Excerpts

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“The Game Was Good To Me”

February 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

Tony Dorsett, the great former NFL running back, began suffering from football-related dementia while still in his fifties. Via the Dallas Morning News, two excerpts from a radio interview in which he discussed the price he’s paid for glory:

On how he’s battling depression and dementia:

“I’m in a battle, obviously. I got diagnosed with CTE and it’s very frustrating at times for me. I’ve got a good team of people around me, my wife and kids, who work with me. When you’ve been in this town for so long and I have to go to some place I’ve been going to for many, many, many years, and then all of a sudden I forget how to get there. Those things are frustrating when it comes to those things. I understand that I’m combating it, trying to get better. But, you know, some days are good. Some days are bad. I signed up for this when, I guess, I started playing football so many years ago. But, obviously, not knowing that the end was going to be like this. But I love the game. The game was good to me. It’s just unfortunate that I’m going through what I’m going through. I’m in the fight, man. I’m not just laying around letting this overtake me. I’m fighting. I’m in the battle. I’m hoping we can reverse this thing somehow.”

On if he’d let his son play football knowing about the effects of concussions:

“Yes I would. I would just be a little bit more concerned about certain injuries. When I was playing, my whole mentality was that if I could walk I’d play. Obviously there’s been a lot done for head injuries. They know a lot more about the brain and head trauma that can be created because of being knocked unconscious so many times. But yeah, the game is still a great game. I’d just be more careful and pay a bit more attention to some of the injuries that I got over the years. It’s football. It’s a very physically demanding sport on one’s body. And when you play football you sign up for that. It’s what you want to do. You like that contact. But, again, you just want to be taken care of if you become injured.”•

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“Consciousness Is A Much Different Story”

February 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

David W. Buchanan, one of IBM’s Watson enablers, agrees with me that Strong AI with human-extincting powers isn’t happening in the foreseeable future, but in arguing against the likelihood of our imminent elimination in a Washington Post editorial, he does concede the growing power of Weak AI, which will continue to introduce automation into more and more workplaces. That could be a great thing or a destabilizing one that encourages even greater income inequality. From Buchanan, a passage about what he terms the “consciousness fallacy”:

Science fiction is partly responsible for these fears. A common trope works as follows: Step 1: Humans create AI to perform some unpleasant or difficult task. Step 2: The AI becomes conscious. Step 3: The AI decides to kill us all. As science fiction, such stories can be great fun. As science fact, the narrative is suspect, especially around Step 2, which assumes that by synthesizing intelligence, we will somehow automatically, or accidentally, create consciousness. I call this the consciousness fallacy. It seems plausible at first, but the evidence doesn’t support it. And if it is false, it means we should look at AI very differently.

Intelligence is the ability to analyze the world and reason about it in a way that enables more effective action. Our scientific understanding of intelligence is relatively advanced. There is still an enormous amount of work to do before we can create comprehensive, human-caliber intelligence. But our understanding is viable in the sense that there are real businesses that make money by creating AI.

Consciousness is a much different story, perhaps because there is less money in it. Consciousness is also a harder problem: While most of us would agree that we know consciousness when we see it, scientists can’t really agree on a rigorous definition, let alone a research program that would uncover its basic mechanisms. The best definitions capture the idea that consciousness grounds our experiences and our awareness. Certainly consciousness is necessary to be “someone,” rather than just “something.” There is some good science on consciousness, and some progress has been made, but there is still a very long way to go.

It is tempting to conflate something that we understand better with something we hardly understand at all, and scientists are not immune to this temptation.•

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“The International System Lacks Many Of The Stabilizing Elements That Have Helped Preserve Peace In The Past”

February 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

President Obama’s foreign policy strategy has long been clear: sanctions, containment, diplomacy, no boots on the ground unless absolutely necessary and a reluctance to arm those fighting regimes we dislike for fear that weaponry will eventually be used against us. David Rothkopf, editor of Foreign Policy, sees flaws in this mindset, though he gives the President credit for the relatively brisk U.S. economic turnaround in the wake of the Great Recession. A few exchanges follow from the Reddit AMA Rothkopf just conducted.

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Question:

Off the top of your head, greatest threat to world peace?

David Rothkopf:

It is tempting to say that the greatest threat to world peace is inequality or imbalances that create deep social tensions. That can certainly be a contributing factor. But just as often the threat is a leader or group that seeks to take advantage of instability or lack of order. Right now, there are many places in the world that are at risk on that front…because the international system lacks many of the stabilizing elements that have helped preserve peace in the past.

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Question:

What do you feel has been the Obama administration’s biggest foreign policy success thus far? Biggest failure or missed opportunity?

David Rothkopf:

The biggest success of the Obama administration has been helping to engineer the U.S. economic recovery. The biggest failure has been an unwillingness to address–with a clear strategy–threats to stability in the Middle East and Ukraine.

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Question:

Assuming there is no congressional veto override of the existing temporary agreement, what are the chances of a lasting nuclear enrichment agreement between Washington and Tehran between now and the end of the Obama administration? Could Iran be trusted to keep such an agreement if one is made?

David Rothkopf:

On Iran, a deal is likely between the US and Iranian government. Whether it actually constrains the Iranians from developing nuclear weapons in the long run is another issue–but it is certainly a goal worth trying to achieve. That said, Iran has caused a lot of problems for three decades without having any nuclear weapons and the deal will not do much to address that aspect of its foreign policy.

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Question:

Is inaction, allowing the stalemate in Syria and Iraq to solidfy, more dangerous than overreaction?

David Rothkopf:

Inaction against IS is dangerous…as is action without a coherent strategy (which is what we currently have). Big winners to date are Iran, Assad, IS in places where the Syrian and Iraqi governments have alienated their people, and the Kurds, who, in the end, will have the state they deserve to have. (Though it will surely take too long to get there.)

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Question:

What is Russia’s/Putin’s end-game?

David Rothkopf:

Strengthening Russia via seizing every international opening to do so…because a.) they seek to return Russia to the status it deserves in their minds and b.) because they are so hopeless at addressing their domestic economic issues at home. Much of it is very much a “wag the dog” or “bread and circuses” initiative, seeking to distract from their failures at governance, demographic crisis and, recently, the pressures associated with a downturn in the price of oil.

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Question:

If you had to grade Americans as a whole on their knowledge of world events, what would be the grade and why?

