How Human-Robot Relationships Push Our Buttons

In today’s newsletter, romancing the robots, and then:
•Managing mental health in Gaza
•A pro-free-speech dean shuts down a student protest
•A year after the East Palestine train crash and chemical fire

“The future is at our door with flowers,”Jennifer Wilson writes inthis waggish reviewof two new novels about the budding relationship between humans and robots. “Annie Bot,” by Sierra Greer, and “Loneliness & Company,” by Charlee Dyroff, both rely too readily on the weird ways people might use technology, rather than on how technology could be used against us, Wilson contends, “serving us sex panics-cum-screen panics that are all byte, no bite.” In “Annie Bot,” the eponymous biomorphic robot is purchased by Doug, a man whose misogyny is so rote he himself “sounds like an A.I. bot trained on 4Chan.” In “Loneliness & Company,” a young tech worker is tasked with collecting “observational data” for the A.I. companion her company is developing; she poses as a nude model, has sex with a rich married man, and eventually realizes that, even if virtual friends could solve the loneliness epidemic, the cure might be worse than the disease. These books want to scare readers away from A.I., but they are “out of synch with its real dangers,” Wilson notes. “Don’t hate the player, hate the gamification.”

Further reading:John Seabrook’s investigation, from 2008, of the evolving technology for a “conversational computer” feels simultaneously ancient and prescient.

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Taylor Swift flexedher mastermind muscles overnight, following up her midnight album release with a surprise addendum of fifteen songs at 2A.M.as part of “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology.” Tyler Foggattprovides an appraisalin today’s Goings On newsletter, our guide to what we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week.Sign up to receive it every Friday »

Ninety-seven years ago today,Mae West was sentenced to jail by a New York court for corrupting the morals of youth with her Broadway play “Sex.” After West was released, Thyra Samter Winslow wrotethis fantastic Profilefor the magazine, describing her as “one hundred per cent good showman,” on and off the stage: “Her admirers come back to see her after the show, and for two hours after the final curtain Mae is in the costume of the bad lady of the nineties, wig and corset and tight-fitting gown. The gown is immensely becoming in spite of its grotesqueries. If the evening is warm she’ll take off a couple of outer garments as she laughs over the foibles of the day, adding comments in her husky, Brooklynese drawl, always the Little Queen.”

P.S. All this talk of courtbrings to mind a landmark case from 2022: Nonhuman Rights Project v. James Breheny, et al., in which lawyers debated the personhood of Happy, an Asian elephant stuck roaming a one-acre enclosure at the Bronx Zoo. As Lawrence Wright wrote in hisbeautiful exposition of the dispute, “the case raised the broader question of whether animals represent the latest frontier in the expansion of rights in America—a progression marked by the end of slavery and by the adoption of women’s suffrage and gay marriage.”