By John Hoberman

The use of performance-enhancing drugs in elite sports over the past 70 years has been massive, unknowable in its scope, and beyond effective regulation. The doping control system managed by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has been spectacularly ineffective. Since drug testing began in 1968 at the Mexico City Olympic Games, far less than one percent of the athletes tested at the Olympic Games have tested positive for a banned doping drug. Informed estimates of doping prevalence are much higher, depending on the sports discipline.

The concept of athletic “doping” has existed for the past century. It arose in Germany during the 1920s to enforce a distinction between “natural” athletic effort and the ethically illegitimate boosting of human performance by means of performance-enhancing drugs.

Given the well-known failures of the drug-testing regime, some have argued that doping drugs should not be banned at all. Advocates for legalized doping have long argued that doping athletes under medical supervision is a safe and fair arrangement that creates a level playing field for all competitors. In fact, as we will see below, medically supervised doping has never been safe.

The American sporting public may remember the most recent American doping scandals that prompted, not an acceptance of doping, but widespread condemnation. The BALCO steroid doping scandal in 2003 compromised the reputations of the baseball superstar Barry Bonds and star sprinter Marion Jones. In 2013 the American super-cyclist Lance Armstrong finally admitted to having doped throughout his spectacular career. Also in 2013, Biogenesis, a Florida-based rejuvenation clinic, was exposed for supplying doping drugs to Major League Baseball players.

The doping epidemic that has developed for most of the past century has proven to be intractable. At the same time, major sports organizations and sports fans have accepted the status quo so that our sports culture can continue to provide its enormously popular entertainments.

So the question arises: How might this stalemate between the irresistible pressures to dope and the official mandate to offer the public “clean” sport be broken? Who might have a formula to resolve this dilemma?

In June 2023, an Australian lawyer and entrepreneur named Aron D’Souza told the world that, along with the American billionaire Peter Thiel and other hyper-wealthy investors, he was going to stage “Enhanced Games,” a drug-fueled athletic competition to challenge the International Olympic Committee’s ban on the use of performance-enhancing drugs by Olympic athletes.

Over the next two years, D’Souza fed the gullible global media a series of sensational and misleading claims that inspired headlines such as “Enhanced Games: “Event for doped athletes backed by group who want to ‘cheat death’” and “A doping free-for-all Enhanced Games calls itself the answer to doping in sports.” “‘I want to see 60-year-olds breaking world records,” D’Souza exclaimed, and the overwhelming media response was to take him at his word.

After the first sensationalistic phase of publicity, the Games leadership has implemented an anticlimactic shift from the initial fantasies of a debauched pharmacological carnival where anything goes to a tamer version of conducting doping experiments on human athletes. “It’s not a complete free-for-all,” D’Souza said in 2024. “We don’t want to do anything that’s like really pushing the boundaries – insurance won’t let me do that.”

During most of two years of media-generated publicity, D’Souza had been happy to watch credulous reporters spread the idea that these Games were going to be a no-holds-barred doping bacchanalia of taboo-breaking that would set the venerable IOC back on its heels. This was the swashbuckling ethos that had kept the Games in the public eye. But now the goal was to portray the Games as a benign medical operation that cared only for the medical safety of the athletes and that would generate medical data that would advance human health. At this point there were promises of comprehensive medical supervision of the athletes and a guarantee that this doping experiment would be the “safest” elite sports event ever staged for the sporting public.

The Enhanced Game’s leadership’s claims about medical care for their doped athletes has been as opaque and unreliable as their claims about the recruitment of their experimental subjects. There is no indication that any of the members of their “Independent Medical Commission” have treated the athletes. All the doctors purportedly treating the athletes remain anonymous. The only doctor named is Dr. Ravi Trehan, an orthopedic surgeon at the Sheikh Shakhbout Medical City in Abu Dhabi, where the athletes are being doped before leaving for Las Vegas in May.

In fact, medically supervised doping has never been safe. The expert doping doctors of the former East Germany caused hundreds of female athletes to suffer terrible medical injuries to their reproductive and other organs. Doping doctors have never achieved medical legitimacy, in part because it is unethical to administer non-therapeutic drugs to patients, and because they recklessly disregard the medical dangers that lurk everywhere. In short, the Enhanced Games project has promoted the subversion of standard medical care.

The medical dangers of athletic doping have been thoroughly documented. Anabolic steroids can cause liver damage and depression, blood doping can cause strokes and heart attacks, human growth hormone can cause high blood pressure and diabetes. The Enhanced policy has been to avoid the subject of doping side-effects or to discount them.

The recruitment of athletes to compete in the Games has turned out to be an abject failure, following a long series of false or simply fanciful claims and assurances D’Souza has fed to the media. Having devoted his adult life to making money, he assumed that throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars at athletes would convince them to sign up. He apparently did not realize that his “Olympics on steroids” would prompt the International Olympic Committee (IOC), as well as the major international sports federations, to expel any athletes who took D’Souza up on his offer. Nor did he understand that wealthy Olympic champions do not need “life-changing” money from a rogue operator sponsoring an allegedly revolutionary type of athletic competition.

Below is a narrative of some of the false or simply fanciful claims and assurances D’Souza has fed to the media over a period of almost two years.

In July 2023 a member of the Enhanced Games Athletes Advisory Committee claimed that “over five hundred athletes had contacted him asking him for more information.” In August 2023 D’Souza claimed that there were over 500 “sleeper athletes” who were “breaking world records in their basements and sending us videos of it.” In early 2024 D’Souza said that he was getting more than 100 requests for interviews every day. In March 2024 he stated that “On our peak day, we’ve had 4000 inbound requests.” In May 2024 D’Souza claimed that 1500 athletes had made formal applications to compete in the Games. In February 2025 he estimated the number of athletes who would participate to be “maybe a couple of thousand.”

As of April 26, 2026, the Enhanced Games website listed exactly 39 athletes as participants in the Enhanced Games that are scheduled to take place in Las Vegas on May 24, 2026.

D’Souza’s claim that the Enhanced Games represent a novel “scientific” methodology for using drugs to stimulate record-breaking athletic performances has always been pure hyperbole. For one thing, there is nothing less original than doping athletes for the purpose of setting world records. Doped world records have been set on countless occasions throughout the doping epidemic in elite sport that dates from the 1960s. In fact, two steroid-fueled world records set by Czech and East German women in 1983 and 1985 are still standing today and are acknowledged as valid records on the website of World Athletics. It is, therefore, remarkable that D’Souza’s bravado and the falsehoods he has trafficked in over this long campaign have induced so many journalists to accept his claims at face value.

The grand irony of the Enhanced Games operation is that its investors’ ultimate ambition to sell performance-enhancing drugs to a global market has long escaped public attention. Today the Enhanced Games website is selling allegedly performance-enhancing substances to anyone looking for a way to promote a feeling of well-being or lift a flagging libido. Testosterone and the newly fashionable peptides are the prime attractions. In 2024 D’Souza said, “if there’s a magic pill that makes us younger, the fountain of youth, there’ll be infinite revenue there.”

In a word, the Enhanced Games entrepreneurs have joined a long list of shills selling supposedly life-enhancing substances to a public that is too uninformed to judge what these substances may or may not do for their energy levels or to their bodies.

The prospects for breaking records at these Games are not good. When I heard Aron D’Souza speak at a conference in August 2024, he assured us that his enhanced athletes would break multiple world records at the Games. Given the past athletic achievements of the 39 competitors, this prediction borders on the impossible. The Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev may shave a few hundredths of a second off the 50-meter record, but it is also the case that swimming records fall more often than in other sports.

Short of using thick rubber slingshots to launch the sprinters and spring-loaded prosthetics to catapult the weightlifters upwards, the chances we will see world records set are slim.

In summary, the Enhanced Games have been a massive publicity stunt based on fraudulent claims about recruitment, pseudoscientific claims about boosting human performance, and unsubstantiated claims about providing “world-class” medical expertise to athletes currently working with doping doctors in Abu Dhabi, where lenient drug laws permit them to do so.

John Hoberman is a doping historian at the University of Texas at Austin. He is an internationally recognized expert on doping and has published three books on doping and anabolic steroids.

By Harvey Lederman

For the last three years, since the release of ChatGPT, I’ve been suffering from fits of dread. It’s not every minute, or even every day, but maybe once a week, I’m hit by it—slackjawed, staring into the middle distance—frozen by the prospect that someday, maybe pretty soon, everyone will lose their job.

At first, I thought these slackjawed fits were just a phase, a passing thing. I’m a philosophy professor; staring into the middle distance isn’t exactly an unknown disease among my kind. But as the years have begun to pass, and the fits have not, I’ve begun to wonder if there’s something deeper to my dread. Does the coming automation of work foretell, as my fits seem to say, an irreparable loss of value in human life?

The titans of artificial intelligence tell us that there’s nothing to fear. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, the maker of Claude, suggests that: “historical hunter-gatherer societies might have imagined that life is meaningless without hunting,” and “that our well-fed technological society is devoid of purpose.” But of course, we don’t see our lives that way. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, sounds so similar, the text could have been written by ChatGPT. Even if the jobs of the future will look as “fake” to us as ours do to “a subsistence farmer”, Altman has “no doubt they will feel incredibly important and satisfying to the people doing them.”

Alongside these optimists, there are plenty of pessimists who, like me, are filled with dread. Pope Leo XIV has decried the threats AI poses to “human dignity, labor and justice”. Bill Gates has written about his fear, that “if we solved big problems like hunger and disease, and the world kept getting more peaceful: What purpose would humans have then?” And Douglas Hofstadter, the computer scientist and author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, has spoken eloquently of his terror and depression at “an oncoming tsunami that is going to catch all of humanity off guard.”

Who should we believe? The optimists with their bright visions of a world without work, or the pessimists who fear the end of a key source of meaning in human life?

I was brought up, maybe like you, to value hard work and achievement. In our house, scientists were heroes, and discoveries grand prizes of life. I was a diligent, obedient kid, and eagerly imbibed what I was taught. I came to feel that one way a person’s life could go well was to make a discovery, to figure something out.

I had the sense already then that geographical discovery was played out. I loved the heroes of the great Polar Age, but I saw them—especially Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott—as the last of their kind. In December 1911, Amundsen reached the South Pole using skis and dogsleds. Scott reached it a month later, in January 1912, after ditching the motorized sleds he’d hoped would help, and man-hauling the rest of the way. As the black dot of Amundsen’s flag came into view on the ice, Scott was devastated to reach this “awful place”, “without the reward of priority”. He would never make it back.

Scott’s motors failed him, but they spelled the end of the great Polar Age. Even Amundsen took to motors on his return: in 1924, he made a failed attempt for the North Pole in a plane, and, in 1926, he successfully flew over it, in a dirigible. Already by then, the skis and dogsleds of the decade before were outdated heroics of a bygone world.

We may be living now in a similar twilight age for human exploration in the realm of ideas. Akshay Venkatesh, whose discoveries earned him the 2018 Fields Medal, mathematics’ highest honor, has written that, the “mechanization of our cognitive processes will alter our understanding of what mathematics is”. Terry Tao, a 2006 Fields Medalist, expects that in just two years AI will be a copilot for working mathematicians. He envisions a future where thousands of theorems are proven all at once by mechanized minds.

Now, I don’t know any more than the next person where our current technology is headed, or how fast. The core of my dread isn’t based on the idea that human redundancy will come in two years rather than twenty, or, for that matter, two hundred. It’s a more abstract dread, if that’s a thing, dread about what it would mean for human values, or anyway my values, if automation “succeeds”: if all mathematics—and, indeed all work—is done by motor, not by human hands and brains.

A world like that wouldn’t be good news for my childhood dreams. Venkatesh and Tao, like Amundsen and Scott, live meaningful lives, lives of purpose. But worthwhile discoveries like theirs are a scarce resource. A territory, once seen, can’t be seen first again. If mechanized minds consume all the empty space on the intellectual map, lives dedicated to discovery won’t be lives that humans can lead.

The right kind of pessimist sees here an important argument for dread. If discovery is valuable in its own right, the loss of discovery could be an irreparable loss for humankind.

A part of me would like this to be true. But over these last strange years, I’ve come to think it’s not. What matters, I now think, isn’t being the first to figure something out, but the consequences of the discovery: the joy the discoverer gets, the understanding itself, or the real life problem their knowledge solves. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, and through that work saved thousands, perhaps millions of lives. But if it were to emerge, in the annals of an outlandish future, that an alien discovered penicillin thousands of years before Fleming did, we wouldn’t think that Fleming’s life was worse, just because he wasn’t first. He eliminated great suffering from human life; the alien discoverer, if they’re out there, did not. So, I’ve come to see, it’s not discoveries themselves that matter. It’s what they bring about.

But the advance of automation would mean the end of much more than human discovery. It could mean the end of all necessary work. Already in 1920, the Czech playwright Karel Čapek asked what a world like that would mean for the values in human life. In the first act of R.U.R.—the play which introduced the modern use of the word “robot”—Čapek has Henry Domin, the manager of Rossum’s Universal Robots (the R.U.R. of the title), offer his corporation’s utopian pitch. “In ten years”, he says, their robots will “produce so much corn, so much cloth, so much everything” that “There will be no poverty.” “Everybody will be free from worry and liberated from the degradation of labor.” The company’s engineer, Alquist, isn’t convinced. Alquist (who, incidentally, ten years later, will be the only human living, when the robots have killed the rest) retorts that “There was something good in service and something great in humility”, “some kind of virtue in toil and weariness”.

Service—work that meets others’ significant needs and wants— is, unlike discovery, clearly good in and of itself. However we work— as nurses, doctors, teachers, therapists, ministers, lawyers, bankers, or, really, anything at all—working to meet others’ needs makes our own lives go well. But, as Čapek saw, all such work could disappear. In a “post-instrumental” world, where people are comparatively useless and the bots meet all our important needs, there would be no needed work for us to do, no suffering to eliminate, no diseases to cure. Could the end of such work be a better reason for dread?

The hardline pessimists say that it is. They say that the end of all needed work would not only be a loss of some value to humanity, as everyone should agree. For them it would be a loss to humanity on balance, an overall loss, that couldn’t be compensated in another way.

I feel a lot of pull to this pessimistic thought. But once again, I’ve come to think it’s wrong. For one thing, pessimists often overlook just how bad most work actually is. In May 2021, Luo Huazhong, a 31-year-old ex-factory worker in Sichuan wrote a viral post, entitled “Lying Flat is Justice”. Luo had searched at length for a job that, unlike his factory job, would allow him time for himself, but he couldn’t find one. So he quit, biked to Tibet and back, and commenced his lifestyle of lying flat, doing what he pleased, reading philosophy, contemplating the world. The idea struck a chord with overworked young Chinese, who, it emerged, did not find “something great” in their “humility”. The movement inspired memes, selfies flat on one’s back, and even an anthem.

That same year, as the Great Resignation in the United States took off, the subreddit r/antiwork played to similar discontent. Started in 2013, under the motto “Unemployment for all, not only the rich!”, the forum went viral in 2021, starting with a screenshot of a quitting worker’s texts to his supervisor (“No thanks. Have a good life”), and culminating in labor-actions, first supporting striking workers at Kellogg’s by spamming their job application site, and then attempting to support a similar strike at McDonald’s. It wasn’t just young Chinese who hated their jobs.

In Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work, the Irish lawyer and philosopher John Danaher imagines an antiwork techno-utopia, with plenty of room for lying flat. As Danaher puts it: “Work is bad for most people most of the time.”“We should do what we can to hasten the obsolescence of humans in the arena of work.”

The young Karl Marx would have seen both Domin’s and Danaher’s utopias as a catastrophe for human life. In his notebooks from 1844, Marx describes an ornate and almost epic process, where, by meeting the needs of others through production, we come to recognize the other in ourselves, and through that recognition, come at last to self-consciousness, the full actualization of our human nature. The end of needed work, for the Marx of these notes, would be the impossibility of fully realizing our nature, the end, in a way, of humanity itself.

But such pessimistic lamentations have come to seem to me no more than misplaced machismo. Sure, Marx’s and my culture, the ethos of our post-industrial professional class, might make us regret a world without work. But we shouldn’t confuse the way two philosophers were brought up with the fundamental values of human life. What stranger narcissism could there be than bemoaning the end of others’ suffering, disease, and need, just because it deprives you of the chance to be a hero?

The first summer after the release of ChatGPT—the first summer of my fits of dread—I stayed with my in-laws in Val Camonica, a valley in the Italian alps. The houses in their village, Sellero, are empty and getting emptier; the people on the streets are old and getting older. The kids that are left—my wife’s elementary school class had, even then, a full complement of four—often leave for better lives. But my in-laws are connected to this place, to the houses and streets where they grew up. They see the changes too, of course. On the mountains above, the Adamello, Italy’s largest glacier, is retreating faster every year. But while the shows on Netflix change, the same mushrooms appear in the summer, and the same chestnuts are collected in the fall.

Walking in the mountains of Val Camonica that summer, I tried to find parallels for my sense of impending loss. I thought about William Shanks, a British mathematician who calculated π to 707 digits by hand in 1873 (he made a mistake at 527; almost 200 digits were wrong). He later spent years of his life, literally years, on a table of the reciprocals of the primes up to one-hundred and ten thousand, calculating in the morning by hand, and checking it over in the afternoon. That was his life’s work. Just sixty years after his death, though, already in the 1940s, the table on which his precious mornings were spent, the few mornings he had on this earth, could be made by a machine in a day.

I feel sad thinking about Shanks, but I don’t feel grief for the loss of calculation by hand. The invention of the typewriter, and the death of handwritten notes seemed closer to the loss I imagined we might feel. Handwriting was once a part of your style, a part of who you were. With its decline some artistry, a deep and personal form of expression, may be lost. When the bots help with everything we write, couldn’t we too lose our style and voice?

But more than anything I thought of what I saw around me: the slow death of the dialects of Val Camonica and the culture they express. Chestnuts were at one time so important for nutrition here, that in the village of Paspardo, a street lined with chestnut trees is called “bread street” (“Via del Pane”). The hyper-local dialects of the valley, outgrowths sometimes of a single family’s inside jokes, have words for all the phases of the chestnut. There’s a porridge made from chestnut flour that, in Sellero goes by ‘skelt’, but is ‘pult’ in Paspardo, a cousin of ‘migole’ in Malonno, just a few villages away. Boiled, chestnuts are tetighe; dried on a grat, biline or bascocc, which, seasoned and boiled become broalade. The dialects don’t just record what people eat and ate; they recall how they lived, what they saw, and where they went. Behind Sellero, every hundred-yard stretch of the walk up to the cabins where the cows were taken to graze in summer, has its own name. Aiva Codaola. Quarsanac. Coran. Spi. Ruc.

But the young people don’t speak the dialect anymore. They go up to the cabins by car, too fast to name the places along the way. They can’t remember a time when the cows were taken up to graze. Some even buy chestnuts in the store.

Grief, you don’t need me to tell you, is a complicated beast. You can grieve for something even when you know that, on balance, it’s good that it’s gone. The death of these dialects, of the stories told on summer nights in the mountains with the cows, is a loss reasonably grieved. But you don’t hear the kids wishing more people would be forced to stay or speak this funny-sounding tongue. You don’t even hear the old folks wishing they could go back fifty years—in those days it wasn’t so easy to be sure of a meal. For many, it’s better this way, not the best it could be, but still better, even as they grieve what they stand to lose and what they’ve already lost.

The grief I feel, imagining a world without needed work, seems closest to this kind of loss. A future without work could be much better than ours, overall. But, living in that world, or watching as our old ways passed away, we might still reasonably grieve the loss of the work that once was part of who we were.

In the last chapter of Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence, Newland Archer contemplates a world that has changed dramatically since, thirty years earlier, before these new fangled telephones and five-day trans-Atlantic ships, he renounced the love of his life. Awaiting a meeting that his free-minded son Dallas has organized with Ellen Olenska, the woman Newland once loved, he wonders whether his son, and this whole new age, can really love the way he did and does. How could their hearts beat like his, when they’re always so sure of getting what they want?

