No Man is an Iland....

 

‘No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine;  if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were;  any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.’ (Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII, 1624)

Iron and Nickel

 

Recently I re-read two 'stories', Iron and Nickel, from Primo Levi's The Periodic Table – I can’t remember how long ago it was that I last read this book – I didn’t have a clear recollection of either story, so I must have read them too quickly.  The book was a very early edition given to me by a house-mate in about 1983.  Both stories in different ways are absolutely wonderful, essential reading for everyone, as Saul Bellow says on the cover.  Nickel is interesting but Iron is both moving and inspiring. The two stories, in different ways, bear on my focus of interest these days, about practice being the point of interaction between humans and the world, and the (for Levi, always moral) implications of this for the way we understand what happens to us, what we decide to do, and how we make the best of things.  The name Nickel comes from the German for ‘little devil’…. – this section reminds me of an powerful episode in the amazing tour de force historical novel by Neil Stephenson, Quicksilver, an episode which takes place in the silver mines of Germany at the dawn of the modern age, and that the word dollar comes from thaler, one of the early modern currencies, that name deriving from the German word for valley (thal).

The Invincible: Lem's tale of one possible process of technological evolution

 

I have just re-read The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem, one of the finest ‘hard’ sci-fi novellas I know, absolutely as good as his other much better-known story, Solaris.  It was written in the early 1960s, and is structured as either a detective story or, if you prefer, a report of a scientific investigation concerning the unexplained loss of a spaceship and all its crew on a deserted planet.  It’s told from the perspective of the commanders and crew of a second space ship, called The Invincible, similar to the first, which has been sent to investigate the disappearance.  It reads as halfway between a scientific report and a regular novel, very characteristic of one of Lem’s many different writing styles – sober, concerned primarily with factual occurrences, though also recording emotions in so far as these indicate the strangeness of the circumstances – the style ofTthe Invincible is almost identical to that of Solaris, and some of his Pirx the Pilot stories – Lem was after all a trained and sophisticated scientist.    

As the story unfolds Lem gradually introduces the amazing idea of a process of competitive machine evolution carrying on for millions of years, with no human or other sentient involvement whatsoever, hypothesising that if the initial conditions are right, then the outcome of that evolutionary struggle would be the simplest and smallest kind of ‘device’, powered by the most widely available source of energy (solar power), but having the capability to join together with millions of identical others to form enormous ensembles, able to generate gigantic magnetic field gradients which enable them to ‘fly’ and to attack and disable other machines, which it recognises through their electrical activity.  Over time the remnants of their original programming become a kind of radically simplified group memory, including how to disable different types of potential competitor – and this includes sentient beings too – there are no animals or plants on the land areas of the planet, but there are in the sea, though these flee quickly if they detect any movement on land.  The crew’s investigations lead to some of them being completely disabled by being subjected to massive magnetic field gradients, which wipe their consciousness, effectively reducing them to the state of babies, behaving completely anarchically and unable to look after themselves – and this is what has befallen the previous crew.  Lem’s idea is that this form of ‘device’ might have evolved through millions of years of struggle for resources and power between different types of machines left behind on the planet by sentient beings, the key thing being that in this struggle and in the conditions pertaining on this planet, it wasn’t superior consciousness that won out, but simplicity, small size and flexibility.  And he keeps reminding us that this process could take place in the complete absence of what the singularity merchants would call ‘consciousness’.  The original machines that started the process were programmed to find resources and to protect themselves, whatever their other functions, and if necessary by competing with other machines: this programming was the driver for the evolutionary process the human scientists on the Invincible eventually hypothesise, before leaving the planet having recognised that the only way to ‘manage’ the situation would be to destroy all, or nearly all the tiny ‘machines’, which would effectively mean destroying the planet.  

Very interesting in the context of discussions and debates about the future direction of AI in the real world, and of the MSc module I'm teaching this term on AI, Work and Learning, about the developing social impacts of AI on workplaces, with my colleague David Guile. It’s impressive how absolutely topical the theme of this story is, written over half a century ago, but how in one respect at least it is of its time and its specific place in Iron-Curtain Europe – there are no women in the story, and no women are even mentioned.  At least the US film version of Solaris made some of the crew women, and one of them black.  Furthermore, Lem’s space ‘workers’ –always hyper-professional and always proceed according to protocols as far as they can – are Eastern-block explorer-scientists, apparently culturally neutral, egalitarian and non-competitive compared to their western counterparts, but as far as I can remember (I’ve been reading and collecting his stuff ever since seeing the Russian film of Solaris while I was at university in the early 70s), absolutely always male.

An interesting attempt to imagine the tiny 'robotic' devices encountered by Horpach, Rohan and their colleagues on Regis 111 - but they look much bigger than I imagine them.  There are hints on the web of an animated film of The Invincible being in the pipeline, but nothing definite that I can find.

Lifelong Learning policy at a turning point in the UK?

(This piece was published on the UCL Institute of Education blog on 12th December 2019)

Exactly 100 years ago, it was argued in the 1919 Report, published by the Government Ministry for Reconstruction after World War 1, that Adult Education was essential for a confident, fair and democratic society. Its central recommendation was:

‘Adult education must not be regarded as a luxury for a few exceptional persons here and there… but a permanent national necessity, an inseparable aspect of citizenship, and therefore should be both universal and lifelong’.

Three separate Commissions on Lifelong Learning have published their reports in the last few weeks, and a fourth, a Parliamentary Inquiry, published its oral and written evidence in October.  The timing of these reports – by the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, and also a politically-independent Centenary Commission, is striking. Rates of participation in learning activities among adults have fallen dramatically over the last decade, and the decline is sharpest among those who have benefitted least from their schooling. 

