Author: Mathew Ingram

As many of you may have noticed, some of these Torment Nexus newsletters involve the presentation of a bunch of evidence in the form of links, followed by a well-thought-out conclusion (some may be more well-thought than others, but I let’s not quibble). I want to say up front that this is not one of those newsletters! It’s more of a thinking-out-loud type of thing, and I hope you will come with me on this journey to an unknown and perhaps unsatisfying conclusion 🙂 As some of you know, I am interested in the evolution and social repercussions of what we refer to as AI — which in many cases may just be a form of auto-complete with a large database, or various kinds of machine learning, etc. etc. And I know that many people (perhaps even some of you) see this whole field as anathema, whether because it is controlled by oligarchs, or because it uses too many resources for too little result, or because it is the beginning of a trend that will end with the enslavement of humanity — or possibly all of the above!

I will freely acknowledge all of those existing or potential problems (except perhaps the enslavement thing — that seems unlikely at best). But as a freelance nerd with a lot of time on my hands, I think some interesting questions that emerge from all of this. I’ve written about some of them already, including how AI forces us to think about the nature of consciousness — which isn’t anywhere close to being settled, not by a long shot — and how we might act if we come to the conclusion that an AI is sentient in some sense of that term (and how we might know whether it is or not). But apart from these, there are some interesting real-world questions that come up as well, including: How are people actually using AI? And are those uses ultimately beneficial in a broader sense, or are they going to lead to some kind of universal dumbing-down of Western society? Not to jump to the end too quickly, but I don’t think there’s an overall answer to these questions — in other words, the devil (or angel) is in the details.

I’ve already written about one real-world use case, which is the AI therapy market, in which people who are suffering mental or emotional challenges use chatbots of various kinds as therapists — either because they can’t get a human therapist (even critics of this trend will admit that there is a shortage of trained therapists), because human therapists are too expensive, or because they feel more comfortable talking to a chatbot about whatever they are struggling with, or all of the above. You can read the whole thing if you like, but the conclusion I arrived at was that — for me, at least — the potential for people to actually be helped by this process outweighs any potential negative outcomes. Here’s how I put it:

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Continue reading “Some thoughts on how people (including me) are using AI”

From ABC News: “Residents of a neighborhood in the Bay Area community of Richmond, northeast of San Francisco, claim they have found multiple dead birds in their yards on their street. Security cameras even recorded one fowl’s fatality, showing it falling to its death from a power line after a loud pop was captured in the footage. Richmond resident Maximillian Bolling said he witnessed several birds succumb to a horrible death after perching on power lines. “So when they land and it happens, they just quickly explode and it’s really violent,” Bolling told ABC San Francisco station KGO-TV. Bolling said he and his neighbors have now counted at least 13 birds that have met a baffling demise. As the casualties have mounted, locals have speculated on everything from the birds being electrocuted by power lines to a phantom serial bird killer.”

Scientists surprised to discover that sponges move – not very quickly, but they do

From Nautilus: “On a frigid August day, 2,000 feet beneath the frozen surface of the North Atlantic, a remotely operated camera captured a faint pale smudge snaking across the seafloor. The footage seemed unremarkable — mostly brown and gray seafloor, dark but for the illumination from the camera. But the biologists aboard a research icebreaker above were shocked: The smear in the upper left of the screen was the trace of a sea sponge on the move. Sea sponges are not supposed to move. At least scientists didn’t think they were. But there, off the coast of Greenland, along the seamounts of Langseth Ridge, they were very much moving—slowly. Why, you might wonder, would anyone care about a bevy of brainless organisms crawling along the dark ocean bottom? Sea sponges are in fact central engineers of ocean ecosystems; for over 600 million years they’ve been shaping the very nature of Earth’s seafloors. And the discovery of their unexpected mobility redefined these animals as movers and shakers of the deep.”

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Continue reading “Residents of this California town say that birds are exploding”

From the New York Times: “Jeannette Ralston was at the Lion’s Den bar in San Jose, Calif., when she told her friends that she would be “back in 10 minutes.”She never returned. The next morning, on Feb. 1, 1977, police officers found the 24-year-old woman strangled with the long sleeve of a red women’s dress shirt and squeezed into the back seat of her Volkswagen Beetle in a parking lot a few minutes away from the bar. Almost 50 years later, the authorities believe that they know who strangled her. Willie Eugene Sims, 69, of Jefferson, Ohio, was arraigned on Friday on a charge of murder in San Jose. The investigation into the killing of Ms. Ralston, a mother and resident of San Mateo, Calif., went cold after no credible leads were initially developed. The police found a carton of Eve cigarettes, a popular brand for women in the 1970s, and the shirt that she was strangled with. They also had a sketch drawn of an unidentified man that her friends saw her leave the bar with the night before she was found.”

