Latest news with #LeGuin
The Guardian
20-04-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Blue Origin's all-female spaceflight brought down to earth
For those who have not already read Ursula K Le Guin's 1976 essay Space Crone, it is the perfect antidote to this weird Charlie's Angels-in-space exploit (So Katy Perry went to space. Wasn't there anyone else we could have sent?, 14 April). Le Guin rightly suggests that it is an apparently unremarkable postmenopausal woman who is the ideal candidate to represent humanity on a space mission. The 'crone' has a depth of experience of being human that no young, fit, looks-great-in-Lycra man or woman can match. Sure, Blue Origin didn't expect to encounter alien life on a suborbital flight on the edge of space – unlike Le Guin's intergalactic ambassador – but this flight, as Zoe Williams suggests, is still deeply symbolic of who is chosen as representatives of our strange race. The crone, having travelled through and embraced all stages of being a woman, is fit not just to represent womankind; having also endured life and death and change in a way that no man has ever experienced, she is most suited for representing humanity as a whole. Thankfully we do have alternative narratives which are more powerful than this tech bro fantasy. Le Guin's Space Crone is a must-read. Georgina TreloarFolkestone, Kent Publicising the posturing of the 'crew' of Blue Origin (Blue Origin crew including Katy Perry safely returns to Earth after space flight, 14 April) overlooks as usual the achievements of the many engineers and scientists who made this trip possible, however pointless, both through their design of the craft and their control of its operation. In CM Kornbluth's rather dark short story The Marching Morons (1951), Earth's problem of overpopulation is solved by persuading the masses to board rockets that are making one-way trips to nowhere, in the belief that they are heading for a new and comfortable life on Venus. If Messrs Bezos and Musk could be persuaded to be part of the next 'crew' of Blue Origin, perhaps the backroom team could help solve some of Earth's current problems by providing enough extra boost for the rocket to be able to break out of Earth's gravitational field. And yes, I am aware of what happened in the story to the person who came up with the idea, but I'm willing to take the BudgenDurham I am in full agreement with Zoe Williams' view about the wanton money waste of the recent flit into space by a group of women with luxuriant hair and tight clothing. But I have to disagree that they resembled Charlie's Angels. Surely they were cosplaying early Star Trek, a TV series which I suspect would have been one of Jeff Bezos's WhatleyBerwick St James, Wiltshire Your piece on the Blue Origin flight (Celebrities criticize all-female rocket launch: 'This is beyond parody', 15 April) says that it was 'the first all-female space flight since 1963, when Soviet astronaut Valentina Tereshkova flew into orbit solo'. However, this overlooks the achievements of females such as Martine, a pig-tailed macaque, sole occupant of a French Vesta rocket launched on 7 March 1967. She survived the flight, living for several years afterwards, and – rather inspiringly – never tried to cash in on the experience. Andrew CarrollCastletimon, County Wicklow, Ireland Contributors to your letters page (15 April) criticise the short journey into space taken by Jeff Bezos's wife and her friends. The environmental damage done by such a trip is 'colossal' (Chris Burr). Those on board were not 'crew' as often described, merely passengers (Dan Stacey). The triviality of the jaunt is captured by Toby Wood's phrase 'ladies who launch'. We might expand on this: there is no such thing as a free launch. Richard SmithDurham Do you have a photograph you'd like to share with Guardian readers? If so, please click here to upload it. A selection will be published in our Readers' best photographs galleries and in the print edition on Saturdays.
