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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.”
The title poem in Anthony Hecht’s 1979 collection The Venetian Vespers is a dramatic monologue spoken by an aging American expatriate living in Venice. Across its roughly eight-hundred lines the speaker gives the impression of fleeing something left unstated – not a scandal or crime but his unsatisfactory self. In the sixth and final section he writes: “Ho fatto un fiasco, which is to say, / I’ve made a sort of bottle of my life, / A frangible and transparent failure.” The Italian can be translated: “I made a complete mess of it.” This indulgence in self-disgust continues: “My efforts at their best are negatives: A poor attempt not to hurt anyone, A goal which, in the very nature of things, Is ludicrous because impossible. Viscid, contaminate, dynastic wastes Flood through the dark canals, the underpasses, Ducts and arterial sluices of my body . . .” Here, Hecht makes an inspired transition: “. . . As through those gutters of which Swift once wrote: ‘Sweepings from Butcher Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood, Drown’d Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench’d in Mud, Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.’” Those are the concluding lines of “A Description of a City Shower,” a pastoral parody and my favorite among all of Swift’s poems, first published in The Tatler in October 1710. Pat Rogers in his edition of The Complete Poems (Yale University Press, 1983) tells us it was also Swift’s favorite. The final three rhyming lines are inspired. An early edition of the poem was subtitled an “imitation of Virgil’s Georg[ics].” Nearly as good as the passage quoted by Hecht are the lines leading up to them: “Now from all parts the swelling kennels flow, And bear their trophies with them as they go: Filth of all hues and odors seem to tell What street they sailed from, by their sight and smell. They, as each torrent drives with rapid force, From Smithfield or St. Pulchre’s shape their course, And in huge confluence joined at Snow Hill ridge, Fall from the conduit prone to Holborn Bridge.”
On August 23, 1939, Hitler and Stalin agreed to the secret non-aggression Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Germans invaded Poland from the west nine days later, on September 1, 1939. On September 17, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. The battle was over, Poland subdued, by October 6. The Soviets were driven out of Poland by the Germans in 1941, and the Germans were driven out in turn by the Red Army three years later. In one of those curious historical coincidences, on September 2, 1939, Whittaker Chambers, then working as a writer-editor for Time magazine, met with assistant secretary of state Adolf Berle at his home in Washington, D.C. Chambers revealed his own background as part of the Soviet spy network, which included officials within the Roosevelt administration. He named names: Alger Hiss, among others. Berle was skeptical. He reported Chambers’ revelations to the president, who dismissed them. Berle then shared what he had heard with the FBI, who interviewed Chambers in March 1940, and again in 1942 and 1945. The FBI took no action. In Witness (1952), called by Hilton Kramer "one of the few indispensable autobiographies ever written by an American -- and one of the best written, too," Chambers describes what happened next: “I had had to hurry from my office at Time magazine to the airport to catch the six o’clock flight for Washington. I fastened my safety belt, chewed my gum, lay back and closed my eyes. The great plane took off into the serene evening sky of September 2, 1939. “On the plains of Poland, at the same moment, a new day was awakening the Polish nation to terror and insane distress as cavalry tried to turn back, with lance and rifle, a new force in the history of war and men—the German Panzer divisions. “In Moscow, a few days before, Stalin, with a tigerish grin, and a more reserved Ribbentrop, had signed the pact that made Nazism and Communism allies. By the same scratch of the pen, Stalin had unloosed upon mankind, for the second time in two decades, the horror of world war." Chambers had worked as a spy for the Soviet Union from 1932 until 1938, when he broke with communism. On August 3, 1948, Chambers testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He described the spy network at work in the late 1930s, including Hiss’ role. Though the statute of limitations on espionage had expired, in his second trial Hiss was convicted of perjury and sentenced to two concurrent five-year terms in federal prison and eventually served three and a half years. For further context, I suggest reading Victor Davis Hanson’s The Second World Wars (Basic Books, 2017), concentrating on Chap. 19, “The Dead,” pages 463-499. Hanson tallies the carnage suffered by every nation. Poland stands out: “[B]y war’s end, Poland would suffer between 5.6 and 5.8 million dead, the highest percentage of fatalities (over 16 percent) of a prewar population of any participant of World War II.” Part of the explanation for the slaughter is that Poland capitulated, though never surrendered, to both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union in little more than a month. Between September 1 and October 6, 1939, the country suffered some sixty-six thousand fatalities. “Poland alone,” Hanson writes, “lost more of its citizens than all the Western European nations, Britain, and the United States combined.” He continues: “Poland was the laboratory of Nazi barbarism, given that it was the site of over 450 German extermination, concentration, labor, and prisoner-of-war camps. It was both the first country attacked by Hitler and the first to have its citizens—both Jews and Slavs—targeted for mass extinction. . . The Holocaust accounted for the greatest number of Polish deaths, given that the prewar Jewish community of Poland—10 percent of the population—was the largest in the world at somewhere around 3.5 million persons. Scarcely over a hundred thousand Polish Jews survived the German extermination efforts. The six most infamous extermination camps of the Holocaust—Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka—were all in Poland.” In praise of the Poles, Hanson writes: “Polish resistance fighters usually fought the Nazi occupation in a far more muscular fashion than their Western European counterparts, provoking a commensurately fearsome German response.”
