Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Future in 1964: Artificial Intelligence, Instantaneous Global Communication, Remote Work, Singularity & More

in Science | July 8th, 2022

Are you feel­ing con­fi­dent about the future? No? We under­stand. Would you like to know what it was like to feel a deep cer­tain­ty that the decades to come were going to be filled with won­der and the fan­tas­tic? Well then, gaze upon this clip from the BBC Archive YouTube chan­nel of sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke pre­dict­ing the future in 1964.

Although we best know him for writ­ing 2001: A Space Odyssey, the 1964 tele­vi­sion view­ing pub­lic would have known him for his futur­ism and his tal­ent for calm­ly explain­ing all the great things to come. In the late 1940s, he had already pre­dict­ed telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion satel­lites. In 1962 he pub­lished his col­lect­ed essays, Pro­files of the Future, which con­tains many of the ideas in this clip.

Here he cor­rect­ly pre­dicts the ease with which we can be con­tact­ed wher­ev­er in the world we choose to, where we can con­tact our friends “any­where on earth even if we don’t know their loca­tion.” What Clarke doesn’t pre­dict here is how “loca­tion” isn’t a thing when we’re on the inter­net. He imag­ines peo­ple work­ing just as well from Tahi­ti or Bali as they do from Lon­don. Clarke sees this advance­ment as the down­fall of the mod­ern city, as we do not need to com­mute into the city to work. Now, as so many of us are doing our jobs from home post-COVID, we’ve also dis­cov­ered the dystopia in that fan­ta­sy. (It cer­tain­ly has­n’t dropped the cost of rent.)

Next, he pre­dicts advances in biotech­nol­o­gy that would allow us to, say, train mon­keys to work as ser­vants and work­ers. (Until, he jokes, they form a union and “we’d be back right where we start­ed.) Per­haps, he says, humans have stopped evolving—what comes next is arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (although that phrase had yet to be used) and machine evo­lu­tion, where we’d be hon­ored to be the “step­ping stone” towards that des­tiny. Make of that what you will. I know you might think it would be cool to have a mon­key but­ler, but c’mon, think of the ethics, not to men­tion the cost of bananas.

Point­ing out where Clarke gets it wrong is too easy—-nobody gets it right all of the time. How­ev­er, it is fas­ci­nat­ing that some things that have nev­er come to pass—-being able to learn a lan­guage overnight, or eras­ing your memories—have man­aged to resur­face over the years as fic­tion films, like Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind. His ideas of cryo­genic sus­pen­sion are sta­ples of numer­ous hard sci-fi films.

And we are still wait­ing for the “Repli­ca­tor” machine, which would make exact dupli­cates of objects (and by so doing cause a col­lapse into “glut­to­nous bar­barism” because we’d want unlim­it­ed amounts of every­thing.) Some com­menters call this a pre­cur­sor to 3‑D print­ing. I’d say oth­er­wise, but some­thing very close to it might be around the cor­ner. Who knows? Clarke him­self agrees about all this conjecture-—it’s doomed to fail.

“That is why the future is so end­less­ly fas­ci­nat­ing. Try as we can, we’ll nev­er out­guess it.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Arthur C. Clarke Read 2001: A Space Odyssey: A Vin­tage 1976 Vinyl Record­ing

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts the Future on The David Let­ter­man Show (1980)

How Pre­vi­ous Decades Pre­dict­ed the Future: The 21st Cen­tu­ry as Imag­ined in the 1900s, 1950s, 1980s, and Oth­er Eras

Octavia Butler’s Four Rules for Pre­dict­ing the Future

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

An Introduction to the Voynich Manuscript, the World’s Most Mysterious Book

in Books, History | July 8th, 2022

“The Voyn­ich man­u­script is a real medieval book, and has been car­bon-dat­ed to the ear­ly 1400s.” No mod­ern hoax, this noto­ri­ous­ly bizarre text has in fact “passed through the hands of many over the years,” includ­ing “sci­en­tists, emper­ors, and col­lec­tors.” Though “we still don’t know who actu­al­ly wrote it, the illus­tra­tions hint at the book’s orig­i­nal pur­pose,” hav­ing “much in com­mon with medieval herbals, astrol­o­gy guides, and bathing man­u­als.” Hence the like­li­hood of the Voyn­ich man­u­script being “some sort of med­ical text­book, although a very strange one by any mea­sure. Then there’s the writ­ing.”

This sum­ma­ry of the known his­to­ry and nature of the most mys­te­ri­ous man­u­script in exis­tence comes from the Youtube video above, “Secrets of the Voyn­ich Man­u­script.” Its chan­nel Hochela­ga has pre­vi­ous­ly been fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for episodes on medieval mon­sters, a guide to super­nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­na from renais­sance Ger­many, Hoku­sai’s ghost art, and the Bib­li­cal apoc­a­lypse.

In short, the Voyn­ich man­u­script could hard­ly find a more accom­mo­dat­ing wheel­house. And as in Hochela­ga’s oth­er videos, the sub­ject is approached not with total creduli­ty, but rather a clear and straight­for­ward dis­cus­sion of why gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion of enthu­si­asts have kept try­ing to fig­ure it out.

No aspect of the Voyn­ich man­u­script fas­ci­nates as much as its hav­ing been “writ­ten in a mys­tery lan­guage with a unique alpha­bet and gram­mat­i­cal rules.” It could be an exist­ing lan­guage ren­dered in code; it could be one cre­at­ed entire­ly and only for this book. Though attempts are made with some fre­quen­cy, “no one has been able to defin­i­tive­ly solve the Voyn­ich man­u­scrip­t’s lan­guage.” It could, of course, be that “we’ve fall­en for one big medieval prank,” but the video’s cre­ator does­n’t buy that expla­na­tion. Even in its incom­pre­hen­si­bil­i­ty, the text appears to pos­sess great com­plex­i­ty. If it were to be decod­ed, “would the mag­ic and mys­tery dis­ap­pear? Or would we uncov­er a whole new set of ques­tions and embark on anoth­er jour­ney entire­ly?”