David Rothkopf:

F. Because the average American citizen spends precious little time thinking about global affairs, we don’t teach it very well in the schools–we don’t even really teach things like geography or civics any more. And too many people get their information from websites and cable networks that cater to one political view…people hear like-minded voices and don’t get enough of a range of views.•

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“To Fund His Grand Venture, He’d Charge $16,500 Per Head”

February 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A private city of conspicuous consumption being built at Burning Man, that Libertarian wet dream, says so much about the weird welter of technology, wealth inequality and batshit politics that make up much of the mishegas modern American landscape. The opening of Felix Gillette’s Bloomberg story about the 1% decamping to the Nevada desert with AC, Wi-Fi and a wait staff:

For his 50th birthday, Jim Tananbaum, chief executive officer of Foresite Capital, threw himself an extravagant party at Burning Man, the annual sybaritic arts festival and all-hours rave that attracts 60,000-plus to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada over the week before Labor Day. Tananbaum’s bash went so well, he decided to host an even more elaborate one the following year. In 2014 he’d invite up to 120 people to join him at a camp that would make the Burning Man experience feel something like staying at a pop-up W Hotel. To fund his grand venture, he’d charge $16,500 per head.

Tananbaum, a contemporary art collector who resembles the actor Bob Saget, grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and graduated from Yale and Harvard, where he earned both an M.D. and an MBA. After years of starting, selling, and investing in health-care companies, he founded Foresite in 2011. A private venture capital firm with $650 million under management, San Francisco-based Foresite specializes in the health-care and pharmaceutical industries.

Busy building his portfolios, Tananbaum only made it to Burning Man in 2009, the festival’s 24th year, but instantly fell under its spell. While his peers in San Francisco’s high finance circles took up kitesurfing or winemaking, he devoted his spare time to preparations for the next burn. “Jim put a tremendous effort into trying to create something very special for the Burning Man community,” says his friend Matt Nordgren, a former quarterback at the University of Texas, who went on to star in the Bravo reality show Most Eligible Dallas. 

For 2014, Tananbaum wanted a camp that was aesthetically novel, ecologically conscious, and exceedingly comfortable.•

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“The Brain Data Suggested That Passive Twitter Use Increased A Sense Of Personal Relevance By 27 Percent”

February 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The always great Steven Levy filed a story at Backchannel about Twitter usage measured by neuroscience, which revealed greater stimulation of emotion and memory in test subjects than they displayed during more general web use. Not surprising, since personal engagement is more intense in tweets than on newsfeeds, even personalized ones. Clearly such info can be, for better or worse, used by the company for neuromarketing purposes. An excerpt:

[Twitter senior director of market research Jeffrey] Graham’s team arranged a study at Twitter’s UK headquarters. One hundred and fourteen people participated, in groups of around twenty. Videos of the sessions show people putting on the helmets, which look like a cross between a Snoopy-style Red Baron helmet and a polka dot shower cap destined for Katy Perry’s cranium in a music video.

Then, during 45-minute sessions, they alternated between normal Web-surfing activities and using Twitter — reading their timelines, tweeting, and other birdy stuff.

Graham had hoped that the brain profiles of people using Twitter would show the difference between his employer and more static Web use. “When I go on Twitter, oftentimes I really get sucked into it,” he says. “I get this strong anticipation to see what engagement is going to be.” But he admits that he had no idea what the data would actually show.

The results were more than he’d dreamed of. The study first tried to measure a neural signature that tends to correlate with information relating to you—a “sense of personal relevance.” It did this by comparing how participants’ brains activated when either passively scrolling and browsing on Twitter, actively tweeting and retweeting, or engaging in normal online activity. The brain data suggested that passive Twitter use increased a sense of personal relevance by 27 percent. Active use boosted that number to 51 percent. The representative from NeuroInsight told Twitter that in all the testing the research company has done, there’s been only one result as high: when people opened personal mail. (The physical kind.)

The most dramatic results reflected emotional intensity.•

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“I Think We’re Heading Towards A World Of What I Call ‘Technological Socialism'”

February 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Like most aspiring trillionaires, Peter Diamandis would like to live forever. Who can blame him? In a PC Magazine interview conducted by Evan Dayhevsky, the utopian futurist and author of Bold explains why he believes a small number of trillionaires plus a highly automated society won’t equal bloody revolution. An excerpt:

PCMag:

You’ve mentioned in previous media appearances that in the not crazy distant future, we may see the first trillionaires. 

Peter Diamandis: 

So, we’re at a point now when we’re starting to take on the world’s biggest problems and biggest opportunities. I have two ventures that are big and bold and which I talk about in detail in the book: the first is Planetary Resources. Think about everything that we hold of value here on Earth—metals, minerals, energy, real estate—they are in near infinite quantities in space. You know, some of the asteroids that we [Planetary Resources] are targeting to prospect are trillion-dollar assets. So, that’s one place where we might see the first trillionaires made, and, you know, I’m taking my shot at it.

The second place is in the life sciences. My other company I speak about in Bold is a company I co-founded called Human Longevity, Inc (HLI). Today there are six to seven trillion dollars a year spent on healthcare, half of which goes to people over the age of 65. In addition, people over the age of 65 hold something on the order of $60 trillion in wealth. And the question is what would people pay for an extra 10, 20, 30, 40 years of healthy life. It’s a huge opportunity. These are areas where we may see significant wealth creation.

PCMag:

One of the things you don’t touch on too much in the book are all the people who aren’t entrepreneurs. As things like AI and robotics develop and give businesses the ability produce big ideas, there will be a diminishing need for a human labor force to support it. What does the future hold for all of us non-entrepreneurs and CEOs?

Peter Diamandis: 

I think we’re heading towards a world of what I call “technological socialism.” Where technology—not the government or the state—will begin to take care of us. Technology will provide our healthcare for free. The best education in the world—for free. We’ll have access to more and more energy, better quality water, more nutritious food. So, the cost of living and having your fundamentals met will come down.

