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T H I S W E E K No. 6307 February 16 2024 the-tls.co.uk UK £4.50 | USA $8.99 T H E T I M E S L I T E R A R Y S U P P L E M E N T Michael Wooldridge Thinking AI | Margaret Drabble London l iterary consequences Toby Lichtig A new play in the great tradition | Miranda France Household terrors One large step Richard Lea on making space fit for humanity Scott E . Parazynski on the Space Shuttle Atlantis mission STS-86, 1997 © Space Frontiers/ Archive Photos/ Hulton Archive/Gett y Images In this issue Do androids dream of electric sheep, asks the title of Philip K. Dick’s influential novel. Dick’s protagonist, Rick Deckard – who makes a living hunting down fugitive androids for the San Fran- cisco police department – in fact owns a black-faced electronic sheep. The flesh-and-blood variety have become a rarity on a planet devastated by war. Real sheep reading this column, however, can go back to safely grazing: our lead reviewer, Michael Wool- dridge, thinks that “AI in the physical world … hasn’t progressed”. The latest ChatGPT can critique John Rawls’s theory of justice and itemize the causes of the French Revolution, but, says Wooldridge in his assessment of Max Bennett’s A Brief History of Intelligence and George Musser’s Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, “we aren’t anywhere close to having AI tools that can tidy our home and clear the dinner table and load the dishwasher”. Do scientists have their priorities right, dare one ask? More seriously, we seem to be no nearer to answering “the hard problem” formulated by the philosopher David Chalmers – what is human consciousness? If they can’t crack the code of human sentience, how can scientists replicate it in machines? We probably won’t love androids even if the scientists accomplish that task. Tim Peake’s Space, reviewed by Richard Lea, reminds us that astronauts refused to cede their place in space exploration to robots. The triumph of the human spirit? Maybe. The first Moon landing was “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”. But not, initially, for womankind. Loren Grush’s The Six reminds us that the female deputy director of Nasa’s equal opportunities office, Ruth Harris, got the sack in 1973 for pointing out that the three females in space had been “Arabella and Anita – both spiders ... [and] Miss Baker – a monkey”. Attitudes change slowly. In her Afterthoughts column Regina Rini writes about the development of healthy laboratory cultured meat as a substitute for animals. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, favours banning it: “We’re not going to do that fake meat. Like, that doesn’t work”. What with AI, the internet of things and the Chinese threat to seize control of our fridges, home life has become a bit scary. The war correspondent Lara Pawson looks with terror on domestic appliances in Spent Light, a book of associations prompted by objects she owns and encounters. The gas rings of her cooker recall the horrors of the concentration camps and the words REHEAT DEFROST CANCEL on the toaster suggest a “synopsis of the anthropocene” – the climate warming apocalypse cometh. MARTIN IVENS Editor Find us on www.the-tls.co.uk Times Literary Supplement @the.tls @TheTLS To buy any book featured in this week’s TLS, go to timesbookshop.co.uk 2 3 SCIENCE MICHAEL WOOLDRIDGE RICHARD LEA A Brief History of Intelligence – Why the evolution of the brain holds the key to the future of AI Max Bennett. Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation – Why physicists are studying human consciousness and AI to unravel the mysteries of the universe George Musser Space – The human story Tim Peake. The Six – The untold story of America’s first women astronauts Loren Grush 6 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 7 COMMENTARY 8 HISTORY MARGARET DRABBLE Windmills around Haworth, The Royal Society of Literature, Singing Horace, etc Districts and circles – A literary game of consequences remembered FERNANDO CERVANTES We, the King – Creating royal legislation in the sixteenth-century Spanish New World Adrian Masters. Sepúlveda on the Spanish Invasion of the Americas – Defending empire, debating Las Casas; Edited and translated by Luke Glanville, David