Eccentricity in books is a tricky quality. It can be charming and inspire lifelong devotion. Take Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, a book I discovered in my freshman year. I redundantly keep three copies on the shelves nearest my desk. Tristram Shandy is another endlessly readable eccentricity. Among the less successful are Ronald Firbank’s novels, which I have tried hard to love for many years but always find tedious. Daniel Mark Epstein has written a poem, “A Dream,” about acquiring a copy of the most eccentric and readable work of literary – not criticism, not scholarship, perhaps love letter – I know, Ford Madox Ford’s The March of Literature (1938): “Someone learned of my collector’s interest In the finer points of this autographed edition, The March of Literature: From Confucius’ Day to Our Own. I read it first at twenty-one, Then passed it on to one friend, then another, Several copies lost and found in bookstores Now abandoned to the online trade. I wanted a clean one with the author’s name Written in his graceful hand, a book he’d held As he held the pen that wrote the heavy book That sums up all he’d read and learned In a lifelong lover’s quarrel with literature, As much as any man could ever know In one life of four thousand years of books In ten languages, works he knew by heart.” I read it at nineteen or twenty after reading for the first time The Good Soldier for a class. In his introduction to The March of Literature, Ford describes himself as “an old man mad about writing,” and the book as “an attempt to induce a larger and always larger number of my fellows to taste the pleasure that comes from always more and more reading.” In a volume of more than eight-hundred pages you expect lapses, omissions and misguided judgments. I find it easy to forgive Ford, for reasons obvious in the sampler that follows: A third of the way through the book, in the middle of a digression on the English border ballads, Ford inserts a three-page digression-within-a-digression based on his Great War experience: “The writer happens to have been present at what you might call a poplar recension of folksong during several weeks in the fall of 1916. His regiment having spent a disproportionate time in the trenches during the First Battle of the Somme, it was given a long fatigue to do at a long distance from the trenches, so that they might at once rest their weary bones and get some exercise.” Here Ford writes of his friend and collaborator Joseph Conrad’s short story “Youth”: “The language is again so low-keyed, so of the vernacular, so just, so fluid that when you read you have again no sense of reading.” Here is Ford’s moving tribute to Dr. Johnson, a man with whom he must have felt substantial literary and personal kinship: “But ten years’ rest and the getting into his head of a conversational rhythm and a vocabulary comprehensible to most of the cultivated men of his day had on Johnson the effect of evolving a style that was at once sufficiently learned to save his face and sufficiently actual to let us read his Lives of the Poets with pleasure even in these anti-Latinistic days. It is a work that, had there been no Boswell, must have been a resounding monument to this great man. As it is, it stands almost forgotten like an Aztec temple lost in South American [sic] undergrowths. It is a great pity.” Ford nicely characterizes the best of eighteenth-century English prose: “In Gibbon we come upon a figure very different in timber from any of the other eighteenth century littérateurs, save only Richardson – and Johnson, if you can persuade yourself to think of him as a writer and not merely as a dancing bear, growling numbers in and out.” Ford suggests we look at works of literature on both the macro and micro scales, comparing the latter to music: “It is to be remembered that a passage of good prose is a work of art absolute in itself and with no more dependence on its contents than is a fugue of Bach, a minuet of Mozart, or the writing for piano of Debussy.” Ford then quotes a passage about storks, of all things, from Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, the paragraph here marked with the number three. Ford writes: “And I am prepared to leave it to the taste of my readers who may decide each for himself whether a passage of flawless prose gains or loses when the subject treated is one of universal interest.” The March of Literature is no dry textbook. It’s inimitably Ford’s work, as eccentrically personal as DNA. It ought to be academic but reads like inspired conversation.
The Battle of Malvern Hill was fought near Richmond, Va., the capital of the Confederacy, on July 1, 1862. Not as well remembered as Antietam or Gettysburg, it was the last of the Seven Days Battles in the Peninsula Campaign, and prompted Confederate General Daniel H. Hill to say: “It was not war -- it was murder.” Union artillery from its position on the hilltop slaughtered General Robert E. Lee’s troops. Confederate casualties in one day of fighting totaled some 5,550; Union, about 3,000. In a grim twist, Union General George B. McClellan and his forces, despite the victory, retreated to Harrison’s Landing on the James River and Richmond remained securely behind Confederate lines until the war was nearly concluded, almost three years later. Herman Melville’s “Malvern Hill” was included in his Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866). The poem is a dialogue between a Union soldier and the elm trees standing on the battlefield. It is notably unromantic and unconsoling: “Ah wilds of woe!” The speaker asks, “Does Malvern Wood / Bethink itself, and muse and brood?” The trees reply with the italicized stanza at the end of the poem: “We elms of Malvern Hill Remember every thing; But sap the twig will fill: Wag the world how it will, Leaves must be green in Spring.” R.L. Barth titles a four-line epigram, collected in Deeply Dug In (2003), with an unattributed quotation lifted from Melville’s poem: “Leaves must be green in spring”: “Malvern elms, limbs sap-filled and leaves green, Spring an easy consolation; However, where may they turn, who’ve known a jungle Blasted by defoliation?” Barth writes as a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War. He refers to the decade-long use by American forces of chemical defoliants, the most widely known being Agent Orange. The goal was to strip trees of foliage to prevent the enemy from concealing supplies and encampments. Traditionally, spring is a consolation for another winter endured, a rebirth of nature and hope, and green is its color. Barth’s jungle is “blasted,” denuded, without “easy consolation.” In his Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce, a Civil War veteran severely wounded at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, defined war as: “a by-product of the arts of peace. The most menacing political condition is a period of international amity. The student of history who has not been taught to expect the unexpected may justly boast himself inaccessible to the light.”
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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.
