Op-eds

Late last year, Facebook inducted The Weekly Standard (TWS), an American news outlet, as one of its only five fact-checkers and the sole conservative voice in the group. Earlier this week, TWS raised objections about an article published by Think Progress, a liberal news outlet, prompting the latter to claim it was being discriminated against for its ideological slant. Obviously, the event has raised a furore on Twitter, with many more liberal voices piping up in favour of Think Progress and denouncing Facebook’s attempt to appease everyone instead of aligning itself with the truth. There’s a lot going on here that I’d like to unpack.

Facebook scrambled to find "conservative" fact checkers when conservatives complained that the third-party fact checkers Facebook had contracted with were not fact-checkers at all, just the 'liberal media' in another guise. That made this event inevitable. https://t.co/jVYQhSM8XI

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) September 11, 2018

The Think Progress headline reads: ‘Brett Kavanaugh said he would kill Roe v. Wade last week and almost no one noticed.’

First – As Think Progress has discussed, it doesn’t make sense that Facebook recruited TWS into its fact-checkers’ fold when it hadn’t been subjected to the same evaluation standards as the social platform’s four other fact-checkers (AP, Factcheck, PolitiFact and Snopes) – until you suspect Zuckerberg is indeed trying to appease both sides of the political spectrum. This doesn’t bode well for a platform that constantly aspires to be the place people get their news in nor does it bode well for publishers, who now have a disincentive to be liberal or more generally disagree with TWS.

Second – It’s possible that Think Progress has been penalised for its ideological slant here. Liberal v. conservative rivalries in the news space are increasingly becoming the norm, with some outlets pointedly aiming their guns at what their ‘opponent’ outlets are saying. That said, the headline for the original Think Progress article was, in fact, misleading and deserved to be cautioned about.

When you say a judge has “said he would kill” a law or previous judgment, you are immediately implying he intends to undo it. But this is not what Kavanaugh said. According to the Think Progress article itself, and explainers by Vox and The Conversation, Kavanaugh is opposed to the precedent set by Roe v. Wade. As an associate justice nominee to the SCOTUS, if Kavanaugh makes it to the bench, there will be a 5-4 majority to overturn Roe v. Wade. Does the Think Progress headline imply that he will vote that way? Yes. But has Kavanaugh said he will vote that way? No.

Third – Michael Stern argued on Slate that it was unfair for TWS to dock Think Progress for an opinion piece and label it as “false news” on Facebook. But opinion or not, Think Progress is guilty of misrepresenting reality in its headline. As TWS appears to have asserted, changing the headline will remove it from Facebook’s ‘beware’ bin. This is also where a point made by Brendan Nyhan, a public policy expert who contributes to Upshot NYT, is relevant: that on Facebook, most people see only the headline.

If you read it, @imillhiser's piece makes an argument about why Kavanaugh is likely to rule against Roe. That is a prediction about the future & one for which he makes a reasonable argument. As such, the article should not be tagged. But again, most will only see the headline.

— Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan on 🟦☁️) (@BrendanNyhan) September 11, 2018

At The Wire, we have often observed that an article with a striking headline will receive a lot of engagement on Facebook for the headline alone, and with the numbers suggesting those sharing the link may not even have read the article. So the headline plays an outsized role on Facebook and Think Progress should have exercised restraint with that component of the standard article, and not have tried to hide behind nuanced analyses and hedging syntax following in the body.

Fourth – While Nyhan makes a useful point about how it is Think Progress that is really resorting to the ‘liberal v. conservative’ defence, and not TWS, I think he falters in believing that fact-checking wasn’t exercised as a form of censorship here as well as in not considering if TWS itself may have stepped over the line.

Disappointed in how simplistic this piece is and how it equates fact-checking with censorship, but that’s the problem with Facebook’s approach – it raises the stakes and therefore incentivizes these kinds of attacks https://t.co/Es68pvvxAy

— Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan on 🟦☁️) (@BrendanNyhan) September 12, 2018

Both these concerns are tied to how Facebook handles content that makes questionable claims. For example, Think Progress has alleged that:

When an article is labeled false under Facebook’s third-party fact-checking system, groups that share that article on Facebook receives a notification informing them that the article received a “False Rating” and that “pages and websites” that share that piece “will see their overall distribution and their ability to monetize and advertise removed.” Facebook’s notification regarding our piece on Kavanaugh and Roe v. Wade effectively warned outlets not to share ThinkProgress content or risk censorship themselves.

