Excerpts

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“I Have Thought About Him As A Presidential Candidate Without Passion Or Self-Involvement”

December 4, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Norman Mailer, no stranger to politics himself, sincerely wanted the Democrats to draft Ernest Hemingway, who liked to fucking fish, as their nominee for President in 1956, encouraging such a move in an open letter to the party in the Village Voice. Not quite as bad an idea as liberating Jack Henry Abbott, but not his best one, either. An excerpt from Mailer’s original article republished at the Penguin Random House Medium site:

YES, IT MAY SEEM a trifle fantastic at the first approach, but the man I think the Democrats ought to draft for their presidential candidate in 1956 is Ernest Hemingway.

I have had this thought in mind for some months, and have tried to consider its merits and demerits more than once. You see, I am far from a worshipper of Hemingway, but after a good many years of forever putting him down in my mind, I came to decide that like him or not, he was one of the two counterposed aesthetic forces in the American novel today — the other being Faulkner of course — and so his mark on history is probably assured.

Now, what I think of Hemingway as a writer would be of interest to very few people, but I underline that I am not a religious devotee of his work in order to emphasize that I have thought about him as a presidential candidate without passion or self-involvement (or at least so I believe it to be). As for his merits and even more important his possibilities for victory, I will try to discuss them quickly in the limits of this column.

To begin with, the Democratic Party has the poorest of chances against Eisenhower, and whether it be Stevenson, Kefauver, or some other political half- worthy, the candidate’s personality would suffer from his unfortunate resemblance to a prosperous undertaker. There is no getting around it — the American people tend to vote for the candidate who gives off the impression of having experienced some pleasure in his life, and Eisenhower, whatever his passive vicissitudes, looks like he has had a good time now and again. I would submit that this is one of the few healthy aspects of our unhealthy country — it is indeed folk wisdom.

A man who has had good times has invariably also suffered (as opposed to the unfortunate number of people who have avoided pain at the expense of avoiding pleasure as well), and the mixture of pain and pleasure in a man’s experiences is likely to give him the proportion, the common sense, and the charm a president needs.

Hemingway, I would guess, possesses exactly that kind of charm, possesses it in greater degree than Eisenhower, and so he would have some outside chance to win.•

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“Cryptocurrencies May Be The Biggest Endgame Threat, But Not The Biggest Immediate Threat”

December 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

David Weidner of Marketwatch on the existential threat Wall Street faces from cryptocurrencies and the more near-term hazard big banks are encountering. The opening:

“Wall Street’s greatest threat isn’t from regulation or another meltdown. As we’ve seen over the past few years, governments and central banks will enable and protect the status quo at any cost.

No, the threat isn’t from traditional sources — it’s from technology. So-called cryptocurrencies, including the best known one, bitcoin, will eventually dislodge the power banks, brokerages and other financial institutions have over the system. Digital currencies circumvent the fees and roadblocks to access that come with traditional financial services.

The possibilities, especially in the underdeveloped world, are enormous. As much as $9.6 trillion in assets locked out of the global economy could be freed up, accordingto the International Monetary Fund.

And on a bigger scale, the centralized power of these institutions will diminish. That was a key message at the Future of Money, a summit of forward-thinking pioneers in the digital-currency space in San Francisco on Tuesday. Bitcoin is community-based; there is no central bank.

Someday a winner will emerge, whether it be bitcoin, a rival or some yet-crafted currency.

There’s just one problem: It isn’t going to happen anytime soon. This stuff is not ready for prime time. It’s not even usable for people and organizations that want to use it. One attendee who was trying to use bitcoin to help finance power projects in underdeveloped nations complained of the currency’s wild valuation swings, the lack of trust and, well, the fact that no one uses it.

Said another enthusiast: ‘When and how do I get my mother to use bitcoin?’

That’s why cryptocurrencies may be the biggest endgame threat, but not the biggest immediate threat. That distinction goes to a new breed of banking that isn’t really technology focused at all. It’s called peer-to-peer lending.”

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“There’s Nothing That Spooks Us More”

December 4, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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In a New York Times opinion piece, Margaret Atwood looks at the specter of robotics, that helpful and scary thing, offering that it’s not our tin others that may eventually doom humanity but the growing need for a cheap energy source to power these systems we’re increasingly basing our civilization on. An excerpt:

Thereby hangs many a popular tale; for although we’ve pined for them and designed them, we’ve never felt down-to-earth regular-folks comfy with humanoid robots. There’s nothing that spooks us more, say those who study such things, than beings that appear to be human but aren’t quite. As long as they look like the Tin Woodman and have funnels on their heads, we can handle them; but if they look almost like us — if they look, for instance, like the ‘replicants’ in the film Blade Runner; or like the plastic-faced, sexually compliant fake Stepford Wives; or like the enemy robot-folk in the Terminator series, human enough until their skins burn off — that’s another matter.

The worry seems to be that perfected robots, instead of being proud to serve their creators, will rebel, resisting their subservient status and eliminating or enslaving us. Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice or the makers of golems, we can work wonders, but we fear that we can’t control the results. The robots in R.U.R. ultimately triumph, and this meme has been elaborated upon in story after story, both written and filmed, in the decades since.

A clever variant was supplied by John Wyndham in his 1954 story “Compassion Circuit,” in which empathetic robots, designed to react in a caring way to human suffering, cut off a sick woman’s head and attach it to a robot body. At the time Wyndham was writing, this plot line was viewed with some horror, but today we would probably say, “Awesome idea!” We’re already accustomed to the prospect of our future cyborgization, because — as Marshall McLuhan noted with respect to media — what we project changes us, what we farm also farms us, and thus what we roboticize may, in the future, roboticize us.

Maybe. Up to a point. If we let it.•

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“Don’t Build New Prisons. They Cost Too Much.”

December 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Almost as surprising as the seemingly sudden acceptance of gay marriage in America has been the GOP turnabout on warehousing nonviolent criminals, creating a massive prison state, a policy equally morally bankrupt and financially expensive. Former David Cameron speechwriter Danny Kruger visited Texas and reported for the BBC on the shuttering of prisons in a red state. An excerpt:

“Texas, for instance, has half the population of the UK but twice its number of prisoners.

