The revelation that ChatGPT, the astonishing artificial-intelligence chatbot, had been trained on an Nvidia supercomputer spurred one of the largest single-day gains in stock-market history. When the Nasdaq opened on May 25, 2023, Nvidia’s value increased by about two hundred billion dollars. A few months earlier, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s C.E.O., had informed investors that Nvidia had sold similar supercomputers to fifty of America’s hundred largest companies. By the close of trading, Nvidia was the sixth most valuable corporation on earth, worth more than Walmart and ExxonMobil combined. Huang’s business position can be compared to that of Samuel Brannan, the celebrated vender of prospecting supplies in San Francisco in the late eighteen-forties. “There’s a war going on out there in A.I., and Nvidia is the only arms dealer,” one Wall Street analyst said.
Huang is a patient monopolist. He drafted the paperwork for Nvidia with two other people at a Denny’s restaurant in San Jose, California, in 1993, and has run it ever since. At sixty, he is sarcastic and self-deprecating, with a Teddy-bear face and wispy gray hair. Nvidia’s main product is its graphics-processing unit, a circuit board with a powerful microchip at its core. In the beginning, Nvidia sold these G.P.U.s to video gamers, but in 2006 Huang began marketing them to the supercomputing community as well. Then, in 2013, on the basis of promising research from the academic computer-science community, Huang bet Nvidia’s future on artificial intelligence. A.I. had disappointed investors for decades, and Bryan Catanzaro, Nvidia’s lead deep-learning researcher at the time, had doubts. “I didn’t want him to fall into the same trap that the A.I. industry has had in the past,” Catanzaro told me. “But, ten years plus down the road, he was right.”
In the near future, A.I. is projected to generate movies on demand, provide tutelage to children, and teach cars to drive themselves. All of these advances will occur on Nvidia G.P.U.s, and Huang’s stake in the company is now worth more than forty billion dollars.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
In recent years, the idea that the United States is an empire in decline has gained considerable support, some of it from quarters that until very recently would have denied it was ever an empire at all. The New York Times, for instance, has run columns that describe a “remarkably benign” American empire that is “in retreat”, or even at risk of decline and fall.
Yet the shadow American power still casts over the rest of the world is unmistakable. The US has military superiority over all other countries, control of the world’s oceans via critical sea lanes, garrisons on every continent, a network of alliances that covers much of the industrial world, the ability to render individuals to secret prisons in countries from Cuba to Thailand, preponderant influence over the global financial system, about 30% of the world’s wealth and a continental economy not dependent on international trade.
To call this an empire is, if anything, to understate its range. Within the American security establishment, what it amounted to was never in doubt. US power was to be exercised around the world using the “conduits of national power”: economic centrality, military scale, sole possession of a global navy, nuclear superiority and global surveillance architecture that makes use of the dominant American share of the Earth’s orbital infrastructure.
If proponents of the end of the US global order do not assert a decrease in the potency of the instruments of American power, that is because there has been no such decrease. The share of global transactions conducted in dollars has been increasing, not declining. No other state can affect political outcomes in other countries the way the US still does. The reach of the contemporary US is so great that it tends to blend into the background of daily events. In January 2019, the US demanded that Germany ban the Iranian airline Mahan Air from landing on its territory. In September 2020, it sanctioned the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court for refusing to drop investigations into American citizens. In February 2022, at US request, Japan agreed to redirect liquefied fossil gas, which is critical to Japanese industry, to Europe in the event of a conflict with Russia over Ukraine. At the height of that conflict, the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, found the time to visit Algiers to negotiate the reopening of a gas pipeline to Spain via Morocco. These were all quotidian events, unremarkable daily instances of humdrum imperial activity. The practical operation of the empire remains poorly understood, not despite its ubiquity, but because of it.
From this perspective, the menial adherence of Britain to the US global project is at least intelligible. Historically, American planners divided their approach to the rest of the world by region. In western Europe and Japan, American interests were usually pursued by cautious political management. In Latin America and the Middle East, constant interventions, coups and invasions were needed. In east Asia and south-east Asia there was military exertion at scale. As long as it lasted, the Soviet Union was cordoned off and contained, against the wishes of the generals in the US Strategic Air Command, who would have preferred to destroy it in a nuclear holocaust. The major US allies were on the right side of this calculus and had less reason to begrudge it.
When dealing with the US, elites in countries on the periphery of the global economy still often behave as though they are dealing with the imperial centre. The US permits a variety of political systems in its subordinates. US client states include medieval monarchies in the Arab Gulf, military juntas like Abdel Fatah al-Sisi’s Egypt, personal presidential autocracies in the Philippines and Thailand, apartheid parliamentary systems like Israel and reasonably democratic systems with greater social equity and conditions than the US itself. What is required is not democracy, but reasonably close allegiance to American foreign policy goals.