(I’m not on Facebook and can’t check for myself.)

Separately, Nyhan shared a screenshot of a message he had received when he attempted to share the Think Progress article:

What happened: a @weeklystandard fact-check https://t.co/dv3AigxQjM of a @thinkprogress piece https://t.co/2eRnuNhx5h is reducing its prominence on Facebook because TWS is a member of FB's fact-checking partnership. As a result, I see this prompt when I try to share the story: pic.twitter.com/uFGu5BUAOx

— Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan on 🟦☁️) (@BrendanNyhan) September 11, 2018

Zuckerberg has also said that content marked as “fake” or “false” will be demoted on Facebook and rendered invisible to up to 80% of all the people who could have seen it otherwise.

My takeaways from these messages are the following:

1. Facebook doesn’t care how wrong an article is – it can be entirely wrong or it can have one wrong sentence –, it will still be graded on a single-point scale (falseness: 0/1) instead of providing users with a more meaningful assessment of the problem.
2. If an article is marked as “fake” or “false”, it will lose 80% of its audience. If this isn’t censorship, what is?
3. The fact-checker gets to plonk its own article in front of another on the same topic but which it has deemed unreliable. Thus, given Facebook’s apparent intent to appease all sides, including TWS among its fact-checkers runs the risk of magnifying conservative voices over liberal ones. Can we expect that Facebook will soon include a liberal voice, you know, just to please everyone?

Fifth – The essential problem with treating the political right and political left on equal footing, as much as treating the social conservative and the social liberal on equal footing, is that such an equation contains a Trojan horse that most people don’t account for: the right/conservative frequently make claims and argue from a position that is not rooted in rational beliefs and, in the US, yearn for originalist interpretations of constitutional values. As I wrote two days ago,

As such, [a realistic ‘idea of India’] is hard to come by in the media because, as Ram Guha explains, it is unglamorous and difficult to sell, even as the press is the institution responsible for the viewpoint’s day-to-day distribution and maintenance. As a result, you get partisanship more often than deliberation. … It might be useful to clarify here that such deliberation is not between leftwing and rightwing vantages but between reason and reason. Unreason has no place here, nor does its conflation with partisanship. And it is often the case that the right is aligned with pseudoscience and illogic that it confuses resistance against unreason with resistance against itself. It is frustrating not because the pedantic distinction is lost in the muddle – who cares – but because the result is often that the leftists co-opt your turf simply because you’re not right enough.

A similar endeavour to co-opt territories has happened here: because Facebook screwed up its fact-checkers’ ability to respond meaningfully to an article that was partly flawed, it gave Think Progress the ammunition it needed to claim that it had been wronged by a conservative competitor. So an effort to appease both sides – as undertaken by Facebook, for example – will remain an appeasement and will never qualify as any kind of attempt at fairness. This doesn’t negate TWS’s calling out Think Progress as much as assert that Facebook is chiefly responsible for this mess being what it is.

Footer image credit: TheDigitalArtist/pixabay.

The short excerpt below from Patriots and Partisans by Ram Guha caught my attention because it offers a simple definition of the idea of India (at the risk of oversimplification). One may have encountered it recently in Amartya Sen’s Argumentative Indian as well but that book was too dense for me. As such, this ‘idea’ is hard to come by in the media because, as Guha explains, it is unglamorous and difficult to sell, even as the press is the institution responsible for the viewpoint’s day-to-day distribution and maintenance. As a result, you get partisanship more often than deliberation. It’s easier.

It might be useful to clarify here that such deliberation is not between leftwing and rightwing vantages but between reason and reason. Unreason has no place here, nor does its conflation with partisanship. And it is often the case that the right is aligned with pseudoscience and illogic that it confuses resistance against unreason with resistance against itself. It’s frustrating not because the pedantic distinction is lost in the muddle – who cares – but because the result is often that the leftists co-opt your turf simply because you’re not right enough.