There have always been things to grieve about getting old. But modern technology has given us new ways of coming to be out of date. A generation born in 1910 did their laundry in Sellero’s public fountains. They watched their grandkids grow up with washing machines at home. As kids, my in-laws worked with their families to dry the hay by hand. They now know, abstractly, that it can all be done by machine. Alongside newfound health and ease, these changes brought, as well, a mix of bitterness and grief: grief for the loss of gossip at the fountains or picnics while bringing in the hay; and also bitterness, because the kids these days just have no idea how easy they have it now.

As I look forward to the glories that, if the world doesn’t end, my grandkids might enjoy, I too feel prospective bitterness and prospective grief. There’s grief, in advance, for what we now have that they’ll have lost: the formal manners of my grandparents they’ll never know, the cars they’ll never learn to drive, and the glaciers that will be long gone before they’re born. But I also feel bitter about what we’ve been through that they won’t have to endure: small things like folding the laundry, standing in security lines or taking out the trash, but big ones too—the diseases which will take our loved ones that they’ll know how to cure.

All this is a normal part of getting old in the modern world. But the changes we see could be much faster and grander in scale. Amodei of Anthropic speculates that a century of technological change could be compressed into the next decade, or less. Perhaps it’s just hype, but—what if it’s not? It’s one thing for a person to adjust, over a full life, to the washing machine, the dishwasher, the air-conditioner, one by one. It’s another, in five years, to experience the progress of a century. Will I see a day when childbirth is a thing of the past? What about sleep? Will our ‘descendants’ have bodies at all?

And this round of automation could also lead to unemployment unlike any our grandparents saw. Worse, those of us working now might be especially vulnerable to this loss. Our culture, or anyway mine—professional America of the early 21st century—has apotheosized work, turning it into a central part of who we are. Where others have a sense of place—their particular mountains and trees—we’ve come to locate ourselves with professional attainment, with particular degrees and jobs. For us, ‘workists’ that so many of us have become, technological displacement wouldn’t just be the loss of our jobs. It would be the loss of a central way we have of making sense of our lives.

None of this will be a problem for the new generation, for our kids. They’ll know how to live in a world that could be—if things go well—far better overall. But I don’t know if I’d be able to adapt. Intellectual argument, however strong, is weak against the habits of years. I fear they’d look at me, stuck in my old ways, with the same uncomprehending look that Dallas Archer gives his dad, when Newland announces that he won’t go see Ellen Olenska, the love of his life, after all. “Say”, as Newland tries to explain to his dumbfounded son, “that I’m old fashioned, that’s enough.”

And yet, the core of my dread is not about aging out of work before my time. I feel closest to Douglas Hofstadter, the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach. His dread, like mine, isn’t only about the loss of work today, or the possibility that we’ll be killed off by the bots. He fears that even a gentle superintelligence will be “as incomprehensible to us as we are to cockroaches.”

Today, I feel part of our grand human projects—the advancement of knowledge, the creation of art, the effort to make the world a better place. I’m not in any way a star player on the team. My own work is off in a little backwater of human thought. And I can’t understand all the details of the big moves by the real stars. But even so, I understand enough of our collective work to feel, in some small way, part of our joint effort. All that will change. If I were to be transported to the brilliant future of the bots, I wouldn’t understand them or their work enough to feel part of the grand projects of their day. Their work would have become, to me, as alien as ours is to a roach.

But I’m still persuaded that the hardline pessimists are wrong. Work is far from the most important value in our lives. A post-instrumental world could be full of much more important goods— from rich love of family and friends, to new undreamt of works of art—which would more than compensate the loss of value from the loss of our work.

Of course, even the values that do persist may be transformed in almost unrecognizable ways. In Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World, the futurist and philosopher Nick Bostrom imagines how things might look. In one of the most memorable sections of the book—right up there with an epistolary novella about the exploits of Pignolius the pig (no joke!)—Bostrom says that even child-rearing may be something that we, if we love our children, would come to forego. In a truly post-instrumental world, a robot intelligence could do better for your child, not only in teaching the child to read, but also in showing unbreakable patience and care. If you’ll snap at your kid, when the robot would not, it would only be selfishness for you to get in the way.

It’s a hard question whether Bostrom is right. At least some of the work of care isn’t like eliminating suffering or ending mortal disease. The needs or wants are small-scale stuff, and the value we get from helping each other might well outweigh the fact that we’d do it worse than a robot could.

But even supposing Bostrom is right about his version of things, and we wouldn’t express our love by changing diapers, we could still love each other. And together with our loved ones and friends, we’d have great wonders to enjoy. Wharton has Newland Archer wonder at five-day transatlantic ships. But what about five day journeys to Mars? These days, it’s a big deal if you see the view from Everest with your own eyes. But Olympus Mons on Mars is more than twice as tall.

And it’s not just geographical tourism that could have a far expanded range. There’d be new journeys of the spirit as well. No humans would be among the great writers or sculptors of the day, but the fabulous works of art a superintelligence could make could help to fill our lives. Really, for almost any aesthetic value you now enjoy—sentimental or austere, minute or magnificent, meaningful or jocular—the bots would do it much better than we have ever done.

Humans could still have meaningful projects, too. In 1976, about a decade before any of Altman, Amodei or even I were born, the Canadian philosopher Bernard Suits argued that “voluntary attempts to overcome unnecessary obstacles” could give people a sense of purpose in a post-instrumental world. Suits calls these “games”, but the name is misleading; I prefer “artificial projects”. The projects include things we would call games like chess, checkers and bridge, but also things we wouldn’t think of as games at all, like Amundsen’s and Scott’s exploits to the Pole. Whatever we call them, Suits—who’s followed here explicitly by Danaher, the antiwork utopian and, implicitly, by Altman and Amodei—is surely right: even as things are now, we get a lot of value from projects we choose, whether or not they meet a need. We learn to play a piece on the piano, train to run a marathon, or even fly to Antarctica to “ski the last degree” to the Pole. Why couldn’t projects like these become the backbone of purpose in our lives?

And we could have one real purpose, beyond the artificial ones, as well. There is at least one job that no machine can take away: the work of self-fashioning, the task of becoming and being ourselves. There’s an aesthetic accomplishment in creating your character, an artistry of choice and chance in making yourself who you are. This personal style includes not just wardrobe or tattoos, not just your choice of silverware or car, but your whole way of being, your brand of patience, modesty, humor, rage, hobbies and tastes. Creating this work of art could give some of us something more to live for.

Would a world like that leave any space for human intellectual achievement, the stuff of my childhood dreams? The Buddhist Pali Canon says that “All conditioned things are impermanent—when one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering.” Apparently, in this text, the intellectual achievement of understanding gives us a path out of suffering. To arrive at this goal, you don’t have to be the first to plant your flag on what you’ve understood; you just have to get there.

A secular version of this idea might hold, more simply, that some knowledge or understanding is good in itself. Maybe understanding the mechanics of penicillin matters mainly because of what it enabled Fleming and others to do. But understanding truths about the nature of our existence, or even mathematics, could be different. That sort of understanding plausibly is good in its own right, even if someone or something has gotten there first.

Venkatesh the Fields Medalist seems to suggest something like this for the future of math. Perhaps we’ll change our understanding of the discipline, so that it’s not about getting the answers, but instead about human understanding, the artistry of it perhaps, or the miracle of the special kind of certainty that proof provides.

Philosophy, my subject, might seem an even more promising place for this idea. For some, philosophy is a “way of life”. The aim isn’t necessarily an answer, but constant self-examination for its own sake. If that’s the point, then in the new world of lying flat, there could be a lot of philosophy to do.

I don’t myself accept this way of seeing things. For me, philosophy aims at the truth as much as physics does. But I of course agree that there are some truths that it’s good for us to understand, whether or not we get there first. And there could be other parts of philosophy that survive for us, as well. We need to weigh the arguments for ourselves, and make up our own minds, even if the work of finding new arguments comes to belong to a machine.

I’m willing to believe, and even hope that future people will pursue knowledge and understanding in this way. But I don’t find, here, much consolation for my personal grief. I was trained to produce knowledge, not merely to acquire it. In the hours when I’m not teaching or preparing to teach, my job is to discover the truth. The values I imbibed—and I told you I was an obedient kid—held that the prize goes for priority.

Thinking of this world where all we learn is what the bots have discovered first, I feel sympathy with Lee Sedol, the champion Go player who retired after his defeat by DeepMind’s AlphaGo in 2016. For him, losing to AI “in a sense, meant my entire world was collapsing”. “Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated.” Right or wrong, I would feel the same about my work, in a world with an automated philosophical champ.

But Sedol and I are likely just out of date models, with values that a future culture will rightly revise. It’s been more than twenty years since Garry Kasparov lost to IBM’s Deep Blue, but chess has never been more popular. And this doesn’t seem some new-fangled twist of the internet age. I know of no human who quit the high-jump after the invention of mechanical flight. The Greeks sprinted in their Olympics, though they had, long before, domesticated the horse. Maybe we too will come to value the sport of understanding with our own brains.

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic of the creations-kill-creator genre, begins with an expedition to the North Pole. Robert Walton hopes to put himself in the annals of science and claim the Pole for England, when he comes upon Victor Frankenstein, floating in the Arctic Sea. It’s only once Frankenstein warms up, that we get into the story everyone knows. Victor hopes he can persuade Walton to turn around, by describing how his own quest for knowledge and glory went south.

Frankenstein doesn’t offer Walton an alternative way of life, a guide for living without grand goals. And I doubt Walton would have been any more personally consoled by the glories of a post-instrumental future than I am. I ended up a philosopher, but I was raised by parents who, maybe like yours, hoped for doctors or lawyers. They saw our purpose in answering real needs, in, as they’d say, contributing to society. Lives devoted to families and friends, fantastic art and games could fill a wondrous future, a world far better than it has ever been. But those aren’t lives that Walton or I, or our parents for that matter, would know how to be proud of. It’s just not the way we were brought up.

For the moment, of course, we’re not exactly short on things to do. The world is full of grisly suffering, sickness, starvation, violence, and need. Frankenstein is often remembered with the moral that thirst for knowledge brings ruination, that scientific curiosity killed the cat. But Victor Frankenstein makes a lot of mistakes other than making his monster. His revulsion at his creation persistently prevents him, almost inexplicably, from feeling the love or just plain empathy that any father should. On top of all we have to do to help each other, we have a lot of work to do, in engineering as much as empathy, if we hope to avoid Frankenstein’s fate.

But even with these tasks before us, my fits of dread are here to stay. I know that the post-instrumental world could be a much better place. But its coming means the death of my culture, the end of my way of life. My fear and grief about this loss won’t disappear because of some choice consolatory words. But I know how to relish the twilight too. I feel lucky to live in a time where people have something to do, and the exploits around me seem more poignant, and more beautiful, in the dusk. We may be some of the last to enjoy this brief spell, before all exploration, all discovery, is done by fully automated sleds.

Harvey Lederman is a professor of philosophy at UT Austin and a leader in the university’s AI+Human Objectives Initiative.

“ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life” was originally published on Shtetl-Optimized, the blog of UT Austin computer science professor Scott Aaronson.

This question leads her to examine many creations related to suicide in Japan. There are the writings themselves, of course — the suicide notes and the autobiographical work of creatives who went on to die by suicide — but also sites across Japan made famous by their association with suicide and memorials set up to the dead. The analysis of each site, letter, and death requires a sensitive approach, and Cather’s commitment to understanding is evident on every page. In their award to Cather for Scripting Suicide in Japan, the judges of the Association of Asian Studies’ John Whitney Hall Prize explicitly cited her “rare sensitivity and rigor” in this “interdisciplinary, hauntingly beautiful study of mapping, noting, and mourning that honors the voices of the dead and asks what it means to read and write beside them.”

Earlier this month I met with Cather to discuss her book and the writing and teaching processes that shaped it. Along the way we cover samurai stereotypes, YouTube scandals, and the difficult but necessary work of talking about suicide out loud. Read on for an edited and condensed version of our conversation, and for more on Cather’s work you can read Scripting Suicide in Japan on Open Access.

Kirsten, congratulations on the book and the awards! You have been getting a lot of positive attention for this work, and it’s extremely well deserved.

To jump in with the obvious acknowledgement: Suicide is an extremely complicated and difficult topic. Where did the idea to focus on suicide — both suicide sites and writings of and about suicide — come from? The question of suicide is an enormous one; how did you get started working in this field?

It was a little bit out of naivete: I started writing about this because I was teaching on the topic of suicide in Japanese fiction while I was writing my dissertation on censorship and living in D.C. I had a chance to teach at George Mason and University of Maryland, and they said, “You have to do something that’s going to interest the kids today.” And something that had always puzzled me was what I would say is the overrepresentation of suicide in translated works of Japanese literature and film. It was so omnipresent. And then there were the overly simplistic conclusions people draw about it: It’s celebrated, it’s honorable. There’s a samurai tradition. It’s part of “the” cultural psychology of “the” Japanese. And I thought, surely there’s a better way to think about this.

So, I think like most books, it grew out of a dissatisfaction I found in the existing work. It was often a version of the celebrated honorable samurai — which, for contemporary Japan, that link is quite difficult…

Right. For one thing, there’s hundreds of years and a huge cultural distance between the samurai past and now.

Yeah. And I would say that there were honor suicides in Western cultures too. The gentleman given the bottle of whiskey and the pistol and left alone for a few moments.

So I just started probing and trying to think it through. At first the project was very much about fictional representations of suicide, but then I realized that I really wanted to figure out the even more difficult question of when real life and fiction entwine in uncomfortable ways. I soon realized that one of the problems was that people made overgeneralizations about Japanese stereotypical culture, or they regarded these suicide notes and other writings about suicide very cynically, like “this person was looking for posthumous fame.” Surely if you are writing about something as dire as self-death and then go on to die by suicide, you’re doing something more complicated than just seeking monetary rewards. But there’s a lot of antipathy towards suicide and people who die by suicide. So you would see that strain [in the reactions to these writings], or you’d see the very naive, “Oh my gosh. We can see into their soul in the very moments of before they died.”

As if the writer of a suicide note becomes perfectly open and vulnerable to produce a work of total self-disclosure.

Yes, and unintentional self-disclosure at that! Just a subconscious slip of the pen, like “whoops, I just revealed to you my deepest thoughts.” I found that very frustrating.

Eventually I realized I really did want to think about real life and representation and the moments when those things collided. I thought the autobiographical fiction would be the easiest, and that ended up being the hardest part, which is interesting. I thought, fiction’s a safe refuge. I can talk about it; I’m very used to talking about it. And I thought the suicide notes would be the more difficult representations, but it was trickier when a writer so obviously implicated fiction in the project of self-writing their self-death.

I also realized that, not that I didn’t care about their motives for dying, but I didn’t think that the traces these writers leave behind were useful to investigate that question.

And that is the inevitable question anybody looks at after somebody dies by suicide. What was the motive? What was happening? What would lead somebody to make this ultimate decision? And in this book you’re pointing out both that ultimately we can’t know and that there are other questions to ask that are more interesting.

I think so, because I think — I hope — my approach brings us to a more compassionate place of discovery by trying to put us in the shoes of that person in their moment of writing. That was the thing that, when that clicked for me, a lot unlocked. And it took me a long time to discover and get comfortable with that sort of positionality, if we want to call it that. I couldn’t figure out a way to explicitly say, which I do in my introduction, that I want us to stay in the moment of writing. And sure, there are limits to that approach, but the other approaches have been so overdone and so critiqued, and we haven’t found other ways of doing this.

Tell me more about that decision to say “I want to stay in this moment,” because it structures the book. You say you came to that a little bit late in the process. When did you realize that’s what you wanted to do?

I don’t remember exactly when, but I do remember one piece that led me there. This wonderful colleague of mine who teaches at Georgetown pointed me to a short piece on these suicide maps made in the 1920s by Kon Wajirō, who was an early ethnographer. This is in chapter three of the book, and it’s about a suicide map that he makes of Inokashira Park, an area where I lived for a year before I had even thought about this place as a former suicide hotspot.

You read “suicide map” and you think, there’s not going to be anything ethical about this approach. He’s mapping suicides and he also has a map of picnics. There’s one essay that he writes and literally it’s a 5-minute sketch of “they were eating hard boiled eggs, and these lovers were entangled hands on the bench…” and then the companion essay becomes the suicide map. My initial reaction was, no, you cannot do that. But then I read a piece where he stages the struggle he was having to talk about and research this topic in a way that captured this moment of disappearance, this moment of self-willed self-absence. Like, “I’m disappearing myself from the equation, but there are traces that remain.”

His essay was key for me. Something about it really got me on this idea of traces and capturing and the ethical compulsion surrounding them. The compulsion to mark one’s own perspective, this absence, and then the project of us left behind to capture that in a way that doesn’t just simplify. I was like, this is him struggling with exactly what I’m struggling with. And then I thought, well, make that obvious in the book, make it more obvious how I’m constantly making my presence a little more felt, which is not something we’re always taught to do in academia.

That partly answers a question I was going to ask you about whether there was something you found as part of your research process for this book that changed the direction of the final book.

Going to actual locations.

Was that it?

Yeah, it was. Getting away from books and texts that sterilize the subject and physically visiting these sites was really powerful and illuminating.

I went to historical sites like Inokashira Park and Kegon Falls, though I couldn’t go visit the volcano of Mt. Mihara in the end because the pandemic hit, unfortunately. But those visits forced me to come more nose-to-nose with the idea that there were physical bodies that were dying at these real-life sites. And I did try to go to the apartment complex of the more recent suicide of the filmmaker, and I felt like a ghoul. Then I realized there was something really important about these visits and there’s also some importance about my maintaining distance. And I decided that the Aokigahara suicide forest is too much. It’s too visceral now. So I decided not to go there.

This may say something about me and my age and my time spent online, but whenever I think of the suicide forest I think of the influencers like Logan Paul who go and film there. The idea of the touristic draw to this place of real sadness and loss is so strange.

I wrote a short op-ed after Logan Paul’s video. I was so not ready at that point, but interestingly I found myself thinking about how Logan Paul himself got caught up in that in a very uncomfortable way. I don’t know if you saw that video before it got scrubbed from the internet, but the critique was that he shows himself, he focuses on himself. But I think there’s a real question in there that we have to face. There’s no easy answer to whether and how to represent the dead.

This ties in with my first project on censorship. As I was writing this book, things were disappearing from the web. Suicide prevention in Japan went in this direction of “let’s foreclose all representations.” But there’s another approach, which is to show the dead in all their visceral reality: “Let’s show these bodies in the hopes of de-romanticizing the act and thereby preventing suicide.” This goes back to an Edo period practice where lovers’ bodies would be displayed under bridges for days to dissuade other would-be suicides. It’s not easy. Neither is a good solution.

One thing that I was thinking about as I was reading the book — and this is projection on my part — was that suicide is such a heavy topic. It’s so freighted with all kinds of meanings, but also emotionally very difficult to sit in. What was it like for you personally sitting with this material for that long?

For so many years, yeah. It was hard. People say about me, “You’re one of the more optimistic, happy people I know. Why would you choose this topic?” But I think the compulsion to try to do this ethically helped mitigate how I was feeling. I felt I had a responsibility to these voices to try to do some kind of justice to them.

It was interesting to see which ones really got me and which ones I could read more easily. Some of them are written with levity. That is interesting too, that this person was seemingly laughing at themselves and wanting to produce things that would seemingly produce laughter. I’m nervous when we talk about intent because I don’t know what their intent was, but I was sometimes surprised by the levity, the winking at us, and the sort of self-conscious acknowledgement of even me as a reader not just decades later but sometimes a century-plus later.

And you know, you do start entertaining the idea of your own death and the deaths of people you know. Nobody who I know has been untouched by suicide at this point in their lives. So there’s some version where you think of voicing, or trying your best to voice, things that would otherwise be dead and disappeared. In my wildest dreams, that’s what literature does. It allows the preservation of these voices.

You even start for fast forwarding to like, “when I’m dead, somebody’s going to read this, and then what?”

And then they’re going to think, “What was she trying to tell us?” Which is sort of mind-bending to think about.

But I do need a happier topic for my next work. My mother, she’s Irish Catholic, she’s like, “Please, Kirsten, could you do something else? Your first book was on sex and obscenity and your second book’s on death and suicide. Can you please do something I can talk to my friends about?”