We have also had research reports on the impact of adult learning from nearly 40,000 UNISON workers and from more than 5,000 Workers Education Association students; and if that isn’t enough, UNESCO’s 4^th Global Report on Adult Learning and Education was also published last week.

The trends they reveal are part of the broader decline in the social and cultural fabric over the past decade. They are a key issue in the general election, but they emerged first in the 1990s, when successive governments decided that public funds should be focussed on education for employment and for formal qualifications.  Tightly-focussed outcomes and test results, rather than participation, became the primary indicator of value for money, and as a result much of the loose network of community organisations and local authority services which directly or indirectly supported adult learning lost its funding. Alison Wolf argued against these trends in 2002:

‘We have almost forgotten that education ever had any purpose other than to promote growth. To read government documents of even fifty years ago…gives one a shock. Of course their authors recognized that education had relevance to people’s livelihoods and success, and to the nation’s prosperity. But their concern was as much, or more, with values, citizenship, the nature of a good society, the intrinsic benefits of learning.’

However, things got steadily worse: since 2010, government funding for adult education has been cut by 40%, and nearly 500 public libraries have closed during the same period as a result of the policy of austerity.

The original 1919 Report, and its 2019 descendant, both argue explicitly and cogently that the whole social and cultural infrastructure, including clubs, theatres, libraries, allotments, parks and museums, all of which have suffered funding cuts, needs to be understood as supporting opportunities for adults to learn. This is because much of the most significant learning is informal, incidental and takes place as a result of participation in a wide range of activities, none of which need necessarily to be purposefully or wholly educational. They maintain that a broad and generous conception of adult education and its social value, and its integration with more or less all the organisations and institutions of civil society, is desperately needed now, no less than it was in 1919.

The UNESCO report also sees adult learning infrastructure as a central feature of a healthy democracy, as a central element of the ‘safety net’ supporting individuals at risk, for example, of homelessness or loneliness, as well as a stepping stone to more formal and certificated learning leading to improved employment prospects. It assesses progress made by 159 countries (sadly not the UK, which did not take part) against 30 Recommendations for Adult Learning and Education published in 2015, which support the Belem Framework for Action on ‘Harnessing the Power and Potential of Adult Education’ adopted by UNESCO exactly ten years ago.

For me, the most encouraging aspect of this sequence of global policy documents on Lifelong Learning is that they highlight clearly and explicitly the importance of informal networks for learning, not simply provision of formal courses; and of participation as the key goal for productive policy frameworks, rather than narrowly-defined commodifiable outcomes. The value of informal learning in supporting broad social, political and economic goals within a participatory and informed democracy, has not been taken seriously enough since 1919 to warrant much attention from policymakers, but I for one hope that December 2019 may be turning point for Lifelong Learning in the UK.

How about a Hawkeye-type system for monitoring and promoting truth-telling in the public sphere?

This is a proposal for instituting a procedure which will allow members of the public to challenge the truth of statements made by public figures in public contexts.

Once a challenge has been made, a panel made up of individuals accredited by a new national body would judge whether the challenge was justified. The job of these individuals would be similar to that of magistrates or judges in legal cases, but the idea is that this procedure would operate relatively informally and flexibly, to avoid costly and time-consuming legal proceedings, as far as possible. If the panel upholds the challenge, the perpetrator would be given a first warning. If the panel finds that the challenge was not justified, the challenger would be given a first warning, as in the situation of drivers found to have broken the speed limit. Anyone who receives, say, three warnings would be banned, either from making public statements, or from challenging such statements, for 5 years. Being found to have made untrue statements three times, then, would in effect prevent a politician or columnist practising their profession, so they would have to resign. Mischievous challenges would also be discouraged.

The system would not be perfect, and panels may often difficulty separating statements purporting to be of fact, with statements of opinion.  There will also need to be a working definition of 'the public domain' - but I see no great difficulty with this - it is illegal already for advertisers to mislead the public.  However the primary purpose of such a system would be to promote the importance of truth telling in the public sphere, and to highlight the damage that lying and misleading the public can do to democratic culture and institutions. Difficult cases would produce debate about honesty in the public sphere, which over time would improve the quality of our political culture, and the probity of public life.

The popularity of such systems in cricket and tennis, which have now become valuable additions to the tactics of the game, and have clearly captured the enthusiasm of spectators and fans, suggests that the proposed system might also capture public attention, thereby undermining cynical but fashionable 'fake news' trends, and hopefully reinvigorating our democratic culture.

Inspiration

·       

      

   

     ‘Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working’.  (Picasso)

Reality is unpredictable: a thriller that aims to minimise suspense

·     

                                                            

         ‘In this film [The Passenger] I have instinctively looked for narrative solutions that are different from my usual ones. It's true, the basic format may be the same, but as I was shooting, every time I realized that I was moving on familiar grounds I tried to change track, to deviate from the norm, to resolve in some other way certain moments of the story. Even the way in which I had these realizations was strange. I noticed a sort of sudden disinterest in what I was doing, and that was the sign that I had to move off in another direction. We are talking about an area which is fraught with doubts, anxieties, and sudden, enlightening flashes. The only certain thing was my need to reduce the suspense to a minimum, even though there had to be some left - and I do think some has been left, even if it is an element of indirect, filtered suspense. It would have been very easy to make a thriller. I had the pursuers and the pursued; nothing was missing, but it would have been banal.’  (Michelangelo Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision, p346)

·        Q: ‘Why do you have such a strong preference for location shooting?’

     MA: ‘Because reality is unpredictable.  In the studio everything has been foreseen’.

     (Michelangelo Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision, p334)