Anyway:

The groups and individuals mentioned in the preceding paragraph are, of course, merely illustrative [Ela Bhatt, Jean Drèze, etc.]. The work that they and others like them undertake is rarely reported in the mainstream media. For, the task of reform, of incremental and evolutionary change, is as unglamorous as it is necessary. It is far easier to speak of a wholesale, structural transformation, to identify one single variable that, if acted upon, will take India up and into the straight high road to superstardom. Among the one-size-fits-all solutions on offer are those promoted by the Naxalites, whose project is to make India into a purer, that is to say more regimented, version of Communist China; by the Sangh Parivar, who assure the Hindus that if they discover their religion they will (again) rule the world; and by the free-market ideologues, who seek to make India into an even more hedonistic version of the United States of America.

Based as it is on dialogue, compromise, reciprocity and accommodation, the idea of India does not appeal to those who seek quick and total solutions to human problems. It thus does not seem to satisfy ideologues of left or right, as well as romantic populists.

Featured image credit: Samuel Zeller/Unsplash.

Do all editors share that excoriating sensation that carves through one’s gut when one sees one’s writer writing for another publication?

Of course, “one’s writer” is unjust phrasing because writers don’t belong to editors and are free to write for whoever they please.

However, this isotropic sea of writer-editor relationships is more suitable for the writer than it is for the editor.

Editors build publications – that means responsibilities that don’t look all that beautiful under the light of day.

One such responsibility is to build exclusivity, which is the notion that in order to read writer W, you must read publication P.

If the writer is good, then the editor is implicitly required to encourage the writer to write more, to help them become better, without encouraging diversification.

For writers, however, it is more desirable to diversify, to write for more outlets so that their name is accessible to the public memory through a variety of sources.

Depending on the writer’s choice of outlets, it also means diverse audiences to speak to and diverse opportunities to access.

Most good writers share healthy relationships with the editors they regularly work with, which often leads to long-lasting friendships.

So a friendly editor might encourage a writer to diversify if he has the liberty to think beyond the needs of his publication.

I don’t know how often this is or isn’t the case, but when it is, TFW you see a writer belonging to your vision of exclusivity writing for a competitor is pure pain.

To an outsider, the exclusivity drive may seem like an unfair, even unnecessary, ideal because it acts against the interests of the writer.

Eminently, exclusivity seems opposed to nurturing a community of good writers capable of weathering risk as well as to the democratisation of journalism.

The latter is in that all people have access to all stories because all journalists write for all publications.

In fact, this would be the most efficient way, in all senses of the term, to conduct journalism as a business – as an open, social enterprise.

However, this worldview conveniently forgets that competition exists and extant journalism organisations are founded on market forces, not social good.

Exclusivity exists because competition exists: it is the conservation law born when the competition orders the system along a new symmetry.

There are two forms of exclusivity: of stories and of writers; but where one exists, the other will too, which exposes the distinction for its pedantry.

The point is you, the editor, need both forms in order to orient your organisation towards profitability; without exclusivity, you have no edge.

And of course, competition is as competition does, putting editors at odds with their writers in a proxy battle for the organisation’s conquest for new edges.

The question now is whether writers should be expected to understand all of this and act in a way that protects the editor’s interests to the extent possible.

This is because, if exclusivity is on the table, editors are also likelier to give the writers more leeway in terms of what to write and how.

One might argue that a good editor will always be able to wrangle a good story out of a writer.

However, it is not possible to understate the importance of a long-standing editor-writer relationship and what that can produce.

Perhaps journalism would be more benefited by an arrangement where all editor-writer pairs can work for all publications, instead of just writers.

This is in effect a framing of the ‘story’ as the nuclear unit of journalism instead of the storyteller, an identity that excludes the editor.

Such an arrangement would protect the interests of the editor as well as the writer, and ensure that publications can also produce better stories as a result.

