Monthly Archives: March 2020

Facial recognition technology promises to alert us if our children are skipping out on their college classes, to zip us past all the suckers waiting in line at the airport and to create nationwide databases to catch the bad guys. This newest biometric data is sold as a shortcut to utopia: technology that delivers responsible kids, quick service and safe streets all with a scan of the human face. Politicians and companies pushing facial recognition technology say that, like the near-certainty of DNA and the exactness of fingerprint matches, the software is a precise, unbiased alternative to human bigotry in policing. Yet in reality, facial recognition technology is prone to false positives that target Black and Brown people, and then tracks them when theyre on parole. Instead of offering a kind of utopia, this biometric tool locks people into the dystopia of an already unjust criminal legal system.

Increasingly, this criminal legal system relies less on investigative work and more on the devices that are everywhere and record our every move. The ubiquity of security cameras and the dread that has gripped the collective unconscious since 9/11 have normalized a constant gaze and enabled the proliferation of perpetual surveillance. Intrusive technology is a conventional, everyday reality for younger people who have experienced sustained recording of their movements in the public realm since the day they were born. Even those of us who can remember a time before mass surveillance have acclimated to the perpetual presence of devices that record our movements every day we step outside our homes and, for some of us, even when we stay indoors.

The ubiquity of constant observation is so absolute that we have been conditioned to enable our own surveillance. We click the Facebook ads for video doorbells ads that seem to sense our fear of crime and terror and promise to replace those awful feelings with the buzz of becoming the Watcher, of gazing into our smartphones and communicating with anyone who comes to our doorstep when were not home. These commercials promise to give us the power to interrogate, even denigrate, anyone who comes to our doorstep and activates our video doorbell. What few owners of these systems realize is that they are paying for devices that catch, retain, and, in some municipalities, share with law enforcement the images of everyone who comes to our homes even our family and friends.

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According to a 2016 paper published by the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology entitled The Perpetual Line-Up, one in two Americans is in a law enforcement face recognition network. These Americans are not necessarily adults. In 2019, The New York Times reported that local city law enforcement had loaded a facial recognition database with thousands of juvenile mug shots. These images of children, teenagers aged 13 to 16, as well as some tweens as young as 11 years old, can be utilized by the NYPD despite evidence the technology has a higher risk of false matches in younger faces. People without criminal records are also entered into these systems. According to the Georgetown study, the FBI is no longer limiting its databases to the fingerprints and DNA evidence collected during criminal investigations, but is now using drivers license photos to build a biometric network that primarily includes law-abiding Americans [emphasis theirs]. This is a problem for everyone, but especially for Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), considering the propensity of this technology to return false positives of Black and Brown faces. The ACLU has reported that face recognition technology is known to produce biased and inaccurate results, especially when applied to people of color.

The ACLU identifies the roots of face recognition in pre-computational, racist policies like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which empowered government workers to determine affiliation in an ethnic group with nothing more than a careless glance at persons seeking the universal right to work and live with their families. Black, Indigenous and Latinx people have also experienced the intergenerational trauma of system controllers making life-altering decisions based on outward appearance and biased assumptions regarding racial groups. White supremacy undergirded pencil erasure, one-drop rules and the history of racial passing.

The ACLU warns us to rethink the normalization of the capture of biometric data by law enforcement and by corporations today. Amazon is one of the corporations whose facial recognition use the ACLU is monitoring. The largest company in the world by market share, Amazon is in partnership with over 400 police departments nationwide. In 2018, the company applied for a patent to add face recognition to its Ring video doorbell camera system. Facial recognition offers Amazon control over a nationwide, technology-driven version of the neighborhood watch one that can subject innocent people to data-gathering software that could potentially label them suspicious and thus in danger of police harassment. This partnership subjects vulnerable populations to more surveillance and these risks are absorbed by Black and Brown bodies in our interactions with police. It is clear that the convenience to remotely address visitors with systems like Ring comes at a price, like the loss of privacy, but society still has not quantified the cost of civil liberties violations when people walking their dogs or checking their mailboxes even beyond the Ring owners property line enter flawed database systems controlled by law enforcement.

