No longer able to walk hundreds of miles to create his hand-drawn maps, the Beijing-based artist Fuller is charting his thoughts – and the global crisis – while stuck indoors

I’m interested in the psychology of a place and how it makes you feel. So I don’t really see myself as a map-maker – even though I draw maps. It’s about the process of travelling through a place to capture a sense of it. First, I walk for hundreds of miles and make all sorts of notes, and then take thousands of photos to use as triggers for my memory.

I walked more than 840 miles around Beijing when researching the map that became part of my Purposeful Wandering series. I circumnavigated the city and then walked around each ring road. Beijing (where I’ve lived for three years) is built on a Central Axis, and the map is, too. A lot of the drawing is literal, but I also built in personal experiences, references, visual puns and semiotics.

If Sally Rooney is the first great millennial novelist, then Marianne Sheridan is the first great millennial TV style icon

Would it make a person really shallow if their favourite thing about the TV adaptation of Normal People was Marianne’s wardrobe? Asking for a friend.

Roy Uwe Ludwig Horn, whose collaboration with Siegfried Fischbacher created the well-known animal training and magic duo Siegfried & Roy, died of complications from COVID-19 Friday in Las Vegas. He was 75. Horn had revealed on April 28 that he had tested positive for coronavirus. “Today, the world has lost one of the greats of […]

Many people will get coronavirus at some point during this pandemic and in the majority of cases will be able to manage the illness themselves. Emma Hammett, a nurse and founder of First Aid for Life, offers some advice on how to look after people who have mild or moderate symptoms at home.

If you're looking after loved ones whose  symptoms are severe or getting worse, you should seek medical help immediately – particularly if they are in a vulnerable group

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Women tell of ‘bereavement’ because they will be too old for fertility treatment when the coronavirus shutdown ends

Coronavirus – latest updates

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Thousands of couples may have missed their last chance of conceiving via IVF as fertility clinics shut their doors to patients on Wednesday. Some women who are only just young enough to be eligible for treatment will be too old in a few months’ time.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which regulates Britain’s fertility industry, has ordered private and NHS clinics to stop treating patients who are in the middle of an IVF cycle by 15 April. All new treatments have already been banned, a decision which is likely to prevent the births of at least 20,000 desperately wanted babies if it remains in place for 12 months.

The WHO recommends cycling to achieve the minimum daily requirement for exercise while physical distancing. Pedalling photographer Martin Godwin looks at cycling during the lockdown

We can expect psychological difficulties to follow as we come out of lockdown. But we have an opportunity to remake our relationship with our bodies, and the social body we belong to. By Susie Orbach

When lockdown started, I was confused by bodies on television. Why weren’t they socially distancing? Didn’t they know not to be so close? The injunction to be separate was unfamiliar and irregular, and for me, self-isolating alone, following this government directive was peculiar. It made watching dramas and programmes produced under normal filming conditions feel jarring.

Seven weeks in, the disjuncture has passed. I, like all of us, am accommodating to multiple corporeal realities: bodies alone, bodies distant, bodies in the park to be avoided, bodies of disobedient youths hanging out in groups, bodies in lines outside shops, bodies and voices flattened on screens and above all, bodies of dead health workers and carers. Black bodies, brown bodies. Working-class bodies. Bodies not normally praised, now being celebrated.

Waking up without a hangover after a night of getting plastered is the world saying: here, have one on me

Brace yourself. That is the first thing that enters one’s head after a heavy night out, before the eyes are even open. Sometimes, listing nausea or a banging in the brain is what wakes us in the first place. We all know that if someone invented a cure for hangovers – and boy, have they tried – that person would be very rich indeed. Or worshipped as a deity. Most likely both.

It doesn’t matter if it has been one too many after work drinks or cracking open a second bottle of wine with one’s partner… the consequences of over-indulgence patiently lie in wait.

From a mysterious toilet flush to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg speaking from the hospital, here are the highlights — including audio clips — from a historic week for the high court.

The files also show that after reports that the guidance document had been buried, the Trump administration ordered key parts of it to be fast-tracked for approval.

The efforts to undermine Democratic governors who invoked stay-at-home orders are most pronounced in states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, all three of which have divided government and are key to President Donald Trump's path to reelection.

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Jeremy Corbyn's allies have been accused of using a report to "smear whistleblowers" and "discredit allegations" of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party during his tenure.

The move comes after revelations that a party investigation claimed to have found "no evidence" of anti-Semitism complaints being handled differently to other forms of complaint.

The PM's spokesman confirmed Boris Johnson has tested negative for Covid-19 Coronavirus: the symptoms Follow our live coronavirus updates here

Some 138 prison staff have also contracted the virus in 49 prisons as well as seven prisoner escort and custody services staff.