Of course, this would mean more work for the editor but it could also conceivably mean more business.

Featured image credit: Rafaela Biazi/Unsplash.

Donald Trump

When you criticise a person, you naturally take into account their office and assess whether you know all that you need to to come to your conclusions.

For a long time, this ‘stop and assess’ step prevented mediapersons, who generally like to be careful, from calling Donald Trump an outright liar or an incompetent bozo.

‘Stop and assess’ meant that journalists would hold back from calling a spade a spade if the spade wielded great power and influence over society, mostly in an effort to give it more credit than it actually deserved.

Matters would have had to have reached some kind of point of inflection before it would become ‘okay’ to call the American president a fool.

This delay – an offset between the people thinking him a fool and the media thinking him a fool – could fuel media distrust by giving the impression that the media isn’t going as hard as it needs to against this man.

Jay Rosen has written and tweeted about this a lot.

The delay would also more directly affect newsroom decision-making if everyone present thought the president deserved more credit by virtue of being president, and that they might not be privy to all the information needed to make rational decisions.

Persisting with this idea could in the longer run result in journalists making excuses for the president and presidential behaviour.

When this happens, shit has hit the fan because these journalists will no longer be able to feel the pulse of the people, so to speak, and could miss more significant developments while following trivial ones.

Narendra Modi

A similar concern has plagued my impression of the team Narendra Modi leads in the name of the government.

His ministers, and he himself, have been saying pseudoscientific things, often substituting scientific knowledge with traditional beliefs that over-glorify the achievements of pre-Mughal India.

At the recently concluded science/media workshop at Matscience, Sowmiya Ashok of the Indian Express said that when ministers make such claims, they should specify their sources, and that these sources should be collected in one place and displayed for all to see.

This is a good idea – if we are assuming that the ministers actually believe what they are saying.

My reluctance here is not about calling a spade a spade but about calling a non-spade a non-spade.

(a) If the ministers actually believe what they are saying, they are misguided, and I have no compunctions about calling them misguided.

(b) However, what if the ministers don’t actually believe what they are saying but (i) are continuing to do so in an effort to misdirect the public and (ii) are participating in a strange FFA game where the person who makes the most casteist/classist statement promoting Hindutva superiority can draw the attention of the prime minister while feeding the supporters of his sponsor, the RSS, at the same time?

Both (a) and (b) are hypotheses that can explain the string of stupid statements by ministers and, on the downside, both (a) and (b) are yet to be falsifiable.

However, (b) has a slight edge in that it can be checked if ministers make pseudoscientific claims when there is also one other controversial issue in the media that they would like no one to focus on, a.k.a. misdirection.

Trump recently did this when he wanted the media to spend its time and energy looking up (nonexistent) discrimination against white farmers in South Africa and not focus on Michael Cohen’s volte-face against him.

(I acknowledge that (a) and (b) are not entirely mutually exclusive but they could be in terms of their underlying intentions.)

Towards supporting (b), I posit that ministers will not want to collate their sources and make it available at one location because it beats the purpose of (ii).

Yuval Noah Harari

Unlike with Modi and Trump, or perhaps more illustratively, where the ‘stop and assess’ step has been surmounted with great confidence has been in reviews of the books of Yuval Noah Harari.

Of course, Harari is no public leader like Modi or Trump, and the derision towards his books may have been incentivised by their corresponding valorisation by the Silicon Valley types.

Nonetheless it has been heartening to read laborious assessments online about Harari’s thematic reluctance to engage deeply with the subjects of his ‘analysis’.

The same is also true of the words of Steven Pinker, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Richard Dawkins, Eric Lander, Devdutt Pattanaik,

We journalists are comfortable calling these men out but give them more power and it is as if some quantum field is born that skews our bearings.

I was prompted to think of Harari, and others like him, because of this review in particular, which is of his latest book. Excerpt (edited to be brief):

So it continues, great swathes of padding followed by dinner-party observations of crushing banality. The chapters cover some big subjects – war, terrorism, nationalism, God – but since most average about fifteen pages, they fall almost comically short of providing the ‘dazzling’ insights promised on the book’s cover. One sentence literally reads, ‘Humans have bodies.’ Amazing. ‘European civilisation is anything Europeans make of it.’ Profound. Where terrorism is concerned, ‘we just cannot prepare for every eventuality’. Dazzling.

