If you hear a politician or community organizer tout the employment opportunities provided by Uber, realize that person is either misinformed or likely on the payroll in one form or another. The rideshare service may be temporarily using the posture of “job creator” for publicity purposes and to dodge regulation, but it has no interest in employing drivers. In fact, it’s business model pretty much demands it remove human hands from the wheel.
Whether Uber is Napster or not (and increasingly it seems to not be), this new app-enabled arrangement is here to stay, and it’s a major reckoning for the taxi industry in particular and, more broadly, Labor.
“The natural end point has to rely on autonomous driving technology”—not humans, says Emilio Frazzoli, director of the Transportation@MIT Initiative. He thinks robots could be taking the wheel in the next 15 years, certainly within the next 30. The reasons, he says, are economical and cultural.
First, as much as 50 percent of an Uber ride’s cost goes toward paying the human behind the wheel, Frazzoli says, and that’s money that could be going into Uber’s pocket. Replacing human operators has already begun in Singapore, a city that relies heavily on public transit. It’s not widely advertised, Frazzoli says, but the subway trains there “are completely automated. They are just horizontal elevators.”
Felix Oberholzer-Gee, a professor at Harvard Business School, agrees. Uber, he says, is a perfect example of a business that benefits from network effects, where the value of its service increases with more use. But, unlike other companies that benefit from strong network effects, such as Facebook, Uber has to deal with bringing two different types of users—and networks—together: drivers and riders. The network effects of getting rid of human drivers, he says, “will make the platform even stronger.”
Plus, for reasons from supply to quality control, Oberholzer-Gee says getting drivers will likely always be more of a headache than finding more riders. With autonomous vehicles, he says, “You could have a guaranteed supply of one of the sides, and particularly of the side that is harder to manage.”•
Hewden’s “2045: Constructing the Future” report predicts driverless EVs omnipresent within 30 years. If that transition actually materializes, it’s a positive in most ways, most importantly in an environmental sense. Another prognostication which doesn’t sound as good anticipates buildings being constructed sans windows, utilizing augmented reality to make up for the lack. Yikes.
Two excerpts:
TRANSPORT WILL BE ELECTRIC AND DRIVE ITSELF
Self-driving cars and trucks will be ubiquitous by 2045, almost entirely fleet managed, with private ownership almost non-existent, since there is almost no point in owning one. As well as greatly reducing cost, pollution, congestion and accidents, it also means that roads will need far less street furniture, signs, bus stops or taxi ranks. Self-driving cars will be able to drive very close to each other, sideways as well as front to back, so if size can be standardised, and there is a huge incentive to do so, then there will be more lanes and more in each lane, up to 15 times more ‘pods’ than cars today. They could share energy supplies too, one accelerating powered by one braking, so their environmental impact will be low and people will be able to travel more with less impact. Road surfaces will include inductive electrics to power and even propel self-driving cars and pods, reducing their need for bulky, heavy and expensive batteries, thereby reducing cost and size.
Although most will still use wheels, in some special high-impact status areas, some vehicles might even levitate on magnetic cushions, but this will require part-metal road surfaces. Pods will not crash so with their reduced batteries and external power sources, can be made of lightweight materials and almost all of their volume used for occupant comfort or goods carrying capacity.
_________________________
NO WINDOWS, LOWER COST, NICER APPEARANCE
Thanks to widespread use of augmented reality and virtual architecture, many buildings will not have windows, but have a very simple planar surface instead. Even so, these could make liberal use of displays or projection to make them attractive even without AR. This could be a very cheap and fast way of constructing cheap residential accommodation.•
In his NYRB piece “What Libraries Can (Still) Do” James Gleick takes a hopeful view of a foundering institution, seeing a 2.0 life for those formerly vaunted knowledge centers, once-liberating forces now chiefly a collection of dusty rooms offering short blocks of free computer-terminal time to those lacking a wi-fi connection. I wish I could share his cautious optimism, but the inefficiency inherent in a library search seems a deal breaker in this age.
Gleick references John Palfrey’s manifesto BiblioTech(which he probably didn’t borrow froma library) in urging these erstwhile knowledge storehouses to become stewards and curators rather than trying to be exhaustive collections. That sounds right, but Palfrey’s assertion that “our attention cannot be bought and sold in a library” is a truth that ignores a bigger truth: That’s the very thing our transactional souls seem to want. We’ll sell our attention–our privacy, even–if the return is something that flatters or conveniences us.
From Gleick:
Is the library, storehouse and lender of books, as anachronistic as the record store, the telephone booth, and the Playboy centerfold? Perversely, the most popular service at some libraries has become free Internet access. People wait in line for terminals that will let them play solitaire and Minecraft, and librarians provide coffee. Other patrons stay in their cars outside just to use the Wi-Fi. No one can be happy with a situation that reduces the library to a Starbucks wannabe.
Perhaps worst of all: the “bookless library” is now a thing. You can look it up in Wikipedia.
I’m an optimist. I think the pessimists and the worriers—and this includes some librarians—are taking their eyes off the ball. The library has no future as yet another Internet node, but neither will it relax into retirement as an antiquarian warehouse. Until our digital souls depart our bodies for good and float away into the cloud, we retain part citizenship in the physical world, where we still need books, microfilm, diaries and letters, maps and manuscripts, and the experts who know how to find, organize, and share them.