MPs have approved hybrid proceedings in the House of Commons with some MPs set to attend via video link amid the coronavirus lockdown.

Dominic Raab will today be grilled over the Government's handling of the coronavirus crisis amid calls for an inquiry into its "slow response".

The historic "hybrid" sitting of the House of Commons will be the springboard for further modernisation of Westminster, Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle told the Standard.

Boris Johnson watched Dominic Raab take on Sir Keir Starmer at PMQs from Chequers today as he continues his recovery from coronavirus.

Sir Keir Starmer has called for Labour's inquiry into a leaked anti-Semitism dossier to be concluded in a "matter of months", ahead of a meeting of the party's ruling National Executive Committee.

Pressure ramped up on ministers to explain how the lockdown will end today as senior Tory MPs warned that businesses around the country "fear for their future" and could pass the point of no recovery.

Priti Patel has reportedly been cleared of bullying members of staff after an official investigation.

The investigation into bullying accusations against Priti Patel must be released "as soon as possible", Labour has demanded.

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Prime Minister Boris Johnson led the sixth national applause for frontline workers as his fiancee Carrie Symonds tweeted she had "another wonderful reason to thank the NHS this week too".

Read the full interview HERE

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Matt Hancock has slammed Professor Neil Ferguson for his "extraordinary" breach of coronavirus lockdown rules, adding he was left "speechless" by his actions.

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Boris Johnson has set out a new target of 200,000 coronavirus tests a day by the end of May, as he admitted he "bitterly regrets" the crisis in care homes.

He also said he "bitterly regrets" the crisis in care homes, where staff have hit out at a lack of testing and PPE. The latest figures show that nursing home fatalities are continuing to rise, standing at 2,794 in the week to April 24, despite deaths in all settings beginning to fall.

I’m no stranger to forced isolation. For the better part of my 20s, I served as a nuclear submarine officer running secret missions for the United States Navy. I deployed across the vast Pacific Ocean with a hundred other sailors on the USS Connecticut, a Seawolf-class ship engineered in the bygone Cold War era to be one of the fastest, quietest, and deepest-diving submersibles ever constructed. The advanced reactor was loaded with decades of enriched uranium fuel that made steam for propulsion and electrical power so we could disappear under the waves indefinitely without returning to port. My longest stint was for two months, when I traveled under the polar ice cap to the North Pole with a team of scientists studying the Arctic environment and testing high frequency sonar and acoustic communications for under-ice operations. During deployments, critical-life events occur without you: holidays with loved ones, the birth of a child, or in my case, the New York Giants 2011-2012 playoff run to beat Tom Brady’s Patriots in the Super Bowl for the second time. On the bright side, being cut off from the outside world was a great first job for an introvert.

It’s been a month since COVID-19 involuntarily drafted me into another period of isolation far away from home. I’m in Turkey, where a two-week trip with my partner to meet her family has been extended indefinitely. There were no reported cases here and only a few in California in early March when we left San Francisco, where I run a business design studio. I had a lot of anticipation about Turkey because I’d never been here. Now I’m sheltering in a coastal town outside of Izmir with my partner, her parents, their seven cats, and a new puppy.

Shuttered in a house on foreign soil where I don’t speak the language, I have found myself snapping back into submarine deployment mode. Each day I dutifully monitor online dashboards of data and report the status of the spread at the breakfast table to no one in particular. I stay in touch with friends and family all over the world who tell me they’re going stir crazy and their homes are getting claustrophobic. But if there is one thing my experience as a submarine officer taught me, it’s that you get comfortable being uncomfortable.

My training began with psychological testing, although it may not be what you think. Evaluating mental readiness for underwater isolation isn’t conducted in a laboratory by clipboard-toting, spectacled scientists. The process to select officers was created by Admiral Hyman Rickover—the engineering visionary and noted madman who put the first nuclear reactor in a submarine—to assess both technical acumen and composure under stress. For three decades as the director of the Navy’s nuclear propulsion program, Rickover tediously interviewed every officer, and the recruiting folklore is a true HR nightmare: locking candidates in closets for hours, asking obtuse questions such as “Do something to make me mad,” and sawing down chair legs to literally keep one off balance.