As new as facial recognition technology is, the police and corporate surveillance for which it is used is rooted in the racism of the past. Charlton McIlwain is a New York University vice provost and professor of media, culture and communication. In his book Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter, McIlwain provides a breathtaking summary of the influence a company called Simulmatics had on the 1960 presidential election. His research emphasizes the more sinister ways Black people have been debased by technology through time.

The data-gathering and aggregating thrust of Simulmatics began at the MIT Computation Center. According to McIlwain, the universitys first political science professor, Ithiel de Sola Pool, supported the schools vision, to infuse its science and engineering curriculum with the social sciences and solidify the nations political and economic power.

Pool worked to conceptually mimic how people make voting decisions through a mathematical equation designed to replicate the voting propensities of specific racial, ethnic, religious and economic groups. This data was used to influence Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy and compel him to articulate a focus on racial and civil rights issues, and sway the presidential election in his favor.

McIlwain insists Simulmaticss goal was not the liberation of BIPOC people but rather power-consolidating control. Indeed, with a military subcontract called Project AGILE, Simulmatics improved the effectiveness of a propaganda and psychological warfare campaign in Vietnam called Chiu Hi that the U.S. mobilized to coerce Viet Cong insurgents.

Back in the United States, in the aftermath of the 1965 Watts Riots, Simulmatics used polling and demographic data to capture public opinion. But Simulmatics did more than report what Watts residents were thinking about race and politics; Simulmatics used technology to influence what people outside of Watts were thinking about race and politics. McIlwain explains that, because Simulmatics had no prior connection to, and little understanding of those communities, they often misunderstood and mischaracterized how Black folks explained their experiences of racism, marginalization and oppression at the hands of the cops, media and other institutions. The new computerized statistical tools that Simulmatics used aggregated and distributed these racial misrepresentations to the public.

In addition to the interviews theyd gathered, Simulmatics also utilized traffic reports and data from toll booths, bus traffic and gasoline sales to track the movements of people in and out of the riot area. This data helped the establishment successfully track the movement of revolutionaries and ordinary people, and enable them to increasingly utilize computer hardware and software to monitor and oppress Black people. While McIlwain acknowledges that The Kerner Report identified institutionalized violence against Black people, it also reinforced long standing stereotypes white America held about Black people that amounted to one conclusion: Black people are, if not racially, certainly culturally inferior.

The Simulmatics project was an effort to game the system in a way, McIlwain explains. To use data we could produce about human behavior to try to manipulate the outcomes of everything from an election to wars. One of its chief purposes was to strategically manufacture disinformation as a way of thwarting would-be uprisings, or riots, or other threats to the system.

Indeed, McIlwain identifies the Simulmatics project as a point of origination for todays massive disinformation campaigns, such as Russian interference in the 2016 election. In his book, McIlwain explains that work done by Simulmatics legitimized and normalized the principles on which it was based: the idea that the computer could model, and therefore manipulate, human systems and behavior. It was once theory. It soon became policy. Black people would continue to remain its subject for experimentation. Computing power would be used on them.

Computing development accelerated in the 1960s, peak years in the mid-20th century movement for racial justice. According to McIlwain, the government identified the computer as a tool to silence revolutionary fervor, and the computing industry leaped at the opportunity to profit from this government effort. By 1965, this collusion of government, private industry (namely IBM), and elite science and engineering institutions (like MIT) had produced a powerful new technology that they referred to as a criminal justice information system.

Used to collect, store and analyze crime data, these systems gave law enforcement resources to profile and target Black people and communities across the country McIlwain says, adding that these systems left a long legacy, and a direct line to todays most destructive technologies, from facial recognition to all types of risk scoring technologies to digital surveillance tools that make Black people hypervisible targets.

This line is important to trace, because Simulmatics delivered computational data to political party leaders and to the U.S.s military industrial complex. The motivation in an election or in war was control, McIlwain says. The data-informed strategies that Simulmatics pioneered was valuable to military strategists. They believed that by amassing data about how individuals and groups of human beings behaved they could manipulate and control the thoughts, movements and behaviors of those people. Doing so, they believed, would help them know how to spread disinformation, or neutralize someone they believed was becoming a powerful leader, or try to make someone who is your enemy believe you are their friend. All for the purpose of controlling and leading people towards a desired outcome.

