Excerpts

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“The Ben Franklin Of Today Is Elon Musk”

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

Walter Isaacson, who has written his second Silicon Valley book, The Innovators, just conducted an AMA at Reddit. Elon Musk will no doubt be pleased with the headline quote, though for all his accomplishments, he certainly hasn’t emulated Benjamin Franklin’s political achievements, nor will he likely. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Hey Walter, who is the Ben Franklin of 2014?

Walter Isaacson:

The Ben Franklin of today is Elon Musk.

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Question:

I thoroughly enjoyed your biography on Steve Jobs! Thank you for your diligence!

I know you talked about how you had never done a biography on a living person before. What it easier to feel like you could get a more accurate picture of a living subject? Did you have a system in place that you felt would prevent the tainting of your perspective based on the bias of the person you were interviewing?

Walter Isaacson:

I have done living people before: Kissinger, the the Wise Men. With a living subject, you get to know (if you take time to do a lot of personal interviews and listen) a hundred times more than you can learn about a historic person. I know much more about the chamfers of the original mac than about all of Ben Franklin’s lightning rod and kite-flying experiments. I tend to be a bit soft when writing about someone alive, because I tend to like most people I get to know.

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Question:

I’m surprised to see computers have not evolved beyond silicon in nearly 30-40 years. What are your thoughts?

Walter Isaacson:

It would be interesting if we built computers not based on digital circuits using binary logic — and instead tried to replicate the human mind in a carbon-based and wetware chemical system, perhaps even an analog one, like nature did it!

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Question:

What are your thoughts on singularity? Do you think it will happen, and if so, when? 

Walter Isaacson:

The theme of my book is that human minds and computers bring different strengths to the party. The pursuit of strong Artificial Intelligence has been a bit of a mirage — starting in the 1950s, it’s always seen to be 20 years away. But the combination of humans and machines in more intimate partnership — what JCR Licklider called symbiosis and what Peter Thiel calls complementarity — has proven more fruitful. Indeed amazing. So I suspect that for the indefinite future, the combination of human minds and machine power will be more powerful than aiming for artificial intelligence and a singularity.•

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“The Air-Cleaning Building Is Designed To Be Easy To Take Apart And Reconstruct”

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

If one thing can destabilize China’s authoritarian form of capitalism, it might be the extreme pollution that’s attended the febrile pace of urbanization. A quick bit from a Fast Company post by Adele Peters about architect Alexander Balchin’s conceptual Clean Air Tower, a “portable” skyscraper inspired by China’s poor air quality which sucks pollutants from the atmosphere:

“Beijing is notorious for its record-breaking air pollution, but 12 other cities in China have even dirtier air. Dozens more fail to meet minimum standards for air that’s safe to breathe. While the Chinese government has committed billions to cleaning up pollution, those changes are happening slowly, especially in cities with little political clout. In the meantime, here’s another approach: Modular skyscrapers that suck up dirty air.

The Clean Air Tower, from China-based architect Alexander Balchin, is a conceptual design envisioned for the city of Binhai. ‘It’s one of China’s many ‘overnight cities’ where an entire city of skyscrapers is built simultaneously, all in a matter of years,’ Balchin explains. The air-cleaning building is designed to be easy to take apart and reconstruct, so if air quality improves in Binhai, the skyscraper can move to another city.”

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“Mars Needs Bureaucrats”

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

From Richard Hollingham’s BBC piece “Five Steps to Colonizing Mars,” a section about the development of government in space should we inhabit our neighboring planet and create a self-sustaining civilization:

I have written before of the challenges of governing an extraterrestrial colony. The early missions – particularly those involving space agencies – will almost certainly be run with a hierarchical command system. The past 50 years of human spaceflight have taught us that, in the extreme environment of space, this is the safest way. However, there is a fine line between a Star Trek-type command structure and a brutal military dictatorship, and as the settlement matures, some sort of democracy is going to be favoured.

