Perhaps it was his background in biology that made H.G. Wells believe that the differences among us were smaller than politics made them out to be.
The author, who in the 1890s wrote a series of classic novels of science fiction decades before that genre was named, believed schools were using the teaching of history to instill a dangerous strain of nationalism. He called for a shift to a less ideological view of the past. A brief article in the September 5, 1937 Brooklyn Daily Eagle recalls the marks that caused something of a sensation.
A little more of Jerry Kaplan and his new book, Humans Need Not Apply, is on display in Anthony Mason’s CBS News report “The Future of Work and Play.” Most of the piece will be familiar to those already thinking about the perplexing question of how a free-market economy can operate if it becomes a highly automated one, with discussion of driverless cars, algorithms thinning the ranks of blue- and white-collar workers alike, etc.
Most interesting is a visit to the Associated Press, which has begun relying on software to rapidly transform raw data into its inverted-triangle pieces, stories that can pass for human-level composition. Both the software makers and the AP say the innovation has complemented workers, not replaced them.
Still, NYU Professor Gary Marcus offers that a guaranteed minimum income from the state to citizens (likely through the taxation of capital) is ultimately the endgame of automation. View here.
The band played on as the Titanic went down, and Julian Niccolini, Managing Partner of the Four Seasons, may likewise sink with the ship.
The hoary bastion of power lunches for privileged New Yorkers is soon to shutter, and Niccolini will either reopen it downtown or be doing a stretch in prison. That’s because the infamously “handsy” proprietor was arrested earlier this year for the sexual abuse of a woman who attended a party at the dated establishment.
In a very good GQ article, Robert Draper sees the fall of Four Seasons and its unruly ruler in terms of a generational shift, when a passé concept of white, male privilege ran up against new table manners.
An excerpt:
Whichever room you choose, you’ll notice two things. First is that the food is exorbitant (over $70 for some entrées) and often lackluster. A wild snapper with corn and guajillo sauce I had at lunch seemed a tired throwback to the nouveau-southwestern craze a couple of decades back. The ahi tuna burger from the bar menu was resoundingly inedible. Such trifles, as even restaurant critics who have consistently praised The Four Seasons acknowledge, are ultimately beside the point. You come here to bask in the spaciousness of what Jackie Onassis liked to call “the cathedral.” You come to take your rightful place in the pantheon and to be seen occupying that choice real estate. About a thousand faithful Four Seasons customers have a “house account”—meaning the bill typically goes directly to their companies. My old boss, former GQ editor-in-chief Art Cooper, had one such arrangement with The Four Seasons. According to Julian, Art spent about $200,000 a year at his favorite restaurant and never once saw a receipt—all the way up until June of 2003, when he rose from his corner booth, lumbered over to a barstool, succumbed to a stroke, and died at the age of 65.
That’s the second thing you’ll notice about The Four Seasons: Its clientele is, eh, not youthful. Still, it’s possible to look down from Siberia upon the octo- and nona-genarians and to imagine them as younger, hungrier, Bonfire of the Vanities versions of their present-day selves.
Julian Niccolini was present at their ascension, and they at his. On the subway to work each morning, he studied the Times, the Daily News, and Women’s Wear Daily to find out which celebrities were in town, what schemes the ultra-wealthy were up to, and who was cavorting with whom. The Grill Room’s seating chart became Julian’s interpretation of America’s pecking order. Even the richest of patrons would come to learn that this was Julian’s roost. As longtime customer Bill White, the CEO of the development firm Constellations Group, puts it, “The Four Seasons is one place where the customer isn’t always right.”