That’s hilarious. And to jump back to book ideas: It sounds like the earliest roots of this project were in a class that you were teaching. Were there projects that you considered and set aside before you settled on this one?

Not really. This one was pretty clear to me. I knew it mattered to me enough to work with it for so long, and I always want to make sure my topic’s going to matter and be of interest to a broad variety of people. I’m pretty wary of specialization. I’m a Gemini; I am always interested in everything. I dabble, and I encourage dabbling with my students. It’s the way we grow.

There was one idea I sort of toyed with. I wanted to stay in the vein of my first book and write about copyright and copyright law in Japan, thinking about copyright infringement cases. But it just didn’t interest or matter to me as much as thinking about life and death.

I can see how the stakes would be difficult to compare.

Yeah. But what I didn’t totally realize was I had really had to work on legal language in Japanese, which was like two foreign languages for me, for my first book. And then the second book had all of this medical and psychological literature that got pretty dense. A lot of it didn’t end up making it into the book, but that took longer than I thought. Everything took longer than I thought.

Everything always takes longer than we think. I have yet to talk to anybody who’s like, “It was so easy. It all just fell together.”

What drives me crazy is listening to authors of historical fiction books who have these six figure contracts for their books, and they’ll say, “And I spent two months in the archive!” People say, ahh, two months! And I’m like, are you kidding me? I’ve got like $0 for this book, and I can tell you I spent more than two months in the archive.

I was going to ask: How much time did you spend in an archive for this?

I mean, so much time. I can’t even calculate. But I never did a long stint. This was an interesting part of the second book versus the first book project. You have a lot more leisure in your second book to spread things out, but you don’t have that dedicated time of your dissertation research fellowship.

Of that dedicated year abroad, yeah. My husband’s a historian and I basically didn’t see him for almost a year because he was off at archives. I was like, “Happy for you! But…”

“Happy for you, but gosh, I miss you.” Yeah. My husband and I got married and I left two weeks later for Japan for my dissertation research, and then he came over three months later for a few months. I wasn’t willing to do that with my young kids growing up for the second book, so I just kind of stole time when I could in madcap two-week visits. Things have gotten so digitized that archives were less necessary. Instead, I’d go interview and talk to people, go to sites — that’s what you do when you go to Japan. You spend that time like that, because everything else is copyable.

Still, a lot more than two months in an archive is what I’m hearing.

And for a lot less than six figures.

Was there anything in the archive that surprised you, that you came across and thought, “oh my goodness…”

The Harry Ransom Center has the Alfred A Knopf publishing company’s archives, in which there was outright acknowledgement of, “We are gonna make a lot of money because Mishima just died by suicide and we’re in the midst of translating this work by him, so let’s get on it.” The willingness to put that on paper and then to be able to use that, that was wild.

And then sometimes what was most surprising was the disappearance of the very material in the archives. Once, I was researching suicide prevention materials put out by a Japanese organization. Because I’m totally still analog, I printed everything. When I looked back, I found that I could trace what happened to the language used to describe a “poetic suicide site,” a jisatsu meisho, that had very poeticized beautiful classical imagery, or as beautiful as you can get when you say “suicide” next to it. And then they changed the wording to something like “a site where there are numerous suicides occurring therein.” Very stiff, very buttoned up. And I was like, “oh my gosh, they actually censored themselves here,” because my theory was there was this move toward unrepresentation.

Thinking about changing how we talk about suicide in consideration of who might be listening brings me to a question about audience. When we think of an audience for an academic book, you think of other academics, and usually specifically other academics in your specific field. Were you thinking about a different audience when you were writing this book? Who did you think would read it?

My base concern was to create something that’s good for the field that people can build upon, something that opens the conversation and doesn’t close it, that offers a helpful methodology. And then when I saw the New Interventions in Japanese Studies series [at University of California Press], I thought, yes, I am trying to intervene, even though I am not a theory-heavy person. That’s not my comfort zone; my comfort zone is close readings of texts. But, oddly, I think it was an intervention, which is interesting because it’s an old-school methodology.

So, there were some meta-methodology thoughts about my field in my mind, but I also want to write what I want to read, and I want to read anything that’s interesting. I want to read things that are written in real language for real people, to make it as accessible as possible.

I was also thinking about my experience teaching a grad seminar on this topic and my experience teaching undergrads. As I’m talking I realize that everything and everyone I’d ever talked with about the book stuck in my mind, even every conference talk I ever gave. And it was shocking the way that the audiences would react sometimes. One time I gave a talk about the suicide forest and had a person say, “Why should we care about these dead bodies in the forest? Why should the Japanese government care?” And I was like, wow, ok, so some of my audience is going to be thinking that.

Let’s sit with that for a minute. That’s wild!

Like, can I just reflect your question back to you for a moment so you can hear yourself?

I do want to come back to talk about the classes in a minute, but I bet you have had a lot of strong reactions over the years. As you said earlier, this is a topic that ultimately touches all of us in some way, and people bring a lot of themselves and their own experiences, I imagine, to this material. That seems like it would shape the experience of working on a book about suicide.

Yeah. Eventually you have to have your own thing, your own rationale for why you’re doing what you’re doing, and know you can’t do all the things.

Now to go back: This is a course you were teaching for a while?

And I don’t teach it anymore. I don’t feel like I can in this climate. I feel students are in a really vulnerable place. We’re more aware of how vulnerable they are, and it started feeling not right, so I stopped.

But teaching it as a young, naïve professor in a different era, I had the students do creative projects at the very end that allowed them to digest the material in a different way. And I remember in the last class from ages ago some students brought up their own experiences with suicide – their own struggles or losses and their upbringing where even uttering the word suicide out loud was an unspoken taboo. The class just went around opening up to one another. There were tears, there were hugs, there was warmth, but what the students were saying was, “This gave me an avenue by which to approach this difficult topic, to talk about suicide.” The class really seemed to help. I know that’s not always going to be the experience, but for a moment there, it was a very lovely. But then I became a lot more self-conscious about it. I was like, this is a difficult dialogue, and I need to make sure I’m trained in how to do this. I need to make it clear that this is not therapeutic. That’s not the goal.

But it was really interesting to hear these students talk about finally tackling their thoughts and feelings, mostly about being suicide survivors, having had classmates or family members who had died by suicide. I thought, this is an interesting methodology, to think that if you start with distant, ancient Japan and you allow the students to creep at this topic, it could be helpful. But it also feels very precarious.

That makes sense to me: It’s difficult to both look back on this class as such a warm and positive experience, one that could foster a lot of connection among students and with this difficult, almost impossible subject matter, but also to acknowledge that there’s a risk in teaching it, that it might push a particularly vulnerable student in a dark direction.

I remember reading this one journalist turned suicidologist from the 1940s. He wrote these books [about suicide] and then he wrote about how one of his books had been found by a body of a suicide and how devastating it was.

But then you talk to professionals and they’re clear that not talking about it is not the solution. Of course, this difficult dialogue needs to be in the hands of trained mental health professionals. But I think back to your question of audience, and I do hope that somebody could read parts of this and think about suicide in a different way. And for me too, the writers I talk about in this book helped me think about people in my life who have died by suicide in a different way, and that was wonderful and useful.

By Zeltzyn Rubi Sanchez Lozoya

We were already seated on the plane headed to Chicago when the captain announced over the speaker that the flight was going to be delayed. A collective groan moved through the cabin. Resigned, I instinctively took out my phone to pass the time and opened the New Yorker story I was reading, Sam Lipsyte’s “Final Boy.”

A few minutes later, I was pulled out of the story and back to my American Airlines seat when Lipsyte’s narrator, to avoid describing an obscure sitcom, broke the fourth wall. “I won’t even try to explain that,” he said. “Look it up on the device you no doubt hold in your hand.”

I looked up and around as if he was in the cabin with me, waiting to make eye contact. I felt called out by this hyper-aware narrator and wondered if he knew I was switching back and forth between the story, emails, and scrolling. Or, even worse, that I was saving the downloaded audio version of the piece for when the plane took off and I lost WiFi, fully knowing that I might fall asleep listening to it.

By calling out the reader for being on their phone, Lipsyte not only recaptured my wandering attention but also exposed a larger truth about modern media consumption. He knew that the device used for reading his story was the same one distracting his reader. Losing their attention was just a notification away.

Because we now consume media constantly, be it books, movies or TV shows, and largely just to pass the time, we rarely give it the attention necessary for analysis, questioning, or even real enjoyment. Dedicating time to read a book or watch a movie without multitasking has almost disappeared. Instead, many of us incorporate media into our life as background noise, selecting a Netflix movie or TV show for “casual viewing” while folding laundry or washing dishes. Even film students have trouble watching an entire film without distractions. This disconnect directly contributes to the ongoing decline of media literacy, the ability to analyze and make sense of media presented to us.

Last week, as thousands of educators, artists, and entrepreneurs gathered in Austin for South by Southwest and SXSW EDU, they discussed the trials of creating art and media at a time when audiences’ attention spans are fragmented and an overflow of information has shifted our relationship with media from active engagement to passive consumption. As one of the participants, I was there to share my suggestion: To improve media literacy, we need to do nothing.

Over the years, driven by our need to constantly do something, our collective relationship with media has changed to “time pass.” Comedian Kanan Gill explains this brilliant Indian concept in his Netflix special “Yours Sincerely” as “both an activity and a review of an activity.” What do you do when you are doing nothing? “Time pass.” How would you describe a movie that wasn’t that good? “Time pass.”

Looking at media as “time pass” implies a constant, superficial consumption that doesn’t allow for questioning or meditation and that’s driven by the contemporary need to always be doing something. Something to do to minimize or eradicate boredom, something to do with our hands, something to do to appear busy. In the modern digital age, it appears there’s no room to do nothing.

In her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, artist and writer Jenny Odell expands on this idea to argue “nothing is harder than to do than nothing.” For Odell, “in a world where our value is determined by our productivity, […] doing nothing [is] an act of political resistance.” To do nothing, Odell argues, is to disengage with technologies that are designed to capitalize on our attention and our data and which do not allow us the time and space to question, evaluate, and digest the media we are consuming.

To reclaim our attention, and with it not only the joy but also the time to critically engage with art and media, it is imperative that we practice doing nothing. If we allow ourselves to drastically limit our consumption of media, then we can engage with it better and more deeply. We can check a source before sharing, figure out if we like a movie without reading other people’s reviews, read beyond the clickbait headline, recognize when a post is actually an ad, and realize that is not the real Will Smith eating spaghetti. To rebuild media literacy, we must practice doing nothing. Instead of consuming media for time pass, slow down, waste time, look up.

Zeltzyn Rubi Sanchez Lozoya is an assistant professor of instruction in The University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Asian Studies. Her first book, Female Lead: India's Women Filmmakers in the Age of Netflix, is currently under contract with Routledge, and she hosts the film podcast Watch Next.

Consider two images, or visions, of the study of the liberal arts. One is of a bright young student looking intently at a beautifully burnished bookshelf. On the shelves are rows of books that are obviously part of a carefully curated series, all the same size and spun off from the same design template.

The other is that same student but in a big library. She’s looking up in wonder at a forest of brightly colored books surrounding her, each volume a portal into a wholly different world.

The first image we might call the “great books” vision of studying the liberal arts. The texts have been carefully chosen by the wisdom of the ages and the elders to provide the student a single curriculum she must absorb in order to become a cultivated and educated citizen of our society.

The second is what we might call the “abundance” vision of studying the liberal arts. The student is given access to the whole wide world of texts, cultures, ideas, and narratives, then encouraged to craft from these riches her own curriculum, a remix of her own tradition, guided by various mentors each offering a distinct perspective.

There’s a temptation to plot each of these visions on the contemporary partisan spectrum, with abundance on the left and great books on the right, but that framing confuses more than it clarifies. The great texts of the past aren’t so easily shoehorned into any contemporary political framework. That’s true whether you’re talking about major thinkers of the Western canon, many of whom were radical deconstructors of the orthodoxies of their era, or major thinkers of the non-Western canons. Was Karl Marx a conservative? Was the Buddha a liberal? Darwin? Nietzsche? Freud? Borges? Achebe? Naipaul?

Abundance, similarly, is not intrinsically a left-wing approach to learning, but rather a liberal one in the classical sense of the term. It’s opened up the curriculum to a lot of texts, courses, perspectives, and departments that have a more leftish flavor to them. It has also, however, been a conduit through which a more consumerist or free-market orientation toward education has seeped into the university.

For the university communications professional, the question isn’t which vision is better in the cosmic sense but rather which story, at any given moment, better captures the essence of what the university is doing. After World War II, for example, it’s easy to see why the abundance vision of the liberal arts made marketing sense. Thanks to the GI Bill and post-war economic expansion, the numbers and kinds of Americans going to college dramatically increased. This was mirrored in the expansion and diversification of the people who were teaching college and devising the curricula.

What had been an elite endeavor, oriented toward white men of means, became a mass phenomenon, encompassing more middle- and working class people, more people of color, and more women. In this context, liberal arts abundance made marketing sense. It spoke to people’s optimism. It aligned, conceptually, with the expansion of the consumer markets. It created space to accommodate people and populations who had been excluded from the old story. And in the context of material abundance, in an era when the prestige of the liberal arts remained high, this kind of expansion didn’t require a rejection of the great books approach to liberal arts education. It encompassed it. Students of all disciplinary and demographic stripes still enrolled in big survey courses on Shakespeare, ancient philosophy, American history, political theory, and the like, and many of them chose to major in traditional humanities disciplines with fairly traditional curricula.

When I was an undergraduate liberal arts student in the mid-1990s, this was the vibe. We enrolled in the big survey courses to get our informal core curriculum of the great books and thinkers, and then we spread out to our respective disciplines where we got more specialized knowledge. Even the STEM majors, most of the time, wanted to get their Shakespeare and Plato on the side. There didn’t seem to be a conflict between the two visions.

It feels different now, for a few reasons. One is that there are simply fewer students taking humanities courses. Another is that the cultural expectation that graduates of elite colleges should have at least a facsimile of knowledge of Moses, Plato, Shakespeare, Austen, Ellison, Morrison, and Rawls seems to have diminished below some critical threshold. An English professor at Duke told me last year that the department can’t fill their Shakespeare lecture survey courses anymore, so they’ve been eliminated. You can still study Shakespeare at Duke, but it will be in a small seminar room, seated almost exclusively next to other English majors, of whom there are many fewer than there used to be.

Instead of abundance, then, there is scarcity. And instead of the great books regime that preceded it, with its elite product developed for an elite customer base, there is fragmentation. And then, of course, there are the politics. Every choice being made, right now, about what and how to teach in the liberal arts is occurring within an intensely polarized, politicized context, with a lot of different actors with different agendas fighting to have influence.

We’re in a period of transition, in other words. Who are we? Who do we want to be? What should we hold on to, or go back to, and what should we move past and let go? Who will we be allowed to be?

And what tableau should we be painting? The burnished bookshelf? The vast library? A tiny free library? The cloud?

When UT Austin sociologists (and married couple) Robert Crosnoe and Shannon E. Cavanagh first set out to research what eventually became their new book, The Journey into Adulthood in Uncertain Times, their own children were in preschool.

“A grant was given to us to analyze the impact of the Great Recession of 2007-09 on people transitioning to adulthood, and the idea was that our study would be done within a few years,” says Crosnoe. “But we just didn’t find anything terribly interesting in the short-term effects. We became more interested in the long-term trends.”

Now, nearly two decades later, both of their kids are themselves young adults, and the initial study has grown into a sweeping, data-rich portrait of what it means to grow up in 21st-century America.

Their findings challenge the familiar hand-wringing about “adultolescence” and “lost generations.” Instead, Crosnoe and Cavanagh argue, the journey from adolescence to adulthood has long been shaped by slow, inexorable forces rather than single, seismic events.

I spoke to them recently about their book and its implications. A lightly edited and condensed version of our conversation is below.

Rob, Shannon, welcome. Tell me about your new book. It sounds like it’s been a big endeavor for the two of you.

Robert Crosnoe: It’s the product of a large-scale study using a variety of data to look at how markers of the transition to adulthood — employment, education, family formation, mental health, and behavior — have changed over the course of the last 50 or so years, and whether those changes are more acute during times of crisis, like the Great Recession.

The basic thrust of what we found is that young adults today look very different than young adults from 50 years ago or even 25 years ago. But those changes do not represent the specific impact of any one thing, like a recession or the pandemic or the invention of the iPhone. It’s been a slow, gradual change over many decades. They look different today than they used to, but there’s really no critical period over the last 50 years that made that happen.

Is there a relatively technical way that you or the field defines what this period of young adulthood is?

Crosnoe: We picked 18 to 26, in part because of the data we had but also because the National Academy of Sciences used that marker and it was related to policies for young adults.

The whole idea of adolescence, to put it in context, is only about 120 years old. It came into existence because the times changed and you had these people who looked like adults but were treated like children. Now we all just think adolescence is this naturally occurring phenomenon, when in reality it was something we created.

The same thing is going on right now with young adulthood. The transition from being an adolescent to an adult is getting longer and longer, so now it seems like maybe this isn’t a transition anymore. Maybe it’s its own stage of the life course. That’s where a lot of the ambiguity comes into play.

What’s the argument of the book? What are the big changes over the period of time you’re covering?

Crosnoe: There are two buzzwords that people often use to describe these changes. One is the “lengthening” of this young adulthood period. The other, and this is going to sound more pejorative than people mean it, is the “disorder.” What that means is that young people are spending longer achieving what adults think of as the markers of adulthood: leaving home, finding a job, starting a family. And they’re doing it in a different and less predictable order than they did in the past.

What does that look like? Young adults are spending a lot longer in the educational system than they used to, not just because they’re pursuing higher education but because they might be going in and out of the educational system over time. They’re pushing back their entry into the labor market and spending more time in more insecure positions before they become full-time labor force participants.

Shannon Cavanagh: Family formation is also slowing down tremendously because of insecurity in the economic realm. Young adults today are less likely to cohabit, much more likely to remain single, and even less likely to get married. Teen fertility has never been lower than it has been in the last 15 years. So there’s a real slowing down.

The other thing to keep in mind, in family and in education and work, is the incredible inequality. There are some young people who are continuing on in education, gaining more degrees, and transitioning into paid full-time labor. Those people are also more likely to be in a cohabiting union and eventually move into marriage with children. Then there are tremendous numbers of young people who are not in work, not in school, not in romantic unions, and not tied to any institution that we think of as central to citizenship. That’s really striking. It’s mostly men, and disproportionately men of color, who are out of these primary social institutions like work or school or marriage.

Crosnoe: There’s a pretty clear trend that alcohol use, which is a big activity during this period of young adulthood, goes up by age, as you’d expect, but is going down overall over time. With depression, it’s the exact opposite. It goes down with age, but it’s going up by calendar year. So young people are less likely to be depressed as they get older, but they are more depressed as a cohort than 19-year-olds were before.

You’ve said that when you started this project, you were looking at how the Great Recession did or didn’t affect these observable trends. What did you conclude?

Crosnoe: We found that they really weren’t affected. For the most part, the long-term evolution of society trumps any one event. But when we interviewed young people, we found many (but not all) really thought they had been affected by the Great Recession. They would’ve predicted that the quantitative results would look very different.

We were comparing people who went through the transition to adulthood in the ‘90s, 2000s, and 2010s. The biggest influence on whether they felt they’d been negatively affected by the recession — whether they’d been screwed versus having this “grit” idea of “I came out better for it” — wasn’t their social class. It was whether they were downwardly mobile. Doing worse than their parents had done really made people look at the recession very negatively.

We also found something interesting: when we asked them about the transition to adulthood, nobody really talked about family formation at all. They only talked about work and school, even though almost half of them had already started families. They just didn’t bring it up, even though in some cases they were doing it.

You’ve both described these changes as being “due to economic insecurity” in a significant way. What do you mean by that, and how do you understand it as a driver of these trends?

Crosnoe: We’re talking about economic insecurity rather than overall economic outcomes. If you go back to before economic restructuring started in the 1970s, there was this middle part of the labor market where you didn’t really need a college education to guarantee a decent life. You could go into a job, stay in that job, and move forward with benefits over time. That has disappeared, and young people really struggle with that. They either need to go through higher education to find something more secure or they’re bouncing around a lot more during their twenties. Even those who go to college are going to be changing jobs a lot and be unsure about themselves. So it’s not so much that they’re economically disadvantaged, if you step back and look at their incomes, but that they’re uncertain about their economic futures.

