I’ve been continuing to think about ‘AI’ and LLMs and the like; partly through sheer annoyance at some very silly ‘This Is How AI Will Build Utopia’ and ‘This Is How AI Will Destroy Us All’ articles (it’s a two-man con, isn’t it? They set this up as THE debate we should be having, with both sides calling for more funding for research in this area, drawing attention away from the systems and structures shaping these developments), partly because I was putting together a funding application for a small project on how to respond to Chat-GPT and its ilk within the assessment of historical skills, and partly because the philosopher John Holbo has been posting some very interesting, thought-provoking pieces on Crooked Timber, prompting some high-quality discussion. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘slavery’
Deeper Understanding
Posted in Musings, tagged AI, slavery on July 15, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Have A Cigar
Posted in Musings, tagged slavery, television on February 15, 2021| Leave a Comment »
You’re going to go far? Well, no. I have long since resigned myself to the fact that I am not suddenly going to embark on the sort of media career that allows one to produce a calendar of swimsuit shots in exotic filming locations or be interviewed for a weekend supplement about my favourite recipes or (sob) get invited onto Strictly Come Dancing or Desert Island Discs. Am an attendant lord, fit to sneak onto the occasional In Our Time when everyone else is busy. (more…)
Aristotle Must Fall
Posted in Musings, tagged classical reception, modernity, slavery on June 12, 2020| 2 Comments »
SCENE: the reception area, morning. Sybil is doing accounts. Basil is painstakingly recolouring a map of the world. One of the members of the visiting cultural delegation from Ghana approaches the desk cautiously. He is ignored.
Stephen: Excuse me?
Basil continues to ignore him.
Stephen: Sir? Mr Fawlty?
Basil: Not. Now.
Sybil: Attend to Mr Assamoah, Basil.
Basil: Oh! Right! Stop whatever you’re doing, Basil, it can’t possibly be important!
Sybil: It isn’t.
Basil: But the colours are all wrong! They should be pink! And what’s happened to Rhodesia? (more…)
A Very Peculium Practice
Posted in Musings, tagged higher education, slavery, work on March 29, 2018| Leave a Comment »
In recent years, it’s become clear that the traditional model of work, in which one is paid a regular wage for specified hours and tasks, generally carried out at a designated workplace, applies to ever fewer people, at any rate in the West. The division between work and non-work is blurred, as increased connectivity and/or zero hours contracts both, in different ways, create and support the expectation of permanent availability, and – especially but not only in the creative industries, including academia – the mantra of “do what you love, love what you do” turns enthusiasm and dedication into a system of self-exploitation. One of the revelations of the recent (ongoing) industrial action in British universities has been the revelation – for me, as I suspect for many, not so much a hitherto unknown bit of information, but something previously not fully registered or felt – of how far the whole system depends on us all working way beyond contracted hours (insofar as those can be defined at all), so that working to contract is tantamount to failing to fulfill the terms of the contract. Goodwill, self-sacrifice and willingness to go the extra couple of miles are now treated as the norm, or even the minimum. (more…)
Return of the Slave Society
Posted in Musings, tagged automation, capitalism, Karl Marx, robots, slavery, technology on November 29, 2017| 2 Comments »
Aristotle dreamed of the robot revolution. A slave is a living tool that serves multiple purposes; likewise a craftsman’s assistant (Politics 1253b). This is demonstrated by the fact that, if every tool could perform its own work when ordered, or by seeing what to do in advance, like the statues of Daedalus or the self-moving tripods of Hephaestus, craftsmen would have no need of assistants or masters of slaves. Tools are an essential component of the state; workers, maybe not so much. (more…)
Vicarious Virtue
Posted in Musings, tagged agriculture, luxury, slavery, Thomas Jefferson, Varro on November 18, 2016| Leave a Comment »
The seminar text for my Roman History course over the last fortnight has been the opening of the third book of Varro’s Rerum Rusticarum, the convoluted argument about the nature of the ‘true’ villa and the disputed legitimacy of pastio villatica. It’s a great passage for opening up questions about the nature of the work – the unexpected use of dialogue in a supposedly practical handbook of agriculture, as a means of raising problematic ethical and political questions (ancient sock puppets!) without necessarily trying to resolve them – and about how Roman aristocrats thought about the world at the end of the first century BCE; in particular, how one negotiates tensions between inherited values (the ‘farmers are the best citizens and soldiers’ ideology offered by e.g. Cato, harking back to exemplary early Romans like Cincinnatus) and the realities of a globalised economy in which money pervades every area of society and politics. Pastio villatica – the raising of bees, birds, snails, dormice, game etc. in the vicinity of the villa – is good insofar as it’s productive (rather than the purely consumptive villas where the wealthy relax and show off their wealth), but it’s bad insofar as it’s intimately bound to the development of luxurious tastes in the city, founded on the corrupting influx of wealth from the acquisition of empire – and hence involves precisely the sort of risky pursuit of profit that Cato had condemned in merchants and money-lenders. (more…)
A Class Act
Posted in Musings, Uncategorized, tagged class, Ellen Meiksins Wood, history, Marxism, politics, slavery on January 20, 2016| Leave a Comment »
RIP Ellen Meiksins Wood (and see also here)
A week and a half into term, and I am already being forcibly reminded of why I didn’t manage to post more than once or twice a month for much of 2015. It’s not as if I don’t have a load of stuff I’d like to write about – not least because Malcolm Turnbull, Prime Minister of Australian, has just produced a load more Thucydides references in a recent speech, on the (not unreasonable) assumption that this is how to communicate with US foreign policy types these days (cf. Xi Jinping) – it’s just the quantity of other stuff that has to take precedence. But some things do deserve recognition and comment, above all – despite the fact that this blog has started to look like an obituary column – the passing of yet another significant figure in my intellectual pantheon. I have got to find some younger, healthier people to get influenced by… (more…)
Let’s Work It Out
Posted in Musings, Research Seminar, tagged bees, Georgics, imperialism, labour, slavery, Tom Geue, Vergil on January 23, 2015| 3 Comments »
Who works in the text? According to Tom Geue, in an excellent paper in the Bristol Classics Research Seminar last week, this question is at least as important for our understanding of Roman culture as the more familiar “Who speaks in the text?”. He took as his case study Georgics IV, a poem ostensibly devoted to old-fashioned Italian small-holding in which remarkably little real work gets done. Slavery is of course more or less invisible throughout the Georgics, with the slave treated as a mere prosthesis so that his labour is credited to the owner, but the fourth book takes things still further. Half of it is devoted to bee-keeping: a gift of heaven, a slight field of toil bringing great reward, in which the owner’s labour is limited to tearing off the wings of the ‘kings’ so that the bees are not inclined to give in to their tendencies to idleness… (more…)
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