This robot is made from natural materials and biodegrades when you are finished with it

From Scientific American: “Picture a robot. What do you see? A rugged, steel-clad machine built to transcend living beings’ organic fragility? Unfortunately, this very quality now threatens to drown the planet in extremely durable e-waste. What if, instead, our increasingly prevalent machines were designed to decay and disappear — like life does? For a study in Science Advances, researchers crafted a robotic arm, and a joysticklike controller to operate it, from pork gelatin and plant cellulose — materials sturdy enough to function yet delicate enough to degrade in backyard compost. They started with cellulose layers derived from cotton pulp, then added glycerol for flexibility and dried the layers for strength. To build sensors, the researchers used a conductive gelatin extracted from pork, in which the flow of ions changes when the material is stretched, bent or pressed. They then folded the flat films and sensors into 3D structures.”

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Continue reading “A thumbprint on a cigarette pack solved a 48-year-old murder”

From the New York Times: “In August 2021, a mysterious package from Sarasota, Fla., showed up in Nicole Archer’s mailbox in Manhattan.Dr. Archer hurried upstairs to her cramped Chelsea apartment with the thick envelope in hand and tore it open at her dining table, revealing a legal document she had wondered about for months.She knew that a beloved college professor had bequeathed her something in her will. She was expecting a modest gift — enough money for a fancy dinner, perhaps, or one of the beaded bracelets the professor liked to make by hand.But when Dr. Archer, 49, saw the number on the last page — $100,000 — she thought there must be a misplaced decimal point.“I truly, honestly believed that I read it wrong,” she said. “I remember following the number with my finger, making sure I understood how many zeros it was.”At about the same time, 30 other people across the country received similar letters, sent at the behest of a professor whose class they had taken years earlier.”

Physicists managed to turn lead into gold but only for a fraction of a second

From Scientific American: “The dream of seventeenth-century alchemists has been realized by physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), who have turned lead into gold — albeit for only a fraction of a second and at tremendous cost. The not-so-mysterious transmutation happened at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory, near Geneva, Switzerland, where the multi-billion-dollar LHC smashes together ions of lead for a portion of each experimental run. Early chemists hoped to turn abundant lead into precious gold. But differences in proton number between the elements (82 for lead and 79 for gold) made that impossible by chemical means. CERN researchers achieved the feat by aiming beams of lead at each other, travelling at close to the speed of light. The ions occasionally glance past each other, rather than hit head on. When this happens, the intense field around an ion can create a pulse of energy that triggers an oncoming lead nucleus to eject three protons — turning it into gold.”

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Continue reading “A teacher split her $2.8M estate among her favorite students”

From the BBC: “Islanders in the Outer Hebrides say their lives are being disrupted by a mysterious low frequency humming sound that can be heard day and night. Lauren-Grace Kirtley, who has set up a Facebook page dedicated to the “Hebridean Hum”, said about 200 people on Lewis have reported hearing the noise. Dr Kirtley said the sound had prevented her from sleeping properly for several weeks, adding: “It’s impossible to ignore – it is like somebody shouting in your face constantly for attention.” Marcus-Hazel McGowan, who has been using amateur radio techniques to try and find the source, added: “It’s just trying to narrow it down and hoping nobody loses their mind completely over it.” The local council, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, said it had received reports relating to low frequency sounds from a small number of islanders.”

Four years after he died, lab-grown parts of a composer’s brain are making new music

From Forbes: “Legendary avant-garde composer Alvin Lucier died in 2021 — but that hasn’t stopped him from making new music. Credit an artificial “brain,” grown from his own cells, that emits sound-triggering electrical signals. This in-vitro structure lives at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth. There, through Aug. 3, visitors can wander through “Revivification,” an immersive installation that merges sound and biotechnology to imagine a compelling way creativity could, potentially, live on long after artists die. The provocative installation features tiny 3D organoids, sealed and displayed on a raised pedestal, that resemble a developing human brain. Their neural activity sends signals that activate electromechanical mallets to strike 20 curved, wall-mounted brass plates, sending ambient sound rippling through the gallery.”

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Continue reading “Residents of this island can’t escape a mysterious hum”

From Wikipedia: “In 1959, Hope Cooke was a freshman majoring in Asian Studies at Sarah Lawrence College. She went on a summer trip to India and met Palden Thondup Namgyal, Crown Prince of Sikkim. He was a 36 year-old recent widower with two sons and a daughter. Two years later, in 1961, their engagement was announced, but the wedding was put off for more than a year because astrologers in both Sikkim and India warned that 1962 was an inauspicious year for marriages. After the wedding she became the Queen Consort to the 12th and last King of Sikkim. In 1975 Namgyal was deposed and Sikkim merged into India as a result of internal turmoil, Indian military intervention and a referendum. Cooke returned to the US and began a career as a lecturer, book critic, and newspaper columnist for the Daily News.”