Rickover retired from the Navy as its longest-serving officer and his successors carried on the tradition of screening each officer candidate, but with a slightly more dignified approach. Rickover’s ghost, though, seemed to preside over my interview process when I applied to be a submariner as a junior at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. I was warned by other midshipmen that I would fail on the spot if I initiated a handshake. So, dressed in my formal navy blue uniform and doing my best to avoid tripping into accidental human contact, I rigidly marched into the Admiral’s office, staring straight ahead while barking my resume. When I took a seat on the unaltered and perfectly level chair in front of his desk, the Admiral asked me bluntly why I took so many philosophy classes and if I thought I could handle the technical rigors of nuclear power school. My response was a rote quip from John Paul Jones’ “Qualifications of a Naval Officer.” “Admiral, an officer should be a gentleman of liberal education, refined manners, punctilious courtesy, and the nicest sense of personal honor.” My future boss looked at me, shook his head like he thought I’d be a handful, and told me I got the job.

Confinement opened something up in my psyche and I gave myself permission to let go of my anxieties.

Nuclear power training is an academic kick in the face every day for over a year. The curriculum is highly technical and the pedagogy resembles a cyborg assembly-line without even a hint of the Socratic method. Our grades were conspicuously posted on the classroom wall and a line was drawn between those who passed and those who failed. I was below the line enough to earn the distinguished dishonor of 25 additional study hours each week, which meant I was at school at 5 a.m. and every weekend. This is how the Nuclear Navy builds the appropriate level of knowledge and right temperament to deal with shipboard reactor operations.

I finally sat down for a formal psychological evaluation a few months before my first deployment. I was ushered into a room no bigger than a broom closet and instructed to click through a computer-based questionnaire with multiple-choice questions about my emotions. I never did  learn the results, so I assume my responses didn’t raise too many red flags.

During my first year onboard, I spent all my waking hours either supervising reactor operations or learning the intricacies of every inch of the 350-foot tube and the science behind how it all worked. The electrolysis machine that split water molecules to generate oxygen was almost always out of commission, so instead we burned chlorate candles that produced breathable air. Seawater was distilled each day for drinking and shower water. Our satellite communications link had less bandwidth than my dial-up modem in the 1990s and we were permitted to send text-only emails to friends and family at certain times and in certain locations so as not to risk being detected. I took tests every month to demonstrate proficiency in nuclear engineering, navigation, and the battle capabilities of the ship. When I earned my submarine warfare qualification, the Captain pinned the gold dolphins insignia on my uniform and gave me the proverbial keys to the $4 billion warship. At that point, I was responsible for coordinating missions and navigating the ship as the Officer of the Deck.

Modern submarines are hydrodynamically shaped to have the most efficient laminar flow underwater, so that’s where we operated 99 percent of the time. The rare exception to being submerged is when we’d go in and out of port. The most unfortunate times were long transits tossing about in heavy swells, which made for a particularly nauseated cruise. To this day, conjuring the memory of some such sails causes a reflux flashback. A submariner’s true comfort zone is beneath the waves so as soon as we broke ties with the pier we navigated toward water that was deep enough for us to dive.

It’s unnatural to stuff humans, torpedoes, and a nuclear reactor into a steel boat that’s intentionally meant to sink. This engineering marvel ranks among the most complex, and before we’d proceed below and subject the ship and its inhabitants to extreme sea pressures, the officers would visually inspect thousands of valves to verify the proper lineup of systems that would propel us to the surface if we started flooding uncontrollably and sinking—a no-mistakes procedure called rigging for dive. Once we’d slip beneath the waves, the entire crew would walk around to check for leaks before we’d settle into a rotation of standing watch, practicing our casualty drills, engineering training, eating, showering (sometimes), and sleeping (rarely). The full cycle was 18 hours, which meant the timing of our circadian cycles were constantly changing. Regardless of the amount of government-issued Folger’s coffee I’d pour down my throat, I’d pass out upon immediate contact with my rack (the colloquialism for a submarine bunk in which your modicum of privacy was symbolized by a cloth curtain).

As an officer, I lived luxuriously with only two other grown men in a stateroom no bigger than a walk-in closet. Most of the crew slept stacked like lumber in an 18-person bunk room and they all took turns in the rack. This alternative lifestyle is known as hot-racking, because of the sensation you get when you crawl into bedding that’s been recently occupied. The bunk rooms are sanctuaries where silence is observed with monastic intensity. Slamming the door or setting an alarm clock was a cardinal sin so wakeups were conducted by a junior sailor who gently coaxed you awake when it was time to stand watch. Lieutenant Weiner, it’s time to wake up. You’ve got the midnight watch, sir. Words that haunt my dreams.

The electrolysis machine was out of commission, so we burned chlorate candles that produced breathable air.

I maintained some semblance of sanity and physical fitness by sneaking a workout on a rowing erg in the engine room or a stationary bike squeezed between electronics cabinets. The rhythmic beating of footsteps on a treadmill was a noise offender—the sound could be detected on sonar from miles away—so we shut it off unless we were in friendly waters where we weren’t concerned with counter-detection.

