André Saramago

Lecturer in International Relations. Very occasional tweets on international politics, science and science fiction

[André Saramago @andre_saramago]

@Leigh_Phillips Ah, of course. Thanks a lot. Still have to get into that one 👍

[André Saramago @andre_saramago]

@Leigh_Phillips Great comment. Have you written on the critique of market socialism vis-à-vis your understanding of socialism anywhere?

[Isabella M Weber @IsabellaMWeber]

Remember when in 2021 Wall Street was talking about China’s Lehman moment? Well, here we are. The real estate bubble has been deflated without a crash. That’s the difference between free and managed markets. There might be a lesson for the AI hype in this.

[Leigh Phillips @Leigh_Phillips]

@BigMeanInternet Jacobin offers the only critical understanding of air conditioning necessary: a defense of it as a right and against the eco-austerity mongers: https://t.co/xg9GMZEqL9

[Iskra Books @iskrabooks]

On the anniversary of Domenico Losurdo's passing, Iskra is very pleased to announce the 'The Communist Question', translated into English by Henry Hakamäki (@Huck199) and Salvatore Engel Di-Mauro. The book will be released later this year.

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

Why did our ruling class not invest in decarbonising faster to avoid this acceleration in deadly heatwaves that scientists warned would come? Because of the capitalist law of value.

Capital invests in what is most profitable to capital, rather than what is most necessary for humanity, so our ruling class keeps ploughing investment into fossil fuels and SUVs, while we get far too little in renewables and public transit, even while the world burns around us.

We have more than enough capacity (labour, factories, technology) to address the climate crisis, but as long as capital controls investment and production we are prevented from doing it.

We are trapped by the capitalist law of value, living in a miserable shadow of the world we could have.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

It says an awful lot about France - and not in a good way - that there is "political divide" on using air conditioning when temperatures literally exceed those of the Sahara desert, and when France has one of the greenest energy mixes in the world (thanks to nuclear).

And it says even more that those who oppose AC are often the same as those who oppose nuclear: the view - presumably - is that you should neither adapt to climate change (AC) nor prevent it (nuclear).

Also the same people, incidentally, who oppose pesticides and fertilizers - basically modern farming - and push for all-organic: a prescription that, if universally applied, would literally starve billions of people (and, ironically, would require so much additional farmland it would devastate the world's remaining forests).

It's all part of the same logical fallacy, the notion that if something causes a problem, then that thing is the problem.

Yes progress and technology caused and continue to cause plenty of environmental issues. And there is indeed something seductive in saying "we've gone too far, let's change tracks, let's head towards a simpler, slower life, we used to be like that."

But not only is this just not feasible without causing far greater harm to ourselves, it's also a fundamentally nihilistic and mortiferous ideology. One that rests on a profound discomfort with what's arguably the single most defining feature of humanity: our ability to shape our environment to suit us, to fight our circumstances rather than surrender to them. That's been the case ever since we discovered fire and invented farming.

It is, at the end of the day, the transformation of humanity's genius - our need to create and improve our condition - into a vice. They make it sound like a humanistic project but how could it be since the core premise is fear of humans and contempt for our very nature?

Conclusion: yes, 100 times yes, use AC. You'd need to be a complete moron to let yourself boil under 43C heat in order to "save the planet." If climate change is to be solved, it will be by getting the ideologues out of the way of the people who actually fix things.

[João Ferreira (o outro) @vilalva_joao]

No final,o que fica é uma extraordinária demonstração da força dos trabalhadores, destacando-se o papel da CGTP, que conduziu à rejeição do Pacote.E a cara de enterro de toda a Direita, inclusive dos deputados do CH que foram obrigados a votar contra os interesses que representam

[Evgeny Morozov @evgenymorozov]

The Italian version of my Le Monde Diplomatique essay is out in Il Manifesto today

[Carina Castro @CpiCastro]

As televisões desdobram-se em entrevistas a patrões e capatazes, fingem que cá em baixo, na matéria real, não há movimento. Há movimento, força, coragem e vontade. Haverá greve. Está na nossa mão derrotar o Pacote Laboral e abrir uma janela de esperança.

