Top 5: COVID-19 memory and the attention economy

Plus: Will we have 4th of July parties this summer? And can we trust robots in war?

This dog at NY Fashion Week looks better than any time I have in the past year of the pandemic. Image credit: John Lamparski/Getty.

The Top 5 articles for your week:

1. “Cleave” (Pioneer Works)

   Because this essay tries to distill how we might remember the pandemic. Memory always plays a huge role in our future social, economic, and political behaviors/choices and in the choices of the political class. “Everyone is going to recall the unwinding of this strange and horrible year differently. This depends not only on how we remember, but our competing impulse to ignore and forget. Too much suffering is hard for the human mind to comprehend. The "arithmetic of compassion" simply doesn’t scale. Paul Slovic, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, who coined that term, explains that people are less willing to help someone when they know many more are in need and not being helped. This can lead to a blunting indifference. Some people try to fight that feeling.”

2. “I Talked to the Cassandra of the Internet Age” (NYT)

   Because we missed this op-ed but subscriber Caitie Butler pointed it out to us, and we wanted to share it. Michael Goldhaber, a theoretical physicist, predicted much of the negative externalities that the internet has produced today (disinformation, influencer culture, reality TV, etc.) and why the attention economy explains so much of what ails our politics.

3. “Can Computer Algorithms Learn to Fight Wars Ethically?” (Washington Post Magazine)

   Because there’s a new technological revolution in the US’s military arsenal: autonomous robots that can do the killing for us on the battlefield — each one programmed with a set of directions and ethics. We’ve had the drone debates (highly recommend watching 2015’s “Eye in the Sky”), and now we can expand those debates further with the rise of this new tech and how much we can trust robot judgement vs. human judgement.

4. “A Quite Possibly Wonderful Summer” (The Atlantic)

   Because James Hamblin, a doctor and writer for The Atlantic, is relatively optimistic about this summer and how we might gain back some more “normal” rhythms of life. But that’s counting on vaccine distribution, vaccine choices, and the choices we make in how we support much poorer countries in vaccinating their own populations.

5. “Why is America getting a new $100 billion nuclear weapon?” (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)

   Because you could read just the first section of this essay on the US’s nuclear stockpile and be left with many questions (that is to say: it’s a long essay). As the Biden admin seeks to form a new treaty with Russia on our nuclear stockpile, “$100 billion to replace machines that would, if ever used, kill civilians on a mass scale and possibly end human civilization is just another forgotten subscription on auto-renew.”