Urban Studies

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“You Can Feel The Hatred This Generates Up And Down The Length Of The Street”

May 25, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

A couple years before Michael Herr began writing his amazing Vietnam reportage for Esquire–an experience which later served as the basis for his great book Dispatches—the journalist penned “Bleecker Street: Bohemia’s Barometer,” a 1965 piece for Holiday magazine about his New York City neighborhood of Greenwich Village. He knew the community of that era as a tale of two cities, a divide among bewildered locals and invading “barbarians.” Herr, who turned 75 last month, also famously co-wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket with his longtime friend Stanley Kubrick. Two excerpts from Holiday follow.

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Between this corner and the Bowery, Bleecker Street is like a river running into swamp, block after block with no definable character. It is neither market nor tenement nor warehouse district, but a nondescript mixture of these, with a few grimy luncheonettes and some slum lofts thrown in: a vacuum. A walk down this end of Bleecker is an exercise in induced despair, emotional slumming. The cityscape here is so desolate that it becomes surreal. You feel that behind the brick building fronts there is nothing but emptiness, fixtures connecting nothing to nothing, stairs leading up to doors that open onto a void. At Crosby you come to the Bayard Building, the only work of Louis Sullivan that is left in New York. The façade, particularly in this setting, is magnificent. Beyond it, a two-minute walk will put you on the Bowery, where nothing ever changes.

By the press, the politicians, the police and the populace, Bleecker Street has been called practically everything: a “hotbed of incipient violence,” a slum, a honkytonk, a refuge for homosexuals and/or miscegenists, a hangout for beatniks and commies and dope fiends, a shameless tourist trap. But whatever it may or may not be, whatever strange flavors outsiders bring to it, Bleecker is primarily, prevailingly Italian.

There is an old blind man who sits in the afternoons near the corner at Sixth Avenue. He told me once that he has never left Naples. He sits close enough to the Hudson to smell the harbor, and all around him are the aromas of new produce, olive oil, fennel, roasting coffee and freshly killed meat. At least as much Italian is being spoken as English.

Bleecker Street days are not much like Bleecker Street nights. Afternoons are taken up by the business of the neighborhood: the schooling and recreation of children, the purchase of groceries, the delivery of commodities to fifty shops and stalls up and down the street. Whatever social life the older residents have is conducted on these sidewalks during daylight hours, when the sidewalks are still theirs.

On these afternoons there is a moon-faced woman in black polka-dotted housedress who leans on a crate of fresh plums, gesturing to customers over baskets of grapes. Her prices are marked, but she will tolerate a limited amount of bargaining. Some of this bargaining has gone on between her and the same customers for over twenty years. Up the street some old men in shirtsleeves stand in front of Ruggiero’s Fish Market, lunching on oysters from a card table set up on the sidewalk. They prepare each one separately, adding hot sauce and lemon. A Negro workman comes up to the table, and the old men throw down some coins and leave. At the corner, one of them mutters, “Mulignam!” a dialect expression for eggplant, which is also their pejorative for Negroes. Then they cross the street to Father Demo Square. Of course the Negro knows what has happened.

This parade route for visiting liberals. anarchists, socialists, apolitical grousers, peace marchers and civil-rights workers is also a neighborhood of Ghibelline rigidity, prejudice, reaction. Not long ago the Carmine DeSapio sound trucks cruised along here begging votes in blaring Calabrese dialect. Now you can see the remains of a Goldwater poster peeling to reveal the spattered likeness of De Sapio oil brick walls at street corners, and the traditional Democratic block is finished. The mounting tourist traffic is an outrage to the residents, particularly among first-generation immigrants. For them, the thought of miscegenation is unbearable, and you can feel the hatred this generates up and down the length of the street. Some of the locals have turned this influx to their advantage, opening bars, restaurants and galleries, but most sit locked in severe parochial resentment. If the Evil Eye really worked, the sidewalks would be strewn with paralytics, heaped with the blind and the dead.

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They call MacDougal “the Mess,” and not without reason. In summer, at the corner where it crosses Bleecker, the sidewalks are clogged every night of the week. During the rest of the year the crowds come only on weekends, but they come in such numbers that they make up for the Monday-through-Thursday calm. No one knows exactly what brings them or who they are or even who they think they are, but there are a lot of them. The word is out that this is Where It’s At. As usual, the word lies, but none of the thousands, the tens of thousands, who come here night after night will ever admit it.

Most of them are young, under twenty, of a type that used to be written of as “beatnik.” But that word hasn’t meant anything for years, and it certainly doesn’t apply to this crowd. These are cultists whose beliefs are murky, a whole generation sprung half-baked from a badly digested notion of Bohemia, malnurtured on mass-media accounts of groovy goings-on from Liverpool to Berkeley. What they appear to want, more than anything else, is to enchant, but there never seem to be any takers. They are the sons and daughters of Tarrytown orthodontists, Rochester retailers, Long Island manufacturers, Jersey City construction workers, all come to conduct one of the most elaborate flirtations in history. And they are not the only ones; their parents come, too, impeccably polished. expensively dressed, and they come for almost the same reason. Everyone wants his slice of hip cake.

Once, it was the bourgeoisie’s had joke to say they couldn’t tell the boys from the girls. but this is no longer a joke. Young men, apparently not homosexual, wear their hair shoulder-length: if it were cleaner you might say it flowed. It is a part of the fashion, and the MacDougal-Bleecker crowd pays careful attention to fashion. The real hippies have been forced into coats and ties, now that their old turf has been overrun by creeps.

It was the fashion, for several weeks last spring, for girls to walk along Bleecker carrying a single flower. If they could get nothing better, they would carry a plastic flower, but there were dozens of these girls with their flowers. That ended. They turned up wearing those Liverpool sailors’ hats. And little white ankle boots. Then bellbottomed denim slacks with broad-striped jerseys worn loose around the waist. On dress occasions they wore discotheque dresses and patterned stockings that made the skin on their legs look diseased. Then the boys began wearing watch caps—hadn’t the Beatles introduced them?—and a few even started wearing the slacks. The esoterics, gurus and prep-school liberals took to wearing rimless glasses, often with hexagonal lenses, and with the glasses came effete Danish pipes, and floppy felt hats like the ones W. B. Yeats used to wear—all kinds of Yellow Bookish paraphernalia. Fashion. And they come down here to parade all this, each one sure that the Village has never seen anything like it.

After dark the sidewalks become so crowded that you have to take odd little two-inch steps or else walk around the cars, police and motorcycles in the street. If you have had the practice you can discern the slightest trace of marijuana in the air, although they say that it is only Sano cigarette smoke. There is usually music, either from a passing folkie or from a transistor radio.

