Today in Focus: How Greta Thunberg's school strike went global: a look back

This week we return to some of our favourite episodes of the year. Greta Thunberg spoke to Today in Focus in March, before her transatlantic voyage to address the UN.

One day in mid-2018, Greta Thunberg skipped school and went to sit outside the Swedish parliament with a homemade banner that read skolstrejk för klimatet or “school strike for climate”. By March 2019, her sign had been translated into dozens of languages and her school strike protest had spread to more than 70 countries.

She told the Guardian’s global environment editor, Jonathan Watts, how it all began and what she made of the attention she generated.

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99 Percent Invisible: The ELIZA Effect

Weizenbaum started raising these big, difficult questions at a time when the field of artificial intelligence was still relatively new and mostly filled with optimism. Many researchers dreamed of creating a world where humans and technology merged in new ways. They wanted to create computers that could talk with us, and respond to our needs and desires. Weizenbaum, meanwhile, would take a different path. He’d begin to speak out against the eroding boundary between humans and machines. And he’d eventually break from the artificial intelligentsia, becoming one the first (and loudest) critics of the very technology he helped to build. [...]

In 1950, British mathematician Alan Turing wrote the seminal Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Brian Christian, author of The Most Human Human, notes that this paper was published “at the very beginning of computer science … but Turing is already … seeing ahead into the 21st century and imagining” a world in which people might build a machine that could actually “think.” In the paper, Turing proposed his now-famous “Turing test” in which a person has a conversation with both a human and a robot located in different rooms, and has to figure out which is which. If the robot is convincing, it passes the test. Turing predicted this would eventually happen so consistently that we would speak of machines as being intelligent “without expecting to be contradicted.” [...]

He also may have missed something that Darcy has thought about a lot with Woebot: the idea that humans engage in a kind of play when we interact with chatbots. We’re not necessarily being fooled, we’re just fascinated to see ourselves reflected back in these intelligent machines.

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BBC4 In Our Time: Coffee

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history and social impact of coffee. From its origins in Ethiopia, coffea arabica spread through the Ottoman Empire before reaching Western Europe where, in the 17th century, coffee houses were becoming established. There, caffeinated customers stayed awake for longer and were more animated, and this helped to spread ideas and influence culture. Coffee became a colonial product, grown by slaves or indentured labour, with coffea robusta replacing arabica where disease had struck, and was traded extensively by the Dutch and French empires; by the 19th century, Brazil had developed into a major coffee producer, meeting demand in the USA that had grown on the waggon trails.

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The Art Assignment: The $150,000 Banana

Artist Maurizio Cattelan duct taped a banana to a wall, titled it "Comedian", and sold 5 editions of the artwork for as much as $150,000 each. Why did it capture our attention, curiosity, and memes? What does it mean?

UnHerd: So did ‘idiot voters’ get it wrong?

There are two important ways in which the electorate could be “wrong”: they could vote against their own interests, and they could vote in ways that are morally faulty. It seems obvious that both of those things are possible. According to YouGov, 33% of all richer “ABC1” voters voted Labour, 43% Tory; 33% of poorer “C2DE” voters voted Labour, 48% Tory. Sure, not all C2DE voters or all ABC1 voters are alike, and there were divisions by age, ethnicity and sex as well. But for every Labour voter, there will almost certainly have been a Tory voter whose material and financial interests would have been near-identical. One of them must have been making the worse choice, from a purely selfish point of view. [...]

If the electoral system returns something that doesn’t look “fair”, such as Donald Trump or George W. Bush winning the electoral college despite losing the popular vote, or the Tories getting one MP per 37,000 votes and the Lib Dems getting one seat per 350,000, then that’s just what the algorithm returns. It may be that you can convince people to rewrite the algorithm, but — under the system — it’s the correct output. It is tautologically true that what the electorate elects is elected. [...]

Where does all this get us? Well: obviously, voters can be “wrong”. There’s a whole subset of the electorate called “low-information voters”. God knows I don’t blame them; keeping up with political news is boring, is hard work, and does very limited good in the world. But still, I don’t imagine they do much better than chance at working out what the “right” vote would be. Once you throw in media misinformation — deliberate or otherwise — it would honestly surprise me if a large majority of voters got it “right” by any single metric you happen to choose. I would be totally unsurprised to learn that I got it “wrong”. And voters can be immoral, because, you know, people.

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UnHerd: Welcome to the new Springtime of the Peoples

This may have some elements of exaggeration. It is difficult to see what protestors in Catalonia and Iraq have in common; the former are restricting political ties to ethnic identity, the latter are expanding them. But even when distinct, they march together, and ultimately the uprisings of 2019 have a common thread that links them, tied together by technological change, economic pressure, and the shifting axis of power from West to East. [...]

Today the dialectic of revolution is very different. Rather than starting from the heavens and trying to bring them down to earth, protestors everywhere fill the streets to seek redress for a specific grievance: the extradition law in Hong Kong, the fuel tax in France, the price increase of the Santiago Metro ticket in Chile (the 30 pesos which cannot but remind us of the 30 pieces of silver for which Judas betrayed Jesus). [...]

And yet the specific grievance is never a cause. To see it as such would be a serious mistake, one that authorities all over the world are prone to make, but which we can and should avoid. In all these demonstrations ,the protest is an occasion, a beginning, an incitement, a vehicle for a much deeper urge. Once the protests start, they take on a life of their own. Sharper collective awareness and a growing list of political demands are a consequence rather than a cause. [...]

And the Western vision of the future is receding, something particularly obvious in India. The consensus around a Western, secular model for the country has collapsed, but how can Indians agree on a new path to be built from scratch? Cultural and political independence have an irresistible appeal, but with independence comes a life of danger.

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The Point: The Problem with Letters of Recommendation

This magic is real, but it is also dangerous, because I actually know so much less than I seem to my students to know. I do not know who they should become. I do not know what they will succeed at or whether “success,” as they currently conceive of it, would make them happy. Of course I have a few guesses and predictions, and some of them may be of use to graduate admissions committees. (Even there, as a reader of many such letters, I have my doubts.) To the student herself, however, these educated guesses threaten to take the place of the vague and fuzzy representation they have as to what I think of them, what I hope from them, what they have to do to make me proud. I can’t clarify the situation without invading Mental Agnes’s turf, and that would be a big mistake. [...]

Just as it is not my job to decide whether my student is the best candidate for the position—that’s up to the recipient of the letter—likewise it is not my job to make the comparative assessment that would underwrite the student’s choice of letter-writer. There are limits to what I owe in my capacity as letter-writer, and these limits are crucial to protecting my more important job as teacher. [...]

The kind of positive feedback sought at a letter request cannot mean much, precisely because it has been asked for; what matters has been freely given all along, and it has taken the form not only of approval and encouragement but, more importantly, of spontaneous reactions such as excitement, interest, curiosity, surprise, joy, amusement and, yes, pride. The real feedback is wrapped up in the aspirational fog.

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The Guardian: Methodist church announces plan to split into pro- and anti-gay branches

Leaders of the United Methodist church – America’s second-largest Protestant denomination – have announced plans to split the church in two after years of division over same-sex marriage.

The plan, if approved at the church’s worldwide conference in Minneapolis in May, would divide the denomination into two branches: a traditionalist branch that opposes gay marriage and the ordination of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender clergy, and a more tolerant branch that will allow same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ clergy.

The split would affect the denomination globally, church leaders said. The United Methodist church lists more than 13 million members in the United States and 80 million worldwide.

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