Then something happened in 2007, when Texas Republican Congressman Jerry Madden was appointed chairman of the House Corrections Committee with the now famous words by his party leader: ‘Don’t build new prisons. They cost too much.’

The impulse to what has become the Right on Crime initiative was fiscal conservatism – the strong sense that the taxpayer was paying way too much money to fight a losing war against drugs, mental ill-health and petty criminality.

What Madden found was that too many low-level offenders were spending too long in prison, and not reforming. On the contrary, they were getting worse inside and not getting the help they needed on release.

The only response until then, from Democrat as well as Republican legislators, was to build more prisons. Indeed, Mr Madden’s analysis suggested that a further 17,000 prisoners were coming down the pipe towards them, requiring an extra $500m for new prisons. But he and his party didn’t want to spend more money building new prisons. So they thought of something else – rehab.”

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“It’s The ‘Moneyball’ Approach To Crime”

December 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

New York City is apparently a place where a black man can be choked to death with impunity for selling loose cigarettes, but white-collar criminals are bailed out by feds and gifted with bonuses for bringing down the nation’s economy. On the day of the non-indictment in the Eric Garner homicide, the New York Times Magazine published a piece by Chip Brown which examines the virtues of Manhattan D.A. Cyrus Vance Jr.’s data-rich approach to crime reduction. The thing is, the new system doesn’t move us beyond the crudity of the dubious Broken Windows Theory, only serving as a complement to it, and may actually exacerbate inequity and further profiling. Striving for fewer violent attacks is great, though that should include the kind Garner suffered. Numbers, ultimately, are only as good as the system they feed. An excerpt:

“C.S.U. ‘violence timelines’ reveal patterns around certain housing developments and neighborhoods, including shooting incidents that didn’t generate a police report but that prosecutors were able to substantiate through debriefings or reports on social media. Probably the most comprehensive database is the Crime Prevention System, which targets violent crimes and gathers on one spreadsheet the sort of information that used to be scattered on legal pads or parked in some retired detective’s head — details about a defendant, including nicknames, which can be linked to additional information: friends, tattoos, telltale scars, Facebook entries, geo-coded street addresses, debriefing tips, excerpts from jailhouse phone calls.

‘It’s the ‘Moneyball’ approach to crime,’ [Vance’s executive assistant D.A. Chauncey] Parker told me. ‘The tool is data; the benefit, public safety and justice — whom are we going to put in jail? If you have 10 guys dealing drugs, which one do you focus on? The assistant district attorneys know the rap sheets, they have the police statements like before, but now they know if you lift the left sleeve you’ll find a gang tattoo and if you look you’ll see a scar where the defendant was once shot in the ankle. Some of the defendants are often surprised we know so much about them.’

In speeches praising intelligence-driven prosecution, Vance often cites the case of a 270-pound scam artist named Naim Jabbar, who for more than a decade made a living in the Times Square area bumping into pedestrians and then demanding money, saying they had broken his glasses. Convicted 19 times on the misdemeanor charge of ‘fraudulent accosting,’ Jabbar never served more than five months in jail until he was flagged by the C.S.U. His next arrest, in July 2010, triggered an alert. Instead of being offered a plea bargain, he was indicted and subsequently convicted on a felony robbery charge, and sentenced to three and a half to seven years in prison. With time served before his conviction, he was soon paroled and then arrested again, in July 2014, for another broken-eyeglasses incident and charged with robbery and grand larceny. 

More broadly, working with the Police Department and following a plan based on information developed by the C.S.U., the Violent Criminal Enterprises Unit, which Vance created in his first term, began taking down the most violent of Manhattan’s roughly 30 gangs; since 2011, 17 gangs have been dismantled, including three broken up last June at the Manhattanville and Grant housing projects, resulting in the largest number of gang indictments in a single operation. ‘There’s a reason murders in Manhattan went from 70 in 2010 to 29 so far this year,’ Karen Friedman Agnifilo, former chief of the Trial Division, told me late last year. (In January, Vance promoted Friedman Agnifilo to the No. 2 job, chief assistant district attorney.) ‘We figured out who are the people driving crime in Manhattan, and for four years we focused on taking them out.’”

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“Bitcoin Isn’t Just A Way To Buy Gift Cards Online, But An Act Of Civil Disobedience”

December 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There are reasons to be wary of the U.S. government, but there’s also cause to fear the people, and though the two are supposed to be indivisible, you would be hard-pressed to convince the more paranoid among us that such a thing ever be considered. Disney World, that authoritarian state, was host in October to the initial “Coins in the Kingdom” conference, a gathering of cryptocurrency enthusiasts which delivered, among others, all manner of government-hating, Bitcoin-loving Libertarians to Walt-ville. They’re pioneers of a virtual kind, though they want to leverage online might to reconfigure the physical realm. Sam Biddle of Gawker decamped to Orlando to assess the damage:

“‘There are those who just want to be left alone, there are those that just won’t leave ’em alone! It’s no more complicated than that. You think it is, but it’s not.’

Podcaster Ernie Hancock, who takes credit for Ron Paul’s ‘rEVOLution’ campaign logo and once brandished a weapon at an Obama rally, provided Saturday’s opening remark before an audience of about 12. If you’ve ever wondered where the carpet that was removed from your parents house wound up, it appears to be in a Disney conference ballroom now.

Hancock delivered his comments urgently, as if stormtroopers from the Federal Reserve would storm the room at any moment. ‘What we want to do,’ he went on, with the lilt of a carny, ‘is try to make sure that bitcoin develops in such a way that it is supportive of the rights of the individual.’

I would hear this again, and again, and again: bitcoin is a weapon for liberty that we dearly need to wield against government. Bitcoin isn’t just a way to buy gift cards online, but an act of civil disobedience, a democratization of the global financial system. There’s no denying how radical that idea is.

But before we resisted them, we needed to be scared of them.

‘Can they?’ Hancock asked the audience, invoking every conceivable form of big government malice. ‘Then they are.’ It was up to all of us in the uncomfortable chairs to stop this. ‘If it’s technologically possible to advance the interest of those with coercive power, then it will eventually become politically inevitable.’ The audience nodded along—it starts with regulation, with Wall Street acceptance, and before you know it, a prison state. Or something. If anyone disputed the notion that the very concept of government was just one fat obstacle in the way of unobstructed bullion exchange paradise, they kept quiet.