There is a folksong that goes:

When I die please bury me deep,

Down at the end of Bleecker Street,

So I can hear old Number Nine,

As she goes rolling by.

I can’t find out what this really means.•

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“[Uber] Has Lately Been In The Habit Of Unilaterally Squeezing Drivers”

May 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

As usual, Christopher Mims gets to the heart of the matter in his latest WSJ column, this one about the so-called Sharing Economy, in which little or nothing is shared, the only real change being jobs destabilized by businesses that are pure app and no inventory. It’s a Libertarian dream, a market with fungible, low-paid workers and no nets, and you, rabbit, had better get used to your task because it’s fractional employment and you are a very common denominator.

Mims wonders how this new breed of workers will ultimately be classified and whether an eventual class-action lawsuit could kill the category, though I if I had to bet, I would guess that’s not how things unfold.

An excerpt:

The first thing everyone misses about the sharing economy is that there is no such thing, not even if we’re being semantically charitable. Increasingly, the goods being “shared” in the sharing economy were purchased expressly for business purposes, whether it’s people renting apartments they can’t afford on the theory that they can make up the difference on Airbnb, or drivers getting financing through partners of ride-sharing services Uber and Lyft to get a new car to drive for those same services.

What’s more, many of the companies under this umbrella, like labor marketplace TaskRabbit, don’t involve “sharing” anything other than labor. If TaskRabbit is part of the sharing economy, then so is every other worker in America. The only thing these companies have in common is that they are all marketplaces, though they differ widely in the amount of control they give their buyers and sellers.

In the minds of critics, perhaps the worst offender in how it controls its labor force is Uber. Uber sets the prices that its drivers must accept, and has lately been in the habit of unilaterally squeezing drivers in two ways, both by lowering the rates drivers are paid per trip and increasing Uber’s cut of those wages. Behavior like this has led to some pretty overheated but not entirely undeserved rhetoric.•

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“It Just Removes Food Completely From My Morning Equation”

May 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Some Silicon Valley employees save time by skipping solid food, instead slurping Soylent or Schmoylent or Schmilk or Schcum (made up the last one), protein powders containing essential vitamins which are mixed with water or milk. Certainly, it’s unnecessary. It doesn’t take any more time to pack light, healthy foods, but subcultures have their own viral trends, and sometimes good can come of them. Think Los Angeles in the ’60s and ’70s with health food and exercise. But perhaps these coders and venture capitalists might consider that teeth and jaws and stomachs benefit from the biting, chewing and digesting of solids.

From Brian X. Chen of the New York Times:

SAN FRANCISCO — Every night, Aaron Melocik, a software developer, follows a precise food routine. He blends together half a gallon of water, three and a half tablespoons of macadamia nut oil and a 16-ounce bag of powder called Schmoylent. Then he pours the beige beverage into jars and chills them before bringing the containers to work the next day at Metrodigi, an education technology start-up.

At the office, Mr. Melocik stashes one Schmoylent jar in the refrigerator and takes the other to his desk. From 6:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., he sips from the first jar for breakfast, and the second for lunch. He consumes about 14 fluid ounces of Schmoylent each day so he can focus on coding instead of grabbing a bite to eat.

“It just removes food completely from my morning equation up until about 7 p.m.,” said Mr. Melocik, 34, who has been following his techie diet since February.

Boom times in Silicon Valley call for hard work, and hard work — at least in technology land — means that coders, engineers and venture capitalists are turning to liquid meals with names like Schmoylent, Soylent, Schmilk and People Chow. The protein-packed products that come in powder form are inexpensive and quick and easy to make — just shake with water, or in the case of Schmilk, milk. While athletes and dieters have been drinking their dinner for years, Silicon Valley’s workers are now increasingly chugging their meals, too, so they can more quickly get back to their computer work.•

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A Brief Note From 1929 About A Wealthy Monkey

May 24, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the March 4, 1929 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

petmonky

 

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“In The Long Run We Needed A Broader Safety Net”

May 24, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s not that I’ve learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, but I’m not nearly as concerned about the future of books as I was only a couple of years ago. 

I certainly don’t think Amazon should be setting online book prices, and if it reaches monopoly level (and it may have already), that should be addressed on a federal level. I say that as someone who isn’t an Amazon hater. No company has made reading such a full and diverse experience.

There are so many great books being published now that I can’t even begin to keep up with them. That wasn’t supposed to happen as screens shrunk, publishers were pummeled, bricks and mortars were dismantled and libraries cut hours. 

I grew up in a neighborhood without a bookstore, and if I had then had a Kindle and an Amazon Prime membership, I would have had access to the most amazing collection of volumes in the history of the world. That was never possible before the Internet.

While books are more widely available than ever before, they’re certainly less visible offline. That could be remedied on a local level if small shops were incentivized with government funds, the way NYC does with supermarkets that sell sections of healthy food in poorer neighborhoods which don’t already have easy access to fresh produce. (Of course, these markets haven’t changed eating habits.)

So, I suppose I’m much more sanguine about the present and future of reading in the U.S. (or at least the opportunity to read) than Scott Timberg of Salon, who feels there must be serious intervention to save our literary culture. From Timberg:

It’s always good news when a bookstore opens, and when it’s an indie backed with significant amounts of cash, and run by someone who really cares, it’s even better. So like everyone else, we smiled when we saw the New York Times story about Diary of a Wimpy Kid author Jeff Kinney — whose series “has spawned three feature films that have earned more than $225 million worldwide” — opening a bookstore in Plainville, Mass. Like Parnassus, the shop novelist Ann Patchett co-owns in Nashville, this will allow people to stumble upon books they’d never thought of looking at, it will employ booklovers behind the counter, and will hold events that allow authors to reach readers. All good things.

But it also makes us wonder: In the Age of Amazon, are the only people who can open bookstores celebrity authors? And aren’t these cheery stories about these mostly anomalous events kind of distracting us from the big picture? …

But isn’t this a bit like the benefit concerts that we threw for ailing and dying musicians back in the days before national medical insurance? The fact that Victoria Williams, Vic Chetnutt and Alejandro Escovedo came close to dying because they lived in a country that denied people basic health coverage was the original sin – and larger context — there. Musicians and fans worked hard to apply a (much needed) band-aid with Sweet Relief concerts and the like. But in the long run we needed a broader safety net, not more passing of the hat.

So what’s the larger context here? Well, if you follow the conversation as it’s expressed by bookstore organizations and the Times story, everything is fine: Indies are bouncing back, and some really cool authors are opening new stores! But somehow the Times piece neglects to use the term “online bookselling” or name Amazon even once, or to mention that there are approximately half the number of indies now than there were in the ‘90s, even as we’ve added more than 60 million people to U.S. population since then.•

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“There’s Going To Be Weird People That Are Sweating In Your Car”

May 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Not only are car dealers and renters challenged by GetAround, the new Airbnb-ish app that allows you to loan out your vehicle by the hour for a fee, but just imagine what the service will do, should it become successful, to no-tell motels and sex clubs. You know that new car smell? That will be gone.

