We like to think that we would stick up for ourselves after being wronged. No one wants to be a coward. Often, though, faced with the realities of power, wealth, and superior resources, we shrink from the good fight. More worryingly, humans can misdiagnose or externalise an issue, rationalising it away. We take a problem grounded in interpersonal relationships, politics, or some other social arrangement, and convince ourselves it is an objective, natural state of being. After all, as distinguished artificial intelligence researcher and author Toby Walsh, author of Machines Behaving Badly: The morality of AI, says: ‘We are, for example, frequently very poor at explaining ourselves. All of us make biased and unfair decisions.’

The last in a trilogy exploring the near and far future of AI, Machines Behaving Badly should be commended for its focus on the relationships being constructed with new intelligent machines. Walsh is clearly passionate about AI. For him, the topic of machine intelligence is one requiring compromise, self-improvement, and clear communication. Building fruitful, equitable AI requires the patient nurturing of a healthy relationship, like friendship or romance. Unlike some breathless accounts of AI, for Walsh, there are no easy fixes.

Morality is a question of politics and a vision of the good life. Politics and the good life are, of course, open-ended questions. Walsh is aware of this: ‘There is no universal set of ethical values with which we need to align our AI systems.’  The reader gains a general understanding of Walsh’s values in Machines Behaving Badly. He is concerned with AI’s impact on equality, racial and gender bias, and climate change. Intervening effectively in the development of AI requires making the case, based on an ethical philosophy, that others should care too.

Professor Joy Damousi was the ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow at the University of Melbourne between 2014 and 2019. The ARC Fellowship made possible the scale of the now published book, enabling research not only in Australia but also the United States, Britain, and Europe. The book evidences the potential of richly funded historical research.

Damousi’s work is a major contribution to the expanding field of humanitarianism, presented as an Australian case study focused on child war refugees. Through a historical lens, it explores complex, multilayered, and shifting meanings. It brings into focus the intersection of humanitarian concerns and broader political questions related to immigration, race, ethnicity, and gender in the era of White Australia.

The chapters are structured around four overlapping concepts: saving, evacuating, assimilating, and adopting. They encompass a range of activities including fundraising, aid and development schemes, child sponsorship, the establishment of orphanages, and inter-country adoption. The study is theoretically positioned within Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of ‘emotional communities’, in which individuals and their collectives define the valuable and the harmful, ‘the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate and deplore’.

Spanning six decades, Damousi’s study traverses the two world wars, the Armenian genocide, the Spanish Civil War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. The transnational positioning follows the humanitarians on their travels to sites of conflict, the bringing to Australia of new ideas, languages, and causes, and the taking of Australian perspectives to the global community.

There is a slaughterhouse-like logic to the way humanity’s mistreatment of animals tends to be written about. Repetitive. Relentless. Atrocity piles upon atrocity, with no hope of remedy. Readers, probably appalled by the abattoir to begin with, likely vegetarians or vegans or animal fosterers, discomfort themselves yet again in the name of … what exactly? Duty? Academic interest? A renewed sense of the righteousness of animal liberation? We read on grimly, plumbing the depths of a despair that would feel commonplace if it didn’t remain, always, so excruciatingly raw.

Abandon Every Hope, the first book by Hayley Singer (no relation to Peter, doyen of animal rights in this country), is a short, experimental collection of fragmentary essays. It both deploys well-worn tropes of slaughterhouse literature and attempts to nudge the form forwards or, perhaps more accurately, sideways. Ellipses and caesuras dot the mostly brief paragraphs, bespeaking the absences that define Singer’s subject.

Primarily, Abandon Every Hope is a book concerned with the idea of disappearance, how the plight of animals raised for human consumption is elided by obfuscation and euphemism (while reading, I was periodically reminded of David Brooks’s writings on how language shapes and distorts animal–human relations). It is a sort of thanatological diary, an accounting of the unaccounted for – a lament for the unlamented.

‘That was my first experience of disappearance,’ Singer writes about when her grandmother would feed her corned tongue sandwiches, ‘old-world Jewish comfort food’, about which she felt not revulsion but curiosity. ‘It had,’ she reflects, ‘been neatened’, utterly divorced from its origins, a process Singer describes as ‘banal magic’.