In the midst of an information explosion, librarians are still the most versatile information specialists we have. And the purest. In his new book, BiblioTech, a wise and passionate manifesto, John Palfrey reminds us that the library is the last free space for the gathering and sharing of knowledge: “Our attention cannot be bought and sold in a library.” As a tradition barely a century and a half old in the United States, it gives physical form to the principle that public access to knowledge is the foundation of democracy.•
When a small child, I thought Peter Sellers’ Dr. Strangelove character was based on Henry Kissinger, not yet understanding of the chronology involved. He certainly seemed a fictional character, and one who could not have existed in the same way at any other time but during the Cold War, when information-gathering was far less than ideal and bold strokes based on half-knowledge seemed (to some) necessary.
Tom Carson has written an excellent Barnes & Noble review of Niall Ferguson’s 1000-page biography (part one!) of Nixon’s urbane henchman, a book that is frankly not yet on my must-read list and may never make it there, given the brevity of life. Carson judges the title absorbing if not unbiased (Kissinger sought out Ferguson to write his story), reminding that while the erstwhile Secretary of State was despised by the Left, he also wasn’t liked or trusted by the Right, and his often grandiose attempts at diplomacy have had ramifications for better and worse ever since. The opening:
Still craggily with us at age ninety-two, which certainly puts him one-up on countless Vietnamese, Cambodians, Chileans, and Bangladeshis in no position to volunteer their opinions of his foreign policy skills, Henry Kissinger isn’t someone too many people have ever been able to view with equanimity. Between early 1969 and early 1977, first as Richard Nixon’s uncommonly prominent NSC adviser and then as secretary of state under both Nixon and Gerald Ford, he was a figure unique in our history: a self-styled geopolitical maestro whose cachet exceeded that of the presidents he nominally worked for. If that often left Nixon seething — something he had a lot of practice at, of course — poor Ford, a newbie at international affairs when Nixon’s Watergate-driven resignation parked him in the Oval Office, didn’t have much choice except to keep Henry plummily running the show.
It’s a backhanded tribute to Kissinger’s mystique that even his enemies end up aggrandizing “the American Metternich” — his standard appellation back then, though maybe not in the Appalachians — as the ultimate wicked mastermind. If you ask almost any leftist of a certain vintage, he’s plainly destined to end up sharing a lake of fire with Darth Vader and Lord Voldemort. Nixon is despised, occasionally pitied, and sometimes cautiously respected, Ford is a historical nullity — but Kissinger? Kissinger is clammily loathed, as Hillary Clinton was reminded by the liberal old guard’s “Say it ain’t so” groans when Obama’s new secretary of state publicly embraced her most notorious predecessor.
Nobody ever calls him a mediocrity, although perhaps they should.•
Donald Trump stands with Jesus Christ, but so did Judas Iscariot, and how did that turn out? Don’t let Trump kiss you, JC!
The thrice-married liar, braggart and casino owner is baffled that Iowa voters who identify as evangelicals seem to be turning away from his brand. How can they forsake him when he’s arguably slightly more moral than fellow entrepreneur Dennis Hof?
The usual grab bag of GOP zealots and loudmouths (the Huckabees, Christies and Santorums) have fallen by the wayside this campaign season, unable to gain any helium, because Trump preemptively out-crazied them with the hardcore wingnuts of the party with his hateful brand of xenophobia, racism and sexism.
Alas, someone even wackier came along in the form of Dr. Ben Carson, who divides his enemies into neat piles of Nazis and slaveowners. While Trump is a panderer to the worst impulses, Carson is a true believer in them. I mean, this is a guy who thinks there’s actually a devil with a pitchfork. Game on!
This was Trump’s second rally in less than a week in Iowa. But he returned to a far different landscape than the one he’d left days earlier. Since he was last here, Trump has seen his solid lead in the state evaporate as four new polls reported Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon, surging to claim the top spot. Trump was in standard campaign mode as he addressed a crowd of nearly 2,400 and took a few questions — but his usual complaints about illegal immigration, corporate inversion and jobs moving overseas were punctuated with new self-deprecating comments, humanizing details and a plea to voters here for the chance to be their president.
He also ran through some reasons why the polls might have shifted, placing a lot of blame on evangelicals.
“I do well with the evangelicals, but the evangelicals let me down a little bit,” Trump said. “I don’t know what I did.”
Trump told the crowd he’s “a great Christian” and described his favorite Bible, one inscribed by his mother. Each audience member was given a card showing two black-and-white photos, including one taken at Trump’s 1959 confirmation. Amid listing off his religious credentials, Trump stopped and begged once again: “Will you get the numbers up, Iowa, please? It’s ridiculous.”•
By any standards, California’s Luther Burbank was a virtuoso botanist and horticulturist, mixing, matching and creating. Among the hundreds of exotic varieties he hatched from his experimental Santa Rosa farm, greenhouse and nursery–which included plants, potatoes, fruits and flowers–was the spineless cactus. The “plant wizard,” as he was called, was a beloved public figure until months before his death in 1926 when he created a furor by simply expressing his skepticism about an afterlife. “I am an infidel,” he asserted. Burbank was mocked openly in some quarters for such heresy. Twenty years before his dramatic, if abbreviated, fall from grace, he was the subject an admiring1906 New York Times profile. The opening:
Every summer our transatlantic steamers are burdened with great throngs of travelers beginning their pilgrimages to the shrines of departed genius. In America, too, we may visit places made illustrious by the former presence of Washington, Jefferson, Lee, Lincoln, Emerson, Poe, and other native men of genius. But, disguise it as we will, the visits are at last to cemeteries, where everything is described in the past tense.
