I like a lot of different types of films, but my favorite are the subtextually rich, nuance-light action/science fiction films of the late 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, made by directors like Cameron, Carpenter, Cronenberg, McTiernan, Scott, and Verhoeven. Perhaps the most prescient of all of these is RoboCop (1984). The film’s feel is set by over-the-top comic sex and violence and silly diagetic TV clips. In less deft hands, it could easily have become the sort of campy farce best described (or perhaps, denigrated) as a “cult classic”. (This usually means a film is just bad.) But Verhoeven wields sex and violence like a master wields a paintbrush. (I take this to be a sort of self-critique of his childhood aesthetic appreciation of the violence he saw as a boy growing up in Nazi-occupied Holland, not far from the V-2 launch sites.) The film is thematically rich, so much so that one can easily forgive Verhoeven’s apparent decision to leave out (in what is probably the most “dated” element of the film) any overt criticism of policing as an institution. It is ruthlessly critical of what we’d now call neoliberalism, of corporatism, and has much to say about the nature of the self. The theme that strikes me as most prescient is how the film hinges on the very modern realization that, to a striking degree, what we call “AI” is fundamentally just “other people”, alienated and dehumanized by contractual labor relations. Verhoeven could somehow see this coming decades before anything that could reasonably be called AI.
Month: January 2023
1-on-1 Zoom
If you’re just doing a “meeting” with one other person located in the same country, I don’t see the point of using Zoom. Ordinary phone lines are more reliable and have more familiar acoustic qualities (this is why VoIP sounds worse: unless you’re quite young, you’re probably far more familiar with the 8kHz sampling rate and whatever compression curve the phone system uses). Just call people on the phone!
ACL Workshop on Computation and Written Language
The first ACL Workshop on Computation and Written Language (CAWL) will be held in conjunction with ACL 2023 in Toronto, Canada, on July 13th or 14th 2023 (TBD). It will feature invited talks by Mark Aronoff (Stony Brook University) and Amalia Gnanadesikan (University of Maryland, College Park). We welcome submissions of scientific papers to be presented at the conference and archived in the ACL Anthology. Information on submission and format will be posted at https://cawl.wellformedness.com shortly.
Generalized capitalist realism
One of the most memorable books I’ve read over the last decade or so is Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009). The book is a slim, 81-page pamphlet describing the feeling that “not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” As Fisher explains, a lot of ideological work is done to prevent us from imagining alternatives, including the increasingly capitalist sheen of anti-capitalism, and there are a few areas—the overall non-response to climate change and biosphere-scale threats, for example—where capitalist realism ideology has failed to co-opt dissent, suggesting at least the possibility of an alternative on the horizon, even if Fisher himself does not imagine or present one.
A very clear example of capitalist realism can be found in the ethical altruism (EA) movement, which focuses on getting charity to the less well-off via existing capitalist structures. Singer (2015), the moment’s resident philosopher, justifies this by setting the probability of a viable alternative to capitalism surfacing in any reasonable time frame to be zero. Therefore the most good one can do is to ruthlessly accumulate wealth in the metropole and then give it away where it is most needed. Any synergies between the wealth of the first world and the dire economic conditions in the third world simply have to set aside.
Fisher’s term capitalist realism is a sort of pun on socialist realism, a term for idealized, realistic, literal art from 20th century socialist countries. His use of the term realism is (deliberately, I think) ironic, since both capitalist and socialist realism apply firm ideological filters to the real world. The continental philosophy stuff that this ultimately gets down to is a bit above my pay grade, but I think we can generalize the basic idea: X realism is an ideology that posits and enforces the hypothesis that there is no alternative to X.
If one is willing to go along with this, we can easily talk about, for instance, neural realism, which posits that there is simply no alternative to neural networks for machine learning. You can see this for instance in the debate between “deep learning fundamentalists” like LeCun and the rigor police like Rahimi (see Sproat 2022 for an entertaining discussion): LeCun does seem believe there to be no alternative to employing methods we do not understand with the scientific rigor that Rahimi demands, when it seems obvious that these technologies remain a small part of the overall productive economy. An even clearer example is the term foundation model, which has the fairly obvious connotation that they are crucial to the future of AI. Foundation model realism would also necesarily posit that there is no alternative and discard any disconfirming observation.
References
Fisher, M. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books.
Singer, P. 2015. The Most Good You Can Do. Yale University Press.
Sproat, R. 2022. Boring problems are sometimes the most interesting. Computational Linguistics 48(2): 483-490.