Has that been something that has progressively been more the case in the last 50 years?

Cavanagh: Yes. Whether it’s real or not, there’s a general sense that there’s less security and also fewer “good jobs” out there, and that a lot of the jobs that are available are gig economy jobs and not at all secure. That makes independence, which is at the heart of the idea of what adulthood is, feel like a harder and harder thing to achieve.

Crosnoe: That’s where the marriage stuff comes in too. There’s this relatively new idea that young people feel like they need to meet some level of economic security before they marry. They want to get married; they just feel like they need to reach this bar. That idea is what’s pushing back the age of marriage, because it’s taking them longer and longer to think they’ve reached that bar. It doesn’t mean they’re not going to achieve it. It’s just that a 22-year-old today is going to be in a more uncertain terrain than one from 50 or 60 years ago, even if they eventually turn out fine.

Are there drivers other than economic ones? You were talking about people not being in churches, unions, the whole “Bowling Alone” phenomenon. Is that purely economically driven, or are there cultural or other macro drivers of these shifts?

Crosnoe: One thing we write about a lot in the book is parenting and the way that parents view their children. We’ve reached a point now where the majority of parents do not think that kids in their early twenties are adults. That’s a new thing, this whole idea of your kids being your kids a lot longer than they used to be. Your stage of active parenting is a lot longer.

This is certainly related to economic insecurity too, wanting to keep these kids in the nest longer and investing more in them to really launch them into adulthood, but it has generalized far beyond that to this idea that 20-somethings are not adults. And when we don’t think of them as adults, we don’t treat them as adults, which makes it harder for them to act like adults. It’s this self-reinforcing thing. It is related to economics, but it’s taken on a life of its own.

Cavanagh: I don’t think you can separate the cultural from the economic. You could try to parse it out, but these things move together.

Rob was talking about marriage. There’s a sociologist, Andrew Cherlin, who talks about how historically we thought of marriage as the cornerstone of adulthood, literally the first thing you build, and then you build your life around it. Now it’s the capstone. It’s the thing you do once you can afford everything and everything is in a row. Partly this is a cultural shift driven by generalized uncertainty about marriage and divorce, which feed into a general cautiousness. Then there’s the real economic reality that for many young people, there aren’t the kinds of jobs that can get them started. Forty percent of young men in our sample are neither in work nor school. That’s an incredible percent of young people not doing things, and no one’s going to want to marry them or have a child with them. We have underinvested in or limited supports for young people as they move into adulthood.

Crosnoe: I think the thing about “Bowling Alone” and social isolation is something we need to grapple with, and we don’t really know how things like the internet have affected that. We do know that young people are closer to their parents than they used to be, which seems like a good thing. But the decline in drinking really struck us because we thought, if you think of drinking as a marker of stress, in many ways you’d expect it to be increasing. But it’s decreasing, and there’s some evidence it decreased even more during the Great Recession. What is that suggesting? Well, it’s probably something about social isolation. Coupled with the depression stuff, the decline in drinking might be suggesting young people are a little bit more untethered now than they used to be in the past. That doesn’t mean we want kids to go out drinking, but we’re trying to think critically about what those trends are doing.

In your work you’ve identified five or six pathways young people typically take between the ages of 18 and 26 or so. What are those pathways in brief?

Crosnoe: They tend to be characterized by the age at which young people do things. The easy ones are the people who just stay single the whole time; that’s a path. There are a couple of pathways where they’re partnering and having kids at a really young age, versus ones where people are partnering eventually but never having kids within this 18-26 window, versus ones where they’re doing all of the above: having kids and going in and out of relationships.

For socioeconomic attainment, it’s the most disadvantaged — low education, leaving the educational system early, then having unstable employment trajectories — versus the people who go from high school to college to the labor market versus those who go from high school to college to some sort of extended educational state, usually graduate school, before entering the labor market.

And then there’s this group in the middle that’s a pretty sizable group, but it’s a throwback to the ‘60s and ‘70s. They leave high school, go into full employment, and stay there. Interestingly, they look a little bit more like the kids going through higher education than they do other high school graduates in terms of family formation, their health behavior, their depression, where they’re coming from. That group is also very heavily Latino.

Looking back on this project as a whole, what makes you most optimistic and most pessimistic?

Cavanagh: Reading the qualitative interviews and hearing how young people made sense of things, I saw a lot of grit. I learned a lot about how people make meaning. They were telling stories of, “We’re going to get through this, and I’m stronger because of this, and it’s going to be okay.” That wasn’t everyone, of course, but it was a lot of people. That was really interesting to me and hopeful. We make meaning all the time, and we mostly err on the side of optimism.

Crosnoe: The way we close this book is by acknowledging that young people today do not look the way young people did when we were born. And we adults tend to say, “Well, why aren’t they doing this? Why aren’t they doing that?” In reality, what’s really happening is that the world has changed. The world is not the same as it was 50 years ago, and young people are adapting to this new world. Our concerns too often are more about whether they’re following the rules we think are right based on the world we grew up in rather than the one we have created for them.

So, if we’re going to do this hand-wringing about what young adults are doing, it’s not about whether they’re growing up or not, because they are growing up. It’s whether they’re trying to play by rules that we set for them that no longer apply. And I take that as very hopeful. They’re going to find their way, and they’re going to change the script for us. And then someday they will probably look down at their kids and think that they’re not growing up too.

Is there something general you can say about the way young adults today look at the world, their values and priorities?

Crosnoe: I’ll say it this way: the goals that young people have today are really not that different than the goals we had. Eventually, they want to be in the same place we wanted to be.

They want a stable job, they want to get married, they want to have kids, but how they’re going to do that is what’s changing?

Crosnoe: Yeah. This is the thing. We talk about the decline of marriage. Most young people want to get married. And most of them will, over time, but not as young adults. The path they take to that goal is going to be different than what we took. So the book is really about how the path has changed, not how the goal has changed. That’s an important way of looking at this.

When we’re talking about building a life, the goals are really not that different. Young adults today just take a different path. They’re adapting to the world we created for them.

Shannon, what about you? How are they different or the same?

Cavanagh: I think they feel they’re navigating a very different world than even we did 25 or 30 years ago. What was very clear in the qualitative research is this idea of uncertainty, and that data is now eight years old. What would it look like if we did those interviews during the pandemic or thereafter? This is a generation that has grown up confronting 9/11, the Great Recession, the pandemic, two discontinuous terms of Trump. It’s a really intense historical moment. The way they talk about their lives reflects that there’s this kind of uncertainty.

At the same time, Rob is right: young people want to get married, they want a home, they want a job. They’re also rational. This is my critique of a lot of the low fertility discussion: It’s not that people’s values have shifted, but that we always do what’s rational based on the circumstances in front of us. In a world that feels less certain, the rational choice might not be to have five children.

Are you going to keep working on this project?

Cavanagh: Right now I am working with grad students to look at the effect that housing may play in slowing down family formation. Who are young adults living with, how long are they staying at their parents’ home, how that is slowing everything down? The cost of housing could be a real pinch to family building in general. I think it adds another layer to the stories we have about young people.

Crosnoe: I’m really interested in the parenting part. If your kids are going to have a more dependent relationship with you through their twenties and thirties, what does that mean for you as a parent who, in the old days, might be letting go of a lot of those responsibilities? Your active parenting phase is longer than it used to be. That’s really what I’m studying now.

People want that, I think. Their kids are their friends, and vice versa.

Crosnoe: They do. Parents and kids are a lot closer than they used to be. They spend more time together and they’re more connected. Some people view that as bad, like it’s delaying their independence, but as a parent, it’s hard for me to get upset about that.

Part of it is that parents are being more vigilant because their kids are having a longer path to independence. And part of it is they like this new model. They like maintaining the active role. Those things are all driving each other.

In the 20th century, there was a lot of research on parenting adolescents and what that would mean, because this new idea of what an adolescent was emerged. Now I think this century is going to be like: What is parenting a 25-year-old, or a 35-year-old?

On December 16, 1775, future novelist Jane Austen was born in a village in Hampshire, England. Two hundred and fifty years later, her birthday celebration has spanned continents and lasted for months, complete with newspaper features, commemorative teas, and a birthday parade in Bath.

Of course, it’s not just Jane herself that’s being celebrated — there are, after all, her novels to consider. From elegantly bound volumes to mass market paperbacks, the many iterations of Austen’s books have profoundly shaped her fame and public reception, and no anniversary would be complete without a close look at this material legacy. So argues Janine Barchas, professor of English at UT Austin and author of, among other titles, The Lost Books of Jane Austen. And so argues “Paper Jane: 250 Years of Austen,” an exhibition at the Grolier Club in New York City on which Barchas served as co-curator. With exhibits ranging from first editions to “pinked” paperbacks and signed film posters, “Paper Jane” tells the story of Austen’s growing fame through her print history and examines the way her extended family and their descendants used their own publications to both reveal and obscure her life and work.

Earlier this month, I spoke with Barchas about the exhibition and Austen’s enduring popularity. Our conversation below, which has been lightly edited and condensed, covers the Grolier Club, “public intimacy,” and the many generational adaptations of Pride and Prejudice. Read on for more, and if you’re in the New York area, you can race to catch “Paper Jane” in person through February 14. For the rest of us, there’s always the web version.

Janine, thank you for making time to talk to me about “Paper Jane”! To get us started, give me the in-a-nutshell intro to the exhibition: what it is and why it’s at the Grolier Club.

The Grolier Club is America’s oldest book collecting club, and its exhibitions, like this one, are open and free to the public. The “Paper Jane: 250 Years of Austen” exhibition is really a love letter to Jane Austen that showcases the books and objects — very unequal and eclectic — owned by three collectors, of whom I am one. All of us are members of the Grolier Club with different expertise in Jane Austen and different collecting strategies and goals.

Austen is an author who wrote only six published novels, so you might think, well, what is there to collect other than those six books? But it turns out that one of us focused on collecting the scholarly history, especially books by members of the extended Austen family, and tracking their interferences and contributions to Jane Austen’s reception history. One of us is a schoolteacher who collected very widely, starting with first editions, but who also is interested in how children read and interact with Jane Austen. Did Victorian kids in Britain have a different idea of Jane Austen than, for example, American kids in the 1940s or 1960s?

And then there’s me, who wrote a book called The Lost Books of Jane Austen. For that project I collected for years the cheapest, most throwaway, tawdry, least-authoritative editions of Jane Austen that had enjoyed, in my view, the largest readership and therefore exerted the greatest impact on her reception history. These are editions with misprints galore that don’t get collected by rare books libraries because they’re not important firsts, but they are the reprints that kept her name alive and fed her reputation. Those were the copies that had the widest readership, whereas Jane Austen’s first editions had a very narrow, elite readership. She was a bit of a sleeper during her own lifetime and did not enjoy the kind of popularity that we associate with her now; that popularity grew over time.

The three of us put together “Paper Jane” for the 250th anniversary. It has five different sections that cover 50 years each, organized temporally. That allows you to see, during each 50-year increment, what happens to Austen’s reputation. What does she look like in terms of her material incarnations as books? And each period in the show offers a different perspective — a different Jane.

Walk me through how this came about. At what point did you and your co-curators think, “we could really pool our resources, both intellectual and material, and put on this show for this major anniversary?”

Because the Grolier is a book collecting club, you already have that context of people meeting because they share certain kinds of interests. And Sandra Clark and I had already worked together on The Lost Books of Jane Austen, for which she opened her collection to me as a scholar. It’s a mode of working that is just magical, really: to be able to rifle through someone’s collection in their home, to be able to befriend them and talk over things and use their private archive. I’d had that experience working with Sandra and knew her collection complemented mine in many ways. Hers was so much more extensive than mine that it cemented the claims that I would otherwise not have been able to make. She had collected for 50 years and I had only been doing that for a decade or so at the time of our joining forces, so she had so many more of these lost books than I had been able to find amongst the flotsam and jetsam of eBay.

So Sandra and I had already worked together. And when, as part of the Grolier Club, we met Mary Crawford, whose name is identical to that of a character in Mansfield Park…

I loved that that’s called out on the website and in the notes for this exhibition. “Mary Crawford — not the character.”

So we knew one another and our shared interests. And as you do when an author you love is having a standout anniversary, you put your heads together and say, “Hey, how can we share our interest with others and bring people to the Grolier?” Once we had conjured up the idea of dividing the exhibition into 50-year increments, it became clear how we could pull from each of our collections to tell a larger story about her changing reputation.

Now we keep saying that the result is more than the sum of its parts. None of us could have done anything like this on our own. It’s only when you put different collecting instincts together — and of course a scholarly library or a scholarly context ultimately does that, pulling from different individuals and their perspectives — that you can shape a new story.

When you’re putting together an exhibition, many people have to collaborate to make it happen. Whereas, when we lay folks think about the typical work of an academic — writing a book, for example — the idea we often have is one of solitary pursuit. How do you think about or approach the differences between those two kinds of projects?

Everything has its place and its importance. I learn different things from writing a book, and the depth of the research behind something like that is different than what you do for an exhibition. In a way the exhibition comes last. It comes after all that learning and is an opportunity to showcase the learning in a different way and reach a different audience. Just as teaching and scholarship go hand in hand, an exhibition is a different product of the same intellectual work that it takes to write a book. You’re using the same material, but it has to be presented differently. You can’t just take a paragraph from a book and turn it into a museum label.

And while I enjoy my own solitary time in my intellectual cave here and there, I really do also enjoy what it means to coordinate with other people, and not just about taking your ideas and putting them in front of a new audience in an exhibition. Rather the collaboration means that the end-product is something you couldn’t have generated on your own. There’s growth and learning that happens in the process itself.

What did you learn from putting this exhibition together?

Everyone has their prejudices, and coming into this exhibition I had my prejudice against the Austen extended family during the Victorian period. All those interferences! I just wasn’t really interested in all those Victorian relatives who sanitized and adjusted their Aunt Jane’s reputation. But the other collector, Mary Crawford, pointed out in our discussions that yes, but these books were still very important. Even though members of the Austen clan did sanitize and edit out things and commit these horrible crimes that I was accusing them of, they nonetheless also showed people Jane Austen’s voice in letters that the world had not yet seen. That newly published material then generated new thinking and new scholarship about Jane.

After a while there were so many things she mentioned that, quite frankly, I’d never read, that I began to read them. And I began to ask questions like, how’s this book related to this other book? Whose relative was that? Mary ended up drawing us a sort of schematic to explain it all, and once we started working on that visual explanation, it was clear that this “family book tree” had to be part of the show.

Even though I still feel that not all these family contributions were by any means equal, and not all of them were for the better, the sheer number of them kind of convinced me that yeah, of course they had this extraordinary impact. You can dismiss them as misguided, but that isn’t the whole truth. So, occasionally this sort of scholarly habit of sneering at this or that popular thing gets corrected when you work with other people who rightly see the value of those things. There’s some course correction that happens that’s really healthy.

Now, the second part of the question: What do you hope that a visitor would take away from visiting “Paper Jane”?

I would hope that a visitor who knows nothing about Jane Austen enjoys walking through a timeline of what is essentially book history and pop culture to see what the last 250 years in print looks like for an author that they may not have ever read. Although I think you’d be hard-pressed to find somebody now who hasn’t been exposed to Jane Austen in some way.

At the same time, we’ve been very gratified by reactions from other Jane Austen scholars and fans who know a great deal about her but who nonetheless have never seen a first edition of this novel or a railroad edition of that one and who can now see the popular culture kaleidoscope that Jane Austen was in the early period.

I have a confession about this exhibition, which I think gets at something about how we think about Jane Austen generally. When you first told me about this project, you said, “here’s some information about my ‘Paper Jane’ exhibition,” and I thought for a long time that the title of the exhibition was “My Paper Jane.” Now, looking back on that misunderstanding, there’s something about that possessive “my” that feels appropriate. A lot of people really feel a connection and almost an ownership over the works of Jane Austen in a way that feels unique.

Yeah, I think they do. Janeites call themselves “Janeites,” and I don’t think that Shakespeare fans call themselves “the Willies,” for example.

I wish that they would! But we don’t really do this with other writers to the same degree, and I wonder if you have any insight into why that is.

There is an intimacy that readers feel with the works of Jane Austen, and it might have something to do with how novels are read silently and alone. At the same time, movies do bring people together, and now Jane Austen’s popular on the stage too. But there is an intimacy to reading.

Joe Roach, who is a scholar of celebrity culture at Yale, calls any feeling of intimacy with a celebrity “public intimacy.” Celebrities awaken that feeling in a fan — true fandom — which is about feeling that intimacy with, in this case, a writer, or with actors from the screen or the stage. And that public intimacy is something that defines Jane Austen’s celebrity for certain. I don’t know if it’s more so than other writers, but it might be a reflection of her celebrity, of how famous she is, that people feel that close connection to her. It might be an aspect of fame rather than an aspect of her writing specifically.

Oh, that’s interesting. I would’ve thought the opposite, that she’s famous because she inspires this connection. But it could be the reverse, that her fame is what draws people closer to her.

It could also be a chicken and the egg issue.

Absolutely. And whatever the cause, I imagine that dynamic is something that you have to navigate as a scholar and teacher of Jane Austen.

I have taught many older novels that I need to sell to my students, where they’ve never heard of the authors and I really have to sell them on the book before they are willing to crack the spine. Like, “You really want to read these because they’re great! Let me tell you how great they are so that you will want to invest your time.”

And those are novels by Frances Burney, Sarah Fielding, Henry Fielding, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson. These are people who do not have an action figure and don’t have a movie and have no celebrity status anymore, even though they were bestselling authors in their day. So, I know what it’s like to have to sell a book and promote it and maybe even inflate its importance in order to make people pay attention.

When it comes to teaching Austen, it’s the opposite. You’re speaking to a room that’s already convinced. They already love her, and now it’s about turning that love into something productive so that we’re not just talking about how great Mr. Darcy is or how much Mrs. Bennett looks like our mother. I tell my students those things are off the table. I don’t want to know your feelings. Your feelings are for sharing with your friends. Let’s look at these passages; that’s what we’re doing here. But it’s a lot easier when you have to say “keep your feelings to yourself and let’s look at the book,” because those feelings animate interest, and they already direct a students’ gaze to the page. Whereas, when it comes to the lesser-known novelists who made Austen possible, it’s heavy lifting, no matter how great they were in their day. And that’s partly because, you know, Hollywood is working for me when it comes to teaching Jane Austen.

Absolutely. There’s always another adaptation just around the corner.

And I can’t wait for Netflix’s new Pride and Prejudice that they’ve promised to release this year.

I hadn’t heard about this. That’s exciting. And Pride and Prejudice in particular feels so generational, doesn’t it? I was of the Keira Knightley generation…

Of course you were! As she rolls her eyes.

Whereas my mother-in-law, who is a devoted Jane Austen fan and has been her whole life, can’t stand the Keira Knightly adaptation.

I’m with your mother-in-law on this one. But ultimately I love them both for bringing students into my classroom.

It’s a well-known truism that money can’t buy happiness. Just think of the clichéd miserable lottery winner or an oil-rich nation suffering from the “resource curse.” But what if that unhappiness is a phase rather than a permanent state? Is it possible to “reverse the curse”? And if so, how?

These are the questions that interest political scientist Delgerjargal Uvsh. A professor of Slavic and Eurasian studies at UT Austin, Uvsh is also a researcher working on the “resource curse,” the longstanding theory in social science that developing countries with abundant natural resources, such as oil and gas, will typically experience worse political and economic outcomes than their comparatively resource-poor neighbors. These nations, the theory goes, frequently have lower economic growth, less democracy, and generally poorer development while experiencing more corruption, more autocracy, and greater state interference in the economy. Think of OPEC countries with authoritarian regimes, or the diamond-rich Democratic Republic of the Congo’s long history of exploitation and civil war.

It’s an old theory, at least by the standards of social science, and continues to be influential (and debated). But Uvsh is less concerned with the resource curse itself than with what comes next.

“How do countries get out of this? When is it possible to reverse the resource curse, and when is that most likely to happen? That’s what I’m interested in exploring right now,” she says.