[Paulo Coimbra @x_coimbra]

Defende-te, defende a Democracia, no próximo dia 3 faz greve! https://t.co/h0K8HFmU04

[Ladrões Bicicletas @LadrBic]

Aproveito este dia para lembrar que o pacote laboral também prejudica as crianças. Quem trabalha poderá ter horários de trabalho mais instáveis, com vínculos mais precários, com menor capacidade reivindicativa; pais e mães com menos condições para o cuidado que as crianças merecem. Faltam dois dias para a Greve Geral.
https://t.co/Bfe8hH5zdj

[Communist Party ☭ @CPBritain]

Today marks the centenary of the birth of Norma Jeane Mortenson, the woman the world knew as Marilyn Monroe.

While the bourgeois press continues to gape at the ghost of a manufactured icon, the Communist Party of Britain reclaims the intellectual and the comrade.

Her politics were born of the assembly line. From the foster homes of Los Angeles to the Radioplane munitions factory, Monroe’s class consciousness was forged in the heat of proletarian survival. She was a woman of fierce intelligence, possessing an IQ that dwarfed the men who sought to manage her, yet she was reduced to a commodity to be bought, sold, and traded by the parasitic studio system.

The FBI files, which tracked her until her final breath, confirm what the establishment feared - a sex symbol who had read Marx and admired the Chinese Revolution. She was a militant anti-racist who used her platform to shatter the colour bar for Ella Fitzgerald, and she stood firm against the cowardice of the McCarthyite witch hunts when she married the blacklisted playwright Arthur Miller.

We must recognise that Monroe’s struggle was the intersection of class exploitation and patriarchal violence. She was a worker whose labour was her own body, super-exploited by a system that demanded she be beautiful and silent. Her life was a constant act of rebellion against the male gaze of capital. On her 100th birthday, we do not celebrate a "bombshell". We honour a clear-minded socialist who understood that the liberation of her class was inseparable from the liberation of her sex.

Happy Centenary, Comrade Marilyn. The struggle continues.

#MarilynMonroe

[AbrilAbril @abrilabrilpt]

FRASE DO DIA

“O melhor antifascismo (...) está ligado aos valores do trabalho com direitos na escala nacional, cuidando das ligações internacionais que os reforcem, combatendo o despotismo patronal, trampolim para os outros despotismos de classe. Sem classes e suas alianças, +

[Ladrões Bicicletas @LadrBic]

Recebi por correio eletrónico o longo ensaio sobre totalitarismo do historiador Rui Bebiano (Público, 24 de maio). Arrisco um resumo do ensaio: é relativamente consensual entre os historiadores sérios que o conceito é imprestável, mas usa-o por razões político-ideológicas, até porque existem hoje “nacional-populistas” potencialmente totalitários, o que quer isso seja.

O conceito de nacional-populismo, sobretudo nas mãos de euro-liberais, é tão inútil quanto o de totalitarismo, já que nacionalismos e populismos há mesmo muitos e de sinais absolutamente contrários ao longo da história sempre presente: do nacionalismo imperialista ao anti-imperialista, do populismo triádico ao diádico.

E isto sem esquecer o que disse o insuspeito Francis Fukuyama: “populismo é o termo que as elites usam para as políticas de que não gostam, mas que a gente comum apoia”. Todo o cuidado é pouco.

Bebiano está naturalmente preocupado com o pensamento único. Infelizmente, jamais menciona e desafia o seu grande centro produtor em grande parte do continente europeu: o eixo Bruxelas-Frankfurt, o da moeda única, do mercado único, da política neoliberal tendencialmente única, incluindo no belicismo antissocial, do fascismo assim promovido.

O melhor antifascismo, entretanto, está ligado aos valores do trabalho com direitos na escala nacional, cuidando das ligações internacionais que os reforcem, combatendo o despotismo patronal, trampolim para os outros despotismos de classe. Sem classes e suas alianças, nada feito.