Julian’s reputation as a host persisted to the point that he was eventually penning columns in Gotham, Details, and the New York Observer, where he’d flatter this or that “beautiful” customer while gossiping about others (Bethenny Frankel urinating in a wine bucket). He also dispensed wisdom that ranged from the practical (like when to wear a linen suit) to the prurient (like what to do when a woman hits on you when your wife is standing nearby). At least a few uninitiated readers must have wondered just who this pretentious reptile was.•
The Gig Economy has been on the margins of America, but the fear is that it’s going mainstream. If technology, which hasn’t proved to be the worker’s friend, allows contingent employment to become the norm, we really aren’t arranged to handle that new reality. President Obama has been achampion of Labor, particularly in his second term, but he’s chastening elements of a system that may not continue. A piecemeal economy, if pervasive, will need fresh answers.
To be sure, technology has helped make workers more productive. But they are reaping few of the rewards that come from producing more in less time, and at lower costs. From 2000 to 2014, netproductivity rose by nearly 22 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. The gain in hourly compensation during that time? Less than 2 percent.
Nearly all the benefits of the surge in productivity have gone to top executives, in the form of bigger pay packages; to owners, as higher profits; and to investors, as better returns, the Economic Policy Institute said.
The rise of what’s being called the gig economy gives people the flexibility to work when and where they want — a great advantage for many workers. But few of these jobs come with benefits, or a guarantee of steady work. Many workers take them by necessity, not choice.
These types of arrangements are growing, and not only with so-called sharing economy firms such as the ride-hailing service Uber or TaskRabbit, which finds labor for daily chores. A recent study by the Government Accountability Office, an independent congressional watchdog agency, found that as many as 40 percent of employed Americans in 2010 were contingent workers — part-timers, temps, day laborers, or independent contractors — up from 35 percent in 2006.•
Paddy Chayefsky, that brilliant satirist, holds forth spectacularly on a 1969 episode of the Mike Douglas Show. It starts with polite chatter about the success of his script for Marty but quickly transitions into a much more serious and futuristic discussion. The writer is full of doom and gloom, of course, during the tumult of the Vietnam Era; his best-case scenario for humankind to live more peacefully is a computer-friendly “new society” that yields to globalization and technocracy, one in which citizens are merely producers and consumers, free of nationalism and disparate identity. Well, some of that came true. He joins the show at the 7:45 mark.
Andy Warhol refuses to speak during a 1965 appearance on Merv Griffin’s talk show, allowing a still-healthy-looking Edie Sedgwick to do handle the conversation. Not even the Pop Artist himself could have realized how correct he was in believing that soon just being would be enough to warrant stardom, that it wouldn’t matter what you said or if you said a thing, that traditional content would lose much of its value.
You know you had to have experienced the highest highs and lowest lows to see Preston Tucker in yourself, which is why he made such a perfect subject for Francis Ford Coppola. Below is a fun 1948 PR film that Tucker produced about his then-newest machine, a sedan nicknamed the “Tucker Torpedo,” which revolutionized the American automobile, before the SEC and rumors of wrongdoing forced it off the road.
The endless fetishization of food is mind-numbing, but Alice Driver’s story at Vice “Munchies” takes a smart, offbeat approach to the topic, wondering about the future of nutrition, how we’re going to feed a growing population without further imperiling the environment. She does so while in Mexico, trailing outré chef Andrew Zimmern, who fears he will be viewed as the “fat white guy [who] goes around world eats fermented dolphin anus, comes home.” Zimmern thinks Soylent will eventually be the meal of the poor–or maybe something else we can’t even yet visualize. I would think lab-grown food will play a significant role.
An excerpt:
I was skeptical of the argument that Soylent was simply a McDonald’s alternative, but I found Zimmern’s second point—that Soylent would be the food of the future for the poor—more compelling. He explained, “I’m at this strange intersection where I’m talking to all these different people about it. You can’t tell me when you’re turning crickets into cricket flour to put in a protein bar and masking it with ground up cranberries and nuts—you can’t tell me that that’s eating crickets or grasshoppers. It’s not. You’re eating a ground-up natural protein source. I would think that solving hunger problems in poverty-stricken areas, it’s probably better to give people a healthy nutri-shake or something once a day. What drives a lot of investigation of alternative foods is hunger and poverty. Ten years ago I told everybody, ‘Yes, it’s going to be bugs. It’s going to be crickets.’ Today, I think it’s going to be something else that we just don’t know yet because you’re talking about 50 years from now or 20 or ten years from now—who knows what we’re going to have invented by then?”
