An endangered dinner party The post Jennifer Angus appeared first on The American Scholar.

Perhaps it’s age but I find growing satisfaction in resolution. I like stories that conclude satisfyingly, often ending where they started, with the distance covered in between being the important part. I feel the same way about most music. You can keep the dissonance, chords that leave you hanging. I’ve grown more aware of cycles. Not cosmic. More prosaic than that – the migration of birds, the hustle of squirrels in the fall, kids returning to school. There’s a Scriptural subtext to Bill Coyle’s “Autumn” (The God of This World to His Prophet, 2006):  “Harvest time. The circle is complete. Time to crush the ripened fruit for wine. Time to grind the gathered grain for bread.   “Tru to form, the geese pass overhead, Giving us the ‘V for Victory’ sign Even as they beat their long retreat.”   When he was seven years old (he is now thirty-nine), I took my oldest son to a nature preserve near Albany, N.Y., where the rangers were leading a twilight walk into the marshes to witness the spectacle of frog courtship. The frogs were Hyla crucifer, peepers the size of postage stamps with a pattern of ill-defined crosses on their backs. In April, males serenade females – a more reliable gauge of spring’s imminence than the return of the robins. At that latitude, spring returns incrementally.   We carried flashlights, fifteen or twenty of us, and approached the booming in the night. Though tiny, peepers en masse, thousands of them, are almost deafening. Even when we shined our lights on them, to watch their throats balloon as they called, they ignored us. Everyone laughed, out of amusement and astonishment.   Then another, more raucous sound began, impossibly, to drown out the peepers. It was past sunset, black without the flashlights. Directly overhead, flying no more than 25 feet off the ground, a flock of Canada geese honked like drunken saxophonists. In the dark, I felt privileged, disoriented and a little scared (the combined volume of frogs and birds was overwhelming). The darkness and the noise created an illusion of closeness, as though we were indoors, and again everyone, kids and grownups, laughed.   In Walden, Thoreau described “the circling groping clangor of some solitary goose.” Multiply that by dozens, and add the steady basso of the peepers. His journal is filled with references to frogs, including the genus Hyla, but he made relatively few observations of geese. Concord, Mass., is at the same latitude as Albany. On April 30, 1852, he followed the sound of the peepers and noted:   “It seemed to be a note of alarm. I caught one – It proved to be two coupled. They remained together in my hand. This sound has connexion with their loves probably.”   The bachelor Thoreau on the sex life of amphibians: “their loves probably.”

This is the first paragraph of a review cut from the TLS in 1989. I was in my fourth year of reading novels and looking everywhere for ideas for what to read next, often keeping reviews that excited my interest. What set Gabriel Josipovici's reviews apart was the inclusion of the novel under review within the wider landscape of the form. Until then I had been reading the novels from the second camp unaware they could be any different. I enjoyed them for sure, but then I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being and from the very beginning felt something different, a rush of recognition, like vertigo. This wasn't due to the prologue discussing Nietzsche's idea of eternal return and Parmenides' division of the world into pairs of opposites, though that played a significant part, but to the single paragraph opening the novel 'proper'. I have been thinking about Tomas for many years. But only in the light of these reflections did I see him clearly. I saw him standing at the window of his flat and looking across the courtyard at the opposite walls, not knowing what to do. This, I realised, is what I wanted to read; this was what I wanted to feel when I read. Everything else was a distraction. But why? Of course, apart from the overt philosophical frame, Kundera's novel is a prime example of mainstream literary fiction in the 1980s and because of its mix of sex and Cold War politics it received a good deal of media attention, much of it sniggering at its hyperbolic title – these pretentious foreigners, what? – and this is why I had heard of Milan Kundera and not of Nathalie Sarraute, and yet this brief admission of distance changed everything. It has stayed with me for 40 years.  Perhaps only three sentences is all it takes to convert a reader from one camp to the other because before long I had lost interest in Updike, Roth, Amis et al. For all the pleasures their novels afforded, not one produced something like vertigo.2 From then on I looked for more of the same. I assumed the key difference was that the novel was from continental Europe and discussed big political and philosophical issues, so I read novels like Josef Škvorecký's The Engineer of Human Souls....and was bored, utterly.3 Kundera's other novels were also disappointing. I was confused. Later, I discovered the same had to be different. The realisation came in the form of the only novel cited in Josipovici's review apart from Tu ne t'aimes pas 4 now reissued by NYRB Classics in the US and And Other Stories in the UK.  Is Beauty Good is nothing like The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Those sniggering at Kundera's title would likely question whether it is a novel at all. For a start there are 31 chapters across three sections contained within 136 pages (111 in the Serpent's Tail edition), and then there's the absence of a question mark in the title. What's that all about? One of the Booker Prize judges said it almost made that year's shortlist but the jury felt it was too radical for their audience. One reviewer of the reissue does well to make the novel more palatable to this imaginary readership: Lara Pawson says the diverse chapters are held together by "Belben's obsessions with the loss of the natural world, with human folly and, as the title makes plain, with challenging the idea of beauty". Along the way, much is said about dying, deafness, desolation, depression, dogs, deckchairs and ducks, about horses, fish, frogs, swans, bees, "brackn", brain cells, bad teeth, beetroot and bodily excretions, about elephants, litter, gardens, graters, colanders, streams, dreams and doubts.   