Faltam seis dias para a Greve Geral.

https://t.co/wYLlOEkuID

[Leigh Phillips @Leigh_Phillips]

It is useful that a figure like the Pope is groping toward the quite profound consequence of the emergence of AI and both the threat and potential it offers humans and human meaning-making.

At a time of galloping misanthropy from both the green left and tech right, Pope Leo’s encyclical offers a reminder to all, of faith or otherwise, of the radical and unique moral importance of humans.

Magnifica Humanitas is a theologically dense ~180pgs, so it’ll take some time to explore it in depth, but an initial scan suggests the screen-captured paragraph below offers something of a core argument:

However impressive an engineering achievement AI is, it should not be confused with an entity that enjoys personhood, for it lacks the full complement of the key attributes that give humans and *humans alone* their inherent dignity: rationality, consciousness, interiority, self-awareness, sociality, moral agency and, what flows from the latter, the capacity for moral progress. One does not need to be Catholic or even have any faith to accept this. It is a secular argument.

Intelligence alone—which is perhaps synonymous with rationality, but also perhaps not, and we might want to meditate on the distinction between intelligence and rationality—is not commensurate with consciousness, moral agency and the rest of the above suite of attributes. We do not accord personhood to a calculator, even though it surpasses human intelligence in the single field of rapid calculation. Similarly, while AI meets or exceeds human intelligence across multiple fields, in its lack of these other attributes, AI remains—for now—morally indistinguishable from a calculator. Another example: a thermostat can hold an internal state, but it has no true interiority or self-awareness, and certainly not the rest of this suite of morally consequential attributes. There is nothing it is like to be a thermostat.

It might be useful here to compare the situation with AI to how some wish to accord personhood to chimpanzees and dolphins (and a few other species) because these animals approach us in some of these attributes of profound moral consequence. However, these creatures do not enjoy *all* these attributes, and certainly not with the same quality in which we enjoy them. How closely they approach the human is sufficient to argue for a depth of duty of care that humans owe these creatures, but it is insufficient to warrant according them a moral equivalence to humans.

But what happens if we do begin to observe interiority, self-awareness, consciousness in AI’s? Then the moral assessment changes radically. However, first we need more rigorous tests of interiority, consciousness, etc. (This is a very big ask, as philosophers know all too well! I know that *I* have interiority, but I cannot even know for sure that anybody else does)

But let us assume that we do become more rigorous in this regard, that we develop better tests of interiority etc. I think that this is what Anthropic’s Chris Olah, invited by the pope to respond to the encyclical, is getting at here (in the second screen capture).

I am for the moment sceptical that what Olah has observed are indeed internal states that are akin to what neuroscientists observe in human brains during experiences of joy, fear, grief, etc., but I’d like to know more about what exactly it is that his team has observed, and I do not put it beyond the realm of possibility that one day we could indeed create not just thinking machines but experiencing machines (while I suspect that the Pope thinks that this will never be possible, for only God could create such a creature).

If one day we do create not just thinking machines but experiencing machines, then we should indeed accord such machines personhood, but then we can’t very well be using them just as machines any more.

Once again, it is clear a rigorous definition of what it means to be human is urgently required—as urgently as perhaps the coming years or even months.

[Carina Castro @CpiCastro]

Hoje realizou-se a conferência de imprensa da @festaavante. Vários artistas presentes e um programa que faria sempre notícia, ainda para mais na 50a edição. Zero jornalistas presentes. Contamos com o povo para que se passe a palavra e enchermos a Atalaia de vida e festa.

[Carina Castro @CpiCastro]

"Mas não é só, nem fundamentalmente, o passado do PCP que incomoda Henrique Raposo. Quanto muito, dificulta-lhe a vida. O que incomoda verdadeiramente Henrique Raposo é o que o PCP representa hoje, o que o seu ideal e projecto significam no presente e para o futuro."

[Bruno Maçães @MacaesBruno]

I must confess I am surprised at the reactions against Israel’s treatment of the European protestors. Israel killed tens of thousands of children in Gaza, killed young children with deliberate sniper shots to head, starved babies, shot hundreds of bullets into a 5 year old girl..