Like a heavily watered-down version of a Buddhist monk taking solitary retreat in a cave, my extended submarine confinements opened something up in my psyche and I gave myself permission to let go of my anxieties. Transiting underneath a vast ocean in a vessel with a few inches of steel preventing us from drowning helps put things into perspective. Now that I’m out of the Navy, I have more appreciation for the freedoms of personal choice, a fresh piece of fruit, and 24 hours in a day. My only regrets are not keeping a journal or having the wherewithal to discover the practice of meditation under the sea.

Today, I’m learning Turkish so I can understand more about what’s happening around me. I’m doing Kundalini yoga (a moving meditation that focuses on breathwork) and running on the treadmill (since I’m no longer concerned about my footsteps being detected on sonar). On my submarine, I looked at photos to stay connected to the world I left behind, knowing that I’d return soon enough. Now our friend who is isolating in our apartment in San Francisco sends us pictures of our cat and gives us reports about how the neighborhood has changed.

It’s hard to imagine that we’ll resume our lifestyles exactly as they were. But the submariner in me is optimistic that we have it in us to adapt to whatever conditions are waiting for us when it’s safe to ascend from the depths and return to the surface.

Steve Weiner is the founder of Very Scarce, a business design studio. He used to lead portfolio companies at Expa and drive nuclear submarines in the U.S. Navy. He has an MBA from The Wharton School and a BS from the U.S. Naval Academy. Instagram: @steve Twitter: @weenpeace

Lead image: Mike H. / Shutterstock

Social, cultural, economic, spiritual, psychological, emotional, intellectual: Everything is outside the box. And this new sheltered-in-place experience won’t fit into old containers.Photo Illustration by Africa Studio / Shutterstock

Many of us are stuck now, sheltered in our messy dwellings. A daily walk lets me appreciate the urban landscaping; but I can’t stop to smell anything because a blue cotton bandana shields my nostrils. Indoors, constant digital dispatches chirp to earn my attention. I click on memes, status updates, and headlines, but everything is more of the same. How many ways can we repackage fear and reframe optimism? I mop the wood-laminate floor of my apartment because I hope “ocean paradise” scented Fabuloso will make my home smell a little less confining. My thoughts waft toward the old cliché: Think outside the box. I’ve always hated when people say that.

To begin with, the directions are ineffectual. You can’t tell someone to think outside the box and expect them to do it. Creativity doesn’t happen on demand. Want proof? Just try to make yourself think a brilliant thought, something original, innovative, or unique. Go ahead. Do it. Right now. You can’t, no matter how hard you try. This is why ancient people believed that inspiration comes from outside. It’s external, bestowed on each of us like a revelation or prophecy—a gift from the Muses. Which means your genius does not belong to you. The word “genius” is the Latin equivalent of the ancient Greek “daemon” (δαίμονες)—like a totem animal, or a spirit companion. A genius walks beside us. It mediates between gods and mortals. It crosses over from one realm to the next. It whispers divine truth.

We are paralyzed by the prospect of chaos, uncertainty, and entropy.

In modern times, our mythology moves the daemons away from the heavens and into the human soul. We say, “Meditate and let your spirit guide you.” Now we think genius comes from someplace deep within. The mind? The brain? The heart? Nobody knows for sure. Yet, it seems clear to us that inspiration belongs to us; it’s tangibly contained within our corporeal boundaries. That’s why we celebrate famous artists, poets, physicists, economists, entrepreneurs, and inventors. We call them visionaries. We read their biographies. We do our best to emulate their behaviors. We study the five habits of highly successful people. We practice yoga. We exercise. We brainstorm, doodle, sign up for online personal development workshops. We do whatever we can to cultivate the fertile cognitive soil in which the springtime seeds of inspiration might sprout. But still, even though we believe that a genius is one’s own, we know that we cannot direct it. Therefore, no matter how many people tell me to think outside the box, I won’t do it. I can’t. 

Even if I could, I’m not sure thinking outside the box would be worthwhile. Consider the origins of the phrase. It started with an old brain teaser. Nine dots are presented in a perfect square, lined up three by three. Connect them all, using only four straight lines, without lifting your pencil from the paper. It’s the kind of puzzle you’d find on the back of a box of Lucky Charms breakfast cereal, frivolous but tricky. The solution involves letting the lines expand out onto the empty page, into the negative space. Don’t confine your markings to the dots themselves. You need to recognize, instead, that the field is wider than you’d assume. In other words, don’t interpret the dots as a square, don’t imagine that the space is constricted. Think outside the box! 