But there is in America at this moment a man of the very greatest genius, just in the flower of his fame, a visit to whom not only emphasizes his genius and his leadership in thought and living things, but also enables one to see far into the future. There is a searchlight of truth in constant operation at Santa Rosa, Cal., and the mind and heart of Luther Burbank are the lenses through which the light is focused. Long ago I resolved to beg the privilege of standing near the searchlight and making a few observations as it illumined some of the peaks of knowledge I could never hope to scale.
Our so-called “Captains of Industry” are busy men, but many of their duties and responsibilities they may delegate to others. Luther Burbank is the busiest man in the world. I make that statement without fear of successful contradiction. His ship is alone on a vast sea of nature’s secrets. With him on the voyage of discovery are a few near relations to encourage him, a dear friend or two for protection and companionship, and several humble helpers to feed the boilers and oil the engines. But he is more alone than was Columbus, because he has no first officer, no second officer, no mate. Like Columbus, upon him alone falls the responsibility for the expedition; he alone knows why the vessel’s prow is kept always in one direction; he alone has faith that it must ultimately touch the shores of truth and reality.•
Once a thing is developed and the dollar signs are in sight, venture capital is a really effective means of bringing it all home. But in those early days when it’s just risk without reward, government plays a crucial role. For political means, Mitt Romney excoriated the Obama Administration in 2012 for investing in alternative energy companies like Solyndra (a bomb) and Tesla (a boom), but as the philanthropic Bill Gates 2.0 recently pointed out, federal investment in such technologies is vital. Even far-less-essential tools like the Internet would not have gotten off the ground without DARPA dollars.
In a smart Alternet Q&A, Lynn Stuart Parramore asks economist Mariana Mazzucato about the interdependence of public and private sectors in birthing new industries and devices, including the ever-present iPhone. An excerpt:
Lynn Parramore:
We constantly hear that anything to do with government is incompetent and inefficient. Yet as you show, many of the industries and products that make our lives better wouldn’t exist without government-funded research. The whole process of economic growth is hugely interdependent with governmental action.
What about something like the iPhone? Is it a product of Silicon Valley magic and the genius of Steve Jobs? Or is there more to the story?
Mariana Mazzucato:
Economists have recognized that government has a role to play in markets, but only to fix failures, like monopolies, for example. Yet if we look at what governments have done around the world, they have not just stepped in to address failures. They have actually actively shaped and created markets. This is the case in IT, biotech, nanotech and in today’s emerging green economy. Public sector funds have not only supported basic research, but also applied research and even early-stage, high-risk company finance. This is important because most venture capital funds are too short-termist and exit-driven to deal with the highly uncertain and lengthy innovation process.
I often use the iPhone as an example of how governments shape markets, because what makes the iPhone “smart” and not stupid is what you can do with it. And yes, everything you can do with an iPhone was government-funded. From the Internet that allows you to surf the Web, to GPS that lets you use Google Maps, to touchscreen display and even the SIRI voice activated system —all of these things were funded by Uncle Sam through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NASA, the Navy, and even the CIA.
These agencies are allmission driven, which matters to their success, including who they are able to hire. The Department of Energy was recently run by Steve Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, who wanted the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to do for energy what DARPA did for the Internet. Would he have bothered leaving academia to join the civil service just to “fix” markets? Surely not. That’s boring.•
If we’re talking “ever,” then of course diagnostics and other key medical functions will be revolutionized by computer hardware, which continues to grow smaller, faster and cheaper. But will it be later than sooner? Measurement and maintenance of biological functions are much more challenging tasks to perform than simply using a smartphone to order an Uber or burger.
In a FT blog post, Andrew McAfee addresses concerns that the health sector is being left behind in the Digital Age. An excerpt:
All the gear packed into most modern phones — compasses, accelerometers, gyroscopes, thermometers, WiFi and cellular antennas, and so on — have been getting better, smaller and cheaper at a rate that makes Moore’s Law look pokey by comparison. It’s easy to conclude that this is just what happens when the protean properties of silicon are brought to bear on an industry.
At a private event I attended recently, however, the CEO of a global pharmaceutical company said that sensors for healthcare were not improving quickly enough, and that we don’t yet have the gear we need for next-generation diagnosis and monitoring. The current turmoil at the USblood diagnostics start-up Theranosseems to support this view. Adamning exposein the Wall Street Journal revealed (and Theranos has confirmed) that the company uses industry-standard machines instead of its own equipment for most of the blood work it performs, and that its proprietary methods have so far only been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for a single test.
So will the sensor revolution skip healthcare? Will our bodies not ever be brought into the “internet of things”? I think the answer to these questions is “no.” We’ll get great gear in this area, but it might take a while.•
Apple is just crazy enough to (most likely) enter the auto industry, but it assuredly has no intention of going into the non-profit university business. But should the company do just that?