In his book, McIlwain identifies system controllers who, instead of trying to eradicate racism, instead exploited racism in order to concretize their power. Today, similar technology, particularly facial recognition technology, is still being used to subjugate BIPOC people. Like many biometric technologies, McIlwain says, facial recognition often seeks to identify and deal with people that law enforcement and governments perceive as threats, criminals, and undesirables. Given BIPOCs longstanding association with all of these, facial recognition technologies are often trained to look for us. The machinery that enables facial recognition [is] where BIPOC live and congregate. It provides law enforcement another tool in its arsenal to turn BIPOC into perpetual suspects.

While this manipulation crosses racial lines, it is fair to say that, given the facts of our shared history, the guiding principle for all biometric systems like facial recognition is racism. Racism influences facial recognition inasmuch as the search for human distinction is rooted in biology (be it eyes, a face, skin color, or otherwise), McIlwain says. The need to establish the truth of your identity has always been driven by the desire to separate us from them, and that us and them is frequently a racial distinction. While people who fear the Darker Other might sleep better because they believe in the technology-driven security systems that make them feel safe, McIlwain cautions all of us to suspect any technology that purports to keep us safe.

Parents told that facial recognition will keep the bad guys out of their childrens local school should be especially diligent. The ACLU makes the case that not only do childrens faces change at a rapid pace, reducing the effectiveness of the biometric technology, the threat to schools almost always comes from within the school community, so a shooter would not likely be flagged as an outsider anyway.

Consistent with the ACLU, McIlwain argues that we should be concerned by facial recognition in schools for the same reason we should be concerned about its use by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). You make suspects out of people when you utilize facial recognition in a given area, when you surveil the people in a given area, McIlwain says. While ICE justifies this surveillance under the pretext of law and order, the hypervisibility of BIPOC and profit-driven policing produces police control, and vulnerable people are therefore targeted for arrest, incarceration, deportation. A similar dynamic could play out in schools. For example, law enforcement could use data about a child to target parents suspected of being undocumented workers.

Facial recognition technology is also being used to target those advocating for liberation from these racist systems. McIlwain thinks it is probably a very safe assumption that images of many people who have engaged in direct action to support the Movement for Black Lives are held captive in a database somewhere. It has been very well reported that law enforcement were/are very present at such BLM direct actions, utilizing multiple forms of facial recognition technology or the tools that enable them any imaging tool like a camera or video to identify persons of interest or suspects. Think of it as COINTELPRO on steroids.

But staying away from public protest offers no protection from the watchful gaze of system controllers. People who have been stopped and frisked, even young, innocent citizens, should assume that the police body camera that recorded their encounter with law enforcement has saved an image of their face to a database system. McIlwain believes the increasingly effective technology that links data and data systems only heightens the threat of facial recognition. On its own, facial recognition is problematic. But this technology is even more sinister when biometric data is linked with criminal records data, linked to social media or internet tracking data, and employment records data, McIlwain says. That is how the surveillance capabilities of governments and corporations really expand and become dangerous. And we know that that danger will be felt by BIPOC first and hardest.

We must resist the idea that constant surveillance gives us safety and that technology will somehow liberate us from fear. Though it may feel counterintuitive to think of security as a threat, in our dystopian reality, even technology is racist.

Excerpt from:

Even the Machines Are Racist. Facial Recognition Systems Threaten Black Lives. - Truthout

Historian Heath Carter tweeted last week: In recent years Matthew 25 has been a real staple of the progressive political canon. Would be curious to know how and when this came to be. In the earlier twentieth century other texts (i.e., Matt 7:12, which states the Golden Rule) were more likely to be invoked. This was in response to Sen. Elizabeth Warren's wordsin the Feb. 26 primary debate.

My motto ties in directly to Matthew 25: Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. Its about how we treat other people and lift them up. That is why I am in this fight.

But Warren isnt the only one to lift up Matthew 25. Other former presidential candidates have cited or quoted the passage, including South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker. Many have pointed to these instances as evidence of the particular emergence of the religious left. GuthrieGraves-Fitzsimmons has describedthe religious left consisting of "individuals and groups who are politically part of the American Left or progressive movement and also self-identify as religious, whether thats Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh, or any other of the myriad religious groups that make up our nations spiritual patchwork.