I tried to imagine the world’s poor subsisting off of Soylent, but I couldn’t help feel that there was something perverse about that solution to world hunger.
Meanwhile, in Oaxaca, Zimmern focused on learning about traditional pre-Hispanic cuisine, in which insects played a prominent role.•
Sometimes a truth is hidden for so long that the reveal becomes anticlimax. For many years, Americans would have given anything to know the identity of Watergate’s Deep Throat, but how many could today readily name him as W. Mark Felt, who seemed to mysteriously disappear back into the shadows immediately after acknowledging in 2005 his key role in the Woodward-Bernstein reportage?
Similarly more interesting in his nebulous state was “D.B. Cooper,” who in 1971 hijacked a plane, collected ransom and parachuted into parts unknown. Excited 2011 headlines named Lynn Doyle Cooper as most likely being the daring criminal, but by then it was almost beside the point, the man had become myth.
This original 1971 Walter Cronkite report about the D.B. Cooper hijacking, heist and escape, contains interviews with many members of the shaken flight crew.
Before Mailer and Breslintried to relocate to New York City’s Gracie Mansion, William F. Buckley made his own quixotic run for the mayor’s office for the Conservative Party. In these 1965 clips on NBC’s Meet the Press, Buckley discusses his candidacy, which, as the New York Timeswrote in 2008, “drew much of its support from aggrieved white ethnic voters who were angry over crime, urban unrest and liberal policies on poverty and welfare.”
Gossip really bothers me on a visceral level, but I have to acknowledge its utility. Before news organs with something to lose will touch a story, whispers carry the day. While most of it’s petty and unnecessary, but occasionally it can be an insurgency. Sometimes gossip, the original viral information, is the fastest route to justice.
In 1973, gossipmonger Rona Barrett and Sigmund Freud’s polymath grandson, Sir Clement Freud, got into a dust-up on a program Jack Paar hosted years after he abandoned the Tonight Show.
There is a fascinating premise underpinning Steven Levy’s Backchannel interview with Jerry Kaplan, the provocatively titled, “Can You Rape a Robot?”: AI won’t need become conscious for us to treat it as such, for the new machines to require a very evolved sense of morality. Kaplan, the author of Humans Need Not Apply, believes that autonomous machines will be granted agency if they can only mirror our behaviors. Simulacrum on an advanced level will be enough. The author thinks AI can vastly improve the world, but only if we’re careful to make morality part of the programming.
An exchange:
Steven Levy:
Well by the end of your book, you’re pretty much saying we will have robot overlords — call them “mechanical minders.”
Jerry Kaplan:
It is plausible that certain things can [happen]… the consequences are very real. Allowing robots to own assets has severe consequences and I stand by that and I will back it up. Do I have the thing about your daughter marrying a robot in there?
Steven Levy:
No.
Jerry Kaplan:
That’s a different book. [Kaplan has a sequel ready.] I’m out in the far future here, but it’s plausible that people will have a different attitude about these things because it’s very difficult to not have an emotional reaction to these things. As they become more a part of our lives people may very well start to inappropriately imbue them with certain points of view.•
It’s not for sure that this time will be different, that automation will lead to technological unemployment on a large scale, but all the ingredients are in place. Such a shift would make us richer in the aggregate, but how do we extend the new wealth beyond the owners of capital? 3-D printers may become ubiquitous and make manufacturing much less expensive, leading to cheaper prices and abundance. But the basic needs of food, shelter, etc. will still be required by those no longer employable in the new arrangement.
Sure, it’s possible thus-unimagined fields will bloom in which humans won’t be “redundancies,” but if they don’t or if there aren’t enough of them? What then?