It’s easy to spend someone else’s money, and Apple might be better served by instead investing in an attempt at a latter-day Bell Labs á la Google X, but in a really smart Marginal Revolution post, economist Alex Tabarrok argues that Apple should devote some of its vast banked wealth to buy a university and reinvent it. An excerpt:
Apple is a for-profit corporation not a charity but there are plenty of ways to make money from a non-profit university. Aside from the tax breaks and other deductions, Apple University would be a proving ground for educational technologies that would be sold to every other university in the world. New textbooks built for the iPad and its successors would greatly increase the demand for iPads. Apple-designed courses built using online technologies, a.i. tutors, and virtual reality experimental worlds could become the leading form of education worldwide. Big data analytics from Apple University textbooks and courses would lead to new and better ways of teaching. As a new university, Apple could experiment with new ways of organizing degrees and departments and certifying knowledge. Campuses in Delhi, Seoul, Shanghai, Berlin, and Sao Paulo could provide opportunities for studying abroad. Apple’s reputation would attract top students, especially, for example, if it started with a design and business school. Top students would lead Apple University to be highly ranked. The more prestigious Apple University became the greater would be the demand for Apple University educational products.•
There were three people ahead of me at the checkout line at Best Buy yesterday, and it took 45 minutes to pay for my purchase, so I hope human beings are soon replaced by superintelligent robots. We had our shot. Didn’t pan out.
I’m not one who thinks conscious machines are on the verge of “awakening” and destroying us, but I acknowledge that as AI assumes more responsibilities and is permitted to teach itself via Deep Learning, ghosts within those systems can lead to a cascading disaster.
Forbesreported this month: “The vision of talking to your computer like in Star Trek and it fully understanding and executing those commands are about to become reality in the next 5 years.” Antoine Blondeau, CEO at Sentient Technologies Holdings, recently toldWiredthat in five years he expects “massive gains” for human efficiency as a result of artificial intelligence, especially in the fields of health care, finance, logistics and retail.
Blondeau further envisions the rise of “evolutionary intelligence agents,” that is, computers which “evolve by themselves – trained to survive and thrive by writing their own code—spawning trillions of computer programs to solve incredibly complex problems.”
While Silicon Valley enthusiasts hail the potential gains from artificial intelligence for human efficiency and the social good, Hollywood has hyped its threats. AI-based enemies have been box office draws at least since HAL cut Frank Poole’s oxygen hose in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And 2015 has truly been the year of fictional AI provocateurs and villains with blockbuster movies including Terminator Genisys, Ex-Machina, and The Avengers: Age of Ultron.
But are the risks of AI the domain of libertarians and moviemakers, or are there red flags to be seen in the specter of “intelligence agents?” Silicon Valley cannot have “exponential” technological growth and expect only positive outcomes. Similarly, Luddites can’t wish away the age of AI, even if it might not be the version we see in the movies.•
Far fewer American children are playing tackle football in recent years, which might seem a very sane reaction to knowledge about brain injuries caused by the sport, but, in fact, participation in all youth athletics around the country is off by surprising numbers. Where have all the children gone?
Most of them have their heads inside a different type of cloud, the information kind. It’s certainly a life lived more virtually by everyone, but children today are on the front lines of an indoors revolution, Huck Finn now a hologram, and it’s almost strange when you encounter them playing in the streets. In this new arrangement, something’s gained and something’s lost.
In Andrew Holter’sParis Review Q&Awith Luc Sante, the great writer speaks to this point while discussing his latest book about low life,The Other Paris.The opening:
Question:
Flaneurie is a huge part of The Other Paris—you call the flaneur the “exemplar of this book.” Since flaneurs have been the truest historians of Paris, did you find the act of walking at all important to your research? For as much consideration as you give to the social consequences of the built environment, it seems like a dérive or two might go a long way toward finding the essence of Paris from “the accumulated mulch of the city itself,” to borrow a phrase from Low Life.
Luc Sante:
When I wasn’t at the movies, I was walking. I walked all over the city, repeatedly—I kept journals of my walks, which are actually just lists of the sequences of streets. Even though the city isn’t as interesting as it once was—modern construction and commercial real-estate practices have wiped out so much of the old eccentricity—there are still hidden corners and ornery survivals, and of course the topography is such a determinant. New York City is more or less flat and what isn’t was mostly leveled long ago, so it’s missing that aspect of accommodation to hills and valleys and plateaux, not to mention the laying out of streets on a human scale long before urban planning scaled things to the demands of machines.
Question:
You describe the “intimacy” of cities up until a century ago, even cities the size of Paris, when by default a person’s neighborhood was fundamental to every part of her life, before the phenomenon of commuting and, most crucial of all, “where the absence of voice- and image-bearing devices in the home caused people to spend much more of their time on the street.” Does it distress you that cities have lost that intimacy? You don’t have much patience for nostalgia.
Luc Sante:
I do regret the passing of that intimacy. It was chipped away in increments, by cars, television, chain stores, fear—parental fears of children’s autonomy, “fear of crime,” et cetera—commercial and residential zoning, highway construction, urban renewal, escalating rents, the takeover by corporations of almost all the formerly owner-operated small businesses—groceries, drugstores, coffee shops, stationers, haberdashers, even bodegas. The last bastions of strictly neighborhood commerce are being rapidly decimated by chains these days. And then personal computers, which definitively drove people indoors. The single most jarring of all these changes for me, because so sudden and so absolute after millennia, is the disappearance of children playing in the streets—but then again that’s not confined to cities. I can’t imagine childhood without having the freedom to roam whatever town you’re in.•
Let’s not kill all the lawyers–imagine the shitload of personal-injury lawsuits if we tried–but merely replace them with algorithms.