Like much of the Peer Economy, it’s probably better for consumers and the environment, though it’s likely damaging to industries that actually provide solid jobs.

From Matt McFarland at the Washington Post:

For D.C. residents concerned that they won’t make enough income, GetAround is guaranteeing income of $1,000 in the first three months. Cars must have fewer than 125,000 miles and can’t be more than 10 years old. GetAround provides insurance for drivers during the rental period.

District resident Tara Boyle, 29, began renting her Mazda3 for $8 an hour a couple of weeks ago. Getaround recommended $7.50, but she wanted to charge more. (The $1,000 guarantee requires that you don’t raise your rate more than 20 percent above what Getaround recommends.)

Boyle can walk to work but didn’t want to sell her car, so she jumped at the chance for extra income. She hopes her car will be especially popular with other residents of the high-rise building she lives in. Boyle said she isn’t worried about a renter potentially scuffing up her bumpers during city driving, saying that comes with the territory.

“My dad said, ‘Why do you want to do this? There’s going to be weird people that are sweating in your car,’ ” Boyle said with a laugh. “I said, ‘Dad, a parking spot down here is, like, $200 a month, I want my car to pay for itself.’ ”•

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“The Shareconomy? The Freeconomy? It’s Going To Happen.”

May 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Free is expensive, but cheap may be even costlier.

The Freeconomy (Facebook, Google, etc.) will give you stuff you need–or your ego wants–but in return will extract your information. Money isn’t necessary among “friends.” How unseemly. You don’t put a quarter in the slot; the slot just takes what it pleases. These nouveau companies want inside your head, first virtually and eventually literally.

The Cheapoconomy is dicier still. Not only do services like Uber and others track you, but they reduce workers to glorified serfs, promising flexibility for minimal payment, destabilizing more secure industries. As they gain greater power, the laborers will be squeezed more–until they’re completely obliterated. It’s great for us, except if we’re one of them. And more of us in the coming decades will likely become them. We won’t just be the consumers. We’ll be consumed. 

The thing is, the Peer Economy (a funny name since the workers are not your equals) is an improvement over the old way when it comes to transportation and delivery services. The disruption was successful because it was, in many ways but not all, good. And that’s where we are, at a strange crossroads of capitalism, libertarianism and socialism. Who can give us a lift out of that neighborhood?

From Douglas Coupland at the Financial Times:

I think right now the Uber situation is like the Teamsters and garburators in the mid-20th century. There’s no real argument to not have Uber drivers. They are superior to taxis in all possible ways. The only thing stopping them are all these cab drivers who had to pay extortionate amounts of money for a medallion, and suddenly entering their arena are these new people with superior service in every way, who also didn’t get hosed buying a medallion (honestly, medallions? How is that even still a thing?). So of course taxi owners are angry, and of course they’re going to lash out and try to generate urban legends to frighten people who, the moment they use an Uber, will never use a taxi again if they don’t have to. Uber’s not alone in this sort of engineered fear environment. Remember the Craigslist killer?

Gosh — someone didn’t buy an ad in a newspaper, and for their stupidity they paid with their life.

And in Canada two weeks ago, the press revelled in the fate of an Edmonton couple who rented out their house on Airbnb, and came back only to find it trashed to the tune of C$100,000. Airbnb now has the largest hotel footprint in the world. Uber has image problems but they’re on the correct historical track. Craigslist, Lyft et al . . . the shareconomy? The freeconomy? It’s going to happen. And the moment these firms start paying more in taxes is the moment they officially suffocate to death the old economy.•

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“You Don’t Even Need A Computer To Hijack A Plane Remotely”

May 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If it isn’t already possible for a cyberterrorist to remotely hack a plane and commandeer its guidance system, such a virtual hijacking will soon be possible. Security expert Hugo Teso has been claiming for years that the deed can be accomplished with just a smartphone, not even a laptop required, and in the last week reports suggest that a commercial plane’s system may have been breached. Once a computer is inside of something, it’s hackable, whether it’s a plane, a driverless car or an autonomous lawnmower. An age of cheap and powerful tools means wonderful and horrible things happen. It will be a permanent race to stay ahead of hackers with ill intent. From Marcel Rosenbach and Gerald Traufetter at Spiegel:

The Spaniard’s name is Hugo Teso, and he now works for a data security firm based in Berlin. For the past several years, he has been commissioned by various companies to try to break in to their computers and networks. But because Teso is also a pilot and continues to hold a valid license, he has developed a reputation in the aviation industry as someone whose tech-security warnings should be taken seriously.

Teso has demonstrated that you don’t even need a computer to hi-jack a plane remotely. A smartphone equipped with an app called PlaneSploit, which Teso himself developed, could be enough. In theorycyber-terrorists could use such an app, or something similar, to take over a plane’s steering system and, in a worst-case scenario, cause the plane to crash.

Danger Facing Airlines and Passengers

Attacks on cockpit computers have been an issue at hacker conferences for years. But airlines and airplane manufacturers have long sought to play down their warnings — or they have ignored them altogether. Last week, though, the debate intensified. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is looking into whether a US-based IT expert named Chris Roberts actually implemented — at least in part, from on board an aircraft — the things that Teso has been warning about and simulating. He claims to have penetrated the entertainment system of a normal passenger jet several times and even to have manipulated the plane’s engines during a flight.

The claims and ensuing investigation have triggered a new debate about a danger potentially facing airlines and passengers.•

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“The School Now Teaches 14 Elementary-School-Aged Kids From Mostly SpaceX Employees’ Families”

May 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s difficult for multi-billionaires to find good grade schools for their children, so Elon Musk designed and founded his own for his sons and some kids of SpaceX employees. From Kwame Opam at Verge:

Musk hired one of the teachers from the boys’ school to help found Ad Astra, and the school now teaches 14 elementary-school-aged kids from mostly SpaceX employees’ families. The CEO wanted his school to teach according to students’ individual aptitudes, so he did away with the grade structure entirely. Most importantly, he says learning should be about problem solving.

“It’s important to teach problem solving, or teach to the problem and not the tools,” Musk said. “Let’s say you’re trying to teach people about how engines work. A more traditional approach would be saying, ‘We’re going to teach all about screwdrivers and wrenches.’ This is a very difficult way to do it. A much better way would be, like, ‘Here’s the engine. Now let’s take it apart. How are we gonna take it apart? Oh you need a screwdriver!'”•

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

May 22, 2015 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

“DO NOT TOUCH eyes, face, genitals,”

Rare Super Hot Peppers

WARNING :::::::: THESE PEPPERS ARE NO JOKE !!!!!!!!