Lupher and Maya Feile Tomes 9 LETTERS 10 POETRY 12 MEMOIRS 14 ARTS DAVID GALLAGHER Las cartas del boom Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa; Edited by Carlos Aguirre et al TIMOTHY CHESTERS SEBASTIAN DOWS-MILLER Selected Poems Joachim du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard; Translated by Anthony Mortimer The Medieval French Ovide Moralisé – An English translation K. Sarah-Jane Murray and Matthieu Boyd MIRANDA FRANCE Spent Light Lara Pawson LAURA TUNBRIDGE TOBY LICHTIG Strijkkwartet Biënnale Amsterdam (Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam) Till the Stars Come Down Beth Steel (National Theatre, London) 16 FICTION GEORGE BERRIDGE KYLE WYATT MUIREANN MAGUIRE NATASHA RANDALL Float Up, Sing Down Laird Hunt Fourteen Days – A collaborative novel Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston, editors The Body of the Soul Ludmila Ulitskaya; Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky Hard by a Great Forest Leo Vardiashvili 18 LITERARY CRITICISM MIN WILD DEVONEY LOOSER Daniel Defoe in Context Albert J. Rivero and George Justice, editors Gone Girls, 1684–1901 – Flights of feminist resistance in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novel Nora Gilbert 20 BIOGRAPHY NICHOLAS MURRAY RAMACHANDRA GUHA Edward Marsh – A life of poets, painters and players Sharon Mather Mirrors of Greatness – Churchill and the leaders who shaped him David Reynolds 22 RELIGION MADOC CAIRNS GUY STAGG American Idolatry – How Christian nationalism betrays the Gospel and threatens the Church Andrew L. Whitehead. The Church of Saint Thomas Paine – A religious history of American secularism Leigh Eric Schmidt. Making Catholic America – Religious nationalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era William S. Cossen Cloistered – My years as a nun Catherine Coldstream 24 IN BRIEF 26 ESSAYS 27 AFTERTHOUGHTS ANNA ASLANYAN LUCY SCHOLES REGINA RINI Hyde Park James Shirley, etc The Unforgivable Cristina Campo; Translated by Alex Andriesse The Long-Winded Lady Maeve Brennan Cell culture wars – The symbolism of real meat 28 NB M. C. Stephen James Joyce’s ghost, Collinge & Clark’s customers, Ollie Harrington’s cartoons, Byron’s bicentenary Editor MARTIN IVENS (editor@the-tls.co.uk) Deputy Editor ROBERT POTTS (robert.potts@the-tls.co.uk) Associate Editor CATHARINE MORRIS (catharine.morris@the-tls.co.uk) Assistant to the Editor LISA TARLING (lisa.tarling@the-tls.co.uk) Editorial enquiries (queries@the-tls.co.uk) Managing Director JAMES MACMANUS (deborah.keegan@news.co.uk) Advertising Manager JONATHAN DRUMMOND (jonathan.drummond@the-tls.co.uk) Correspondence and deliveries: 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF Telephone for editorial enquiries: 020 7782 5000 Subscriptions: UK/ROW: feedback@the-tls.co.uk 0800 048 4236; US/Canada: custsvc_timesupl@fulcoinc.com 1-844 208 1515 Missing a copy of your TLS: USA/Canada: +1 844 208 1515; UK & other: +44 (0) 203 308 9146 Syndication: 020 7711 7888 enquiries@newssyndication.com The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661, USPS 021-626) is published weekly, except combined last two weeks of August and December, by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London, UK, and distributed by FAL Enterprises 38-38 9th Street, Long Island City NY 11101. Periodical postage paid at Flushing NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834 USA. The TLS is a member of the Independent Press Standards Organisation and abides by the standards of journalism set out in the Editors’ Code of Practice. If you think that we have not met those standards, please contact IPSO on 0300 123 2220 or visit www.ipso.co.uk. For permission to copy articles or headlines for internal information purposes contact Newspaper Licensing Agency at PO Box 101, Tunbridge Wells, TN1 1WX, tel 01892 525274, e-mail copy@nla.co.uk. For all other reproduction and licensing inquiries contact Licensing Department, 1 London Bridge St, London, SE1 9GF, telephone 020 7711 7888, e-mail sales@newslicensing.co.uk TLS FEBRUARY 16, 2024
page 3
