Mechanical Intelligence

Before miniaturization made them all but disappear, computers were experienced as physical things. [...] But their magic had its limits because they didn’t work very well. Any illusion of spiritual embodiment was shattered when you had to clear up a jammed paper tape. If you were on a first-name basis with the mechanic who oiled the gears and adjusted the set screws, you were unlikely to attribute transcendent qualities to the machine even on the days when it worked perfectly.

But people were beginning to converse with computers without seeing them, and it turned out that even the flimsiest screen—between Dorothy the user and Oz the computer—seduced people into regarding the machine as human, or even wizardly.

ELIZA was the original chatbot, created by MIT’s Joseph Weizenbaum in the mid-1960s. Named after the reprogrammed flower girl of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Harry R. Lewi, Harvard Magazine

breve storia dell'intelligenza artificiale

 

Farewell to Academe

After 42 years of academic life—not counting five years spent getting a Ph.D.—I am hanging it up.[...]

My more than four decades, interrupted by stints of public service in the Defense and State Departments, were spent at just three academic institutions. Harvard formed and launched me; the Naval War College exposed me to America’s senior officer corps and its leadership culture; and Johns Hopkins, where I spent 34 years, gave me the opportunity to teach wonderful students, build a department, and become a dean. In all three places, I was given extraordinary freedom to think, write, speak, and serve my country, alongside remarkable colleagues, superiors, and, above all, students.

And yet I leave elite academe with doubts and foreboding that I would not have anticipated when I completed my formal education in 1982.  Eliot A. Cohen, The Atlantic

condivido

The history of the footnote

“The history of the footnote may well seem an apocalyptically trivial topic,” writes historian Anthony Grafton. “Footnotes seem to rank among the most colorless and uninteresting features of historical practice.” And yet, Grafton—who has also written The Footnote: A Curious History (1999)—argues that they’re actually pretty important.

“Once the historian writes with footnotes, historical narrative becomes a distinctly modern” practice, Grafton explains. History is no longer a matter of rumor, unsubstantiated opinion, or whim.

“The text persuades, the note proves,” he avers. Footnotes do double duty, for they also “persuade as well as prove” and open up the work to a multitude of voices. Matthew Wills, Jstor Daily

 

 

Writers Analyze Sigmund Freud

The book is the clever idea of the literary agent Andrew Blauner. He commissioned 25 of his favourite authors to write about Freud. [...]

But why bother putting Freud on the couch? Aren’t his Victorian views about women, homosexuality and much else besides as outmoded as crocheted covers for sexually arousing piano legs? It’s notable that it is the women here who make the strongest cases for the dead patriarch’s relevance to us. The sociologist Sherry Turkle calls for a return to Freud as cure for our age of inauthenticity, in which we are reduced to exploitable datasets that deny our inwardness, not to mention our polysemous perversity. Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian

il libro in questione è: On the Couch: Writers Analyze Sigmund Freud, edited by Andrew Blauner (Princeton University Press).

The Language of War

Oleksandr Mykhed and his wife Olena lost their home when the Russians invaded Ukraine. Before February 2022 he had never held a gun in his hands. But a week before the invasion, fearing the worst, he trained with a Kalashnikov assault rifle. And after helping to make a bomb shelter out of a university library in Chernivtsi, he enlisted in the armed forces of Ukraine.

His book, much of it written during his 100 days in the barracks, is less a record of armed service than a reflection on the impact of war – how it has changed him and others, too, not least children. It’s a ferociously angry book, borne of “rage, love for homeland, revenge”. Where his compatriot Andrey Kurkov’s reports from Ukraine are nuanced and sometimes comic, Mykhed’s are bitter and indignant. “This is a book about things one can never forget. Or forgive,” he says, recalling the free and happy life he enjoyed before the Russian army and “a gigantic net of saboteurs” destroyed it. Blake Morrison, The Guardian

recensione al romanzo dello scrittore ucraino, Oleksandr Mykhed, The Language of War (Penguin).

Qualche giallo per l'estate

The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley; Death in the Air by Ram Murali; The Burial Plot by Elizabeth Macneal; French Windows by Antoine Laurain; The Man in Black & Other Stories by Elly Griffiths, recensiti da Laura Wilson, The Guardian

e anche:

Deep-sea divers feel the pressure, Stephen King returns with some masterly tales, a mother fears her own son, and a Dorset resort isn’t as restful as it seems, Allison Flood, The Guardian

When Espionage Was Amateur

In the 17th century, the Uffizi offered its visitors a rather more diverse range of exhibits than it does now, among them weapons made by some distant precursor of Q Branch. The Scottish traveller James Fraser on a visit to Florence in the 1650s recorded what he saw: ‘A rarity, five pistol barrels joined together to be put in your hat, which is discharged at once as you salute your enemy & bid him farewell … another pistol with eighteen barrels in it to be shot desperately and scatter through a room as you enter.’ Peter Davidson, Literary Review

recensione al libro: Nadine Akkerman & Pete Langman. Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration (Yale University Press).

The Uptown Local

One night in July 2013, Leadbeater, then 24, was drinking and smoking with his older brother and friends outside his parents’ house in Kearny, N.J., when he opened an email from the poet James Fenton, his mentor at the time in the MFA program at Columbia University. Earlier in the day, Fenton had sent a cryptic email about an unnamed “well-known writer” searching for an assistant, and Leadbeater had immediately expressed interest; now, Fenton revealed that Leadbeater would be interviewed by Joan Didion. “Whatever criminal gamble my father had made — desperately poor, abused horrifically, thirty years of manual labor, a few years of wire fraud — had paid off,” Leadbeater writes. “In one generation, we’d gone from the basement of the gas station next to the junkyard in New Jersey to the Upper East Side, Madison Avenue, Joan.” Kristen Martin, The Washington Post

What Is Noise?

"Noise” is a fuzzy word—a noisy one, in the statistical sense. Its meanings run the gamut from the negative to the positive, from the overpowering to the mysterious, from anarchy to sublimity. The negative seems to lie at the root: etymologists trace the word to “nuisance” and “nausea.” Noise is what drives us mad; it sends the Grinch over the edge at Christmastime. (“Oh, the Noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!”) Noise is the sound of madness itself, the din within our minds. The demented narrator of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” jabbers about noise while he hallucinates his victim’s heartbeat: “I found that the noise was not within my ears. . . . The noise steadily increased. . . . The noise steadily increased.” Alex Ross, The New Yorker

What Is an Editor?

“What editors do for writers is mysterious, and does not, contrary to general belief, have much to do with titles and sentences and ‘changes.’ The relationship between an editor and a writer is much subtler and deeper than that, at once so elusive and so radical that it seems almost parental.” Thus spake the venerable Joan Didion in a eulogistic essay about the late Henry Robbins, her editor first at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and then at Simon & Schuster. Elroy Rosenberg, Tablet