Could this time be different, in that where previous manifestations of “robot angst” created new and usually better jobs and sectors to replace those lost, this time there is no automatism for better job creation once existing jobs become redundant?
If that’s the case, Citi says there may indeed be some feedback between weak aggregate demand and growing polarisation of productivity across workers and firms. And this inevitably leads to larger inequalities in income and wealth.
So what’s to be done?
According to Citi a list of potentially desirable policy measures includes:
a) improve and adapt education and training to better align workers’ skills with the demands of firms and technologies, b) reduce barriers to reallocating resources, including by reducing barriers to labour mobility and simplifying bankruptcy procedures, c) increase openness to trade and FDI to facilitate knowledge transfers, d) increase support for entrepreneurship, e) improve access to credit for restructuring and retraining, and f) use the tax-transfer mechanism (e.g. through a guaranteed minimum income for all, or an ambitious negative income tax, public funding of health care and long-term care etc.) to support those left behind by technological advances.
Note with particular attention that last policy recommendation: a basic income for one and all to help society adjust to the new hyper technological environment, in a way that encourages competition and productivity in laggard firms, and dilutes the power of the winner-takes-all corporates.•
File this February 19, 1928 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article about Palestine under “Bad Predictions.” In addition to bemoaning that Palestinian profiteers were turning the land into a dusty tourist trap and a squalid one at that, it also openly scoffed at the notion that Jewish settlers, still a target of casual anti-Semitism, could ever be a power in the region. The new settlement of Hapharalm, or Israel, was singled out as particularly “laughable.”
All knowledge cannot be reduced to pure information–not yet anyway.
Machines may eventually rise to knowledge, or perhaps humans will be reduced to mere information. The first outcome poses challenges, while the second is the triumph of a new sort of fascism.
In a NYRB piece that argues specifically against MOOCs and more broadly against humans being replaced by machines or encouraged to be more machine-like, David Bromwich is convinced that virtual education is a scary step toward the mechanization of people.
I’m not so dour about MOOCs, especially since everyone doesn’t have the privilege of a high-quality classroom situation. Their offerings seem an extension to me of the mission of public libraries: Make the tools of knowledge available to everyone. The presence of both online education and physical colleges simultaneously is the best-case scenario. Having one without the other is far less good. Bromwich’s fear, a realistic one, is that traditional higher education will be seriously disrupted by the new order.
From Bromwich:
American society is still on the near side of robotification. People who can’t conjure up the relevant sympathy in the presence of other people are still felt to need various kinds of remedial help: they are autistic or sociopathic, it may be said—those are two of a range of clinical terms. Less clinically we may say that such people lack a certain affective range. However efficiently they perform their tasks, we don’t yet think well of those who in their everyday lives maximize efficiency and minimize considerate, responsive, and unrehearsed interaction, whether they neglect such things from physiological incapacity or a prudential fear of squandering their energy on emotions that are not formally necessary.
This prejudice continues to be widely shared. But the consensus is visibly weaker than it was a decade ago. As people are replaced by machines—in Britain, they call such people “redundant”—the survivors who remain in prosperous employment are being asked to become more machinelike. This fits with the idea that all the valuable human skills and varieties of knowledge are things that can be assimilated in a machinelike way. We can know the quantity of information involved, and we can program it to be poured into the receiving persons as a kind of “input” that eventually yields the desired “product.” Even in this short summary, however, I have introduced an assumption that you may want to stand back and question. Is it really the case that all knowledge is a form of information? Are there some kinds of learning or mental activity that are not connected with, or properly describable as, knowledge?•
All fast-casual dining won’t likely be automated nor will restaurants with human staff soon be an overwhelming minority. It will not in the near future resemble the way a few shoes are still made by hand while almost all of them are manufactured by machines. I don’t think that happens so quickly or absolutely.
