuelled by fear and loathing, not research.... The second problem with the myths of mob mentality, homogeneous 'herd logic' and contagious crowd violence is that they are incredibly persistent – in spite of being false – because defaming the crowd will always serve elite power and undermine democracy.... Fortunately, a new generation of crowd psychologists are developing fresh ideas. Detailed case studies conducted by academics such as Stephen Reicher and Clifford Stott have proved what many of us know instinctively: that joining a crowd of like-minded souls brings us kinship, confidence, and joy – and that every crowd contains a multitude of behaviours and psychological responses. Reicher uncovered what might be an unpalatable truth in his seminal study of the 'riot' in St Paul’s, Bristol, in 1980: that joy, warmth and solidarity are often experienced even while cars are being set alight. Far from erasing our sense of self, coming together with fellow football fans, music fans, or people with the same political or religious affiliations, is greatly affirming.... This doesn’t mean all crowds are forces for good, of course. While my reporting has taken me to inspiring political protests, hedonistic global carnivals and other festivals in the name of journalism, I have also borne witness to sinister crowds, such as the fascist paramilitaries of the Magyar Gárda in Budapest and a proto-Trump Tea Party rally in White Plains, New York; I have even been to watch Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. Watching with horror the racist riots in August this year, I was unsurprised that many anti-racists opted for the classic Le Bonian interpretation: here is the deranged, brainless violence of the mob. But it does nothing to strengthen the cause of anti-racism to apply the same baseless analysis to crowds we dislike. When you call a violent fascist 'brainless', you are not just skipping a much-needed reckoning with their hateful ideology, you are also letting them off the hook for their conscious decisions and actions."

15 years of Horrible Histories: kids’ TV so good it’s getting a Bafta – article by Michael Hogan in The Guardian. "Hooray for Horrible Histories. It was announced today that, in its 15th year, the beloved CBBC sketch show will receive a Bafta special award in honour of its 'extraordinary cultural and social impact'. Based on the bestselling books by Terry Deary, it blazed on to our screens in 2009 and gave patronising children’s programming a hobnail boot up the backside. It spoke to young viewers in a language they understood. Sophisticated sketches were mixed with pop video parodies. The emphasis was always on the gruesome, anarchic, anti-authoritarian and scatological, inspiring six- to 12-year-olds to engage with the past.... In the comedic lineage of Monty Python and Blackadder, it became cult viewing for parents too.... Regardless of demographics, Horrible Histories remains one of the most inventive, exuberant and flat-out funniest shows on TV. Its theme song and continuing mission statement? 'Gory, ghastly, mean and cruel. Stuff they don’t teach you at school.'"

‘I miss her a lot’: Andrew Garfield telling Elmo about grief was his best work yet – article by Stuart Heritage in The Guardian. "Two days ago, a video of [actor Andrew Garfield] talking to Elmo [on Sesame Street] was released online. In it, Garfield discusses the death of his mother and the complicated forms that his grief has taken. 'I’m just thinking about my mum today,' he tells Elmo. 'She passed away not too long ago, and I miss her a lot.' Elmo tells Garfield that he gets sad when he misses people, but Garfield replies that: 'Sadness is kind of a gift. It’s a lovely thing to feel, in a way, because it means you really love somebody when you miss them … it makes me feel close to her when I miss her.' Something like this – an actor simplifying bereavement for the benefit of a puppet – could be cloying. Yet there is absolutely no doubt that Garfield is being utterly sincere. He stumbles over some of his lines. His eyes prick with tears as he speaks. It is not, as you can imagine, something you should watch without steeling yourself a bit beforehand.... To some extent, I can relate. My mum died a couple of years before Garfield’s, and in similar circumstances. Like Garfield, I had to go and promote something while it was happening.... And I was only talking to a few hundred people at a time. Garfield had to talk to the entire world, while simultaneously knowing that most people just wanted to know if he was going to be Spider-Man again. The fortitude this must have required. However, in this most recent instance, Garfield at least had Elmo to help him. This must have been some comfort because there’s something about Elmo, some innate puppet magic, that allows whoever he’s talking with to be the version of themselves that they most are.... [Garfield's] Elmo segment let him take a step back from his memefication [of the promotional trail for his new film] and talk about something that truly matters to him, with far more genuine emotion than stars often show while they’re out punting their movies. We should be thankful for the both of them."