In the early 1900s a famous art historian wrote about how he was turning into a werewolf

From Public Domain Review: “Wholly oblivious to any and all of the festive sacred and secular celebrations of the day, or even to it being St. Michael’s Day, Hamburg-born art historian Aby Warburg sat at his desk in his brightly lit apartment in the Bellevue Sanatorium. Discouraged and frustrated by the previous seventeen-month succession of fruitless therapies, medical director Dr. Ludwig Binswanger had suggested to Warburg that the composition of an anamnesis — a biographical account of his illness — might help heal his troubled body and soul. On the morning after composing the anamnesis, before the onset of the very same daily psychotic attacks that he had been enduring for four years, he wrote to his wife Mary, lamenting that his situation had returned to that of the fall of 1918, as he writes about again reverting to being a werewolf.”

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Continue reading “At 23 years old she became the queen of a mountain kingdom”

It seems quaint now, but not that long ago, one of the biggest reasons for concern about the surveillance of our behavior by massive internet platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon — or by companies buying click data and GPS location from our smartphones — was that they might use that information to flog advertising at us in a more personalized and irritating way. This was supplanted quickly by a fear that our data might be used by foreign agents like the Internet Research Agency, a “troll farm” linked to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, or by those who wanted to target voters in order to get Trump elected. Those things are bad, obviously, but compared to what is happening now, they seem almost anodyne — like being concerned that you might get a bug bite while on a picnic in the woods, compared with seeing a massive grizzly bear advancing on your location, its teeth bared and its intentions obvious.

If you’ve been following The Torment Nexus for the last little while, you may recall a recent post titled “Be careful what you say on social media, part 2” — which was a followup to an earlier post. The first was triggered by the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a former student at Columbia who took part in peaceful pro-Palestine protests and was detained by agents of ICE — Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the Department of Homeland Security. They told Khalil that his visa was being revoked, and when they were told that he had a green card, the agents said that this was being revoked as well. He was taken to a detention facility, and has been there ever since. The second post in this series was sparked by the similar detention of several other students, including Turkish graduate student Rumeysa Öztürk, Columbia PhD student Ranjani Srinivasan, and Yunseo Chung, who came to the US when she was seven. Öztürk’s main offence seems to be that she wrote an op-ed about Israel in a student paper.

In that post, I described some of the tools that ICE and others are using to identify people they wish to detain and/or rendition to a for-profit prison in El Salvador (something which is unconstitutional in a number of different ways, but continues to occur, despite the Supreme Court’s attempts to get the government to stop). There are a variety of methods that government agencies can use to monitor social media with the aid of AI and then use those posts as evidence of potentially un-American conduct, as part of what Marco Rubio has called a “Catch and Revoke” plan. As 404 Media has reported, an ICE contractor known as ShadowDragon has the ability to monitor more than 200 social media and other sites, including Bluesky, OnlyFans, Instagram, etc. As I wrote:

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Continue reading “The Trump administration is building a Panopticon”

From Wikipedia: “Sarah Bishop was born around 1759 on Long Island, New York. She led a life of privilege as a member of an affluent and well-educated family. During the American Revolutionary War, her family’s house was burnt by a raiding party from a British privateer. She was captured by the raiding party and eventually became the wife of the captain. After the captain was killed, she went overboard and swam towards the shore at Stamford, Connecticut. She then travelled to Westchester County, New York, where she took up residence in a rocky cleft or cave. Described as mentally sound and deeply devoted to her faith, her few possessions included an old pewter basin and a gourd shell for cooking. She slept on a solid rock with scattered old rags, and when a reporter visited her in 1804, her cave had no signs of food or an active fire.”

He wrote a cryptic note to the judge and then jumped out the window and escaped

From Now I Know: “In the spring of 1976, Albert Spaggiari robbed the Société Générale bank in Nice. Bank employees returned to work from a long weekend, having just celebrated Bastille Day, but they couldn’t get into the vault. The door had been welded shut. Once inside, the bankers saw the damage: all the lockboxes had been opened and almost all the cash was gone. In total, the thieves got away with the equivalent of as much as $10 million — $55 million in today’s dollars. Spaggiari was ultimately arrested and he confessed to being the mastermind. In a private meeting with the judge, he said he was going to implicate others, including local political figures. The judge couldn’t make sense of Spaggiari’s handwriting, so he got up to explain to the judge what he had written, and then leaped out the window, landed on a parked car, then jumped onto a waiting motorcycle and fled. He was never caught, and lived out his life on the lam, surviving another decade before dying of cancer at the age of 56.”

