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Are Ancient Phallic Objects ... Exactly What They Look Like?

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › science › archive › 2023 › 03 › ancient-rome-sex-toy-history-archaeology-research › 673548

Just south of Hadrian’s Wall, the ancient stone barrier that cuts across England from coast to coast, is a Roman fort called Vindolanda. Built around 85 A.D. and occupied for more than 300 years, Vindolanda was the tense interstice between empire and unoccupied frontier—a largely self-contained city at the edge of the Roman world. Today, surrounded by green, picturesque countryside, it is a wellspring of insight into the human past.

Thousands of wooden objects have been found at Vindolanda, most of them mundane—bits of wheels, remnants of furniture, a toilet seat. Rob Sands, an assistant professor in archaeology at University College Dublin, was recently examining these objects for an upcoming exhibit when he came across one particular artifact and did a double take. The artifact’s official description labeled it as a darning tool, a crafting device that helps secure fibers and can be shaped like a mushroom or maraca. But to Sands, the “darning tool” looked much more like a wooden penis.

Sands made that hunch official last month, when he and Rob Collins, who had been researching phallic stone carvings from Vindolanda, published a reinterpretation of the ancient object as a disembodied phallus. They proposed three possible functions for the wooden carving based on an analysis of its most-worn areas, details of its shape, and the cultural context in which it was created: a decorative good-luck charm, a pestle, or most provocatively, a dildo. Collins, a senior lecturer at Newcastle University, in England, told me that the first time he had closely examined the nearly 2,000-year-old object, he’d noticed “some really interesting wear patterns” that were highly suggestive of a use quite distinct from sewing. “This doesn’t prove anything,” he told me, but it reinforced the possibility that the object might have, in his words, a “business end.”

If the Vindolanda phallus is what Collins thinks it might be, then it’s the first Roman object identified as such. Ancient sex toys, generally, are hard to come by. There are rare exceptions—like a stone dildo found in China dated to about 600 A.D.—but most definitive examples are more recent, like sex toys from around the 18th century in France and Japan. Yet representations of sex toys in art and texts abound; for instance, in one Greek play from the third century B.C., two women discuss a scarlet-leather dildo and how much they enjoy it. This kind of evidence strongly suggests that these objects existed in antiquity. So what has archaeology been missing?

[Read: Victorian-era orgasms and the crisis of peer review]

It’s possible that most ancient sex toys were made from organic materials and, as a result, haven’t survived: A leather dildo, or even a wooden one, has the odds stacked against it. The Vindolanda phallus happened to be preserved only because of particular soil conditions caused by repeated building on the same spot. But even when genitalia-shaped objects do survive, Collins said, they tend not to be seen as sexual—and many of them likely weren’t. We can’t always determine an object’s purpose based only on its shape: Plenty of old and modern objects are, to varying degrees, penis-shaped without having a sexual use, or sexual without being penis-shaped. In their paper, Collins and Sands cited a few other examples of ancient wooden phallic objects—recovered in Egypt, China, and Japan—none of which are categorized as sex toys.

Determining whether a particular object was used for sex can be challenging. Ideally, you’d be able to reference supporting documents, such as a mosaic or poem depicting its function, says Rebecca Fasman, a curator at the Kinsey Institute, which focuses on research related to sex. For example, the Kinsey Institute houses a five-inch-long Egyptian terracotta phallus that Fasman says might have been used sexually. The supporting evidence for that theory: It’s life-size—too big to be a good-luck talisman, too small to be art—and lacks the adornments of other commonly found phallic objects, such as wind chimes. But the artifact may have served a different purpose, or even multiple purposes, Fasman told me. Perhaps it was attached to a larger sculpture as a charm to ward off evil or a symbol of fertility.

As Collins and Sands see it, however, the fact that sex toys are missing from the archaeological record may say much more about how ancient people are studied today than how they actually behaved. Until the late 20th century, Collins said, most archaeologists were reluctant to consider the possibility that an artifact might be a sex toy at all. Prudishness and propriety limited how researchers could decipher objects and past cultures, Collins argues, with “only certain interpretations deemed acceptable for a wider public.” In the 1930s, for example, a classics scholar and poet named A. E. Housman tried to publish an examination of Roman homosexuality, but it was turned down for being too salacious, says Kelly Olson, a classics professor at Western University in Canada. These attitudes restricted people’s understanding of not just antiquity but also a fundamental part of our human story—the search for sexual pleasure.

[Read: A twist in our sexual encounters with other ancient humans]

After the sexual revolution of the 1970s, research on ancient sexuality picked up in the 1980s. Marianne Moen, a Viking expert at the University of Oslo, told me that this was a period of reassessment—through the lens of sex and gender, archaeologists could interpret historical events and artifacts in a new way. Third-wave feminism and the queer-studies movement of the 1990s also had more mainstream scholars thinking more about sex, Olson told me, but enthusiasm for sexual archaeology soon waned thanks to backlash against those movements, Moen said. Even today, the public isn’t completely on board with the idea that the Vindolanda phallus may be a dildo: Some non-archaeologists have scoffed at the possibility of its sexual use, and Collins has received some aggressive emails pushing back on his interpretation. Some people, he said, simply don’t like the idea of a dildo being wanted in a Roman fort because its potential use would suggest that male anatomy wasn’t necessary (or sufficient) for pleasure.

Archaeologists “always have to be careful not to project our contemporary values and expectations onto past societies,” Collins said. If he were an archaeologist in the 1970s and encountered the Vindolanda phallus, he told me, he might not even have known what a dildo was, and likely would not have thought to label an ancient artifact as one. At the same time, present-day researchers have to be careful not to project a modern view of sexuality onto the ancients. Fasman told me she doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that researchers are able to suggest the Vindolanda phallus is a dildo when it’s easier than ever to spot and buy a sex toy.

If Sands and Collins are correct, their reinterpretation of the phallus, along with other reassessments of ancient art, objects, and texts relating to sex and gender, show how easy it can be for researchers to overlook something in plain sight—whether that’s ancient Greek authors’ love of a dirty joke or the concept of gender fluidity in the La Tolita-Tumaco culture, of what is now the borders of Colombia and Ecuador. Olson pointed out that if the Vindolanda phallus is indeed a sex toy, its form and wear suggest it was better suited for clitoral stimulation than anything else—a rare (or rarely noticed) sign of female sexuality in antiquity. Details like this help expand our awareness of ancient sexuality beyond stereotypes.

[Read: Before vibrators were mainstream]

Fasman and Olson said it’s fair to assume that museums and institutions outside Vindolanda house unlabeled dildos too. The National Archaeological Museum in Naples, for example, hosts an impressive collection of objects that are considered to be erotic art but may have had a more hands-on use. Much of it was found in Pompeii in the 18th century, a time when early archaeologists would not have ventured to classify artifacts as sex toys. In 1819, the art was called obscene and locked away; the general public was not allowed to see it until 2000. Every ancient object in a museum collection might be an opportunity for reinterpretation. “If this research kind of prompts a curator to go back and say, ‘Oh, that reminds me of something in our collection,’” Collins said, “that would be fantastic.”

The West Agreed to Pay Climate Reparations. That Was the Easy Part.

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › science › archive › 2023 › 03 › pakistan-monsoon-countries-pay-climate-change-loss-damage › 673552

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Last year, Pakistan was hit with floods so devastating that they were hard to comprehend. In some areas, 15 inches of rain fell in a single day. And the rain went on for months, inundating one-third of the country, spreading disease, and displacing nearly 8 million people. Six months later, Pakistan is still in crisis—nearly 2 million people are living near stagnant floodwater. Pakistan has estimated that it needs about $16.3 billion to recover from the floods, a sum that does not take into account so many ripple effects of the crisis: grief over those who died, education abruptly ended, the struggles of girls married off young as their families coped with a sudden plunge into poverty.

But these floods were not a “natural disaster.” The monsoon rains were up to 50 percent more intense than they would have been without climate change. So although Pakistan has to foot this bill, or at least most of it, the country bears little responsibility: Pakistan contributes less than 1 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions, while the United States is the world’s second-biggest emitter, accountable for about 20 percent of emissions since 1850. But there is no mechanism for the United States or any other country to pay for the loss and damage that it is at least partially responsible for.

That may be changing. In November, world leaders at the most recent big climate meeting, known as COP27, agreed to set up a “loss and damage” fund, bankrolled by rich countries, to help poor countries harmed by climate change. Now comes the hard part of figuring out the details: This week, a special United Nations committee set up to plan the fund will meet for the first time, in Luxor, Egypt. Delegates will start negotiating which nations will be able to draw from the fund, where it will be housed, where the money will come from, and how much each country should pitch in. At this point, the fund is “an empty bucket,” says Lien Vandamme, a senior campaigner at the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law, who is in Egypt for the negotiations. “Everything is still open.” Other meetings will follow, and the committee will make its recommendations to the world this fall in Dubai at COP28.

If the past several decades of climate negotiations are anything to go on, the loss-and-damage fund will be poorly endowed, or filled with money that got moved over from some other fund and relabeled, or in the form of loans rather than grants. If that happens, it will likely be perceived by poorer nations as yet another inadequate response by the same countries that messed up the climate in the first place. And those that are wronged are unlikely to simply suffer in silence.

The loss-and-damage fund would be separate from what is currently the dominant form of climate funding that flows to the global South: money to help low-income nations reduce their emissions. And it would also be separate from “adaptation,” money to help areas prepare for disasters or avoid the harms of warming. Instead, the new fund would be provided by rich countries to compensate poor countries that have already suffered losses. In a word, it would be reparations.

The agreement to establish a fund for this purpose was initially opposed by some rich countries. The U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said in the fall that helping the developing world cope with climate change is “a moral obligation”—but he wanted that help to flow through existing funds and institutions, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Developing countries, however, demanded a new, dedicated fund, and they ultimately prevailed. Almost all the details were left to be finalized at COP28 in Dubai, after the committee has worked to iron out specifics. But by agreeing that a loss-and-damage fund should exist, countries seem to be reluctantly acknowledging that they bear some moral accountability for climate change. “It is very clear that developed countries have a historical responsibility,” says Liane Schalatek, a climate-finance expert at the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Washington, D.C., who is also in Luxor this week.

Funds are especially needed for the “day after” problems—the ongoing work of rebuilding and recovering after a flood or a heat wave is over and the emergency foreign aid has dried up, Mohamed Nasr, Egypt’s delegate to this week’s meeting, told me. People don’t just need tarp tents and bowls of rice. They need “social support, a way to return livelihoods,” Nasr said.

But how much is enough? One analysis suggests that the true scale of the financial losses due to climate change outside of the West may be as much as $580 billion a year by 2030, and some groups are considering a figure in that ballpark to be the minimum acceptable amount. Another analysis estimated that America owed $20 billion for global climate losses in 2022, a number that would rise to about $117 billion annually by 2030. Nasr demurred on naming specific amounts, suggesting that the workings of the fund be negotiated first. The needs are enormous, and mentioning figures at this point would only “scare people,” he said. “If you put a number on at the beginning, the focus will only be on the number,” he told me. But he did add that “it will be in the billions.”

Given that the standing UN goal for all types of climate funding from rich countries to poorer ones—$100 billion—has never been met, filling the loss-and-damage fund with hundreds of billions of dollars feels like an almost impossible lift. “It will be a huge challenge to get countries to agree on the amount that is needed,” says Leia Achampong of the European Network on Debt and Development. For many delegates from the global South, a key demand is that the fund not come in the form of loans. Many poor countries, including Pakistan, are already dealing with debt, which is affecting their ability to provide for their own citizens. More loans would just add to this debt burden. “If a country is in debt, you have the World Bank and the IMF calling for austerity, and the first thing that usually goes is the social safety net,” Schalatek told me.

A central issue going into the meeting in Egypt is that, despite broad agreement that rich countries responsible for the most emissions should pay in and that poor countries feeling the brunt of the effects should receive the funds, the globe cannot be neatly divided into just two categories—“developed” and “developing.” The trickiest case is undoubtedly China. Historically classified as a developing country, China is getting richer by the month and has emitted 11 percent of historical emissions, second only to the United States. At COP27, a coalition of developing countries rallied around China’s claim that it should be a recipient rather than a donor, to the consternation of the European negotiators. The U.S. will likely be loath to lavish money on a fund that China can draw from. Another outstanding question is whether contributions to the fund will be legal obligations rather than just voluntary donations. Anything with legal teeth would require congressional approval in the U.S., which would not be easy. (The State Department did not respond to a request for comment on the loss-and-damage negotiations.)

If the loss-and-damage fund are skimpy, communities and nations will likely seek restitution for their losses through national and international courts. An early test case began in 2015, when a Peruvian farmer sued the German energy giant RWE. The farmer, Saúl Luciano Lliuya, says his home is at risk of being washed away by meltwater from a glacier, and he wants the company to pay 0.47 percent of his adaptation costs, on the basis of a study that attributes that fraction of emissions to the company’s activities. RWE has denied culpability, and the case is ongoing. In an example of targeting nations rather than companies, Indigenous people from four low-lying Australian islands—Boigu, Poruma, Warraber and Masig—submitted a petition to the UN Human Rights Committee arguing that the country had done little to stop the climate change threatening their homes. In September, the committee agreed, ordering Australia to compensate the islanders for their losses.

But legal action might actually be a best-case scenario for the West. Poor, debt-ridden countries struggling with a climate crisis do not make for a stable globe. In 2021, a U.S. Department of Defense report on climate change warned that “the physical and social impacts of climate change transcend political boundaries, increasing the risk that crises cascade beyond any one country or region.” People who lose homes and livelihoods to climate-caused disasters will do what they can to improve their situation. As far back as 1995, the Bangladeshi dignitary Atiq Rahman warned, “if climate change makes our country uninhabitable, we will march with our wet feet into your living rooms.” Hundreds of millions of people may be displaced by 2050.

Mass migrations, resource scarcity, and poverty can lead to global conflicts. No country, no matter how rich, can build a seawall high enough to keep out that kind of chaos. If rich countries cannot be moved to lavishly fund the loss-and-damage bucket by appeals to justice, perhaps they will be moved by what has long been a more reliable motivating force: fear.

Thousands of animal mummies discovered at ancient Egyptian site

CNN

www.cnn.com › travel › article › mummified-ram-heads-ancient-egyptian-intl-scli-scn › index.html

At least 2,000 mummified ram heads dating from the Ptolemaic period and a palatial Old Kingdom structure have been uncovered at the temple of Ramses II in the ancient city of Abydos in southern Egypt, antiquities officials said on Saturday.

The Age of Infinite Misinformation Has Arrived

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › technology › archive › 2023 › 03 › ai-chatbots-large-language-model-misinformation › 673376

New AI systems such as ChatGPT, the overhauled Microsoft Bing search engine, and the reportedly soon-to-arrive GPT-4 have utterly captured the public imagination. ChatGPT is the fastest-growing online application, ever, and it’s no wonder why. Type in some text, and instead of getting back web links, you get well-formed, conversational responses on whatever topic you selected—an undeniably seductive vision.

But the public, and the tech giants, aren’t the only ones who have become enthralled with the Big Data–driven technology known as the large language model. Bad actors have taken note of the technology as well. At the extreme end, there’s Andrew Torba, the CEO of the far-right social network Gab, who said recently that his company is actively developing AI tools to “uphold a Christian worldview” and fight “the censorship tools of the Regime.” But even users who aren’t motivated by ideology will have their impact. Clarkesworld, a publisher of sci-fi short stories, temporarily stopped taking submissions last month, because it was being spammed by AI-generated stories—the result of influencers promoting ways to use the technology to “get rich quick,” the magazine’s editor told The Guardian.  

This is a moment of immense peril: Tech companies are rushing ahead to roll out buzzy new AI products, even after the problems with those products have been well documented for years and years. I am a cognitive scientist focused on applying what I’ve learned about the human mind to the study of artificial intelligence. Way back in 2001, I wrote a book called The Algebraic Mind in which I detailed then how neural networks, a kind of vaguely brainlike technology undergirding some AI products, tended to overgeneralize, applying individual characteristics to larger groups. If I told an AI back then that my aunt Esther had won the lottery, it might have concluded that all aunts, or all Esthers, had also won the lottery.

Technology has advanced quite a bit since then, but the general problem persists. In fact, the mainstreaming of the technology, and the scale of the data it’s drawing on, has made it worse in many ways. Forget Aunt Esther: In November, Galactica, a large language model released by Meta—and quickly pulled offline—reportedly claimed that Elon Musk had died in a Tesla car crash in 2018. Once again, AI appears to have overgeneralized a concept that was true on an individual level (someone died in a Tesla car crash in 2018) and applied it erroneously to another individual who happens to shares some personal attributes, such as gender, state of residence at the time, and a tie to the car manufacturer.

This kind of error, which has come to be known as a “hallucination,” is rampant. Whatever the reason that the AI made this particular error, it’s a clear demonstration of the capacity for these systems to write fluent prose that is clearly at odds with reality. You don’t have to imagine what happens when such flawed and problematic associations are drawn in real-world settings: NYU’s Meredith Broussard and UCLA’s Safiya Noble are among the researchers who have repeatedly shown how different types of AI replicate and reinforce racial biases in a range of real-world situations, including health care. Large language models like ChatGPT have been shown to exhibit similar biases in some cases.

Nevertheless, companies press on to develop and release new AI systems without much transparency, and in many cases without sufficient vetting. Researchers poking around at these newer models have discovered all kinds of disturbing things. Before Galactica was pulled, the journalist Tristan Greene discovered that it could be used to create detailed, scientific-style articles on topics such as the benefits of anti-Semitism and eating crushed glass, complete with references to fabricated studies. Others found that the program generated racist and inaccurate responses. (Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, has argued that Galactica wouldn’t make the online spread of misinformation easier than it already is; a Meta spokesperson told CNET in November, “Galactica is not a source of truth, it is a research experiment using [machine learning] systems to learn and summarize information.”)

More recently, the Wharton professor Ethan Mollick was able to get the new Bing to write five detailed and utterly untrue paragraphs on dinosaurs’ “advanced civilization,” filled with authoritative-sounding morsels including “For example, some researchers have claimed that the pyramids of Egypt, the Nazca lines of Peru, and the Easter Island statues of Chile were actually constructed by dinosaurs, or by their descendents or allies.” Just this weekend, Dileep George, an AI researcher at DeepMind, said he was able to get Bing to create a paragraph of bogus text stating that OpenAI and a nonexistent GPT-5 played a role in the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Microsoft did not immediately answer questions about these responses when reached for comment; last month, a spokesperson for the company said, “Given this is an early preview, [the new Bing] can sometimes show unexpected or inaccurate answers … we are adjusting its responses to create coherent, relevant and positive answers.”

[Read: Conspiracy theories have a new best friend]

Some observers, like LeCun, say that these isolated examples are neither surprising nor concerning: Give a machine bad input and you will receive bad output. But the Elon Musk car crash example makes clear these systems can create hallucinations that appear nowhere in the training data. Moreover, the potential scale of this problem is cause for worry. We can only begin to imagine what state-sponsored troll farms with large budgets and customized large language models of their own might accomplish. Bad actors could easily use these tools, or tools like them, to generate harmful misinformation, at unprecedented and enormous scale. In 2020, Renée DiResta, the research manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory, warned that the “supply of misinformation will soon be infinite.” That moment has arrived.

Each day is bringing us a little bit closer to a kind of information-sphere disaster, in which bad actors weaponize large language models, distributing their ill-gotten gains through armies of ever more sophisticated bots. GPT-3 produces more plausible outputs than GPT-2, and GPT-4 will be more powerful than GPT-3. And none of the automated systems designed to discriminate human-generated text from machine-generated text has proved particularly effective.

[Read: ChatGPT is about to dump more work on everyone]

We already face a problem with echo chambers that polarize our minds. The mass-scale automated production of misinformation will assist in the weaponization of those echo chambers and likely drive us even further into extremes. The goal of the Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” model is to create an atmosphere of mistrust, allowing authoritarians to step in; it is along these lines that the political strategist Steve Bannon aimed, during the Trump administration, to “flood the zone with shit.” It’s urgent that we figure out how democracy can be preserved in a world in which misinformation can be created so rapidly, and at such scale.  

One suggestion, worth exploring but likely insufficient, is to “watermark” or otherwise track content that is produced by large language models. OpenAI might for example watermark anything generated by GPT-4, the next-generation version of the technology powering ChatGPT; the trouble is that bad actors could simply use alternative large language models to create whatever they want, without watermarks.

A second approach is to penalize misinformation when it is produced at large scale. Currently, most people are free to lie most of the time without consequence, unless they are, for example, speaking under oath. America’s Founders simply didn’t envision a world in which someone could set up a troll farm and put out a billion mistruths in a single day, disseminated with an army of bots, across the internet. We may need new laws to address such scenarios.

A third approach would be to build a new form of AI that can detect misinformation, rather than simply generate it. Large language models are not inherently well suited to this; they lose track of the sources of information that they use, and lack ways of directly validating what they say. Even in a system like Bing’s, where information is sourced from the web, mistruths can emerge once the data are fed through the machine. Validating the output of large language models will require developing new approaches to AI that center reasoning and knowledge, ideas that were once popular but are currently out of fashion.  

It will be an uphill, ongoing move-and-countermove arms race from here; just as spammers change their tactics when anti-spammers change theirs, we can expect a constant battle between bad actors striving to use large language models to produce massive amounts of misinformation and governments and private corporations trying to fight back. If we don’t start fighting now, democracy may well be overwhelmed by misinformation and consequent polarization—and perhaps quite soon. The 2024 elections could be unlike anything we have seen before.