So I think we’re heading towards a world where people will be able to spend their time doing what they enjoy rather than what they need to be doing. There was a Gallup poll that said something like 70 percent of people in the United States do not enjoy their job—they work to put food on the table and get insurance to survive. So, what happens when technology can do all that work for us and allow us to actually do what we enjoy with our time?•

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“He Asks To Be Read As A Political Writer”

February 8, 2015 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

James Salter’s sad 1967 novel, A Sport and a Pastime, has only grown in stature since its publication, but the book apparently didn’t make the author financially independent. Salter, who will turn 90 in June, picked up some paychecks writing articles for People in the 1970s, including a profile of a septuagenarian Graham Greene, who was then living a rather anonymous life in Paris. Judging from this piece, Philip Roth and China were among Greene’s dislikes. An excerpt:

Greene still reads a lot, three or four books a week, and notes them in his diary, putting down a little tick or cross in judgment. Among the Americans, he likes Kurt Vonnegut. Gore Vidal: “I like his essays.” Alison Lurie. Philip Roth, not much. Bellow, he finds rather difficult. As for his own work, even coming from a long-lived family it is not easy, he admits, to think of starting on a book these days. “The fears,” he says simply, “not knowing whether one will live to see the end of it.”

He has been a published writer since 1929 with his first novel, The Man Within. There have been novels, travel books, thrillers, films, plays, short stories and autobiography as well as essays and reviews. His output has been protean and the breadth of his travel and experience, vast. Many of his settings are foreign. The Honorary Consul, for instance, resulted from a three months’ trip to South America. Though his command of Spanish covers only the present tense, he was visiting in Argentina and saw the town of Corrientes one day while going up the river to Asunción. Corrientes became the scene of the book. He has been in Africa, Mexico, Russia and China (“I found it depressing”), served as an intelligence officer in Sierra Leone during the war, smoked opium in Indochina where he went as a correspondent regularly beginning in 1951 and flew in French bombers between Saigon and Hanoi. He has been an editor in a publishing house, a film reviewer, a critic, a life as varied and glamorous as that of André Malraux, another great literary and political figure. Like Malraux, he asks to be read as a political writer and has set his fiction firmly in that world. The lesson in the books of Graham Greene is the great lesson of the times: one must take sides.•

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“The Reveal Is Always Going To Be Imminent But It Will Never Quite Happen. That’s The Future.”

February 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

For Douglas Coupland, the future (that scary thing) and the present have merged. Everyone is a pioneer now, without any movement westward or in any other direction. Everything is within sight, even if most of it is just out of reach. What is the effect on the human mind of permanent tantalization? The opening of his latest Financial Times column:

I’ve spent much of my life waiting for the future to happen, yet it never really felt like we were there. And then, in this past year, it’s become almost instantly and impossible to deny that we are now all, magically and collectively, living in that far-off place we once called the future — and we all know we’re inside it, too. It’s here, and it feels odd. It feels like that magical moment when someone has pulled a practical joke on you but you haven’t quite realised it yet. We keep on waiting for the reveal but the reveal is never going to happen. The reveal is always going to be imminent but it will never quite happen. That’s the future.

What was it that pulled us out of the present and dumped us in this future? Too much change too quickly? One too many friends showing us a cool new app that costs 99 cents and eliminates thousands of jobs in what remains of the industrial heartlands? Maybe it was too much freakish weather that put us in the future. Or maybe it was texting almost entirely replacing speaking on the phone. Or maybe it was Angelina Jolie’s pre-emptive mastectomy. Or maybe it was an adolescent comedy about North Korea almost triggering nuclear war — as well as incidentally revealing Sony’s thinking on Angelina Jolie. Or maybe it was Charlie. How odd that much of what defines the future is the forced realisation that there are many people who don’t want a future and who don’t want the future. They want eternity.

I feel like I’m in the future when I see something cool and the lag time between seeing something cool and reaching for my iPhone camera is down to about two seconds as opposed to 30 seconds a few years back. I feel like I’m in the future whenever I look for images of things online and half the images I see are watermarked and for sale. I feel like I’m in the future when I daydream of bingeing on season three of House of Cards on my new laptop that weighs nothing, never overheats and its battery goes on for ages.

How long is this sensation of futurity going to last? Is it temporary? Maybe society will go through a spontaneous technological lull allowing the insides of our brains to take a time holiday and feel like they’re in 1995, not 2015. But to be practical, that’s probably not going to happen. Ever. Ever.•

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“Some 10,000 People Watch Him Eating Per Day, He Says”

February 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The Andy Warhol quote about everybody in the future being famous for 15 minutes was as prophetic as anything Marshall McLuhan ever said or wrote, but the late Pop Artist’s elevation of the excruciatingly banal has perhaps been equally prescient. In our egalitarian world, talent really isn’t necessary to entertain any longer–just share your minutiae, just live in public. A few spectacles of prowess, like, say, the Super Bowl, still attract attention, but it’s the long tail or ordinariness that wins in the bigger picture. Case in point: In South Korea, that hyper-wired world, “performance eating” has become a phenomenon. It’s food porn, sure, but Stephen Evans of the BBC suspects more is at play. An excerpt:

How do you fancy eating your dinner at home in front of a webcam and letting thousands of people watch? If they like the way you eat, they will pay you money – maybe a few hundred dollars a night… a good salary for doing what you would do anyway. This is happening now in South Korea.

It’s often said that if you want to see the future look at how technology is emerging in perhaps the most connected country on the planet. The food phenomenon is called mukbang – a combination of the Korean word for eating (muk-ja) and broadcasting (bang-song).

I have seen this future in the eighth-floor apartment of Lee Chang-hyun in Seoul (pictured at work, above). At around midnight, he goes online with a couple of friends and performs his meal, spicy raw squid one day, crab the next. “Perform” is the right word. He is extravagant in his gestures, flaunting the food to his computer camera to tantalise the viewers. He eats noisily and that’s part of the show. He’s invested in a good microphone to capture the full crunch and slurp.

This is not a private affair. Some 10,000 people watch him eating per day, he says. They send a constant stream of messages to his computer and he responds verbally (by talking) and orally (by eating, very visibly and noisily).

If the audience like the performance, they allocate him what are called “star balloons” and each of these means a payment to him and to the internet television channel on which he performs. He is coy about how much he earns but the BBC has estimated, by noting the number of star balloons on his screen, that it would run into several hundred dollars for a two-hour stint.

