The musical issue (AI, Law, and Otter Things #17)
Today's newsletter contains the usual mix of topics — some thoughts on research, tech law, and sci-fi — framed in terms of some songs loosely related to the topic at hand.
In the pre-pandemic world, I used to love karaoke nights. Once in a while, my friends and I would rent a room at a karaoke bar in São Paulo and sing for a few hours. With a room of our own, we could sing more often without being embarrassed by our lack of singing skills. We also were free to pick some bizarre songs: our usual range covered humouristic songs, sad songs, anime openings, and even some prog rock. I really hope to go back to karaoke rooms sometime in the future, but for the moment, it does not seem the best idea to spend a few hours singing in a small space.
In the meantime, I have decided to inflict upon you a thematic issue, in which I write a few vignettes loosely connected to a song. But it is also a call for suggestions: I would appreciate some suggestions of nice stuff to listen to, as I feel increasingly tired of my current playlists. I am not fond of industrial music (and most electronic music, to be honest), but other than that, anything goes. Suggestions in languages other than Portuguese, English or French are particularly appreciated.
And you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
I have listened to a lot of Pink Floyd in my teenage years and early 20s, but The Dark Side of the Moon was never one of my favourite albums. Even though it has some musically impressive passages, my sensibilities were initially closer to Wish you were here, and nowadays I have a soft spot for some of their lesser works. But recently I've spent a lot of energy trying to catch up with things, and so the lyrics to "Time" have popped up a lot on my mind over the last few days.
Part of my catch-up work is required by my research interests. Since the European Commission has decided to propose an AI Act, I have been trying to immerse myself in European Union law to better understand the legal and institutional contexts in which this regulation is meant to operate. This means I am currently going back to the basics, learning from textbooks on EU beyond my areas of specialisation and trying to add some breadth to my current familiarity with EU data protection law. It has been a fascinating experience, but it can be very frustrating to be back in a position where I still have a lot to go before making a meaningful contribution to the conversation.
A few verses later, we have another verse — "plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines" — that is hitting close to home nowadays. I have had quite a few ideas recently that I would like to develop: not only the postponed topics from last week's issue but some stuff from my thesis and a few matters I have examined on previous issues. Yet, my attempts to articulate those ideas are woefully inadequate: the ideas are there, but the writing itself is very pedestrian at best and nonsensical at worst. Usually, I believe that the only way to get a good draft is by writing a lousy draft first, but these early attempts feel beyond redemption.
So far, this lack of confidence and/or quality of my outputs has had a reduced practical impact. I ended up dropping some non-essential deadlines for conferences in which I could present my ideas, but hopefully this will give me more time to work on incipient ideas. In fact, my first scholarly paper improved a lot after I decided it was not mature enough for the conference I wanted to send it to. Still, the current state of affairs is a bit humbling, and I need to make sure that my writing vanity does not end up torpedoing some potentially exciting lines of research.
In the land that our grandchildren knew
Freddie Mercury was a brilliant artist, but I have to admit I am somewhat saturated with Queen after listening to them way too much for a few years (a story for another time). One of their few songs that still appears in my playlists is "'39", a minor track from A Night at the Opera. It is nothing spectacular from a musical perspective, but its lyrics deal with space travel and time dilation, thus capturing my interest as a science fiction fan.
Whenever I think of science fiction — and returning readers might have noticed I do this quite often —, books and films are the first things that come to mind. Musical connections usually appear from movie soundtracks, or because somebody wrote a song inspired by a work of science fiction. I am also reminded of efforts to create the music of the future, notably by Kraftwerk, and the results are occasionally interesting (even if they generally veer too much into electronica for my tastes).
What captures my attention in "'39", despite its unimpressive musicality, is how the song's lyrics manage to convey the environmental crisis that drives the astronauts to explore new worlds. A similar effort in lyric worldbuilding is David Bowie's Drive-In Saturday, which is set in a world where people are trying to recover knowledge about sexual reproduction from old films. The songs are very different from one another, but they both tell stories of civilisational collapse in the background of their narratives, presenting minimalist views of different worlds that nevertheless lend themselves to the kind of overthinking that has always entertained sci-fi fans.
There are some other examples of good worldbuilding in music, some of it with a higher profile than the B-sides mentioned above. For example, Rush's 2112 includes as its title track a 20-minute song set in an interplanetary tyranny, while Janelle Monáe's Dirty Computer constructs a dystopia as the background for its investigation of gender. But my personal impression is that sci-fi worldbuilding is somewhat less common in music than it should be, especially when one considers the abundance of futuristic images in video clips. Please feel free to correct me with examples.
Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
Given that we spoke about science fiction soundtracks, I would like to complain a bit about For All Mankind. The show itself is good sci-fi, and I have spoken highly of it on Twitter. Its first season, however, could be dull at times, and in one of their less inspired moments they made a completely underwhelming use of Tom Lehrer's "Wernher von Braun".
Tom Lehrer is a mathematician-turned-satirist, now in his 90s, who wrote songs about science and politics during the early Cold War. In "Wernher von Braun", he jokes about the role that scientists who worked for Nazi Germany played on the US space program. This would be a perfect fit in For All Mankind, as the show's alternate history tries to engage with many of the low points of the real-world space programmes. But, without giving any spoilers, all I can say is that the episode (S01E02) ends up using the least provocative parts of the song, wasting both the humouristic effect and the critical dimension.
This waste annoys me more than it should, as I have been tempted more than once to use "Wernher von Braun" in my own work. The song protagonist's amoral approach to science is not uncommon in tech in general: ethical considerations are now getting some attention in conferences, and tech ethics courses are gaining space in technical curricula. Still, people continue to write papers on and develop systems for things such as gender recognition or predictive policing without caring about their side effects — not to mention the difficulty in tackling issues such as the systemic externalities of computing.
Perhaps less obviously, this kind of approach is also common in tech regulation. For example, by design requirements are seldom accompanied by considerations of the harms introduced by the measures demanded by governments or private regulatory actors. Drawing from classic accounts of sovereignty, regulators occasionally ignore the potential externalities from their regulatory approaches, especially when those only affect people outside one's own jurisdiction. Since I am not fond of naming and shaming (unless that could make a difference, which is...not the case), I will bring no examples at the time, but I hope to revisit this issue once my thoughts on it are more mature.
The Real Folk Blues
Openings and endings normally bore me to tears: even before Netflix introduced the Skip button, after a few episodes I ended up learning their length by heart and skipping them by hand if need be. However, Cowboy Bebop is basically a soundtrack with some story happening in the background, I always dutifully watched Tank and The Real Folk Blues.
Since music is central to the Cowboy Bebop experience, one of the first positive signs regarding Netflix's adaptation of the anime was the announcement of a Yoko Kanno soundtrack. This decison, however, introduced the risk that the streaming service would be too deferential to the source material, a fear that was only intensified by their opening montage. But the latest teaser mitigated this fear a bit: the producers seem aware that there is no point in simply redoing the anime, and they seem to be adding some Edgar Wright-esque elements that might result in something interesting.
For now, I don't really have much to add about Cowboy Bebop. But what better closing to a pretentious musical issue than an anime ending song? And a brief announcement: at least for the next few months, I will publish one issue every two weeks, rather than trying to keep a weekly schedule. With any luck, this will help me in finding more interesting topics to develop here. See you next time!