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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