His performance-eating is part of a phenomenon which says something about the way society is changing and about the way television is changing – in Korea today, and perhaps, in your own country, tomorrow.•

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Andy Warhol eats a burger:

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“Novels Are Always About People Even If They Purport To Be About Rabbits Or Robots”

February 6, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Ed Finn of Slate has a new interview with Margaret Atwood, and in one give-and-take she explains her philosophy on writing about the future. An excerpt:

Question:

Whether you call it science fiction or speculative fiction, much of your work imagines a future that many of us wouldn’t want. Do you see stories as a way to effect change in the world, especially about climate change?

Margaret Atwood:

I think calling it climate change is rather limiting. I would rather call it the everything change because when people think climate change, they think maybe it’s going to rain more or something like that. It’s much more extensive a change than that because when you change patterns of where it rains and how much and where it doesn’t rain, you’re also affecting just about everything. You’re affecting what you can grow in those places. You’re affecting whether you can live there. You’re affecting all of the species that are currently there because we are very water dependent. We’re water dependent and oxygen dependent.

The other thing that we really have to be worried about is killing the oceans, because should we do that there goes our major oxygen supply, and we will wheeze to death.

It’s rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots. They’re still really about people because that’s who we are and that’s what we write stories about.

You have to show people in the midst of change and people coping with change, or else it’s the background. In the MaddAddam books, people hardly mentioned “climate change,” but things have already changed. For instance, in the world of Jimmy who we follow in Oryx and Crake, the first book, as he’s growing up as an adolescent, they’re already getting tornadoes on the East Coast of the United States, the upper East Coast, because I like setting things in and around Boston. It’s nice and flat, and when the sea rises a bunch of it will flood. It’s the background, but it’s not in-your-face a sermon.

When you set things in the future, you’re thinking about all of the same things as the things that you’re thinking about when you’re writing historical fiction. But with the historical fiction, you’ve got more to go on, and you also know that people are going to be checking up on your details. If you put the wrong underpants on Henry VIII, you’re in trouble.•

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“The Record Age Was Just A Blip”

February 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

It was a smooth ride for a short while, but it’s long been believed by some astute observers that vinyl had a better future in couches than in music. From Paul Morley’s new Guardian piece about Brian Eno:

“I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn’t last, and now it’s running out. I don’t particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you’d be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history’s moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it.”•

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“Are you fed up with constantly searching for the records you want?”

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“How Do We Build Killer Robots That Will Make The Correct Decision In Every Situation?”

February 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Photography, Science/Tech | Permalink

You don’t need conscious machines to wreak havoc upon the world; Weak AI can cause serious disruptions in employment and autonomous machines can be tasked with lethal work. Nikola Tesla dreamed of military drones bringing peace to the world, but that hasn’t been the reality. If some government (or rogue state) allows pilotless planes to operate automatically, the weapons systems might be even deadlier. Of course, with the human track record for mass violence, that might not be so. From Robert McMillan at Wired:

Military drones like the Predator currently are controlled by humans, but [Clearpath CTO Ryan] Gariepy says it wouldn’t take much to make them fully automatic and autonomous. That worries him. A lot. “The potential for lethal autonomous weapons systems to be rolled off the assembly line is here right now,” he says, “but the potential for lethal autonomous weapons systems to be deployed in an ethical way or to be designed in an ethical way is not, and is nowhere near ready.”

For Gariepy, the problem is one of international law, as well as programming. In war, there are situations in which the use of force might seem necessary, but might also put innocent bystanders at risk. How do we build killer robots that will make the correct decision in every situation? How do we even know what the correct decision would be?

We’re starting to see similar problems with autonomous vehicles. Say a dog darts across a highway. Does the robo-car swerve to avoid the dog but possibly risk the safety of its passengers? What if it isn’t a dog, but a child? Or a school bus? Now imagine a battle zone. “We can’t agree on how to implement those bits of guidance on the car,” Gariepy says. “And now what we’re actually talking about is taking that leap forward to building a system which has to decide on its own and when it’s going to preserve life and when it’s going to take lethal force.”•

 

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“They Would Create The First Mechanistic Theory Of The Mind”

February 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Warren McCulloch, the poet-philosopher of brain science, knew a great collaborator in Walter Pitts, a high-school dropout who escaped his troubled home at 15 with a genius which would insinuate him into the inner circle of the twentieth century’s greatest minds, despite his lack of all credentials. Before Pitts deteriorated from increasingly onerous alcoholism, he and McCulloch brought mathematics to neural activity. The opening of “The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic,” Amanda Gelter’s new Nautilus piece:

Walter Pitts was used to being bullied. He’d been born into a tough family in Prohibition-era Detroit, where his father, a boiler-maker, had no trouble raising his fists to get his way. The neighborhood boys weren’t much better. One afternoon in 1935, they chased him through the streets until he ducked into the local library to hide. The library was familiar ground, where he had taught himself Greek, Latin, logic, and mathematics—better than home, where his father insisted he drop out of school and go to work. Outside, the world was messy. Inside, it all made sense.

Not wanting to risk another run-in that night, Pitts stayed hidden until the library closed for the evening. Alone, he wandered through the stacks of books until he came across Principia Mathematica, a three-volume tome written by Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead between 1910 and 1913, which attempted to reduce all of mathematics to pure logic. Pitts sat down and began to read. For three days he remained in the library until he had read each volume cover to cover—nearly 2,000 pages in all—and had identified several mistakes. Deciding that Bertrand Russell himself needed to know about these, the boy drafted a letter to Russell detailing the errors. Not only did Russell write back, he was so impressed that he invited Pitts to study with him as a graduate student at Cambridge University in England. Pitts couldn’t oblige him, though—he was only 12 years old. But three years later, when he heard that Russell would be visiting the University of Chicago, the 15-year-old ran away from home and headed for Illinois. He never saw his family again.

In 1923, the year that Walter Pitts was born, a 25-year-old Warren McCulloch was also digesting the Principia. But that is where the similarities ended—McCulloch could not have come from a more different world. Born into a well-to-do East Coast family of lawyers, doctors, theologians, and engineers, McCulloch attended a private boys academy in New Jersey, then studied mathematics at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, then philosophy and psychology at Yale. In 1923 he was at Columbia, where he was studying “experimental aesthetics” and was about to earn his medical degree in neurophysiology. But McCulloch was a philosopher at heart. He wanted to know what it means to know. Freud had just published The Ego and the Id, and psychoanalysis was all the rage. McCulloch didn’t buy it—he felt certain that somehow the mysterious workings and failings of the mind were rooted in the purely mechanical firings of neurons in the brain.