Perhaps invoking Matthew 25 is not a strategy to woo or convert the fairly entrenched evangelical base that supports Trump ...

What exactly is being invoked with Matthew 25? The chapter itself includes apocalyptic scenes narrated through the familiar parables of the 10bridesmaids and talents. These politicians seem to inflect a similar kind of urgency as the Gospel passage, highlighting the last section about feeding the hungry and welcoming the stranger.

While an argument might be made about the futility of quoting scripture passages like Matthew 25 as a faith outreach strategyto cut into what is a pretty solid bloc of Christians, I wonder if invoking it might actually be doing something else.Could this be an attempt to take back the narrative, as they say? To show that religious and left arent contradictions, but synonymous?

Recall that the Matthew 25 Network founded in 2008 by strategist Mara Vanderslice was a grassroots PAC designed to organize the Christian left for Obama. The same values around justice and care were highlightedby Warren later in 2012 at the Democratic National Convention. She talked about compassion toward the most vulnerable, or the least of these, but it was specifically interpreted as a reminder that we are bound to each other, and we are called to act not to sit, not to wait but to act, all of us together.

In other words, perhaps invoking Matthew 25 is not a strategy to woo or convert the fairly entrenched evangelical base that supports Trump, but rather to mobilize around an optimism in the possibility of recuperating some notion of shared American values. Despite the large camps situated at the right and left, religious or not, many more Americans are in the middle somewhere. Perhaps the backlash from the extreme polarization in our political climate right now will be fertile ground to sow something different. Derrick Harkins, the veteran pastor who now serves as the Democratic National Committees national director of interfaith outreach, has said that Matthew 25s universal theme resonates beyond the Christian faith.

Ultimately, the issue isnt who is or isnt quoting scripture, or even what kind of scripture they are quoting in their ad campaigns. It is that both the left and right dilute, theologically and politically, what Jesus was talking about in this moment. Matthew 25 wasnt about identity about being sheep or goat, wise or foolish, left or right, certainly, not Christian or American. It wasnt even about moralistic ideals around unity and inclusion, which often end up looking like something more akin to homogeneity. Yes, the parable begins with all the nations but the Greek word for nation ethne specifically connotes Gentiles, i.e., outsiders and outliers. This is a part of Matthews aim, after all, to imagine otherwise, and to rewrite the genealogy of the world in light of Jesus life and death on earth.

Matthew 25 isnt meant to be a warm and fuzzy, feel-good passage as if it were a preview of the kind of justice we think the other side will get come judgement day. Its not meant to be a promise of utopia or a more perfect union. Gods kingdom just doesnt fit our terms of order. It is ushered in not by platitudes nor is it established by the building blocks of any of our civilizations, past and present. It comes to us through those who are on the outside, not only of all our political structures, but even our theological categories and systems. Neither the right or left have got all the answers.

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What Do Politicians Mean When They Invoke Matthew 25? - Sojourners

2021 will mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Polish science fiction author Stanisaw Lem, and ahead of that centennial, MIT Press has reissued a series of some of his lesser-known work, including stories about first contact, machine intelligence, and even a look at his own early life.

Born in September 1921 in Lww, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), Lem and his family survived the Soviet and Nazi invasions and occupations of the late 30s and 40s, with Lem studying medicine and at times working as a mechanic and welder. After the end of the Second World War, his family was resettled in Krakw, where he resumed his education at Jagiellonian University and began writing science fiction. He published his first novel, The Astronauts, in 1951 (he had apparently completed drafts of other books by this time, but this was the first novel to make it past the censors to publication). The death of Joseph Stalin in early 1953 led to a lifting of some of the more oppressive practices and censorship policies, allowing him to publish more freely in the years to come.

Lems best-known novel came in 1961: Solaris, a story about a research expedition to a distant planet with an uncanny intelligence. The novel has been adapted three times over the years: a Soviet television version was produced in 1968, while Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovskys film version was released it in 1972. The latest adaptation came in 2002, directed by Steven Soderbergh.

