David Foster

Worthwhile Reading and Viewing

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There’s been lots of talk about the need for the US to produce more of its own semiconductor chips–but it’s not just the making of the chips that matters, it’s also the making of the machines that make the chips.  The market for the highest-end chipmaking equipment is dominated by the Dutch company ASML, which now will be prohibited from exporting these machines to China, per Dutch government agreement with US request.

ASML’s current high-end lithography machine has over 100,000 components and takes 40 freight containers to ship.  Unsurprisingly, ASML’s CEO says that the export restrictions will simply push China to create its own technology, and also unsurprisingly, David Goldman (‘Spengler’) agrees.

Mark Andreessen says The most important idea and paper I’ve encountered in the last 20 years is “availability cascades”.  His summary here.

The strategic importance of the Black Sea, especially as it relates to the Ukraine War.

Dating dealbreakers for women.

Speaking of dating, here’s a study suggesting that creative output leads to mating opportunities.

Ridicule:  Some thoughts at The Orthosphere.

Violence and Self-Esteem: Some thoughts on the connection.

How people kept multiple tabs open in the 1500s:

Book Review: The Year of the French (rerun)

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The Year of the French, by Thomas Flanagan

St Patrick’s day gives me a good hook for re-posting this review, in the hope of inspiring a few more people to read this superb book.  Ralph Peters calls it “the finest historical novel written in English, at least in the twentieth century,” going on to say “except for ‘The Leopard,’ I know of no historical novel that so richly and convincingly captures the ambience of a bygone world.”

In August of 1798, the French revolutionary government landed 1000 troops in County Mayo to support indigenous Irish rebels, with the objective of overthrowing British rule in Ireland.  The Year of the French tells the (fictionalized but fact-based) story of these events from the viewpoint of several characters, representing different groups in the complex and strife-ridden Irish social structure of the time.

Owen MacCarthy is a schoolmaster and poet who writes in the Gaelic tradition.  He is pressed by illiterate locals to write a threatening letter to a landlord who has evicted tenants while switching land from farming to cattle-raising.  With his dark vision of how an attempt at rebellion must end–“In Caslebar.  They will load you in carts with your wrists tied behind you and take you down to Castlebar and try you there and hang you there”–MacCarthy is reluctant to get involved, but he writes the letter.

Sam Cooper, the recipient of the letter, is a small-scale landlord, and captain of the local militia.  Indigenously Irish, his family converted to Protestantism several generations ago to avoid the crippling social and economic disabilities imposed on Catholics. Cooper’s wife, Kate, herself still Catholic, is a beautiful and utterly ruthless woman…she advises Cooper to respond to the letter by rounding up “a few of the likeliest rogues,”  jailing and flogging them, without any concern for actual guilt or innocence. “My God, what a creature you are for a woman,”  Cooper responds. “It is a man you should have been born.”  “A strange creature that would make me in your bed,” Kate fires back, “It is a woman I am, and fine cause you have to know it…What matters now is who has the land and who will keep it.”

Ferdy O’Donnell  is a young hillside farmer on Cooper’s land.  Far back in the past, the land was owned by the O’Donnell family…Ferdy had once shown Cooper  “a valueless curiosity, a parchment that recorded the fact in faded ink the colour of old, dried blood.”

Arthur Vincent Broome is a Protestant clergyman who is not thrilled by the “wild and dismal region” to which he has been assigned, but who performs his duties as best he can. Broome is resolved to eschew religious bigotry, but…”I affirm most sincerely that distinctions which rest upon creed mean little to me, and yet I confess that my compassion for their misery is mingled with an abhorrence of their alien ways…they live and thrive in mud and squalour…their music, for all that antiquarians and fanatics can find to say in its flavor, is wild and savage…they combine a grave and gentle courtesy with a murderous violence that erupts without warning…”‘

Malcolm Elliott is a Protestant landlord and solicitor, and a member of the Society of United Irishmen.  This was a revolutionary group with Enlightenment ideals, dedicated to bringing Catholics and Protestants together in the cause of overthrowing British rule and establishing an Irish Republic.  His wife, Judith, is an Englishwoman with romantic ideas about Ireland.

John Moore, also a United Irishman, is a member of one of the few Catholic families that have managed to hold on to their land.  He is in love with Ellen Treacy, daughter of another prominent Catholic family: she returns his love, but believes that he is caught in a web of words that can only lead to disaster.  “One of these days you will say a loose word to some fellow and he will get on his horse and ride off to Westport to lay an information with Dennis Browne, and that will be the last seen of you”

Dennis Browne is High Sheriff of Mayo…smooth, manipulative, and devoted to the interests of the very largest landowners in the county, such as his brother Lord Altamont and the mysterious Lord Glenthorne, the “Big Lord” who owns vast landholdings and an immense house which he has never visited.