Though they started at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, McCulloch and Pitts were destined to live, work, and die together. Along the way, they would create the first mechanistic theory of the mind, the first computational approach to neuroscience, the logical design of modern computers, and the pillars of artificial intelligence. But this is more than a story about a fruitful research collaboration. It is also about the bonds of friendship, the fragility of the mind, and the limits of logic’s ability to redeem a messy and imperfect world.•

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“Dad Combined Porn With All Manner Of Genre Fiction”

February 5, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The thing about pornographers, those horrible people, is that they were right, their suspicions about us proved true. No matter the moral posture, we did want their wares, and we wanted them to be portable. Before smartphones offering every category you could imagine and some you couldn’t, pulpy paperbacks did the trick. The 1970s were the golden age for such prurient printed matter, until that moment was disrupted by technology, first the VCR and then the Internet. Andrew Offutt (who wrote most often as “John Cleve”) was the lonely and tortured king of the Selectric-produced sex book, making it possible for gentlemen to jerk it to genre art, sordid space odysseys and wankable Westerns. His son Chris, who was deputized with the responsibility of sorting through his late father’s sizable and seemly estate, recalls dad’s uneasy reign in the New York Times Magazine. An excerpt:

The commercial popularity of American erotic novels peaked during the 1970s, coinciding with my father’s most prolific and energetic period. Dad combined porn with all manner of genre fiction. He wrote pirate porn, ghost porn, science-fiction porn, vampire porn, historical porn, time-travel porn, secret-agent porn, thriller porn, zombie porn and Atlantis porn. An unpublished Old West novel opens with sex in a barn, featuring a gunslinger called Quiet Smith, without doubt Dad’s greatest character name. By the end of the decade, Dad claimed to have single-handedly raised the quality of American pornography. He believed future scholars would refer to him as the “king of 20th-century written pornography.” He considered himself the “class operator in the field.”

In the 1980s, John Cleve’s career culminated with a 19-book series for Playboy Press, the magazine’s foray into book publishing. The “Spaceways” series allowed him to blend porn with old-time “space opera,” reminiscent of the 1930s pulps, his favorite kind of science fiction. Dad’s modern twist included aliens who possessed the genitalia of both genders. Galactic crafts welcomed the species as part of their crews, because they were unencumbered with the sexual repression of humans and could service men and women alike. The books were popular, in part, because of their campiness, repeating characters and entwined stories — narrative tropes that later became standard on television. The “Spaceways” series ended in 1985, coinciding with the widespread ownership of VCRs. Men no longer needed “left-handed books” for stimulation when they could watch videotapes in their own homes. The era of written pornography was over.

John Cleve retired. Dad insisted that he himself hadn’t quit, but that John Cleve had. It was more retreat than retirement, a slipping back into the shadows, fading away like an old soldier. Cleve had done his duty — the house was paid off, the kids were grown and the bank held a little savings.

Dad was 52. As Cleve, he published more than 130 books in 18 years. He turned to self-publishing and, using an early pseudonym, Turk Winter, published 260 more titles over the next 25 years.•

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“It’s Disturbing That Williams Has Told Many Different Versions Of This Story Over The Years”

February 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I don’t like, trust or watch TV news so my main interest in the Brian Williams debacle, in which he has repeatedly claimed for more than a decade to have been in a U.S. military plane in Iraq that was fired upon, is psychological. For some reason, he pretended in an elaborate way that he was close to the same type of peril that genuinely caused terrible brain damage to former fellow anchor Bob Woodruff. People who should know better–who do know better in almost every other instance in their lives–can internalize a fiction and repeat it as fact until they’re eventually called out on the lie.

Even then it’s difficult for them to come clean, as has been the case with Williams, who seems to have also lied in his second version of the story. Intellectually, Williams knows such behavior can imperil his career and is unnecessary. What I’m saying is that some deeper frailty, emotionally or neurologically or both, drove his behavior and does so in others. You usually see it in people who’ve had great success early in their lives, who haven’t yet had the bullshit knocked out of them by life, but it is something beyond that with the NBC news anchor. From Rem Rieder at USA Today:

It’s an unmitigated disaster for Brian Williams and NBC News.

The revelation that the NBC anchor had lied on air about being in a helicopter that was forced down after it was hit by enemy fire during the Iraq War is devastating.

It’s hard to see how Williams gets past this, and how he survives as the face of NBC News.

An anchor’s No. 1 requirement is that he or she has credibility. If we don’t believe what an anchor tells us, what’s the point?

It’s disturbing that Williams has told many different versions of this story over the years. In some he was in a helicopter that was hit by enemy fire. In some he was in one near the chopper that was hit.

This from a man whose word should be gospel to us?

And Williams hardly has helped himself with his tortured explanations about what has gone so terribly wrong.•

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“Brace Yourself. This Is The Economy We’re Now Barreling Toward.”

February 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The main question I’ve asked since beginning this blog–and one you may be weary of by now–is this: How do we reconcile what’s largely a free-market economy with one that’s highly automated? All work that humans currently do that can be replicated by Weak AI will be ceded to the machines. Will the lack of McJobs (fast-food workers, hotel clerks, customer service, etc.) and many knowledge-based ones (here and here) be replaced by work in other yet-to-be hatched industries? If not, how do the majority of people share in the great bounty that automation will yield? I don’t think getting to own really cheap smartphones will be enough. At some point, the people grow tired of bread and Kardashians. The opening of a Salon article about the destabilizing effects of the Peer Economy by that mensch Robert Reich:

How would you like to live in an economy where robots do everything that can be predictably programmed in advance, and almost all profits go to the robots’ owners? 

Meanwhile, human beings do the work that’s unpredictable – odd jobs, on-call projects, fetching and fixing, driving and delivering, tiny tasks needed at any and all hours – and patch together barely enough to live on.

Brace yourself. This is the economy we’re now barreling toward.

They’re Uber drivers, Instacart shoppers, and Airbnb hosts. They include Taskrabbit jobbers, Upcounsel’s on-demand attorneys, and Healthtap’s on-line doctors.

They’re Mechanical Turks.

The euphemism is the “share” economy. A more accurate term would be the “share-the-scraps” economy.

New software technologies are allowing almost any job to be divided up into discrete tasks that can be parceled out to workers when they’re needed, with pay determined by demand for that particular job at that particular moment.