“A space colony is a tyranny-prone environment,” says Charles Cockell, an astrobiologist from the University of Edinburgh who is also leading research on developing a constitution for space habitats. “If somebody gets control of oxygen, they could very well have control over the whole population and threaten dire consequences in return for extraordinary levels of power.”

As a commander of a space colony on Earth, Tarvin is one of the few people to have any experience of overseeing a Mars base. “It’s certainly not a Star Trek-style military environment,” he says. “It’s a small group of highly motivated people and it really doesn’t take much effort to manage them.”

A government also needs all the structures that go with it. Any new society needs an economy as well as systems to maintain the habitat, provide employment, health, childcare, social care and education. In short: Mars needs bureaucrats.•

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“Could Be A Very Messy Few Decades, Politically Speaking”

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

All these new technologies and the ones to come will create great wealth, but it will be up to us to figure out how to deal with rising inequality and technological unemployment. We’re likely looking at a long, hard slog getting from here to there. A few exchanges follow from an excellent Reddit AMA on the topic conducted by Ryan Avent, economics correspondent for the Economist.

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Question:

The industrial revolution destroyed a lot of jobs but also created a lot of new ones. What makes this new changes different? Won’t new opportunities replace the obsolete jobs?

Ryan Avent:

Maybe! We certainly shouldn’t rule it out.

But one thing I’ve tried to bring out in my writing on these subjects is that the industrial revolution was a huge mess for a lot of people. We can look back today and note that there’s tons of employment at high wages and so obviously everything worked out. But there were whole generations at a time during the IR that really never saw much benefit at all from industrialisation. Old ways of life were torn up, people found themselves in horrible, deadly cities, and wages were awful for long stretches of time. There was a reason people thought maybe communism wasn’t such a terrible idea.

Quite possibly this revolution won’t be as unpleasant or transformative. But it still might make for very hard times for workers for several decades (we’re well on our way, actually).

Then one has to think forward and say, ok, where will technology be in 20 years? Is there a point at which things will slow down enough for workers to catch up? I’m not sure. In the meantime, I think there is a strong argument for more action to cushion workers against economic troubles.

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Question:

What do you think is the nascent technology that will most greatly exacerbate inequality, both within nations and between them? Which one will do the most to decrease inequality?

Ryan Avent:

Over the longer term, and looking within nations, I think AI is likely to contribute most to inequality. It’s possible that AI will be a skill leveller, but I suspect it will not be. Those with more cognitive skills will be better at managing the intelligence at their disposal, asking the right question, etc.

Across nations, we’re talking advanced manufacturing and robotics. The huge advantage that emerging markets have relative to the developed world is a large stock of cheap labour. If technology means that firms no longer need to tap into those labour pools to make things cheaply, then it will be very difficult for developing economies to find a foothold in the global economy and raise their incomes.

In the short term, more mundane stuff will probably raise inequality. Mobile technology that allows really good teachers to reach many more students will reduce the need for mediocre teachers, for instance.

In the short term, peer-to-peer platforms could help reduce inequality by making it easier to match underemployed workers with people who are looking for particular skillsets. Over the long term, I’m not sure. Bionic implants? A drug that made it easy for any worker to be disciplined and conscientious might actually go a long way.

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Question:

Things seem pretty bad for low-to-mid-skill workers in developed nations: stagnant wages, increased disability enrollment, and lower workforce participation. The explanations I’m most familiar with include race-to-the-bottom globalization, technology, and now this gloomy-but-vague secular stagnation hypothesis.

So, two questions. First, do you agree & how do you break down attribution between causes these days? Second, if this trend continues do you expect to see larger shares of the population supported exclusively by transfers, and does this worry you (for practical reasons or otherwise)?

Ryan Avent:

I don’t know whether I’d consider secular stagnation a cause or just a way of describing a bunch of symptoms that may or may not be related to one particularly malady.