But not all (or almost all) of these jobs have to disappear for the sector’s workers to be devastated. In most places, anything out of sight in the kitchen that can be robotized will be, and some visible positions will as well. Of course, some restaurants and hotels and other corners of the hospitality industry will go all in and completely disappear the human element.
I’m not suggesting we dash robot heads with rocks, but we probably need to have some political solutions at hand, should, say, popular dining and the trucking and taxi industries no longer be there to employ tens of millions of Americans. A Plan B would be handy then.
One of the trailblazers in disappearing visible workers is the new digital automat known as Eatsa, the San Francisco cafe I blogged about a couple of days ago. In a smart Atlantic piece, Megan Garber looks at the underlying meaning of this nouveau restaurant beyond its threat of technological unemployment, how it’s selling not just meals but social withdrawal. An excerpt:
The core premise here, though, is that at Eatsa, you will interact with no human save the one(s) you are intentionally dining with. The efficiencies are maximized; the serendipities are minimized. You are, as it were, bowl-ing alone.
That in itself, is noteworthy, no matter how Eatsa does as a business—another branch is slated to open in Los Angeles later this year. If fast food’s core value was speed, and fast casual’s core value was speed-plus-freshness, Eatsa’s is speed-plus-freshness-plus-a lack of human interaction. It’s attempting an automat-renaissance during the age of Amazon and Uber, during a time when the efficiency of solitude has come to be seen, to a large extent, as the ultimate luxury good. Which is to say that it has a very good chance of success.•
Industrial robots are built to be great (perfect, hopefully) at limited, repetitive tasks. But with Deep Learning experiments, the machines aren’t programmed for chores but rather to teach themselves to learn how to master them from experience. Since every situation in life can’t be anticipated and pre-coded, truly versatile AI needs to autonomously conquer obstacles that arise. In these trials, the journey has as much meaning–more, really–than the destination.
Of course, not everyone would agree that humans are operating from such a blank slate, that we don’t already have some template for many behaviors woven into our neurons–a collective unconsciousness of some sort. Even if that’s so, I’d think there’ll soon be a way for robots to transfer such knowledge across generations.
One current Deep Learning project: Berkeley’s Brett robot, designed to be like a small child, though a growing boy. The name stands for “Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks,” and you might be tempted to ask how many of them it would take to screw in a light bulb, but it’s already far beyond the joke stage. As usual with this tricky field, it may take longer than we’d like for the emergence of such highly functional machines, but perhaps not as long as we’d expect.
Jack Clark of Bloomberg visited the motherless “child” at Berkeley and writes of it and some of the other current bright, young things. An excerpt from his report:
What makes Brett’s brain tick is a combination of two technologies that have each become fundamental to the AI field: deep learning and reinforcement learning. Deep learning helps the robot perceive the world and its mechanical limbs using a technology called a neural network. Reinforcement learning trains the robot to improve its approach to tasks through repeated attempts. Both techniques have been used for many years; the former powers Google and other companies’ image and speech recognition systems, and the latter is used in many factory robots. While combinations of the two have been tried in software before, the two areas have never been fused so tightly into a single robot, according to AI researchers familiar with the Berkeley project. “That’s been the holy grail of robotics,” says Carlos Guestrin, the chief executive officer at AI startup Dato and a professor of machine learning at the University of Washington.