I don’t know if most young attorneys will be done away with inside of a decade, but as soon as software can replace a legal task, it will be adopted. Positions will grow scarcer as the industry becomes more automated.
The opening of an article on the topic by David Kravet at Ars Technica:
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” —Henry VI, Part 2.
Shakespeare interpretations aside, it seems that artificial intelligence is on its way to, well, killing off lawyers. That’s according to arecent survey(PDF) of law firm leaders who say that within 10 years, new attorneys and paralegals could be replaced by an IBM Watson-like computer. The study, which included responses from high-ranking lawyers at 320 firms with at least 50 lawyers on staff, found that 35 percent of the top brass at responding law firms envision replacing first-year associates with some type of AI in the coming decade. Less than 25 percent of respondents gave the same answer in a similar survey in 2011. About 20 percent of those anonymous respondents also said second- and third-year attorneys could also be replaced by technology over the same period. Half of law firm leaders said that paralegals could be killed off by computers.•
Katie Allen has written a Guardian piece about a recent Deloitte study which suggests machines won’t be stealing our jobs. Fucking lazy robots! Get to work!
The research argues that machines have always taken on the worst of jobs, creating better new ones, leaving us with more disposable income for luxuries and grooming and such. I don’t think the report is controversial in its historical view: Technology has traditionally been a job-creating force. The Industrial Revolution was boon, not bane, for workers.
But the past isn’t necessarily prologue. What if it truly is different this time, employment becomes too scarce and the distribution of wealth is exceedingly uneven? In the aggregate, it would be great if AI did a lot of the work, but would you want to be a truck driver right now?
The opening:
In the 1800s it was the Luddites smashing weaving machines. These days retail staff worry about automatic checkouts. Sooner or later taxi drivers will be fretting over self-driving cars.
The battle between man and machines goes back centuries. Are they taking our jobs? Or are they merely easing our workload?
A study by economists at the consultancy Deloitte seeks to shed new light on the relationship between jobs and the rise of technology by trawling through census data for England and Wales going back to 1871.
Their conclusion is unremittingly cheerful: rather than destroying jobs, technology has been a “great job-creating machine”. Findings by Deloitte such as a fourfold rise in bar staff since the 1950s or a surge in the number of hairdressers this century suggest to the authors that technology has increased spending power, therefore creating new demand and new jobs.
Their study, shortlisted for the Society of Business Economists’ Rybczynski prize, argues that the debate has been skewed towards the job-destroying effects of technological change, which are more easily observed than than its creative aspects.•
Sir Martin Rees believes if extraterrestrial life exists it’s probably robotic, which makes Sir Martin Rees the greatest person ever. Now if we can just alert this otherworldly machine intelligence of our whereabouts and it can come down to Earth and eat our tiny, delicious brains, things will be perfect.
I’m only half-kidding.
The best-case scenario is that humans will ultimately evolve into a combination of carbon and silicon, becoming human-ish rather than human. The worst-case scenario: extinction. After all, those who aren’t busy being born are busy dying. In Rees’ excellent Nautilus piece on the topic, the astronomer points out that any life in the inhospitable environs of outer space has probably already successfully transitioned into that of conscious machines. An excerpt:
Few doubt that machines will gradually surpass more and more of our distinctively human capabilities—or enhance them via cyborg technology. Disagreements are basically about the timescale: the rate of travel, not the direction of travel. The cautious amongst us envisage timescales of centuries rather than decades for these transformations. Be that as it may, the timescales for technological advance are but an instant compared to the timescales of the Darwinian selection that led to humanity’s emergence—and (more relevantly) they are less than a millionth of the vast expanses of time lying ahead. So the outcomes of future technological evolution will surpass humans by as much as we (intellectually) surpass a bug.
There are, after all, chemical and metabolic limits to the size and processing power of “wet” organic brains. Maybe we’re close to these already. It is remarkable that our brains, which have changed little since our ancestors roamed the African savannah, have allowed us to understand the counterintuitive worlds of the quantum and the cosmos. But there is no reason to think that our comprehension is matched to an understanding of all key features of reality. Scientific frontiers are advancing fast, but we may sometime “hit the buffers.” There may be phenomena crucial to our long-term destiny that we are not aware of, any more than a monkey comprehends the nature of stars and galaxies.
But no such limits constrain silicon-based computers (still less, perhaps, quantum computers): For these, the potential for further development could be as dramatic as the evolution from monocellular organisms to humans. By any definition of “thinking,” the amount and intensity that’s done by organic human-type brains will be utterly swamped by the cerebrations of AI. Abstract thinking by biological brains has underpinned the emergence of all culture and science. But this activity—spanning tens of millennia at most—will be a brief precursor to the more powerful intellects of the inorganic post-human era.
This will be especially true in space, which is a hostile place for biological intelligence.•
Plastic surgery certainly says something about us as individuals and perhaps nationally as well. A mass of people in a particular country choose to lift or resize busts or butts or brows for a variety of factors, some of which are shared. In an Economist article, the natural beauties at that publication assign the popularity of rhinoplasty in Iran to women having to cover everything but the face. That still doesn’t speak to why a smaller nose is thought to be more attractive or why so many Persian men are also opting for them. An excerpt:
MANY would agree that Persians are among the world’s most naturally attractive people. Yet ever more of them are submitting to the knife. It is common to see women walking Tehran’s streets sporting a plaster on the bridge of their nose. “It’s just a thing everyone does,” says one woman who had the operation at the age of 19.