The big factors at work here seem to me to be technology and globalisation (which is related and dependent in some ways on technology). Interestingly, it’s not just workers in developed nations that are being affected. Wages have risen rapidly for workers in China, for instance, but in many parts of the emerging world inequality has been rising just as in the rich world, as has the share of national income going to owners of capital rather than workers.

The actual break-down depends on when and where you’re talking about. For service-sector workers now or manufacturing workers in the 1980s, technology was the biggest deal. For manufacturing workers in the 2000s it was almost all China.

Unless there is a big change in the way technology affects labour markets, there will be no getting around much greater transfers. That doesn’t worry me that much in and of itself. What does worry me is how we get there (or fail to). Political conflict over redistribution is often nasty, and politicians often seek to defuse it by redirecting anger to foreigners. Could be a very messy few decades, politically speaking. Messier.•

 

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“He Expects Multiple Robots In The Halls Of All Of Aloft’s Locations By Early 2016”

October 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The Aloft Hotel in Cupertino currently employs a single robot butler to deliver sundries to its many guests, but soon there’ll be an army of such dumb smart waiters in all lodgings. As the poet of despair once sang: “The bell hop’s tears keep flowing / The desk clerk’s dressed in black.” From Matt McFarland in the Washington Post:

“The situation usually plays out like this. You’re unpacking in a hotel room and realize you forgot something. Rather than trek to whatever store might be near, you call the front desk and ask for a razor, toothpaste or whatever you need. The hotel then sends someone up with the delivery.

Except for the Aloft Hotel in Cupertino, Calif, which will begin using an R2D2-esque robot for such trips. Fittingly, Aloft’s parent company, Starwood Hotels, tests the latest technology at the Silicon Valley hotel. Guests can enter their rooms with a smartphone app and bypass the traditional check-in process at the front desk.

For now, only one robot will shuttle around the hotel’s hallways in a pilot program, but Brian McGuinness, global brand leader at Starwood’s Speciality Select Brands, expects multiple robots in the halls of all of Aloft’s locations by early 2016.

The robot, which Aloft is calling the Botlr, is capable of safely riding elevators and navigating winding hallways. Botlr uses a camera and sonar to map out the hotel so it isn’t smashing into walls or falling down unanticipated steps. An elevator was retrofitted to communicate wirelessly with Botlr. The elevator car alerts Botlr that it’s in the lobby and safe to board. Botlr then boards, and passes on what floor it wants to travel to.”

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“A Former Cab Driver With His Own PR Handler? Curious.”

October 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

L.A. Weekly is reporting that its concerning story about Uber, penned by one of that company’s drivers, was responded to with some chicanery by the Silicon Valley ride-share service. From a post by Sarah Fenske:

“Yesterday — barely 24 hours after we published a first-person essay critical of Uber — L.A. Weekly‘s editorial assistant was contacted by a stranger offering a first-person essay about how great Uber is.

It was kind of strange. It was purportedly written by a former taxi driver named Cabdi Xuseen (‘Confessions of a Former L.A. Taxi Driver,’ the title read), but it came from the email of a different person, someone with the improbable name of Tawny Valentine. ‘This piece is exclusive to the L.A. Weekly and we hope that you would consider placing it,’ Valentine wrote.

A former cab driver with his own PR handler? Curious.

The essay was all about how great it was working for Uber. ‘I’ve driven a lot of things for a lot of different people throughout my career: taxis, limos, and even 18-wheel trucks. But now, I drive for myself, with Uber. I get to be my own boss. I make my own hours. My car is my small business, and I am free to run it as I see fit.’

Our editorial assistant emailed Valentine back. Normally, she told her, we hear from writers directly. What was her relationship with Xuseen? Valentine dodged the question, but sent us Xuseen’s cell, explaining, ‘Cadbi saw the piece that ran yesterday and wanted to author a response.’

Naturally, we called Xuseen. And he had a different story. Valentine had contacted him. He didn’t seem to have seen our piece at all. Instead, she’d reached out to him because he was one of Uber’s top-rated drivers — 4.87 out of 5 stars, he told us proudly.