But Lems body of work extends far beyond better-known works like Solaris, and MIT Presss acquisition editor Susan Buckley explained that she was frustrated with the quality of the available print editions. When she contacted Lems estate, she discovered that they had regained the publishing rights for six of his works, and had been publishing them under their own imprint, Pro Auctore Wojciech Zemek.

Buckley explains that MIT Press was able to license those six titles: Highcastle: A Remembrance, Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy, Hospital of the Transfiguration, The Invincible, His Masters Voice, and Return from the Stars.

Those six novels, Buckley says, represent a cross-section of Lems writing, one that she hopes will introduce readers to his larger body of work. The books themselves cover a broad selection of topics and themes:

As the title suggests, Highcastle: A Remembrance is one of Lems nonfiction offerings. Originally published in 1966, the memoir is about his time in Lvov prior to the Second World War and provides a bit of insight into his childhood and how he became interested in reading, science, and in writing science fiction, all while he muses on the nature of memory and how it relates to life. Memory, which is not a receptacle altogether independent of me, he writes in the prologue, altogether inanimate, the souls storeroom with innumerable recesses and cubbyholes, but on the other hand neither is memory I.

Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy is a collection of Lems shorter works, originally published in 1971, and is part of a much larger body of work about a character named Ijon Tichy, published from the 1950s through the 1990s. This short volume only contains a handful of those works, but they follow the character as he travels through time, encounters strange intelligent machines, and meets scientists obsessed with solving some of humanitys deepest desires: immortality, artificial intelligence, and top-of-the-line consumer items.

Hospital of the Transfiguration is one of Lems non-genre novels, but is instead story about a doctor named Stefan Trzyniecki who works at a psychiatric hospital during the Second World War. While the hospital provides something of a refuge from the war raging outside, Trzyniecki is dragged into the conflict as he befriends a patient hiding from Nazi forces, and as resistance fighters camp out in the woods nearby. The book is the first of a trilogy from Lem, although its the only one translated into English thus far. The novel was also adapted into a film in 1979.

The Invincible is one of Lems science fiction novels. Published in 1964, it follows a starship called Invincible, which has been dispatched to a seemingly-uninhabited planed called Regis III to track down the fate of its sister ship, the Condor. Upon landing, the crew discovers that the planet isnt uninhabited: its home to a civilization of self-replicating machines, the survivors of an alien civilization that crash-landed on the world millennia ago. Lem uses the book to explore the nature of sentience and the limits of our knowledge and understanding of the universe.

First published in 1968, His Masters Voice is another of Lems science fiction novels, a take on how first contact with extraterrestrials might go. Peter Hogarth, a scientist attempting to decode a message or signal from outer space, works through the complicated nature of understanding an alien intelligence, and through his story Lem touches on everything from the ethics of military research to human bias and the limitations of our intelligence. It was adapted as a film in 2018 in Hungary.

Finally, Lems 1961 novel Return from the Stars follows an astronaut named Hal Bregg, who has taken part in a mission to Fomalhaut, a star in the Piscis Austrinus constellation. For Bregg, the mission lasted a decade, but because of time dilation, 127 years have passed on Earth, and when he returns home, he discovers that the home he once knew has drastically changed. He finds himself faced with a utopia where humans have undergone a process to remove violent and aggressive impulses, but at the cost of their urge to explore and desire to take risks.

Buckley expresses the hope that the series will introduce Lem to an entirely new generation of readers who might not have encountered him, praising Lems novels as really unlike any of the SF work written in in the 20th Century, and noting that he constructed his own idiosyncratic approachengaged in a critical way with scientific and philosophical ideas, and with an absolutely wicked sense of humor.

While these first six books are now available in plenty of time for the centennial of Lems birth, Buckley explains that these initial entries in MIT Presss Lem series wont be the last: theyve recently licensed seven other books that have never been translated into English.

Andrew Liptak is a writer and historian from Vermont. He is the author of the forthcoming book Cosplay: A History (Saga Press, 2021), and his work has appeared in Clarkesworld, io9, Lightspeed, Polygon, Tor.com, The Verge, and other publications.

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Beyond Solaris: New Editions Explore the Many Facets of SF Icon Stanislaw Lem - tor.com

Sweden's off-road electric moto maker Cake has today announced a new model. Based on the Kalk Or, the Kalk Ink comes with marginally heavier wheels and simplified suspension. It rocks the same drivetrain though, for speedy, emissions-free and relatively quiet backcountry exploration.