Hancock was in good company at the Magic Kingdom. Down the orange-tinted hall from his orange-tinted conference room was another chasm of hellish textiles, set up with folding chairs and tables as an exhibitor hall. At one table stood Mark Edge and Carla Mora from the Free State Project, a campaign to get 20,000 people who hate and fear government to move to New Hampshire and live near each other. Carla, asking me if I were ‘liberty-minded’ (the actual word ‘libertarian’ was rarely heard), touted New Hampshire’s permissive laws about bar closing times.

I wasn’t ready to commit to a new life in a liberty-minded colony, but I was curious what any of this had to do with bitcoin. Orlando was a long way from Manchester.

Edge provided a cheery answer with his radio host’s tenor: ‘Wide [bitcoin] adoption needs to happen to decimate the state.’ Edge always said the word ‘state’ with finger air-quotes. ‘The state is the most killing-minded thing,’ he explained. As a pacifist, he saw bitcoin as his best means to hurt the U.S. government back, by ditching its dollars.

Edge’s outlook may have sounded fringe-y, but in this particular magic kingdom, there is no lunatic fringe.”

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“While Customers Save Money, Drivers May Also Earn Less”

December 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Uber doesn’t care about workers and wishes they would go away, and it doesn’t really even have much concern for its customers, surging prices in the middle of snowstorms. The company is enchanted only with its own emotionless dissection of the market, cooking its schemes into pure narcotic. While medallion prices seem to have fallen even more steeply than first reported, the leading ridesharer is seeking new and creative ways to marginalize drivers, the plans optional for the time being. From a Newsweek report by Polly Mosendz:

“Uber has just launched UberPool, a carpooling service, in New York. UberPool is already live in San Francisco and Paris. With UberPool, a rider will be able to pick up a second and even third Uber user along their way, riders with a destinations close by that of the original rider. Then, the cost of the ride is split between both parties. 

While customers save money, drivers may also earn less. Uber believes a driver won’t earn less simply because the ride may be longer, ‘Drivers spend more time earning money on longer trips—without the downtime between passengers.’ The focus of UberPool is on passengers, however, not drivers. Uber gives several examples of how this benefits New York riders: Williamsburg to the East Village will be as cheap as $7.50 using UberPool, and Nolita to Lincoln Center might be as long as $10 a ride, but none of how driver income may vary.

The long-term effect of UberPool, the company argues, will be getting cars off the road—they hope to remove 1 million cars from the road with the service. Uber estimates that in a personal car, there are only 4.8 person-trips per day. With UberPool, there are 36.4 person trips. 

That is, of course, if drivers agree to use the service.”

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“I Want To See Millions Of People Living And Working In Space”

December 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

You hear less about Jeff Bezos’ ambitions for space pioneering than you do Elon Musk’s or Richard Branson’s, perhaps because his core business, that mom-and-pop store Amazon, is such a lightning rod, sucking up all the oxygen. From a report about his work on Blue Origin from Lisa Eadicicco at Business Insider:

“Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has an ambitious vision for the future of humanity.

When asked about why space exploration appears to be a common interest among tech entrepreneurs such as himself, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, Bezos replied with the following:

‘We are really evolved to be pioneers,’ Bezos told Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget at this year’s Ignition conference. ‘And for good reason. New worlds have a way of saving old worlds… And that’s how it should be. We need the frontier. My vision is I want to see millions of people living and working in space.’

Bezos’ private spaceflight company Blue Origin is currently working with the United Launch Alliance to build a new liquid rocket engine called the BE-4. The United Launch Alliance is said to be one of the biggest rivals to Musk’s commercial spaceflight company SpaceX.”

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“There Once Was An Age When Speculation Matched Reality”

December 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I think the argument that technological progress has stalled, perhaps permanently plateaued, is a mismeasurement of what is and what will be, though I grant that the U.S. dropped the ball on space exploration soon after we touched down on the moon. While the cleverness of the Sharing Economy and utility of Weak AI are not giant leaps for humankind, I think work being done now in transportation, space exploration and medicine is setting us up for a new dawn, despite the extraordinary pettiness of our political system. At any rate, Michael Hanlon makes an interesting argument in favor of ours being a stagnant era in a new Aeon piece, “The Golden Quarter,” in which he anoints 1945-1971 as tech’s golden age. The opening:

We live in a golden age of technological, medical, scientific and social progress. Look at our computers! Look at our phones! Twenty years ago, the internet was a creaky machine for geeks. Now we can’t imagine life without it. We are on the verge of medical breakthroughs that would have seemed like magic only half a century ago: cloned organs, stem-cell therapies to repair our very DNA. Even now, life expectancy in some rich countries is improving by five hours a day. A day! Surely immortality, or something very like it, is just around the corner.

The notion that our 21st-century world is one of accelerating advances is so dominant that it seems churlish to challenge it. Almost every week we read about ‘new hopes’ for cancer sufferers, developments in the lab that might lead to new cures, talk of a new era of space tourism and super-jets that can fly round the world in a few hours. Yet a moment’s thought tells us that this vision of unparalleled innovation can’t be right, that many of these breathless reports of progress are in fact mere hype, speculation – even fantasy.

Yet there once was an age when speculation matched reality. It spluttered to a halt more than 40 years ago. Most of what has happened since has been merely incremental improvements upon what came before. That true age of innovation – I’ll call it the Golden Quarter – ran from approximately 1945 to 1971. Just about everything that defines the modern world either came about, or had its seeds sown, during this time. The Pill. Electronics. Computers and the birth of the internet. Nuclear power. Television. Antibiotics. Space travel. Civil rights.

There is more. Feminism. Teenagers. The Green Revolution in agriculture. Decolonisation. Popular music. Mass aviation. The birth of the gay rights movement. Cheap, reliable and safe automobiles. High-speed trains. We put a man on the Moon, sent a probe to Mars, beat smallpox and discovered the double-spiral key of life. The Golden Quarter was a unique period of less than a single human generation, a time when innovation appeared to be running on a mix of dragster fuel and dilithium crystals.