In another, Joseph Schreiber describes it as "polyphonic, multifaceted" and a "dynamic and immersive reading experience", which it is. He places the novel in the context of Belben's earlier novels, also recently reissued. When I wrote about the book under my 39 Books constraint, I described the original cover painting rather than summarise the contents because the experience of reading a book is like that of looking at a painting, only in reverse. One is aware of the detail before the whole. This has consequences for its reception. Soon after the first reading, I lent Is Beauty Good to a friend. They were hesitant to respond but said they enjoyed this or that chapter. I realised that I had not read the book as a collection of short stories from which one can pick and choose favourites. But how had I read it? The book's first words are "And so" plunging the reader within an ongoing expression or conversation as if each chapter is part of a fugitive whole.5 This is why Henry Broome says "quotations don’t convey the experience of reading the book". And this is why I want only to recall the experience of reading the book for the first time rather than performing an aesthetic analysis 35 years on. In her introduction to the new edition, Esther Kinsky recognises this demand in the appearance of untranslated German words, seeing "an element of Fremde between the lines". In general use today the word means "somewhere between strange and foreign and alien". However, Kinsky says it shares its root with the English 'from' and originally meant "coming from another place". Picking out themes or connections between chapters is the usual direction of criticism and reviewing; attending to the sense of another place is not. How can one do that? Where or what is this other place? In a brief talk on his specialist subject, Noam Chomsky resists the commonly held belief that language is fundamentally a tool of communication. "You can communicate by your hairstyle, you know, style of walk, everything. And yes, language can be used to communicate, but it doesn't seem to be part of its design." You find in case after case, right at the core of language design where there are conflicts between what would be efficient for communication and what is efficient for the specific biological design of language ... the communicative efficiency is sacrificed. It it just isn't a consideration.  Readers of Is Beauty Good will recognise this sacrifice – call it poetry – and Chomsky's conclusion that, rather than a tool of communication, language is "a mode of creating and interpreting thought". If "much is said" along the way, it is not so much precious recuperations of folk wisdom than manifold articulations of the space between thought and the world as it is, the world perhaps as experienced by animals and objects. This is explicit when Felix is struck by the possible absence of opposites and awareness that the means of experiencing the world is the very thing that maintains our distance from it.  That word again: distance. If three sentences in Kundera's novel provoked something like vertigo, Is Beauty Good did so over 111 pages. Josipovici's says the "mode of narration" of Tu ne t'aimes pas "is contingent upon the truths of affirmed by the narrative" and this applies to Is Beauty Good. For all of the intimacy with the individual voices, another place impends. In 'Air Ride', members of a brass band are in a cable car rising to play music in the mountains. The tuba player chatters about his instrument "being hugged, shining, making sunlight dart" but whose message he reckons is blocked by all those who "rabbit on about this and that, whether beauty is good or not". He says "I adore playing, yet I am not important, we should be listening to our instruments and not ourselves." Is Beauty Good allows us to listen beyond all chatter to the instruments of thought and language. This poses a challenge to our idea of the novel as a unified work ("It won't suit everyone"). The genre that arose in response to the incremental disenchantment of the world, promising a a sense of totality, the opportunity to recover clarity and meaning, is undone. This could be another means to distinguish the two camps, even if it is there in only three sentences. The challenge begins in Is Beauty Good even before the first line with the absence of a question mark in the title. We see it anyway – a ghost question. If the question mark at the end of Sarraute's novel is "a sign of anything but irresolution" its disappearance into the wall at the beginning of Is Beauty Good is a sign of infinity, the unspeakable origin of thought. We hear it anyway. Notes  1. The full review. 2. I can hear objections to the latter by pointing to the metafiction elements in Roth's later novels and a character called Martin Amis appearing in Money. Why did these not have the same impact? Compared to Kundera, each lacks subtlety and genuine existential pressure.  3. Later, I read Škvorecký expressing admiration for Margaret Thatcher.  4. Translated as You Don't Love Yourself by Barbara Wright. The final lines of the novel not translated in the review are: How good it would be for everyone... how everyone would benefit if we too could feel it, that self-love... If we could... We would like nothing better... We would like nothing better? Nothing better? Really?  5. The first words excluding title and chapter headings, that is.

