December 1, 2016 Our Correspondents In Comparison By Wei Tchou Asking Ma about life in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution. My mother and I were decorating the Christmas tree during a quiet afternoon last week when I thought to ask her if the sorrow I have been inclined toward postelection is anything like what she experienced during the Cultural Revolution, when she was a teenager. I had flown home to Georgia for Thanksgiving feeling exhausted and emotionally volatile—still trapped in what felt and continues to feel like grief. “Some of it seems familiar,” she said, “but no, it’s nothing in comparison.” I asked her what felt the same, as I scooped up a handful of ornaments. Our collection neatly comprises my family’s entire United States’ life: here are a few mice knitted by my grandmother when my parents first arrived in America; a sand dollar tied with a red ribbon from the first church they joined in Kentucky; a bell cut from orange construction paper with a photograph of my pudgy face pasted on it, from 1991. Read More
December 1, 2016 On the Shelf Robots Are Superior Buddhists, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring That’s a good robot. Whenever someone asks me how I’m doing, I say, Good! The robots haven’t eradicated me or my species yet! I’ve been going on this way my whole adult life—but now Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist who studies tech, has convinced me that my real fear isn’t the robots. It’s staring right back at me when I look in the mirror. “Western culture has some anxieties about what happens when humans try to bring something to life … What we are seeing now isn’t an anxiety about artificial intelligence per se, it’s about what it says about us. That if you can make something like us, where does it leave us? And that concern isn’t universal, as other cultures have very different responses to AI, to big data. The most obvious one to me would be the Japanese robotic tradition, where people are willing to imagine the role of robots as far more expansive than you find in the West. For example, the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori published a book called The Buddha in the Robot, where he suggests that robots would be better Buddhists than humans because they are capable of infinite invocations … Mori’s argument was that we project our own anxieties and when we ask: ‘Will the robots kill us?’ what we are really asking is: ‘Will we kill us?’ ” The CIA tried for years to assassinate Castro—with a poison pen, an exploding underwater seashell (I’m not making this shit up), and a cigar tainted with botulism. It was only fair that the New York Times began drafting his obit in 1959: for a minute there it seemed as if he was not long for this world. Now the Times remembers its many false alarms: “The development of the Castro obituary is as legendary as the man himself. Countless colleagues—spanning many different technologies and platforms—have massaged it and passed the baton. Each of the many death scares gave us the opportunity to dust off the package and reassess our digital strategy based on ever-changing audience consumption habits and storytelling tools.” Read More