RARE HOT and SUPER HOT PEPPER PLANTS FOR SALE IN CENTRAL NEW JERSEY AREA

$2 EACH or 6 FOR $9.

VARIETIES AVAILABLE INCLUDE:

  • JAMAICAN RED MUSHROOM…50,000 shu
  • CHOCOLATE SCOTCH BONNET…300,000 shu
  • PETER RED or PENIS PEPPER…30,000 shu
  • MORUGA SCORPION. . . 2,000,000 shu

WARNING: shu stands for scoville heat units. It’s a measure of capsaicin concentration. JUST AN EXAMPLE: MILITARY PEPPER SPRAY is 2,000,000 shu.

When handling these chiles use protective gloves or the oils could remain in your skin for 2 days.

DO NOT TOUCH eyes, face, genitals, pick your nose or you’re a** before washing hands with soap and COLD water or you will be sorry. Hot water makes it burn more! A mild liquid dish detergent seems to work best.

NOT FOR CHILDREN.

These chile peppers are not for jokes. If you have a friend who knows what they are up against and they take the dare to eat one, okay. But do not trick someone into eating one or you may have to drive them to the hospital! PLEASE handle these mature pepper pods with the same respect you would give a loaded gun! You will need to sign a Waiver and Release of Liability form upon purchase. They are the real deal!

 

“When Project Cybersyn Was Built During The 1970s, There Were Approximately Fifty Computers In All Of Chile”

May 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Lost in the collateral damage of the 1973 coup d’etat in Chile that toppled Salvador Allende was Project Cybersyn, a singular computerized business control management system set up by British organizational guru Stafford Beer. “Cybersyn,” a portmanteau for Cybernetic Science, was an odd mélange of socialism, biology, business dynamics, computer science and space-age accoutrements. Telex machines in a Santiago-based control room (which seemed straight out of Star Trek) were used to sync up Chilean factories and provide real-time management for them. Its goal was no less than to regulate the entire national economy. It seems a questionable if fascinating idea whose time has finally arrived, for better or worse, with Big Data and quantification.

The control center was destroyed during the overthrow, but Beer’s influence went far beyond Chile or the business world; Brian Eno, an acolyte, wrote the forward to a collection of Beer essays. The following is an excerpt of Beer’s feelings about Project Cybersyn at its outset:

Dear friends, I should like to greet you personally to this place, in the development of which I have taken enormous personal interest, and for this reason I am asking you to take a special interest in it. What you see is the outcome of 18 months of hard work on the part of a group of extremely professional Chilean engineers who have devoted their efforts to solving corporate management problems. They have created for us  a series of tools to help us in the task of controlling the economy. Modern science, and specifically electronic  computer science, offers the Government a new opportunity to address modern economic problems. We have seen that the power of this science has not  yet been used in the so-called developed countries. We have developed a system on our own. What you are about to hear today is revolutionary – not only because this is the first time that this is applied in the world –  it is revolutionary because we are making a deliberate effort to give the people the power that science gives to us, enabling them to use it freely.•

From Eden Medina’s Jacobin piece “The Cybersyn Revolution,” which suggests lessons learned from the project we can apply today, a passage about the lo-fi nature of the future-forward system:

When Project Cybersyn was built during the 1970s, there were approximately fifty computers in all of Chile, and most were outdated. Nor could Chile call up IBM for help. IBM decreased its operations in Chile following Allende’s election because they feared the Chilean government would nationalize them. The Nixon administration had also instituted an “invisible blockade” to destabilize the Chilean economy and prevent Latin America from becoming a “red sandwich” with Cuba on one side and Chile on the other. This further limited Chile’s ability to import US technology.

As a result, Beer and the Chilean team came up with an ingenious way to create the data-processing network they needed to link the country’s factories to the central command center: they would connect the one outdated computer they had for the project to another technology that was not state-of-the-art: the telex machine — or rather, several hundred of them. And it worked.

In 1972, a national strike that grew to include forty thousand truck drivers threw the country into a state of emergency and disrupted the distribution of food, fuel, and raw materials for factory production. The government used the telex network created for Project Cybersyn to determine which roads were open, coordinate the distribution of key resources, and maintain factory production.

The Cybersyn network improved government communication and substantially increased the speed and frequency at which the government could send and receive messages along the length of the country. It lacked the technological sophistication of ARPANET, the US military communications system that was the forerunner of the Internet and a contemporary of Chile’s telex system. But the Chilean network used fewer technical resources at a lower cost and proved highly functional nonetheless. Older technologies were creatively re-envisioned and combined with other forms of organizational and social innovation.•

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A Brief Note From 1907 About A Wonderful Habit

May 21, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the August 13, 1907 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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“Compact Consumer Computers Have Quietly Entered The Household”

May 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

An article I found in a 1970 Life magazine is probably the earliest profile I’ve ever read of an average American family (well, a relatively affluent one) having a networked home computer. An added bonus is that it was written by Michael Shamberg, a guerilla filmmaker and journalist who has gone on to produce some crazy documentaries and Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained. The opening:

Computers for the home have been envisioned by science-fiction writers and engineers ever since a huge, unwieldy prototype was developed 25 years ago. The whole futuristic age the prophesied, with an omnipotent electronic monster named Horace in every living room, is still a long way from realization, but compact consumer computers have quietly entered the household. While the market hardly rivals TV sets or refrigerators, the computer-as-home-appliance is now more than just a toy for the wealthy or a mysterious instrument for technical specialists.

Those pioneer families who have one, like the Theodore Rodmans of Ardmore, Pa., have discovered their obedient machine can perform a large variety of useful functions. Dr. Rodman originally brought it home for medical research, but then his family found it could plan mortgage payments, help out with homework, even play with the children. Although the cost is still high, computers like theirs have come within possible reach of a two-car family budget. A small, self-contained model is available for $8,000, complete. The Rodmans’ computer system, called time-sharing, uses a Teletype terminal connected to a big central unit via telephone. It costs $110 a month rent, plus $7.50 per hour of use.

The Rodmans’ computer is no anthropomorphic robot that can accomplish physical feats. It cannot flip the light switch, monitor the thermostat or do the cooking. Rather, it is a sophisticated mental appendage with a capacity for problem-solving that is limited only by the family’s imagination. Neither Dr. Rodman nor his family had ever operated, much less programmed, a computer before a terminal was installed in their home last August. Since then they have assigned it so many chores that Mrs. Rodman says, half seriously, “It’s really become a member of the family.”