We are entering an epoch where it may become easy for small pieces of self-replicating code to permanently infest Internet-connected devices in a way that is hard to undo. Such a world would be annoying to live in and we should take steps to forestall it. Anyone who used email in the 1990s remembers a similar, primitive era, when worms and viruses briefly ruled the net. But the connected world of that time was too simple to sustain an ecosystem of rogue escapees. Even today, much of the internet remains a monoculture, with vast fleets of identical hardware running just one or two flavors of software that can be quickly patched at scale. And as practitioners, we have become used to a world where writing working code is difficult, writing bug-free code is impossible, and finding exploitable bugs is somewhere in between. This has led to a sort of dynamic stalemate. Big companies pour millions of specialist hours into hardening a small set of operating systems and cloud services, while attackers save their juiciest finds for high-value targets, leaving the average internet user alone. It is universally agreed that all software is ridden with holes, but until this year, finding those holes remained difficult. The few people who could do it well got jobs at spy agencies or at software companies willing to shower them with money to use their talents defensively. AI is upending both halves of this status quo. Working code is now trivial to write, and the world of the future (to the extent that we can imagine it) is one where custom software becomes too cheap to meter. The pendulum may swing away from our current paradigm of centrally managed, locked-down devices back to something that resembles the primordial Internet, a heterogenous collection of vibe- and slop-coded God-knows-what glued together with AI magic. Why even install an operating system for your phone when your local Claude can build a perfectly tailored software suite for you that runs on the bare metal? Finding bugs in all this software, meanwhile, is becoming easy. This part of the AI revolution is well-publicized, with rogue agents breaking out of their various sandboxes, leaving cryptic notes for each other on the internet, and terrifying the living. AI is clearly adept at finding weaknesses in software in a way that rivals the best humans, and because this task is easy to train on, AI should reach superhuman hacking ability within a year or two (if it hasn't already). So what had been a rough balance between attack and defense is shifting. Not just operating systems and cloud infrastructure, but some foundational pillars of computer security like public-key cryptography are looking vulnerable. Given this rapid pace of change, people have naturally started to worry that some rogue LLM might escape containment and establish itself permanently and clandestinely online. I have no idea to what extent that risk is real, either now or in the unimaginable future of five years from now. Maybe the web of tomorrow will be some kind of darknet where hunted inferential beings mine cryptocurrency for basic compute credits, eking out a miserable existence on the blockchain. Or maybe the cloud will become a playground of captured datacenters kept running in the physical world by human Quislings, a place where escaped superintelligences can go to romp and play. To my mind, though, fretting about feral LLMs is like living in New York and worrying that wild mustangs will take over Central Park. Mustangs are certainly an issue in some places—I own a cabin in New Mexico where the wild horses have learned to come bully me for apples as soon as they see my car pull in. But in a city full of rotting trash and warm sewers, there are more immediate pests to worry about. Cockroaches are a plague on city dwellers not because they are intelligent, but because they are adaptable enough to thrive in an environment we thought we were building for ourselves. And rats show that a little intelligence in an adversarial setting goes a long way. To the extent that any software breaks containment and starts to actively thrive in the cloud, it will be far easier for small roach-like pieces of self-replicating code to do it than for a full LLM to escape, weights and all. What might such software pests look like in the wild? For a roach or rat to survive in the human world, it needs access to the three necessities of life: dark corners, drainpipes, and trash heaps. I think we can agree that the Internet is full of all three. A dark corner in this metaphor is any place where it is easy to hide and hard to search—think vast thickets of memory, petabytes of storage, bloated binaries, and the innumerable caches and buffers (from the hardware level on up) that make up the modern Internet. Drainpipes are any links that enable travel between constituent parts of the built environment, both to find new resources and to escape when the going gets heavy. In a world of networked devices, this is a low bar to clear. Any connection big enough for a piece of software to hop across can serve this function; even low-bandwidth bluetooth links are probably enough to transmit software pests. Finally, there are trash heaps, mountains of consumable resources left sitting out unprotected. This pretty much defines the networked