‘You tried to tell yourself I wasn’t real’: what happens when people with acute psychosis meet the voices in their heads? – article by Jenny Kleeman in The Guardian. "If you hear voices, clinicians don’t generally ask what they’re saying to you, beyond whether they are asking you to harm yourself or others.... A clinician may diagnose a patient with psychosis, and prescribe them medication or CBT, without knowing what the patient’s voices say to them. ... Prof Julian Leff was seven years into his retirement when the idea of avatar therapy came to him. After a celebrated career as a social psychiatrist and schizophrenia specialist at University College London, Leff was sitting at home in Hampstead, pondering the results of a survey that reported the most distressing aspect of hearing voices was the feeling of helplessness. On the rare occasions when his patients had had meaningful exchanges with their voices, he knew they had felt more in control. 'I thought, how can I enable the patient to have a dialogue with an invisible voice?' Leff said in an interview for a documentary made in 2018, three years before his death.... Leff was awarded a small grant for a pilot study in 2008. He recruited Mark Huckvale, professor of speech, hearing and phonetic sciences at UCL, to be in charge of the tech. They tinkered with existing police identikit software, animating digitally created faces in three dimensions so they could nod, smile and maintain eye contact.... The avatar was a floating, moving head on a computer screen, voiced by Leff, who would be in a separate room to the patient, watching via webcam. He could speak to the patient in his own voice, guiding them through the dialogue, and then switch with the click of a mouse to the role of the avatar on the patient’s screen, its lips synched to his speech. The setup allowed him to act as a therapist to the patient and a puppeteer to the avatar. At first, the avatar would say typical lines the patient had shared with Leff: often degrading, abusive phrases. But over the course of six sessions, the dialogue would change, with the avatar yielding to the patient, transforming from omnipotent to submissive. At all times, Leff and the patient were to treat the avatar as if it were an entirely real third party. Sixteen people – all of whom had heard voices for years, despite being on medication – participated in this pilot study.... To Leff’s surprise, [two of the participants] stopped hearing their voices entirely after only three sessions. While most patients did not experience such a dramatic change, the results were still impressive: for 13 of the 16 participants, voices remained, but they were less frequent and intrusive, and suicidal feelings were significantly reduced."

Eternal You: it’s impossible not to be horrified by this AI quest to bring the dead back to life – review by Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. "Eternal You is a 100-minute dive into the cold and murky waters of the digital afterlife industry. To those of you blessedly unfamiliar with this phenomenon – as I was before I watched this world-tilting, mind-galvanising film – there are companies dedicated to using AI to create convincing avatars of dead people. The whole of internetted human history is crunched, including whatever digital footprint left by the deceased, plus whatever details the bereaved care to add and then, for a small sum, loved ones can communicate once again with the departed.... It is impossible not to be horrified by the whole thing. It is impossible not to notice the expansive understanding of humanity emanating from critics such as Sherry Turkle and Carl Öhman compared with the flippant demeanour of most of the tech bros and others behind the development of the technology. With special mention going to the founder of Project December, Jason Rohrer, whose wife had the idea before he did but didn’t tell him because, he laughs: 'She thought it shouldn’t be done, or something.' Rohrer laughs his way dismissively, too, through Angel’s distress after [the AI version of her dead partner] Cameroun tells her he is in hell. 'I’ve got some bad news for her – in my opinion … her whole belief system [Christianity] is flawed.' It is not his job, Rohrer insists, to keep warning people not to buy into the illusion: 'That doesn’t make for a good experience.' And, the thought hangs unspoken in the air – a good experience is what people pay for.... Eternal You is a film about many things. At one level, it’s about technological innovation, brilliant minds, practical and legislative conundrums, the best and worst of free-market capitalism. At another, even perhaps for people of a naturally less luddite bent than myself, it is about the eternal exploitation of the desperate by the greedy, cruel or unthinking. It’s also about the opening up of an abyss of horrors masquerading as answers to unbearable longings, into which some people will willingly jump, others will fall, and over whose edge all of humanity will eventually be dragged, kicking, screaming, but with no other choice. It is about the death of grace, the death perhaps of the meaning of life itself."

‘You can’t shoot climate change’: Richard Seymour on how far right exploits environmental crisis –interview by Maya Goodfellow in The Guardian. "An examination of the far right globally, Disaster Nationalism isn’t strictly about the climate crisis. But they are clearly connected. While disaster-laden fantasies capture imaginations, the environmental crisis lurks in the background. Seymour wants to interrogate this: why is fictional collapse so appealing, so exhilarating, when we live in a world of already existing, real disasters? If people are miserable, insecure and humiliated, the far right offers a specific remedy in disaster nationalism, Seymour argues. 'It offers the balm, not just of vengeance, but of a sort of violent reset which restores the traditional consolations of family, race, religion and nationhood, including the chance to humiliate others.' ...'If I agree to fantasise about gruesome, erotically charged scenarios for whose reality I’ve been given no good evidence, I am not simply lacking ‘critical skills’ or ‘media literacy’: the fantasy is doing something for me. It is staging something that I want, even if I don’t want to want it. And if that fantasy is then adopted by numerous others, for no good reason, then the wish obviously isn’t reducible to personal psychopathology but is rooted in a shared social condition.'... And that shared social condition is crucially affected and shaped by climate breakdown. The 2020 Oregon wildfires are illustrative, sweeping through the western US state after a series of chronic disasters: the credit crunch, skyrocketing rural poverty, alcoholism, suicide above the norm and a breakdown of local news, leaving Facebook and Nextdoor to fill the void. But when mostly white, rural, conservative Christians see the fires, it’s not climate change or capitalism they blame. Spontaneously – not orchestrated by any one person or politician – it is the conspiracies they’ve heard that make the most sense of something so large and so destructive: Antifa, doing the bidding of the Democrats whose aim is to usher in communism, are to blame, wanting to kill people like them to remake America. Ideas like these spread like a contagion and the threshold for their uptake isn’t necessarily that high.”