“For me, the main physical effect of having a computer at home is that I’m able to spend a lot more time with my family,” says Dr. Rodman, who is a lung specialist on the faculty of Temple University medical school in Philadelphia. “For all of us the real impact is mental. Programming a computer is like thinking in a foreign language. It forces you to approach problems with a high degree of logic. Because we always have a computer handy, we turn to it with problems we never would have thought of doing on one before.”•

 

“Chinese Is Not On A Path To Become A World Language”

May 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Robert Lane Greene, the Economist language columnist and author of You Are What You Speak, just conducted an unsurprisingly whip-smart Ask Me Anything at Reddit. One questioner wondered whether we should all be learning a Chinese dialect, and Greene used that opening to explain that the language is not headed for global-tongue status even as the nation gains great prominence on the world stage. The exchange:

Question:

If you’re going to learn a language, should everyone who doesn’t know Chinese learn it?

Lane Greene:

I’ve written about this several times, most recently

http://www.economist.com/comment/2610697

but also

http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/robert-lane-greene/should-you-teach-your-kids-chinese

and in my book.

The short version is this: China is hugely important and getting important faster. But Chinese is not getting more important at anything like the same rate as China.

What does this mean for the learner? If you plan to do any business that might involve intensive contact with China, definitely, learn Mandarin – it’ll be advantageous to understand the country and its people better than your competitors.

But here’s what it doesn’t mean: Chinese is not on a path to become a world language. It is overwhelmingly spoken by Chinese people, most of them in historically Chinese areas and the diaspora. It is not a lingua franca of wider communication. What does a Japanese person speak to a Cambodian? What does a Chinese businessman in Germany speak? A Swede holidaying in Portugal? You get my drift: lingua franca status comes when non-natives use a language for its practical access to lots of other people, including other non-natives.

So Chinese will get more important, no doubt. But it’s not on its way to lingua franca status.

And finally, I think the Chinese writing system is a huge impediment for the foreign learner, and therefore to the rise of the language in wider circles.•

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“Let’s Consider The Case Of Guided Strolling”

May 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Before cars or even bicycles were perfected, there were walking machines like the Aeripedis, or Pedomotive Carriage. They aimed to remove much of the strain of ambulation though, of course, the process still had to be manged by your brain.

When I heard about Max Pfeiffer’s “cruise control for pedestrians” last month, I thought at first it might be an April Fools’ Day joke, but that’s not the case. The system combines smartphone GPS and electrodes attached to your legs to offload your navigational responsibilities to the cloud. More or less, it’s “automated walking,” and the movements can be remotely directed by another party. If you’re someplace unfamiliar and don’t know what direction in which to head, actuated navigation can do the thinking for you, guide your every step.

At Wired UK, Evan Selinger argues that the scheme is a road to hell. An excerpt:

In order to truly get a handle on the significance of “actuated navigation,” we need to do more than just imagine rosy possibilities. We’ve also got to confront the basic moral and political question of outsourcing and ask when delegating a task to a third party has hidden costs. To narrow down our focus, let’s consider the case of guided strolling. On the plus side, Pfeiffer suggests that senior citizens will appreciate help returning home when they’re feeling discombobulated, tourists will enjoy seeing more sights while freed up by the pedestrian version of cruise control, and friends, family, and co-workers will get more out of life by safely throwing themselves into engrossing, peripatetic conversation. But what about the potential downside?        

Critics have identified several concerns with using current forms of GPS technology. They have reservations about devices that merely cue us with written instructions, verbal cues, and maps that update in real-time. Nicholas Carr warns of our susceptibility to automation bias and complacency, psychological outcomes that can lead people to do foolish things, like ignoring common sense and driving a car into a lake.Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly lament that it’s “dehumanising” to succumb to GPS orientation because it “trivialises the art of navigation” and leaves us without a rich sense of where we are and where we’re going. Both of these issues are germane. But while, in principle, technical fixes can correct the mistakes that would erroneously guide zombified walkers into open sewer holes and oncoming traffic, the issue of orientation remains a more vexing existential and social problem.

Pfeiffer himself recognises this dilemma. He told WIRED.co.uk that he hopes his technology can help liberate people from the tyranny of walking around with their downcast eyes buried in smartphone maps. But he also admitted that “when freed from the responsibility of navigating…most of his volunteers wanted to check email as they walked.” At stake, here, is the risk of unintentionally turning the current dream of autonomous vehicles into a model for locomotion writ large.•

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“Actuated navigation is a new kind of navigation, reducing cognitive load.”

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“Wilson Briefs Me On The Bourgeoning Business of International Kidnapping”

May 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

When I was a child, my grandmother used to say, “There once was a girl named Patty Hearst who got kidnapped. Don’t you get kidnapped.” But nobody wanted me, so I went and played in traffic. 

These are scary times for the internationalist, with rogue states of no defined boundaries and narco-terrorism. America’s ability to set global order has waned after the disaster of the Iraq War and the rise of China. Who will keep you from being kidnapped and used as barter if you’re an executive on the go and the places you’re going include Belgrade and Caracas and Mexico City, or even more dangerous locales where drones are aimed at your head and knives at your throat? No one, that’s who. You’re on your own, MacGyver.

Luckily, Andy “Orlando” Williams of the private security firm Risks Incorporated is here to help save your ass with a three-day kidnap and ransom course. The journalist Mitch Moxley enrolled, participated in a variety of exercises, submitted briefly to a waterboarding, and filed a report for Slate. An excerpt:

As we drive to an office in nearby Pembroke Pines, [Andy “Orlando”] Wilson briefs me on the bourgeoning business of international kidnapping. The White House’s recent acknowledgment of the accidental killing of two al-Qaida hostages in Pakistan in January, as well as the dark news from Syria in recent months, both overshadows and underscores the fact that kidnappings are a global scourge. As incidents have increased worldwide, a parallel industry has emerged, one that includes insurance companies, negotiators, lawyers, and security firms like Risks Inc. In a 2010 investigation, London’s Independent newspaper dubbed this the “hostage industry,” and estimated its worth at about $1.6 billion a year.