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to “the World’s Most Mys­te­ri­ous Book,” the 15th-Cen­tu­ry Voyn­ich Man­u­script

The Mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich Man­u­script Gets Dig­i­tized: Explore the 15th-Cen­tu­ry Text That Lin­guists & Code-Break­ers Can’t Under­stand

The Voyn­ich Man­u­script: A New Doc­u­men­tary Takes a Deep Dive Into the Mys­ter­ies of the Bizarre Man­u­script

Has the Voyn­ich Man­u­script Final­ly Been Decod­ed?: Researchers Claim That the Mys­te­ri­ous Text Was Writ­ten in Pho­net­ic Old Turk­ish

The Writ­ing Sys­tem of the Cryp­tic Voyn­ich Man­u­script Explained: British Researcher May Have Final­ly Cracked the Code

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence May Have Cracked the Code of the Voyn­ich Man­u­script: Has Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy Final­ly Solved a Medieval Mys­tery?

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Take Graphic Design Courses to Launch Your Career as a Graphic Designer, Video Game Designer, UI Designer & More

in Design, Online Courses | June 30th, 2022

What can you do with graph­ic design skills? More and more, it seems, as emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies dri­ve new apps, soft­ware, and games. New design chal­lenges are every­where, from human-machine inter­faces, to 3D mod­el­ing in video games and ani­mat­ed films, to re-imag­in­ing clas­sic designs in print and on screen. In addi­tion to tra­di­tion­al jobs like art direc­tor, graph­ic design­er, pro­duc­tion artist, and ani­ma­tor, the past few years have seen a sharp rise in demand for User Expe­ri­ence (UX) and User Inter­face (UI) design­ers, roles that require a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent cre­ative and tech­ni­cal skill sets.

You could get a four-year degree in design to work in one of these fields, or you could take a Cours­era Spe­cial­iza­tion and be one step clos­er. Cours­era has met the demand for new job skills and tech edu­ca­tion by part­ner­ing with top arts insti­tu­tions and uni­ver­si­ties to offer online cours­es at low cost. All of these cours­es grant cer­tifi­cates that show poten­tial employ­ers you’re ready to put your learn­ing to use. If careers in art and con­tem­po­rary design, graph­ic design, web user expe­ri­ence and inter­face design, or video game design appeal to you, you can learn those skills in the five cer­tifi­cate-grant­i­ng Spe­cial­iza­tion pro­grams below.

• Graph­ic Design Spe­cial­iza­tion (5 cours­es offered by Cal­i­for­nia Insti­tute of the Arts)
• UI / UX Design Spe­cial­iza­tion (4 cours­es offered by Cal­i­for­nia Insti­tute of the Arts)
• Mod­ern and Con­tem­po­rary Art and Design Spe­cial­iza­tion (4 cours­es Muse­um of Mod­ern Art)
• Game Design: Art and Con­cepts Spe­cial­iza­tion (4 cours­es offered by Cal­i­for­nia Insti­tute of the Arts)
• Graph­ic Design Ele­ments for Non-Design­ers Spe­cial­iza­tion (4 cours­es offered by Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado Boul­der)

Graph­ic design­ers can choose to be as spe­cial­ized or gen­er­al­ized as they like, but as in all cre­ative fields, they need a thor­ough under­stand­ing of the basics. A Cours­era Spe­cial­iza­tion is a series of cours­es intend­ed to lead stu­dents to mas­tery, build­ing on the his­to­ry and foun­da­tions of the field. You can enroll for free and try out any of the Spe­cial­iza­tions for 7 days. After that, you’ll be charged between $39-$49 per month until you com­plete the cours­es in a Spe­cial­iza­tion. (Finan­cial aid is avail­able).

The excit­ing Spe­cial­iza­tions from CALARTS and the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art will bring you many steps clos­er to a new career, or maybe even a new per­son­al pas­sion project.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Cours­era. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Cours­era cours­es and pro­grams, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google Unveils a Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing & E‑Commerce Cer­tifi­cate: 7 Cours­es Will Help Pre­pare Stu­dents for an Entry-Lev­el Job in 6 Months       

Google & Cours­era Launch Career Cer­tifi­cates That Pre­pare Stu­dents for Jobs in 6 Months: Data Ana­lyt­ics, Project Man­age­ment and UX Design

Become a Project Man­ag­er With­out a Col­lege Degree with Google’s Project Man­age­ment Cer­tifi­cate

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Aldous Huxley to George Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours (1949)

in Life, Literature | June 25th, 2022

In 1949, George Orwell received a curi­ous let­ter from his for­mer high school French teacher.

Orwell had just pub­lished his ground­break­ing book Nine­teen Eighty-Four, which received glow­ing reviews from just about every cor­ner of the Eng­lish-speak­ing world. His French teacher, as it hap­pens, was none oth­er than Aldous Hux­ley who taught at Eton for a spell before writ­ing Brave New World (1931), the oth­er great 20th cen­tu­ry dystopi­an nov­el.

Hux­ley starts off the let­ter prais­ing the book, describ­ing it as “pro­found­ly impor­tant.” He con­tin­ues, “The phi­los­o­phy of the rul­ing minor­i­ty in Nine­teen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been car­ried to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion by going beyond sex and deny­ing it.”

Then Hux­ley switch­es gears and crit­i­cizes the book, writ­ing, “Whether in actu­al fact the pol­i­cy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indef­i­nite­ly seems doubt­ful. My own belief is that the rul­ing oli­garchy will find less ardu­ous and waste­ful ways of gov­ern­ing and of sat­is­fy­ing its lust for pow­er, and these ways will resem­ble those which I described in Brave New World.” (Lis­ten to him read a dra­ma­tized ver­sion of the book here.)

Basi­cal­ly while prais­ing Nine­teen Eighty-Four, Hux­ley argues that his ver­sion of the future was more like­ly to come to pass.