Yahoo
05-04-2025
- Yahoo
Opinion - AI companies are commiting mass theft and hiding behind the language of ‘training'
Ursula K. LeGuin once wrote, 'There is no right answer to the wrong question.' And while AI might struggle to understand the quip, we human readers get the point immediately. To solve a problem, you have to focus on what really matters about it. That's a big problem with the ongoing debate, most recently joined by Professor Nicholas Creel, over whether artificial intelligence models 'learn' the same way as humans. The simple answer, spelled out well in Erik J. Larson's book 'The Myth of Artificial Intelligence,' is that they don't. They can't handle or generate novelty, they become stymied when forced to operate with uncertainty or incomplete information, and they lack empathy and any real conception of understanding. They can copy and exploit almost infinite volumes of data, but they cannot extrapolate or intuit new truths from mere scraps of information as humans can. I asked Microsoft's AI, Copilot, the question, 'Does AI reason in the same way humans reason?' This is the answer I received: 'AI relies on large datasets and algorithms to make decisions and predictions. It processes information based on patterns and statistical analysis. AI follows predefined rules and models to arrive at conclusions. It doesn't have intuition or emotions influencing its decisions. AI can learn from data through techniques like machine learning, but this learning is based on mathematical models and not personal experiences.' As the Human Artistry Campaign's Moiya McTier has explained, real creativity flows from far more than crunching big data sets to pull out patterns and connections. It 'is the product of lived experience and grows organically from the culture, geography, family, and moments that shape us as individuals.' Thus, it's clear that AI learns and produces outputs in fundamentally different ways than humans do. But for those of us living and dealing with AI in the real world, including musicians like me whose work has been scraped off the internet and fed into AI models without any kind of consent, it's also clear this sterile philosopher's dispute isn't that important. Per LeGuin, the real question we should be asking is what AI does — and whether that is worth the cost. In order to develop their models and launch their pattern-detecting algorithms, it is indisputable that AI companies must cause a machine to reproduce copyrighted works or produce a new work derived from copyrighted works. They also distribute the work across a large network. These are three exclusive rights reserved to authors under federal law. Normally, a company that wishes to engage in this kind of activity would simply license the works from authors. But AI companies, ostensibly competitors, have all pretty much decided not to license the works but use them anyway, effectively setting the price for these copyrights at zero. That's a mass devaluing of the world's creative legacy — a huge cost in lost opportunities and jobs for real people. What's more, it will create a dumbed down and derivative culture and, if left unchecked too long, a gaping empty hole where the next generation of truly fresh or novel creations should be. AI models may excel at producing different versions of works they have copied and analyzed (reassembled from enough different sources to avoid immediate liability for plagiarism) but they cannot break the mold and give us something truly new. Sadly, AI evangelists seem determined to anthropomorphize commercial AI as cute little robots that learn the same way humans learn. They have coopted the language, reframing art as 'data' and mass copying as 'training,' as if AIs were pets. This is a fairytale designed to conceal the fact there is a cartel of trillion-dollar companies and deep-pocketed technology investors committing or excusing mass copyright infringement. Maybe that game would fool an AI, but we humans see right through it. David Lowery is a mathematician, writer, musician, producer, and singer-songwriter for the bands Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
New York Times
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Historical Fantasy Novels Offer a Magical Escape Into the Past
People have been telling fantastical tales about the past since, well … most likely long before our ancestors began painting caves with wild beasts that danced in the firelight. A ragtag collection of Bronze Age skirmishes is transformed into the Trojan War, where gods meddle and great heroes are dispatched on quests we're still retelling. Alexander the Great, already pretty remarkable, ends up a larger-than-life character in romance tales across Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Asia that have him battling centaurs and searching for the fountain of life (inspired by even older tales of Gilgamesh). If the past were a foreign country, clearly a great number of us would be eager to plan a trip. While I appreciate and admire the wild creative freedom of a secondary world setting, I have a special place in my heart for fantasy novels set in our historical past — particularly those that are well-researched and interrogate their settings in novel ways (authors, please