So we emailed Valentine again. She reached out to him? Who was she working for?

Only then did the truth come out. ‘We work with Uber.'”

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“We Have To Make A Continuous Monitoring And Measuring Device”

October 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a Medium post, Steven Levy interviews Andrew Conrad of Google X, who explains the company’s attempts at an early-detection health system, which will be miniaturized computer particles that “live” in your bloodstream and are read by an external wearable, something akin to a Star Trek tricorder. An excerpt:

“Andrew Conrad:

The first thing you realize is the triggers of diseases usually start way before they’re clinically apparent. They are usually subtle and rare. Most of the time people are not sick. That means monitoring would have to be done continuously. You have to measure all the time because if you only measure once a year when people visit he doctor—or in men’s cases, once a decade—you’re going to miss huge swaths of the possibility of detecting disease early. So we have to make a continuous monitoring and measuring device. Since it’s continuous, it has to be something people wear, right? Can you imagine if you had to carry a sixty-pound thing around with a radar dish on your head and poke yourself with needles every hour? People just wouldn’t do it.

So the radical solution was to move away from the episodic, ‘Wait ‘til you feel a big lump in your chest before you go into the doctor’ approach, and do a continuous measurement of key biological markers through non-invasive devices. And we would do that by miniaturizing electronics. We can make a little computer chip which has three hundred and sixty thousand transistors on it, yet it’s the size of a piece of glitter. One of the other ways is to functionalize nanoparticles. Nanoparticles are the smallest engineered particles, the smallest engineered machines or things that you can make. Nature does its business on the molecular level or the cellular level. But for two thousand years we’ve looked at medicine at the organ or the organism level. That’s not the right way to do it. Imagine that you’re trying to describe the Parisian culture by flying over Paris in an airplane. You can describe the way the city looks and there’s a big tower and a river down the middle. But it’s really, really hard to opine or understand the culture from doing that. Its the same thing when we look at systems—you can see that there’s a complex system, but unless you’re down at the level where the transactions occur, it’s very hard for you to imagine how it works.”

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“Oh, We’re Really Making An AI”

October 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In an excellent Wired piece, Kevin Kelly predicts the near-term future of AI and reminds that search was never the principal goal of Google. He also explains that our attempt to define artificial intelligence has a parallel, tacit quest: redefining what being human means. An excerpt:

A picture of our AI future is coming into view, and it is not the HAL 9000—a discrete machine animated by a charismatic (yet potentially homicidal) humanlike consciousness—or a Singularitan rapture of superintelligence. The AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services—cheap, reliable, industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything, and almost invisible except when it blinks off. This common utility will serve you as much IQ as you want but no more than you need. Like all utilities, AI will be supremely boring, even as it transforms the Internet, the global economy, and civilization. It will enliven inert objects, much as electricity did more than a century ago. Everything that we formerly electrified we will now cognitize. This new utilitarian AI will also augment us individually as people (deepening our memory, speeding our recognition) and collectively as a species. There is almost nothing we can think of that cannot be made new, different, or interesting by infusing it with some extra IQ. In fact, the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI. This is a big deal, and now it’s here.

Around 2002 I attended a small party for Google—before its IPO, when it only focused on search. I struck up a conversation with Larry Page, Google’s brilliant cofounder, who became the company’s CEO in 2011. “Larry, I still don’t get it. There are so many search companies. Web search, for free? Where does that get you?” My unimaginative blindness is solid evidence that predicting is hard, especially about the future, but in my defense this was before Google had ramped up its ad-auction scheme to generate real income, long before YouTube or any other major acquisitions. I was not the only avid user of its search site who thought it would not last long. But Page’s reply has always stuck with me: “Oh, we’re really making an AI.”