In Hux­ley’s seem­ing­ly dystopic World State, the elite amuse the mass­es into sub­mis­sion with a mind-numb­ing drug called Soma and an end­less buf­fet of casu­al sex. Orwell’s Ocea­nia, on the oth­er hand, keeps the mass­es in check with fear thanks to an end­less war and a hyper-com­pe­tent sur­veil­lance state. At first blush, they might seem like they are dia­met­ri­cal­ly opposed but, in fact, an Orwellian world and a Hux­leyan one are sim­ply two dif­fer­ent modes of oppres­sion.

Obvi­ous­ly we are nowhere near either dystopic vision but the pow­er of both books is that they tap into our fears of the state. While Hux­ley might make you look askance at The Bach­e­lor or Face­book, Orwell makes you recoil in hor­ror at the gov­ern­ment throw­ing around phras­es like “enhanced inter­ro­ga­tion” and “sur­gi­cal drone strikes.”

You can read Huxley’s full let­ter below.

Wright­wood. Cal.

21 Octo­ber, 1949

Dear Mr. Orwell,

It was very kind of you to tell your pub­lish­ers to send me a copy of your book. It arrived as I was in the midst of a piece of work that required much read­ing and con­sult­ing of ref­er­ences; and since poor sight makes it nec­es­sary for me to ration my read­ing, I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on Nine­teen Eighty-Four.

Agree­ing with all that the crit­ics have writ­ten of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how pro­found­ly impor­tant the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals — the ulti­mate rev­o­lu­tion? The first hints of a phi­los­o­phy of the ulti­mate rev­o­lu­tion — the rev­o­lu­tion which lies beyond pol­i­tics and eco­nom­ics, and which aims at total sub­ver­sion of the indi­vid­u­al’s psy­chol­o­gy and phys­i­ol­o­gy — are to be found in the Mar­quis de Sade, who regard­ed him­self as the con­tin­u­a­tor, the con­sum­ma­tor, of Robe­spierre and Babeuf. The phi­los­o­phy of the rul­ing minor­i­ty in Nine­teen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been car­ried to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion by going beyond sex and deny­ing it. Whether in actu­al fact the pol­i­cy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indef­i­nite­ly seems doubt­ful. My own belief is that the rul­ing oli­garchy will find less ardu­ous and waste­ful ways of gov­ern­ing and of sat­is­fy­ing its lust for pow­er, and these ways will resem­ble those which I described in Brave New World. I have had occa­sion recent­ly to look into the his­to­ry of ani­mal mag­net­ism and hyp­no­tism, and have been great­ly struck by the way in which, for a hun­dred and fifty years, the world has refused to take seri­ous cog­nizance of the dis­cov­er­ies of Mes­mer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.

Part­ly because of the pre­vail­ing mate­ri­al­ism and part­ly because of pre­vail­ing respectabil­i­ty, nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry philoso­phers and men of sci­ence were not will­ing to inves­ti­gate the odd­er facts of psy­chol­o­gy for prac­ti­cal men, such as politi­cians, sol­diers and police­men, to apply in the field of gov­ern­ment. Thanks to the vol­un­tary igno­rance of our fathers, the advent of the ulti­mate rev­o­lu­tion was delayed for five or six gen­er­a­tions. Anoth­er lucky acci­dent was Freud’s inabil­i­ty to hyp­no­tize suc­cess­ful­ly and his con­se­quent dis­par­age­ment of hyp­no­tism. This delayed the gen­er­al appli­ca­tion of hyp­no­tism to psy­chi­a­try for at least forty years. But now psy­cho-analy­sis is being com­bined with hyp­no­sis; and hyp­no­sis has been made easy and indef­i­nite­ly exten­si­ble through the use of bar­bi­tu­rates, which induce a hyp­noid and sug­gestible state in even the most recal­ci­trant sub­jects.

With­in the next gen­er­a­tion I believe that the world’s rulers will dis­cov­er that infant con­di­tion­ing and nar­co-hyp­no­sis are more effi­cient, as instru­ments of gov­ern­ment, than clubs and pris­ons, and that the lust for pow­er can be just as com­plete­ly sat­is­fied by sug­gest­ing peo­ple into lov­ing their servi­tude as by flog­ging and kick­ing them into obe­di­ence. In oth­er words, I feel that the night­mare of Nine­teen Eighty-Four is des­tined to mod­u­late into the night­mare of a world hav­ing more resem­blance to that which I imag­ined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased effi­cien­cy. Mean­while, of course, there may be a large scale bio­log­i­cal and atom­ic war — in which case we shall have night­mares of oth­er and scarce­ly imag­in­able kinds.

Thank you once again for the book.

Yours sin­cere­ly,

Aldous Hux­ley

via Let­ters of Note

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Com­plete Read­ing of George Orwell’s 1984: Aired on Paci­fi­ca Radio, 1975

George Orwell Iden­ti­fies the Main Ene­my of the Free Press: It’s the “Intel­lec­tu­al Cow­ardice” of the Press Itself

Aldous Hux­ley Tells Mike Wal­lace What Will Destroy Democ­ra­cy: Over­pop­u­la­tion, Drugs & Insid­i­ous Tech­nol­o­gy (1958)

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

Hear Aldous Hux­ley Nar­rate His Dystopi­an Mas­ter­piece, Brave New World

Aldous Huxley’s Most Beau­ti­ful, LSD-Assist­ed Death: A Let­ter from His Wid­ow

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

An Introduction to Stanislaw Lem, the Great Polish Sci-Fi Writer, by Jonathan Lethem

in Literature | June 20th, 2022

Who was Stanis­law Lem? The Pol­ish sci­ence fic­tion writer, nov­el­ist, essay­ist, and poly­math may best be known for his 1961 nov­el Solaris (adapt­ed for the screen by Andrei Tarkosvky in 1972 and again by Steven Soder­bergh in 2014). Lem’s sci­ence fic­tion appealed broad­ly out­side of SF fan­dom, attract­ing the likes of John Updike, who called his sto­ries “mar­velous” and Lem a poet of “sci­en­tif­ic ter­mi­nol­o­gy” for read­ers “whose hearts beat faster when the Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can arrives each month.”