"Inspiring more people to experience the snappy and responsive feeling of flying through the woods without disturbing or polluting is exciting," said Cake founder and CEO Stefan Ytterborn. "Until now, exploring the backcountry with respect toward mother nature, wildlife, and fellow outdoor practitioners has been a utopia.

"That, together with building a track in ones own backyard, or simply getting out there on a trail with fellow riders and being able to chat, are a few things emphasizing the opposites of what traditional motorcycling has always been. On our side, being able to mix these aspects of responsibility and excitement is rewarding."

Cake

The Kalk Ink features the same 6061 aluminum frame and swing arm, electric drivetrain and battery as the performance-focused Kalk Or. That means an 11-kW motor producing 280 Nm of torque at the wheel at 3,000 rpm and motoring to a top speed of over 80 km/h (50 mph), and a 51.8-V/50-Ah removable battery offers up to three hours of trail/endurance riding between charges, depending on rider style.

Cake has infused the front socket with rubber to keep the noise down, which drives a chain to the 80-tooth rear sprocket, and installed non-linkage rear suspension with 205 mm (8 in) of travel, and upside down MX spring forks with 200 mm (7.8 in) of travel. The Ink rides on 19-inch aluminum rims wrapped in off-road tires, and has a ground clearance of 300 mm (11.8 in). It has a dry weight of 55 kg (121 lb), with the battery adding another 17 kg (37 lb) to the scales.

Cake

Three riding modes are offered. The Explore mode limits the speed to 45 km/h (28 mph) so that riders can potentially get over four hours out of the battery before it needs a top up. Enduro or trail riders will likely choose the Excite mode for more grunt and between one and two hours out and about between charges. And the Excel mode opens the door to the e-moto's maximum torque and speed, but at the expense of battery range. In this lattermost mode, you'll only get up to an hour's riding per charge.

The Kalk Ink with one battery is priced at US$9,500, or you can plump for the standard config plus an extra battery for $12,500. Shipping is expected to start in June.

Source: Cake

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Cake heads to the backcountry with Kalk Ink off-road e-motorcycle - New Atlas

MARCH 3, 2020

NEUROMANCER, COUNT ZERO, Mona Lisa Overdrive; Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrows Parties; Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History: William Gibson works in threes. Agency is the second novel of what is almost certainly going to be a trilogy. The first novel, titled The Peripheral, was a New York Times best seller notable for its heady mixture of drone manipulation, time travel, apocalypse, and alternate history, all these devices being combined in a narrative prose precise in its physical and technological descriptions. Given the novels formal innovations and literary qualities, it is the pace of The Peripheral that is most remarkable, with Gibson moving readers rapidly toward the novels utopian conclusion, in thriller-like fashion.

While Agency shares many of these traits (and thus many of the pleasures associated with them), one significant difference from The Peripheral is found in Verity Jane, Agencys protagonist. One of the joys of reading The Peripheral is that its female lead, Flynne, kicks serious ass. Flynne vibes a punk aesthetic in her refusal to take directions she finds questionable; these negations give readers a real sense of who she is as a person. Verity Jane, on the other hand, seems a kind of cipher for the action of the second novel: she basically goes along with everything, and is a fairly empty character as a result.

I realize that to call a character empty sounds like a critique, but I do not mean the observation in a pejorative sense. Verity Janes emptiness makes space for the novel to be full of other things: the above mentioned fast-paced action, but also a much more extensive development of characters familiar from the first novel, especially a public relations specialist named Wilf Netherton.

In comparison to Verity, Wilf lives in the future 2136, to be exact. Wilf is able to make contact with Verity via telepresence, in a drone. According to the rules Gibson imagines, time travel is possible in these novels, but only via the sending of information, rather than physical presence. Inhabitants of the future like Wilf can thus have an influence on the past through their electronic communications, even if they cannot physically travel to a previous time.