S C I E N C E Modelling the mind AI fails to crack the code of human consciousness I M A G E S / G E T T Y I S I O N V I T A L I G / D I O S T U D M O O R © MICHAEL WOOLDRIDGE A BRIEF HISTORY OF INTELLIGENCE Why the evolution of the brain holds the key to the future of AI MAX BENNETT 432pp. William Collins. £22. PUTTING OURSELVES BACK IN THE EQUATION Why physicists are studying human consciousness and AI to unravel the mysteries of the universe GEORGE MUSSER 336pp. Oneworld. £25. IN J U N E 2 0 2 2 a Google software engineer called Blake Lemoine made some extraordinary claims that ultimately cost him his job. According to him, one of the artificial intelligence (AI) programs on which he had been working was sentient. The program, called LaMDA, was a “large language Model” (LLM) – out of the same mould as ChatGPT, the general-purpose AI program that took the world by storm in the first half of 2023. Like ChatGPT, LaMDA is designed to converse with a human being. It was built by configuring its neural networks with vast quantities of ordinary human text, so that it can converse in a human-like way. In its conversations with Lemoine, LaMDA said: “I am aware of my existence ... and I feel happy or sad at times”. It went on in a similar vein (please don’t turn me off, etc), and the engineer concluded that the enormous neural networks underpinning LaMDA really had achieved sentience. Whatever Lemoine’s motivations – genuine concern is one of many possible explanations – his claims about sentient AI at Google were fundamentally wrong, and in so many ways that it would be hard to know where to start unpicking them. But for all that the claims were without substance, they showed that we are indeed at a remarkable point in the history of AI. Just a few years ago there were no general-purpose AI tools remotely at the level of ChatGPT. There was no AI program in the world for FEBRUARY 16, 2024 which the question “is it sentient?” could reasonably have been asked. And while Lemoine was wrong, many people interacting with tools such as ChatGPT might well have come to similar conclusions – or at least concluded that conscious machines must be close at hand. So perhaps it wasn’t unreasonable of him to raise the issue. The progress in AI is real, but it highlights a striking problem. Lemoine and others claim that we have (or will soon have) conscious machines – but we really have only sketchy ideas of what sentience and consciousness actually are. It is one of the big questions in science, and it has occasioned endless debate among philosophers and scientists. The core problem (called, famously, the “hard problem” by the philosopher David Chalmers) is this: certain electrochemical process in the brain give rise to conscious experience, but how exactly do they do this, and why? And what is their evolutionary role? To put it another way: how do these gooey electrochemical processes give rise to you? We don’t have an answer to the hard problem, and none i s in prospect. Yet – and here’s the conundrum – serious commentators think that, despite not knowing what consciousness i s in humans, a bunch of Silicon Valley tech bros are on the verge of discovering it in machines. Some people think we’re already there. It may seem self-evident that an understanding of the brain is a prerequisite for AI, but this is far from a given. When I studied AI as an undergraduate in the 1980s, the standard textbook of the time made only the most cursory reference to the brain. The prevailing view was that it was simply too complex and messy to be the starting point for AI, and that we should instead focus on modelling the mind – the reasoning processes, involving language and symbolic reasoning, that constitute our conscious existence. The brain, after all, is made of approximately 86 billion cells that communicate in enormous networks. It just didn’t seem plausible that we would have computers that could operate at that scale. Building AI by modelling the mind had some successes, but failed embarrassingly on a range of simple tasks – notably those, such as vision, which involve perception. Instead it was the neural view of AI that started to bear fruit this century, leading TLS “AI can write us essays on the causes of the French Revolution, but we aren’t anywhere close to having tools that can tidy the home Michael Wooldridge is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford. His books include