Today, progress is defined almost entirely by consumer-driven, often banal improvements in information technology.•

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“It’s Just That It Would Have Some Goal That Is Indifferent To Humans”

December 3, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies is sort of a dry read with a few colorful flourishes, but its ideas have front-burnered the existential threat of Artificial Intelligence, causing Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and other heady thinkers to warn of the perils of AI, “the last invention we will ever need to make,” in Bostrom-ian terms. The philosopher joined a very skeptical Russ Roberts for an EconTalk conversation about future machines so smart they have no use for us. Beyond playing the devil’s advocate, the host is perplexed by the idea of superintelligence can make the leap beyond our control, that it can become “God.” But I don’t think machines need be either human or sacred to slip from our grasp in the long-term future, to have “preferences” based not on emotion or intellect but just the result of deep learning that was inartfully programmed by humans in the first place. One exchange:

“Russ Roberts: 

So, let me raise, say, a thought that–I’m interested if anyone else has raised this with you in talking about the book. This is a strange thought, I suspect, but I want your reaction to it. The way you talk about superintelligence reminds me a lot about how medieval theologians talked about God. It’s unbounded. It can do anything. Except maybe created a rock so heavy it can’t move it. Has anyone ever made that observation to you, and what’s your reaction to that?

Nick Bostrom:

I think you might be the first, at least that I can remember.

Russ Roberts: 

Hmmm.

Nick Bostrom: 

Well, so there are a couple of analogies, and a couple of differences as well. One difference is we imagine that a superintelligence here will be bounded by the laws of physics, and which can be important when we are thinking about how we are thinking about how it might interact with other superintelligences that might exist out there in the vast universe. Another important difference is that we would get design this entity. So, if you imagine a pre-existing superintelligence that is out there and that has created the world and that has full control over the world, there might be a different set of options available across humans in deciding how we relate to that. But in this case, there are additional options on the table in that we actually have to figure out how to design it. We get to choose how to build it.

Russ Roberts:

Up to a point. Because you raise the specter of us losing control of it. To me, it creates–inevitably, by the way, much of this is science fiction, movie material; there’s all kinds of interesting speculations in your book, some of which would make wonderful movies and some of which maybe less so. But to me it sounds like you are trying to question–you are raising the question of whether this power that we are going to unleash might be a power that would not care about us. And it would be the equivalent of saying, of putting a god in charge of the universe who is not benevolent. And you are suggesting that in the creation of this power, we should try to steer it in a positive direction.

Nick Bostrom: 

Yeah. So in the first type of scenario which I mentioned, where you have a singleton forming because the first superintelligence is so powerful, then, yes, I think a lot will depend on what that superintelligence would want. And, the generic [?] there, I think it’s not so much that you would get a superintelligence that’s hostile or evil or hates humans. It’s just that it would have some goal that is indifferent to humans. The standard example being that of a paper clip maximizer. Imagine an artificial agent whose utility function is, say, linear in the number of paper clips it produces over time. But it is superintelligent, extremely clever at figuring out how to mobilize resources to achieve this goal. And then you start to think through, how would such an agent go about maximizing the number of paper clips that will be produced? And you realize that it will have an instrumental reason to get rid of humans in as much as maybe humans would maybe try to shut it off. And it can predict that there will be much fewer paper clips in the future if it’s no longer around to build them. So that would already create the society effect, an incentive for it to eliminate humans. Also, human bodies consist of atoms. And a lot of juicy[?] atoms that could be used to build some really nice paper clips. And so again, a society effect–it might have reasons to transform our bodies and the ecosphere into things that would be more optimal from the point of view of paper clip production. Presumably, space probe launchers that are used to send out probes into space that could then transform the accessible parts of the universe into paper clip factories or something like that. If one starts to think through possible goals that an artificial intelligence can have, it seems that almost all of those goals if consistently maximally realized would lead to a world where there would be no human beings and indeed perhaps nothing that we humans would accord value to. And it only looks like a very small subset of all goals, a very special subset, would be ones that, if realized, would have anything that we would regard as having value. So, the big challenge in engineering an artificial motivation system would be to try to reach into this large space of possible goals and take out ones that would actually sufficiently match our human goals, that we could somehow endorse the pursuit of these goals by a superintelligence.”

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“The Insects From The Medians And Traffic Islands Of Two Long Manhattan Streets…Could Remove The Equivalent Of 600,000 Potato Chips Per Year”

December 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I love you, New York City, but you smell. It’s not just the tourists urinating on skyscrapers or the all-around body funk of people pressed into crowded subway cars but also the mountains of rotting food discarded wherever. Just imagine how stanky it would be if there weren’t armies of insects gobbling up the the crumbs, crusts and cores we toss aside. In Mike Jeffries’ new piece at the Conversation, the ecologist charts the results of an experiment into the startling powers of voracious vermin in Manhattan. An excerpt:

“To audit the pavement biodiversity, the team collected insects from among the leaf litter, with additional forays into other areas in search of ants. The rate of food clear-up was measured by putting out potato chips, cookies and hot dogs and seeing how much was left the following day.

Some of the food was protected by wire mesh, others not – so that larger creatures such as rats and pigeons could get in too, to allow for their impact. The precise brands of crisp, cookie and hot dog are detailed, each cut up into more appetising chunks. …

The speed with which food was removed proved startling. In the first run of the experiment using small chunks of food, 59% was gone within 24 hours. A second run using larger portions resulted in a 32% loss within a day. Whole cookies and chips … gone, chunks of hot dog … vanished.

The insect life on the traffic islands consumed supplies two to three times faster than the inhabitants of the parks. Life in the fast lane perhaps, or maybe the park life was more used to ice creams and sandwiches. In either locality, hot dogs were preferred to the light snacks.

In total the insects from the medians and traffic islands of two long Manhattan streets – Broadway and West St – could remove the equivalent of 600,000 potato chips per year. This could become a standard measure of invertebrate junk food ecosystem services.”

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“I Think It’s Just Baffling That We’re Not Massively Larger”

December 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Alcor, the cryonics non-profit, isn’t dead or dying, but it’s seen livelier days. Like McDonald’s, it’s seeing surprising market resistance. Immortality by this method is still viewed by most as dubious or creepy or a luxury item, though even the 1% haven’t really embraced the deep freeze. Dr. Max More, the outfit’s CEO, spoke to Daniel Oberhaus of Vice about trying to overcome psychological, financial and technological barriers. The opening:

Question:

So, how’s Alcor doing?