On and on it goes. ‘With a single exception, all flags are rectangular pieces of cloth.’ Well I never. ‘A robot army would probably have strangled the French Revolution in its cradle in 1789.’ There’s a good Doctor Who story in that. ‘If the USA had had killer robots in the Vietnam War, the My Lai massacre might have been prevented.’ Is this Yuval Noah Harari or Alan Partridge?

… In reality, Harari’s political observations are fantastically bland. He likes equality, he thinks we should be humble, he thinks we should reach across national boundaries, he thinks that sometimes democracy gets it wrong – oh, I can barely bring myself to write this stuff down. Does he really believe that President Erdoğan will be heartened to learn that we ought to try to ‘make the world a little bit better’? Can he really believe that all this is likely to bring a smile to Vladimir Putin’s face? The truth is that Harari’s book is far more likely to send him to sleep.

The name of Sadanand Menon had found mention in Raya Sarkar’s list last year. Since then, a journalist and former student of the Asian College of Journalism (ACJ) had published an article in The News Minute about how a noted scholar and culture critic had sexually harassed her. Though she hadn’t mentioned Menon by name at the time, his identity was revealed recently when the journalist’s complaint to the ICC at the ACJ, where Menon teaches, was dismissed.

Sashi Kumar, the college’s director, had said the accusation couldn’t be examined by college authorities because the alleged incident had happened after the journalist had graduated from ACJ and outside the ACJ campus. However, she, her supporters and many allies of the #metoo movement in India have been urging ACJ to conduct an investigation on moral grounds, saying, among other things, that it’s the college’s responsibility to provide a safe space for its students.

Earlier this week, a group of teachers, artists, activists and other people signed and released a letter in the public domain refuting allegations of moral corruption after theatre artistes had convened in Spaces, a space for non-mainstream artistic and cultural events maintained by Menon in Chennai, to discuss redressal mechanisms after one of their peers had been accused of sexual harassment.

The question of whether we can, or should, separate the artist from his art has always bothered me. After witnessing a brief but striking exchange on Twitter between astrophysicist Katie Mack and theoretical physicist Tommaso Dorigo, I was able to decide that the production and consumption of art, or science, enabled misogynist attitudes to survive in creative industries; that good art shouldn’t be an excuse to put up with unprincipled people.

Of course, this places us on a slippery slope. We may have decided to shun the work of people we know are morally corrupt; what about those creators whose work we enjoy but about whose inner lives we know very little? Second: everyone is flawed; does this mean we just don’t consume any art anymore?

§

Xan Brooks in The Guardian, November 2017:

I’d love to follow [Peggy] Drexler’s advice. Keep the art clean and pure, exempt from the actions of its creator. I’m just not convinced it quite works in practice. If we accept that “bad” (subjective moral judgment) people can create “good” (subjective aesthetic judgment) art, then it follows that amoral artists can hold the world to a higher moral standard than they follow themselves. But isn’t art also an extension of the artist’s inner self? How does one begin separating the two? “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” as Yeats put it – though ought we still to quote Yeats, what with all that fascist-sympathising? If so, here’s another: “Out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” …

For years I thrilled to the notion of the wild, outlaw artist. I thought of great, personal film-making as something torn from the heart, or a form of self-therapy. It was the process by which flawed, stumbling individuals could harness their demons and spin their basest matter into gold. That sounds wonderfully romantic. It may also be bullshit. Because what if it’s not that at all? How about, instead of harnessing the demons, the artistic process is a means of feeding the demons, of indulging them? Then the film is a fig leaf; even a by-product of abuse.

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Stray thought: It feels so much harder to navigate towards a solution in the non-technical sciences. Can think of three reasons: the lack of a fixed framework in which to ‘solve’ problems, the sheer number of ‘solutions’ that are required according to context, and the possibility that the tendency towards ‘solution’ as such might be unique to the technical sciences. And I think getting used to the last of the three reasons is where the pain lies.