Updike’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion is but one ver­sion of Lem. There are sev­er­al more, writes Jonathan Lethem in an essay for the Lon­don Review of Books, penned for Lem’s 100th anniver­sary – at least five dif­fer­ent Lems with five dif­fer­ent lit­er­ary per­son­al­i­ties. Only the first is a “hard sci­ence fic­tion writer,” the genre orig­i­nat­ing not with Mary Shelley’s Franken­stein, but “in H.G. Wells’ tech­no­log­i­cal prog­nos­ti­ca­tions.”

Rep­re­sent­ed best in the pages of Astound­ing Sto­ries and oth­er sci-fi pulps, hard sci-fi “adver­tis­es con­sumer goods like per­son­al robots and fly­ing cars. It val­orizes space trav­el that cul­mi­nates in suc­cess­ful, if dif­fi­cult, con­tact with the alien life assumed to be strewn through­out the galax­ies.” The genre also became tied to “Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ist ide­ol­o­gy, tech­no­crat­ic tri­umphal­ism, man­i­fest des­tiny” and “lib­er­tar­i­an sur­vival­ist bull­shit,” says Lethem.

Lem had no use for these atti­tudes. In his guise as a crit­ic and review­er he wrote, “the sci­en­tif­ic igno­rance of most Amer­i­can sci­ence-fic­tion writ­ers was as inex­plic­a­ble as the abom­inable lit­er­ary qual­i­ty of their out­put.” He admired the Eng­lish H.G. Wells, com­par­ing him to the inven­tor of chess, and Amer­i­can Philip K. Dick, whom he called a “vision­ary among char­la­tans.” But Lem hat­ed most hard sci-fi, though he him­self, says Lethem, was a hard sci-fi writer “with vision­ary gifts and inex­haustible dili­gence when it came to the task of extrap­o­la­tion.”

Much of Lem’s work was of anoth­er kind, as Lethem explains in the short film above, a con­densed ver­sion of his essay. The sec­ond Lem “wrote fairy tales and folk tales of the future.” The third, “wrote just two nov­els, yet he could eas­i­ly be, on the right day, one’s favorite.” Lem num­ber four “is the pure post-mod­ernist, who uni­fied his essay­is­tic and fic­tion­al selves with a Bor­ge­sian or Nabo­kov­ian ges­ture.” This Lem, for exam­ple, wrote the very Bor­ge­sian A Per­fect Vac­u­um: Per­fect Reviews of Nonex­is­tent Books.

Lem num­ber five, says Lethem, is “anoth­er major fig­ure,” this one a pro­lif­ic lit­er­ary essay­ist, crit­ic, review­er, and non-fic­tion writer whose breadth is stag­ger­ing. Rather than con­fin­ing him with the label “futur­ist,” Lethem calls him an “any­thingist,” a point Lem proved with his 1964 Sum­ma Tech­nolo­giae, a “mas­ter­work of non-fic­tion,” Simon Ings writes at New Sci­en­tist, with the ambi­tion and scope of the 13th-cen­tu­ry Aquinas work for which it’s named.

This fifth and final Lem “will be a fab­u­lous shock to those who know only his sci­ence fic­tion,” writes Ings. Only trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish in 2014, his Sum­ma presages search engines, vir­tu­al real­i­ty, and tech­no­log­i­cal sin­gu­lar­i­ty. It attempts an “all encom­pass­ing… dis­course on evo­lu­tion,” com­ment­ed bio­physi­cist Peter Butko, “not only… of sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy… but also evo­lu­tion of life, human­i­ty, con­scious­ness, cul­ture, and civ­i­liza­tion.”

The last Lem makes for heady read­ing, but he imbues this work with the same wit and wicked­ly satir­i­cal voice we find in the first four. He oper­at­ed, after all, as Lethem writes in his essay cel­e­brat­ing the Pol­ish author at 100, “in the spir­it of oth­er Iron Cur­tain fig­ures who slipped below the cen­sor’s radar by using forms regard­ed as unse­ri­ous.” Yet few have tak­en the form of sci­ence fic­tion more seri­ous­ly.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“Auteur in Space”: A Video Essay on How Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Tran­scends Sci­ence Fic­tion

Revis­it Vin­tage Issues of Astound­ing Sto­ries, the 1930s Mag­a­zine that Gave Rise to Sci­ence Fic­tion as We Know It

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Discover DALL‑E, the Artificial Intelligence Artist That Lets You Create Surreal Artwork

in Art, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Data, Technology | June 17th, 2022

DALL‑E, an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence sys­tem that gen­er­ates viable-look­ing art in a vari­ety of styles in response to user sup­plied text prompts, has been gar­ner­ing a lot of inter­est since it debuted this spring.

It has yet to be released to the gen­er­al pub­lic, but while we’re wait­ing, you could have a go at DALL‑E Mini, an open source AI mod­el that gen­er­ates a grid of images inspired by any phrase you care to type into its search box.

Co-cre­ator Boris Day­ma explains how DALL‑E Mini learns by view­ing mil­lions of cap­tioned online images:

Some of the con­cepts are learnt (sic) from mem­o­ry as it may have seen sim­i­lar images. How­ev­er, it can also learn how to cre­ate unique images that don’t exist such as “the Eif­fel tow­er is land­ing on the moon” by com­bin­ing mul­ti­ple con­cepts togeth­er.

Sev­er­al mod­els are com­bined togeth­er to achieve these results:

• an image encoder that turns raw images into a sequence of num­bers with its asso­ci­at­ed decoder

• a mod­el that turns a text prompt into an encod­ed image

• a mod­el that judges the qual­i­ty of the images gen­er­at­ed for bet­ter fil­ter­ing 

My first attempt to gen­er­ate some art using DALL‑E mini failed to yield the hoped for weird­ness.  I blame the bland­ness of my search term — “toma­to soup.”

Per­haps I’d have bet­ter luck “Andy Warhol eat­ing a bowl of toma­to soup as a child in Pitts­burgh.”

Ah, there we go!

I was curi­ous to know how DALL‑E Mini would riff on its name­sake artist’s han­dle (an hon­or Dali shares with the tit­u­lar AI hero of Pixar’s 2018 ani­mat­ed fea­ture, WALL‑E.)