Uvsh’s interest in resource-rich nations is itself a natural one. She was born and grew up in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert just as the country was emerging from its Soviet past and transitioning to a democratic government. The questions that confronted Mongolians then continue to influence her research now. “My formative years in Mongolia were shaped by this curiosity about, ‘Is Mongolia on the right path politically, economically, and policy-wise? Are we going in a direction that will benefit the country as a whole or not?’ That is what we would hear on the news, what my parents and relatives were talking about,” she remembers. “So, it was natural for me to be curious about how changes happen in these post-Soviet countries.”

It turns out the answer, at least for Mongolia, is closely tied to the country’s natural wealth. Its deep deposits of copper, gold, and coal helped fund its transformation from one of the poorest former Soviet nations to an “oasis of democracy” and continue to support a huge portion of its economy. But while Mongolia’s enduring democracy is remarkable, the country hasn’t proven immune to the resource curse. It experiences a high level of corruption, and the Mongolian government has not always been transparent about how revenues from natural resources are handled or spent.

So how can a country like Mongolia reverse elements of the resource curse? In her current book project, Uvsh outlines one possible answer. It all has to do with “negative shocks,” or sharp and sustained declines in government revenues from resources that can lead to economic crises.

“In almost all cases of natural resource-dependent countries,” she explains, “they inevitably go through a decline in natural resource revenue. When it comes to oil and gas in particular, these times of negative shocks, particularly times of long-lasting negative shocks, are the exact moments when positive changes can happen. These moments of tough times can be used as opportunities to make policy changes because it’s then that governments are most willing to listen to business owners or other non-government actors. They are, in some ways, in a fiscally patient position.”

Mongolia’s recent history offers a helpful example of this theory in practice. In the early 2010s, commodity prices were high and money was flowing into the country, Uvsh says. Then, beginning around 2014, prices fell, with serious implications for government budgets across the nation. Tellingly, this period coincided with Mongolia taking steps to diversify its economy, such as increasing its support of the cashmere industry, small business owners, and female entrepreneurs.

The negative shock effect can be seen outside Mongolia too. Take the oil-and-gas-producing regions of Russia. “When the governments of these regions were faced with what they consider permanent negative shocks — when they thought the lost oil and gas revenue wasn’t coming back and there was a political story behind that — they worked really hard to expand their tax base,” Uvsh says. “They established things like one-stop windows that make state business interactions easier and state organizations that facilitate dialogue between the government and businesses. We see this increase in initiatives that the governments took because they needed to tax these businesses. That incentivized them to be more open, to be more inclusive, and to listen to these businesses more intently than in positive shock times.”

It may sound counter-intuitive that something called a negative shock could have such positive downstream effects, but Uvsh sees her findings as analogous to other parts of day-to-day life.

“On a personal level, when there’s something negative going on, we can look at it as an opportunity to change our lifestyle,” she points out. “So, I think this is a very intuitive finding that tough times force us to think about the longer term and can require us to make painful changes that we didn’t have to make when times were good.”

It’s the longer term thinking here that’s essential, Uvsh says, because short-term negative shocks can actually further entrench resource-curse-type governmental behavior. In the case of Russia’s oil-and-gas regions, for example, short-term shocks see upticks in corruption, state inspections, and general government interference in business.

“We can think of these instances as the government trying to hang on until their revenue comes back, and in order to do that sometimes they may have to resort to more extractive behavior from the business community,” she explains.

In addition to her work on the resource curse and negative shocks, Uvsh approaches her main theme — the causes of change in post-Soviet nations — in other ways. There’s her work on Mongolian political parties, for one, which she sees as both foundational to the country’s democracy and as exhibiting warning signs of instability. And then there are the undergraduate and graduate courses she leads, which expand far beyond Mongolia and Russia to encompass almost 30 present-day countries across two continents.

“We look into the experiences of the 28 countries that were either part of the Soviet Union or were satellites to it to understand how the political regimes and institutions have developed since the fall of the Soviet Union,” Uvsh says. “And we do a lot of comparison between different countries and different modalities that these countries have gone through in order to transition to different political regimes from the communist regime.”

Her emphasis on comparisons marks Uvsh as a scholar in the comparative politics subfield of political science, she says. It’s also one of the most important things she hopes students take away from her teaching and her work.

“These scientific-inquiry techniques are something we spend considerable time on,” Uvsh says, “because I want my students to be better thinkers and readers of science, to think about their own reflections, conclusions, and observations in a comparative term and be aware of why they’re reaching the conclusions they do. If they change their lens with another one, will that change their conclusion? How? The idea is that these are skills that they can then use for any question about any topic, whether it’s about politics, economics, or health.”

While the future for Mongolia and other resource-rich nations is far from settled — Mongolia itself is currently experiencing ongoing political uncertainty related to allegations of government corruption, and global resource markets remain unstable — Uvsh is certain that the social science techniques she practices in her own scholarship and shares with students will continue to expand our understanding of both the resource curse and what comes after. And she’s certain of this, too: The resource curse, like everything else, can change for the better.

Our guest on this episode of the Extra Credit podcast is English professor Frederick Luis Aldama, or “Professor Latinx,” as he’s affectionately known in the world of comics and comics studies. He is co-editor of the newly published comics anthology From Cocinas to Lucha Libre Ringsides: A Latinx Comics Anthology, for which he invited an array of talented comic artists and writers to collaborate to create short graphic stories on either sports or food that intersect in some fashion with Latino identity and culture.

We talk about the book, which includes a story on which he is a collaborator. We also talk about the greater world of Latinx comics scholarship, a field of study which he helped bring into existence and within which he has written dozens of books over the course of decades. He’s more than just a scholar, in other words. He’s an institution, community, and canon builder, which is a rare thing to be able to say about someone.

This isn’t the first time Aldama has featured here on Extra Credit: Back in our very early days he generously provided a reading list for anyone new to the comic genre or looking to dive deeper, and it’s just as insightful and inspiring now as it was then. Review that list at the link below, read more about Professor Latinx’s origin story here, and listen to our discussion here or wherever you get your podcasts.

Julija Šukys, associate professor of English and author of Artifact: Encounters with the Campus Shooting Archives, recommends The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing

Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time proceeds by association. Using the rehabilitation of her new-to-her home garden as a frame, the author then fans out across history to consider what horticulture reveals about power, care, and time. She introduces us to towering figures like Capability Brown, whose grand landscapes inspire both admiration and unease, bound as they are to authority and hierarchy. Surprisingly (at least to me), the book considers W. G. Sebald as a garden writer, providing a new view on a beloved literary figure, asking what it means to tend what is fragile, fleeting, and shared.

Chad Seales, associate professor of religious studies and subject of “Deus Ex Machina?”, recommends God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O’Gieblyn

This is the one book that I’ve recommended the most this past year. It’s a book that makes you think twice about the promise of Artificial Intelligence and predictive technologies to usher in new forms of human freedom and flourishing. O’Gieblyn, who exited the theological world of evangelical Christianity with a host of questions that led her towards agnosticism, found the theological problems she thought she left behind regenerated within technological futurism. Rather than professing faith in a mysterious God who predestined some for heaven and some for hell, humans now submitted to the unknown forces of data machines that determined our fate. God, Human, Animal, Machine is a wonderfully written and staggeringly honest account of what it means to be human in the face of the unknown we have come to believe can know us more than we know ourselves.

Kirsten Cather, professor of Asian studies, director of the Center for East Asian Studies, and author of Scripting Suicide in Japan, recommends The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa

Even in my pleasure reading, I can’t seem to get away from dark, haunting topics. But this novel haunts in a good way. It begins with a simple premise: a totalitarian world where things disappear one-by-one, from the seemingly frivolous — roses and perfume — to essentials like maps, photographs, and books. First the object, then the words for that object, and eventually all memories are obliterated. For most people, these frictionless disappearances hardly disrupt their daily lives, but a select few retain their memories and become enemies of the state. Ogawa’s novel offers a beautiful meditation on the ways that censorship remains ever-present, shrinking our worlds. At the same time, it reminds us that being haunted by the beloved people and things we have lost in our lives offers its own form of salvation.

John Hoberman, professor of Germanic studies, recommends Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

It is no accident that Colson Whitehead has won two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction. He demonstrates perfect pitch as he creates the mood of his (Black) first-person narrator and the vernaculars that he and the other characters employ. He has a gift for composing conversations that flow effortlessly. On a larger scale, he invokes the major themes of African-American life with subtlety and weaves them into a larger narration about the various forms of segregation and fraud that are inherent in American life.

Kathleen Griesbach, assistant professor of sociology and subject of “Hustling Today to Rest Tomorrow,” recommends Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance by Karen Levy

Data Driven highlights the many (unintended) consequences of introducing new technology (specifically the electronic logging device, or ELD) into truckers’ work process in the 2010s. It shows how this technology only exacerbated truckers’ structural financial precarity while also threatening their sense of autonomy and expertise. The book is an ethnography that also highlights the modern history of trucking and how truckers’ lives and livelihoods came to be so insecure (for more on the latter, the sociologist Steve Viscelli wrote another great book called The Big Rig). Somehow this book also manages to be a rich and vivid investigation of the trucker in American culture! Data Driven has insights for thinking about trucking and technology today, including the experiments in driverless trucks we’re seeing on Texas highways. It shows how technology’s impacts are fundamentally shaped by social interactions and social forces, showing how technological change is contingent and unpredictable at a moment when it might feel inevitable.

Jason Cons, associate professor of anthropology and author of Delta Futures: Time, Territory, and Capture on a Climate Frontier, recommends Absolution: A Southern Reach Novel by Jeff VanderMeer

I typically avoid dystopian fiction: the climate realities that I work on are dystopian enough. But this year, I was thrilled by the return of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series. VanderMeer’s books explore “Area X” — a mysterious disturbed ecology cut off from but located in a place resembling Southern Florida. They are some of the eeriest, strangest, and most satisfying works of speculative fiction I’ve read. Absolution is a genre-bending prequel to his original trilogy that blends noir with Southern gothic and an eye for the profoundly uncanny. I loved this book.

Yoav Di-Capua, professor of history and director of the Institute for Historical Studies, recommends The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present by Fredric Jameson

Have you ever wondered what all the fancy academic talk about “theory” — French theory in particular — is really about? How did a post–World War II foreign system of thought come to exert such an iron grip on the cultural and political imagination of at least three generations of American professors? And what kind of cultural work did French theory perform on American campuses?

In this posthumously published book, American literary critic and philosopher Fredric Jameson takes the reader on a personal journey through half a century of French theory. At times idiosyncratic and at others more conventional, The Years of Theory is not intended as an introduction to contemporary French philosophy but rather as a meditation on it — and a distinctly American one at that. From the spectacular ascent of existentialism and structuralism, through post-structuralism and high postmodernism, Jameson explores key philosophical moments and turning points, engaging with household names such as Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Guattari, Deleuze, Kristeva, Foucault, Lyotard, Rancière, Baudrillard, Alain Badiou, and many others.

With characteristic irony, Jameson reflects on how “theory” shifted from a revolutionary mode of thought opposed to the totalizing nature of “the system” into a hegemonic system in its own right. Marked by an aura of exclusivity and elitism, and by the promise of an esoteric path to hidden knowledge about virtually everything, one might be tempted to dismiss theory as an irrelevant academic affectation. That would be a mistake. Its fingerprints can be found across nearly every front of the American culture wars — most notably in debates over grand narratives, great texts, and the structure of the college curriculum, to say nothing about questions of race and gender. Both critical and sympathetic, Jameson’s timely book invites us to imagine a much-needed new phase in the humanities, one in which a more synthetic and relaxed engagement with the cultural legacies of Europe and America might finally command broad consensus.

Frances Champagne, professor of psychology and associate dean of research in the College of Liberal Arts, recommends The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

In 2025, I read Hillary Mantel’s final novel — the third from her Wolf Hall trilogy — focused on Thomas Cromwell and the intrigues of 16^th century England during Henry VIII’s reign. Published in 2020, Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning historical fiction is a delight to experience and brings to life a personal narrative of its infamous protagonist. This final novel is full of foreboding as Cromwell navigates the ever-changing political landscape of his time and both the triumph and perils of royal favor. The novel weaves in imagined dialogues with ghosts from Cromwell’s past creating a haunting finale to a truly remarkable story.

Chelsi West Ohueri, assistant professor of Slavic and Eurasian studies and author of Encountering Race in Albania: An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife, recommends Create Dangerously by Edwidge Danticat

Create Dangerously is not a new book, but it is a deeply personal and moving book by one of my favorite writers, and I revisit the book often whenever I am trying to envision, to write, and to create. I love to read Danticat’s words as she wrestles with memory, storytelling, and voice. During my most recent read I really connected with Danticat’s recounting of reading in public libraries in her youth because I too have been returning to reading and writing in public libraries. The book consists of personal essays which makes it a great source for reading sections at a time or finishing it all at once.

Emily Drumsta, assistant professor of Middle Eastern studies and author of Ways of Seeking: The Arabic Novel and the Poetics of Investigation, recommends The Parisian by Isabella Hammad

My favorite book that I read in 2025 was hands-down Isabella Hammad’s The Parisian. A work of historical fiction set during the British mandate era in Palestine (1917-1948), this chronicle of the life of Midhat Kamel, the son of a wealthy textile merchant from Nablus, introduces readers to the history of nationalism in and around Palestine better than nearly any work of straight-ahead history I know. Lost letters, star-crossed lovers, a mad priest in a Nablus asylum, and the negotiations of family, marriage, friendship, and other loyalties (ethnic, religious, nationalist) engage the reader from start to finish; you’ll barely feel its 595 pages as they pass. A highlight for this reader was a small, throwaway moment when the protagonist travels by train from Cairo direct to Nablus; if only such a journey were so easy today.

Brenda Boonabaana, assistant professor of geography and the environment featured in “People of the Park,” recommends The Routledge Handbook of Tourism and Indigenous Peoples, edited by R. Butler and A. Thompson-Carr

This book provides global perspectives on tourism and indigenous people. As one of the contributors (see chapter 12), I was motivated to engage deeply with the work of fellow authors, which made my experience highly rewarding. I love the book so much, and it made my year awesome!

I particularly enjoyed chapter 14, “Stewarding Māori Taonga for Sustainable Indigenous Tourism Enterprise,” by Ashley Puriri and Allison McIntosh. They nicely highlight the value of local community-based cultural and environmental stewardship that shape their sustainable business ethos. I quote: “Upholding the wisdom of their Kaumātua, the founders of Taiamai Tours strive to ensure they follow the advice of their elders to ‘Tiaki Te Taonga’ or, look after the rare and precious resources. This drives the enterprise’s commitment to both cultural, social and environmental sustainability, honoring intergenerational responsibility so that the world they live in will be kept the same way they inherited it from their ancestors.”

Desmond Ong, assistant professor of psychology, recommends Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI by Karen Hao

Hao’s book puts forward a history and analysis of the latest wave of Generative AI technology, specifically focusing on the explosive growth of OpenAI. It discusses the worldviews and ideologies held by some of today’s most influential technology leaders, with Generative AI being the fastest-growing commercially-consequential technology. But it also sheds light on some of the outcomes of such concentration of power using an analogy to empires of old, such as the extractive and exploitative transfer of resources (intellectual property; human labor; minerals, electricity, and water) from Global South countries — as well as creative professions like writers and artists — to Silicon Valley.

Two weeks ago we ran the first half of a Q&A with UT Austin philosophy professor Michael Tye, one of our most influential contemporary philosophers of mind. If you haven’t read it, I encourage you to do so before you go any further — you can find it here. If you did, then you’ll remember that we discussed what it means to be conscious at all, how we can make determinations about who and what have this experience, and whether our understanding of consciousness could and should expand to include AI machines or models.

In this issue of Extra Credit, we’re sharing the second half of that discussion. The format here is a little different: Rather than continuing to ask Tye my own questions, I opened the floor for UT faculty, students, and alumni to ask theirs, and the resulting conversation covers a wide variety of related topics. The questions have been anonymized, and both questions and responses have been lightly edited for clarity. I hope you find it as thought-provoking as I did.

Michael, you seem to argue that if we observe sufficiently realistic outputs or complex behaviors, we can infer the presence of thinking or consciousness so long as there is no defeater. But isn’t the key defeater in the case of large language models that we know they have been programmed through semi-Pavlovian training to approximate plausible responses more and more closely over time? Why doesn’t that count as a defeater, at least in the case of LLMs if not of all possible artificial intelligence paradigms.

The networks are certainly trained up via reinforcement learning, and they’re trained up in such a way that they pick the most probable outcomes given the inputs. There’s no question that the training is sort of statistical, but it’s not clear that what ends up from that training itself operates in a purely statistical way. If it is indeed the case that the system is operating purely statistically — it’s just picking the statistically most likely outcome and there is nothing more complex than that going on inside — then I think that gives us a reason to think that there isn’t consciousness that’s present, but it’s not clear that that’s what’s going on in all of these cases.

You mentioned Claude Sonnet from Anthropic. What researchers found with respect to Claude Sonic was whether or not they gave it inputs about the Golden Gate Bridge in English, Korean, Japanese, or whether they gave it visual inputs of pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge, there kept recurring internally a pattern of activations which they thought was most plausibly viewed as a common representation of the Golden Gate Bridge. And it’s really quite striking because, after all, these inputs are physically very different. English doesn’t sound like Korean and none of the languages are anything like the visual inputs, but the same pattern of activation kept being generated. So somehow the network, through its training, had ended up — this was the claim made by the Anthropic people — constructing a representation of the Golden Gate Bridge which was then used in giving accurate responses to questions about the Golden Gate Bridge. If you’ve got evidence of that sort, then you’ve got evidence of a sort to make you think that the situation is more complex than it might first appear and that it isn’t just statistical.

But if it is just statistical, then I agree. You have to say, despite how the behavior looks, there isn’t consciousness present.

How might you address this argument: Machines, such as a very advanced LLM, might have behaviors and representations such as beliefs about things that they can’t possibly know, like the feeling of a breeze on skin. Humans can imagine this and can imagine new experiences, but they have to base it in things that they’ve already experienced, whereas this machine has never felt anything like a breeze. The knowledge of the machine, then, is based on learned facts. This is like the knowledge argument, where someone who learns all these facts about red but never experience red aren’t actually conscious of that experience. So we can’t trust that these representations of the machine are reflective of phenomenal consciousness, and therefore we should not believe that these machines are conscious.

With respect to the case of pure large language models that are trained up with a linguistic input and then give a linguistic output, I agree there with respect to the example that you’ve just mentioned, because they don’t have any inputs of the right sort. But imagine that the situation is more complex — that you’ve got a much, much more complicated network which takes inputs through a whole bunch of different sense modalities. That network is embedded in a robot body and enables the robot body to move around and imagine that the inputs are something like the inputs that our own bodies have. Then I think the situation is not so obvious. It depends in part, as you say, on the situation that the robot has found itself in. If it’s in an environment in which there are breezes, as it were, which impact their receptors, maybe that robot is in more of a position to understand what it’s like to experience a wind or a breeze of a certain sort than one who hasn’t. I don’t see why we have to suppose there that there couldn’t be experience of the sort that we undergo.

But I agree with the following point, that being able simply to talk about consciousness, as a number of large language models can, is not sufficient to conclude that they genuinely are conscious. There was an engineer who worked for Google, Blake Lemoine. He had an AI called LaMDA, and he went public with the claim that, as a result of conversations with LaMDA, he was convinced that it was conscious. Google then fired him.

So he had these long conversations with LaMDA, and LaMDA talked intelligently about consciousness. But talking about consciousness and being conscious are two radically different things. I think in that case, the range of inputs was much, much too limited to license the conclusion that he drew. The kind of robot that I’m envisaging here is one in which you’ve got a much more complex multimodal input, taking a variety of inputs. I’m envisaging one that’s embedded in a robot body with an artificial skin that reacts to stimuli of various sorts — something like our skin that’s equipped with auditory systems, visual systems, and so on — and which has had a complex training, not unlike the training we have as we grow, it just would be faster for the robot given the way in which these things are done. Then I think, depending on how it behaves, it’s not irrational to think that it’s subject to consciousness at all.