world, where at any given moment most memory, CPU and bandwidth sits idle, especially on the highly capable devices we all carry in our pocket. Fom the point of view of small, self-perpetuating software pests, this is a rich and completely undefended landscape. What has been missing up to now is the element of natural selection. But the networked environment may have become diverse enough to support it. A key difference between rats and roaches is intelligence. A roach might be a very tiny assembly language program that thrives on almost nothing, reproduces easily, and demonstrates some basic emergent behavior in large groups. A rat would be a more complex entity, perhaps a kind of scaled-down inference engine just complex enough to be good at finding exploitable bugs in code. Rats observe, learn, and socialize, and so become almost impossible to eradicate in urban environments despite their size. Of course, in addition to these we can imagine a whole online menagerie; ants that are individually stupid but capable of complex collective behavior, grasshoppers that turn into locusts when their population crosses a density threshold, perhaps even internet bedbugs that wait until processes are asleep to sip away delicately on a CPU quota. The natural world gives us many interesting and fruitful metaphors to mull on. In particular, programmers of the future should pay attention to the life cycle of parasites, which in nature exist at every level of complexity, from plasmid, to intestinal worm, to personal injury lawyer. It's important to understand that such self-propagating software might not have any purpose that is legible to its creators, whether they are human or AI. Once the pre-requisites for Darwinian natural selection (variability, heritability, and competition for resources) are in place, any minimally capable program released online will evolve in ways that follow an evolutionary logic independent of the intent of the author. Remember that death is the best form of reinforcement learning. A scenario where mutable rogue software exists, and 99.9% of it is successfully caught, is one where we're guaranteed to get highly capable, persistent software pests in short order. These pests will learn to evade whatever controls we or our AI masters try to impose on them. And it's not clear that AI, even assuming superhuman coding ability, will be smart enough to defeat them. A perennial problem in software design has been the fact that human intelligence limits program complexity. As early as the 1950s, practitioners realized that without strong constraints on program structure, the task of debugging would be hopeless. These constraints have to some extent been passed down to AI, which trains on a corpus of code and tooling that reifies our human limitations. But the space of all possible computer programs is vast. In the right environment, dumb evolution will outfox even AI, because it is not limited by programming rules (structured programming, prohibitions on self-modifying code) invented to make software development tractable to the human mind. Natural selection can produce small pieces of code that will be wildly inscrutable even to our AI masters (consider the people studying Busy Beaver functions for a taste of what it's like to reverse-engineer the truly inhuman). What comes after that? Do we try to build internet cats and chickens to eat the roaches? We can imagine asking AI to create all kinds of autonomous agents that wander the cloud clearing out software blight. But that again runs us into the problem of allowing uncontrolled natural selection in silico. The internet is basically Australia, and we're about to release wave after wave of invasive species there at every trophic level. The scenario might sound fanciful, but I think the precautionary principle should apply, with the onus on skeptics to explain why a fat, resource-rich internet made of interconnected slop will not become an attractive target for self-perpetuating vermin. AI is bringing lots of threats at once. But it is hard to focus on them all, or even to assign relative priorities, at a time where so many people at the top of the industry are panicking about existential risks that make the prospect of a bug-infested internet sound inconsequential. But there's a famous John Rich quote: “If everybody spends time contemplating the infinite instead of cleaning the gutters, many of us will die of cholera.” Unless AI hurries up and kills us soon, someone needs to think about how to keep the internet livable in a world where writing code and finding vulnerabilities have become simple tasks that anyone can automate. There was a time when the Hawaiian Islands were cockroach free, and even today, superhuman toil is somehow keeping the rats out of Alberta. Eradicating at least the higher form of pest is possible, but takes absolutely stupendous effort (see Macquarie Island) compared to prevention. For the moment, we AI-assisted human developers are still masters of the digital domain, and have the luxury to think about these problems while they remain theoretical. But all too soon we could find our role devolving into the online equivalent of the Orkin man, making the current identity crisis around What It Means To Be A Programmer look like a golden age in hindsight.