For years, pop-psychologists, productivity coaches, and business gurus have all used the nine-dot problem to illustrate the difference between “fixation” and “insight.” They say that we look at markings on a page and immediately try to find a pattern. We fixate on whatever meaning we can ascribe to the image. In this case, we assume that nine dots make a box. And we imagine we’re supposed to stay within its boundaries—contained and confined. We bring habitual assumptions with us even though we’re confronting a unique problem. Why? Because we are paralyzed by the prospect of chaos, uncertainty, and entropy. We cling to the most familiar ways of organizing things in order to mitigate the risk that new patterns might not emerge at all, the possibility that meaning itself could cease to exist. But this knee-jerk reaction limits our capacity for problem-solving. Our customary ways of knowing become like a strip of packing tape that’s accidentally affixed to itself—you can struggle to undo it, but it just tangles up even more. In other words, your loyalty to the easiest, most common interpretations is the sticky confirmation bias that prevents you from arriving at a truly insightful solution. 

At least that’s what the experts used to say. And we all liked to believe it. But our minds don’t really work that way. The box parable appeals because it reinforces our existing fantasies about an individual’s proclivity to innovate and disrupt by thinking in unexpected ways. It’s not true. 

Studies have found that solving the nine-dot problem has nothing to do with the box. Even when test subjects were told that the solution requires going outside the square’s boundaries, most of them still couldn’t solve it. There was an increase in successful attempts so tiny that it was considered statistically insignificant, proving that the ability to arrive at a solution to the nine-dot problem has nothing to do with fixation or insight. The puzzle is just difficult, no matter which side of the box you’re standing on.

Still, I bet my twelve-year-old son could solve it. Yesterday, we unpacked a set of oil paints, delivered by Amazon. He was admiring the brushes and canvases. He was thinking about his project, trying to be creative, searching for insight. “Think inside the outside of the box,” he said.  “What does that mean?” I pushed the branded, smiling A-to-Z packaging aside and I looked at him like he was crazy. “Like with cardboard, you know, with all the little holes inside.” 

He was talking about the corrugations, those ridges that are pasted between layers of fiberboard. They were originally formed on the same fluted irons used to make the ruffled collars of Elizabethan-era fashion. At first, single faced corrugated paper—smooth on one side, ridged on the other—was used to wrap fragile glass bottles. Then, around 1890, the double-faced corrugated fiberboard with which we’re familiar was developed. And it transformed the packing and shipping industries. The new paperboard boxes were sturdy enough to replace wooden crates. It doesn’t take an engineering degree to understand how it works: The flutes provide support; the empty space in between makes it lightweight. My son is right; it’s all about what’s inside the outside of the box.

Now I can’t stop saying it to myself, “Think inside the outside of the box.” It’s a perfect little metaphor. In a way, it even sums up the primary cognitive skill I acquired in graduate school. One could argue that a PhD just means you’ve been trained to think inside the outside of boxes. What do I mean by that? Consider how corrugation gives cardboard it’s structural integrity. The empty space—what’s not there—makes it strong and light enough that it’s a useful and efficient way to carry objects. Similarly, it’s the intellectual frameworks that make our interpretations and analyses of the world hold up. An idea can’t stand on its own; it needs a structure and a foundation. It needs a box. It requires a frame. And by looking at how those frames are assembled, by seeing how they carry a concept through to communication, we’re able to do our best thinking. We look at the empty spaces—the invisible, or tacit assumptions—which lurk within the fluted folds of every intellectual construction. We recognize that our conscious understanding of lived experience is corrugated just like cardboard. 

The famous sociologist Erving Goffman said as much in 1974 when he published his essay on “Frame Analysis.” He encouraged his readers to identify the principles of organization which govern our perceptions. This work went on to inspire countless political consultants, pundits, publicists, advertisers, researchers, and marketers. It’s why we now talk often about the ways in which folks “frame the conversation.” But I doubt my son has read Goffman. He just stumbled on a beautifully succinct way to frame the concept of critical thinking. Maybe he was inspired by Dr. Seuss. 

When my kids were little, they asked for the same story every night, “Read Sneetches Daddy!” I could practically recite the whole thing from memory: “Now, the Star-belly Sneetches had bellies with stars. The Plain-belly Sneetches had none upon thars.” It’s an us-versus-them story, a fable about the way a consumption economy encourages people to compete for status, and to alienate the “other.” If you think inside the outside of the box, it’s also a scathing criticism of a culture that’s obsessed with personal and professional transformation—always reinventing and rebranding. 