Maybe you’ve mostly answered this, but have you seen evidence thus far that AI systems exhibit intentionality or are agentic in a way that would suggest something approaching human level consciousness? It sounds like what you’re saying, Michael, is that we’re probably not there yet. What we have evidence of is that there’s a likelihood that we will get there, or that we can kind of set some benchmarks such that, when we achieve them, we will feel some degree of confidence that we’ve gotten there, but we’re not there yet.

That’s essentially correct. I think that a lot of people don’t yet fully appreciate quite how far we’ve got. The latest AI from OpenAI can solve problems in theoretical physics which are too hard for most doctorates in theoretical physics. And if you ask the AI how it’s coming out with the solution, it’ll give you an answer, which sure makes it look as if it’s going through careful steps of reasoning. It will explain how it went from this to this to this and then got to the conclusion.

There’s another example that just came out in the last year of a very, very complex crossword puzzle that was given to Claude and to OpenAI’s latest AI. I think the crossword was really pretty dubious, but one of the clues was “Galaxy cluster.” You immediately think of stars and stuff. It’s a four-letter word, and the was “apps” — it was a play on Samsung Galaxy.

What happened when this puzzle was given to the AIs was Claude immediately gave an answer to that — “star” or something like that — which was wrong, and then Claude couldn’t do the rest of the puzzle. But the latest OpenAI machine, it paused for 108 seconds before it did anything. They probed it and asked, “what’s going on here?” And then they got responses from the machine and they were exactly the sorts of responses that you or I might give when we were looking at a really hard crossword puzzle: coming up with ideas as to what might be right and how it might fit in with other words we’ve thought of as answers to other clues. It’s strongly suggestive that something like reasoning was going on there.

When you put these pieces of data together — the bit about the Golden Gate Bridge, the capacity to solve new problems — I don’t really see any strong reason to deny that some of these machines are, or at least are very close to being, able to reason and think things through. Once you’ve got that and you’ve got a sufficiently complex range of inputs and you’ve got complex bodies, then I think you have to take seriously the idea that the robots can be conscious too and that you’ve artificially created something like an organism in the natural world.

I may be posing this question in the wrong way, but is consciousness, or what you’re talking about as the hard problem of consciousness, a yes or no phenomenon? In other words, in the case of an animal, can we decide whether they’re conscious or not? We said a leech’s nervous system is too simple; it can’t be conscious. But is there a level of complexity at which consciousness begins, and is there a gray area where we can’t really decide? I’m thinking in terms of human development. For example, are children conscious at birth, or do they become conscious over the course of time? Is there a transitional period when it isn’t clear whether they are or aren’t conscious?

Those are hard questions. One general observation first, which may not be directly related, but I’ve come to think that consciousness itself is an on-off matter. You’re either conscious or you’re not. The notion of borderline consciousness doesn’t make any sense. What makes sense is to ask how broadly one is conscious of things. With consciousness, it’s as if the light goes on, bang!, and then as one makes one’s way the light gets richer and richer. But the idea that there’s something present which is not definitely conscious and not definitely not-conscious, once you think about it enough it’s very hard to think of examples. If you wake up in the morning, you’re kind of groggy. People might say, well, are you conscious or not? I would say you’re conscious, but your consciousness is much less rich in that case.

So that’s a further puzzle. How could consciousness be something that’s completely on and off? Because things in the physical world generally are not just on and off, they admit of borderline cases. Now, obviously our consciousness is generally richer than that of other organisms, though of course in specific areas, other organisms may have a richer consciousness —for example, dogs with smells. What we want to explain is how it is that we get a richer consciousness rather than a less rich one.

So, it’s a good question, but I don’t see that as particularly puzzling, I’m afraid.

How much do you think that this whole recent boom in AI and LLMs has changed these fundamental philosophical questions about phenomenal consciousness? Is there some new data on the table or are we basically just having the same old conversations?

If you’re asking “have the new discoveries managed to give us a deeper understanding of phenomenal consciousness,” then I think the answer to that is no. But I don’t think that until recently, due to a lot of what has gone on recently, people have considered the question of the extent of consciousness in the way in which we are now considering it. Some of the things that these AIs are capable of doing, they’re not things that we would ever have predicted in the past. Now we find that they do do these things, we have to take seriously the question as to whether they’re conscious or not. But if you’re asking me, “have we managed with these new discoveries to come to a solution of the hard problem,” I would say no.

My sense is that it hasn’t fundamentally changed the questions, it’s changed some of our thought experiments. We can now carry around a Chinese room and a pea zombie in our pocket, which makes that thought experiment more interesting.

I think I agree with that sentiment. It’s not that the things that are happening now in the world of these machines has radically deepened our understanding of anything. But it’s challenged us to take seriously the question of whether there could be, actually in our lifetimes, genuinely conscious artificial beings. It now looks as if the answer to that is yes. The kind of intelligence these machines are beginning to exhibit in some cases is very striking.

There’s another company called One X, which I think is some sort of subsidiary of OpenAI, that has got a bunch of robots that operate completely autonomously. There’s a single neural net in their head, and the neural net controls their behavior and you can see them walking around, picking up packages, going to charge themselves, cleaning rooms, picking up toys that have been left around in a house, and so on. What you’ve got here are these machines that are operating autonomously via an internal net and engaging in quite complex behavior. This is going to continue and it’s going to become more and more complex. As it does so, then, I think we have to start taking seriously the idea that some of these nets will support consciousness.

I can’t resist mentioning this: I was woken up yesterday at my house by a noise at the courtyard at the front. There was a robot dog that had come down the steps and it was delivering a package to the front door. It delivered the package, dropped it, turned around and went up back to the street and sort of sat by the van to get in it, much to my astonishment. So this stuff is happening all around us, and it’s going to continue to get richer and richer and God knows what the final consequences will be.

You’re obviously paying close attention to the literature that’s coming from, I assume it’s primarily computer science journals, about what we understand about what’s happening inside of these large language models and maybe the robots that are operating on similar principles. Is there something you’re on the lookout for? Are there questions you think may be answered in the next few years that would be of particular interest to you in light of these questions? Or was the threshold the Golden Great Bridge example, where we start to see things that look like kind of cognitive representations in the software?

I think it would be interesting to see that develop further. And there’s some argument about whether there really is, in that case, a genuine internal representation of the Golden Gate Bridge. But I think it would be great if there was more done in that direction and if it could be agreed that internal representations are being generated by the machines that then are responsible for its behavior, rather than the machine operating in a purely statistical way as is the case with the auto complete on your phone. It’s hard to predict how it’s going to go, but I would be interested to see that, and I’m sure we’re going to get more and more of that since it’s crucially relevant.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with an example by Jeffrey Hinton, in which he gave a problem to Chat GPT, and it sure doesn’t look as if the machine giving its answer is operating purely statistically. The problem is quite simple really. You have a house in which some of the walls are white, some are yellow and some are blue. Yellow paint fades to white in one year. In two years’ time, you want all the walls in your house to be white. What should you do? Chat GPT came up with the right answer in less than one second. Hinton said it sure doesn’t look as if somehow, by combing through statistics from past problems like that, it somehow statistically came up with the right answer. It looks as if something else is going on there, just as it looks as if something else is going on with the latest OpenAI and the crossword puzzle or the AI that can solve problems in theoretical physics. It looks as if what happens is, after a sufficient amount of training, a kind of mechanism gets generated and almost clicks into place.

There was another case I read in which some workers at OpenAI had been trying to get a machine to add together two numbers, and it kept getting it wrong. They accidentally left it on for two days and when they came back, much to their amazement, it was finally doing it correctly. How come it suddenly got to do the math correctly? It’s like a mechanism had clicked into place. I talked last summer to a guy who has a part-time appointment at Imperial College London who’s also employed by Google, and he thought that that’s what happens in cases like this: that, in fact, via the training, various mechanisms get created, not deliberately, but they just end up getting generated, and those then have an impact on the behavior that results.

In our current age of widespread large language model AI, philosophical questions of consciousness feel particularly relevant. What does it mean to be conscious, and is this an experience exclusive to humans? If not — if we’re willing to accept that non-human organisms can experience consciousness similar to ours — could our understanding of consciousness expand to include sophisticated AI models, now or in the future?

To help answer these questions and more, I spoke earlier this fall with UT Austin philosophy professor Michael Tye, who also happens to be one of our most influential contemporary philosophers of mind. His books, including Ten Problems of Consciousness and Tense Bees and Shell-Shocked Crabs: Are Animals Conscious?, have helped shape current debates about consciousness in humans and non-humans. In his new paper, the well-titled “How Can We Tell if a Machine is Conscious?”, he turns his attention to the possibility of AI consciousness and alternatives to the famous Turing test.

Below is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for concision and clarity. The second half of our conversation, featuring an open Q&A-style discussion with UT Austin faculty, students, and alumni, will be published on Extra Credit in the coming weeks.

Michael, thanks for joining us. Before we get into whether machines can be conscious, I’ll start with the obvious question. What is consciousness? What do we mean when we talk about it, and what does it mean to have it?

I think it’s useful initially to distinguish between what is sometimes called “creature consciousness” and what is sometimes called “state consciousness.” Creature consciousness is consciousness that creatures have for various things. For example, imagine I’m conscious that I’m late for an appointment. That is an attribute of me; I’m a creature. That’s an example of creature consciousness, and it’s also a self-consciousness.

Another kind of creature consciousness is higher order consciousness. This is the consciousness creatures have of what’s going on in their own minds, consciousness of a mental state by another mental state. Then there’s a very general notion of consciousness which creatures have. Suppose I say to you, “let me go upstairs to see if my daughter’s conscious yet.” All I really mean there is, “let me go upstairs and see if she’s functioning properly, if she’s awake and can come down and have a conversation.”

Those are three kinds of consciousness. They’re important in various ways, but they’re not the kinds of consciousness that philosophers are primarily puzzled about. Historically, I think what has happened is that when scientists have talked to philosophers, they didn’t quite get the kind of consciousness that philosophers were on about. So they thought, what’s the big puzzle here? And then they proposed theories with respect to the sorts of consciousness I’ve just distinguished.

The kind of consciousness I haven’t gone through yet is state consciousness. The idea here is that some of our mental states — some, but not all — are inherently conscious. Some examples would be pain, the visual experience of red, the experience of anger, feeling an itch. Those mental states are such that by their very nature they are conscious mental states; they have a distinctive conscious or subjective character to them. That kind of consciousness is known as phenomenal consciousness, and it’s what philosophers have been primarily puzzled about. What is it exactly that these states have that makes them have their distinctive phenomenal or subjective character? And how are we to understand how that arises as a result of neurological activity? How are we to fit it into our overall picture of the structure of the world? This has given rise to what has come to be called “the hard problem of consciousness.”

What is the hard problem of consciousness, and why do we care about it?

Well, because we want to understand ourselves, and it’s a big stretch for our understanding of ourselves. The hard problem of consciousness is associated with David Chalmers, but he didn’t really invent this problem. There are plenty of people who’ve formulated the problem in one form or another right the way back to the late 1800s or something.

The thought is simply this: We get a story about what’s going on in the brain neurophysiologically, chemically, and, if you like to go down to this level, even quantum mechanically. We get a full detailed physical story of what’s going on when a certain kind of phenomenal conscious state is present. In the example of the feeling of pain, we get a complete physical story of the neurological chemical basis of the feeling of pain. It still seems to make perfectly good sense for us to ask ourselves how it is that that particular set of neurological goings-on generated this particular feeling. Why didn’t it generate a different feeling? Why didn’t it generate a feeling of an itch, for example? Why did it generate any feeling at all? There seems to be a huge gap in our understanding here; it’s called the explanatory gap. We can say that when this is going on physically, we get this subjective, conscious state, but we still want something more than that.

That’s the problem, and there are various strategies with respect to it. Some people argue that it’s not a genuine problem, it’s a pseudo problem. Other people take it seriously. And it’s resulted in there being some proposed theories that are, initially, at any rate, pretty counterintuitive.

In your paper, you give the example of a leech as something that doesn’t have anything like consciousness. It will move in such a way that we could imagine that it has a conscious experience of pain or desire, but from what we know scientifically about how the leech’s neurons work, we can draw a pretty strong conclusion that it doesn’t have conscious experiences at all. But we feel that there’s something different about our experience. Can you say more about that distinction?

The leech doesn’t have many neurons. Its body is divided into segments, and I think that each segment has something like 400 neurons. If you look at how it is that leeches move, they appear to operate in a completely automatic, stimulus-response way. They have receptors that respond to vibrations in the ground that are made by their prey, so they can orient themselves with respect to their prey, and they have other receptors which pick up the scent that their prey emanates. These receptors make the leech automatically move in certain directions. It doesn’t move in those directions because it has decided to itself that it’s now going to move due to a desire of a certain sort. That’s not how the leech operates. The leech operates much more like an automatic door opener. If you stand in front of the automatic door, it’s not that it decides to open or wants to open. It’s built in such a way that it inevitably opens.

Not many animals, in my view, are at all like the leech here. It’s the exception rather than the rule. Usually animals move as they do because of decisions that they make reflecting desires and beliefs that they have. There’s a mental antecedent to their behavior.

Now, I think that the experiences that we have by their very nature play a certain role for us. They enable us to form appropriate beliefs and make appropriate decisions. For example, suppose I have a visual experience of red. What it’s representing with respect to some object before me, that information is available to my cognitive centers. I can then believe that the object before me is red and make certain decisions as to where I want to move. Experiences in general, I think, are cognitively poised. They stand ready and available to make a direct difference with respect to what we want, what we believe, what we decide.

Another example is the feeling of pain. When you feel pain, that is immediately available to the centers that form desires. You want it to stop; you believe the source of the pain is over here; that then makes you form a decision to move in this other direction, and off you go. Experiences produce behavior, but they do so via various cognitive estates. In the case of the leech, you don’t have anything of that sort going on, so I think that leeches are not conscious. But in many other animals, I think it’s plausible to suppose that you get the behavior as a result of various cognitive states. It’s plausible to suppose that those cognitive states are present because various experiences are present.

When I think about the “hard problem of consciousness,” intuitively what I hear is that there’s something special about consciousness. It’s not just that it’s a hard problem — there’s lots of hard problems in science — it’s that there’s something special and distinctive about the problem of consciousness in particular. Do you think that’s right?

That’s a reasonable response. One thing we might say here is that there are other hard problems too, but the more you reflect on consciousness, the weirder the situation seems, because it doesn’t seem as if there’s any immediate connection between what we get from science about what’s going on in the brain and what we experience. Why does that collection of physical goings on feel this way? Why doesn’t it feel some other very different way? Our feelings vary hugely subjectively, so why does it feel exactly this way? It seems like there’s a reasonable question to ask. It seems like there should be an answer to it, but it seems whatever else we come up with, we get a more detailed story about what’s going on functionally. But again, why does that produce this feeling?

There are things that can be said, and I myself have said them through the years, because I’ve been a committed, straightforward physicalist, if you look back to many of my earlier publications. But the problem is, if you stick around long enough, you have time to reflect. And what you want, in the end, is a view that you can believe. And what I found myself coming to think was that something had been left out. Intellectual honesty required me to admit that and then to consider some other alternatives.

What do you mean when you say that in your earlier development you were a pure physicalist? Do you mean that you thought consciousness was a pseudo problem, that there was something about the way our brains work that made us feel as though there was an experience of consciousness that couldn’t be explained in traditionally physicalist terms?

Basically that was what I thought. We all have to agree that there is this puzzle here. We then can either take it at face value and admit that as yet we have no answer to it, or we can make various proposals that would be consistent with our saying things like “pain is such and such a neurological state” or “pain is such and such a functional state.”

One way in which people in philosophy historically have tried to do that is by saying that we have very special ways of conceiving of our experiences and feelings. They’re really just brain states or whatever, but we have special ways of conceiving of them that generate in us the illusion that they’re radically different from the physical goings on when in reality they aren’t. I and others have told detailed stories of that sort, but I think, in the end, philosophers have sort of collectively come to the conclusion that they’re not satisfying enough. And that’s what I think myself, unfortunately.

One view that at least I think is worth taking seriously is that maybe there’s a straightforward answer to the hard problem, but maybe we’re cognitively closed to that answer by the structure of our minds. It’s not as if, given the evolutionary niche we occupy, we’re going to be able to solve all problems with respect to the universe. If you take rats, for example, they can’t solve problems in theoretical physics, their minds aren’t appropriately structured for them to be able to do that. Maybe we’re in something like that state with respect to the hard problem and there really is a straightforward, satisfying solution, but we can’t get our minds around it. I think that’s possible, but it’s not satisfying. So we continue to consider whether there are alternative answers.

Let’s switch to the question of the day. Can machines be conscious? And before we get into what your answer means, what’s your yes or no answer?

Yes.

Okay. Maybe the next question is: What are the key things we need to know to be able to answer that? How do you go about answering a question like that for yourself?

It’s like the question about animal consciousness. I think the way to proceed there is to look at the animal’s behavior in the first instance and ask why the animal is behaving in the way that it is. Likewise, I think, with machines.

If you take our own case, for each of our experiences and feelings, there’s a kind of distinctive behavior that goes along with it. Just stick with a simple example of pain. Initially there’s a characteristic cluster of behaviors that’s generated by the feeling of pain. Some of these behaviors are more complex than simply pulling your injured limb away from the damaging stimulus. There’s something called trade-off behavior, which is very important. If you are feeling pain as a result of doing something, but you are doing it and it has great value to you, you’ll put up with the pain and continue to behave in that way. And if you go through it, there’s a complex cluster of behaviors that is generated by the feeling of pain.

When we look at other animals, one thing we see is whether that cluster of behaviors is found in them. If it is, then you’ve got the overt appearance of pain. I think that is a reason to believe that they genuinely do feel pain unless we’ve got some further information that undercuts that inference. Some debates go on about whether neurological differences are salient, but I think that, in the end, the best way to proceed is through the animal’s behavior. If you look at other mammals, fish, and arguably even some insects, you find quite complex behaviors that are straightforwardly explainable on the assumption that they’re feeling something like us, namely pain, and which can’t be explained satisfactorily if we take a different view.

In the machine world, imagine that we’ve got a machine that is running a variant on today’s large language models in that the machine not only takes linguistic inputs to its “brain” but also takes inputs of a whole host of sorts: inputs about what’s happening on the surface of its body, inputs visually to the system. Imagine the robot has a head and the neural network is embedded in the head auditory inputs. You get inputs on forces to the body, and you equip it in such a way that it can generate behavior of the appropriate source. Then imagine that what’s happening after this is constructed is that you’re getting very complex behavior under certain circumstances when the robot damages its body, behavior of the sort that we would produce if we were feeling pain as a result of damage to our bodies. Then I think prima facie we can at least take seriously the idea that the robot is feeling pain.

Now, that’s not the only possibility — and this is where things get kind of complicated — because what’s really going on in these networks, if we just look at large language models, is not well understood. We know what went on when we trained up these networks to give the desired outputs, but there are different views about exactly what’s going on internally in these networks. I think that makes a difference to how reasonable inference is with respect to there being in such and such an internal state.

You’ve coined a phrase, “Newton’s rule.” Can you talk about what that is? I think it’ll be obvious to people how that applies to this case, and I think it’s an interesting question of how we ultimately arrive at a conclusion and say a machine is or isn’t conscious. The one that a lot of people will know, which you don’t think is adequate, is the Turing test. You have a related but different approach to determining whether something is what it seems to be.

My view on the Turing test is that the way the system behaves gives us evidence of various sorts, but contra Turing, I don’t think being intelligent is just behaving in an apparently intelligent way. With Newton’s rule, what Newton said was: if you find in nature a given effect occurring on a bunch of occasions, and every time the same cause is operative, then when you meet that effect again on a new occasion, it’s rational for you to believe that the same cause is operative unless you’ve got some reason to think that there is a difference in the new case that makes a difference. Obviously the new case will be different in a bunch of ways, but unless you have evidence that those differences make a difference, you’re entitled to think that the same cause is operative for that effect.