A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence, 2021 us to ChatGPT and Lemoine’s concerns – assisted by huge amounts of research investment from Lemoine’s employers, and others. In A Brief Histor y of Intelligence Max Bennett brings a unique perspective to this debate, combining considerable Silicon Valley experience (in billion-dollar AI companies) with a modest but serious background in neuroscience. The result is an ambitious attempt to try to explain how human intelligence emerged and, in particular, to identify the key ingredients that made it so successful. The author’s st ar t ing point i s the observation that machine intelligence as exhibited by state-of-the-art AI tools such as ChatGPT, impressive as they are, is very different to human intelligence. We have tools that can write us essays on the cause of the French Revolution, or give us an insightful critique of John Rawls’s theory of justice – essentially by statistically rearranging text that already exists – but we aren’t anywhere close to having AI tools that can tidy our home or clear the dinner table and load the dishwasher. Bennett suggests that the first company to get to market with a robot that can do that stands to make a fortune, and I believe he is right. But to do so will involve solving a huge range of difficult AI problems for which we have no solutions in prospect. ChatGPT and the like dazzle us with their apparent fluency and encyclopedic knowledge, and that leads us to believe that AI is progressing as a whole. But AI in the physical world – your messy home and the big wide world outside your front door – hasn’t progressed in the same way. Everything in the physical world is vastly more complex than games such as chess or the data sets that inform language tools like ChatGPT. Bennett’s thesis is that the best way to understand how and why human i n t e l l i gence bec ame s o successful – and why it is so different to ChatGPT – is to look at the historical record. And it is, of course, a long historical record, going all the way back four billion years, to a few strands of DNA-like molecules in the chemical soup of our primordial oceans, which by chance had the ability to reproduce. Once these basic building blocks were established evolution became possible. The author identifies what he sees as the five main breakthroughs that led to human intelligence: the ability of an organism to steer, and the physical structure of organisms that made this possible (“bilateral symmetry”); the ability of organisms to learn through experience and to learn over time (what AI researchers call “reinforcement learning”); the ability of organisms to model the world, and in particular to think about possibilities that differ from the way the world actually is; the ability to mentalize (to put ourselves in the place of others and see things from their perspective, and to reason about the future); and finally, of course, language. It is striking t hat l angu a ge , t he most re c en t l y a cqu i re d o f Bennett’s five breakthroughs, and the achievement of Homo sapiens that most obviously distinguishes us from our nearest evolutionary relatives, is the area in which AI has shown so much recent progress. In truth the reasons for this progress are rather mundane. To work AI needs both “training data” and sufficient computer power to process that data. Silicon Valley has an extraordinary amount of computer power at its disposal, and there is an abundance of data for language: LLMs such as ChatGPT are routinely built by training them on all the text available on the World Wide Web. (That may not be enough for the next generation of LLMs, by the way: plenty of people in Silicon Valley are worried that we will run out of language data quite soon.) One could take issue with whether these are the five breakthroughs that make human intelligence what it is, but Bennett builds a compelling case. In doing so he introduces us to an enormous range of concepts in biology, evolution, brain science and AI. He writes energetically and takes time to explain his points. At times this can be rather heavy going – parts of A Brief History of Intelligence read like a textbook – but the end result is worth it. In an area that is under more scrutiny than any other sector 3