After years of AI and robotics research, Berkeley aims to devise a system with the intelligence and flexibility of Rosie from The Jetsons. The project entered a new phase in the fall of 2014 when the team introduced a unique combination of two modern AI systems&and a roomful of toys—to a robot. Since then, the team has published a series of papers that outline a software approach to let any robot learn new tasks faster than traditional industrial machines while being able to develop the sorts of broad knowhow for solving problems that we associate with people. These kinds of breakthroughs mean we’re onthe cusp of an explosionin robotics and artificial intelligence, as machines become able to do anything people can do, including thinking, according to Gill Pratt, program director for robotics research at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.•
A digitized Automat with no visible workers roughly describes Eatsa, a San Francisco fast-casual eatery for tomorrow that exists today. Tamara Palmer of Vicevisited the restaurant and found it “much more reminiscent of an Apple store than a fast food franchise.” Its design may be too cool to work everywhere in America, but I bet some variation of it will. Sooner or later, Labor in the sector will be noticeably dinged by technological unemployment. The opening:
People often muse on a future controlled by machines, but that is already well in motion here in the Bay Area, where hotels are employing robot butlers, Google and Tesla are putting driverless vehicles on the road, and apps that live every aspect of your life for you continue to proliferate. The rush to put an end to human contact is at a fever pitch around these parts, where a monied tech elite has the deep pockets to support increasingly absurd services.
Right on trend, this week marks the debut ofEatsa, a quick-service quinoa bowl “unit” (as one owner called it) billing itself as San Francisco’s premiere “automated cafe.”
I attended a media preview lunch at Eatsa last week to test out the concept before the doors officially opened. Pushing a button to summon an Uber ride to my door, I wondered how good automated food might be.
I realized it doesn’t really matter, because as California inches towards a $15 per hour minimum wage, that’s the direction we’re headed in, starting with a people-free fast food world.•
Vladimir Bekhterev had a great brain, but he lacked diplomacy.
Joseph Stalin probably was a “paranoiac with a short, dry hand,” but when the Russian neurologist reportedly spoke that diagnosis after examining the Soviet leader, he died mysteriously within days. Many thought he’d been poisoned to avenge the slight. Or maybe it was just a coincidence. A cloud of paranoia envelops all under an autocratic regime, whether we’re talking about Stalin in the 20th century or Vladimir Putin today: Some deaths are very suspect, so all of them become that way. At any rate, the scientist’s gray matter became an exhibit in his own collection of genius brains. An article in the December 27, 1927 Brooklyn Daily Eagle recorded the unusual series of events.
Terrible products that fail miserably delight us not only because of the time-tested humor of a spectacular pratfall, but because it’s satisfying to feel now and then that we’re not just a pack of Pavlovian dogs prepared to lap up whatever is fed us, especially if it’s a Colgate Ready Meal and a Crystal Pepsi.
In a really smart Financial Times column, Tim Harford takes a counterintuitive look at how companies can avoid launching surefire duds. The usual manner has been to find out which products representative people want, but he writes of an alternative strategy: Discover what consumers of horrible taste embrace and then bury those products deep in a New Mexico desert alongside Atari’s E.T. video games. Of course, it does say something that companies can’t just identify what’s awful. Why do almost all businesses become echo chambers?
An excerpt:
If savvy influential consumers can help predict a product’s success, might it not be that there are consumers whose clammy embrace spells death for a product? It’s a counter-intuitive idea at first but, on further reflection, there’s a touch of genius about it.
Let’s say that some chap — let’s call him “Herb Inger” — simply adored Clairol’s Touch of Yogurt shampoo. He couldn’t get enough of Frito-Lay’s lemonade (nothing says “thirst-quenching” like salty potato chips, after all). He snapped up Bic’s range of disposable underpants. Knowing this, you get hold of Herb and you let him try out your new product, a zesty Cayenne Pepper eyewash. He loves it. Now you know all you need to know. The product is doomed, and you can quietly kill it while it is still small enough to drown in your bathtub.
A cute idea in theory — does it work in practice? Apparently so. Management professors Eric Anderson, Song Lin, Duncan Simester and Catherine Tucker have studied people, such as Herb, whom they call “Harbingers of Failure.” (Their paper by that name is forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing Research.) They used a data set from a chain of more than 100 convenience stores. The data covered more than 100,000 customers with loyalty cards, more than 10 million transactions and nearly 10,000 new products. Forty per cent of those products were no longer stocked after three years, and were defined as “flops.”•
The future seldom arrives in a hurry, which is usually a good thing from a practical standpoint. Today and tomorrow don’t always mix so well.
