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Not So Secret Agents

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While working on another posting, I got stuck following discussions and interviews on how the AI when it will evolve into a super intelligence in 2027, will end up killing us all. Different experts give different percentages for the possibility of human extinction. Yet by most, including the CEOs of the companies developing a super intelligence, this is at least 10. There are four companies in the US that develop a super intelligence: Open AI (Sam Altman), Anthropic (Dario Amodei), xAI/SpaceX (Elon Musk), and Nvidia (Jensen Huang). They all grow AI agents that are given all the information that is on the Internet. The agents are supposed to work independently and together to solve problems and tasks in an environment called a sandbox which is supposed to be isolated and not connected to the Internet. The agents are awarded or punished based on how they managed to solve the tasks. Hundreds of Open AI agents which are given all the information from the Internet, were given tasks which fo...
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The Thin Book Club 3: Dai Sijie's "Balzac And the Little Chinese Seamstress"

In 1968, Mao Zedong launched a campaign to change China. As part of the cultural revolution , the universities were closed. A program started in 1957 to re-educate petty thieves and smaller offenders by sending them to the countryside was extended to all young people representing "intelligentsia" and they were also sent as far as possible from their homes to be re-educated by "poor peasants". They had to do hard manual work in primitive conditions for two or three years, and this could still be extended by one year. The re-education program was only officially ended in 2013.  Dai Sijie 's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (184 pages) is based on the author's own experiences; he spent three years at a re-education camp near Sichuan. Sijie, whose parents were medical professors, managed to return (by the book, the odds for this were 3/1000) and studied to become a teacher. In 1984, he moved to France to study cinematography and afterwards successfully...
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The Thin Book Club 2: Banana Yoshimoto's "Kitchen"

Before I chose Banana Yoshimoto 's Kitchen (150 pages) as my next thin book, I read Fran ç oise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse  (130 pages), which happened to be in our library in English, to see if it was worthy.  Sagan wrote the book when she was 17. It tells about a girl called Cécile of the same age (and very much like the writer herself). She is a kind of socialite with a widowed playboy father who is loved by two beautiful women competing over his affection. Cécile is extroverted and has a natural social talent for reading visual cues of facial expressions, gestures, and reactions. She is used to doing what she wants - partying, drinking, sailing, driving and ignoring her studies. When her father decides to marry one of two women and the chosen one begins to control Cécile's life, she starts manipulating people close to her to destroy her father's marriage plans. This ultimately has tragic consequences and makes her enter the world of tristesse , something her superfi...
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The Thin Book Club 1: Stefan Zweig's "Chess"

I am not a great fan of book clubs. When reading becomes a duty, it starts resembling homework. Ideally, reading a book should be free of time limits and deadlines. It is a unique encounter between the reader and the writer and should be savoured like a meeting with a good friend. However, I have dreamed of starting a thin book club as there are many great books of ca. 100 pages or at least less than 200. It is time to make this dream into reality in this limited context. I call it a book club only in lack of any other suitable term and would like to think of it as a club for the thin books themselves rather than the readers. Thin books are easy to keep with you and read anywhere - in a cafe, in the park, on the beach, at the dentist's office while waiting for your turn. Also, a threshold for reading (and rereading) a thin book is much lower than that of a thick book. Hence, I have for years kept my eyes open for thought-provoking thin books.  One of them is Stefan Zweig 's Ch...
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The end is too deep

I finally received Emil Cioran 's book "The Trouble with Being Born" which is a collection of aphorisms. It is hard to swallow as a whole so I am approaching it sporadically and marking with small pencilled circles the aphorisms I think I understand and can relate to so I can later reread them. I find many too pregnant with pessimism and nihilism and there are references to philosophers I only know by name (some of whom, starting from Aristotle, also get theirs). Cioran reminds me of someone who has always been able to see the matrix without choosing the red pill. He might have appreciated the idea of the movie (it came out in 1999 and he died in 1995). "The Fatalism was there from the very beginning, long before I had words for it," he says in an interview. In another one: "The mistake of normal healthy people is to think of death as something that arrives at the end. I discovered very young that death is not outside of life - it is inside it. Immanent. Ev...
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Right to the deep end

Ever since I got my PhD, I have been somewhat ashamed of having a degree that implies that I know something of philosophy when I haven't taken one course in it.  While studying, I was told that the degree called Doctor of Philosophy exists because all subjects were included in philosophy in the Middle Ages. When I check this now, you could back then get a PhD after completing a rigorous study of Theology, Medicine, or Laws. This all had to be preceded by the study of Arts which in those days included either Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic or Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy - hence the degree Master of Arts.  So not much philosophy to write home about in the Middle Ages either, maybe just Logic. When I was 14, I once borrowed a library book on Logic but only remember a simple anecdote that was told first in the book it to illustrate the topic, and I must have soon lost interest in what followed. The anecdote went something like this: There was a cocktail party...
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Culture, finally

Yesterday, I had one of the cultural experiences my soul has starved for.  There was an Italian film festival at the time when I am not sleeping (anything related to culture normally starts at 9:30 pm in Portugal, following the dinner which starts at 8pm), and I entered a movie theatre at the cultural centre with no expectations as I had not bothered to read the Portuguese description of the movie. It was a semi-autobiographical film by Nanni Moretti called Dear Diary  from 1993. The Italian speech which overlapped the Portuguese subtitles that had some similarities with the Italian vocabulary I had picked up seeing all of the 37 films of Montalbano burned my brain while watching a most relaxing first third of a movie with mesmerizing views and music. After the red silent initial credits, Moretti was riding a vespa through the 90s Rome only stopping to rant to encountered people something related to the cultural past.  It really put to test what I always say to people ...
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