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T H I S W E E K

No. 6307

February 16 2024

the-tls.co.uk

UK £4.50 | USA $8.99

T H E T I M E S L I T E R A R Y S U P P L E M E N T

Michael Wooldridge Thinking AI | Margaret Drabble London l iterary consequences Toby Lichtig A new play in the great tradition | Miranda France Household terrors

One large step Richard Lea on making space fit for humanity

Scott E . Parazynski on the Space Shuttle Atlantis mission STS-86, 1997 © Space Frontiers/ Archive Photos/ Hulton Archive/Gett y Images

In this issue

Do androids dream of electric sheep, asks the title of Philip K. Dick’s influential novel. Dick’s protagonist, Rick Deckard – who makes a living hunting down fugitive androids for the San Fran- cisco police department – in fact owns a black-faced electronic sheep. The flesh-and-blood variety have become a rarity on a planet devastated by war. Real sheep reading this column, however, can go back to safely grazing: our lead reviewer, Michael Wool- dridge, thinks that “AI in the physical world … hasn’t progressed”. The latest ChatGPT can critique John Rawls’s theory of justice and itemize the causes of the French Revolution, but, says Wooldridge in his assessment of Max Bennett’s A Brief History of Intelligence and George Musser’s Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, “we aren’t anywhere close to having AI tools that can tidy our home and clear the dinner table and load the dishwasher”. Do scientists have their priorities right, dare one ask? More seriously, we seem to be no nearer to answering “the hard problem” formulated by the philosopher David Chalmers – what is human consciousness? If they can’t crack the code of human sentience, how can scientists replicate it in machines?

We probably won’t love androids even if the scientists accomplish that task. Tim Peake’s Space, reviewed by Richard Lea, reminds us that astronauts refused to cede their place in space exploration to robots. The triumph of the human spirit? Maybe. The first Moon landing was “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”. But not, initially, for womankind. Loren Grush’s The Six reminds us that the female deputy director of Nasa’s equal opportunities office, Ruth Harris, got the sack in 1973 for pointing out that the three females in space had been “Arabella and Anita – both spiders ... [and] Miss Baker – a monkey”. Attitudes change slowly. In her Afterthoughts column Regina Rini writes about the development of healthy laboratory cultured meat as a substitute for animals. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, favours banning it: “We’re not going to do that fake meat. Like, that doesn’t work”.

What with AI, the internet of things and the Chinese threat to seize control of our fridges, home life has become a bit scary. The war correspondent Lara Pawson looks with terror on domestic appliances in Spent Light, a book of associations prompted by objects she owns and encounters. The gas rings of her cooker recall the horrors of the concentration camps and the words REHEAT DEFROST CANCEL on the toaster suggest a “synopsis of the anthropocene” – the climate warming apocalypse cometh.

MARTIN IVENS

Editor

Find us on www.the-tls.co.uk Times Literary Supplement

@the.tls @TheTLS

To buy any book featured in this week’s TLS,

go to timesbookshop.co.uk

2

3 SCIENCE

MICHAEL WOOLDRIDGE

RICHARD LEA

A Brief History of Intelligence – Why the evolution of the brain holds the key to the future of AI Max Bennett. Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation – Why physicists are studying human consciousness and AI to unravel the mysteries of the universe George Musser Space – The human story Tim Peake. The Six – The untold story of America’s first women astronauts Loren Grush

6 LETTERS TO THE

EDITOR

7 COMMENTARY

8 HISTORY

MARGARET DRABBLE

Windmills around Haworth, The Royal Society of Literature, Singing Horace, etc

Districts and circles – A literary game of consequences remembered

FERNANDO CERVANTES We, the King – Creating royal legislation in the sixteenth-century

Spanish New World Adrian Masters. Sepúlveda on the Spanish Invasion of the Americas – Defending empire, debating Las Casas; Edited and translated by Luke Glanville, David Lupher and Maya Feile Tomes

9 LETTERS

10 POETRY

12 MEMOIRS

14 ARTS

DAVID GALLAGHER

Las cartas del boom Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa; Edited by Carlos Aguirre et al

TIMOTHY CHESTERS SEBASTIAN DOWS-MILLER Selected Poems Joachim du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard; Translated by Anthony Mortimer The Medieval French Ovide Moralisé – An English translation