Max More:

It’s growing, but much too slowly. I think it’s just baffling that we’re not massively larger because we’ve been around for 42 years. We’ve had periods of higher growth, so in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s we had a growth rate of 25-30 percent. It’s just dropped after that and gotten into the low single figures. We actually stopped growing a year or two ago and I think it’s because the dues were raised too high and the economy was doing badly. The [Alcor] board wanted to reduce dependence on donations by having higher membership dues, but they went too far. We’ve brought them down since then, we’ve made two reductions and now there are student discounts and discounts for long time members.

Question:

How much does it cost to get frozen indefinitely? 

Max More:

There are the main membership dues which are $530 per year and $180 per year on top of that for the Comprehensive Member Standby plan, which basically means that’s money that you pay into this fund and in turn we guarantee that wherever you are, we’ll be there. We just introduced a new policy which says if you provide $20,000 in addition to the $80,000 or $200,000 [that it takes to cryopreserve your head and body, respectively], then we’ll waive the CMS fee. This really helps younger members because an extra $20,000 in life insurance is really very little for them, whereas $180 per year actually feels a lot worse.

I gave a talk a few years ago called ‘Join the .00004%’ (because that’s how small we are) and that’s ludicrous to me. There are plenty of crazy ideas out there with much less backing that get much more support, and we have actual evidence for what we’re doing! We’ve been around for almost 43 years and only have 1008 members—that’s not very many. So why is that? Obviously, there is some expense to it, but I don’t think that’s the main thing.

Question:

What’s the main hurdle?

Max More:

There are major cultural and psychological barriers that have to be overcome and I think eventually they will be.•

 

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“Raw, Pure, Unbridled Ambition Is An Uncomfortable Thing To Look At”

December 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

America has a love-hate relationship with Uber, wanting what it offers even if it knows the company is ethically challenged, a Walmart on wheels. (Or perhaps the love-hate relationship is really with ourselves for being addicted to something that we know hurts others.) In “How to Get Away with Uber,” a terribly titled Matter piece, Bobbie Johnson tries to locate the source of our visceral discomfort with the leading ridesharer, thinking it may lie in the unblinkingly brutal nature of its business model–capitalism boiled down to its purest form–and the uncharted path that lies ahead. An excerpt:

“[Uber CEO] Travis Kalanick certainly knows who his heroes are. He rejects the Amazon comparison, but he’s made no secret of his admiration for Bezos (who was, in fact, an early Uber investor), or his envy of Amazon’s relentless march from a mere supplier of services to a business that maintains a choke hold on modern life (Amazon was, in fact, almost called Relentless.com). ‘Amazon was just books and then some CDs, and then they’re like, you know what, let’s do frickin’ ladders,’ Kalanick told Wired earlier this year. ‘We feel like we’re still realizing what the potential is… We don’t know yet where that stops.’

Amazon — more than any other company, more than Google, more than Facebook, more than Apple — taps into what people desire in a terrifyingly primal way: We want a thing, fast and preferably cheap. Not much else matters. We know Amazon’s not a nice company, and that the people who work there are treated poorly. We don’t always like it, but there is absolutely, definitively, nothing we will do to stop it. We are happily addicted.

That same feeling is there with Uber, except one thing: We know where Amazon has ended up, more or less, but we don’t know where Uber’s going to stop. Maybe, for Uber, it doesn’t stop at all. For Kalanick and his team, the means are the end. There is no greater mission. There is only hunger.

Raw, pure, unbridled ambition is an uncomfortable thing to look at. It’s not that it’s ugly, necessarily. It’s just brutally, shockingly honest. Uber does not pretend to have a glorious philosophy—it wants to make transport easy, but there is no aspiration as lofty as ‘organize the world’s information’ or ‘make the world more open and connected.’ And perhaps that’s the way it should be. After all, would it be more offensive if Uber had a mission beyond itself? It certainly feels like less of a betrayal to know that it just wants to be as big, as powerful, as necessary, as it can be.”

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“Mr. Bezos And The Staff Of The Post Have Their Work Cut Out For Them”

December 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Jeff Bezos didn’t think the Washington Post is hopeless, not completely, so he decided to buy the company. In a piece by Mike Isaac of the New York Times, which is currently undergoing its latest wave of painful buyouts and layoffs, Bezos explains his reasoning:

“In his telling, which was one of the first candid interviews on the subject since he bought the paper for $250 million last year, Mr. Bezos was approached through an intermediary by Donald E. Graham, then the chairman and chief executive of The Washington Post Company. Aside from his lack of expertise on the newspaper industry, Mr. Bezos was skeptical for other reasons.

‘I went through a few gates before deciding to buy The Post. Is it hopeless? I didn’t want to do it if it was,’ he said. ‘The Internet has radically disrupted traditional newspapers. The world is completely changed, and advertisers have tons of options on how to reach people in local areas.”

Mr. Bezos and the staff of The Post have their work cut out for them. As the newspaper industry undergoes significant change to cope with the rise of digital publishing, The Post has gone throughmultiple rounds of layoffs, and recently announced cuts to employees’ retirement benefits. Similar to The Post, The New York Times is currently going through a round of employee buyouts.

But Mr. Bezos was ultimately convinced that The Post, which he called a national institution, can be brought into the digital age by leveraging the technical expertise and knowledge that he has gained over his decades spent building Amazon into a global technology company.

‘I didn’t know anything about the newspaper business, but I did know something about the Internet,’ Mr. Bezos said. ‘That, combined with the financial runway that I can provide, is the reason why I bought The Post.’“

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“The Human Part Of Lawyering Would Shrink”

December 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

When walking in Brooklyn the other day I passed a tall, blond woman in her twenties, crying into her smartphone, who said to her connection, “I was always so happy until I went to law school.” I mean, if the lawyers are crying, what hope is there for the rest of us?