Randall MacDonnell is a Catholic landowner with a decrepit farm and house, devoted primarily to his horses.  His motivations for joining the rebellion are quite different from those of the idealistic United Irishmen…”For a hundred years of more, those Protestant bastards have been the cocks of the walk, strutting around on acres that belong by rights to the Irish…there are men still living who remember when a son could grab his father’s land by turning Protestant.”

Jean Joseph Humbert is the commander of the French forces.  A former dealer in animal skins, he owes his position in life to the revolution.  He is a talented commander, but  the battle he is most concerned about is the battle for status and supremacy between himself and  Napoleon Bonaparte.

Charles Cornwallis, the general who surrendered to the Americans at Yorktown, is now in charge of defeating the French and the rebels and pacifying the rebellious areas of Ireland.   Seen through the eyes of  a young aide who admires him greatly, Cornwallis is portrayed as a basically kindly man who can be hard when he thinks it necessary, but takes no pleasure in it.  “The color of war had long since bleached from his thoughts, and it remained for him only a duty to be scrupulously performed.”

This book is largely about the way in which the past lives on in the present, both in the world of physical objects and the world of social relationships.  Two characters who make a brief appearance are Richard Manning, proprietor of a decrepit and debt-laden castle, and his companion Ellen Kirwan:

Traute Lafrenz, Last of the White Rose

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Traute Lafrenz, last surviving member of the anti-Nazi resistance movement known as the White Rose, has died.  She was a university student in Munich in 1941 when she met Hans Scholl and Christoph Probst and got involved in the group.  Her involvement became known to the Nazi authorities following the arrest of Hans and Sophie Scholl, and she was also arrested.  Unlike Probst and the Scholls, who were executed, she was sentenced to one year in prison…but following her release, she was rearrested, and was liberated by the Allies only three days before her scheduled trial, which would likely have led to her own execution.  After the war, she emigrated to the US, became a physician, got married, and had four children.  She retired to Yonges Island in South Carolina.

More about Lafrenz, and the story of the White Rose group.

My post about Alexander Schmorell, another member of the group.

There is a wonderful German movie from 1982 about the group, titled simply The White Rose.  It portrays them not as plaster saints, but rather as real, if highly exceptional, people–sometimes, as high-spirited kids.  In German with English subtitles, the film doesn’t seem to have ever made it to DVD, in the US at least, but VHS versions are often available on Ebay. Highly, highly recommended.

Nothing Beyond the Current Moment

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From Harvard:

Young people are very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction—all these kinds of things that, actually, we think about a lot!” Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor, told me last fall. She was one of several teachers who described an orientation toward the present, to the extent that many students lost their bearings in the past. “The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. “Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.”

Reading the above, the first thing that struck me was that a university dean, especially one who is an English professor, should not view the 19th century as ‘a very long time ago’…most likely, though, she herself probably does not have such a foreshortened view of time,  rather, she’s probably describing what she observes as the perspective of her students (though it’s hard to tell from the quote).  It does seem very likely that the K-12 experiences of the students have been high on presentism, resulting in students arriving at college  “with a sense that the unenlightened past had nothing left to teach,” as a junior professor who joined the faulty in 2021 put it.  One would hope, though, that to the extent Harvard admits a large number of such students, it would focus very seriously on challenging that worldview.  I do not get the impression that it actually does so.

In a discussion of the above passage at Twitter, Paul Graham @PaulG said:

One of the reasons they have such a strong “orientation toward the present” is that the past has been rewritten for a lot of them.

to which someone responded: 

that’s always been true! it’s not like the us didn’t rewrite the history of the civil war to preserve southern feelings for 100 years. what’s different is that high schools are no longer providing the technical skills necessary for students to read literature!

 …a fair point that there’s always been some rewriting of history going on, or at least adjusting the emphasis & deemphasis of certain points, but seems to me that what is going on today is a lot more systematic and pervasive than what’s happened in the past, at least in the US.  Changing the narratives on heroes and villains,  selecting particular facts to emphasize (or even to make up out of whole cloth) is not the same thing as inculcating a belief that “the unenlightened past has nothing left to teach.”

I don’t think most people inherently view the past as uninteresting; many stores, after all, have traditionally begun with the phrase “Once upon a time.”

