The Occasional 9

Shannon Vallor & AI, Joseph O'Connor in Rome, Ferdia Lennon in Sicily, Barbara Everett on 'Hamlet', Tom Lehrer & Wernher von Braun, Mary Oliver on August, the power of extended reading, and much more.

Welcome to lots of new subscribers over recent weeks. The Occasional is for paid subscribers of The Fortnightly - the latter returns when term starts, and is taking its summer holidays at the moment.

---

Shannon Vallor

The discourse around AI is currently a depressing mess of hyperbole, misunderstanding and hysteria. So Shannon Vallor’s new book The AI Mirror comes as a tonic. She is the Baillie Gifford Professor in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, and has been thinking about the technology for a lot longer than since November 2022, and her understanding of the technology as backward-looking and reductive is profound. This is certainly the best writing I have come across so far about the subject:

There is a steep price to pay if we surrender the task of understanding ourselves, our history, our differences, and our shared humanity to machines that merely fabricate variations on the stories already told, and only by the most privileged.

My full comments.

---

The Ghosts of Rome

Joseph O’Connor started his series about the Escape Line Vatican ‘Choir’ in 2023 with My Father’s House, a most enjoyable first book in the trilogy. In the next book, The Ghosts of Rome, the Irish priest Hugh O’Flaherty takes a back-seat (again there is a coda, this time in Kerry after he has died), and the narrative works itself around Contessa Giovanna Landini. But again the real central character is Rome itself (including the Vatican), marvellously evoked in its wartime guise, so I’ll repeat what I wrote two years ago:

It’s impossible to think that this book and its successors will not be filmed as a cinema feature or TV series, but it’s almost impossible to imagine that any filmed version will evoke the place as pleasurably as O’Connor does.

---

Below the line, Ferdia Lennon’s début novel set in ancient Sicily (with a Dub accent), Glorious Exploits; the brilliant Barbara Everett on ‘Hamlet’; Doug Lemov on the power of complete books; cognitive load theory; photographs of a Magdalene laundry by Ethna Rose O’Regan; Tom Lehrer RIP; reading technologies; Mary Oliver’s poems about August.