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Of all places, I found on Scott Aaronson’s blog the perfect articulation of some feelings related to my sexual identity, particularly relating to how males privileged by their nerdiness are not entirely without suffering. Specifically, it’s comment #171 below a blog post published in 2014, by Aaronson himself. Excerpt:

Here’s the thing: I spent my formative years—basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s—feeling not “entitled,” not “privileged,” but terrified. I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison. And furthermore, that the people who did these things to me would somehow be morally right to do them—even if I couldn’t understand how.

You can call that my personal psychological problem if you want, but it was strongly reinforced by everything I picked up from my environment: to take one example, the sexual-assault prevention workshops we had to attend regularly as undergrads, with their endless lists of all the forms of human interaction that “might be” sexual harassment or assault, and their refusal, ever, to specify anything that definitely wouldn’t be sexual harassment or assault. I left each of those workshops with enough fresh paranoia and self-hatred to last me through another year.

Contrary to what many people claimed, I do not mean to suggest here that anti-harassment workshops or reading feminist literature were the sole or even primary cause of my problems. They were certainly factors, but I mentioned them to illustrate a much broader issue, which was the clash between my inborn personality and the social norms of the modern world—norms that require males to make romantic and sexual advances, but then give them no way to do so without running the risk of being ‘bad people.’ Of course these norms will be the more paralyzing, the more one cares about not being a ‘bad person.’

§

Of course, such suffering does not legitimise the privilege men like me have because it doesn’t live and die in our teenage years. It’s something we need to know is there, is all; beyond that, there’s still the patriarchy to face down. Laurie Penny spelled it out best in the New Statesman: that nerdy boys get out of their suffering into a world that respects them; nerdy girls get out of their suffering into a world of sexism. Feminism is a stand against every step of this painful journey, not just the one that keeps nerdy boys nervous about what to do next.

Heterosexuality is fucked up right now because whilst we’ve taken steps towards respecting women as autonomous agents, we can’t quite let the old rules go. We have an expectation for, a craving for of a sexual freedom that our rhetoric, our rituals and our sexual socialisation have not prepared us for. And unfortunately for men, they have largely been socialised – yes, even the feminist-identified ones – to see women as less than fully human. Men, particularly nerdy men, are socialised to blame women – usually their peers and/or the women they find sexually desirable for the trauma and shame they experienced growing up. If only women had given them a chance, if only women had taken pity, if only done the one thing they had spent their own formative years been shamed and harassed and tormented into not doing. If only they had said yes, or made an approach.

§

Yes, a rubric about ‘what to do’ alongside ‘what not to do’ would be fantastic, but I think we need to figure that shit out for ourselves. Simultaneously, everyone needs to keep telling the world stories of what we – men, women and others – did and didn’t do to help it cope.

https://twitter.com/AWDubreuil/status/470362825529888768

Featured image credit: Alice Donovan Rouse/Unsplash.

Since news of the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke last month, many of us have expressed apprehension – often on Facebook itself – that the social networking platform has transformed since its juvenile beginnings into an ugly monster.

Such moral panic is flawed and we ought to know that by now. After all, it’s been 50 years since 2001: A Space Odyssey was released, and a 100 since Frankenstein – both cultural assets that have withstood the proverbial test of time only because they managed to strike some deep, mostly unknown chord about the human condition, a note that continues to resonate with the passions of a world that likes to believe it has disrupted the course of history itself.

Gary Greenberg, a mental health professional and author, recently wrote that the similarities between Viktor Frankenstein’s monster and Facebook were unmistakable except on one count: the absence of a conscience was a bug in the monster, and remains a feature in Facebook. As a result, he wrote, “an invention whose genius lies in its programmed inability to sort the true from the false, opinion from fact, evil from good … is bound to be a remorseless, lumbering beast, one that does nothing other than … aggregate and distribute, and then to stand back and collect the fees.”