Sitting in his brightly coloured surgery in Tehran, Ali Asghar Shirazi explains that the majority of women—and an increasing number of men—are most preoccupied by the size of their snout. “Iranian noses are generally bigger than European ones,” says Mr Shirazi. “They don’t want Western noses; they want smaller ones.”
The phenomenon is perhaps surprising in a country far more conservative than plastic surgery hotspots such as America, Brazil and South Korea. But there is a good reason why Iranians have a penchant for the alteration. “For ladies who have to cover themselves apart from the face, it is the only thing they can show,” says Mr Shirazi. “A boob job will only get you so far if you have to spend most of the day shrouded in a manteau, the mackintosh-like outer garment almost all Iranian women wear.•
Kurt Waldheim had a past, and it caught up to him, if belatedly. The stunning reveal of his Nazi-linked wartime activities was remembered at the time of his death in James Graff’s 2007 Time article “The Skeletons of Kurt Waldheim“:
When I went to visit Waldheim in 1994, he was ensconced in his opulent offices at the Austrian League for the United Nations — but he was still under siege. Freedom of Information Act requests had pried open the 1987 Washington report that put Waldheim on the Justice Department’s “watch list.” The document placed him in Banja Luka in the summer of 1942, when the Nazis had rounded up the city’s Jews and the Wehrmacht was fighting an anti-partisan offensive in the Kozara Mountains to the north. Reprisal killings against civilians were part of the Germans’ brutal efforts to quell armed dissent in the region. The report didn’t prove any direct personal responsibility of Waldheim, who was serving as a quartermaster’s deputy, but its author, Neal Sher, argued that “one doesn’t have to pull the trigger to be implemented in crimes.” Waldheim was having none of that: “unfounded allegations and accusations, with no proof given,” he told me.
The question of guilt in a command structure is no less complex now than it was then; Waldheim was no card-carrying Nazi, but he had been an officer in a unit that had a very dirty war in the Balkans. His clean-vest spiel particularly rankled me because I’d been spending a fair amount of time in Banja Luka myself. Less than a year before my interview with Waldheim, the city’s principal mosque had been totally razed by Serbs, and most of the Muslim population driven out of the city. In the summer of 1992, Serbs in Banja Luka had taken me on a bizarre tour of the camps further west where they held Muslim prisoners. The cruelty of the conflict, the suffering of thousands languishing in refugee camps, had already left a permanent mark on me. Could the conflict have been any less gutting in 1942?•
Before the Waldheim Affair became an international fiasco during the 1980s and he was banned from the United States, the future Austrian president with the Nazi past spoke with PBS talk show host James Day in New York in 1973.
_______________________
In a science-centric 1978 issue of Penthouse, a periodical published by the leathery beaver merchant Bob Guccione, there’san interviewby Richard Ballad with the late NASA astronomerRobert Jastrow, who possessed an interesting mix of beliefs. A staunch supporter of the Singularity, he saw computers as a new lifeform, and he was also a denier of human-made climate change. An excerpt:
Robert Jastrow:
I say that computers, as we call them, are a newly emerging form of life, one made out of silicon rather than carbon. Silicon is chemically similar to carbon, but it can enter into a sort of metal structure in which it is relatively invulnerable to damage, is essentially immortal, and can be extended to an arbitrarily large brain size. Such new forms of life will have neither human emotions nor any of the other trappings we associate with human life.
Penthouse:
You use the term life to describe what we usually think of as lifeless creatures. One might call them “computers with delusions of grandeur.” How can you say they are a form of life?
Robert Jastrow:
They are new forms of life. They react to stimuli, they think, they reason, they learn by experience. They don’t, however, procreate by sexual union or die — unless we want them to die. We take care of their reproduction for them. We also take care of their food needs, which are electrical. They are evolving at a dynamite speed. They have increased in capabilities by a power of- ten every seven years since the dawn of the computer age, in 1950. Man, on the other hand, has not changed for a long time. By the end of the twentieth century, the curves of human and computer growth will intersect, and by that time, I am confident, quasi-human intelligences wilt be with us. They will be similar in mentality to a fresh- ly minted Ph.D.: very strong, very narrow, with no human wisdom, but very powerful in brute reasoning strength. They will be working in combination with our managers, who will be providing the human intuition. Silicon entities will be controlling and regulating the complex affairs of our twenty-first-century society. The probability is that this will happen virtually within our own lifetime, What happens in the thirtieth century, or the fortieth? There are 6 billion years left before the sun dies, and over that long period I doubt whether biological intelligence will continue to be the seat of intelligence for the highest forms of life on this planet. Nor do I think that those advanced beings on other planets, who are older than we are, if they exist, are housed in shells of bone on a fish model of carbon chemistry Silicon, I think, is the answer. …
Penthouse:
Will humans as we know them die out like the dodo?
Robert Jastrow:
It may be that a symbiotic union will exist between humans and new forces of life, between biological and nonbiological intelligence — and it may now exist on other planets. We might continue to serve the needs of the silicon brain while it serves ours.
Penthouse:
Do you think that the computer beings will triumph in the end?
