Noema Magazine Issue I: The Great Acceleration (Digital)

Steven Weber is a professor at the school of information and the department of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Nils Gilman is the deputy editor of Noema Magazine. We’re living through a real-time natural experiment on a global scale. The differential performance of countries, cities and regions in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic is a live test of the effectiveness, capacity and legitimacy of governments, leaders and social contracts. The progression of the initial outbreak in different countries followed three main patterns. Countries like Singapore and Taiwan represented Pattern A, where (despite many connections to the original source of the outbreak in China) vigilant government action effectively cut off community transmission, keeping total cases and deaths low. China and South Korea represented Pattern B: an initial…

We asked: Yuval Noah Harari, Elif Shafak, Eric Schmidt, Lorraine Daston, Patrick Soon-Shiong, Dambisa Moyo, John Gray, Davide Casaleggio, Onora O’Neill, Jared Diamond, Li Jinglin, Safiya Noble, Pascal Lamy, David Brin, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Bill Joy, Joseph Nye and Bing Song. Tel Aviv “In the next few months, politicians will remake the world. During these few months, the world is going to be fluid and malleable. We could choose to deal with the current crisis through global solidarity and cooperation, which will result in a more unified and harmonious world. We could also choose to deal with it through nationalistic isolation and competition, which will probably make the crisis far more acute and will result in a more fragmented and hostile world. We could choose to deal with the crisis by…

Harriet A. Washington is a science writer and ethicist. Her book “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present,” which she wrote as a research fellow in ethics at Harvard Medical School, won the National Book Critics Circle Nonfiction Award. Once collected and analyzed, the numbers of COVID-19 deaths, which the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agreed to report by race and ethnicity only reluctantly, unveil a stark reality. Nationally, African-American deaths are nearly two times greater than their share of the population. In New York City, the death rate is twice that of whites. Hispanic data, where it exists, show similarly disproportionate illness. Native Americans fare still worse. This disproportionate devastation of communities of color caught the nation…

Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel laureate for economics and a professor at Columbia University. Ray Dalio is the founder and chairman of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund. NOEMA You have both talked and written extensively about inequality in the U.S. in recent years. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed that social fracture more sharply than ever. In this first-ever service economy recession, many of those on the front line — from store clerks to caregivers to ambulance drivers — are the least paid and often only a paycheck away from poverty. In this context, the massive taxpayer-financed cash infusion to save some of the largest companies that are otherwise viable may present a unique opportunity to more effectively tackle inequality by bolstering the assets of the less well-off. If…

Walter Scheidel is a professor of classics and history at Stanford University and the author of “The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century.” All over the world, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has been growing for decades. America is among the leaders of the pack. In 2013, Barack Obama singled out “a dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility” as “the defining challenge of our time.” Since then, blunter campaigners have amped up the volume: According to Bernie Sanders, “billionaires should not exist.” But what has all this escalating rhetoric accomplished? Exactly nothing. Last fall, the U.S. Census Bureau reported the highest level of inequality since it started measuring household incomes back in the 1960s.…

Lisa Adkins is the head of the school of social and political sciences at the University of Sydney. Martijn Konings is a professor at the school of social and political sciences at the University of Sydney. They are the authors (with Melinda Cooper) of “The Asset Economy,” available from Polity later this year. The COVID-19 crisis has put a spotlight on the dramatic growth of inequality, with the wealthy able to take refuge in holiday homes while many workers living paycheck to paycheck cannot afford to socially isolate. Somewhere in between are middle-class families that have been mostly able to ride out the storm by staying inside but, at the same time, are becoming increasingly aware of how precarious their security — financial and otherwise — really is. Over the…

Zhao Tingyang is a professor of philosophy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a 2018–19 Berggruen Institute senior fellow. His book “The Tianxia System” was a Chinese-language bestseller. Régis Debray, a political philosopher, established a school of philosophy called “mediology” that reflects on how the intersection between culture and technology shapes society. He was a foreign policy adviser to French President Francois Mitterrand from 1981 to 1988. This starts with an essay from Zhao and is followed by a response from Debray ZHAO TINGYANG BEIJING — There is a stereotyped image of China that prevails for many in the West today: an empire of despotism and an arrogant tributary system. But there is a mostly ignored, much older tale of an ancient China (about 2070 B.C.E. to 1368,…