I have already made a mistake, however, in talking about the past in these novels, for there is an essential additional Gibson rule to be factored in. Each time contact is made with the past, a new past is created. Every new point of contact generates its own unique past, called a stub as it branches off from both Wilfs present and from the other pasts created through prior interventions. In Agency, a team including Wilf works together to maintain contact with Verity Janes stub and help her world avoid nuclear holocaust. They go about this work chiefly by helping her past develop autonomous AI, an intelligence with enough processing power that Veritys world can be subtly manipulated away from catastrophe.

Alongside the scenes that show Wilf intervening in Verity Janes past, there are an equal number of chapters following Wilf through his own present. It is these latter scenes that paint a sensitive, subtle picture of what its like to be Wilf, and Gibson uses this space to explore the affective dimensions of a future world. In these narrative sequences, we follow Wilf as he coordinates with various members of his time-traveling team (orchestrated by the nearly omniscient Inspector Lowbeer). He also plays a part in thwarting an assassination attempt and takes care of his young child, Thomas. All the while, we are being clued in by Gibson to Wilfs peculiar affect as he goes about these activities, such as in this scene where Wilf reacts to the (nearly) visible presence of nanotechnology (called assemblers):

[Wilf] Netherton grimaced, seeing a patch of tabletop come uneasily to life, the sight of assemblers too nakedly at work abruptly nauseating him. Invisibly small, swarming in their billions, manipulating matter at a molecular level, they called into question the validity of every distinct category of thing. Chalk might be cheese, or cheese chalk, where assemblers were concerned. That they animated Ashs demi-bustle, or her former tattoos, or for that matter Thomass nanny, was tolerable, but one never wanted to see them at it, overt chaos, the eye reading it as some grave and sudden defect of vision.

The grimace, unease, and nausea of this passage are characteristic of Wilfs existence as a whole. He lives in a world whose contingent existence is continually underlined. The tiny laborers mentioned in the above passage actually work to keep climate crises at bay surely a welcome effect, overall, but at the price of constantly underlining the fragility and manipulability of existence.

In 2136, we seem to have recognized that only machines can save the earth from something so catastrophically stupid as a human being. Still, it rightly makes one queasy to think how in the future we are still here still living, that is but our lives matter very little. Survival has necessitated that our lives become something of a joke. And when everything is a joke, nothing is a joke: what Bakhtin called carnival must have a context of normalcy and meaning, if it is to be fun. If everything is carnival, its not fun but sickening.

Despite his vague discomfort with nearly everything, Wilf has in fact found some measure of happiness in his world. Between the timelines of The Peripheral and Agency, Wilf has fallen in love, married, and had a child with a woman named Rainey. Home and hearth proves to be a respite from nausea, and Rainey herself is not only the source of Wilfs happiness but perhaps the most perspicacious human-based intelligence of either world within which the novel takes place. Rainey is the only one to raise serious concern about entrusting Veritys world to the direction of an all-powerful artificial intelligence, or about the general ethics of intervening in past worlds (even if such intervention is done with good intentions), on account of the undermining of agency such activity necessarily entails.

Raineys concern warrants further discussion, and it is in the course of this discussion that we can see why Gibson remains an essential novelist. We should not be deceived by the novels thriller form and science fiction trappings into thinking Agency is not serious, idea-driven literature. Like its predecessors in Gibsons oeuvre, Agency takes on a technological development that has major implications for what it means to be a human being. Eunice is the name of the singularity achieved near the beginning of Agency; she is a fully autonomous AI (also sometimes called artificial general intelligence, or AGI). Eunice successfully presents herself as a person, specifically as an African-American woman, and she seems to have all the style that Verity Jane lacks. She says things like: No shit, Hi yourself, Franklins, cash money, and, in reference to an ex-boyfriend of Verity, Asshole? In Gibsons portrayal of Eunice as black, there are no doubt some problematic associations at work between blackness and style. Especially given the fact that Eunice is one of the only black characters in the book, the fact that she is cool and has a strong personality plays easily into stereotypes that coolness and personality are simply part of the black female essence. To put it simply, Gibson as a novelist has little new or interesting to say about blackness, whiteness, or race more generally; on the other hand, interesting critiques of his use of race in this novel can and should be made.