Customers and workers are matched online. Workers are rated on quality and reliability.

The big money goes to the corporations that own the software. The scraps go to the on-demand workers.

Consider Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk.” Amazon calls it “a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence.”

In reality, it’s an Internet job board offering minimal pay for mindlessly-boring bite-sized chores. Computers can’t do them because they require some minimal judgment, so human beings do them for peanuts — say, writing a product description, for $3; or choosing the best of several photographs, for 30 cents; or deciphering handwriting, for 50 cents.

Amazon takes a healthy cut of every transaction.

This is the logical culmination of a process that began thirty years ago when corporations began turning over full-time jobs to temporary workers, independent contractors, free-lancers, and consultants.

It was a way to shift risks and uncertainties onto the workers – work that might entail more hours than planned for, or was more stressful than expected.•

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“What About The Whores And Midgets?”

February 4, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Literature will be around as long as people are, but the particular literary world which George Plimpton and John Gregory Dunne inhabited has been disrupted, permanently. It wasn’t necessarily greater, but it was great. In a 1996 Paris Review interview, the former queried the latter about writing. The opening:

George Plimpton:

Your work is populated with the most extraordinary grotesqueries—nutty nuns, midgets, whores of the most breathtaking abilities and appetites. Do you know all these characters?

John Gregory Dunne:

Certainly I knew the nuns. You couldn’t go to a parochial school in the 1940s and not know them. They were like concentration-camp guards. They all seemed to have rulers and they hit you across the knuckles with them. The joke at St. Joseph’s Cathedral School in Hartford, Connecticut, where I grew up, was that the nuns would hit you until you bled and then hit you for bleeding. Having said that, I should also say they were great teachers. As a matter of fact, the best of my formal education came from the nuns at St. Joseph’s and from the monks at Portsmouth Priory, a Benedictine boarding school in Rhode Island where I spent my junior and senior years of high school. The nuns taught me basic reading, writing, and arithmetic; the monks taught me how to think, how to question, even to question Catholicism in order to better understand it. The nuns and the monks were far more valuable to me than my four years at Princeton. I’m not a practicing Catholic, but one thing you never lose from a Catholic education is a sense of sin and the conviction that the taint on the human condition is the natural order.

George Plimpton:

What about the whores and midgets?

John Gregory Dunne:

I suppose for that I would have to go to my informal education. I spent two years as an enlisted man in the army in Germany after the Korean War, and those two years were the most important learning experience I really ever had. I was just a tight-assed upper-middle-class kid, the son of a surgeon, and I had this sense of Ivy League entitlement, and all that was knocked out of me in the army. Princeton boys didn’t meet the white and black underclass that you meet as an enlisted draftee. It was a constituency of the dispossessed—high-school dropouts, petty criminals, rednecks, racists, gamblers, you name it—and I fit right in. I grew to hate the officer class that was my natural constituency. A Princeton classmate was an officer on my post and he told me I was to salute him and call him sir, as if I had to be reminded, and also that he would discourage any outward signs that we knew each other. I hate that son of a bitch to this day. I took care of him in Harp. Those two years in Germany gave me a subject I suppose I’ve been mining for the past God-knows-how-many years. It fit nicely with that Catholic sense of sin, the taint on the human condition. And it was in the army that I learned to appreciate whores. You didn’t meet many Vassar girls when you were serving in a gun battery on the Czech border and were in a constant state of alert in case the Red Army came rolling across the frontier. As for midgets, they’re part of that constituency of the dispossessed.

George Plimpton:

You once said you only had one character. Is that true?

John Gregory Dunne:

I’ve always thought a novelist only has one character and that is himself or herself. In my case, me.•

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“The Internet Of Things Is Really About Human Augmentation”

February 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Feedback loops between humans and machines, a new type of conversation and one that will ultimately be conducted in hushed tones, is one of the goals of the Internet of Things. Measuring our minutiae will lead to a smarter society, but there’ll really be no way to opt out. The opening of Quentin Hardy’s New York Times Q&A with IoT enthusiast Tim O’Reilly:

Question:

The way most companies sell it, the Internet of Things is about gaining efficiency from putting all kinds of devices online. What is wrong with that definition?

Tim O’Reilly: 

The IoT is really about human augmentation. The applications are profoundly different when you have sensors and data driving the decision-making.

Question: 

Can you give me an example?

Tim O’Reilly: 

Uber is a company built around location awareness. An Uber driver is an augmented taxi driver, with real-time location awareness. An Uber passenger is an augmented passenger, who knows when the cab will show up. Uber is about eliminating slack time and worry.

People would call it “IoT” if there was a driverless car, but it already is part of the IoT. You can measure, test and change things dynamically. The IoT is about the interpolation of computer hardware and software into all sorts of things.

Question: 

But the IoT isn’t just about one sensor in two-way contact with a remote cloud computing battery of servers, or a driver and a rider with a smartphone. There are going to be lots of different data sets, and lots of different feedback loops.

Tim O’Reilly: 

The characteristics are that things are contingent, in relationship with other data. They are on demand. They are load-balanced, and aware of other parts of the system. That is why you get things like congestion pricing. It’s a more context-oriented world, because there is better data.

Question:

Why do you think this isn’t better understood?

Tim O’Reilly: 

We’re not letting the IoT teach us enough about what is possible once you add sensors. There is a complex interplay of humans, interfaces and machines. A big question is, How do we create feedback loops from devices to humans?•

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“What If Technology Really Could End All Language Barriers?”

February 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Google Translate has impressive potential, flawed tool though it is, but so far it’s been long, hard slog to perfect it, and it’s a wonder if that process will ever speed up. From an Economist piece about updates to the app:

The dream has transfixed science-fiction fans for decades. Star Trek had its universal translator, and Douglas Adams’s satirical Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series had its Babel Fish. What if technology (or, in Adams’s case, a super-evolved, ear-insertable fish) really could end all language barriers? In an optimistic scenario, world peace would be all but certain. In Adams’s satire, perfect understanding would cause “more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”

Whichever your view, don’t throw away the language textbooks yet. Google Translate’s update does two nifty things. One is that when you point your camera at a foreign-language text (a book cover, sign or menu), optical-character-recognition and translation software instantly work together to try to render the text into your language—on your camera screen, so you can see the words in context. The second update is to make the voice-recognition and voice-synthesis parts of Google Translate recognise languages, instantly convert spoken words into text, translate the text, and then say the words in the target language. This looks closer to our Universal Translator than anything yet devised.