Read the rest of this article at: The Guardian
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Often, the highest-stake decisions impacting the planet come down to the simplest phrases. The importance of words plays out every year as world leaders and diplomats gather at the United Nations climate change conference, also known as the Conference of the Parties (COP), where they adopt a new climate agreement. Consider one especially foundational one: whether countries agree that they voluntarily “should” slash climate pollution or phase out fossil fuel subsidies or contribute to international funds, or whether they “must.”
Climate action includes vast, sometimes elusive concepts, which is what makes precise language so important.
To really boil it down, there are two broad courses of action we need to take at once: reducing emissions to limit global warming and reducing the harm from the warming we’ve already caused. The longer we wait to slash emissions from the fossil fuel industry, which has disproportionately caused the crisis, the more we’ll pay to adapt to the harms of climate change.
Read the rest of this article at: Vox
In 2019, Sandra Hüller, one of Germany’s foremost stage and film actors, starred as Hamlet in a production at the Schauspielhaus Bochum, in the Ruhr Valley. For most performers, the part is challenge enough. But as Hüller prepared for the role with the theatre’s artistic director, Johan Simons, their discussions kept drifting to the character who animates Hamlet’s fantasies of revenge: his father’s ghost. In most stagings, ghastly makeup and lighting convey that the character is spectral. Could this lingering spirit be conjured without melodramatic clichés? Simons and Hüller agreed that it would be potent for the father to rise from within the son—speaking through him. As Simons recently described the conceit, “The father is so deep in your soul that you can’t get away from him—he is always in you.”
In the opening scene of the modern-dress, German-language production, Hüller stood alone onstage, her hands hanging uselessly by her sides, her eyes downcast. In a trembling near-whisper, she spoke lines that Shakespeare originally wrote for Hamlet’s friend Horatio: “If there be any good thing to be done, / That may to thee do ease and grace to me, / Speak to me.” Hüller smiled faintly to hold back tears, and her voice broke as she muttered, “You are here, you are here.”
When it came time for Hamlet’s encounter with the Ghost, an eerie chord resounded, and Hüller’s soft, breathy voice suddenly dropped an octave. She was no longer Hamlet, or not entirely. “Pity me not!” Hüller said, her eyes hardening and her voice quickening as she channelled the Ghost: “I am thy father’s spirit, / Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night, / And for the day confined to fast in fires, / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away.” As Hüller played it, Hamlet wasn’t seeing a ghost; he was being possessed by it. Hüller’s previously gentle demeanor was displaced by lurching motion, and when the Ghost furiously commanded his son’s obedience—“List, list, O, list!” in Shakespeare’s original—she practically vomited up the words: “Hör, hör, o, hör! ”
The scene was as scary to watch as any horror movie, but it also felt profound: the sins of the old were literally infecting the bodies of the young, emphasizing the generational rot at the heart of the play. German critics hailed Hüller’s performance as revelatory—not just as an examination of character but as an exploration of the capacities of stage art. Der Spiegel said that witnessing Hüller wrestle with Hamlet and the Ghost simultaneously was like watching “an exorcism.”
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
Many academic fields can be said to ‘study morality’. Of these, the philosophical sub-discipline of normative ethics studies morality in what is arguably the least alienated way. Rather than focusing on how people and societies think and talk about morality, normative ethicists try to figure out which things are, simply, morally good or bad, and why. The philosophical sub-field of meta-ethics adopts, naturally, a ‘meta-’ perspective on the kinds of enquiry that normative ethicists engage in. It asks whether there are objectively correct answers to these questions about good or bad, or whether ethics is, rather, a realm of illusion or mere opinion.
Most of my work in the past decade has been in meta-ethics. I believe that there are truths about what’s morally right and wrong. I believe that some of these truths are objective or, as they say in the literature, ‘stance-independent’. That is to say, it’s not my or our disapproval that makes torture morally wrong; torture is wrong because, to put it simply, it hurts people a lot. I believe that these objective moral truths are knowable, and that some people are better than others are at coming to know them. You can even call them ‘moral experts’ if you wish.
Of course, not everyone agrees with all of that. Some are simply confused; they conflate ‘objective’ with ‘culturally universal’ or ‘innate’ or ‘subsumable under a few exceptionless principles’ or some such. But many people’s misgivings about moral objectivity are more clear headed and deeper. In particular, I find that some demur because they think that, for there to be moral truths, let alone objective, knowable ones, morality would have to have a kind of ‘foundation’ that, in their view, is nowhere to be found. Others, anxious to help, try to show that there’s a firm foundation or ultimate ground for morality after all.
It’s my view that both sides of this conflict are off on the wrong foot. Morality is objective, but it neither requires nor admits of a foundation. It just kind of floats there, along with the evaluative realm more generally, unsupported by anything else. Parts of it can be explained by other parts, but the entirety of the web or network of good and evil is brute. Maybe you think that’s weird and even worthy of outright dismissal. I once thought the same thing. The purpose of this essay, which is based on my book Pragmatist Quietism: A Meta-Ethical System (2022), is to encourage you to start seeing this aspect of the world as I now see it.
Read the rest of this article at: Aeon