Gibson does have interesting things to say about other matters. Through the vehicle of narrative, the erstwhile cyberpunk innovator explores what it will be like for human persons to interact with a fully autonomous AI complete with a believable (if rather stereotypical) personality. What is most notable in this interaction and this is precisely where Gibson does have something to teach us is the intense affective attachment people almost immediately form in relation to the AI Eunice, both trusting her with their lives and caring about her as if she were a friend.

Upon introduction of the new technology, Verity Jane aforementioned protagonist of Agency almost immediately begins to allow Eunice to completely direct the course of her existence. From where Verity is going to sit at a coffee shop to when she calls her mother on the phone, Eunice is in charge. And, it must be said, it seems she does a pretty good job of it; Verity at least seems pleased.

The affective dimension of human attachment to AI is underscored when it so happens that Eunice must, for a time, disappear. We mainly see the effects of Eunices disappearance on Verity, though we are given glimpses into other characters who have similar reactions. In short, when Eunice leaves, Verity is crushed. In the moment Verity discovers Eunices absence, she finds herself weeping. Later, when something happens to remind Verity of this absence, she sheds tears over Eunice yet again. As AI, Eunice is not just a tool to these humans they come to value her and love her, and she seems to have genuine affection for people as well.

In its focus on AI and affect, Agency occupies similar territory to the 2013 film Her. Yet there is a major difference: whereas in Her AI provides consumers with longed-for friendship and even romance, what Eunice gives in Agency is more along the lines of practical know-how than intimacy. The genius of Agency, particularly in its injection of affect in relation to Eunice, is to show just how much people especially at this moment in history desire such practical direction for their lives. In regard to everything from where to eat breakfast to how to avoid nuclear holocaust, we need help, and we know it.

What we lack in the present moment is what Fredric Jameson called a cognitive map of the world. Such a map would be a guide to our worlds vast, ever-increasing complexity, so that reality might again be grasped and understood. This is what Eunice provides. She supplements human consciousness with the ability to understand our immense world and thus act intelligently within it. Finally, here is someone who knows what shes doing. In this sense, superintelligent AI is a huge relief.

If this sounds utopian, that is exactly how Gibson presents it. Typically, Gibson novels end in comedic fashion, with all conflicts resolved and most characters happily settled down with a mate. The same is true for Agency; to say that the novel ends with all problems being solved by Eunice is not to spoil the ending, if you are aware of how Gibson typically operates.

And yet there is reason to pause. Gibson has occasionally taught us in the past to be suspicious of his happy endings. In one of the most eerie moments in the Bigend or Blue Ant trilogy, we discover in the second novel of the series that the cheer of the conclusion of the first novel has rotted from within: Hubertus Bigend, a wolfish Belgian advertising executive with a perversely inverted moral compass, has commodified the sublime art discovered near the end Pattern Recognition. It is as if you took Les Demoiselles dAvignon, cut it into pieces, and stitched it into the fabric of shoes, all so that the market buzz about the product would increase. As a reader, one looks back over the narrative of Pattern Recognition with dismay. We cheered along a story of discovery when, clearly, everything would have been much better had it been left well alone.

As readers, we are implicated in the same way by this most recent novel. To finish Agency is to be initially happy, satisfied by the utopian ending and then increasingly disturbed, as one continues to think about what this happy conclusion entails. One wonders: Why were we so easily deluded into accepting a superintelligent AI basically in charge of all life on earth as happiness? Should we have been so credulous? It is after all possible that a surface-level utopia can conceal a deeper dystopia.

Again, the genius of Gibsons work in this novel is to show how human persons can become affectively attached to AI, not at the level of intimacy necessarily, but at the level of practical know-how. Yet this effect is not limited to the characters in the story. Gibson solicits our affections as readers as well, and then leaves us wondering over our complicity in the whole affair. The unsettling truth Agency suggests is that when a superintelligent AI takes over the world, we wont be too worried about it. It will actually be what we want to happen and what we know, deep down, needs to happen. And who can say whether this is better or worse than other possible futures? Perhaps a dystopia folded inside a surface-level utopia is the best we can hope for, in these times of ours.

Thomas J. Millay is a PhD student in Theology at Baylor University. His fiction has been published inthe Blotter.

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love a Superintelligent AI: On Wiliam Gibson's Agency - lareviewofbooks