In some ways that dovetails with what I said earlier about behavior. You find in the animal world the same behavior repeated, and that behavior matches the sort of behavior that we know in human beings is generated by the feeling of pain. The thought is in all the cases in which we have the behavior and we know the cause, we know it’s the feeling of pain that generates it. Arguably we don’t have reason to think that the differences make a difference, so it’s rational for us to believe that the same cause is operative there. Of course, we could be wrong. To say this even more cautiously, maybe we should say it’s rational for us to prefer the view that the organism feels pain to denying it. Maybe our credence level is not quite high enough to entitle us to be definite believers, but it at least makes it rational for us to prefer that view given the way the organism is behaving.

So, why shouldn’t we extend that methodology when we encounter a robot of the future, which has a body associated with the neural network and is behaving in exactly the way that we behave when we feel pain? What we have to do in order to reach further conclusions here is to try and form some further judgments about what’s going on internally in the robot. In our own cases, as I mentioned earlier, it’s not that the feeling immediately generates the behavior. Various cognitive states interact and generate the behavior. The question is whether you can find in the robot not just the behavior but cognitive states of that sort, and that would require you find in the robot representational states, because beliefs and decisions are states that carry information, they have representational content. The question then is whether the machine is just behaving in a purely statistical way or whether it’s somehow coming to form internal representations which are then having an impact on their behavior. It’s an open question, given the behavior, whether the robot is feeling anything. We need to look in further to what’s going on cognitively, if anything at all, in the robot.

When I was reading about your idea of Newton’s rule, I was thinking about what the contrary position might be. I read Newton’s rule as saying your working hypothesis is something like “if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.” If a machine is producing behavior that we would interpret in ourselves as the subjective experience of pain or consciousness, the working hypothesis, until we disprove it, is that it’s experiencing consciousness. Then we try to understand certain things about its neurology, and if we then have reason to discount that experience, we reject the hypothesis.

Some version of the counter position here might be “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” I would think there would be other people, and this gets back to these questions of the hard problem of consciousness, who would say something like, “that’s so counter to our intuition and to our subjective experience of how the world works that you have to do better than that. The burden of proof really rests on the person who would say that machines are conscious.” What you’re saying is the burden of proof rests on the people who want to reject the obvious inference that if a machine’s behaving as though it’s conscious and we have no proof otherwise we should assume it’s conscious. Is that a fair way of framing at least part of the controversy?

I think that’s fair enough. Let me add a couple of things on another way of viewing Newton’s rule, which is sort of as an application of Occam’s razor. Why multiply causes unnecessarily? You keep getting the same effect. Why insist in the new cause as a completely new cause when the simpler hypothesis that it’s the same cause that’s operative is present?

As for the thought that we are just as entitled to go the other way and say, “no, the onus is upon you to prove the same thing is happening.” Well, there’s the opposite observation I’ve just made about not unnecessarily multiplying causes, but there’s also the following two thoughts. One is that we know that in the animal kingdom, brains vary quite dramatically. We don’t take that in and of itself as a reason to deny that the animals experience things as we do. There are interesting questions here as well, by the way, about what really is needed in human beings for the feeling of pain to be present. So the first thought is, in the animal kingdom, brains vary quite a lot, but that doesn’t prevent or preclude us from attributing experiences to those animals. We just think there are different neural realizations for the various experiences that their behavior suggests very strongly that they’re undergoing.

Secondly, there’s a kind of thought experiment in our own case which strikes me as relevant. Imagine that we have a silicon chip. We design it in such a way that it functions exactly as a given neuron in the visual cortex. We implant it in the human visual cortex and it takes inputs in exactly the same way. You can have transducers connected to the silicon chip, so there are wires coming in and a wire coming out, so you’ve got artificial dendrites and artificial axon, and basically it passes messages in just the same way as the neuron it replaces. There’s a pretty good argument I don’t have time to go through here that says, basically, if you do this one by one and you keep building out, you end up with a purely artificial visual cortex that will have no impact on visual consciousness. Visual consciousness will continue just as it did before; you will continue to believe that you’re subject to the same visual experiences as before; you’ll make all the same discriminations. If that’s true, then silicon chips are things of a sort that can support consciousness. Add that to the thought that these other animals are conscious, and then why shouldn’t we say that not just individuals as we are now, imagining them like us with parts of our brains replaced with silicon chips, but individuals built from scratch with silicon chip brains can be capable of consciousness?

Our guest on this episode of Extra Credit is Nahid Siamdoust, assistant professor of Middle Eastern studies at The University of Texas at Austin. We asked Siamdoust to join us to talk about the state of things in Iran, her native country and the subject of most of her work as both of an academic and a journalist.

We had this conversation over the summer, in the aftermath of the coordinated attacks on Iran by Israel and the United States, so if those events feel somewhat more present in the conversation than they may feel to US-based listeners several months later, that’s why. For the people in Iran, however, the dynamics we discuss with Siamdoust are not hazy at all. Nor are they for Siamdoust, who still has many family and friends in the country.

We cover a lot of ground. Siamdoust talks about her background, the complexities surrounding the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in 2022, the recent bombings in Iran by the U.S. and Israel, and the intricate dynamics within the Iranian diaspora. She talks about the internal and external factors affecting Iran’s political landscape, including media influences and the complicated relationship between Iranian citizens and their government. The conversation also touches on the potential future scenarios for Iran, including the possibility of military dictatorship or internal conflict following any regime change.

Siamdoust earned her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford. She is the author of Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran (Stanford, 2017), and has published in academic journals including Iranian Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Cultural Anthropology. Previously, she was Iran correspondent for Time Magazine and a Middle East correspondent for Al Jazeera International. Her recent commentaries have appeared in The New York Times, New Lines Magazine, Foreign Policy, BBC, and NPR. In 2023, she launched the podcast series “Woman, Life, Freedom: All in on Iran,” which captures and archives important knowledge on the 2022 uprising in Iran.

When discussing some of his favorite horror films, Patrick Walter praises moments that “trouble” the viewer. And while the ability to distress and disturb is certainly one measure of success in horror, there is a another meaning of “trouble” that seems equally applicable: to challenge or complicate. Although horror is sometimes dismissed as lowbrow schlock, to connoisseurs like Walter it is the perfect genre for both artistic innovation and complex interpretations.

An associate professor of instruction in UT’s Department of African & African Diaspora Studies, Walter teaches a course titled “Black Horror and Psychoanalysis” that examines horror film and literature through the theories of psychoanalytic pioneers like Sigmund Freud and Black political thinkers like Frantz Fanon. A close reading of the two films that bookend his course — Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Jordan Peele’s Get Out — illustrates how horror has the potential to provide insight into the hidden conflicts and desires that influence humanity at both the individual and societal level.

Since its inception in the late 19^th century, psychoanalytic theory, which seeks to uncover the repressed unconscious drives underlying human thoughts and behaviors, has also been deployed to analyze fictional works. Theorists and critics have long argued that art, whether intentionally or not, often mirrors the mysterious workings of the mind and thus the same tools can be used to unlock its meanings. Horror, which first emerged as gothic horror toward the end of the Enlightenment, is especially suited for such analysis, Walter explains, as it was already exploring the unconscious in the century before Freud formed his theory of the psyche.

“The Enlightenment is all about rationality and rational thought, but we’re not actually rational actors. There’s terror in our background,” says Walter. “What do we do with the French Revolution? What do we do with colonization? What do we do with the way we treat women? One of the major avenues in British culture was horror, which becomes a repository for the repressed of European consciousness.”

As gothic horror tried to process the contradictions of colonial violence and other ugly aspects of human behavior, it also projected the era’s fears of racial difference onto its metaphorical monsters, further marginalizing people of color and reinforcing notions of white superiority. What makes a contemporary film like 2017’s Get Out so fascinating to a lifelong horror fan like Walter is how Peele and other Black horror creators have reimagined the conventions of gothic horror to tell the kind of stories that were initially excluded from the genre.

If Get Out is the deconstruction and reconstruction of the gothic horror paradigm, Walter explains, then The Shining — a tale of haunting and madness in a spooky setting — is the paradigm itself. Walter sees the film as a perfect demonstration of how horror functions, how psychoanalytic concepts can map onto horror, and how conspicuously excluded from both Blackness has historically been.

The 1980 film follows the Torrance family as they journey to the remote Overlook Hotel, where patriarch Jack has accepted a job as winter caretaker. It’s your standard “protagonist goes to isolated place and bad things happen” horror premise. And the three family characters line up neatly with Freud’s three parts of the psyche — the id, ego, and superego — with Jack embodying the rules-and-responsibilities-guided superego, mother Wendy the reality-grounded ego, and son Danny, whose psychic abilities allow him to see the hotel’s dark and hidden past (cue iconic creepy twins image), the id.

But The Shining also has a fourth character: Dick Hallorann, the Overlook’s Black head chef. Dick shares Danny’s psychic powers and, in the film’s third act, undertakes a heroic trek back to the hotel during a winter storm to save imperiled Danny and Wendy, only to be swiftly killed by an axe-wielding Jack (cabin fever plus ghosts causes insanity in certain dads, it turns out). It is a bizarrely anticlimactic moment that demonstrates Walter’s point.

“There is no place for Dick in that paradigm,” he says, meaning not just the traditional horror plot but the Freudian model of the psyche. “In a sense, he’s the out of place. He’s used as a narrative device, but he’s not allowed any characterization, he’s not allowed any interiority. That’s why I begin my class with The Shining. Here’s the horror paradigm, here’s how displaced Blackness is from that paradigm. It’s also an entry point into talking about how displaced Blackness is within psychoanalysis.”

In Get Out, Peele uses many of the horror conventions earlier employed by Kubrick and others but inverts them to tell the story of Black protagonist Chris, a talented photographer meeting his white girlfriend’s family for the first time. As in The Shining, the trouble begins with a trip to the country, but important differences quickly emerge.

“Peele creates a film that is a very bizarre experience,” Walter says. “It’s very familiar but also does not behave in the ways one expects.”

Traditional horror films are often about terror invading ordinary and idyllic lives. To work, they require protagonists who are naïve and trusting; the kind of people who would step out onto their porch after hearing a strange noise with their back to the open door. But Chris is not naïve. He knows enough to realize that the affluent suburb where his girlfriend’s family lives will not be a safe place for him. But he goes there anyway because, Walter says, for a young Black man in a white dominated society, “there is no ‘out’ to go to.”

And perhaps because Peele subverts the norms of horror, Get Out does not respond as readily to psychoanalytic theory as does The Shining.

There is a scene in Get Out in which Chris is (non-consensually) hypnotized and analyzed by his girlfriend’s therapist mother, ostensibly to cure him of his smoking habit. But whereas psychoanalysis is intended to integrate the conscious and unconscious parts of the psyche, Chris experiences the opposite, finding himself adrift in a limbo state dubbed the “sunken place” where he can only watch, but not actively participate in, his conscious reality.

Despite this event occurring on a therapist’s couch, Walter argues that the sunken place cannot be understood through Freudian analysis, which he describes as “a theory of the human subject that cannot deal with Blackness, that structurally has no place for it.” Instead Walter suggests we might find insight in the work of Fanon, who theorized that the legacy of colonialism resulted in Black individuals being alienated from their own identity. This, Walter says, is the framework that better fits Peele’s depiction of Chris’s terrifying experience of being a spectator to his existence.

In general, Walter warns against using any single theoretic tool to whack everything that looks like a nail. “One of the dangers of using psychoanalysis is that you import psychoanalysis onto texts to explain them,” says Walter. Instead, he recommends looking closely at what the art is expressing before picking up one’s toolkit, “Let the art theorize and decide how that theory relates to the theory you’re reading.”

It’s no coincidence that Peele chose horror films as a medium, Walter says. Horror is a genre that demands reinvention in order to surprise. Once audiences get too familiar with a particular trope it loses its impact, so directors must continually look for ways to confound expectations. As a result, the line between horror and experimental cinema is so thin it can be hard to see.

“Horror can be a gateway into appreciating that art doesn’t have to be entertainment,” says Walter. “There can be something in it that really troubles you or disturbs you or makes you upset. It can be ugly.”

Growing up in a small midwestern town, Walter had little access to museums and art house films. Instead, he first encountered weird and ugly art at the local video store, which offered films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Eraserhead on the same shelf, and through horror authors such as Stephen King.

“From a very early age, my reading and viewing was guided by horror,” he says. “I remember my first encounters with canonical American writers like Edgar Allen Poe and Shirley Jackson and sensing how deeply gothic horror pervades American literature, how it often functioned as a sort of sinister critique of American values even as those values were being formulated.”

That subversive appeal of horror makes it a natural companion to political and philosophical thought critiquing Western paradigms, like that of Freud and Fanon, Walter argues. Importantly, horror also flourishes during periods of uncertainty. The political and social upheaval of the 1970s, for example, was a boon for innovative horror. The relationship between horror and societal stability is itself a point of interest for contemporary critics, as it can provide a window into the anxieties of a population as it confronts crises.

So, as we currently live in interesting times, at least horror nerds and theorists alike can look forward to seeing more creative, provocative, and spectacularly troubling films.

“This is a really cool moment for horror,” Walter says. “I’m really intrigued as to what’s going to happen in the coming years.”

Think AI is a modern concept? Think again. According to Chad Seales, an associate professor of religious studies at UT Austin, AI might just be the age-old idea of God in new clothing.

It’s not exactly that we think of artificial intelligence as a literal thing to worship, Seales says, but he argues AI is beginning to play a well-trodden role in steering our lives by replacing individual judgment with algorithmic guidance.

“AI reproduces a lot of the Protestant theological problems, particularly around the Reformation,” says Seales. “Those mainly have to do with Calvinistic notions of predestination: How do you know you’re saved? How do we have agency as humans if God has already predetermined everything?”

He argues these same questions are being repeated with the introduction of AI into our daily lives. As we do our online shopping and listen to our Spotify stations, we’re fed content by AI-guided algorithms that present us with the options we are already most likely to choose rather than the array of all possible options of clothing or music. We feel like we’re making choices, but AI is really behind the scenes shaping our destiny. Sound familiar?

Religion has also historically steered believers to a narrow set of possible outcomes, explains Seales. It gives them a set menu of possible paths and outcomes as presented by a clergy member or doctrine, and they then choose how to act from those options.

This hidden influence isn’t the only overlap Seales sees between AI and millennia-old religious practices. Both, he says, can also serve to explain, address, and even reinforce biases in people’s daily lives.

Take one of the major issues theologians have wrestled with over the ages, the question of God’s justice in a world filled with suffering and unfairness. Calvinism, a particular form of Protestant Christianity, reconciles God’s justice to the suffering of life by leaving it to God to sort out who will earn salvation. Meanwhile, in the secular sphere, AI is increasingly being introduced into many of our social systems with the promise that it will address social inequality in housing, healthcare, education and more. The mechanism may be different, Seales says, but the impulse is similar.

“We knew already that zip code really shapes destiny, and where you live affects access to food and all those things, so I was really fascinated with how AI was playing this role that was introduced as a way of getting bias out of the system, when bias is already built in,” he says.

The ethical question Seales sees in our relationships with both God and AI, whether Calvinism or social-justice-by-algorithm, is whether human agency matters. Does it really matter what choices you make if you’re already being steered toward a small number of possible outcomes? Or, if what you do doesn’t impact whether or not you are saved, or if your personal goodness has no bearing on whether you don’t have access to fresh produce or affordable housing, then by what measure are we granted access to the good life? By our own merits, or by the decisions of an unknowable entity, whether that be God or AI?

Seales explores many of these arguments in his new undergraduate course, “God and AI,” which will start with the Protestant Reformation. By removing the hierarchies of the Roman Catholic Church, Reformation teachings sought to give Christians direct access to God. “But that freedom actually just dispersed the possibilities of authority and control into more areas of life,” argues Seales. “Rather than the authority of the Church being visible and seen, it became internalized in the believer, who could actually have less freedom than was promised.” And by making believers responsible for their own salvation, without the Church as intermediary, the Reformation and the Protestant traditions that followed both promised greater individual freedom and caused a lot of individual anxiety.

A lot of the same promises of individual agency and unfettered access to information are being made by AI. Chat GPT says it can help you write letters and emails and give you a kind of newfound freedom that’s just for you, but it also limits the range of possibilities that a person might be able to conceive of otherwise.

Seales says he’s already seeing AI’s impact on his students’ views of religion. He’s been particularly struck by their willingness to outsource their own emotions to AI. For example, he teaches a class on ethical food systems in which they read Jonathan Safran’s Eating Animals. In the book, for the purpose of showing that our concepts about eating animals are culturally constructed, Safran asks why we don’t eat dogs. Objectively, it would make sense, he explains. So, Seales posed the same question to his students: Would they eat a dog?

“I thought they would naturally respond ‘no way,’ like ‘the dog’s my best friend,’ right?” he says. “But half of the class typed the question in Chat GPT: ‘Would I eat a dog?’ It really put me over the edge.” For their own individual feelings — their human reactions — Seales’ students deferred to something non-human. They asked something outside of themselves to tell them how they feel.

This “How should I feel about this?” example strikes Seales as strangely religious and reminds him of his own evangelical upbringing, where people in his community might ask the minister “How should I feel about this particular issue?” and the minister would say, “God wants you to feel this way. He wants you to feel ABC, but he doesn’t want you to do XYZ.” Now, Seales says, students are asking AI the same questions in the same way.

In both cases, Seales explains, the individual sets aside their human instincts in deference to something else — some form of sovereignty or authority: “Tell me how I should feel in the midst of my uncertainty.” Not all students are using AI in this way, of course; some of them just use Chat GPT as a tool to help write essays. But in Seales’ class on food ethics, many students were using AI as a substitute for their own self, asking a chat program to tell them who they are.

This use of AI as a kind of outsourced conscience is one that Seales wants to examine more closely in his “God and AI” course, but it’s also part of his argument for teaching religious studies more generally. The way we educate students currently separates religion out from other topics, he says, instead of drawing connections between religion and other fields or phenomena. If those topics were taught together, students would likely walk away with a valuable new perspective.

“It’s important to help students understand that we can study religion from sociological, anthropological lenses,” Seales says. “A lot of the stuff that happens in popular culture we can study as religion. And once you study it as religion, you can see the world in a different way and understand how forces that are bigger than and outside of us are really shaping and organizing our lives in unseen and hidden ways.”

Seales hopes that studying these parallels further can help us to better understand that even in areas of society that are supposedly free of religion, at a basic level, we can’t escape these basic religious questions. What do we hand over of our selves when we defer to authority or to sovereignty or to someone else? Is this type of unseen predictive technology something we all as individuals in society want? What are the interests of the people who promote these technologies, and do they serve us? Knowing more about the historical context of how that developed and the people who promote these technologies can give us broader context for how we got here and where we want to go, both as individuals and together.

“Ultimately, being curious about what we can learn by using the language of religious studies will open up new ways to think about AI in terms of ethics, culture, and society,” Seales says. “Religion is not just morally good and bad. It gives us complex ways to look at the world. Religion, and now AI, functions to create the societies we live in. I usually leave it to students to determine: Is this the world you want to live in?”

Welcome back to Peer Reviewed, a podcast series within the larger Extra Credit universe that puts one of our UT Austin Liberal Arts faculty in conversation with a colleague of theirs at another college or university who has written something recently that struck our UT Austin faculty as really profound and important. The goal is to give listeners a glimpse under the hood at the kinds of conversations that scholars have amongst themselves and within their disciplines — and to expose the listeners to an important new article or book in the world.

My co-host for today’s episode is Seth Garfield, professor of history here at UT Austin. Garfield is an expert on Brazilian history and the author of a number of books on the topic, including the award winning Guaraná: How Brazil Embraced the World’s Most Caffeine-Rich Plant, which was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2022.

Our guest is Melissa Teixeira, associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and, like Seth, a historian of modern Brazil. Her interest is in legal history and the history of economic life in Brazil, and the text that struck Seth as an important contribution to his discipline is Melissa’s new book, A Third Path: Corporatism in Brazil and Portugal, which was published last year by Princeton University Press.

A Third Path explores Brazil’s response to the political, economic and social crises of capitalism following the Great Depression, and it highlights the pivotal but understudied interwar experiment in Brazil with corporatism, an economic model that promised a third path between capitalism and communism.

I found this conversation fascinating and and surprisingly relevant to our contemporary situation which is, in some ways, like the 1930s. It’s both a conversation about history but also indirectly — and in some cases directly — a conversation about where we are now and how we think about what the possibilities are for economics and governance.