I’ve thought a lot about that conversation over the past few years as Google has bought 14 AI and robotics companies. At first glance, you might think that Google is beefing up its AI portfolio to improve its search capabilities, since search contributes 80 percent of its revenue. But I think that’s backward. Rather than use AI to make its search better, Google is using search to make its AI better.•

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“We Are Personally And Collectively Complicit In The Recording Of Virtually Everything We Do”

October 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Legislation isn’t going to curb government surveillance nor will prosecutions put a halt to individuals hacking and leaking such information. The tools have become greater than the law–and they will grow even greater still. The other reason we won’t stop snooping is because most of us like it, not just the feeling of protection it gives us in these supposedly scary times, but also the acknowledgement that attends being monitored. We like to watch, and we like being watched. How important we must be. From a David Cole post at The New York Review of Books about Laura Poitras’ Snowden Affair documentary, Citizenfour:

“Snowden’s effort to tame his unruly hair also reveals the self-consciousness that seems to have pervaded every step of his decision to disclose the NSA files. He knows, of course, that he is being videotaped; he invited Poitras in, after all. (In addition to recording his every waking hour in the hotel room, she produced on the spot a twelve-minute film that was released the same week as the first disclosures, which introduced Snowden to the world as the NSA leaker.) Poitras does her best to conceal her presence as the filmmaker, but everyone involved knows they are being filmed, and that someday this will be shown on movie screens around the world. As a result, there are relatively few instances of real candor.

In this respect, Citizenfour unwittingly reflects the tenor of the digital age not just in its subject matter, but in its style. The film’s content concerns the ability of the government in the twenty-first century to monitor all of us at all times. The goal of the NSA’s mass surveillance programs is to ‘collect it all,’ as the agency itself declared in a PowerPoint slide leaked by Snowden. Technology has made that goal possible in ways that could hardly be imagined a decade ago. Snowden’s disclosures have put the world on notice that these are not abstract or speculative dangers.

But as Poitras’s real-time filmmaking itself reminds us, it’s not just the NSA and its sophisticated computers that make dragnet data collection possible. It’s also a defining feature of a world in which we are personally and collectively complicit in the recording of virtually everything we do.”

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“Blagden And His Co-Experimenters (Including A Dog) Subjected Themselves To Enormously Hot Temperatures”

October 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From an excellent post at the Public Domain Review about the Charles Blagden experiments with extreme heat 240 years ago in England, conducted at the same time that revolutionary foment was aboil in the American colonies:

“In 1774 and 1775 the British physician and scientist Charles Blagden conducted a series of experiments concerned with exploring the effects on the human body of extremely high temperatures, ‘air heated to a much higher degree than it was formerly thought any living creature could bear.’ In what equated to something akin to a ‘super-sauna,’ Blagden and his co-experimenters (including a dog) subjected themselves to enormously hot temperatures. Beginning at a modest 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius), by the 1775 session they progressed to temperatures upward of a whopping 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius). Not surprisingly the air was at times quite literally scorching, and a full cladding of clothing was mostly worn to protect their skin, though Blagden did experiment one time being in the room naked from the waist up with only a suspended cloth protecting him from the rays of the hot irons. Among his many observations, in his latter 1775 report to the Royal Society, Blagden became the first to explicitly recognise the role of perspiration in thermoregulation, seeing that the body temperatures of both the heat-subjected humans and heat-subjected dog were significantly lower than the air they were exposed to. The dog endured a temperature of 236 degrees Fahrenheit (113 degrees Celsius) for a full hour, with seemingly little distress, and recording a body temperature of only 110 Fahrenheit (43 degrees Celsius) – higher than a dog’s normal body temperature, but significantly cooler than the room. In reality the dog’s temperature was probably lower by a few degrees, as Blagden acknowledged he had a bit of trouble taking the measurement. In any case, such a difference in body and room temperature was an important one. Fearing the reliability of his thermometers, Blagden thought up a control for this thermo-regulating tendency of living bodies which he’d observed – a fat juicy steak.”