“You don’t have to be rich. People will kidnap you for next to nothing,” Wilson says. “Venezuela is out of control. Mexico is out of control.” Most of his clients for the Florida course are executives or wealthy individuals who live in high-risk areas, primarily in Latin America. (Wilson also offers the course in Belgrade, Serbia.) Other students have included American businessmen who travel to potentially dangerous locations, security contractors, and an international yacht captain. (Lambros Y. Lambrou, a trial lawyer in Manhattan and a father of two, took Wilson’s kidnap course to help ensure his family’s safety when they travel to countries like Mexico and Serbia, where his wife is from. “We live in a very uncertain world sometimes,” Lambrou says. “Unfortunately, most of the time the only person you have to protect you is yourself.”)•

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“Mad Napoleons Were Always Irascible And Imperious”

May 20, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Mike Jay has already demonstrated that mental illness is often expressed in the terms of the era in which it’s experienced. In a really smart London Review of Books piece about Laure Murat’s new title, The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon: Towards a Political History of Madness, Jay writes of Philippe Pinel, a psychiatrist who reshaped and expanded the notion of insanity and its treatments in the wake of the French Revolution, when citizens who went mad often focused their anxieties on the guillotine, with one patient believing he’d been beheaded and subsequently had another victim’s skull attached to his neck.

In 1840, French heads became confused in a different sense, when Napoleon Bonaparte’s remains were laid to rest in an elaborate public ceremony, and soon enough, a quarter of all cases of mental illness in the nation were being diagnosed as delusions of grandeur. An excerpt:

Morbid terror of the guillotine was occasionally recorded in Bicêtre until the 1850s, but by that time it had been usurped by the most celebrated delusion of them all. On 15 December 1840 the remains of Napoleon Bonaparte, rumoured to be miraculously uncorrupted, were taken to the Invalides accompanied by vast crowds and laid to rest in a grandiose imperial ceremony. That same year, Bicêtre admitted at least a dozen Napoleons to its wards.

‘Delusions of grandeur’, of which believing oneself to be Napoleon became the archetype, rose to extraordinary medical and cultural prominence during the July Monarchy. By 1840 it accounted for a quarter of all diagnoses of insanity. It was a form of monomania, the term coined by Esquirol to describe an uncontrolled delusion or obsession (idée fixe) in one who might otherwise appear sane. He conceived it as a disease of the passions, a consequence of ‘self-love, vanity, pride and ambition’, and hence a moral failing as much as a pathology. Mad Napoleons were always irascible and imperious, reciting their interminable compositions, brooking no argument and demanding that everyone submit to their will. Doctors told tales of miraculous cures effected in the Pinelian manner by humouring them, but their blind rages were more commonly addressed with beatings, straitjackets, cold showers and solitary confinement.

During the 1830s monomania became a term of everyday speech, and delusions of grandeur inseparable from the Romantic spirit of the age. The return of Napoleon’s remains catalysed a sense that the era of heroism had passed, the passions of political struggle replaced by bourgeois dullness. Blockbuster novels traded in impossibly heroic narratives, their protagonists adopting grandiose false identities and concealing fateful secrets; Balzac claimed that what Napoleon ‘did with the sword, I will accomplish with the pen’. Characters embarked on fantastic quests that inevitably recalled Don Quixote, whom Esquirol had cited as the perfect example of the monomaniac. For some psychiatrists, ‘the impact of modern novels’ was itself becoming one of the leading causes of madness.

Napoleon – who declared during his final years on St Helena that ‘my life is a novel!’ – was the figure in whom reality and fantasy were conjoined. He was the apotheosis of Rousseau’s new man, who had transcended the limits of history and taken his place among the immortals. Unlike any sovereign before or since he was entirely self-made, and thus uniquely compelling to the delusional. A pretender to the monarchy would always remain just that, but a fake Napoleon might through supreme effort of will become the real thing.•

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Old Print Article: “Flushing Explorer Will Hunt Mummies Of Prehistoric Peoples,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1928)

May 20, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Go mummy-hunting in the Aleutian Islands, you say? But I’m not finished tweeting yet!

Harold McCracken, arctic explorer and big-game hunter and magazine editor and inaugural director of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, was forever risking his hide on rugged fact-finding missions, hoping to recover one shard or another of the past. On the occasion of a spelunking expedition he was to make to search for preserved prehistoric corpses, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle ran an article about the dangerous sojourn in its April 22, 1928 edition. The opening of the piece follows.

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“Computers Break Down. They Have Bugs. They Get Hacked”

May 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I wish everyone writing about technology could turn out prose as sparkling and lucid as Nicholas Carr. In a New York Times opinion piece, he stresses that while people are flawed, so are computers, and our silicon counterparts thus far lack the dexterity we possess to react to the unforeseen. He suggests humans and machines permanently remain a team, allowing us to benefit from the best of both.

I think that’s the immediate future, but I still believe market forces will ultimately cede to robots anything they can do as well (or nearly as well) as humans. And I’m curious as to the effects of Deep Learning on the impromptu responses of machinery.

From Carr:

While our flaws loom large in our thoughts, we view computers as infallible. Their scripted consistency presents an ideal of perfection far removed from our own clumsiness. What we forget is that our machines are built by our own hands. When we transfer work to a machine, we don’t eliminate human agency and its potential for error. We transfer that agency into the machine’s workings, where it lies concealed until something goes awry.
 
Computers break down. They have bugs. They get hacked. And when let loose in the world, they face situations that their programmers didn’t prepare them for. They work perfectly until they don’t.
 
Many disasters blamed on human error actually involve chains of events that are initiated or aggravated by technological failures. Consider the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447 as it flew from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The plane’s airspeed sensors iced over. Without the velocity data, the autopilot couldn’t perform its calculations. It shut down, abruptly shifting control to the pilots. Investigators later found that the aviators appeared to be taken by surprise in a stressful situation and made mistakes. The plane, with 228 passengers, plunged into the Atlantic.

The crash was a tragic example of what scholars call the automation paradox. Software designed to eliminate human error sometimes makes human error more likely. When a computer takes over a job, the workers are left with little to do. Their attention drifts. Their skills, lacking exercise, atrophy. Then, when the computer fails, the humans flounder.•

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“Increased Productivity Should Not Punish The Average Worker”

May 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

One question asked of Bernie Sanders in his AMA yesterday that I failed to include was a query about technological unemployment. He gets it, even if some of the potential jobs for people he mentioned will be disrupted by robotics soon enough. Some already are. The exchange:

Question:

What do you think will have to be done regarding massive unemployment due to automation permanently killing jobs with no fault on the people losing these jobs?

Bernie Sanders:

Very important question. There is no question but that automation and robotics reduce the number of workers needed to produce products. On the other hand, there is a massive amount of work that needs to be done in this country. Our infrastructure is crumbling and we can create millions of decent-paying jobs rebuilding our roads, bridges, rail system, airports, levees, dams, etc. Further, we have enormous shortages in terms of highly-qualified pre-school educators and teachers. We need more doctors, nurses, dentists and medical personnel if we are going to provide high-quality care to all of our people. But, in direct response to the question, increased productivity should not punish the average worker, which is why we have to move toward universal health care, making higher education available to all, a social safety net which is strong and a tax system which is progressive.•

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“A Vast Network Of Couriers…[Wait] For Users To Hit A Button On Their Smartphones”

May 19, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Postmates wants to become the “Uber of goods,” but Uber also wants to fulfill that function, and the “venerable” rideshare company aims to upend the Silicon Valley upstart, founded by German-born entrepreneur Bastian Lehmann, which will deliver an iPad or eye drops to your home or office in under an hour, with the help of non-FT freelancers. The job is very flexible, which is helpful, because you might have time for another job that offers great benefits.