Robert Jastrow:
Yes. Not “triumph” in the sense of a war but triumph in the same sense that the mammals triumphed over the dinosaurs. It will be the next stage of perfection.•
Jastrow discussing his ideas about the Big Bang and theology:
________________________
The 1970s video below has comments by Randolph Hearst made to NBC News about his daughter Patty, who was at the time doing a walkabout through the Radical Left. The heiress was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, (perhaps) brainwashed, and ultimately joined in the group’s acts of domestic terrorism. “I think she’s staying underground just like a lot of kids stay underground,” her father said, accurately assessing the situation. Before the end of the decade, she was captured, convicted, imprisoned and saw her sentence commuted. In January 2001, Bill Clinton granted her a full pardon.
I don’t think there’s ever been a richer time for books of all kinds than right now. Perhaps that’s just the loudest crack of thunder before the skies dry up, but I would bet not. The traditional publishing business being disturbed has welcomed in many more voices, and while it’s difficult for a single title to fully permeate the culture, there so much more variety whether we’re talking fiction or nonfiction.
In Part II of their conversation published in the New York Review of Books, President Obama and Marilynne Robinson speak to the fears that the novel’s place in the culture is diminishing. The author believes fiction is bursting with variety now, while the President worries about narrowcasting. One thing I’ll say about Obama linking great fiction to great empathy is that there are some very well-read people who have little of the latter. An excerpt:
President Obama:
Are you somebody who worries about people not reading novels anymore? And do you think that has an impact on the culture? When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you.
And so I wonder when you’re sitting there writing longhand in some—your messy longhand somewhere—so I wonder whether you feel as if that same shared culture is as prevalent and as important in the lives of people as it was, say, when you were that little girl in Idaho, coming up, or whether you feel as if those voices have been overwhelmed by flashier ways to pass the time.
Marilynne Robinson:
I’m not really the person—because I’m almost always talking with people who love books.
President Obama:
Right. You sort of have a self-selecting crew.
Marilynne Robinson:
And also teaching writers—I’m quite aware of the publication of new writers. I think—I mean, the literature at present is full to bursting. No book can sell in that way that Gone with the Wind sold, or something like that. But the thing that’s wonderful about it is that there’s an incredible variety of voices in contemporary writing. You know people say, is there an American tradition surviving in literature, and yes, our tradition is the incredible variety of voices….
And [now] you don’t get the conversation that would support the literary life. I think that’s one of the things that has made book clubs so popular.•
Fred Trump had many things–money, cars, houses–but sadly lacked a vasectomy scar.
That absence unfortunately led to the existence of his deplorable son Donald, a vicious bullshit artist who seems to have been fertilized more with venom than semen. While Beefsteak Charlie is currently sliming one set of politicians and minorities, the act is nothing new–only the targets have changed.
Trump once directed his adult-baby hatred at Republican icon Ronald Reagan, before he decided to belatedly deify the 40th American President and instead vomit his vitriol against more convenient foes. Nothing is sincere about this cretin except his copious self-loathing that’s wholly free of self-examination and directed outward.
Of course, Trump isn’t alone in his Reagan flip-flop. Newt Gingrich once compared Ronald Reagan meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev with Neville Chamberlain visiting with Adolf Hitler in 1938. The Speaker became close friends again with Reagan after the former President died. But not even Gingrich is as dishonest as Trump.
In 2016, there are 14 Republican presidential candidates for whom Ronald Reagan is both the benchmark for conservative values and the lodestar of conservative ideas. There’s also one who wrote, in the second to last year of Reagan’s presidency, that he had been “so smooth, so effective a performer” that “only now, seven years later, are people beginning to question whether there’s anything beneath that smile.”
The gadfly was Donald Trump, writing in his book The Art of the Deal. But it wasn’t just a glancing blow; to promote the book, Trump launched a political campaign that tore into Reagan’s record, including his willingness to stand up to the Soviet Union. Advised by the notorious Roger Stone, a Nixon-era GOP trickster, in 1987 Trump took out full-page ads inthe New YorkTimes, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post blasting Reagan and his team.
In the text, which was addressed “To the American people,” Trump declared, “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.” The problem was America’s leading role in defending democracy, which had been fulfilled by Republicans and Democrats all the way back to FDR. Foreshadowing his 2015 argument that would have Mexico pay for an American-built border wall, Trump then said that the United States should present its allies with a bill for defense services rendered.
The ads, which cost more than $90,000, came after Trump had visited the Soviet Union and met with Mikhail Gorbachev. (A few years earlier, Trump had offered himself as a replacement for Reagan’s nuclear arms control negotiators, whom he considered too soft.) Trump followed his letter to America with a trip to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where voters were eyeing the candidates in the 1988 primary. There he spoke to the Rotary Club, which met at Yoken’s restaurant, where the sign out front featured a spouting whale and the slogan, “Thar she blows!” In his talk, Trump sounded some of the same themes he offers today, except for the fact that the bad guys who were laughing at the United States were the Japanese and not the Mexicans or Chinese.•
The Dallas Cowboys under GM Tex Schrammand control-freak coach Tom Landry favoredbleeding-edge technological, computer and neuropsychological systems, but according to psychiatrist Dr. Arnold Mandell’sThe Nightmare Season, the San Diego Chargers of 1973 were hopped up on drugs intended to produce “rageful football syndrome.” Whenever anybody talks about the good old days when sports were “clean,” realize they’re being nostalgic for a yesterday that never actually existed.