Hmm… seems like we’re back­slid­ing a bit.

Let me try “Andy Warhol eat­ing a bowl of toma­to soup as a child in Pitts­burgh with Sal­vador Dali.”

Ye gods! That’s the stuff of night­mares, but it also strikes me as pret­ty legit mod­ern art. Love the spar­ing use of red. Well done, DALL‑E mini.

At this point, van­i­ty got the bet­ter of me and I did the AI art-gen­er­at­ing equiv­a­lent of googling my own name, adding “in a tutu” because who among us hasn’t dreamed of being a bal­le­ri­na at some point?

Let that be a les­son to you, Pan­do­ra…

Hope­ful­ly we’re all plan­ning to use this play­ful open AI tool for good, not evil.

Hyperallergic’s Sarah Rose Sharp raised some valid con­cerns in rela­tion to the orig­i­nal, more sophis­ti­cat­ed DALL‑E:

It’s all fun and games when you’re gen­er­at­ing “robot play­ing chess” in the style of Matisse, but drop­ping machine-gen­er­at­ed imagery on a pub­lic that seems less capa­ble than ever of dis­tin­guish­ing fact from fic­tion feels like a dan­ger­ous trend.

Addi­tion­al­ly, DALL‑E’s neur­al net­work can yield sex­ist and racist images, a recur­ring issue with AI tech­nol­o­gy. For instance, a reporter at Vice found that prompts includ­ing search terms like “CEO” exclu­sive­ly gen­er­at­ed images of White men in busi­ness attire. The com­pa­ny acknowl­edges that DALL‑E “inher­its var­i­ous bias­es from its train­ing data, and its out­puts some­times rein­force soci­etal stereo­types.”

Co-cre­ator Day­ma does not duck the trou­bling impli­ca­tions and bias­es his baby could unleash:

While the capa­bil­i­ties of image gen­er­a­tion mod­els are impres­sive, they may also rein­force or exac­er­bate soci­etal bias­es. While the extent and nature of the bias­es of the DALL·E mini mod­el have yet to be ful­ly doc­u­ment­ed, giv­en the fact that the mod­el was trained on unfil­tered data from the Inter­net, it may gen­er­ate images that con­tain stereo­types against minor­i­ty groups. Work to ana­lyze the nature and extent of these lim­i­ta­tions is ongo­ing, and will be doc­u­ment­ed in more detail in the DALL·E mini mod­el card.

The New York­er car­toon­ists Ellis Rosen and Jason Adam Katzen­stein con­jure anoth­er way in which DALL‑E mini could break with the social con­tract:

And a Twit­ter user who goes by St. Rev. Dr. Rev blows minds and opens mul­ti­ple cans of worms, using pan­els from car­toon­ist Joshua Bark­man’s beloved web­com­ic, False Knees:

Pro­ceed with cau­tion, and play around with DALL‑E mini here.

Get on the wait­list for orig­i­nal fla­vor DALL‑E access here.

Relat­ed Con­tent

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Brings to Life Fig­ures from 7 Famous Paint­ings: The Mona Lisa, Birth of Venus & More

Google App Uses Machine Learn­ing to Dis­cov­er Your Pet’s Look Alike in 10,000 Clas­sic Works of Art

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence for Every­one: An Intro­duc­to­ry Course from Andrew Ng, the Co-Founder of Cours­era

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Ziggy Stardust Turns 50: Celebrate David Bowie’s Signature Character with a Newly Released Version of “Starman”

in History, Music | June 17th, 2022

David Bowie’s fans have now been enjoy­ing the char­ac­ter of Zig­gy Star­dust for a full five decades. That’s hard­ly a bad run, giv­en that the open­ing track of The Rise and Fall of Zig­gy Star­dust and the Spi­ders from Mars announces that the end of the world will come in just five years. Released on June 16th, 1972, that album gave the pub­lic its intro­duc­tion to the title char­ac­ter, an androg­y­nous rock star from a dis­tant star who one day arrives, mes­si­ah-like, on the dying Earth. But as the musi­cal sto­ry goes, the result­ing fame proves too much for him: the hap­less Zig­gy ends up in sham­bles, vic­tim­ized by Earth­ly desires in all their man­i­fes­ta­tions.

One could read into all this cer­tain aspi­ra­tions and fears on the part of Zig­gy Star­dust’s cre­ator-per­former, the young David Bowie. Broad crit­i­cal con­sen­sus holds that it was on the pre­vi­ous year’s Hunky Dory that Bowie first showed his true artis­tic poten­tial.

Though that album, his fourth, boast­ed sig­na­ture-songs-to-be like “Changes” and “Life on Mars?”, Bowie declared (no doubt to the label’s frus­tra­tion) that he would­n’t both­er pro­mot­ing it, since he was just about to change his image. This turned out to be a shrewd move, since his sub­se­quent trans­for­ma­tion into Zig­gy Star­dust launched him out of the realm of the respect­ed niche singer-song­writer and into the stratos­phere of the bona fide rock star.

Why did Zig­gy Star­dust dri­ve so many lis­ten­ers to near-mani­ac appre­ci­a­tion half a cen­tu­ry ago? In Bowie’s native Eng­land, many cite his July 1972 per­for­mance of “Star­man” the BBC’s Top of the Pops as the turn­ing point. Though only mild­ly psy­che­del­ic, the seg­ment cel­e­brat­ed the col­or­ful­ly askew glam­our of Bowie-as-Zig­gy and his band the Spi­ders from Mars just when it was des­per­ate­ly need­ed. As music crit­ic Simon Reynolds writes, “It is hard to recon­struct the drab­ness, the visu­al deple­tion of Britain in 1972, which fil­tered into the music papers to form the grey and grub­by back­drop to Bowie’s phys­i­cal and sar­to­r­i­al splen­dor.” Today you can hear a new­ly released 2022 mix of “Star­man” con­struct­ed from the tracks record­ed for Top of the Pops those 50 years ago.