It’s amazing to reflect on services like UrbanFetch or Kozmo, which attempted the same business model during Web 1.0, a time before universally fast downloads, let alone smartphones. The reverse of Miniver Cheevy, they were born too early. Now we have the technology.

From Thomas Schulz’s Spiegel article about the potential Valley unicorn:

Postmates has set itself an ambitious goal — to be the Uber of goods, with a vast network of couriers, linked, like Uber’s drivers, via a sleek app, waiting for users to hit a button on their smartphones and send them forth to pick up anything that money can buy. Like Uber’s drivers, Postmates couriers aren’t employees but “independent contractors.” Anyone with a bike, car, truck, scooter or motorcycle can register and decide exactly when they want to work. …

Game-Changing

Postmates currently takes 70,000 orders a week. Available in 26 major metropolitan areas, the company has raised nearly $60 million in venture capital and presides over the world’s third largest network of couriers, after Uber and Lyft. A few weeks ago, Starbucks announced it would be teaming up with Postmates so that customers can now have their skinny lattes delivered to their door.

The loft premises in a brick building in downtown San Francisco, where the company has been headquartered for the last eight months, are already getting too small. A total of 198 staff members — many of whom boast IT degrees from Ivy League universities — sit at back-to-back computers crammed into two floors. Lunch is eaten al desko.

The start-up’s rise has been so meteoric that many in Silicon Valley thought Postmates could be the next addition to the Unicorn List — one of those rare companies that prove to be game-changers or build whole new markets, such as Airbnb and Uber.•

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“So Long As You Have A Congress Dominated By Big Money…Discussion About Universal Basic Income Is Going To Go Nowhere”

May 19, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

While the 73-year-old Socialist Congressperson Bernie Sanders has to pretend he can win the Presidency, he probably realizes, unlike, say, Ted Cruz, that he has no real shot at victory. What points does he feel his protest candidacy is particularly positioned to make?

An Ask Me Anything at Reddit he just conducted reveals a number of priorities, including the issue of surveillance. It’s good Sanders mentions that the private sector, as much as government, is hopeful of turning society into an Orwellian state, though I don’t see any way such a reach is kept in check, regardless of law. The tools will almost definitely stay ahead of legislation, obliterate it. I’m more hopeful about remedying income inequality and electoral reform.

There are also questions about space-exploration funding and universal basic income. A few exchanges below.

___________________________

Question:

As the longest serving independent in congress, what are your thoughts about electoral reform in the United States?

Bernie Sanders:

The major issue in terms of our electoral system is truly campaign finance reform. Right now, we are at a moment in history where the Koch brothers and other billionaires are in the process of buying politicians and elections. We need to overturn Citizens United with a constitutional amendment. We need to pass disclosure legislation. We need to move toward public funding of elections. We also have got to see an increased federal role in the outrageous gerrymandering that Republican states have created and in voter suppression. These are the main issues that I’ll be tackling in the coming months.

___________________________

Question:

Do you think that wiretapping of American citizens is necessary for security of America?

Bernie Sanders:

I voted against the USA Patriot Act and voted against reauthorizing the USA Patriot Act. Obviously, terrorism is a serious threat to this country and we must do everything that we can to prevent attacks here and around the world. I believe strongly that we can protect our people without undermining our constitutional rights and I worry very very much about the huge attacks on privacy that we have seen in recent years — both from the government and from the private sector. I worry that we are moving toward an Orwellian society and this is something I will oppose as vigorously as I can.

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Question:

If you win in 2016, what will your first dispositions be?

Bernie Sanders:

My first effort would be to rally the American people to demand that Congress pass a progressive agenda which reverses the decline of our middle class. We have got to create millions of decent-paying jobs rebuilding our infrastructure, we’ve got to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, we’ve got to overturn this disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision and we have to transform our energy system in order to protect us from climate change. If the American people are politically active and demand that Congress act on their behalf, we can accomplish those goals and much more.

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Question:

According to Votesmart.org in:

  • 2012: you voted to decrease spending on space exploration
  • 2000: you voted to decrease funding to NASA
  • 1996: you voted to decrease budget for NASA

What, if anything, has or will convince you to provide more funding to NASA in the future? Numerous breakthroughs in recent years and promising technologies being developed and brought to market have made it obvious that, outer space treaty what it is, the first trillionaires will be made in space. Wouldn’t it be best if the American People were part of that?

Bernie Sanders:

I am supportive of NASA not only because of the excitement of space exploration, but because of all the additional side benefits we receive from research in that area. Sometimes, and frankly I don’t remember all of those votes, one is put in a position of having to make very very difficult choices about whether you vote to provide food for hungry kids or health care for people who have none and other programs. But, in general, I do support increasing funding for NASA.

___________________________

Question:

What is your stance on Universal Basic Income (UBI)? If in favor how do you see the United States progressing towards realizing UBI? If against, what alternatives come to your mind for combating rising inequality and poverty in the United States?

Bernie Sanders:

So long as you have Republicans in control of the House and the Senate, and so long as you have a Congress dominated by big money, I can guarantee you that the discussion about universal basic income is going to go nowhere in a hurry. But, if we can develop a strong grassroots movement which says that every man, woman and child in this country is entitled to a minimum standard of living — is entitled to health care, is entitled to education, is entitled to housing — then we can succeed. We are living in the richest country in the history of the world, yet we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country and millions of people are struggling to put food on the table. It is my absolute conviction that everyone in this country deserves a minimum standard of living and we’ve got to go forward in the fight to make that happen.•

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“AI Will Eventually Result In ‘Ambient Intelligence'”

May 19, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Predictions by technologists tend to be optimistic, their timeframes often as aggressive as their ambitions, but there’s no denying the Internet’s relentless attempts to quantify are being visited upon us more and more in the physical realm. Those efforts will only increase, even if it’s anyone’s guess when an “emotion chip” will be realized. We went to the cloud, and now the cloud is coming to us. It will be seamless.

From Neil Howe’s Forbes piece about the potential of a “digital fog”:

Long considered the stuff of science fiction, AI’s great leap forward has been driven by a perfect storm of technological change. First is a growth in capabilities: Rapid advancements in computing power and falling hardware costs have made AI-related computations much cheaper to perform. Second is the advent of Big Data, which has enabled deep-learning algorithms in which the systems themselves learn bottom-up from a vast, fast-expanding universe of digital information.