I get the impression that a lot of ‘educators’, at all levels, have not much interest in knowledge, but are rather driven by some mix of (a) careerism, and (b) ideology.  For more on this,  see my post Classics and the Public Sphere.

And it’s also true that many schools are not providing students with the skills necessary to read literature–although there are certainly some schools that are much better than others in this area, and one would have hoped that graduates of such schools would be highly represented among those selected to become Harvard students.  Maybe not.   And technologies that encourage a short attention span–social media, in particular–surely also play a part in the decline of interest and ability to read and understand even somewhat-complex literature.

Although I suspect some of these students are perfectly capable of concentrating their attention when they really want to.  Some of them are probably computer science majors–hard to write or even understand a program without really concentrating on it. Some may be drama majors–I imagine that learning one’s lines and acting them requires a pretty significant level of focused attention.  And there are surely many other examples.  But the intrinsic motivation which is there in those cases doesn’t seem to be there in the case of reading literature.
Or am I kidding myself, and has the  short attention span phenomenon now become so pervasive that a lot of these students–and and even higher proportion of the people who didn’t go to Harvard…are going to come into adulthood lacking in sufficient attention span to be able to write code, do engineering design, analyze financial statements, fly airplanes or conduct air traffic control, perform surgical operations, etc?
Your thoughts?

Artificial Intelligence & Robotics, as Viewed From the Early 1950s

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In the early 1950s, electronic computers were large and awe-inspiring, and were often referred to as ‘electronic brains’.  At the same time, industrial automation was making considerable advances, and much more was expected from it.  There was considerable speculation about what all this meant for Americans, and for the human race in general.

Given the recent advances of AI and robotics in our own era–and the positive and negative forecasts about the implications–I thought it might be interesting to go back and look at two short story collections on this general theme:  Thinking Machines, edited by Groff Conklin, and The Robot and the Man, edited by Martin Greenberg.  Both books date from around 1954. Here are some of the stories I thought were most interesting, mostly from the above sources but also a couple of them from other places.

Virtuouso, by Herbert Goldstone.  A famous musician has acquired a robot for household tasks.  The robot–dubbed ‘Rollo’ by the Masestro–notices the piano in the residence, and expresses interest in it.  Intrigued, the Maestro plays ‘Claire de Lune’ for Rollo, then gives him a one-hour lesson and heads off to bed, after authorizing the robot to practice playing on his own.  He wakes to the sound of Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’.

Rollo was playing it. He was creating it, breathing it, drawing it through silver flame. Time became meaningless, suspended in midair.

“It was not very difficult,” Rollo explains.

The Maestro let his fingers rest on the keys, strangely foreign now. “Music! He breathed. “I may have heard it that way in my soul. I know Beethoven did.

Very excited, the Maestro sets up plans for Rollo to give a concert–for “Conductors, concert pianists, composers, my manager.  All the giants of music, Rollo.  Wait until they hear you play!”

But Rollo’s response is unexpected.  He says that his programming provides the option to decline any request that he considers harmful to his owner, and that therefore,  he must refuse to touch the piano again.  “The piano is not a machine,” that powerful inhuman voice droned.  “To me, yes.  I can translate the notes into sounds at a glance.  From only a few I am able to grasp at once the composer’s conception.  It is easy for me.”

“I can also grasp,” the brassy monotone rolled through the studio, that this…music is not for robots.  It is for man.  To me it is easy, yes…it was not meant to be easy.”

The Jester, by William Tenn.   In this story, it is not a musician but a comedian who seeks robotic involvement in his profession.   Mr Lester…Lester the Jester, the glib sahib of ad lib…thinks it might be useful to have a robot partner for his video performances.  It does not work out well for him.

Boomerang, by Frank Russell.  In this story, the robot is designed to be an assassin, acting on behalf of a group representing the New Order.   Very human in appearance and behavior, it is charged with gaining access to targeted leaders and killing them. If it is faced with an insoluble problem–for example, if the human-appearing ‘William Smith’ should be arrested and cannot talk his way out of the situation–then it will detonate an internal charge and destroy itself.  As a precaution, it has been made impossible for the robot to focus its lethal rays on its makers. And, it is possessed of a certain kind of emotional drive–“William Smith hates personal power inasmuch as a complex machine can be induced to hate anything.  Therefore, he is the ideal instrument for destroying such power.”

What could possibly go wrong?

Mechanical Answer, by John D MacDonald.  For reasons that are never explained, the development of a Thinking Machine has become a major national priority. After continued failures by elite scientists, a practical engineer and factory manager named Joe Kaden is drafted to run the project. And I do mean drafted: running the Thinking Machine project means being separated from his wife Jane, who he adores. And even though Joe has a record of inventiveness, which is the reason he was offered the Thinking Machine job in the first place, he questions his ability to make a contribution in this role.