Alas, reality is different. What Google has done (in steps, not revolutionary leaps) is truly impressive. But anyone relying on it in a sensitive situation is likely to confuse lots of other people. At worst, it may annoy or insult them.•

 

“How Do We Build Machines That Will Make The World Better, Even When They Start Running Themselves?”

February 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

One tricky point about designing autonomous machines is that if we embed in them our current moral codes, we’ll unwittingly stunt progress. Our morality has a lot of room to develop, so theirs needs to as well. I don’t think Strong AI is arriving anytime soon, but it’s a question worth pondering. From Adrienne LaFrance at the Atlantic:

How do we build machines that will make the world better, even when they start running themselves? And, perhaps the bigger question therein, what does a better world actually look like? Because if we teach machines to reflect on their actions based on today’s human value systems, they may soon be outdated themselves. Here’s how MIRI researchers Luke Muehlhauser and Nick Bostrom explained it in a paper last year:

Suppose that the ancient Greeks had been the ones to face the transition from human to machine control, and they coded their own values as the machines’ final goal. From our perspective, this would have resulted in tragedy, for we tend to believe we have seen moral progress since the Ancient Greeks (e.g. the prohibition of slavery). But presumably we are still far from perfection.

We therefore need to allow for continued moral progress. One proposed solution is to give machines an algorithm for figuring out what our values would be if we knew more, were wiser, were more the people we wished to be, and so on. Philosophers have wrestled with this approach to the theory of values for decades, and it may be a productive solution for machine ethics.•

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“I’m Afraid Of You Doc Because You’re A Mad Scientist”

February 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Before there was turnt, there was turned-on, the term for LSD experimentation taken from the Timothy Leary-Marshall McLuhan co-created mantra “Turn on, Tune in, Drop Out.” Thanks to some fakakta reasoning, Leary was allowed, during his Harvard professor days, to do acid tests on Massachusetts prison inmates, the belief being that the trip would help them arrive at rehabilitation. The subjects were wary of the good doctor, and for good reason, though by Leary’s telling everything went well overall. The guru recalled the experience in an article in the 1969 Psychedelic Review. An excerpt:

I’ll never forget that morning. After about half an hour, I could feel the effect coming up, the loosening of symbolic reality, the feeling of humming pressure and space voyage inside my head, the sharp, brilliant, brutal, intensification of all the senses. Every cell and every sense organ was humming with charged electricity. I felt terrible. What a place to be on a gray morning! In a dingy room, in a grim penitentiary, out of my mind. I looked over at the man next to me, a Polish embezzler from Worcester, Massachusetts. I could see him so clearly. I could see every pore in his face, every blemish, the hairs in his nose, the incredible green-yellow enamel of the decay in his teeth, the wet glistening of his frightened eyes. I could see every hair in his head, as though each was as big as an oak tree. What a confrontation! What am I doing here, out of my mind, with this strange mosaic-celled animal, prisoner, criminal?

I said to him, with a weak grin, How are you doing, John? He said, I feel fine. Then he paused for a minute, and asked, How are you doing, Doc? I was about to say in a reassuring psychological tone that I felt fine, but I couldn’t, so I said, I feel lousy. John drew back his purple pink lips, showed his green-yellow teeth in a sickly grin and said, What’s the matter, Doc? Why you feel lousy? I looked with my two microscopic retina lenses into his eyes. I could see every line, yellow spider webs, red network of veins gleaming out at me. I said, John, I’m afraid of you. His eyes got bigger, then he began to laugh. I could look inside his mouth, swollen red tissues, gums, tongue, throat. Well that’s funny Doc, ’cause I’m afraid of you. We were both smiling at this point, leaning forward. Doc, he said, why are you afraid of me? I said, I’m afraid of you, John, because you’re a criminal. I said, John, why are you afraid of me? He said, I’m afraid of you Doc because you’re a mad scientist. Then our retinas locked and I slid down into the tunnel of his eyes, and I could feel him walking around in my skull and we both began to laugh. And there it was, that dark moment of fear and distrust, which could have changed in a second to become hatred, terror. We’d made the love connection. The flicker in the dark. Suddenly, the sun came out in the room and I felt great and I knew he did too.

We had passed that moment of crisis, but as the minutes slowly ticked on, the grimness of our situation kept coming back in microscopic clarity. There were the four of us turned-on, every sense vibrating, pulsating with messages, two billion years of cellular wisdom, but what could we do trapped within the four walls of a gray hospital room, barred inside a maximum security prison? Then one of the great lessons in my psychedelic training took place. One of the four of us was a Negro from Texas, jazz saxophone player, heroin addict. He looked around with two huge balls of ocular white, shook his head, staggered over to the record player, put on a record. It was a Sonny Rollins record which he’d especially asked us to bring. Then he lay down on the cot and closed his eyes. The rest of us sat by the table while metal air from the yellow saxophone, spinning across copper electric wires, bounced off the wails of the room. There was a long silence. Then we heard Willy moaning softly, and moving restlessly on the couch. I turned and looked at him, and said, Willy, are you all right? There was apprehension in my voice. Everyone in the room swung their heads anxiously to look and listen for the answer. Willy lifted his head, gave a big grin, and said, Man, am I all right? I’m in heaven and I can’t believe it! Here I am in heaven man, and I’m stoned out of my mind, and I’m swinging like I’ve never before and it’s all happening in prison, and you ask me man, am I all right. What a laugh! And then he laughed, and we all laughed, and suddenly we were all high and happy and chuckling at what we had done, bringing music, and love, and beauty, and serenity, and fun, and the seed of life into that grim and dreary prison. …

As I rode along the highway, the tension and the drama of the day suddenly snapped off and I could look back and see what we had done. Nothing, you see, is secret in prison, and the eight of us who had assembled to take drugs together in a prison were under the gaze of every convict in the prison and every guard, and within hours the word would have fanned through the invisible network to every other prison in the state. Grim Walpole penitentiary. Grey, sullen-walled Norfolk.

