Ben Makuch

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“What hath God wrought?” was the first piece of Morse code ever sent, a melodramatic message which suggested something akin to Mary Shelley’s monster awakening and, perhaps, technology putting old myths to sleep. In his movie, Lo and Behold: Reveries Of A Connected World, Werrner Herzog believes something even more profoundly epiphanic is happening in the Digital Age, and it’s difficult to disagree.

The director tells Ben Makuch of Vice that for him, technology is an entry point to learning about people (“I’m interested, of course, in the human beings”). Despite Herzog’s focus, the bigger story is events progressing in the opposite direction, from carbon to silicon.

In a later segment about space colonization, Herzog acknowledges having dreams of filming on our neighboring planet, saying, “I want to be the poet of Mars.” But, in the best sense, he’s already earned that title.

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A bunch of my favorite articles from 2012. (A couple of pieces from December 2011 are included since I do these lists before the absolute end of the year.) All ungated and free.

  • Pedestrian Mania(Brian Phillips, Grantland): Beautiful piece about world-famous 1870s long-distance walking champion Edward Payson Weston, subject of the book, A Man in a Hurry.
  • Brains Plus Brawn(Daniel Lieberman, Edge) Incredibly fun article about endurance, which points out, among many other things, that as quick as Usain Bolt may seem, your average sheep or goat can run twice as fast.
  • A New Birth of Reason” (Susan Jacoby, The American Scholar): Great essay about Robert Ingersoll, the largely forgotten secularist who was a major force in 19th-century America, taken from the writer’s forthcoming book, The Great Agnostic.
  • One’s a Crowd” (Eric Kleinberg, The New York Times): Great Op-Ed piece about the increasing number of people living alone.
  • How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work” (Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, The New York Times): A deep and penetrating explanation of the complicated forces at play in job outsourcing.
  • The Power of Habit“ (Charles Duhigg, Slate): An excerpt from the author’s bestseller of the same name which explains how Pepsodent became omnipresent.
  • We’re Underestimating the Risk of Extinction (Ross Andersen, The Atlantic): I didn’t necessarily agree with the premise (or conclusions) of this interview with philosopher Nick Bostrom, but I enjoyed its intelligence immensely.
  • Hustling the Cloud” (Steven Boone, Capital New York): Wonderful piece about a bleary-eyed, middle-of-the-night search for free Wi-Fi–and anything else that would seem to make sense–in a time of dire economic straits.
  • Craig Venter’s Bugs Might Save the World (Wil S. Hylton, The New York Times Magazine): Fascinating examination of the titular biologist, who wants to make breathing bots that will cure the world’s ills.
  • The Machine and the Ghost(Christine Rosen, The New Republic): The author riffs on how the rise of smart, quantified gizmos and cities necessitates a new “morality of things.”

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According to Dr. Rich Terrile of NASA, one day–and perhaps soon–our computers and robots are going to “awaken” and take over the planet. Okay, whatever. I’m fine with it. We had our shot and effed it up. An excerpt from an interview in Vice which Ben Makuch conducted with the jet propulsion expert:

“Vice:

Listening to you talk about Moore’s Law and our exponential growth in computing makes me wonder what you think about the future, and the fate of humanity?

Dr. Rich Terrile:

OK, well this is where it gets really uncomfortable. I have great hopes for our future, but I don’t necessarily have great hopes for humanity. I think we’ll become something different.

Vice:

What do you mean, like androids?

Dr. Rich Terrile:

I think our machines will wake up and take over our society. They will become us, we will become them. Right now everybody has their own consciousness and we can’t really exchange information very efficiently like computers can. They can exchange tremendous amounts of information and live forever sharing that information at the speed of light, whereas human beings are really quite constrained. We’re caught up in the constraints of our biological evolutionary baggage. I think we’re going to shed that once our machines become conscious. We’ll find ways of continuing our society, but in a different way.

Vice:

So you’re saying in the next hundred years humans will cease to be humans and become machines?

Dr. Rich Terrile:

Yes, I think we’ll merge with machines.

Vice:

Is this something a lot of scientists agree on?

Dr. Rich Terrile:

I don’t think a lot of scientists think about this sort of thing. I think the ones who do inevitably come to the conclusion that there’s a lot of credibility to these kinds of arguments.”

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