You can listen to the podcast here on Substack or wherever you get your podcasts. Please share with anyone who might be interested, and let us know if you have any requests or ideas for future installments of Peer Reviewed.

2025 COLA Book Fair Selections

The Novel Life of Jane Austen: A Graphic Biography by Janine Barchas, illustrated by Isabel Greenberg

You’ve read Jane Austen before, but never like this. Drawing on deep scholarship (this is Barchas’s third book on Austen) and serious whimsy, The Novel Life of Jane Austen presents the beloved literary icon as the starring character in her own graphic novel. Here the gritty circumstances of Austen’s own genteel poverty and the small daily injustices so often borne by creative women at this time are told against the backdrop of Georgian England and reflect, down to the smallest detail, many of the plots and characters woven into Austen’s greatest works. All the settings and scenarios presented are based upon the historical record, including the clothing, architecture, decor, and Regency locations. Plenty of Easter eggs and clever references to popular film adaptations of Austen’s novels are sprinkled throughout, too, satisfying the casual and avid Austen fan alike.

Further reading: This isn’t the first book on Austen that Barchas has published to general acclaim and interest. Back in 2019 our sister publication Life & Letters spoke to Barchas about The Lost Books of Jane Austen, her book that went on to inspire an exhibition at the famous Harry Ransom Center (also covered in L&L).

From Cocinas to Lucha Libre Ringsides: A Latinx Comics Anthology edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Angela M. Sánchez

In this comics anthology full of humor and heart, writers and artists from across the U.S. pay tribute to the ways food and sports endure as touchstones in the Latin American diaspora. In the vein of Frederick Luis Aldama’s bestselling anthology Tales from la Vida, creators offer slice-of-life comics in an array of styles to capture common threads that bind this dizzyingly diverse community. Together, the creators collected in From Cocinas to Lucha Libre Ringsides share a mosaic of stories that vividly portray Latinx identity and life today.

Further reading: Longtime Extra Credit readers may recognize Aldama’s name and his interest in comics: He appeared in this newsletter back in 2023 to make the case for why comics matter. His origin story also appeared in Life & Letters (and features some excellent comic-style portraiture).

Squatter Life: Persistence at the Urban Margins of Buenos Aires by Javier Auyero and Sofia Servián

In Squatter Life, sociologist Javier Auyero and anthropologist Sofía Servián detail the diverse and often precarious strategies that Argentina’s urban poor rely on to survive. Blending three years of ethnographic fieldwork and anthropological theory with personal narratives of Servián’s experience growing up and living in a squatter settlement, the authors examine how Argentina’s squatter communities contend with violence and secure necessities like food, land, and housing despite inadequate state support and protection. Auyero and Servián recount the bricolage of tactics these individuals employ to make ends meet, such as relying on highly exploitative jobs, patronage, and networks of reciprocal exchange that can involve illicit activities. Analyzing how these survival strategies intersect with class, gender, and political domination, the authors present a nuanced account of marginality in Argentinian squatter settlements while maintaining a deeply human portrait of survival and persistence.

Further reading: Auyero’s is another familiar face around these parts. Last summer we spoke to him about his edited book, Portraits of Persistence, that explores many of the same themes present in Squatter Life.

Distinguished Office of Echoes by Lisa Olstein

From renderings of sea creatures to maps of ancient battles, Olstein’s latest collection engages the archive, transforming what it reveals about the body, language, and time.
A collection of three collage-, cutout, and erasure-based poems, Distinguished Office of Echoes leans into the intersection of word and image, exploring the revelatory language they make together. Each sequence uses an antique reference book as its source text: an 1865 study of marine invertebrates becomes an exploration of physical death and the disorientation of sudden loss; an 1865 proto-medical textbook journeys into the eerie dislocations of illness; and a 1905 primer on ancient Greek history investigates human and geologic time, time of war versus the time of rivers. Charged with the magnetic pull of material fascination, each poem enters into and reinvents the realm of its source, undertaking a practice of excavation, collaboration, and transformation to reimagine the field of the page while reconsidering what it means to examine and to be examined.

Further reading: Fancy more poetry? We recommend this Q&A with Jennifer Chang, author of the Pulitzer Prize-finalist collection An Authentic Life, or this profile of Roger Reeves and his National Book Award-finalist Best Barbarian.

Artifact: Encounters with the Campus Shooting Archives by Julija Šukys

Artifact is about the stories we tell ourselves after mass shootings. Each college campus shooting leaves a record: archival collections, monuments to the dead, government-led inquiries, internal university investigations, and lawsuits. By examining the archives of five North American university and college campus shootings between 1989 and 2015, Artifact: Encounters with the Campus Shooting Archives seeks to understand university and college campus shootings that involve students and faculty of those institutions. Šukys considers the aftermaths of such attacks by moving between university archives, memorials to victims, conversations with survivors, and beyond and attempts to speak into silence. The result is a searching book about care, memory, forgiveness, and survival.

Delta Futures: Time, Territory, and Capture on a Climate Frontier by Jason Cons

Delta Futures explores the competing visions of the future that are crowding into the Bengal Delta’s imperiled present and vying for control of its ecologically vulnerable terrain. In Bangladesh’s southwest, development programs that imagine the delta as a security threat unfold on the same ground as initiatives that frame the delta as a conservation zone and as projects that see the delta’s rivers and ports as engines for industrial growth. Jason Cons explores how these competing futures are being brought to life: how they are experienced, understood, and contested by those who live and work in the delta, and the often surprising entanglements they engender—between dredgers and embankments, tigers and tiger prawns, fishermen and forest bandits, and more. These future visions produce the delta as a “climate frontier,” a zone where opportunity, expropriation, and risk in the present are increasingly framed in relation to disparate visions of the delta’s climate-affected future.

Carmen in Diaspora: Adaptation, Race, and Opera’s Most Famous Character by Jennifer Wilks

Carmen in Diaspora is a cultural history of Carmen adaptations set in African diasporic contexts. It explores the phenomenon of the connection between the story of Carmen, which originally appeared in Prosper Mérimée’s eponymous 1845 novella and came to prominence through Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera, with prolific popular recreations in African diasporic settings. Through analyses of Mérimée and Bizet, Harlem Renaissance novels, U.S. movie musicals, Senegalese and South African feature films, and more, Carmen in Diaspora examines how these works illuminate the cultural currents of the 19th-century European context in which the character was born. Carmen is Diaspora is an adaptation study that emphasizes connections formed through the transposition rather than imposition of European culture as it considers how artists have brought — and continue to bring — new energy, vision, and life to the story of opera’s most famous character.

Further reading: Before you dive into Wilks’ full-length study, check out this profile of her new book and its starring character.

After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso

Most people on Earth today live in a country where birth rates already are too low to stabilize the population: fewer than two children for every two adults. In After the Spike, economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso sound a wakeup call, explaining why global depopulation is coming, why it matters, and what to do now. With new evidence and sharp insights, Spears and Geruso make a lively and compelling case for stabilizing the population — without sacrificing our dreams of a greener future or reverting to past gender inequities. They challenge us to see how depopulation threatens social equity and material progress, and how welcoming it denies the inherent value of every human life. More than an assembly of the most important facts, After the Spike asks what future we should want for our planet, for our children, and for one another.

Further reading: Spears and Geruso have previously appeared in Extra Credit to make their case for people.

Thanks for joining us for this year’s book fair round-up! To make sure you don’t miss future profiles, Q&As, and book recommendations, be sure to subscribe below if you haven’t already, and we’ll be back in your inbox soon.

To mark our anniversary, this week we’re thinking back to Extra Credit’s earlier days. Our inaugural Q&A, featuring anthropology professor Anthony Di Fiore, introduced readers to both the world of biological anthropology and an unusually active sloth. If you weren’t one of our 14 subscribers when it came out, you can see the full article here:

As chance would have it, we recently published a new story about Di Fiore’s work on our sister publication Life & Letters. His research has expanded in unexpected directions since we last spoke; let’s just say there’s a few bugs.

Other early Extra Credit newsletters continue to feel relevant for very different reasons. Take, for instance, this debate:

Or this historical review:

It’s not all been heavy, though. Consider this deep dive on Austin’s music scene:

This read on translating The Little Prince:

This defense of comic books:

And this meditation on the role of communications in promoting the liberal arts:

We’re looking forward to another year of interviews, essays, podcasts, and more. Let us know in the comments or over email if there’s anything you’d like Extra Credit to cover in the coming months, and we’ll leave you with a piece of timeless Highbrow Advice ‘til next time.

UT Austin sociologist Kathleen Griesbach has spent years studying what happens when work loses its basic coordinates, when workers simply do not know when and where they’ll be working next. The temptation is to treat this phenomenon — what we call “precarious work” today — as something brand new, a post-recession invention of hustling freelancers and gig apps. But, Griesbach argues, that assessment reveals a lack of historical awareness. Swap out “gig economy” for 1990s temp agencies and "platforms" for 1930s "piecework" and you’ll see that the underlying mechanics remain consistent. What is now framed as disruption is often just the old instabilities in a new form.

As a researcher interested in modern work, Griesbach is always asking herself, "What does instability look like today, and how do workers in different industries manage and make sense of it?” That question, she says, cuts through the media’s coverage of the future of work to focus on something more fundamental: how people construct meaning from circumstances that resist coherent explanation.

Through interviews with oil field workers, agricultural laborers, adjunct professors, and on-demand food delivery workers, Griesbach maps the narratives that emerge when workers’ expectations about their employment are undermined by instability in time and space: in where and when they will have work. Her findings complicate the prevailing wisdom about American workers' relationship to economic insecurity. Rather than defaulting to either entrepreneurial optimism or resigned acceptance, Griesbach argues that workers develop "positioning stories," narratives that “mobilize and reframe particular features of work.” She identifies six main positioning stories that recur across industries: four that respond to particular time and space uncertainties ( the “sacrifice story,” the “addiction story”, “working on the self,” and “the heaviness of time”) and two that highlight workers’ sense of meaning and exploitation (“living big” and “getting burned”).

Each of these narratives is fluid, shifting depending on which aspect of their situation a worker is trying to clarify. For example, Griesbach has found that workers whose jobs require geographic displacement, such as oil field crews and agricultural laborers, consistently deploy a rhetorical strategy that recasts physical separation as a noble sacrifice. This framing transcends income levels: When interviewed about their work, an oil field worker earning six figures during a boom and a farm worker making a few thousand dollars for a season of grueling labor used nearly identical language to explain their present suffering in service of future security. Both spoke of endurance, of building something better, and of the temporary nature of their displacement.

But these same workers also described feeling manipulated by forces they can neither predict nor control. For example, Manny, an oil field worker, told Griesbach that his relationship with the industry resembled a relationship with a cheating girlfriend. “You're like, 'Well, I don't trust you that much,'" he said. Evie, an adjunct professor, similarly described her employment situation as "a list of jobs that are just like bad boyfriends. They're there, they're not, they keep you on the hook. And just when you're like, 'I'm gonna quit,' they come back and they go, 'Oh darling, I love you.'"

These aren't throwaway metaphors, Griesbach argues in a recent paper for The American Sociological Review. Instead, they’re the expressions of people trying to make emotional sense of situations that are financially crazy-making. This emotional logic, she explains, has a particular resonance within our American cultural context, where the American dream is fundamentally a story of individual agency and meritocratic success. Workers’ narrative frameworks accordingly transform flexibility and self-reliance from economic necessities into cultural virtues.

Griesbach's research also reveals another tension: The cultural narrative of the American dream "diverges sharply from the reality of these individuals' working lives," creating a dissonance that shows up in the contradictory stories workers tell about their circumstances. The divergence between dream and reality also erodes workers’ faith in the familiar “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” idea. An oil field worker who describes himself as "middle class, thinking we're on top of the world" while acknowledging "they have us by a chain" is articulating the gap between American mythology and his real experience, Griesbach says.

Her deep dive into workers’ narratives suggests that they often move between different frameworks to explain their relationship with work depending on what part of their experience they're examining. The same worker might invoke personal agency and self-improvement in one breath, channeling a distinctly American faith in reinvention, and in the next pivot to structural critique. The resulting contradiction isn't cognitive dissonance, Griesbach says, but an accurate reflection of chaotic conditions.

Those chaotic conditions shape workers’ understanding of their lives in other ways, too. Workers navigating unpredictable schedules, for example, develop what Griesbach terms "addiction stories." They describe their work as compulsive, game-like, something they're drawn to despite its obvious costs. Meanwhile, those facing cyclical uncertainty, such as agricultural workers following harvest schedules or adjuncts cobbling together semester-by-semester employment, eventually construct narratives around what Griesbach calls "the heaviness of time." These are stories about watching seasons accumulate without meaningful progress toward security.

"I think I held on to the dream too long," one adjunct told Griesbach, reflecting on years of uncertain course assignments and inadequate pay. Other workers similarly celebrate the meaning they derive from their labor (“living big”) while critiquing the systems that capitalize on their commitment.

When asked what these conflicting stories reveal about the future of work, Griesbach reframes the question entirely. The point isn't to predict what work will become, she says, but to understand what we want it to be and how the stories people tell themselves might actually shape that outcome. "If we're going to have work that's unstable in these ways," Griesbach says, "what is it that workers need to be able to keep their families together and plan for the future?"

It’s a question that gets at how our current discourse around flexible work — the promise of freedom from rigid schedules or “being your own boss” — obscures fundamental questions about economic security. Griesbach suggests that flexibility in work functions differently depending on who controls it. When workers control their schedules and working conditions, flexibility can indeed provide autonomy. But when algorithms or market forces control these variables, flexibility can become a narrative weapon and transfers risk from institutions to individuals.

"Broadly, time and space have been scrambled for a lot of workers," Griesbach says, and this scrambling affects not just workers’ schedules and commutes but also their ability to construct coherent narratives about professional life — narratives that can either reinforce their isolation or become the catalyst for action.

So, what happens when workers can't tell themselves a story that makes sense? Sometimes they simply quit or accept the contradictions of their employment, particularly if they have few other options. But in one of Griesbach’s most interesting findings, sometimes workers’ contradictory positioning stories did not produce resignation. Instead, these workers stopped trying to solve problems alone and instead pursued collective action. Several adjuncts Griesbach interviewed became union organizers. Some delivery drivers quit their platforms and started organizing against their companies, and a group of agricultural workers jointly pursued legal action against wage theft.

"The fact that I will take this job for such low money makes me part of the problem," one adjunct organizer told Griesbach. "I need to do something to kind of mitigate what I'm doing here, so that's why I organize." When individual explanations for economic hardship stop working, collective ones start to look more appealing. As Griesbach notes, workers “are at once articulating individual-focused stories while at the same time telling very critical stories,” creating “complex and fragmentary interpretations where workers can challenge structural conditions even amid their ongoing consent to them.”

Griesbach’s research shows that positioning stories are doing the heavy lifting of modern work life. Workers aren’t just coping with uncertainty, they’re actively constructing elaborate narrative frameworks to make sense of chaotic situations. These stories, a kind of shared language, “reveal who workers hold accountable for their circumstances,” says Griesbach, “how they feel about themselves and their place in the world, and what actions they think are possible.”

As remote work, contract employment, and algorithmic management become standard across industries — from tech workers to healthcare professionals — Griesbach argues it’s essential that we design work that can adapt without abandoning the human need for some kind of predictability, or at the very least the security of knowing you’ll be able to pay the bills tomorrow. Her research into positioning stories offers a way to recognize when workers’ survival narratives are at a breaking point, and it suggests that the one of the biggest questions facing today’s workers isn’t about whether work is more precarious now than it has been, or even whether it will become more precarious still. Instead the question is whether the stories we tell ourselves about that precarity will help us endure it or reimagine it.

Do we sell a liberal arts education as preparation for the professional world, or as a chance to explore the deepest questions of human existence? This is the x or y question that haunts my professional existence. One of my least favorite answers, usually, is “x and y. It’s both.” Yeah, right. It’s an evasion of the hard choice, with the result that neither narrative gets its due.

It was a nice surprise, then, when associate professor of sociology Jordan Conwell persuaded me that we really could have both. I’d reached out to him because his department chair, Shannon Cavanagh, had sent me a link to some materials about a project that Conwell is coordinating with our college’s Liberal Arts Career Services team. This project, the Sociology Pathways and Career Engagement Resource, or SPACER, is an online curriculum that can be incorporated into a standard sociology course. It’s made up of 15 modules, one for each week of a semester-long course, that cover topics like transferable skills, “marketing your degree,” resumes, interviewing, social media, and creating a “career game plan.” A National Science Foundation award to Conwell, set to run through 2029, is funding the work.

Conwell piloted the curriculum in his spring 2025 section of “Social Research Methods,” a required course for sociology majors that enrolls sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and the department is planning to expand it to other courses as well. The hope is that SPACER will not just prepare students for careers but will inform their course, certificate, and extracurricular decisions so that they align with students’ long-term goals; familiarize students with where to find expert career help on campus; and pre-empt the fears that keep many students from joining or staying in the major in the first place. It’s a program, but also a sales pitch for the major.

At first glance, SPACER appears to be very much on the pragmatic side of the binary that I’m always worrying over when it comes to pitching the liberal arts to the world. It’s about the job, the brand, the resume, the interview, and the game plan rather than the Truth and the search for knowledge and wisdom for their own sake. Talking to Conwell was gratifying, though, precisely because he doesn’t see the two narratives as being opposed. Instead, he sees the program as a way of helping students to accomplish two complementary goals: They’ll better articulate to themselves what values they want to bring to the world while also making a plan for concretely realizing those values in the work they do.

“A small number of our students will go on to get their Ph.D.s in sociology or a related field, as I did, and get university teaching jobs,” says Conwell, who arrived at UT Austin in 2021, “and that’s great. But the reality is that most of them won’t. They’ll become K-12 teachers, lawyers, social workers, doctors, tech executives, clergy. What we want them thinking about, from the beginning, is how what they’re learning in our program can lead them to a life of purpose and meaning. That exploration shouldn’t be separate from thinking about the job they’ll do to earn a living, and the two can be mutually reinforcing.”

One of Conwell’s theoretical touchstones in thinking about the future of higher education is W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic essay, “Education and Work,” which Du Bois first presented as Howard University’s commencement speaker in 1930. The speech was a return to Du Bois’s famous debate with Booker T. Washington over how Black men and women should be educated in the United States in the aftermath of emancipation but in the face of continued discrimination and segregation. Should technical and professional skills be prioritized, as Washington believed, so that students would be optimally prepared to attain material success (and therefore be better positioned to attain political power as well)? Or would too much of a focus on the pre-professional, and too little focus on the underlying nature of the society, simply prepare them to continue to be exploited by a rigged system, albeit at a higher income level?

Du Bois’s answer, in 1930, was both x and y. “We need then, first, training as human beings in general knowledge and experience,” he wrote, “and then technical training to guide and do a specific part of the world’s work.” Students need to understand the world in order to form and sustain a vision of how they want to shape it, and they need the pragmatic skills and knowledge to realize such a vision.

SPACER, for Conwell, is a Du Boisian endeavor. It’s not an evasion of the tension between the practical and idealist ends of a liberal arts education but rather is an effort to breach what is too often a firewall between what students are learning in their classes and what they’ll go on to do professionally after graduation. Conwell sees embracing that tension, as opposed to running from it, as critical at the current moment in higher education. “Now more than ever, we should be clearly articulating the multiple dimensions of value that sociology and other liberal arts degree programs offer our students, their families, and their communities,” he says.

For me, as a salesman, a nice side benefit of this way at looking at the liberal arts is that it points to certain language and concepts we might be able to deploy in our recruitment efforts that would tap into some of the deepest symbolic currents in American culture and history. I’m thinking of words like “vocation” and “calling” and “purpose,” and of symbols and stories drawn from ancient religious and wisdom traditions that see our labor as one of the primary vehicles for realizing our spiritual ideals in the world.

It would be challenging, of course, to take these heavy-duty ideas and symbols and translate them into… well, a sales pitch. But that’s precisely the kind of challenge that the field of university communications has evolved to confront, and one that has its own Du Boisian spirit. It’s a pragmatic task, with a material goal in mind, but it’s informed at the deepest level by humanistic education and humanistic objectives.