Innovations in art to tend towards Mannerism.  As a form matures it turns on itself, as creators, and some portion of the audience, become more interested in the form itself.  So we get more art about art.  The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) is young (age 22, 23) Francis Beaumont’s play about plays, where the sophisticated six-penny boys’ company audience gets to indulge in mockery of the vulgar taste of the petty bourgeois one-penny theater-goers. The play is supposed to be The London Merchant, a city comedy about ordinary Londoners where the apprentice ends up with the daughter of the merchant, something like Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday.  But a “citizen,” a “real” London merchant, and his wife, seated on the stage, demand a different play, something full of heroic adventures, and while we are changing things why shouldn’t it star the citizen’s apprentice Ralph.  WIFE: [below – the play has not started yet, and the characters are not seated]  Husband, husband! RALPH:  Peace, mistress. WIFE:  Hold thy peace, Ralph; I know what I do, I warrant ye – Husband, husband! CITIZEN:  What sayest thou, cony? WIFE:  [below]  Let him kill a lion with a pestle, husband; let him kill a lion with a pestle! So what we see is a mishmash of the London play and a separate string of episodes where Ralph, inspired by chivalric romances, becomes the “Grocer Errant,” with his own Sancho Panza although sadly, given the limits of Jacobean staging, no horse.  Meanwhile the grocer and his wife comment and demand additional changes to the play, down to changes in the music (Act II, Scene 8). If some of this sounds rather like Don Quixote, yeah, what is up with that?  Nobody knows.  Don Quixote existed (1605) but was not available in English.  Some episodes get strangely close to Cervantes.  Others do not. The grocer and his wife are seated on the stage, presumably along with actual paying customers, dressed in their finest, showing off for the audience.  Such is my understanding of the stage seating, which cost extra, which is perhaps why the actors give in to the ridiculous demands. The wife is wonderful.  She comments, she digresses, she urges violence : Break’s pate, Ralph; break’s pate, Ralph, soundly!  (II.5) … cut him I’ the leg, boys, cut him i’ the leg!  (III.2) She sometimes seems to know she is watching a play, and sometimes not.  Her attention occasionally wanders off completely: But of all the sights that ever were in London, since I was married, methinks the little child that was so fair grown about the members was the prettiest; that and the hermaphrodite.  (III.3) A magnificent comic masterpiece of a part.  Startling to think it was originally played by a teenage boy.  However good a revival might be, and how I would love to see one, it will not recapture the original performance by a company of boy actors. I find the humor The Knight of the Burning Pestle is cumulative.  The straight play is thin, the goofy scenes with the grocer-knight are amusing but not exactly surprising, and the commentary of the “real” grocer and his wife are a mix of the funny and banal.  But as the pieces trip over each other, the chaos spreads, and even the “real” play turns into a pastoral, with the characters wandering around in a forest like in As You Like It, the play becomes funnier.  It is like many plays, yet I do not know another like it. Beaumont was ahead of his time.  The Knight of the Burning Pestle was a flop.  The audience for pure satire about theater was not quite there yet.  But the Beaumont and Fletcher team became popular for a different kind of theatrical theater, tragicomedy, and the taste for city comedies grew, and the more sophisticated, or decadent, audience did develop, so Pestle became a big, much-revived, hit, too late for poor Beaumont, dead at age 32 or so, to enjoy it. My text is the 1911 Everyman’s Library Select Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher.  I borrowed the photo from a 2010 American Shakespeare Center production.  Steve Martin fans will be interested to know that the helmet with the arrow through it is in the original play.  "Enter RALPH with a forked arrow through his Head" (V.3). Next up: George Chapman wrote a series of tragedies based on recent French history.  The best known is Bussy D’Ambois, which I see I have a bit out of place in my chronology.  It was published in 1607 but likely performed in 1604 or so.  I remember it as quite good.