AI may or may not be the end of humanity, but a new report by Jomati Consultants, “Civilisation 2030: The Near Future for Law Firms,” predicts it will greatly disrupt law firms. From Legal Futures:

“The report’s focus on the future of work contained the most disturbing findings for lawyers. Its main proposition is that AI is already close in 2014. ‘It is no longer unrealistic to consider that workplace robots and their AI processing systems could reach the point of general production by 2030… after long incubation and experimentation, technology can suddenly race ahead at astonishing speed.’

By this time, ‘bots’ could be doing ‘low-level knowledge economy work’ and soon much more. ‘Eventually each bot would be able to do the work of a dozen low-level associates. They would not get tired. They would not seek advancement. They would not ask for pay rises. Process legal work would rapidly descend in cost.”

The human part of lawyering would shrink. ‘To sustain margins a law firm would have to show added value elsewhere, such as in high-level advisory work, effectively using the AI as a production tool that enabled them to retain the loyalty and major work of clients…

‘Clients would instead greatly value the human input of the firm’s top partners, especially those that could empathise with the client’s needs and show real understanding and human insight into their problems.’

Jomati pointed out that the managing partners of 2030 are in their 30s today and will embrace the advantages of AI. Alternative business structures (ABSs) in particular will be receptive, it predicted, ‘as it will greatly suit the type of matters they handle.’

It continued: ‘With their external investors able to provide significant capital, they will invest in the latest AI when it becomes available and use it to rapidly increase the volume of matters. This increased efficiency will not harm their model, but rather make the shareholders in their narrow equity model extremely wealthy.’

For associate lawyers, the rise of AI will be a disaster: ‘The number of associates that firms need to hire will be greatly reduced, at least if the intention is to use junior lawyers for billable work rather than primarily to educate and train them ready to become business winners.'”

“Artificial Intelligence Could Become ‘A Real Danger In The Not-Too-Distant Future'”

December 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

If we play our cards right, humans might be able to survive in this universe for a 100 billion years, but we’re not working the deck very well in some key ways. Human-made climate change, of course, is a gigantic near-term danger. Some see AI and technology as another existential threat, which of course it is in the long run, though the rub is we’ll need advanced technologies of all kinds to last into the deep future. A Financial Times piece by Sally Davies reports on Stephen Hawking’s warnings about technological catastrophe, something he seems more alarmed by as time passes:

“The astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has warned that artificial intelligence ‘could outsmart us all’ and is calling for humans to establish colonies on other planets to avoid ultimately a ‘near-certainty’ of technological catastrophe.

His dire predictions join recent warnings by several Silicon Valley tycoons about artificial intelligence even as many have piled more money into it.

Prof Hawking, who has motor neurone disease and uses a system designed by Intel to speak, said artificial intelligence could become ‘a real danger in the not-too-distant future’ if it became capable of designing improvements to itself.

Genetic engineering will allow us to increase the complexity of our DNA and ‘improve the human race,’ he told the Financial Times. But he added it would be a slow process and would take about 18 years before human beings saw any of the benefits.

‘By contrast, according to Moore’s Law, computers double their speed and memory capacity every 18 months. The risk is that computers develop intelligence and take over. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded,’ he said.”

 

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“Silicon Valley Really Differs From A Traditional City”

December 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Urban economist Edward Glaeser has a vested interest, of course, but he’s right when he says that the city is humanity’s greatest invention. One of the hallmarks of a healthy metropolis is a very diverse economy that can survive the vicissitudes of any one industry. Silicon Valley has thus far defied that rule. From an interview with Glaeser at Medium:

Question:

What works and doesn’t work about Silicon Valley?

Edward Glaeser:

Now Silicon Valley is, of course, very successful. It is a place that typifies idea creation. And, I think, almost single-handedly makes the case that new technologies do not make face-to-face contact obsolete… Marissa Mayer at Yahoo, right? Instead of saying, “Go telecommute,” she says you’ve got to show up because face-to-face contact really matters. It has lots of examples — these famous stories of people in the early days of Silicon Valley exchanging ideas at Walker’s Wagon Wheel (restaurant) and all that’s great.

There are ways, however, in which Silicon Valley really differs from a traditional city… First, it’s not all that diverse as an urban economy. That’s one of the things that makes you wonder whether or not it can continue to be as innovative as it has been. There’s a question of whether it will manage to have the same level of idea flows that it had in the past, because it is so singularly focused.

Second, the fact that they’ve made it so difficult to build means that these crappy starter homes are over $2 million. It’s insane. This means they are doing a very poor job of providing employment and economic possibilities for middle-income Americans.

Great cities of the past, be it Chicago or New York, when they got successful and they had an economic engine that was running, they built up around it, right? So think about the stockyards in Chicago. They built up around that thing and millions of people came to the city and found economic opportunity…

And the third point, which is related to this, is that the great cities of the past are archipelagos of neighborhoods. So when you think of what you can get in Chicago, for example, you can get living on the Gold Coast in a historic beautiful apartment building. You can live in a glass tower on the lake. You can live in a lower-density apartment area in Lincoln Park. You can get something within the city that feels like a suburban neighborhood. What that means is that as your life changes, and as your tastes change, you can have any number of urban options in which to live.

Silicon Valley kind of has one model. It has slightly higher-density single-family detached housing and slightly lower-density single-family housing… And I think this is what’s going on with the move to San Francisco, especially the ones that specialize in young, hip people. Their employees don’t want that. They don’t want the ranch house in the suburb. They actually want to live in the hip city…”•

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“The Mall Is Alive”

December 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Are malls dead or just the kind that we have known, geographically distant and not “smart”? In Liat Clark’s Wired UK piece, an industry insider pushes back at the idea that shopping centers will no longer be central. 

In five years time, the word ecommerce will no longer mean what we think it does today. According to J. Skyler Fernandes from Simon Venture Group ecommerce will not be understood as a separate business to offline retail — instead, the line between the two will continue to blur and morph, but the focus will always remain on physical shopping.

“I’m going to break one cliche now,” said Fernandes, who heads up the future of retail investment arm of America’s largest mall owner, Simon. “‘The mall is dead.’ That is not going to happen. The mall is alive. It is at the centre of community, it is the future of conversions and will play an increasingly important role online and off.”