Imag­ine the impact on a young Eng­lish pop-music fan in 1972 who hap­pened to be watch­ing on col­or (or rather, colour) tele­vi­sion, itself intro­duced only a few years ear­li­er. Though Bowie may have cho­sen just the right his­tor­i­cal moment to debut the first of his musi­cal per­son­ae, he did­n’t cre­ate Zig­gy Star­dust ex nihi­lo. Ele­ments of the char­ac­ter have clear prece­dents ear­li­er in Bowie’s career, not least in the pro­mo­tion­al film for 1968’s “Space Odd­i­ty,” the 2001-inspired sin­gle that first asso­ci­at­ed him with the realms beyond our plan­et. But Zig­gy was Bowie’s first gen­uine alter ego, a char­ac­ter per­fect­ly suit­ed to the era of “glam rock” who could con­ve­nient­ly be retired when that era passed. Glam rock may be long gone, but Zig­gy Star­dust still looks and sounds as if he’d only just land­ed on Earth.

Relat­ed con­tent:

David Bowie Recalls the Strange Expe­ri­ence of Invent­ing the Char­ac­ter Zig­gy Star­dust (1977)

The Sto­ry of Zig­gy Star­dust: How David Bowie Cre­at­ed the Char­ac­ter that Made Him Famous

David Bowie Became Zig­gy Star­dust 48 Years Ago This Week: Watch Orig­i­nal Footage

Hear Demo Record­ings of David Bowie’s “Zig­gy Star­dust,” “Space Odd­i­ty” & “Changes”

David Bowie Remem­bers His Zig­gy Star­dust Days in Ani­mat­ed Video

How David Bowie Deliv­ered His Two Most Famous Farewells: As Zig­gy Star­dust in 1973, and at the End of His Life in 2016

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

A Special New, Two-Volume Collection of Philip K. Dick Stories Comes Illustrated by 24 Different Artists

in Books, Literature | June 16th, 2022

Philip K. Dick­’s mul­ti­ple worlds have appeared in increas­ing­ly bet­ter edi­tions since the author passed away in 1982. In the 21st cen­tu­ry, respectable hard­backs and qual­i­ty paper have ful­ly replaced yel­lowed, pulpy pages. Maybe no edi­tion yet is more attrac­tive than the Folio Soci­ety of Lon­don’s two-vol­ume hard­back set of Dick­’s select­ed short sto­ries, illus­trat­ed by 24 dif­fer­ent artists and includ­ing tales that have sur­vived film adap­ta­tions, for bet­ter and worse, like “Pay­check,” “The Minor­i­ty Report,” and “We Can Remem­ber It for You Whole­sale.” The books will set you back $125, but that’s a small sum com­pared to the price of an ear­li­er, four-vol­ume Com­plete Short Sto­ries, pub­lished in a lim­it­ed edi­tion of 750, day-glo, hand-num­bered copies. These sold out in less than 48 hours and now go for $2,500 in rare online sales.

In death Dick has achieved what he sought in his writ­ing life: suc­cess as lit­er­ary author. He thought he would even­tu­al­ly pub­lish his real­ist fic­tion to earn the rep­u­ta­tion, vow­ing in 1960 that he would “take twen­ty to thir­ty years to suc­ceed as a lit­er­ary writer.” Instead, he’s famous for great fic­tion that just hap­pens to use the idiom of sci-fi to ask, as he wrote in an unde­liv­ered 1978 speech: “What is real­i­ty?” and “What con­sti­tutes an authen­tic human being?”

We tend to asso­ciate these exis­ten­tial, pre-post-mod­ernist ques­tions with nov­els and novel­las from the 60s and 70s that com­mu­ni­cate Dick­’s para­noid world­view — works nom­i­nat­ed for a Neb­u­la Award, for exam­ple, like Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep?, the source for the best of the film adap­ta­tions, Blade Run­ner.

Dick first won fame in 1963 when he was giv­en the Hugo Award for The Man in the High Cas­tle, a book that exceeds the bound­aries of genre to become, unmis­tak­ably, a PKD orig­i­nal. His ear­li­er sto­ries, on the oth­er hand, writ­ten through­out the 1950s when the author was in his twen­ties, tend to fol­low the con­ven­tions of the hard sci-fi of the time, with the same themes of space trav­el, robot­ics, and oth­er futur­is­tic tech­nol­o­gy that pre­dom­i­nate in Robert Hein­lein and Isaac Asi­mov. Super­fi­cial­ly, there might seem lit­tle to dis­tin­guish Dick­’s ear­ly sto­ries from oth­er writ­ing of the time pub­lished in pulps like Sci­ence Fic­tion Quar­ter­ly, Galaxy Sci­ence Fic­tion, and IF. 

But the ear­ly sto­ries show the unmis­tak­able touch of the lat­er nov­el­ist. There are the flash­es of humor, absur­di­ty, deep insight into the human psy­che, and the warmth and empa­thy Dick­’s nar­ra­tive voice nev­er lost even in his most bizarre fugues. In his first pub­lished sto­ry, “Roog,” sold in 1951, Dick imag­ines a dog who believes the garbage men come to steal the fam­i­ly’s food, leav­ing only the emp­ty met­al stor­age can behind. “Cer­tain­ly, I decid­ed,” he writes, “that dog sees the world quite dif­fer­ent­ly than I do, or any humans. And then I began to think, maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a pri­vate world, a world dif­fer­ent from those inhab­it­ed and expe­ri­enced by all oth­er humans.”

It’s a short leap from these thoughts to the idea that there might be no sin­gu­lar real­i­ty at all to fight over. Back then, he says, “I had no idea that such fun­da­men­tal issues could be pur­sued in the sci­ence fic­tion field. I began to pur­sue them uncon­scious­ly.” His uncon­scious led him, in 1954’s “Adjust­ment Team” — the source of a less-than-great film — to imag­ine anoth­er dog, one who talks and inter­feres in human affairs (a detail omit­ted, thank­ful­ly, from The Adjust­ment Bureau). Dick­’s ear­ly sto­ries often fea­tured com­i­cal ani­mals — such as the Okja-like Mar­t­ian pig in “Beyond Likes the Wub,” a high­ly-intel­li­gent crea­ture capa­ble of telepa­thy and deep feel­ing. While he would turn his atten­tion from ani­mals and aliens to androids, alter­nate real­i­ties, and altered states of con­scious­ness, Dick always had the abil­i­ty to turn the genre of sci­ence fic­tion into a lit­er­ary tool for the most dar­ing of philo­soph­i­cal inves­ti­ga­tions.