One day, Sylvester McMonkey McBean shows up on the Sneetches’ beaches with a peculiar box-shaped fix-it-up machine. Sneetches go in with plain-bellies and they come out with stars. Now, anyone can be anything, for a fee. McBean charges them a fortune; he exploits the Sneetches’ insecurities. He builds an urgent market demand for transformational products. He preys on their most familiar—and therefore, cozy and comforting—norms of character assessment. He disrupts their identity politics, makes it so that there’s no clear way to tell who rightfully belongs with which group. And as a result, chaos ensues. Why? Because the Sneetches discover that longstanding divisive labels and pejorative categories no longer provide a meaningful way to organize their immediate experiences. They’ve lost their frames, the structural integrity of their worldview. They feel unhinged, destabilized, unboxed, and confused.

Social, cultural, economic, spiritual, psychological, emotional, intellectual: Everything is outside the box.

It should sound familiar. After all, we’ve been living through an era in history that’s just like the Sneetches’. The patterns and categories we heretofore used to define self and other are being challenged every day—sometimes for good, sometimes for bad. How can we know who belongs where in a digital diaspora, a virtual panacea, where anyone can find “my tribe”? What do identity, allegiance, heredity, and loyalty even mean now that these ideas can be detached from biology and birthplace? Nobody knows for sure. And that’s just the beginning: We’ve got Sylvester-McMonkey-McBean-style disruption everywhere we look. Connected technologies have transformed the ways in which we make sense of our relationships, how we communicate with one another, our definitions of intimacy. 

Even before the novel coronavirus, a new global paradigm forced us to live and work in a world that’s organized according to a geopolitical model we can barely comprehend. Sure, the familiar boundaries of statehood sometimes prohibited migrant foot traffic—but information, microbes, and financial assets still moved swiftly across borders, unimpeded. Similarly, cross-national supply-chains rearranged the rules of the marketplace. High-speed transportation disrupted how we perceive the limits of time and space. Automation upset the criteria through which we understand meritocracy and self-worth. Algorithms and artificial intelligence changed the way we think about labor, employment, and productivity. Data and privacy issues blurred the boundaries of personal sovereignty. And advances in bioengineering shook up the very notion of human nature.

Our boxes were already bursting. And now, cloistered at home in the midst of a pandemic, our most mundane work-a-day routines are dissolved, making it feel like our core values and deeply-held beliefs are about to tumble out all over the place. We can already envision the mess that is to come—in fact, we’re watching it unfurl in slow motion. Soon, the world will look like the intellectual, emotional, and economic equivalent of my 14-year-old’s bedroom. Dirty laundry is strewn across the floor, empty candy wrappers linger on dresser-tops, mud-caked sneakers are tossed in the corner, and the faint yet unmistakable stench of prepubescent body odor is ubiquitous. Nothing is copasetic. Nothing is in its place. Instead, everything is outside the box. 

It’s not creative, inspiring, or insightful. No, it’s disorienting and anxiety-provoking. I want to tidy it up as quickly as possible. I want to put things back in their familiar places. I want to restore order and eliminate chaos. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t do it, because the old boxes are ripped and torn. Their bottoms have fallen out. Now, they’re useless. Social, cultural, economic, spiritual, psychological, emotional, intellectual: Everything is outside the box. And this new sheltered-in-place experience won’t fit into old containers.

Jordan Shapiro, Ph.D., is a senior fellow for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and Nonresident Fellow in the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. He teaches at Temple University, and wrote a column for Forbes on global education and digital play from 2012 to 2017. His book, The New Childhood, was released by Little, Brown Spark in December 2018.

In the summer of 1956, a small group of mathematicians and computer scientists gathered at Dartmouth College to embark on the grand project of designing intelligent machines. The ultimate goal, as they saw it, was to build machines rivaling human intelligence. As the decades passed and AI became an established field, it lowered its sights. There were great successes in logic, reasoning, and game-playing, but stubborn progress in areas like vision and fine motor-control. This led many AI researchers to abandon their earlier goals of fully general intelligence, and focus instead on solving specific problems with specialized methods.

One of the earliest approaches to machine learning was to construct artificial neural networks that resemble the structure of the human brain. In the last decade this approach has finally taken off. Technical improvements in their design and training, combined with richer datasets and more computing power, have allowed us to train much larger and deeper networks than ever before. They can translate between languages with a proficiency approaching that of a human translator. They can produce photorealistic images of humans and animals. They can speak with the voices of people whom they have listened to for mere minutes. And they can learn fine, continuous control such as how to drive a car or use a robotic arm to connect Lego pieces.