Speaking at WIRED Retail, Fernandes revealed some staggering figures that show ecommerce is not only no longer in its infancy, it is nowhere near as vital to the retail industry as physical, in-store sales.

Ecommerce conversion rates are a paltry three percent, versus the 20-30 percent conversions of walk-ins to physical stores; basket sizes are 1.5-3 times bigger in-store; ecommerce is worth $304 billion, but traditional retail is worth $4.4 trillion.•

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“We’re Moving Into A World Where There’s Going To Be A Disconnect Between Work And Living”

December 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Robert Reich, complete mensch, asking Peter Diamandis of Singularity University about technological unemployment and how such a thing, if it were to become widespread, would shape political systems. Like a lot of Singularitarians, Diamandis is a Libertarian and capitalist at heart but a realist by nature.

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“It’s Made The Job A Lot Easier”

December 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Speaking of human-machine workplace tandems, Brandon Bailey of AP reports of Amazon’s deployment of a fleet of 15,000 robots in its warehouses, which is a great thing for laborers for now but not for long. Eventually, and not too far in the future, one will be employed more and the other less. The opening:

“TRACY, California (AP) — A year ago, Amazon.com workers like 34-year-old Rejinaldo Rosales hiked miles of aisles each shift to ‘pick’ each item a customer ordered and prepare it for shipping.

Now the e-commerce giant boasts that it has boosted efficiency — and given workers’ legs a break — by deploying more than 15,000 wheeled robots to crisscross the floors of its biggest warehouses and deliver stacks of toys, books and other products to employees.

‘We pick two to three times faster than we used to,’ Rosales said during a short break from sorting merchandise into bins at Amazon’s massive distribution center in Tracy, California, about 60 miles east of San Francisco. ‘It’s made the job a lot easier.’

Amazon.com Inc., which faces its single biggest day of online shopping on Monday, has invested heavily this year in upgrading and expanding its distribution network, adding new technology, opening more shipping centers and hiring 80,000 seasonal workers to meet the coming onslaught of holiday orders. Amazon says it processed orders for 36.8 million items on the Monday after Thanksgiving last year, and it’s expecting ‘Cyber Monday’ to be even busier this year.”

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“Our Machines Are Not Like Us”

December 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I can agree with Christopher Mims in his latest WSJ column, “Why We Needn’t Fear the Machines,” that the existential threat of AI may be overstated for the foreseeable future, but I think he’s way too sanguine about the disruption to employment we’re experiencing at the granular level–and will continue to experience for decades. Sure, the human-machine hybrid will be very effective in workplaces as it is in chess, but there will only be a few kings and many pawns. (Actually, the pawns may be completely cleared from the board.) The more potent argument might be that technology will end up creating whole new industries we can’t yet envision, though I doubt that will make up for the shortfall, either. From Mims:

“Often, when pundits talk about the companies building the future, we talk about them as if the world they are creating is an inevitability. Whether it’s big data and artificial intelligence replacing knowledge workers or taxicab drivers giving way to Uber drivers and eventually self-driving cars, the sense is that with time, humans become progressively less necessary.

But I think Turing, widely considered the father of artificial intelligence, would see things differently. He invented the Turing test for determining if a machine was intelligent—you simply interview it and make up your mind for yourself. It’s a surprisingly nonalgorithmic process for determining the truth or falsity of a statement: ‘Is this thing like me?’

Our machines are not like us. We could make them like us if we want, says Prof. [S. Barry] Cooper, by putting them in mechanical bodies and raising them like children. But we already have a much more efficient way to create human-level intelligence, one that has proved robust even in the face of the titanic changes brought about by its own creations.

The future of technology isn’t about replacing humans with machines, says Prof. Cooper—it’s about figuring out the most productive way for the two to collaborate. In a real and inescapable way, our machines need us just as much as we need them.”

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“We Have A Moral Obligation To Protect The Weakest Among Us”

December 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Justice only works if the people implementing it are just, the impulse to protect the most vulnerable among us useful only if there’s a sense of history and proportion. Some who see themselves as noble, who self-identify as put-upon, are not protecting people but merely a sense of privilege.

Two reactions to Ferguson follow, the first from Manny Fernandez and Alan Blinder of the New York Times about an armed militia that’s descended on the embattled town to protect the “weakest” and the second an exchange from an interview conducted by Frank Rich of New York with Chris Rock, who somehow keeps getting more brilliant and perceptive.

_____________________________

FERGUSON, Mo. — When Sam Andrews awoke on Tuesday morning, he found his wife watching a television interview with a woman whose bakery had been vandalized during the violent unrest here on Monday.

“She said, ‘You’ve got to go help her,’ ” Mr. Andrews said in an interview on Saturday morning.

And so Mr. Andrews, a former Defense Department contractor who is now a weapons engineer in the St. Louis area, set to work. Under the auspices of a national group called the Oath Keepers, Mr. Andrews accelerated plans to recruit and organize private security details for businesses in Ferguson, which are receiving the services for free. The volunteers, who are sometimes described as a citizen militia — but do not call themselves that — have taken up armed positions on rooftops here on recent nights.

“It’s really a broad group of citizens, and I’m sure their motivations are all different,” said Mr. Andrews, who is in his 50s. “In many of them, there’s probably a sense of patriotism. But I think in most of them, there’s probably something that they probably don’t even recognize: that we have a moral obligation to protect the weakest among us. When we see these violent people, these arsonists and anarchists, attacking, it just pokes at you in a deep place.”

_____________________________

Frank Rich:

What would you do in Ferguson that a standard reporter wouldn’t?

Chris Rock:

I’d do a special on race, but I’d have no black people.

Frank Rich:

Well, that would be much more revealing.

Chris Rock:

Yes, that would be an event. Here’s the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.

Frank Rich:

Right. It’s ridiculous.

Chris Rock:

So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.” It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.•

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“You’ll Not Go To A Video Store But Instead Order A Movie On Demand”

December 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

Several excerpts follow from a 1987 issue of Omni, the science magazine published by leathery beaver merchant Bob Guccione, in which Roger Ebert was dramatically right and only a little wrong about the future of film.