Learn more about the two-vol­ume Folio Soci­ety Select­ed Sto­ries of Philip K. Dick here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

33 Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Philip K. Dick as Free Audio Books & Free eBooks

Hear Philip K. Dick’s Famous Metz Speech: “If You Find this World Bad, You Should See Some of the Oth­ers” (1977)

Hear 6 Clas­sic Philip K. Dick Sto­ries Adapt­ed as Vin­tage Radio Plays

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Remembering Dave Smith (RIP), the Father of MIDI & the Creator of the 80s’ Most Beloved Synthesizer, the Prophet‑5

in Computer Science, Music, Technology | June 8th, 2022

Some founders rest on their lau­rels, build indus­tries around them­selves like a cocoon, and nev­er escape or out­grow the big achieve­ment that made their name. Some, like Dave Smith — the so-called “father of MIDI,” and one of the most inno­v­a­tive syn­the­siz­er pio­neers of the last sev­er­al decades – don’t stop cre­at­ing for long enough to col­lect dust. You may nev­er have heard of Smith, but you’ve heard his tech­nol­o­gy. Before pio­neer­ing MIDI (Musi­cal Instru­ment Dig­i­tal Inter­face), the dig­i­tal stan­dard that allows hun­dreds of elec­tron­ic instru­ments to play nice­ly with each oth­er across com­put­er and soft­ware mak­ers, Smith found­ed Sequen­tial Cir­cuits and built one of the most revered syn­the­siz­ers ever made, the Prophet‑5, invent­ed in 1977 and essen­tial to the sound of the 1980s and beyond.

Smith’s key­boards made appear­ances on stage, video, and albums through­out the decade. Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes used the Prophet‑5 on the band’s first album and “vir­tu­al­ly every record I have made since then,” he said in a state­ment. “With­out Dav­e’s vision and inge­nu­ity,” Rhodes went on, “the sound of the 1980s would have been very dif­fer­ent, he tru­ly changed the son­ic sound­scape of a gen­er­a­tion.”

Sequen­tial synths appeared on albums by bands as dis­parate as The Cure and Daryl Hall & John Oates, who demon­strate the dream-like, ethe­re­al capa­bil­i­ties of the Prophet‑5 — the first ful­ly pro­gram­ma­ble poly­phon­ic ana­log synth — in “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do).” The Prophet‑5 also drove the sound of Radio­head­’s Kid A, and indie dance dar­lings Hot Chip wrote they would be “noth­ing with­out what [Smith] cre­at­ed.” Few vin­tage synths are as desir­able as the Prophet‑5.

The orig­i­nal Prophet is “not immune to the dark side of vin­tage synths,” writes Vin­tage Synth Explor­er, includ­ing prob­lems such as unsta­ble tun­ing and a lack of MIDI. Smith fixed that issue him­self with new iter­a­tions of the Prophet and oth­er synths fea­tur­ing his most famous post-Prophet‑5 tech­nol­o­gy. “Like so many bril­liant and cre­ative peo­ple,” the MIDI Asso­ci­a­tion writes, Smith “always focused on the future.” He was “not actu­al­ly a big fan of being called the ‘Father of MIDI.’ ” Many peo­ple con­tributed to the devel­op­ment of the tech­nol­o­gy, espe­cial­ly Roland founder Iku­taro Kake­hashi, who won a tech­ni­cal Gram­my with Smith in 2013 for the pro­to­col that made its debut as a new stan­dard in 1983.

Smith pre­ferred mak­ing hard­ware instru­ments and “almost begrudg­ing­ly accept­ed inter­views about his con­tri­bu­tions to MIDI.…. He was also not a big fan of orga­ni­za­tions, com­mit­tees and meet­ings.” He was a synth lover’s synth mak­er, a design­er and engi­neer with a “deep under­stand­ing of what musi­cians want­ed,” says Rhodes. Col­lab­o­ra­tions with Yama­ha and Korg pro­duced more soft­ware inno­va­tions in the 90s, but in the 2000s, Smith returned to Sequen­tial Cir­cuits and debuted the Prophet X, Prophet‑6, and OB‑6 with Tom Ober­heim. The two design­ers col­lab­o­rat­ed in 2021 on the Ober­heim OB-X8 and Smith intro­duced it just weeks before his death.

He had trav­eled a long way from invent­ing the Prophet‑5 in 1977 and pre­sent­ing a paper in 1981 to the Audio Engi­neer­ing Soci­ety on what he then called a Uni­ver­sal Syn­the­siz­er Inter­face. Smith him­self nev­er seemed to stop and look back, but lovers of his famous instru­ments are hap­py we still can, and that elec­tron­ic instru­ments and com­put­ers can talk to each oth­er eas­i­ly thanks to MIDI. Few of those instru­ments sound as good as the orig­i­nal, how­ev­er. See a demon­stra­tion of the Prophet-5’s range of sounds in the video just above and hear more tracks that show off the synth in the list here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of the Syn­thAxe, the Aston­ish­ing 1980s Gui­tar Syn­the­siz­er: Only 100 Were Ever Made

Wendy Car­los Demon­strates the Moog Syn­the­siz­er on the BBC (1970)

Thomas Dol­by Explains How a Syn­the­siz­er Works on a Jim Hen­son Kids Show (1989)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

How Did Cartographers Create World Maps before Airplanes and Satellites? An Introduction

in History, Maps | May 30th, 2022

Reg­u­lar read­ers of Open Cul­ture know a thing or two about maps if they’ve paid atten­tion to our posts on the his­to­ry of car­tog­ra­phy, the evo­lu­tion of world maps (and why they are all wrong), and the many dig­i­tal col­lec­tions of his­tor­i­cal maps from all over the world. What does the sev­en and a half-minute video above bring to this com­pendi­um of online car­to­graph­ic knowl­edge? A very quick sur­vey of world map his­to­ry, for one thing, with stops at many of the major his­tor­i­cal inter­sec­tions from Greek antiq­ui­ty to the cre­ation of the Cata­lan Atlas, an aston­ish­ing map­mak­ing achieve­ment from 1375.

