Achilles Heels for AGI/ASI via Decision Theoretic Adversaries

As progress in AI continues to advance, it is crucial to know how advanced systems will make choices and in what ways they may fail. Machines can already outsmart humans in some domains, and understanding how to safely build ones which may have capabilities at or above the human level is of particular concern. One might suspect that artificially generally intelligent (AGI) and artificially superintelligent (ASI) systems should be modeled as as something which humans, by definition, can't reliably outsmart. As a challenge to this assumption, this paper presents the Achilles Heel hypothesis which states that even a potentially superintelligent system may nonetheless have stable decision-theoretic delusions which cause them to make obviously irrational decisions in adversarial settings. In a survey of relevant dilemmas and paradoxes from the decision theory literature, a number of these potential Achilles Heels are discussed in context of this hypothesis. Several novel contributions are made toward understanding the ways in which these weaknesses might be implanted into a system.Comment: Contact info for author at stephencasper.co

Cultural fusion in the digital age: rock music scenes and its subcultural community in contemporary China

This PhD thesis is concerned with understanding the social, political, and economic transformations within China and their impact upon Chinese popular music and youth culture in terms of ‘cultural fusion’. The study employs an interdisciplinary approach combining the academic fields: popular music studies, media and cultural studies, sociology, youth studies and social geography. The PhD addresses Simon Frith’s (Frith 1978, 1996) positioning of rock as an umbrella term, inclusive of a variety of music genres such as post-punk, alternative, indie, and post-rock. Through the notion of cultural fusion, the study seeks to illuminate the rise and decline of Chinese rock in the contexts of marketisation, globalisation and the rise of new media. It also explores how rock’s revival through social media shapes urban Chinese youth identities through these changes. Ethnographic and textual research techniques are used in the thesis alongside autoethnography defining my research position as both a critical outsider and an insider of Chinese popular music. The data sets include analysis of rock magazines, documentaries, lyrics, interviews and observations with 80 research participants, who are musicians, critics, audiences and fans. In addition, the study employs content analysis and semiotics. Data has been collected in Beijing, Shanghai, Qingdao and Zibo. These research sites represent cultural diversity from different tiers of economically diverse cities in China. Data has also been collected in London, which is identified as a location offering cultural fusion as part of the music scene in Europe. The thesis explores how rock music has become an expressive tool for Chinese youth to carve out space from realities and controls. It focuses on Chinese youth from a middle-class background and those who migrate to study in the UK. These Chinese youths participate in Western music scenes and bridge popular cultural exchange between the East and the West. The PhD also examines marginal voices and positions within Chinese rock subcultural communities. It suggests rock music articulates subcultural resistance to the structural inequalities of class, gender and ethnicity. The ethnographic data indicates a cultural fusion phenomenon between the East and the West within the music scene, characterised by dynamics and complexities. It symbolises struggles and conflicts for Chinese youth, who face an increasing commercialised and globalised Chinese society

How to remember thee?: problems of memorialization in english writing, 1558-1625

This dissertation focuses on the use of funeral commemoration in religious and political controversies in early modern England. By examining the rhetoric used in funeral sermons and elegies, I show that commemorative writers use figural interpretation of the Bible to legitimize praise by linking the deceased to characters from scripture. Figural interpretation places the dead into a framework of ecclesiastical history and creates Protestant saints used as exempla in political and religious debates. This dissertation examines funeral sermons, elegies, and other commemorative poems written between 1558 and 1625. Chapter one discusses the development of figural interpretation in Elizabethan funeral sermons. By reading sermons by Edmund Grindal, Thomas Sparke, Matthew Parker, and William Barlow, I show that figural interpretation allows preachers to use funeral sermons as reformed counterparts to medieval cults of political saints. Chapter two examines elegies written by George Whetstone, Thomas Churchyard, John Phillips, Edmund Spenser, and Mary Sidney after Sir Philip Sidney’s death in 1586. These poets support military intervention on the continent against Roman Catholic States by using figural interpretation to represent Sidney as a martyr. Chapter three discusses commemoration as a polemical tool for militant Protestants in Elizabethan Ireland by discussing funeral sermons for three Lords Deputy of Ireland and Book V of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Chapter four considers the commemoration of Prince Henry in 1612 and argues that poets George Wither, Joshua Sylvester, and Henry Peacham, and the preacher Daniel Price use biblical figurae of kings David and Josiah to represent Henry as a militant Protestant saint. I also show that John Donne uses figural interpretation in his elegy to advance an agenda of religious pacifism. Chapter five examines funeral sermons preached after James I’s 1625 death. I argue that militant Protestant preachers like Daniel Price and Phineas Hodson and conformist preachers like John Donne and James Williams used different sets of figurae to support their sides in the debate over ceremonies in the English church. The conclusion calls for further research on the role of commemoration in early modern England as a whole, and in Donne’s work in particular