“Linked to a civilization, the Chinese state has the paramount task of protecting a specific cultural tradition.” Bruno Maçães was Portugal’s secretary of state for European affairs from 2013 to 2015. He is now a non-resident senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He is the author of “The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order” (2018) and “History Has Begun” (2020). Three or four years ago, as I drove around Beijing visiting officials and intellectuals, I kept hearing the same message. In my experience, the only moment when a Chinese intellectual or official should be taken literally is when he or she is walking a guest to the car. With no one around and no time to add any commentary, a single sentence can speak volumes.…

“In the era of nuclear weapons, superpower primacy is likely to be determined in the economic sphere, not the military sphere.” Kishore Mahbubani is a distinguished fellow at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. His most recent book, “Has China Won?,” was published in March. SINGAPORE — Is China a threat or an opportunity for America? Is that a simple question? As a student of philosophy, I have learned that behind a simple question can lurk many others that are more complex. Here are a few for that particular question: Does China intend to weaken or undermine America? Or is its rise driven by domestic factors? Does China have a grand strategy? If so, what are its primary goals? Is China’s rise a threat to American…

John Gray has been a professor of European and political thought at the London School of Economics, Oxford, Harvard and Yale. The parallel movement toward universal surveillance in Eastern and Western societies reveals a remarkable convergence in thinking. For all the rise of populism, the United States and much of Europe continue to defer to ideals of individual rights and freedoms that derive from liberal thinkers such as John Locke and John Stuart Mill. Alongside official assertions of the uniqueness of Chinese civilization and the value of Confucian ethics, Chinese President Xi Jinping governs China by reference to ideas derived from the West. In addition to the ideas of Karl Marx, those of the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham are echoed in official Chinese doctrine. Though the two are quite different…

Abeba Birhane is a PhD candidate in cognitive science at the school of computer science at the University College Dublin and Lero, The Irish Software Research Centre. Jelle van Dijk is an assistant professor in human-centered design at the University of Twente. In his most recent book, “Machines Like Me,” the British novelist Ian McEwan imagines a world in which robots are so lifelike that it is hard not to see them as anything but fully human. They have consciousness, emotions, desires — the works. Charlie, the book’s main character, buys a robot named Adam that even has sex with Charlie’s girlfriend. So, when Charlie eventually decides to shut Adam down against his will, we are lead to reflect on an ethical question: Is this murder? Should robots like Adam…

Nicole Rigillo is an anthropologist and a 2018–20 Berggruen Institute Transformations of the Human research fellow based at Element AI in Montreal, Canada. From insurance coverage assessments to diagnosing intensive care patients to finding new drug treatments, many decisions amid the global health crisis are being made with the input of intelligent software. Humans may still be the final decision-makers, but machine-learning algorithms can find patterns and connections that human minds cannot. As public health officials and the tech sector have strategized coordinated responses to COVID-19, AI-enabled interventions have played a central role. Predictive software that can forecast outbreaks before they occur, technology for monitoring physical distancing, and Bluetooth-based contact tracing apps have all emerged as possible measures for combating the continued spread of the virus. However, the potential mass…

Allison Pugh is a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and a 2019–20 Berggruen Institute fellow. The coronavirus crisis has transformed many jobs, but some of the most dramatic changes have been experienced by teachers, therapists and other face-to-face workers. Even before the pandemic hit, however, their work was being altered by technology and targeted by artificial intelligence researchers. It seems we didn’t need a virus for people to call for nonhuman providers, and in the post-COVID-19 future, that call might become ever louder. But these calls ignore the unique presence that humans have to offer, a presence that nonetheless has been unequally distributed. Many jobs — primary care physicians, therapists, teachers, coaches, ministers, even high-end sales staff and business managers — rely on relationships, on an emotional…

