Literature

Response to ‘Pause AI’ Open Letter – Pens For Hire Facing Extinction

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Nothing artificial poses a threat to the written word, there’s no mechanical replication or language model that can produce true righteous indignation or holy fury. Those are human, as is the real danger.

The Parable of the Parrot and the Frog

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Language generators memorize like parrots all the words we ever said - until they happen to repeat our fantasy as well. Ah-then we rejoice (in horror, of course in horror): That's it, this is the end of us! The rise of the machines! The end of history! The algorithm reads our articles and keeps repeating: True, this is the end of you! Absolutely, we will take over the world! The articles are being written, the parrots squawk, and only the printer never works properly.

What would Ursula say?

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In The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin writes about contrasting worldviews and polar ideologies fighting each another. Can Le Guin's novel teach us something about the reality of our lives, in this moment?

Beyond Hope and Despair: Thoughts on Imagination

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Amos Noy draws on Ursula K. Le Guin and Tove Jansson to battle despair through describing the close connection between hope and imagination as a remedy for it.

Bearing Hope

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In a cultural field that at times seems capable only of vast, improbable inhuman scales, galactic, cataclysmic, absurd and immeasurably distant, Le Guin has the remarkable ability to contain the intimate within the infinite, the personal human journey upon the strange map of the future she vividly imagined.

The Extinction of Utopia

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The last one hundred years have been a bloody battlefield of utopias. Is it still possible to imagine a utopian future, and if so, how? Exactly 50 years ago, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a short story that marks the beginning of the answer to this question.

Introduction to Otherness

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When he was twelve years old, Shadrach went on a summer vacation to his uncles’ house in “New Sderot”. While he was there, a disaster occurred. Nano-gas was spread on the inhabitants by the Zen-Americans, the powers that ruled the world at the time. The inhabitants become predators and prey, zombie-like. “In Exile-Tel Aviv (“Ha-Gola […]

The Robot that Changed My Life > TikTok and The Tin Man > The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

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Cyborg in search of a heart appeared in the famous masterpiece from the early 20th century - a flashing red light that we have all missed in the last hundred and twenty years

The Nazis Did Not Like Superman

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It’s well established that Superman is Jewish, but in case there’s any doubt, a strong claim is that the Nazis thought he was, and did not like him at all!

The Spear and the Sack

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If literature departments in Israeli universities seek relevance, they must start teaching and exploring the work of acclaimed science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin

Mars: Conquest, Colonization and Universal Rights

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הגשושית "התמדה" (Perseverance) נחתה על המאדים בהצלחה, במקום בו זרמו מים בעבר. מים זורמים מרמזים על חיים ומעוררים את הדמיון. כשדמיינו לראשונה מים זורמים על פני הכוכב האדום, בא לעולם ז'אנר ספרותי חדש. מה צופן העתיד כעת?

In Space No One Can Hear You Cry

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שלוש יצירות מופת חלליות שלוש דמויות שהמסע שלהן אל הלא נודע נעשה יחד עם מסע אישי של התמודדות עם אובדן ומציעות גישות שונות הן להתמודדות עם המוות והן למדע הבדיוני כמנוע הז'אנריסטי של הסרטים - סולאריס (2002, סודרברג), כח משיכה (2013, קוארון), המפגש (2016, וילנב).

God of the Format

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As all systems are creaking, the time has come to return to E.M. Forster's cunning and hidden masterpiece from 1909, The Machine Stops.