Embodiments of Cultural Encounters

The meeting of members of different cultures, frequently conceptualized in abstract terms, always involves the meeting of human bodies. This volume brings together contributions by scholars of various disciplines that address physical aspects and effects of cultural encounters in historical and present-day settings. Bodies were and are not only markers of cultural identity and difference, endlessly inscribed and represented as the ‘body politic’ or ‘the exotic other’; as battlegrounds of cross-cultural signification and identification bodies are also potential agents of change. While some essays address the elusiveness of the ‘real’ or material body, forever lost behind a veil of textual and visual representation, others analyze the performative effect of such representations – their function of disciplining colonized bodies and subjects by integrating them into Western systems of cultural signification and scientific classification. Yet, as the volume also shows, formerly colonized people, far from subjecting themselves completely to Western discourses of physical discipline, retain traditional body practices – whether in food culture, religious ritual, or musical performances. Such local reinscriptions escape the grip of Western culture and transform the global semantics of the body

Before Rubens: Titian’s Reception in the Habsburg Netherlands, c. 1550-1600

This research aims to retrace the reception of the art of Titian in the Southern Netherlands from about 1550, when his fame reached its peak at Brussels court, to about 1600, before the crystallization of his artistic “canone” and the developments of the XVIIth century that led to the so-called “Europeanisation of Venetian art”. Whereas the Titianism of the XVIIth century painters Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) and Anton van Dyck (1599-1641) had been thoroughly investigated, the timeframe immediately antecedent presents some gaps and unsolved questions. In particular, did the Flemish artists develop a homogeneous and unequivocal “idea of Titian”, or there were many? And which were the reasons for selecting and using or refusing specific aspects of Titian’s art? In the first chapter, I analyse the court environment of the Brussels court and especially the roles of Charles V (1500-1558), Mary of Hungary (1505-1558) and Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle (1518-1586) in selecting and directing Titian’s production for the court. Their political necessities, artistic taste, and subscription to a language of power oriented towards an all’antica idiom shaped the idea of Titian in the Netherlands. This idea was inherently classical, dealing with Michelangelism and with the Central-Italian art, and the pictorial style was far from the glazed and polished one of the Flemish masters, but it was also not yet the “pittura a macchia” described in 1568 by Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574). The second and the third chapters are devoted to Netherlandish artists who had a direct relation to the Habsburgs, being both court painters for Charles V first and for Philip II (1527-1598) after. The first, Michiel Coxcie (1499-1592), was a history painter who specialised in altarpieces and religious works following the novelties of Roman art, in particular Raphael’s. Being one of the favourite artists of the Brussels court, he was Titian’s peer, and many of their works were hanging next to each other in the Habsburgs palaces. Coxcie used Titian’s motives in his art together with the Central-Italian’s, with no distinction. The second, Anthonis Mor (1520-1577), specialised in portraiture. He adapted the full-length type of portrait that Titian had developed for the Habsburgs for the Flemish-oriented taste of the Netherlandish, German and Spanish aristocracy. His adaptation led to the standardisation of this type as the perfect expression of power through portraiture. After focusing on the court environment under the direct influence of the Habsburgs, I open my view to the artistic production of the city of Antwerp and I identify two macro-themes: the religious paintings and the mythological subjects with the display of naked women. In the fourth chapter, I discuss the issue of Titian’s religious inventions that were adapted and re-invented by the artists in connection to the religious debate. Both Protestants and Catholics expressed their concerns about images, and after the Beeldenstorm (1566) the Netherlandish artists had to experiment and test the boundaries of decorum to find their secure place in the market. Some inventions by the Venetian had particular fortune because of their connection with the Habsburgs (Ecce homo and Mater Dolorosa), but a particular composition had been adapted by painters for its theological implication, namely the engraving of the Adoration of the shepherds (1532/33). The fifth and last chapter studies the reception of the mythological paintings by Titian and of the “Titianesque” mythological themes related to the immense fame of his poesie for Philip II. After discussing the problems of the image debate about lasciviousness and the representation of the nude, I examine how this affected the art market of Antwerp. The depiction of mythologies was not particularly popular in the decades from the 1560s to the 1580s, and few painters specialised in these themes. The artists selected as case studies are Jan Massys (1509-1575), Frans Floris (1517-1570), Jacob de Backer (c. 1555-c. 1585) and Gillis Coignet (1538-1599). These painters worked for circles of rich merchants who collected especially mythological artworks and sold them abroad on the French market and to foreign Princes like Rudolph II (1552-1612). The approaches of these painters to Titian’s art were very sporadic and often too emphasized by the scholars, but they contributed to the process of assimilation of certain themes and compositions into the pictorial language of the end of the century. Gillis Coignet was the first Netherlandish painter who consistently adapted Titian’s inventions and also the first who experimented on the renowned pictorial technique of the Venetian master. In the end, I draw some conclusions on the aspects of Titianisme in the Netherlands before Rubens and the establishment of the Brussels court of Albert VII (1559-1621) and Isabella Clara Eugenia (1566-1633). The research downsized some ideas on the impact of Titian’s art on the Netherlandish painters and revealed the coexistence of different “ideas of Titian” related to the experience of the artists and their intentions. In this study, I also pinpoint some critical issues in the relation between the “idea” of the painter advocated by literature and the one grounded in the practical use of his art