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Continue reading “She was forced to become a pirate and then lived in a cave”

From NPR: “In 2001, after working up to it for years, Tim Friede finally allowed himself to be bitten by a snake. Friede has been fascinated with snakes for as long as he can remember. He used to hunt garter snakes growing up in Wisconsin. As an adult, his obsession turned to venomous snakes — and the harm they cause people globally. He felt the most dramatic way to raise awareness of the issue was to allow himself to be bit, repeatedly. Right out of the gate, he says, “I was put in ICU after two cobra bites and I dropped in a coma for four days.” To date, he estimates he’s willingly been bit some 200 times by all manner of venomous snakes — black mambas, taipans, cobras, kraits and many others. Friede’s motivation evolved to see if he could develop immunity to this swirl of toxins — so that his body might provide a roadmap to making a broad kind of antivenom. Now, researchers say they’ve done just that, thanks in large part to the antibodies that Friede has developed over nearly a quarter century of self-envenomation.”

Victorian ladies who wanted to lose weight infected themselves with tapeworms

From Atlas Obscura: “The Victorian era, roughly the 1830s to 1900, is notorious for its bizarre beauty standards, and the even more bizarre secrets to meeting them. The ideal of the time was modeled after those afflicted by consumption—that is, tuberculosis. Pale skin, dilated eyes, rosy cheeks, crimson lips, and a meagre and fragile figure. From swallowing ammonia to bathing in arsenic—which they knew to be poisonous— to using figure-molding corsets in a quest for the “perfect” 16-inch waist, there was no limit to what fashionable Victorians would do. Most of these practices have, thankfully, gone out of style. There is one gruesome dietary idea, however, that has managed to survive—the tapeworm diet. The idea is simple: you take a pill containing a tapeworm egg. Once hatched, the parasite grows, ingesting part of whatever the host eats. In theory, this enables the dieter to lose weight and eat without worrying about calorie intake.”

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Continue reading “He let snakes bite him 200 times to create a better antivenom”

From the New York Times: “It was May 1996, and David Kaczynski, a counselor for troubled youth in upstate New York, sat down to write a letter to his brother Ted. A month earlier, his brother had been shockingly unmasked as the shadowy Unabomber, responsible for a 17-year campaign of bombings that had killed and maimed people across the country. Ted Kaczynski, a brilliant but mentally troubled mathematician who had retreated years earlier to a remote hovel in Montana, had been arrested based on information from a tipster to the F.B.I.. He was now in custody and facing what would almost certainly be a lifetime behind bars, if not a death sentence. The tipster was David. Sitting in his home in Schenectady, N.Y., David began writing the letter. He used a pencil, knowing he might have to erase before he got it right. “I wanted to tell him in person that we morally felt an obligation to stop the violence,” he said.

Many people believe that the engraving on the Pope’s tomb is a travesty

From Fast Company: “Pope Francis’s tomb is simple by design. Francis—a modest man who opted to live in humble quarters alongside his peers rather than in the Vatican’s official housing for the leader of the church—requested nothing more than his name and a cross to adorn regional marble (“the stone of Liguria, the land of his grandparents”). It really is quietly beautiful. But atop that marble is a tomb inscribed with the name “Franciscus.” Or what—due to terrible spacing between letters, known as kerning—reads something more like “F R   A NCIS VS.” Cheryl Jacobsen, a calligrapher and adjunct assistant professor at the Center for the Book at the University of Iowa, calls the engraving “horrifically bad,” noting that “there is no historical reason for spacing that bad.” Christopher Calderhead, editor and designer of Letter Arts Review, says it is “the most boneheaded rookie mistake you can imagine (pun intended).” Calderhead suspects the work was “farmed out to a run-of-the-mill tombstone company.”

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Continue reading “The Unabomber’s brother turned him in and then tried to win him back”

From Mental Floss: “Louis Knapp saw the girl in the red parka and decided to stop. It was roughly 3 p.m. on Sunday, December 1, 1946, and Knapp was driving along Route 67A in Bennington, Vermont. He asked the girl where she was going. To hike the Long Trail, she said, a reference to a path that climbed five miles up Glastenbury Mountain. She didn’t seem dressed for it, though. Knapp figured she was a student at Bennington College, which was right near where he had stopped. The two said little as Knapp neared his driveway on Route 9. Down the road roughly two miles was the entrance to the Long Trail. A few minutes later, Knapp’s daughter went outside, and there was no sign of the hitchhiker. The girl’s name was Paula Welden, and her fate would lend credence to the belief that the Long Trail seemed to harbor one story after another of people who simply vanished. So many, in fact, that it is called the Bennington Triangle.”

