Machines #1: A crisis of connoisseurship
The Economist | Computer says no
Conventional scholarship involves the study of aesthetics, style and historical records. The oeuvre of a great painter has traditionally been defined by a scholarly panel that maintains a definitive catalogue of the artist’s authentic works. The Corpus Rubenianum, for instance, is an Antwerp-based body that adjudicates the work of Peter Paul Rubens; it reveres the legacy of Ludwig Burchard, a German-born expert who died in 1960. Yet such scholarly deference can be excessive: many of Burchard’s attributions have turned out to be mistaken, as the Rubenianum has quietly acknowledged. “There is no question that more scientific examination is needed” to clean up the Flemish master’s oeuvre, says Kasia Pisarek, a Polish-born British art scholar, whose doctoral thesis traces what she calls a crisis of connoisseurship.
Machines #2: A crisis for pollers
Ubiquitous facial recognition technology can expose individuals’ political orientation, as faces of liberals and conservatives consistently differ… Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity. Given the widespread use of facial recognition, our findings have critical implications for the protection of privacy and civil liberties.
Machines #3: A crisis in a company
Paul Taylor · Insanely Complicated, Hopelessly Inadequate · LRB 21 January 2021
Last year, Google’s work on natural language processing was the subject of a piece co-written by Timnit Gebru, one of the leaders of its ‘ethical AI’ team. The article expressed concerns about the work’s carbon footprint — the extraordinary scale of computation involved means that the carbon dioxide emitted in training Transformer is equivalent to 288 transatlantic flights — and about the way it looks at language. Because it is trained on text that Google harvests from the internet, its calculations reflect the way language has been used in the past or is used now. The problem isn’t just that its outputs therefore reflect our biases and prejudices, but that they crystallise them and, because the programs are inscrutable, conceal them. The paper also discusses the opportunity cost involved in pursuing this approach …
Google’s response was to shoot the messenger, sacking Gebru and then claiming she had resigned. Given that one very dangerous aspect of AI is that it amplifies the already extraordinary power of a very small number of massive corporations, this authoritarian behaviour is alarming. On the other hand, one of its immediate effects has been to galvanise workers at Google into forming a trade union.
Celtic feelings… I know thee well.
The ‘Ulysses’ trial still resonates 100 years on
When Ulysses eventually found a publisher — in Sylvia Beach, proprietor of Shakespeare & Co in Paris — in 1922, it was promptly banned in the UK until 1936. In the US, its publication was finally legalised in 1933, after a long campaign by Morris Ernst, legal counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union, against efforts by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and others. Judge Woolsey, delivering his opinion on United States vs One Book Called Ulysses, stated his defence of Joyce: “In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring.”
Celtic words
Cartographers of Stone and Air | by Colin Thubron | The New York Review of Books
Tim Robinson, an English writer, died from Covid-19 in April at the age of eighty-five. For more than forty years he made an intensive study of the region that many conceive as Ireland’s heart: Connemara.
His words:
History has rhythms, tunes and even harmonies; but the sound of the past is an agonistic multiplicity. Sometimes, rarely, a scrap of a voice can be caught from the universal damage, but it may only be an artefact of the imagination, a confection of rumours. Chance decides what is obliterated and what survives if only to be distorted and misheard.
Irish placenames dry out when anglicized, like twigs snapped off from a tree. And frequently the places too are degraded, left open to exploitation, for lack of a comprehensible name to point out their natures or recall their histories.
No free lunch
Arianne Shahvisi | No such thing as a free lunch · LRB 12 January 2021
The UK’s free school meals programme ensures that children from deprived households get at least one meal a day and costs the government £600 million a year. (‘Eat Out to Help Out’, which ran for just a month and subsidised restaurant meals, cost £849 million.) According to the Sustainable Food Trust, malnutrition costs the UK £17 billion a year, as well as leaving people desperate, miserable, reduced to bellies with a few accessory organs.