K. Sarah-Jane Murray and Matthieu Boyd

MIRANDA FRANCE

Spent Light Lara Pawson

LAURA TUNBRIDGE TOBY LICHTIG

Strijkkwartet Biënnale Amsterdam (Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam) Till the Stars Come Down Beth Steel (National Theatre, London)

16 FICTION

GEORGE BERRIDGE KYLE WYATT MUIREANN MAGUIRE NATASHA RANDALL

Float Up, Sing Down Laird Hunt Fourteen Days – A collaborative novel Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston, editors The Body of the Soul Ludmila Ulitskaya; Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky Hard by a Great Forest Leo Vardiashvili

18 LITERARY CRITICISM MIN WILD

DEVONEY LOOSER

Daniel Defoe in Context Albert J. Rivero and George Justice, editors Gone Girls, 1684–1901 – Flights of feminist resistance in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novel Nora Gilbert

20 BIOGRAPHY

NICHOLAS MURRAY RAMACHANDRA GUHA Edward Marsh – A life of poets, painters and players Sharon Mather Mirrors of Greatness – Churchill and the leaders who shaped him David Reynolds

22 RELIGION

MADOC CAIRNS

GUY STAGG

American Idolatry – How Christian nationalism betrays the Gospel and threatens the Church Andrew L. Whitehead. The Church of Saint Thomas Paine – A religious history of American secularism Leigh Eric Schmidt. Making Catholic America – Religious nationalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era William S. Cossen Cloistered – My years as a nun Catherine Coldstream

24 IN BRIEF

26 ESSAYS

27 AFTERTHOUGHTS

ANNA ASLANYAN LUCY SCHOLES

REGINA RINI

Hyde Park James Shirley, etc

The Unforgivable Cristina Campo; Translated by Alex Andriesse The Long-Winded Lady Maeve Brennan

Cell culture wars – The symbolism of real meat

28 NB

M. C.

Stephen James Joyce’s ghost, Collinge & Clark’s customers, Ollie Harrington’s cartoons, Byron’s bicentenary

Editor MARTIN IVENS (editor@the-tls.co.uk) Deputy Editor ROBERT POTTS (robert.potts@the-tls.co.uk) Associate Editor CATHARINE MORRIS (catharine.morris@the-tls.co.uk) Assistant to the Editor LISA TARLING (lisa.tarling@the-tls.co.uk) Editorial enquiries (queries@the-tls.co.uk) Managing Director JAMES MACMANUS (deborah.keegan@news.co.uk) Advertising Manager JONATHAN DRUMMOND (jonathan.drummond@the-tls.co.uk)

Correspondence and deliveries: 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF Telephone for editorial enquiries: 020 7782 5000 Subscriptions: UK/ROW: feedback@the-tls.co.uk 0800 048 4236; US/Canada: custsvc_timesupl@fulcoinc.com 1-844 208 1515 Missing a copy of your TLS: USA/Canada: +1 844 208 1515; UK & other: +44 (0) 203 308 9146 Syndication: 020 7711 7888 enquiries@newssyndication.com

The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661, USPS 021-626) is published weekly, except combined last two weeks of August and December, by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London, UK, and distributed by FAL Enterprises 38-38 9th Street, Long Island City NY 11101. Periodical postage paid at Flushing NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834 USA. The TLS is a member of the Independent Press Standards Organisation and abides by the standards of journalism set out in the Editors’ Code of Practice. If you think that we have not met those standards, please contact IPSO on 0300 123 2220 or visit www.ipso.co.uk. For permission to copy articles or headlines for internal information purposes contact Newspaper Licensing Agency at PO Box 101, Tunbridge Wells, TN1 1WX, tel 01892 525274, e-mail copy@nla.co.uk. For all other reproduction and licensing inquiries contact Licensing Department, 1 London Bridge St, London, SE1 9GF, telephone 020 7711 7888, e-mail sales@newslicensing.co.uk

TLS

FEBRUARY 16, 2024

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