In an opinion piece at The Conversation, David Glance of the University of Western Australia argues that fears of near-term technological unemployment are overstated. He may be right in the big picture, but if just one significant area is realized in short order, defying business-as-usual stasis–driverless cars is the most obvious example–a large swath of Labor will be blown sideways.
From Glance:
The trouble with predicting the future is that the more dramatic the prediction the more likely the media will pick it up and amplify it in the social media-fed echo chamber. What is far less likely to be reported are the predictions that emphasise that it is unlikely that things will change that radically because the of the massive inertia that is built into industry, governments and the general workers’ appetite for change.
Economists at the OECD may have another explanation for why it is unwise to equate the fact that something “could” be done with the fact that it “will” be done. In a report on thefuture of productivity, the authors detail how it is only a small number of “frontier companies” have managed to implement changes to achieve high levels of productivity growth. The companies that haven’t achieved anywhere near the same productivity growth are the “non-frontier companies” or simply “laggards.” The reasons for this are probably many but lack of leadership, vision, skills or ability may factor into it.
The point is that since 2000 many companies didn’t adopt technology and change their business processes to see improvements in productivity even though they clearly “could” have done.•
Some people don’t know how to accept a gift. America has many such people among its government, as apparently do numerous other developed nations.
One of the few upsides to the colossal downside of the 2008 economic collapse is the rock-bottom interest rates that offer countries the opportunity to rebuild their infrastructure at virtually no added cost. It’s a tremendous immediate stimulus that also pays long-term dividends. But deficit hawks have made it impossible for President Obama to take advantage of this rare and relatively short-term opportunity. While some of it is certainly partisanship, it does seem like a large number of elected officials have pretty much no idea of basic economics.
IT IS hard to exaggerate the decrepitude of infrastructure in much of the rich world. One in three railway bridges in Germany is over 100 years old, as are half of London’s water mains. In America the average bridge is 42 years old and the average dam 52. The American Society of Civil Engineers rates around 14,000 of the country’s dams as “high hazard” and 151,238 of its bridges as “deficient”. This crumbling infrastructure is both dangerous and expensive: traffic jams on urban highways cost America over $100 billion in wasted time and fuel each year; congestion at airports costs $22 billion and another $150 billion is lost to power outages.
The B20, the business arm of the G20, a club of big economies, estimates that the global backlog of spending needed to bring infrastructure up to scratch will reach $15 trillion-20 trillion by 2030. McKinsey, a consultancy, reckons that in 2007-12 investment in infrastructure in rich countries was about 2.5% of GDP a year when it should have been 3.5%. If anything, the problem is becoming more acute as some governments whose finances have been racked by the crisis cut back. In 2013 in the euro zone, general government investment—of which infrastructure constitutes a large part—was around 15% below its pre-crisis peak of €3 trillion ($4 trillion), according to the European Commission, with drops as high as 25% in Italy, 39% in Ireland and 64% in Greece. In the same year government spending on infrastructure in America, at 1.7% of GDP, was at a 20-year low.
This is a missed opportunity. Over the past six years, the cost of repairing old infrastructure or building new projects has been much cheaper than normal, thanks both to rock-bottom interest rates and ample spare capacity in the construction industry.•
The main difference between rich people and poor people is that rich people have more money.
That’s it, really. Those with wealth are just as likely to form addictions, get divorces and engage in behaviors we deem responsible for poverty. They simply have more resources to fall back on. People without that cushion often land violently, land on the streets. Perhaps they should be extra careful since they’re in a more precarious position, but human beings are human beings: flawed.
In the same ridiculously simple sense, homeless people are in that condition because they don’t have homes. A lot of actions and circumstances may have contributed to that situation, but the home part is the piece of the equation we can actually change. The Housing First initiative has proven thus far that it’s good policy to simply provide homes to people who have none. It makes sense in both human and economic terms. But it’s unpopular in the U.S. because it falls under the “free lunch” rubric, despite having its roots in the second Bush Administration. Further complicating matters is the shortage of urban housing in general.
