Academia

I had an odd intellectual experience recently. A US high school student wrote to me as part of an assignment, asking for my thoughts on Brave New World, and its current relevance. I replied talking about the role of “Our Ford”, and Gramsci’s contemporary concept of Fordism.

That got me thinking about post-Fordism, and then to the idea of post-post-Fordism, referring to the information economy that has emerged since the rise of the Internet. I expected that this would be a reinvention of the intellectual wheel on my part, but when I popped the phrase into DuckDuckGo, I got a single hit, which was part of a 2015 interview with UK radical economist Robin Murray. whose ideas about the concept were very similar to mine, but whose comments were very brief.

I didn’t know of Murray, but I thought I should write to him and ask him how he had developed the idea. Sadly, I was led to Wikipedia, which reported that Murray had died in 2017, apparently without writing anything further on the topic. I’ve found a handful of citations, but of the “in passing” variety.

I’m not sure where to go next with this. I’d like to revive the idea (if indeed it died with Murray), but I’m not sure how to deal with an intellectual history like this. Perhaps some of my readers knew (or knew of) Murray or have seen the idea of post-post-Fordism?

This is why food in the US and Britain will never be quite good enough.

I recently caught up with an activist friend I’ve known for twenty-five years. We got into this stuff at the tail end of what were then called the crypto wars, a set of legal and policy battles to free strong encryption from the US and UK’s security services and allow it to be used to secure the internet. (If our guys had lost, there would never have been any of what we used to call “e-commerce”, remember that?) We drank very good coffee and talked about the weirdness of aging into and then (for me) out of the management side of tech policy, and reminisced about people who’d been central both in fighting and passing the laws that created the UK’s unusually comprehensive surveillance system. We also shared ways to exercise with fewer joint injuries and laughed a lot about being grumpy old fucks. We made some pretty fine distinctions between being jaded – neither of us feels that – but markedly less excitable than people for whom the latest state efforts to cripple encryption are a novel outrage. We briefly tried to figure out if we were on the fifth or the sixth UK attempt to backdoor end-to-end encrypted messaging. Sitting down with an old friend who profoundly gets political storytelling, from being so many times around the same apple cart, and can mine hard-won self-knowledge seemingly without limit was a pleasure my twenty-five year old self wouldn’t have even known to anticipate. So when I sat down last week to re-read Cory Doctorow’s Red Team Blues, whose t-shirt slogan is ‘crypto means cryptography’ and is about a battle-hardened old fart, I was primed to enjoy it at least as much as my first go-round.

Henry wrote about Red Team Blues here a couple of weeks ago. We’d both been talking about it and emailing with Cory. I have a strong reader’s debt to this extremely fun and thought-provoking noir-ish crypto thriller. When my brain was completely scrambled, Red Team Blues basically taught me to read again for joy, no less.
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It is reported that Geoffrey Hinton “the godfather of AI” is leaving Google and has voiced some serious worries about the future of humanity as AI continues to develop. I don’t have anything interesting to say about grey gloop or paperclips or AI robots waging wars, but I have been thinking a bit about the impact of AI on creative work, not limited to the production of student essays. Already we are seeing voice actors replaced by clones of their own voices and professional translators reduced to editing the output of machine translation (almost as much work, but for less money, I’m told). So what happens if AI can produce artworks (or should that be “artworks”?) such as plays, paintings, pseudo-photographs, movie scripts, novels, songs, symphonies that are indistinguishable from human productions and that people consume and enjoy? Well, one effect might be that it becomes even harder for people to earn a living producing artworks for the market than it is now. But that doesn’t mean that human production will disappear. And the reason that it won’t is because our interest in creative work isn’t just about the object of production but about its process and the exercise of our human powers (“life’s prime want”, as somebody once said.)

The invention of photography in or around 1839 may have made possible a more accurate representation of reality and in doing so may have displaced some forms of drawing whose purpose was the utilitarian representation of reality, but it hardly stopped people from painting and drawing and, indeed, gave them a new medium in which to express themselves. AI may be, even is, able to produce something that looks like a good drawing of an object, but it cannot replace the human activity of looking hard at that object and co-ordinating hand and eye to produce my (however pathetic and inadequate) represention of it. AI may be able to produce a song, but it cannot substitute for the experience of writing a song and singing it. So I suspect that even if AI gets very good and produces work indistinguishable from human work, it will not and cannot fully replace human work. It will, perhaps, somewhat devalue the artwork as the object of contemplation and consumption, except insofar as we continue to admire works as the product of specifically human intention and execution (just as we would continue to admire the moves of a talented human footballer even in a world where AI-driven robo-footballers were available). But the artwork as the product of a human process, with a renewed focus on that process as the real activity of doing and making will not cease to exist. The Milton who produced Paradise Lost “as a silkworm produces silk” will continues to write; the Leipzig literary proletarian will not. Indeed there may be more of creative labour, since if AI provides for our basic needs, we’ll have the time available to hunt in the morning and criticize after dinner, as well as drawing, painting, cooking, and writing short stories and songs, just as we have a mind. (That is, unless we are enserfed to spend our time catering to the whims of Jeff and Elon instead.)