____________________________________

We will have high-definition, wide-screen television sets and a push-button dialing system to order the movie you want at the time you want it. You’ll not go to a video store but instead order a movie on demand and then pay for it. Videocassette tapes as we know them now will be obsolete both for showing prerecorded movies and for recording movies. People will record films on 8mm and will play them back using laser-disk/CD technology.

____________________________________

I also am very, very excited by the fact that before long, alternative films will penetrate the entire country. Today seventy-five percent of the gross from a typical art film in America comes from as few as six six– different theaters in six different cities. Ninety percent of the American motion-picture marketplace never shows art films. With this revolution in delivery and distribution, anyone, in any size town or hamlet, will see the movies he or she wants to see. It will be the same as it’s always been with books. You can be a hermit and still read any author you choose.

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With the advent of new. cheaper technology, countries that couldn’t afford to make films will begin producing films That express that country’s culture. It’s really an exciting possibility. As a critic, I see moves from Iran. North Vietnam, China, Morocco, Nigeria. But ninety-five percent of all the movies are made in the United States, Japan, Europe, Australia, and India. That means when large portions of the world’s population go to the movies, they see people who don’t speak their language or live in their country. This is going to change in a very big way.

____________________________________

Omni:

There are predictions that computers and robots will one day be used as actors in films and that computers will synthesize deceased film stars, to the delight of their fans. What do you think?

Roger Ebert:

That will be the day. That sounds like the very last thing in the world I would ever want to see. If in the future the technology does become available, there ought to be a law against it.

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The cassette and disk revolution will be consolidated within the next fifteen years. That’s a key factor to remember. The use of prints-will be obsolete. Studios won’t send a print to a theater. The movie will be delivered by satellite via high-definition television technology. This will cause a revolution in the economics of motion-picture production because it will be extremely cheap both to film and to distribute a movie. Because a movie will be beamed in for just exactly where and when it is needed, the break-even point will be reduced substantially. I’m sure we’ll still have a blockbuster mentality in the future — movies that one hundred million people want to see. But directors will be able to make a movie that one hundred thousand or ten thousand people might see. Directors will be free to experiment and take on more offbeat and personal projects. By the year 2000 or so, a motion picture will cost as much money as it now costs to publish a book or make a phonograph album.•

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“As Dishonest As Wall Street Is, It Doesn’t Compare To The Kind Of Thievery That Went On In Iraq And Afghanistan”

November 30, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

I doubt there’s ever been a bridge built without some money being lost to corruption. So accepted a practice it is that hardly a voice is raised provided the bridge gets built and it’s not a bridge to nowhere. But war isn’t business, or at least it shouldn’t be, and what went on in Iraq wasn’t mere malfeasance on the way to a completed project but a massive defrauding of the American people. In a New York Review of Books piece, Charles Simic reminds that as outrageous as some CEOs and bankers are, war contractors are even worse. An excerpt:

“What makes a career in white-collar crime so attractive is that there are so few risks anymore. Everyone knows about Wall Street bankers having their losses from various scams they concocted over the years covered by taxpayers. But now, even when bankers lose billions for their bank by making bad or reckless deals, or have to pay regulatory penalties, as Jamie Dimon, the current chairman, president, and chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase did earlier this year, they are more likely to get a 74 percent raise, as he did, than to lose their jobs. As for the federal agencies that are supposed to watch over them and the Justice Department that is supposed to haul these hucksters into court, if they so much as bestir themselves to confront the banks, they simply ask them to pay fines, thereby avoiding a judge or a jury and making sure that the details of their swindles can remain secret from the public.

As dishonest as Wall Street is, it doesn’t compare to the kind of thievery that went on in Iraq and Afghanistan. Once upon a time, war profiteers were looked at as the lowest of the low and condemned by presidents. ‘Worse than traitors in arms are the men who pretend loyalty to the flag, feast and fatten on the misfortunes of the Nation while patriotic blood is crimsoning the plains of the South and their countrymen mouldering in the dust,’ warned Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. ‘I don’t want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster,’ declared Franklin Roosevelt as the United States entered World War II.

Yet today, according to the Commission on Wartime Contracting, an independent, bipartisan legislative commission established to study wartime contracting, somewhere between $31 billion and $60 billion of US government money has been lost through contract waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is now common knowledge that contractors were paid millions of dollars for projects that were never built, that the Defense Department gave more than $400 billion to companies that had previously been sanctioned in cases involving fraud, and that the beneficiaries of such past largesse have not only gotten fabulously wealthy, but continue to be invited to pursue lucrative business opportunities in the new homeland security–industrial complex.”

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“By The End Of Next Year, The First Test Cars Using 100 Percent Solar Will Come Out”

November 30, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Solar-powered cars have been tried before, but their promise is more realistic now as performance increases and costs fall. You won’t be able to drive long stretches by 2015, but neighborhood trips might be a reality. From Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop’s New York Times interview with Li Hejun, a renewable-energy executive with the Hanergy Holding Group:

“Question:

Do you think one solar technology will dominate others?

Li Hejun:

There are many different types of solar technologies, and that’s fine; we’re like brothers and sisters. The market is big enough for everybody to survive, but thin-film, I think, is the current strategic trend and its production process has the advantage to be very clean. I like to compare crystalline-silicon panel to a black and white TV, and thin-film to an LCD TV. Thin-film is just a much more advanced technology, and I believe it will completely change the way we utilize energy because thin-film allows individuals to use solar energy easily, the way a big plant would with crystalline-silicon panels.

Question:

Can you elaborate on this personal use and its application in our daily life?

Li Hejun:

The two advantages are flexibility and portability. The thin-film is so light you could have it on your jacket, on your hat and it could then power up your phone. It can embrace curves; that’s another big advantage. You can’t do that with a crystal panel. We are currently testing thin-film with Aston Martin Racing on the roof and rear windscreen of the car to power air-conditioning and other electrical functions in the car.

In the future, we’re planning to work with more commercial car manufacturers. Right now, we already have it on the rooftop of some commercial cars in China, and for now, you can help reduce the usage of the gasoline by 20 to 30 percent; but in the coming two to three years, you will be able to replace more. According to our calculations, you need six square miles of our solar module to generate electricity to power an electric car. By the end of next year, the first test cars using 100 percent solar will come out, and you will be able to drive 80 kilometers, or about 18 miles, fully powered.”

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