In a smartAeon essay, Susie Cagle looks at the movement, which has notably taken root in the conservative bastion of Utah, a state which has reduced homelessness by more than 90% in just ten years. An excerpt:
A new optimistic ideology has taken hold in a few US cities – a philosophy that seeks not just to directly address homelessness, but to solve it. During the past quarter-century, the so-called Housing First doctrine has trickled up from social workers to academics and finally to government. And it is working. On the whole, homelessness is finally trending down.
The Housing First philosophy was first piloted in Los Angeles in 1988 by the social worker Tanya Tull, and later tested and codified by the psychiatrist Sam Tsemberis of New York University. It is predicated on a radical and deeply un-American notion that housing is a right. Instead of first demanding that they get jobs and enroll in treatment programmes, or that they live in a shelter before they can apply for their own apartments, government and aid groups simply give the homeless homes.
Homelessness has always been more a crisis of empathy and imagination than one of sheer economics. Governments spend millions each year on shelters, health care and other forms of triage for the homeless, but simply giving people homes turns out to be far cheaper, according to research from the University of Washington in 2009. Preventing a fire always requires less water than extinguishing it once it’s burning.
By all accounts, Housing First is an unusually good policy. It is economical and achievable.•
The square-jawed hero astronauts of 1960s NASA went through marriages at a pretty ferocious clip, as you might expect from careerist monomaniacs, but none has had a more colorful, complicated life than Buzz Aldrin, who successfully walked on the moon but failed at selling used cars after he fell to Earth with a thud. Dr. Aldrin, as he prefers to be called, is now spearheading a plan to build Mars colonies.
MELBOURNE, Fla. (AP) — Buzz Aldrin is teaming up with Florida Institute of Technology to develop “a master plan” for colonizing Mars within 25 years.
The second man to walk on the moon took part in a signing ceremony Thursday at the university, less than an hour’s drive from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The Buzz Aldrin Space Institute is set to open this fall.
The 85-year-old Aldrin, who followed Neil Armstrong onto the moon’s surface on July 20, 1969, will serve as a research professor of aeronautics as well as a senior faculty adviser for the institute.
He said he hopes his “master plan” is accepted by NASA and the country, with international input. NASA already is working on the spacecraft and rockets to get astronauts to Mars by the mid-2030s.
Aldrin is pushing for a Mars settlement by approximately 2040. More specifically, he’s shooting for 2039, the 70th anniversary of his own Apollo 11 moon landing, although he admits the schedule is “adjustable.”
He envisions using Mars’ moons, Phobos and Deimos, as preliminary stepping stones for astronauts. He said he dislikes the label “one-way” and imagines tours of duty lasting 10 years.•
If driverless cars were improved markedly and all vehicles were autonomous, accidents and fatalities would likely experience a steep decline.But a shift to robocars will be a gradual one, and highways and streets will long be a mix of both humans and computers at the wheel. How will those two forces learn to share the road? It’ll take time and research.
IN THE near future, you may have to share the road with a robot. Or perhaps we should say that a robot will have to share the road with you.
At the University of California, Berkeley, engineers are preparing autonomous cars to predict what we impulsive, unreliable humans might do next. A team led by Katherine Driggs-Campbell has developed an algorithm that can guess with up to 92 per cent accuracy whether a human driver will make a lane change. She is due to present the work next month at the Intelligent Transportation Systems conference in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain.
Enthusiasts are excited that self-driving vehicles could lead to fewer crashes and less traffic. But people aren’t accustomed to driving alongside machines, says Driggs-Campbell. When we drive, we watch for little signs from other cars to indicate whether they might turn or change lanes or slow down. A robot might not have any of the same tics, and that could throw us off.
“There’s going to be a transition phase,” she says.•
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