From Barbara Wilkins’ 1976People profileof the shrink and his controversial book:
I’ve tried every drug except cocaine,” says Dr. Arnold Mandell. “LSD? An incredibly beautiful, insightful experience. Lithium? It takes my bright edge off. Heroin? Just like morphine, a cosmically sensual experience. Marijuana? Not that interesting.”
Because Mandell, a psychiatrist, is a prominent researcher into brain chemistry and psychopharmacology, his experiments with dangerous drugs are understandable. But it is not so easy to comprehend why Dr. Mandell ever got involved professionally with the San Diego Chargers.
Actually, Mandell first became interested in football because of his son, Ross, now 13, and he was also a social friend of Chargers owner Gene Klein. And in 1972 San Diego was having such a miserable season that coach Harland Svare was willing to try anything. He asked Mandell to become resident shrink for a team which then included Duane Thomas, the All-Pro recluse, and Tim Rossovich, the linebacker notorious for eating glass. Observing the players close up, Mandell (who insisted that he not be paid) says he discovered that they were typecast: those who played on offense were conservative and more disciplined; most defensive players were free spirits.
Mandell also learned how much some team members depended on amphetamines. “Doc,” one player told him, “I’m not about to go out there against a guy who’s grunting and drooling and comin’ at me with big dilated pupils unless I’m in the same condition.”
Mandell says that 50 to 60 percent of the Chargers used drugs to produce “the rageful football syndrome.” But he argues, “This was not drug abuse. There was great self-discipline. They hated it, but it was drug use for function. Nobody used it off season.”
If Mandell had kept his ruminations to himself, he might still have friends on the team. Instead he wrote a book, The Nightmare Season, out this month, portions of which were published in a San Diego newspaper. His erstwhile friend Gene Klein says, “The book is totally inaccurate. It’s full of lies and innuendos.” And when Harland Svare was fired as general manager, he blamed Mandell’s book for “destroying my credibility” and vowed to “pursue all remedies available.”
“I love Gene,” psychiatrist Mandell says, “I love Harland. If they can’t see the love in the book, it makes me crazy.” The National Football League did not see it either, apparently, and banned Mandell unofficially from NFL locker rooms for life, as well as fining Klein, Svare and eight San Diego players.•
No one need blindly trust Monsanto, but not supporting the development of Genetically Modified Organisms is lunacy. The ability to create strains of food impervious to drought and disease is not just a matter of choice but one of national security–of species security, actually. There’s no reason for thinking natural good and GMOs bad, especially since plenty of poisons exist in nature.
Sadly, many European nations are making it difficult for scientists and private enterprise to pursue these needed safeguards on the global food supply, with their policies having ramifications in Africa.
CALL it the “Coalition of the Ignorant.” By the first week of October, 17 European countries — including Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland — had used new European Union rules to announce bans on the cultivation of genetically modified crops.
These prohibitions expose the worrying reality of how far Europe has gone in setting itself against modern science. True, the bans do not apply directly to scientific research, and a few countries — led by England — have declared themselves open to cultivation of genetically modified organisms, or G.M.O.s. But the chilling effect on biotech science in Europe will be dramatic: Why would anyone spend years developing genetically modified crops in the knowledge that they will most likely be outlawed by government fiat?
In effect, the Continent is shutting up shop for an entire field of human scientific and technological endeavor. This is analogous to America’s declaring an automobile boycott in 1910, or Europe’s prohibiting the printing press in the 15th century.
Beginning with Scotland’s prohibition on domestic genetically modified crop cultivation on Aug. 9, Europe’s scientists and farmers watched with mounting dismay as other countries followed suit. Following the Scottish decision, signatories from numerous scientific organizations and academic institutions wrote to the Scottish government to express grave concern “about the potential negative effect on science in Scotland.”
In theory, terraforming a planet would be an awfully useful thing to know how to do. In practice, wow, not easy.
The dream of remaking Mars as another Earth is certain to be (at best) deferred, as the science needed is as complex as the unintended consequences sure to rear their ugly heads. In the nearer term, perhaps synthetic biology will allow us to rework limited areas of Mars and help us counter drought and environmental damage on the home base.
There is a popular hope, nurtured by futurists like Elon Musk and Craig Venter, that with the right ingredients, Mars can be terraformed into a kind of a paradisiacal facsimile of Earth.
“It’s a fixer-upper of a planet,” Musk told Stephen Colbert on a recent episode of The Late Show. “First you have to live in transparent domes, but eventually you can transform it into an Earthlike planet.”
This is a captivating vision of the future and one that by no means deserves discouragement. But according to NASA astrobiologist Lynn Rothschild, a specialist in synthetic biology, we shouldn’t pin all of our Martian dreams on terraforming alone.
“Terraforming is making a planet Earthlike,” Rothschild told me over the phone. “I think the chance of making Mars like the Earth—an exact replica—is pretty bad.”
A more precise word, Rothschild said, would be “ecopoiesis,” which refers to the process of seeding a new ecosystem into a sterile environment. It’s like a scaled down version of terraforming that can be localized to certain regions—for instance, the Palikir crater where the latest evidence of flowing water was found.
“What I think is the most likely for the foreseeable future is having small areas that are enclosed,” Rothschild said. “Once you establish a smaller enclosed area, then you can start talking about recycling oxygen through algae, and all the stuff we’re working on.”•
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