Bauer's History

For the better part of my adult life I have lived in a neo-fascist era. Across Europe and in my own country I have seen how fascist movements have exploded, not on the streets but in the electoral campaigns. Throughout this period I have also seen people, often to the left arguing on whatever or not a specific movement is fascist or not. In the case of the ongoing us election we can see similar tendencies with regard to Donald Trump jr, were many people are still obsessed with deciding on whether or not Trump is a fascist.  A common argument for Trumps lack of fascism is simply this: he does not propose a party-state and he have not (yet) started to build a mass-movement that is supported by the state. Other people claims that Trump is a fascist due to his stands on women, immigrants and his contineous threats towards the media. What all of these discussions somewhat is lacking, is the understanding that fascism, in my view is not a static ideology. The most clear-cut fascist state...

 An old tale is that when locomotion was invented during the 19th century it came with a medical discourse, we’re people were afraid of their inner organs becoming unarranged or that the human mind could not phantom incredible speeds of 40 km/h. Similar aspects can be high lighted with the case of computer games containing graphic violence, leading to outburst of violence all over society. As astonishing that it might seem for people living and partaking in these debates, some decades later society is still here.  And what’s more interesting is all of this fear of AI. For the last months I’ve spent allot of time reading on it from both a technical, social, judicial and ethical dimension. Some authors, such as Sheikh et al argues that this is a system technology which similar to the early cars will transform society. And what has struck me is that  when the car was invented in the 20th century it was both viewers as a threat to people’s health from the danger of travelling...

 I just finished reading AI ethics by Coeckelbergh. This is actually course literature for a course on AI, digitization and archival science which I will start teaching next week at Lund University. The idea to include it as mandatory reading was from a colleague of mine, and after reading it through I think it has some very strong points as well as some weaknesses. Amongst it strengths is the first chapters which deals with various aspects of AI such the difference between general artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence. It also highlights some aspects of machine learning and deep learning, which is of great interest to novices in the field. Even though I personally have a strong interest in AI, my skills in programming are not very strong even though I can read basic code and understand what it do. According to me it is therefore of importance to people wishing to learn how to utilise AI to learn of the different forms, since once you go deeper into it is impo...

 For the past weeks I have taught seminars on the use of history and history culture. This is not an area of history that I specialise in and I also think that a lot of the theoretical writing on the subject sometimes is both to complex (often invoking everything from Marx and Foucault to that in betweeen) and sometimes to simplified (often these texts highlights a schematic of how people use history in a matrix, thus lessening the complexity of the issue). However, when you teach about teaching, it always become inevitable that you start to reflect around your own practices. In my career as a history teacher at the university level, I have come to conclude that large historical overviews are often lacking in some way or another. Perhaps this is due to the complexity in writing a global history on around 1500 pages and with several authors involved. There are however some parts of writing synthesis that more complex than others given our current culture. As a student I personally h...