But Jane, who has studied neurology and psychiatry, feeds him some ideas that hold the key to success.  Her idea…basically, a matrix of associations among words and concepts..allows the machine to show more ‘creativity’ than previous approaches, and it shows great skills as a kind of Super-ChatGPT question-answerer.

When the Thinking Machine is demonstrated to an audience which includes not only its American sponsors but the Dictator of Asia, the Ruler of Europe, and the King of the States of Africa, the questions to be asked have been carefully vetted.  But when it is asked an unvetted question–“Will the machine help in the event of a war between nations?”…the answer given is unexpected:  “Warfare should now become avoidable.  All of the factors in any dispute can be give to the Machine and an unemotional fair answer can be rendered.”

Of course.

Burning Bright, by John Browning.  A large number of robots are used to work in the radiation-saturated environment within nuclear power plants.  The internal mental processes of these robots are not well understood, hence, no robots are allowed outside of the power plants–it is feared that robot armies could be raised on behalf of hostile powers, or even that robots themselves will become rivals of humans for control of the planet.  So robots are given no knowledge of the world outside of power plants, no knowledge of anything except their duty of obedience to humans.  And whenever a robot becomes too worn-out to be of any continued usefulness, it is scrapped–and its brain are dissolved in acid.

One day, a robot facing its doom is found to have a molded plastic star in its hands–apparently a religious object.

Though Dreamers, Die, Lester del Rey.  Following the outbreak of a plague which looks like it may destroy all human life on earth, a starship is launched. A small group of humans, who must be kept in suspended animation because of the great length of the journey to a habitable planet, is assisted by a crew of robots.  When the principal human character, Jorgan, is awakened by a robot, he assumes that the ship must be nearing its destination.  It is, but the news is grim.  All of the other humans on board have died–Jorgen, for some reason, seems to be immune to the plague, at least so far. And among those who did not survive Anna Holt, the only woman.

If it had been Anna Holt who had survived, Jorgen reflects, she could have continued the human race by using the frozen sperm that has been stored. “So it took the girl!  It took the girl, Five, when it could half left her and chosen me…The gods had to leave one uselessly immune man to make their irony complete it seems!  Immune”

“No, master,” the robot replies. The disease as been greatly slowed in the case of Jorgen, but it will get him in the end–maybe after thirty years.

“Immunity or delay, what difference now?  What happens to all our dreams when the last dreamer dies, Five?  Or maybe it’s the other way around.”

All the dreams of a thousand generations of men had been concentrated into Anna Holt, he reflects, and were gone with her.  The ship lands on the new world, and it appears to be perfect for humans.  “It had to be perfect, Five,” he said, not bitterly, but in numbed fatalism. “Without that, the joke would have been flat.”

Man and robot discuss the world that could have been, the city and the statue to commemorate their landing. “Dreams!” Jorgen erupts. “Still, the dream was beautiful, just as this planet is, master.” Five responds.  “Standing there, while we landed, I could see the city, and I almost dared hope.  I do not regret the dream I had.”

Jorgen decides that the heritage of humanity can go on–“When the last dreamer died, the dream would go on, because it was stronger than those who had created it; somewhere, somehow, it would find new dreamers.”  And Five’s simpatico words–combined with a cryptic partial recording about robot minds and the semantics of the first person signature,  left by the expedition’s leader, Dr Craig–convince him that the robots can carry forward the deeper meaning of the human race.  Five demurs, though:  “But it would be a lonely world, Master Jordan, filled with memories of your people, and the dreams we had would be barren for us.”

There is a solution, though. The robots are instructed to forget all knowledge of or related to the human race, although all their other  knowledge will remain. And Jorgen boards the starship and blasts off alone.

Dumb Waiter, Walter Miller.  (The author is best known for his classic post-apocalyptic novel A Canticle for Leibowitz)   In this story, cities have become fully automated—municipal services are provided by robots linked to a central computer system.  But when war erupted–featuring radiological attacks–some of the population was killed, and the others evacuated the cities. In the city that is the focus of the story, there are no people left, but “Central” and its subunits are working fine, doing what they were programmed to do many years earlier.

I was reminded of this story in 2013 by the behavior of the Swedish police during rampant rioting–issuing parking tickets to burned-out cars.  My post is here.

The combination of human bureaucracy and not-too-intelligent automation is seems likely to lead to many events which are similar in kind if not (hopefully) in degree.

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