The upshot is an answer to the very rea­son­able ques­tion, “how were (some­times) accu­rate world maps cre­at­ed before air trav­el or satel­lites?” The expla­na­tion? A lot of his­to­ry — mean­ing, a lot of time. Unlike inno­va­tions today, which we expect to solve prob­lems near-imme­di­ate­ly, the inno­va­tions in map­ping tech­nol­o­gy took many cen­turies and required the work of thou­sands of trav­el­ers, geo­g­ra­phers, car­tog­ra­phers, math­e­mati­cians, his­to­ri­ans, and oth­er schol­ars who built upon the work that came before. It start­ed with spec­u­la­tion, myth, and pure fan­ta­sy, which is what we find in most geo­gra­phies of the ancient world.

Then came the Greek Anax­i­man­der, “the first per­son to pub­lish a detailed descrip­tion of the world.” He knew of three con­ti­nents, Europe, Asia, and Libya (or North Africa). They fit togeth­er in a cir­cu­lar Earth, sur­round­ed by a ring of ocean. “Even this,” says Jere­my Shuback, “was an incred­i­ble accom­plish­ment, roughed out by who knows how many explor­ers.” Sand­wiched in-between the con­ti­nents are some known large bod­ies of water: the Mediter­ranean, the Black Sea, the Pha­sis (mod­ern-day Rioni) and Nile Rivers. Even­tu­al­ly Eratos­thenes dis­cov­ered the Earth was spher­i­cal, but maps of a flat Earth per­sist­ed. Greek and Roman geo­g­ra­phers con­sis­tent­ly improved their world maps over suc­ceed­ing cen­turies as con­quer­ers expand­ed the bound­aries of their empires.

Some key moments in map­ping his­to­ry involve the 2nd cen­tu­ry AD geo­g­ra­ph­er and math­e­mati­cian Marines of Tyre, who pio­neered “equirec­tan­gu­lar pro­jec­tion and invent­ed lat­i­tude and lon­gi­tude lines and math­e­mat­i­cal geog­ra­phy.” This paved the way for Claudius Ptole­my’s huge­ly influ­en­tial Geo­graphia and the Ptole­ma­ic maps that would even­tu­al­ly fol­low. Lat­er Islam­ic car­tog­ra­phers “fact checked” Ptole­my, and reversed his pref­er­ence for ori­ent­ing North at the top in their own map­pa mun­di. The video quotes his­to­ri­an of sci­ence Son­ja Bren­thes in not­ing how Muham­mad al-Idrisi’s 1154 map “served as a major tool for Ital­ian, Dutch, and French map­mak­ers from the six­teenth cen­tu­ry to the mid-eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry.”

The inven­tion of the com­pass was anoth­er leap for­ward in map­ping tech­nol­o­gy, and ren­dered pre­vi­ous maps obso­lete for nav­i­ga­tion. Thus car­tog­ra­phers cre­at­ed the por­tolan, a nau­ti­cal map mount­ed hor­i­zon­tal­ly and meant to be viewed from any angle, with wind rose lines extend­ing out­ward from a cen­ter hub. These devel­op­ments bring us back to the Cata­lan Atlas, its extra­or­di­nary accu­ra­cy, for its time, and its extra­or­di­nary lev­el of geo­graph­i­cal detail: an arti­fact that has been called “the most com­plete pic­ture of geo­graph­i­cal knowl­edge as it stood in the lat­er Mid­dle Ages.”

Cre­at­ed for Charles V of France as both a por­tolan and map­pa mun­di, its con­tours and points of ref­er­ence were not only com­piled from cen­turies of geo­graph­ic knowl­edge, but also from knowl­edge spread around the world from the dias­poric Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty to which the cre­ators of the Atlas belonged. The map was most like­ly made by Abra­ham Cresques and his son Jahu­da, mem­bers of the high­ly respect­ed Major­can Car­to­graph­ic School, who worked under the patron­age of the Por­tuguese. Dur­ing this peri­od (before mas­sacres and forced con­ver­sions dev­as­tat­ed the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty of Major­ca in 1391), Jew­ish doc­tors, schol­ars, and scribes bridged the Chris­t­ian and Islam­ic worlds and formed net­works that dis­sem­i­nat­ed infor­ma­tion through both.

In its depic­tion of North Africa, for exam­ple, the Cata­lan Atlas shows images and descrip­tions of Malian ruler Mansa Musa, the Berber peo­ple, and spe­cif­ic cities and oases rather than the usu­al drag­ons and mon­sters found in oth­er Medieval Euro­pean maps — despite the car­tog­ra­phers’ use of the works like the Trav­els of John Man­dev­ille, which con­tains no short­age of bizarre fic­tion about the region. While it might seem mirac­u­lous that humans could cre­ate increas­ing­ly accu­rate views of the Earth from above with­out flight, they did so over cen­turies of tri­al and error (and thou­sands of lost ships), build­ing on the work of count­less oth­ers, cor­rect­ing the mis­takes of the past with supe­ri­or mea­sure­ments, and crowd­sourc­ing as much knowl­edge as they could.

To learn more about the fas­ci­nat­ing Cata­lan Atlas, see the Flash Point His­to­ry video above and the schol­ar­ly descrip­tion found here. Find trans­la­tions of the map’s leg­ends here at The Cresque Project.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, the “Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever,” Is Now Free Online

Down­load 91,000 His­toric Maps from the Mas­sive David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

Why Every World Map Is Wrong

Ani­mat­ed Maps Reveal the True Size of Coun­tries (and Show How Tra­di­tion­al Maps Dis­tort Our World)

The Evo­lu­tion of the World Map: An Inven­tive Info­graph­ic Shows How Our Pic­ture of the World Changed Over 1,800 Years

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness