Sorcerer's Apprentice Research Articles

Assisted suicide in Switzerland (part 1): Medical-ethical controversies and the dilemma of the sorcerer's apprentice

Based on the cases in which assisted suicide (AS) has taken place in Switzerland in the context of a mental disorder or dementia, we discuss whether the slippery slope argument often brought up by opponents of assisted dying is justified. Long-term data from the Swiss Federal Statistical Office shows that while the number of cases with these «indications» is increasing (1999-2017: on average 21 cases/year vs. 2018-2022: n = 73 cases/year), the percentage share of these diseases in the total number of all AS cases has remained unchanged at around 5 %. Opponents of assisted dying believe that the slippery slope argument is already fulfilled by the fact that these cases occur at all. However, the still limited prevalence of these specific indications which still represent only a minority of assisted suicide cases over time, may be used by advocates of assisted dying to weaken the opposing viewpoint.

Ethical Considerations of Generative AI: A Survey Exploring the Role of Decision Makers in the Loop

We explore the foresighted concerns that Norbert Wiener voiced in 1960 about the potential of machines to learn and create strategies that could not be anticipated, drawing parallels to the fable "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" by Goethe. The progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has brought these worries back to the forefront, as shown by a survey AI Impacts conducted in 2022 with more than 700 machine learning researchers. This survey found a five percentage probability that advanced AI might cause "extremely adverse" outcomes, including the possibility of human extinction. Importantly, the introduction of OpenAI's ChatGPT, powered by GPT-4, has led to a surge in entrepreneurial activities, highlighting the ease of use of large language models (LLMs).AI's potential for adverse outcomes, such as military control and unregulated AI races, is explored alongside concerns about AI's role in governance, healthcare, media portrayal, and surpassing human intelligence. Given their transformative impact on content creation, the prominence of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT is noted. The societal assessment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has grown increasingly intricate and pressing in tandem with the rapid evolution of this technology. As AI continues to advance at a swift pace, the need to comprehensively evaluate its societal implications has become more complex and urgent, necessitating a thorough examination of its potential impact on various domains such as governance, healthcare, media portrayal, and surpassing human intelligence. This assessment is crucial in addressing ethical concerns related to bias, data misuse, technical limitations, and transparency gaps, and in integrating ethical and legal principles throughout AI algorithm lifecycles to ensure alignment with societal well-being. Furthermore, the urgency of addressing the societal implications of AI is underscored by the need for healthcare workforce upskilling and ethical considerations in the era of AI-assisted medicine, emphasizing the critical importance of integrating societal well-being into the development and deployment of AI technologies. Our study entails an examination of the ethical quandaries and obstacles presented when developing methods to evaluate and predict the broader societal impacts of AI on decision-making processes involving the generating of images, videos, and textual content.

The Oedipal dynamic of 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' (from Fantasia, 1940) - Psychiatry in film.

The Oedipal dynamic of 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' (from Fantasia, 1940) - Psychiatry in film.

Wild brooms and learning analytics.

In this commentary we present an analogy between Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe's classic poem, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, and institutional learning analytics. In doing so, we hope to provoke institutions with a simple heuristic when considering their learning analytics initiatives. They might ask themselves, "Are we behaving like the sorcerer's apprentice?" This would be characterized by initiatives lacking faculty involvement, and we argue that when initiatives fit this pattern, they also lack consideration of their potential hazards, and are likely to fail. We join others in advocating for institutions to, instead, create ecosystems that enable faculty leadership in institutional learning analytics efforts.

Laughing at Architecture: Architectural Histories of Humour, Satire and Wit

Laughing at Architecture: Architectural Histories of Humour, Satire and Wit

The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Sleeping Sickness, Onchocerciasis and Unintended Consequences in the Gold Coast and Ghana, 1930–60 — ADDENDUM

An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Autonomous weapons systems and International Law: a study on human-machine interactions in ethically and legally sensitive domains

Humanity has long discussed its relationship with autonomous devices. In 1797 Goethe wrote a poem that describes a sorcerer's apprentice who bewitched a broom to do his job of fetching water. However, the broom multiplies and escapes out of his control, causing flooding. Only his master, upon return, is able to break the spell. Similar to Goethe's bewitched brooms, Autonomous Weapons Systems (AWS) might behave in unexpected ways. The human role in the human-AWS interaction, named "Meaningful Human Control" (MHC), is an undetermined concept that is on the light spot both of the scholarship and States as a possible venue to address some of AWS's challenges. Throughout the book "Autonomous Weapons Systems and International Law". Daniele Amoroso discusses the central legal debates on AWS and provides a compelling normative model to contribute to regulating those weapons concerning MHC.

What we do in the Shadows... Rapports de force/rapports de France dans quelques romans de Jean-Christophe Grangé

Auteur middlebrow, Jean-Christophe Grangé est peu étudié en tant que tel, mais ses romans (massivement lus) dessinent pourtant une étrange carte de France : la police, siège et incarnation visible du pouvoir officiel, y est régulièrement débordée par un ensemble mouvant et disparate de sectes, de camarillas, d'organisations plus ou moins occultes ou de groupuscules paramilitaires tout-puissants, dans la droite ligne de la pensée apocalyptique des illuministes du XVIIIe siècle. La France des rapports de force est fantasmatiquement présente, sillonnée à toute vitesse par des déplacements précisément décrits et minutés, mais totalement improbables par leur aisance même. Il y a donc réalisme – la Bretagne de Lontano, la rue Goujon de Miserere, la cathédrale Notre-Dame du Serment des Limbes... et en même temps plongée dans une « liquidité » des actions et des trajets qui appartient proprement au songe. Spectrographie d'un irréel surexposé, l'univers romanesque de Grangé pourrait être résumé par le leitmotiv qui parcourt, comme une isotopie, la plupart des rencontres et des échanges : “je serai là dans moins d'une heure”. Ce “pouvoir” curialisé des sectes du bizarre, des retours infernaux du passé, des fantômes de la (dé)colonisation mal liquidés s'incarne en plusieurs figures du Mal, tueurs en série ou apprenti sorciers (La forêt des mânes) qui ne cesse de miner les instruments officiels de la démocratie... La juxtaposition du licite et du paranormal, du réaliste et du loufoque, crée l'ambiance particulière de cet univers où le “dessous” grouillant et mortifère mine et corrompt toujours plus le “dessus” ordonné et brillant des normes sociales, et où la sauvagerie serpente infiniment dans les signes de la modernité.

What are the main surgical and non-surgical techniques of the acceleration of orthodontic tooth movement?

Different surgical and non-surgical techniques have been developed in order to reduce the duration of orthodontic treatment. Regarding surgical techniques, corticotomies are widely used. The micro-osteoperforation technique (MOP), in addition to the piezocision technique, have been developed to provide minimally invasive surgery as an alternative to conventional corticotomies, without the elevation of a mucoperiosteal flap. Regarding non-surgical techniques, the approach is radically different in terms of physical stimuli or chemical techniques. Corticotomy and piezocision techniques have been found to be effective in accelerating orthodontic tooth movement, although the corticotomy technique presents a significant risk of postoperative treatment. These two techniques also offer the possibility of adding a bone graft using a tunneling surgical approach. Regarding non-surgical techniques, physical stimuli techniques such as with a laser are easy to perform, non-invasive and seem to be promising. However, their effectiveness has not yet been demonstrated, as is the case for chemical techniques. While at first glance these techniques are reassuringly non-invasive, do they not give the sensation of playing the sorcerer's apprentice ? Although surgical techniques seem to have demonstrated their significant efficacy in accelerating orthodontic tooth movement, non-surgical techniques do not yet provide a sufficient level of evidence and / or safety to be performed in our routine clinical practice as orthodontists. As these topics are innovative, new and future scientific evidence should be able to lead to the development of all these concepts.

Beyond ESG: Reforming Capitalism and Social-Democracy

The French version of this article is available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3786964. Several voices are rising to demand an in-depth reform of capitalism in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007-2010, the increase in income and wealth inequalities of the last four decades, the climate urgency in a local global world. There is a real danger that governments will be put under pressure from poorly-informed groups and will want to play Goethe’s sorcerer's apprentice: too often, these good intentions are but a paved road to hell. In this document, I analyze various reform projects, I discuss the concepts of ethics and equity (environment, water, life, remuneration, inequalities, ESG) and I propose to add a project for in-depth reforms of capitalism and social-democracy.

“The True Story of the Sorcerer's Apprentice” & “The President and His Bodyguards”

“The True Story of the Sorcerer's Apprentice” & “The President and His Bodyguards”

“The True Story of the Sorcerer's Apprentice” & “The President and His Bodyguards”

“The True Story of the Sorcerer's Apprentice” & “The President and His Bodyguards”

Rhymed Circumstances in Aragon's Musée Grévin

ABSTRACTBuilding on work by scholars such as Michel Murat and Philippe Forest, I argue for the interrelation of two notions—circumstance and rhyme—in Aragon's Occupation-era essays. These essays defend “circumstantial” over “pure” poetry and promote rhyme and reason's compatibility. In keeping with those values, historical and visual analogies (“rhymes”) abound in the Resistance poetry of Aragon's Musée Grévin (1943), whose title foretells fascist leaders' derisory future as immobile, waxen afterimages. Its central poem, by casting Hitler as Goethe's “Sorcerer's Apprentice,” depicts language's power to enchant or immobilize. Furthermore, Aragon's poem itself develops an illusion of imprecatory power exerted over the Führer. It does so, I argue, by engaging with readers' memory for sound, idiom, and history. Rhymes and familiar fixed expressions lend inexorability to the poet's pronouncements. And by “rhyming” historical circumstances (downfallen autocrats) with contemporary circumstances (fascists in power), Aragon prophesies the “pattern's” logical, inevitable conclusion: the fascists' downfall.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Storytelling and Politics

true tale of the hunt will never be told until it is the lion who does the telling.(African proverb)In his book Great Political Wit, former U.S. senator Bob Dole relates what he calls one of former U.S. president Ronald Reagan's favorite stories, about an American and a Soviet citizen's comparison of their respective governments:In my country, said the American, can walk into the Oval Office in the White House, and slam my fist on the desk, and say that I don't like the way Ronald Reagan is running the United States.Well, replied his Soviet counterpart, can do the same thing in the Politburo.You can? asked the incredulous American.Certainly I can, came the response. can go into [Mikhail] Gorbachev's office, and slam my fist on his desk, and say that I don't like the way President Reagan is running the United States. (61-62)This is perhaps the most obvious example of political storytelling: the use of an amusing, or otherwise emotion-generating anecdote to make a point, break the ice, or in some other way support an effective public utterance. Here the president is clearly demonstrating his view of the major distinction between the two political systems. Reagan was a master of this rhetorical tool, the many anecdotes in Dole's book-and several academic papers (e.g., Lewis)-attest.Reagan also employed the more sophisticated form of subliminal storytelling in service of a master narrative. Reich describes how the former president redefined his predecessor Franklin Roosevelt's conception of the Community, one of what Reich identifies the core cultural parables (8) of American political rhetoric. Taking a small-government perspective, Reagan understood the Benevolent Community as small, traditional neighborhoods in which people voluntarily helped one another, free from government interference (16). This approach contrasts significantly with, for example, Roosevelt's New Deal legislation, which included the creation of Social Security, among other examples of welfare state innovations. What we are faced with are two vastly different stories of America's promise to its citizens, the world, and history. Even though these stories may not be explicitly presented, Reich argues, they underlie policy decisions and form the basis for political rhetoric expressed in speeches, press releases, and so forth.As this special issue demonstrates, there are numerous ways in which politicians, academicians, and artists understand storytelling in political, and politicized, settings. Rhetorician Andrew Leslie observes that the persuasive use of story dates back to early rhetorical training and that stories have always been employed in concert with rhetorical argument in the service of persuasive discourse. Combined with Vladimer Propp's conception of the topoi of the story, Leslie's argument offers a new analytical framework for evaluating the persuasive potential of political storytelling.In my conversation with Paul Loeb, we see an activist's on-the-ground view of how stories are effective, and at times destructive, in the political process, whether through the received story of Rosa Parks's protest or by the storytelling prowess, or lack thereof, of Barack Obama.Francesca Polletta, a sociologist, draws on anthropology, political science, and other disciplines to discuss the role of character in competing public and private political narratives, while School of Communication Dean Evan Cornog unpacks the ways in which the New Media landscape has altered the transmission and understanding of these narratives.For a decidedly different approach to the notion of political storytelling, folklorist Steven Zeitlin's brief personal essay takes on folklore fundamentalists. His article is replete with tales of his own experience that make the case for narrative a connective, rather than divisive force. Fairytale expert Jack Zipes's essay on The Sorcerer's Apprentice provides a glimpse into variants on a well-known tale type, providing valuable insights into the master-slave relationship evident recently the publication of the Harry Potter franchise. …

The Master-Slave Dialectic in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”

To know who we are, where we are, and where we are going, we need stories and storytellers to attain self-consciousness-but not just ordinary stories and storytellers. We need storytellers who are consciousness raisers and stories that are consciousness raising. Otherwise, living in the world is but an illusion and delusion. Otherwise, we are controlled by self-serving masters who are not aware of how blind they are and try to lead us blindly along paths of destruction and self-destruction. Otherwise, we will be controlled by authoritarian magicians who cast spells with words of deception and self-aggrandizement that celebrate nothing but their powers to dominate, if not mutilate and annihilate, other human beings.Bearing this in mind, I continue to ponder why J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels and all the similar and imitative narratives, films, plays, and works of art about duels to the death fought between magicians and their apprentices have appealed to millions of readers and viewers throughout the world and why they have achieved such astounding popularity. After much reflection about this popularity, I want to propose that the Harry Potter novels and their variants and imitations hark back to stories told and written about magicians and their apprentices during and before the Greco-Roman period in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Such great dissemination was noted already in the nineteenth century by the great British folklorist, William Alexander Clouston (413). Indeed, these tales were widely disseminated over centuries by word of mouth and script until they became memetic. They formed a memeplex in Western cultural memory, expressing and touching upon core human dispositions and drives for self-consciousness, knowledge, and power in struggles related to the adaptation and survival of the human species.1 Underlying my thesis is the notion that black and white magic are two sides of the same coin of knowledge gained from an intense scientific study of the material universe, and the powerful holders of knowledge of the very basic elements of our world-the magicians, sorcerers, wizards, witches, inventors, shamans, scientists, medicine men, priests/priestesses, and politicians-have discovered miraculous ways to use black and white magic to transform themselves and their environments in ways that most people cannot. In seeking to gain total self-consciousness, omniscience, and absolute truth, sorcerers reveal that their success depends morally on whether they will share their magic (knowledge) to benefit the people who serve them and want to learn from them or whether they will use their magic (knowledge) to dominate and destroy the people of the world, especially young people, who are humiliated if they do not comply with the commands of the sorcerers. These sorcerers are all powerful shape-shifters, and they represent what we all want-namely self-consciousness and recognition as independent human beings-but cannot obtain unless we realize how to negate the sorcerers in the stories and fairy tales that we create and project.I focus here mainly on the dialectic in the tale type underlying the Harry Potter novels as a fairy tale, for it is in these novels viewed as a gigantic fairy tale that we can see its relationship to the Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) 325 tale type, Magician and His Pupil, as noted by Hans-Jorg Uther in The Types of International Folktales, a very useful catalogue that helps researchers trace the historical origins and dissemination of tales with similar plots. I briefly note how this tale type of Magician and His Pupil has been deeply rooted in European, Middle Eastern, and Asian folklore since the fourth century BC, if not earlier, and was adapted as part of the staple of children's literature mainly in America and Europe some time during the late nineteenth century, thanks to the transformation of the Grimms' tales as tales for children and later thanks to Disney's 1940 film Fantasia and book version of Sorcerer's Apprentice. …

Science and the media

Abstract Science seeks and needs the attention of the public and the media, and the media are eager for news from the world of research. This sometimes seduces scientists to communicate their results in early stages of their work and may bring them into the situation of the sorcerer's apprentice – they can’t get rid of the ghosts they called. We give some recent examples of early or doubtful communication in physics and ask for a responsible cooperation of science and the media which takes care of the peculiarities of the scientific process.

A Sorcerer's Apprentice? John Weaver's Comic Muse

This paper examines John Weaver'sEssay Towards an History of Dancing(London, 1712) and hisHistory of the Mimes and Pantomimes(London, 1728). The paper will argue that comic pantomime dancing was critically central to Weaver's agenda as practitioner and writer, theorist, and historian. Modern scholarship has privileged his admittedly considerable contributions in the serious mode in ways that compromise our understanding of his important work overall.

Modifying reality: marketing for the 22nd century

Philosophy and philosophers are useful in making the calls and answering the big questions that, in the end, create the path for all mankind to follow. One of the great falsehoods is the belief that everything we produce is neither good nor evil – that evil resides rather in the person who uses them. Marketing is a powerful tool that can change the behavior of people and eventually allow us to change reality. So, it is worthwhile to think about the way we use it and not just behave as a sorcerer's apprentice, using it in the short term without asking the big questions: what is marketing; why does it work; what should we do with it”? This article analyzes what marketing has been up to this point through reviewing the contributions of each of the schools of thought, digging into the history of marketing schools and analyzing it chronologically. To answer the question “why does it work”, the article briefly presents a general theory of marketing that explains it as a complex phenomenon that emerges in society when you create and communicate value propositions. To answer the question “what should we do with it”, the author questions some of the practices of marketing, the exchange and needs. Finally it proposes a marketing that is ecologically sustainable: one that integrates us with rather than separates us from nature.

Hayek and the Sorcerer's Apprentice: Whither the Hayekian Logic of Intervention?

AbstractCommentators claim that Hayek's work readily explains what consequences are likely to result from the allegedly socialist policies finding favor with the Obama Administration. They have ready cause to invoke his name as Hayek himself has a penchant for promiscuously invoking “planning” with widespread descriptive applicability. This article draws upon archival material to show that Hayek did indeed think that persisting with middle‐way policies (Hayek's supposed “muddle of the middle”) would lead to full‐blown command planning. In particular, Hayek argued that middle‐way policies would induce psychological changes in the populace that would lead it to supposedly favor and call for ever greater government intervention. For Hayek, these supposed psychological changes allegedly provide much grease for any slippery slope that leads to serfdom.

Evolution ‘on purpose’: how behaviour has shaped the evolutionary process

The idea that behaviour has played an important role in evolution has had its ups and downs over the past two centuries. Now it appears to be up once again. Lamarck can claim priority for this insight, along with Darwin's more guarded view. However, there followed a long ‘dark-age’, which began with Weismann's mutation theory and spanned the gene-centred era that followed during most of the 20th Century, although it was punctuated by various contrarians, from Baldwin's ‘Organic Selection theory’ to Simpson's ‘Baldwin effect’, Mayr's ‘Pacemaker’ model, and Waddington's ‘genetic assimilation’, amongst others. Nowadays, even as we are reading genomes and using this information to illuminate biological causation and decipher evolutionary patterns, behavioural processes are more fully appreciated, with ‘multilevel selection theory’ providing a more ecumenical, multicausal model of evolutionary change. This has been accompanied by a flood of research on how behavioural influences contribute to the ongoing evolutionary process, from research on phenotypic plasticity to niche construction theory and gene–culture co-evolution theory. However, the theoretical implications of this paradigm shift still have not been fully integrated into our current thinking about evolution. Behaviour has a purpose (teleonomy); it is ends-directed. Living organisms are not passive objects of ‘chance and necessity’ (as Jacques Monod put it). Nor is the currently popular concept of phenotypic plasticity sufficient. Organisms are active participants in the evolutionary process (cybernetic systems) and have played a major causal role in determining its direction. It could be called ‘constrained purposiveness’, and one of the important themes in evolution, culminating in humankind, has been the ‘progressive’ evolution of self-determination (intelligence) and its ever-expanding potency. I call this agency ‘Teleonomic Selection’. In a very real sense, our species invented itself. For better and worse, the course of evolution is increasingly being shaped by the ‘Sorcerer's Apprentice’. Monod's mantra needs to be updated. Evolution is a process that combines ‘chance, necessity, teleonomy and selection’. © 2013 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2014, 112, 242–260.