“Salesforce Is Using A Hallucination To Sell AI.” Alan Kluegel turns an analysis of a dumb AI commercial into a meditation on the likely social effects of AI adoption: “The only choice you have here is to choose which machine makes your choices for you. Salesforce promises that AgentforceTM AI will allow you to ‘unlock human success,’ but this ad reveals that the opposite is true: It will, at best, construct for you a higher-quality prison. This situation is unbearably bleak.”
“AI-Generated Slop Is Already In Your Public Library.” Emanuel Maiberg describes the challenges that AI-generated books are posing for librarians: “This type of low quality, AI generated content, is what we at 404 Media and others have come to call AI slop. Librarians, whose job it is in part to curate what books their community can access, have been dealing with similar problems in the publishing industry for years, and have a different name for it: vendor slurry.”
“Stop Hacking Humans.” Brad Littlejohn and Clare Morell offer some helpful guidelines to distinguish between technologies that heal or empower humans and those that shortcut or “hack” humans: “Perhaps unsurprisingly, as we have come to think of our own humanity in technological terms — as biological hardware running psychological and social software, which can be reprogrammed — we have come to apply the language and concept of hacking to ourselves. What we are beginning to hack is human nature. When we hack, rather than heal, we discern a human desire and identify a technique that could enable us to meet that desire, bypassing ordinary human functions in a way that, while it may be pleasurable, profitable, or relieving in the short term, threatens the long-term health of the individual and of society.” (Recommended by Matt Stewart.)
“Conservatives Need a Health Care Agenda.” Matthew Loftus proposes a conservative blueprint for better healthcare: “In short, we have to increase our health care quality while decreasing its quantity. The good news is that getting rid of unnecessary care is a key part of improving quality.”
“Conversations on the Plurality of World-views: A Response to Peter Harrison’s Some New World.” Philip Ball grapples with Peter Harrison’s recent book and the history and philosophy of science: “There is a long history of instances showing that, far from banishing the supernatural and transcendental from our world-views, advances in science and technology tend to create new places for them to reside, from radio waves and the ether to quantum fluctuations of the vacuum. ‘Every new medium,’ says John Durham Peters, ‘is a machine for the production of ghosts.’ One message I take from Some New World is that, if we tell ourselves false stories about how the natural and supernatural have been conceptualized in the past, we leave ourselves more vulnerable to such elisions in the future.”
“On the End of Current.” John Fea, Jay Green, and Eric Miller are closing down their publication this spring. I know all too well how fragile such labors of love are: “Your faithful readership and generous financial support kept Current afloat for four years. In that span we learned a lot of lessons, made a lot of new friends, and got a lot of people thinking. We can’t thank you enough for believing in our small and fledgling efforts to build a journal of opinion.”
“New Initiatives at the Center for Needless Splendor.” In happier institutional news, Matt Miller announces a slate of new programs launching at this important center. I’m proud to announce that I’m a Fellow at this splendid organization: “The sole purpose of RFCMCFNSARIUS is to informally encourage acts of frivolity, heedlessness, pleasure, beauty, conviviality, and feckless joy of all kinds. To that end, the Center’s chartered mission dictates that it will never take any steps that involve paperwork, organization, deliberation, metrics, efficiency, automation, pragmatic considerations, or work of any sort.”
“Meat Industry Group Asks Trump To Deregulate Meatpacking and Factory Farms.” Nina B. Elkadi reports on lobbyists’ requests for deregulation. Unfortunately, they aren’t advocating for changes that would empower small-scale and humane abattoirs but those that would continue to concentrate the industry: “While food prices have increased at a fast rate — as much as 2.5 times the rate of inflation — corporate profits have sky-rocketed five times faster than inflation. Four companies control around 70 percent of the pork industry and four companies control more than half the chicken processing market.”
“Feeding a Community Using Regenerative Agriculture.” Jeff King talks about his approach to growing vegetables for a Bruderhof community: “There are six principles in regenerative agriculture that we adhere to: use of cover crops, disturbing the soil as little as possible, diversifying your plant species, maintaining living roots, integrating animals into your operation, and context – practices that work for some farmers may not work for your operation.”
“Labour’s War on the Countryside.” James Rebanks isn’t very impressed with British politicians, carbon offsets, or the disingenuous discussions about land use: “How do you think a national conversation is going to go when the giant polluters are rich and powerful with direct access to No. 10? How do you think Welsh or Cumbrian hill farmers are going to fare in that conversation? What we need instead is a conversation about how corrupted, confused and contradictory environmental policy has become, and how little trust any of us have in government now.”
“Dakota Fanning.” Bill Kauffman may be down on the Dakotas’ politicians, but he sings the praises of their literary scions: “Throw in South Dakota’s George McGovern, standard-bearer of the loveliest presidential campaign slogan in our history (“Come Home, America”); hell-raising American Indian Movement leader Russell Means; and Calamity Jane, and you have the ancestral makings of a powerful southern partner in the Dakota reflorescence that America—whether it knows it or not—desperately needs.”
“As Fellow Pro-Lifers, We Are Begging Marco Rubio to Save Foreign Aid.” Leah Libresco Sargeant, Matthew Loftus, Kristin M. Collier, and Kathryn Jean Lopez defend one particular foreign aid program: “Before PEPFAR was created in 2003, half of children in Africa infected with H.I.V. at birth died before their second birthday. Instead of growing chubby and pulling up to stand for the first time, these children became thin and weak, at risk of dying from complications of infections as minor as the common cold.”