keep including notes at the end!). Below, in vague chronological order, are a few of my favorites. Lavinia The final novel by one of speculative fiction's giants takes us to the sacred woods and hardscrabble towns of Italy long before the rise of Rome. Le Guin breathes life and agency into Lavinia, a nonspeaking character in Virgil's 'Aeneid,' turning the Latin princess with whom Aeneas will forge the dynasty that one day founds Rome into a heroine in her own right. Now, as Le Guin herself acknowledged, 'The Aeneid' is not real history: It's a Roman's politicized retelling of an ancient Greek mythical imagining of a Bronze Age war. And yet it's this chain of storytelling — evolving across centuries — that I find riveting. She Who Became the Sun If we live in a glory age of fantasy, one of its richest (and most overdue) trends is interrogating the gender politics of stories we've been retelling for centuries. Parker-Chan's debut novel does this beautifully, reimagining the founding of the Ming Empire through a wonderfully queer lens (full disclosure: I loved it so much, I blurbed it). Come for the clashing politics and richly realized scenes of 14th century life among Mongol warriors and Chinese monks, stay for the rise to power of a former village girl who assumes her brother's name and changes the fate of an entire people. The Bird King Set in the final days of the last Muslim emirate in Spain, 'The Bird King' quietly showcases the dazzling diversity and complicated mix of religion, culture and language that was the norm in far more places throughout history than we modern humans tend to believe. I fell hard for Fatima and Hassan, the Circassian concubine and magically talented mapmaker at the heart of this impeccably researched, meditative and adventurous book. Their friendship is as profound and heart-wrenching as any romance. The Pasha of Cuisine If a reader is very fortunate, she may come across a book once or twice in her life that makes her think: Was this written just for me? Ersin's Ottoman epic is one of my own personal literary treasures (I blurbed this one too). The book follows the whirlwind adventures of a young chef from the imperial palace as he travels the world, learns cooking magic and wields his enchanted delicacies to save the woman he loves. If you're a history nerd who divides your evenings between episodes of 'The Great British Bake-Off' and fantasy novels, you must read this book. A Master of Djinn It's 1912 in Cairo, but not the Cairo we know: This is the alternate fantasy Egypt of Clark's Dead Djinn Universe, first introduced in his short fiction. I adore the steampunk setting of this sharp, witty book — the first full-length novel in the series (and another recent favorite I blurbed) — and the nefarious, bureaucratic tangle of mysteries that surround its main character, Fatma el-Sha'arawi. The youngest female agent at the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, Fatma is tasked with investigating a murder whose perpetrator claims to be the acclaimed polymath al-Jahiz, a real historical figure who has been missing for decades. Moonshine I've been obsessed with this book (now sadly out of print, but still available at your library or a favorite used bookstore) since 2010. Granted, there was a certain kind of magic to reading about a twentysomething, scrappy, idealistic social activist in Jazz Age New York when I was painfully close to the same, nearly a century later. But I was utterly enchanted by Zephyr Hollis and her adventures in a version of my city where the mob is run by vampires and fairies go to night school. Many years later, I still think fondly about this book and think it deserves another chance to shine. Gods of Jade and Shadow We're still in the Jazz Age but far from New York, though I suspect the protagonist of Moreno-Garcia's tale wouldn't mind the trip. Instead, Casiopea Tun is stuck working in the house of her wealthy relatives in a rural part of southern Mexico, where she can only dream of a more exciting life — until she accidentally unleashes the Mayan god of death. Moreno-Garcia is one of my favorite writers working today, and this novel, with its perfectly bittersweet ending, is a gem. Siren Queen The glamour of Old Hollywood is not usually my cup of tea, but this enchanting novel about a Chinese American girl looking to become a star in the 1930s was unexpectedly haunting and beautiful. 'Siren Queen' makes literal the risks and costs of fame: Its Hollywood is one run on blood magic, devil's deals and fireside cabals. And Luli Wei is determined to pay any price to hit it big, even if it means playing monsters on the white-dominated screen — or becoming a monster herself. Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws It may seem odd to include a nonfiction book on this list, but Mayor's mesmerizing dive into a rich treasury of myths and ancient folklore — and the possible scientific and historical truths behind them — is sure to engross any reader (or aspiring writer) of historical fantasy. From the archaeological explanation behind the Golden Fleece to tales of poisonous pet birds and the plague-ridden origins of ghost ships, this is a volume that proves the old maxim: Real life is often stranger than fiction.