Did you hear? Some Harvard professors gave a new drug to some guys at Concord. They had a ball. It was great. It’s a grand thing. It’s something new. Hope. Maybe. Hope. Perhaps. Something new. We sure need something new. Hope.•

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“The Android Is Able To Speak No Fewer Than 19 Languages And Can Determine Customers’ Emotions From Their Facial Expressions”

February 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Japan’s graying, thinning population knows a scarcity of labor, a problem likely to grow worse. A solution: Open up what’s a very homogenous country to immigrants. But Japan’s chosen not to staff up with foreign humans but with foreigners to the species, setting up hologram desk clerks and robot bank tellers. If this AI, the Weak kind but impressive nonetheless, works there, wouldn’t such machines also be employed in places where humans are still readily looking to land a position? From Julian Ryall at the Telegraph:

Standing less than 23 inches tall and with only three digits on hands that are too big for his body, Nao is an unusual appointment at Japan’s biggest bank.

Officials of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc believe, however, that this humanoid robot is likely to be an important addition to its operations.

Unveiling Nao in Tokyo on Monday, officials at the bank pointed out that the android is able to speak no fewer than 19 languages and can determine customers’ emotions from their facial expressions.

Nao is still undergoing some minor adjustments, officials said, but the bank anticipates that several of the robots will be meeting and greeting customers in branches from April.

Designed by Aldebaran Robotics SA, a Paris-based subsidiary of SoftBank Corp, Nao gave a demonstration of his skills, greeting a customer with a breezy “Hello and welcome” in fluent English.

“I can tell you about money exchange, ATMs, opening a bank account or overseas remittance,” the android added. “Which one would you like?”

Japanese companies are investing heavily in robots, both as a solution to the nation’s ageing and shrinking population and as a growing business opportunity.•

_____________________________

The future of computerized banking, as envisioned in 1969:

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“The Plan Is To Build A ‘Gas Station In Space'”

February 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Gas Station on the Moon sounds like the title of an unproduced Philip Glass composition, but it’s also a corporate dream, Manifest Destiny blasted into the stratosphere. There’s resources to be mined, riches to be had. From Phys.org:

With an estimated 1.6 billion tonnes of water ice at its poles and an abundance of rare-earth elements hidden below its surface, the moon is rich ground for mining.

In this month’s issue of Physics World, science writer Richard Corfield explains how private firms and space agencies are dreaming of tapping into these lucrative resources and turning the moon’s grey, barren landscape into a money-making conveyer belt.

Since NASA disbanded its manned Apollo missions to the moon over 40 years ago, unmanned spaceflight has made giant strides and has identified a bountiful supply of water ice at the north and south poles of the moon.

Since NASA disbanded its manned Apollo missions to the moon over 40 years ago, unmanned spaceflight has made giant strides and has identified a bountiful supply of water ice at the north and south poles of the moon.

“It is this, more than anything else,” Cornfield writes, “that has kindled interest in mining the moon, for where there is ice, there is fuel.”

As the company’s chief executive officer, Dale Tietz, explains, the plan is to build a “gas station in space” in which rocket propellant will be sold at prices significantly lower than the cost of sending fuel from Earth.

SEC plans to extract the water ice by sending humans and robots to mine the lunar poles, and then use some of the converted products to power mining hoppers, lunar rovers and life support for its own activities.•

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“Bureaucracy Is A Utopian Project”

February 3, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In the U.S., the Right pretends it’s attacking bureaucracy while really angling to subjugate unions and workers; the aim is dismantling safety nets, not improving the situation. But that doesn’t mean mountains of paperwork shouldn’t be a bipartisan scourge. It’s often a maze with no exit. David Graeber’s forthcoming book, The Utopia of Rules, sees something even more sinister than incompetence buried in the files and folders. From Cory Doctorow’s review at Boing Boing:

Bureaucracy is pervasive and metastatic. To watch cop-dramas, you’d think that most of the job of policing was crime-fighting. But it’s not. The police are just “armed bureaucrats.” Most of what police do is administrative enforcement — making sure you follow the rules (threatening to gas you or hit you with a stick if you don’t). Get mugged and chances are, the police will take the report over the phone. Drive down the street without license plates and you’ll be surrounded by armed officers of the law who are prepared to deal you potentially lethal violence to ensure that you’re not diverging from the rules.

This just-below-the-surface violence is the crux of Graeber’s argument. He mocks the academic left who insist that violence is symbolic these days, suggesting that any grad student sitting in a university library reading Foucault and thinking about the symbolic nature of violence should consider the fact that if he’d attempted to enter that same library without a student ID, he’d have been swarmed by armed cops.

Bureaucracy is a utopian project: like all utopians, capitalist bureaucrats (whether in private- or public-sector) believe that humans can be perfected by modifying their behavior according to some ideal, and blame anyone who can’t live up to that ideal for failing to do so. If you can’t hack the paperwork to file your taxes, complete your welfare rules, figure out your 401(k) or register to vote, you’re obviously some kind of fuckup.

Bureaucracy begets bureaucracy. Every effort to do away with bureaucracy ends up with more bureaucracy.•

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“It’s Designed To Land Almost Anywhere”

February 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Of all the tomorrow things that may soon happen, ambulance drones seem like a fairly good bet. They won’t be prohibitively expensive and can deliver first responders into the middle of traffic accidents and other messy entanglements. From Mark Wilson at Fast Company:

In emergencies, seconds count. An estimated 1,000 “saveable” lives are lost a year because of slow emergency response in the nation’s biggest cities. But in traffic-jammed urban environments, how can a four-wheeled ambulance be expected to make it anywhere and back quickly?

Design firm argodesign has a wild conceptual solution. It’s a one-person ambulance drone modeled after a standard quadcopter—driven by a GPS, pilot, or combination of both—that could be dispatched to an emergency scene with a single EMT. It’s designed to land almost anywhere, thanks to a footprint the size of a compact car. The EMT stabilizes the patient, loads him up, and sends him back to the hospital for further treatment.

“Obviously, it’s not a thoroughly vetted concept, but I think it’s extremely intriguing where drones might show up,” says Mark Rolston, founder of argodesign. “It would be nice to see them used this way, rather than another military function or more photography.”

The idea was born from a team brainstorming session around how health care could become more accessible. The designers first thought about how they could build a better ambulance, and the rise ofautonomous vehicles inspired them to consider a self-driving ambulance. Then they thought of helicopters and drones, and the rest developed from there.•

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