However, it is 2001‘s HAL 9000 that continues to be an allegory of choice in many ways, not least because it’s an artificial intelligence the likes of which we’re yet to confront in 2018 but have learnt to constantly anticipate. In the film, HAL serves as the onboard computer for an interplanetary spaceship carrying a crew of astronauts to a point near Jupiter, where a mysterious black monolith of alien origin has been spotted. Only HAL knows the real nature of the mission, which in Kafkaesque fashion is never revealed.

Within the logic-rules-all-until-it-doesn’t narrative canon that science fiction writers have abused for decades, HAL is not remarkable. But take him out into space, make sure he knows more than the humans he’s guiding and give him the ability to physically interfere in people’s lives – and you have not a villain waylaid by complicated Boolean algebra but a reflection of human hubris.

2001 was the cosmic extrapolation of Kubrick’s previous production, the madcap romp Dr Strangelove. While the two films differ significantly in the levels of moroseness on display as humankind confronts a threat to its existence, they’re both meditations on how humanity often leads itself towards disaster while believing it’s fixing itself and the world. In fact, in both films, the threat was weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Kubrick intended for the Star Child in 2001‘s closing scenes to unleash nuclear holocaust on Earth – but he changed his mind later and chose to keep the ending open.

This is where HAL has been able to step in, in our public consciousness, as a caution against our over-optimism towards artificial intelligence and reminding us that WMDs can take different forms. Using the tools and methods of ‘Big Data’ and machine learning, machines have defeated human players at chess and go, solved problems in computer science and helped diagnose some diseases better. There is a long way to go for HAL-like artificial general intelligence, assuming that is even possible.

But in the meantime, we come across examples every week that these machines are nothing like what popular science fiction has taught us to expect. We have found that their algorithms often inherit the biases of their makers, and that their makers often don’t realise this until the issue is called out.

According to (the modified) Tesler’s theorem, “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet”. When overlaid on optimism of the Silicon Valley variety, AI in our imagination suddenly becomes able to do what we have never been able to ourselves, even as we assume humans will still be in control. We forget that for AI to be truly AI, its intelligence should be indistinguishable from that of a human’s – a.k.a. the Turing test. In this situation, why do we expect AI to behave differently than we do?

We shouldn’t, and this is what HAL teaches us. His iconic descent into madness in 2001 reminds us that AI can go wonderfully right but it’s likelier to go wonderfully wrong if only because of the outcomes that we are not, and have never been, anticipating as a species. In fact, it has been argued that HAL never went mad but only appeared to do so because of the untenability of human expectations.

This is also what makes 2001 all the more memorable: its refusal to abandon the human perspective – noted for its amusing tendency to be tripped up by human will and agency – even as Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke looked towards the stars for humankind’s salvation.

In the film’s opening scenes, a bunch of apes briefly interacts with a monolith just like the one near Jupiter and quickly develops the ability to use commonplace objects as tools and weapons. The rest is history, so the story suddenly jumps four million years ahead and then 18 months more. As the Tool song goes, “Silly monkeys, give them thumbs, they make a club and beat their brother down.”

In much the same way, HAL recalls the origins of mainstream AI research as it happened in the late 1950s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston. At the time, the linguist and not-yet-activist Noam Chomsky had reimagined the inner workings of the human brain as those of a computer (specifically, as a “Language Acquisition Device”). According to anthropologist Chris Knight, this ‘act’ inspiredcognitive scientist Marvin Minsky to wonder if the mind, in the form of software, could be separated from the body, the hardware.

Minsky would later say, “The most important thing about each person is the data, and the programs in the data that are in the brain”. This is chillingly evocative of what Facebook has achieved in 2018: to paraphrase Greenberg, it has enabled data-driven politics by digitising and monetising “a trove of intimate detail about billions of people”.

Minsky founded the AI Lab at MIT in 1959. Less than a decade later, he joined the production team of 2001 as a consultant to design and execute the character called HAL. As much as we’re fond of celebrating the prophetic power of 2001, perhaps the film was able to herald the 21st century as well as it has because we inherited it from many of the men who shaped the 20th, and Kubrick and Clarke simply mapped their visions onto the stars.