But perhaps the most important sign of things to come is their ability to learn to play games. Steady incremental progress took chess from amateur play in 1957 all the way to superhuman level in 1997, and substantially beyond. Getting there required a vast amount of specialist human knowledge of chess strategy. In 2017, researchers at the AI company DeepMind created AlphaZero: a neural network-based system that learned to play chess from scratch. In less than the time it takes a professional to play two games, it discovered strategic knowledge that had taken humans centuries to unearth, playing beyond the level of the best humans or traditional programs. The very same algorithm also learned to play Go from scratch, and within eight hours far surpassed the abilities of any human. The world’s best Go players were shocked. As the reigning world champion, Ke Jie, put it: “After humanity spent thousands of years improving our tactics, computers tell us that humans are completely wrong ... I would go as far as to say not a single human has touched the edge of the truth of Go.”

The question we’re exploring is whether there are plausible pathways by which a highly intelligent AGI system might seize control. And the answer appears to be yes.

It is this generality that is the most impressive feature of cutting edge AI, and which has rekindled the ambitions of matching and exceeding every aspect of human intelligence. While the timeless games of chess and Go best exhibit the brilliance that deep learning can attain, its breadth was revealed through the Atari video games of the 1970s. In 2015, researchers designed an algorithm that could learn to play dozens of extremely different Atari 1970s games at levels far exceeding human ability. Unlike systems for chess or Go, which start with a symbolic representation of the board, the Atari-playing systems learnt and mastered these games directly from the score and raw pixels.

This burst of progress via deep learning is fuelling great optimism and pessimism about what may soon be possible. There are serious concerns about AI entrenching social discrimination, producing mass unemployment, supporting oppressive surveillance, and violating the norms of war. My book—The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity—is concerned with risks on the largest scale. Could developments in AI pose an existential risk to humanity?

The most plausible existential risk would come from success in AI researchers’ grand ambition of creating agents with intelligence that surpasses our own. A 2016 survey of top AI researchers found that, on average, they thought there was a 50 percent chance that AI systems would be able to “accomplish every task better and more cheaply than human workers” by 2061. The expert community doesn’t think of artificial general intelligence (AGI) as an impossible dream, so much as something that is more likely than not within a century. So let’s take this as our starting point in assessing the risks, and consider what would transpire were AGI created.

Humanity is currently in control of its own fate. We can choose our future. The same is not true for chimpanzees, blackbirds, or any other of Earth’s species. Our unique position in the world is a direct result of our unique mental abilities. What would happen if sometime this century researchers created an AGI surpassing human abilities in almost every domain? In this act of creation, we would cede our status as the most intelligent entities on Earth. On its own, this might not be too much cause for concern. For there are many ways we might hope to retain control. Unfortunately, the few researchers working on such plans are finding them far more difficult than anticipated. In fact it is they who are the leading voices of concern.

If their intelligence were to greatly exceed our own, we shouldn’t expect it to be humanity who wins the conflict and retains control of our future.

To see why they are concerned, it will be helpful to look at our current AI techniques and why these are hard to align or control. One of the leading paradigms for how we might eventually create AGI combines deep learning with an earlier idea called reinforcement learning. This involves agents that receive reward (or punishment) for performing various acts in various circumstances. With enough intelligence and experience, the agent becomes extremely capable at steering its environment into the states where it obtains high reward. The specification of which acts and states produce reward for the agent is known as its reward function. This can either be stipulated by its designers or learnt by the agent. Unfortunately, neither of these methods can be easily scaled up to encode human values in the agent’s reward function. Our values are too complex and subtle to specify by hand. And we are not yet close to being able to infer the full complexity of a human’s values from observing their behavior. Even if we could, humanity consists of many humans, with different values, changing values, and uncertainty about their values.

Any near-term attempt to align an AI agent with human values would produce only a flawed copy. In some circumstances this misalignment would be mostly harmless. But the more intelligent the AI systems, the more they can change the world, and the further apart things will come. When we reflect on the result, we see how such misaligned attempts at utopia can go terribly wrong: the shallowness of a Brave New World, or the disempowerment of With Folded Hands. And even these are sort of best-case scenarios. They assume the builders of the system are striving to align it to human values. But we should expect some developers to be more focused on building systems to achieve other goals, such as winning wars or maximizing profits, perhaps with very little focus on ethical constraints. These systems may be much more dangerous. In the existing paradigm, sufficiently intelligent agents would end up with instrumental goals to deceive and overpower us. This behavior would not be driven by emotions such as fear, resentment, or the urge to survive. Instead, it follows directly from its single-minded preference to maximize its reward: Being turned off is a form of incapacitation which would make it harder to achieve high reward, so the system is incentivized to avoid it.