The mystery behind a Banksy painting that went missing from The Met is finally solved

From the Art Newspaper: “Banksy has been making mischief for years, including hitting the US headlines in 2005 when he illicitly hung a work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. John Barelli, the former head of the Met’s security department, said three accomplices helped the street artist to carry out the stunt. Two of them began arguing, distracting the guards, allowing the third, who wore a fake beard and a tweed hat, to covertly affix a painting to the wall. The intruder then placed a placard next to the painting: “Banksy, 1975. ‘Last breath.’ Oil on board. Donated by the artist.” Banksy apparently tried to reclaim his property. “About a month later, I got a call from our legal department, telling me that he wants it back,” Barelli said. “And I said, ‘Well, he can’t have it back. We threw it out.’” So where is the piece now? Barelli admits that when he retired, he took the work himself. “If I need some money, maybe I’ll do something with it.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “People keep disappearing in Vermont’s ‘Bennington Triangle’”

From AP: “One of the greatest mountain guides will attempt to scale the world’s highest peak for the 31st time — and possibly the 32nd time as well — and break his own record. Kami Rita, 55, flew to Mount Everest from Kathmandu to lead a group of climbers who will try to reach the 8,849-meter summit during the spring climbing season. He holds the record for the most successful ascents of Mount Everest at 30 times. In May last year he climbed the peak twice. His closest competitor for the most climbs of Mount Everest is fellow Sherpa guide Pasang Dawa, who has made 27 successful ascents of the mountain. Kami Rita first climbed Everest in 1994 and has been making the trip nearly every year since. He is one of many Sherpa guides whose skills are vital to the safety and success each year of foreign climbers aspiring to stand on top of the mountain. His father was among the first Sherpa mountain guides.”

These techno-utopians want to colonize the sea

From the New York Times: “Forty-six hours before Rüdiger Koch officially seized the Guinness World Record for the longest time spent living in an underwater fixed habitat, I took a 15-minute motorboat ride from Linton Bay Marina, in north-central Panama, to visit him. It was a warm afternoon in January, and Koch was approaching a full 120 days spent working, eating, sleeping, drinking and smoking cigars in a room 36 feet below the surface of the Caribbean. His 304-square-foot habitat was inside the underwater buoyancy chamber that helps stabilize a floating home called SeaPod Alpha Deep. Koch arrived here, in small part, via a San Francisco-based nonprofit called the Seasteading Institute, which promotes “living on environmentally restorative floating islands with some degree of political autonomy.” The Institute’s president, Joe Quirk, once said the vision is “startup societies where people could form whatever kind of community they wanted” — a libertarian-inflected world where you could “vote with your boat.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “This Sherpa guide has climbed Everest a record 30 times”

From Modern Met: “For most of her life, Tilley Lockey has been championing the limb different community. The 19-year-old singer, influencer, and host lost both her arms to meningitis when she was just 15 months old. But rather than hide it or try to blend in, Lockey has embraced and celebrated her condition. For many years, she has worked with Open Bionics, which have outfitted her with top-of-the-line bionic hands. Now, Lockey has debuted a new pair of wireless bionic arms. The Hero Pro, the latest prosthetic arm by Open Bionics, is 3D-printed and allows users to do things like push a stroller or carry a suitcase, as well as fine motor actions like zipping a jacket, scrolling on a phone, or holding a guitar pick. Lockey explained that the arms have two muscle sensors — squeeze to close, flex to open — and the hands are also completely wireless, so that they can be detached and will still follow the motions the user indicates.”

He climbed Mount Fuji but had to be rescued twice after he went back to get his phone

From the BBC: “A 27-year-old university student who climbed Mount Fuji outside of its official climbing season was rescued twice in four days, after he returned to look for his mobile phone. The Chinese student, who lives in Japan, was first rescued by helicopter on Tuesday while on the Fujinomiya trail, which sits about 3,000m (9,800ft) above sea level. He was unable to descend the trail after he lost his crampons – a spiked device that is attached to the bottom of climbing shoes for better traction. But days later, he returned to the mountain to retrieve belongings that he left behind, including his phone. He was rescued again on Saturday after suffering from altitude sickness but is now out of danger. Due to harsh conditions, people are discouraged from climbing Mount Fuji outside of the official climbing season that starts in early July and ends in early September.

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Continue reading “She can control her bionic hands even when they aren’t attached”