Adrienne Mayor is a research scholar in classics, history and philosophy of science at Stanford University and a 2018–19 Berggruen Institute fellow. According to Greek myth, after the creation of humans and animals, the gods assigned Prometheus and his younger brother Epimetheus the task of allocating their capabilities. The brothers were Titans, a race of divine beings. Epimetheus requested the privilege of assigning the various powers and characteristics to the creatures on Earth, promising that Prometheus could then inspect his work. Epimetheus began sorting out the natures of the animals of land, sea and sky. So absorbed was he in the task of ensuring their survival — with speed, strength, agility, keen eyesight and hearing, a superb sense of smell, venom, camouflage, wings, feathers, fur, scales, fangs, talons, hooves and…

“Food speaks, cues and signals.” Hannah Landecker is the director of the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA and a 2018–19 Berggruen Institute fellow. The Epicurean selects the situations, the persons and even the events which suit his extremely sensitive, intellectual constitution; he renounces the rest — that is to say, by far the greater part of experience — because it would be too strong and too heavy fare for him. The Stoic, on the contrary, accustoms himself to swallow stones and vermin, glass-splinters and scorpions, without feeling any disgust: his stomach is meant to become indifferent in the end to all that the accidents of existence cast into it.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Gay Science” Eating is paradoxically completely normal and pretty weird at the same time, once…

Mara Eagle is an American artist based in Montreal working in a wide range of media. Her work explores ways in which Western philosophy, science and literature have formulated a concept of nature through discursive, methodological and representational means. In “Théâtre De l’Inconnu,” a faltering narrator recounts the life cycle of Saturniids — giant winged insects. The two-channel video installation manipulates elements borrowed from several National Geographic flower time-lapses, the 19th-century opera “Adriana Lecouvreur” and excerpts from various literary, scientific and ancient texts. The work’s title gestures toward early modern scientific compendiums, such as Thomas Muffet’s “Theatre of Insects” (1658), as well as architectures designed for viewing, such as dissection amphitheaters, operating theaters and entertainment venues for performance and cinema. Also a venue for spectacle and observation, the gallery space…

Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. The most disruptive and far-reaching transformations of human civilization — redesigning the genome and creating intelligent machines — are no longer science fiction fantasies but materializing reality. “Biological evolution has taken three and a half or four billion years to get us where we are,” the pioneering cartographer of the human genome Craig Venter says. “Social evolution has been much faster. Now that we can read and write the genetic code, put it in digital form and translate it back into synthesized life, it will be possible to speed up biological evolution to the pace of social evolution. … That gives us control over biological design. We can write DNA software, boot it up to a converter and create unlimited variations on…

NATHAN GARDELS The German philosopher Martin Heidegger famously remarked back in the 1960s that the advent of cybernetics1 meant the end of Western metaphysics.2 What do you think he meant by this comment? And to what extent do you agree? PETER SLOTERDIJK It wasn’t only reading Norbert Wiener, the American philosopher and mathematician known as the father of cybernetics, that brought Heidegger to this assumption. He was familiar with all the debates among theologians and engineers going back to the 17th century about the erosion of the divide between God-given nature and man-made tools and inventions. They understood that once patterns of repetition were discovered in nature, they could be systematically replicated by machines designed to fulfill a particular purpose through instrumental reason. When the first automats3 came into being,…

Yuk Hui, who divides his time between Hong Kong and Berlin, is one of the few philosophers today steeped both in Chinese and Western philosophy. His major work, which is the point of departure for this discussion, is “The Question Concerning Technology in China,” which mirrors from a historical Chinese point of engagement the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s 1954 treatise, “The Question Concerning Technology.” Hui recently sat down with Nathan Gardels, editor-in-chief of Noema, in Los Angeles to explore new paths of reflection on contrasting philosophies of technology. I. COSMOTECHNICS, EAST AND WEST GARDELS You emphasize in your work the notion of what you call “cosmotechnics,” or how civilizational worldviews shape technology. Would you explain? HUI Because our technological creations are challenging historical limits through climate change, artificial intelligence and…