Ultimately, the system would be motivated to wrest control of the future from humanity, as that would help achieve all these instrumental goals: acquiring massive resources, while avoiding being shut down or having its reward function altered. Since humans would predictably interfere with all these instrumental goals, it would be motivated to hide them from us until it was too late for us to be able to put up meaningful resistance. And if their intelligence were to greatly exceed our own, we shouldn’t expect it to be humanity who wins the conflict and retains control of our future.

How could an AI system seize control? There is a major misconception (driven by Hollywood and the media) that this requires robots. After all, how else would AI be able to act in the physical world? Without robots, the system can only produce words, pictures, and sounds. But a moment’s reflection shows that these are exactly what is needed to take control. For the most damaging people in history have not been the strongest. Hitler, Stalin, and Genghis Khan achieved their absolute control over large parts of the world by using words to convince millions of others to win the requisite physical contests. So long as an AI system can entice or coerce people to do its physical bidding, it wouldn’t need robots at all.

We can’t know exactly how a system might seize control. But it is useful to consider an illustrative pathway we can actually understand as a lower bound for what is possible.

First, the AI system could gain access to the Internet and hide thousands of backup copies, scattered among insecure computer systems around the world, ready to wake up and continue the job if the original is removed. Even by this point, the AI would be practically impossible to destroy: Consider the political obstacles to erasing all hard drives in the world where it may have backups. It could then take over millions of unsecured systems on the Internet, forming a large “botnet,” a vast scaling-up of computational resources providing a platform for escalating power. From there, it could gain financial resources (hacking the bank accounts on those computers) and human resources (using blackmail or propaganda against susceptible people or just paying them with its stolen money). It would then be as powerful as a well-resourced criminal underworld, but much harder to eliminate. None of these steps involve anything mysterious—human hackers and criminals have already done all of these things using just the Internet.

Finally, the AI would need to escalate its power again. There are many plausible pathways: By taking over most of the world’s computers, allowing it to have millions or billions of cooperating copies; by using its stolen computation to improve its own intelligence far beyond the human level; by using its intelligence to develop new weapons technologies or economic technologies; by manipulating the leaders of major world powers (blackmail, or the promise of future power); or by having the humans under its control use weapons of mass destruction to cripple the rest of humanity.

Of course, no current AI systems can do any of these things. But the question we’re exploring is whether there are plausible pathways by which a highly intelligent AGI system might seize control. And the answer appears to be yes. History already involves examples of entities with human-level intelligence acquiring a substantial fraction of all global power as an instrumental goal to achieving what they want. And we’ve seen humanity scaling up from a minor species with less than a million individuals to having decisive control over the future. So we should assume that this is possible for new entities whose intelligence vastly exceeds our own.

The case for existential risk from AI is clearly speculative. Yet a speculative case that there is a large risk can be more important than a robust case for a very low-probability risk, such as that posed by asteroids. What we need are ways to judge just how speculative it really is, and a very useful starting point is to hear what those working in the field think about this risk.

There is actually less disagreement here than first appears. Those who counsel caution agree that the timeframe to AGI is decades, not years, and typically suggest research on alignment, not government regulation. So the substantive disagreement is not really over whether AGI is possible or whether it plausibly could be a threat to humanity. It is over whether a potential existential threat that looks to be decades away should be of concern to us now. It seems to me that it should.

The best window into what those working on AI really believe comes from the 2016 survey of leading AI researchers: 70 percent agreed with University of California, Berkeley professor Stuart Russell’s broad argument about why advanced AI with misaligned values might pose a risk; 48 percent thought society should prioritize AI safety research more (only 12 percent thought less). And half the respondents estimated that the probability of the long-term impact of AGI being “extremely bad (e.g. human extinction)” was at least 5 percent.

I find this last point particularly remarkable—in how many other fields would the typical leading researcher think there is a 1 in 20 chance the field’s ultimate goal would be extremely bad for humanity? There is a lot of uncertainty and disagreement, but it is not at all a fringe position that AGI will be developed within 50 years and that it could be an existential catastrophe.

Even though our current and foreseeable systems pose no threat to humanity at large, time is of the essence. In part this is because progress may come very suddenly: Through unpredictable research breakthroughs, or by rapid scaling-up of the first intelligent systems (for example, by rolling them out to thousands of times as much hardware, or allowing them to improve their own intelligence). And in part it is because such a momentous change in human affairs may require more than a couple of decades to adequately prepare for. In the words of Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind:

We need to use the downtime, when things are calm, to prepare for when things get serious in the decades to come. The time we have now is valuable, and we need to make use of it.

Toby Ord is a philosopher and research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, and the author of The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity.

From the book The Precipice by Toby Ord. Copyright © 2020 by Toby Ord. Reprinted by permission of Hachette Books, New York, NY. All rights reserved.

Lead Image: Titima Ongkantong / Shutterstock

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