A federal judge recently ordered a briefing on whether the 13th Amendment grounds a Constitutional right to abortion.  Legal academics such as Michele Goodwin, Peggy Cooper Davis, and Andrew Koppelman have made serious originalist arguments for a right to abortion on 13th Amendment grounds.  I am no originalist.  But I believe that a deeper historical understanding of the law and its evolution is a valuable resource for interpreting it.  Here I want to add to Goodwin, Davis, and Koppelman by linking their arguments, tied to the experience of slaves forced to reproduce before emancipation, to the civil status of free married women in the 19th century.

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Alito rejects the 14th Amendment Due Process case for a right to abortion on the ground that unenumerated substantive Due Process rights must be “deeply rooted in the nation’s history” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” He refutes the claim of deep rooting by arguing that abortion was widely prohibited under the common law in England and the U.S. before the 14th Amendment, and that such bans were extended soon after the 14th Amendment was ratified.  In other words, since people didn’t think there was a constitutional right to abortion around the time of ratification, the 14th Amendment doesn’t include such a right.  On his originalist methodology, the same evidence could equally well be used to refute a 13th Amendment grounding for abortion rights.

I will argue that Alito is wrong, because both before and after the Reconstruction Amendments were passed, married women were civil slaves under the law, and that the 13th Amendment bans civil slavery as well as chattel slavery.  Although it took some time for the feminist movement to persuade people that the civil slavery of married women was wrong, any laws passed on the presumption of their civil slavery, such as the laws against abortion, are invalid under the 13th Amendment (and therefore cannot count as evidence against the 14th Amendment case for abortion rights either). [click to continue…]

When we announced several new timbers last Fall we promised more to come. So, now we are delighted to welcome on board the newest member of the CT collective: Elizabeth Anderson. Liz will be well known to the philosophers who read CT, as author of numerous papers and of the recent books The Imperative of Integration and Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don’t Talk About It). She is Max Shaye Professor of Public Philosophy, John Dewey Distinguished University Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and was recently awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. We hope you’re looking forward to her contributions as much as we are!

There’s been a lot of recent discussion about relative economic performance of the EU and US as well as (mostly separately) discussion of differences in mortality rates.

One way to integrate the two is to think of living in the US as a (very) dangerous occupation, and think about the wage premium demanded by workers to take up such occupations, relative to comparable low-risk jobs.

The typical estimate from econometric studies is that a 0.1 per cent chance of death on the job (a really dangerous job) implies a wage premium of around $10000/year.

For Americans aged between 25 and 65, the annual death rate in 2019 (pre-Covid) ranged between 0.13 and 0.88. EU mortality rates were one-third to half of that.

Doing the math, the wage premium that would be needed to take on the extra risk of being a working-age American, compared to the EU, is somewhere between $10000/yr and $40000/yr.

Even the lower figure would push the US down to the middle of the rich-country pack based on standard comparisons of median income.

(From my Substack)

Endless steps in what was, until 1492, the Jewish quarter of Girona and where there is now a wonderful museum dedicated to the city’s long Jewish history.

Earlier this week, I was at a meeting to discuss the question whether my university should cut its ties with the fossil industry, or else impose additional conditions on working with partners from fossil industries. There was quite some agreement that the university should think hard about spelling out and endorsing a moral framework, and based on those values and moral principles work out what (if any) forms of collaboration would remain legitimate in the future. This led our vice-chancellor to ask the question what else such moral framework would imply for university staff. “Should we perhaps completely stop flying?”, he asked.

And then there is, once again, a very depressing IPCC report and we must radically change our modes of production and consumption if we want to leave our children (and our older selves) a planet that will remain safe for the human species. And it’s not just about the future, but about the present: urgent action is needed to lower the number of the deadly climate-related events that we have seen over the last years, from increases in wildfires to deadly floodings – that led poor people, who have made almost zero contribution to this problem, lose their livelihoods, and many simply died. So to me it seems obvious that what we change in response to climate change is a very urgent moral question.

Hence the question: Do academics fly too much? Should we simply stop flying at all?
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In a passage near the crescendo of Book I of The Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume writes, “the intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another…[I] begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv’d of the use of every member and faculty…. [S]ince reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras.”  (He goes on to play backgammon.)

The delirium Hume ascribes to himself is the effect of human reason and a kind of second order reasoned reflection [“the intense view”] of it. (Recall also this post.) It’s important for what follows that the ‘contradictions and imperfections’ in human reason are not, what we might call, ‘formal’ contradictions and imperfections or biases in reasoning. It’s not as if Hume is claiming that the syllogistic apparatus, or — to be closer to Hume’s own interests and our present ones — the (inductive) probabilistic apparatus is malfunctioning in his brain. Rather, his point is that a very proper-functioning (modular) formal and probabilistic apparatus generates internal, even cognitive tensions, especially when it reflects on its own functioning and the interaction among different cognitive faculties/modules/organs. [click to continue…]