Tech gurus speculate that the marriage of Big Data, the Internet of Things, and AI will eventually result in “ambient intelligence”—an ever-present digital fog in tune with our behavior and physiological state. Affectiva’s founder, Rana el Kaliouby, predicts in The New Yorker that before long, devices will have an “emotion chip” that functions unseen in the background the way that geolocation does in phones. Verizon has drafted plans for a sensor-laden media console that could scan a room and determine a driver’s license worth of information about its occupants. All these data would then determine the console’s selection of TV advertising: Signs of stress might prompt a commercial for a vacation, while cheery humming could result in more ads with upbeat messages.

What kind of mark will AI ultimately leave on society?•

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“The Job-Eating Maw Of Technology Now Threatens Even The Nimblest And Most Expensively Educated”

May 19, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Remember when workers were being nickeled and dimed? Ah, the good old days.

Barbara Ehrenreich, who’s spent much of her journalistic career studying the indignities of the working class, has penned a New York Times review of Martin Ford’s excellent book, Rise of the Robots, an extended diagnosis and concise prescription for the potential mass automation of work. The machines, he argues, are coming for your job, whether your collar is white or blue.

Ford is decidedly in the this-time-it’s-different camp who believe that unlike the the Industrial Revolution, which replaced farm jobs with better ones, this second machine age will not create new positions for people who have their careers disappeared. He also argues that the earlier fear of automation, a twenty-or-so-year period beginning in the late 1940s and cresting in the mid-1960s, wasn’t incorrect, just early.

The author’s argument is supported by academic research of all manner, but it’s a compelling and lucid one deserving of a wide readership. While he addresses the longer term possibility of Strong AI, which would clearly make the situation even more pressing, Ford focuses mostly on the type of Weak AI (non-conscious machines) set to invade every industry from taxi to delivery to law to medicine. In fact, the first inroads have already been made, and they’ve been dazzling. If Moore’s Law holds out a little while longer, the march of the non-wooden soldiers will come at a brisk pace, and the idea of near-universal employment will become an impossibility. No nickels for you, no dimes. What then?

Despite the alarmist topic of the book, Ford is reasoned and cautious, conservative even. Like myself, he argues against the most-quoted Piketty approach to combating income inequality, education, as a panacea. A worthwhile thing, sure, but not a broad answer. Ford asserts that we’ll most likely need to opt for a guaranteed basic income (incentivized to promote work whenever possible) to be funded in part from shifting tax responsibilities from workers to capital. (His feelings on the need for basic income have been shared by disparate thinkers: Andrew McAfee, Charles Murray, Friedrich Hayek, Eric Brynjolfsson, etc.) Easier said than done considering our political climate, but if wealth and productivity increase in the next few decades while employment continually ticks down, Americans at some point will likely not be pacified by bread and Kardashians.

From Ehrenreich:

In the late 20th century, while the blue-collar working class gave way to the forces of globalization and automation, the educated elite looked on with benign condescension. Too bad for those people whose jobs were mindless enough to be taken over by third world teenagers or, more humiliatingly, machines. The solution, pretty much agreed upon across the political spectrum, was education. Americans had to become intellectually nimble enough to keep ahead of the job-destroying trends unleashed by technology, both robotization and the telecommunication systems that make outsourcing possible. Anyone who wanted a spot in the middle class would have to possess a college degree — as well as flexibility, creativity and a continually upgraded skill set.

But, as Martin Ford documents in Rise of the Robots, the job-eating maw of technology now threatens even the nimblest and most expensively educated. Lawyers, radiologists and software designers, among others, have seen their work evaporate to India or China. Tasks that would seem to require a distinctively human capacity for nuance are increasingly assigned to algorithms, like the ones currently being introduced to grade essays on college exams. Particularly terrifying to me, computer programs can now write clear, publishable articles, and, as Ford reports, Wired magazine quotes an expert’s prediction that within about a decade 90 percent of news articles will be computer-­generated. …

This is both a humbling book and, in the best sense, a humble one. Ford, a software entrepreneur who both understands the technology and has made a thorough study of its economic consequences, never succumbs to the obvious temptation to overdramatize or exaggerate. In fact, he has little to say about one of the most ominous arenas for automation — the military, where not only are pilots being replaced by drones, but robots like the ones that now defuse bombs are being readied for deployment as infantry. Nor does Ford venture much into the spectacular possibilities being opened up by wearable medical devices, which can already monitor just about any kind of biometric data that can be collected in an I.C.U. Human health workers may eventually be cut out of the loop, as tiny devices to sense blood glucose levels, for example, learn how to signal other tiny implanted devices to release insulin.

But Rise of the Robots doesn’t need any more examples; the human consequences of robotization are already upon us, and skillfully chronicled here.•

 

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“We Should Consider The Future World As One Of Multi-Species Intelligence”

May 19, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Futurist and philosopher Melanie Swan has a thought-provoking and well-written Edge essay response to the question, “What do you think about machines that think?” She suggests a cafeteria approach to future intelligence, envisioning, among other things, a world in which humans enhanced cognitively would share terrain with those unenhanced.

I wonder about that. Today’s wealth inequality has caused problems and may lead to more serious ones (especially if Narrow AI is the job killer it appears to be), but that’s nothing compared to what would likely happen if superintelligent people were living aside those of much inferior thinking ability. Homo sapiens had company from several other species of humans at one point not too long ago, but we finished vanquishing them all with the fall of the Neanderthals, and perhaps we didn’t even do it on purpose. The sweep of our progress may have just swept everyone else away. Tremendous disparity in future intelligence may lead to something similar whether we’re talking about an intramural contest among humans, or humans vying with sentient machines, should they develop. The writer believes in “trust-building models for inter-species digital intelligence,” but I’m skeptical.

The opening of Swan’s essay:

Considering machines that think is a nice step forward in the AI debate as it departs from our own human-based concerns, and accords machines otherness in a productive way. It causes us to consider the other entity’s frame of reference. However, even more importantly this questioning suggests a large future possibility space for intelligence. There could be “classic” unenhanced humans, enhanced humans (with nootropics, wearables, brain-computer interfaces), neocortical simulations, uploaded mind files, corporations as digital abstractions, and many forms of generated AI: deep learning meshes, neural networks, machine learning clusters, blockchain-based distributed autonomous organizations, and empathic compassionate machines. We should consider the future world as one of multi-species intelligence.

What we call the human function of “thinking” could be quite different in the variety of possible future implementations of intelligence. The derivation of different species of machine intelligence will necessarily be different than that of humans•

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