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“The Thing About Bibi Is, He’s A Chickenshit”

October 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Jeffrey Goldberg’s devastating Atlantic essay plumbs the depth of distrust between the Obama White House and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who seems more and more like a one-man Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld, desultory and self-preserving to the nth degree. The “chickenshit” quote refers to his lack of will, which has good and bad ramifications: He won’t order a major military strike, such as one against Iran, but nor will he move forward the peace process with the Palestinians. The opening:

‘The other day I was talking to a senior Obama administration official about the foreign leader who seems to frustrate the White House and the State Department the most. ‘The thing about Bibi is, he’s a chickenshit,’ this official said, referring to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, by his nickname.

This comment is representative of the gloves-off manner in which American and Israeli officials now talk about each other behind closed doors, and is yet another sign that relations between the Obama and Netanyahu governments have moved toward a full-blown crisis. The relationship between these two administrations— dual guarantors of the putatively ‘unbreakable’ bond between the U.S. and Israel—is now the worst it’s ever been, and it stands to get significantly worse after the November midterm elections. By next year, the Obama administration may actually withdraw diplomatic cover for Israel at the United Nations, but even before that, both sides are expecting a showdown over Iran, should an agreement be reached about the future of its nuclear program.

The fault for this breakdown in relations can be assigned in good part to the junior partner in the relationship, Netanyahu, and in particular, to the behavior of his cabinet. Netanyahu has told several people I’ve spoken to in recent days that he has ‘written off’ the Obama administration, and plans to speak directly to Congress and to the American people should an Iran nuclear deal be reached. For their part, Obama administration officials express, in the words of one official, a ‘red-hot anger’ at Netanyahu for pursuing settlement policies on the West Bank, and building policies in Jerusalem, that they believe have fatally undermined Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace process.

Over the years, Obama administration officials have described Netanyahu to me as recalcitrant, myopic, reactionary, obtuse, blustering, pompous, and ‘Aspergery.’ (These are verbatim descriptions; I keep a running list.)  But I had not previously heard Netanyahu described as a ‘chickenshit.’ I thought I appreciated the implication of this description, but it turns out I didn’t have a full understanding. From time to time, current and former administration officials have described Netanyahu as a national leader who acts as though he is mayor of Jerusalem, which is to say, a no-vision small-timer who worries mainly about pleasing the hardest core of his political constituency.”

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“[He] Hit Bottom With A Noticeable, Almost Cinematic Thud”

October 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

The opening of Kenneth Turan’s 1988 New York Times profile of Robert Towne, one of Hollywood’s all-time greatest screenwriters, who had been suffering through his professional and personal worst, and was angling for a career renaissance:

PACIFIC PALISADES, Calif.— Half a dozen years ago, Robert Towne, the Oscar-winning author of Chinatown, The Last Detail and Shampoo, hit bottom with a noticeable, almost cinematic thud. Alternately battered by ”a hideous custody battle” with his ex-wife, by the death of a dog he was ”shamelessly attached to,” and by a debilitating series of studio battles over his first directorial effort, Personal Best, and his script for Greystoke, he ”walked out on a desolate beach filled with garbage from Santa Monica Bay and felt I had nothing left.”

”There was a guy on the beach with his wife and he came up to me and said, ‘Excuse me, but we made a mistake. We came out here but because of a bus strike, our transfer tickets don’t work and we can’t get back downtown. Can you help us?’ I reached into my pocket and gave him all the money I had.

”I realized that that was the best thing anybody could have done for me. I was feeling completely impotent, and here on this beach was one guy I could do something for. It made me feel that I was not completely useless, that somehow things would be O.K.”

If Mr. Towne’s life were indeed a script, that turnaround would have been effected in an It’s a Wonderful Life twinkling. But its reality is that it has taken him six years to be sitting where he is, newly moved into the cozy den of a rambling Normanesque pile in Ronald Reagan’s old neighborhood in Pacific Palisades. He is remarried, has joint custody of his 10-year-old daughter, two new dogs and a new film that he’s written and directed, Tequila Sunrise, which opens on Friday. Yet not only are echoes from what, he says, ”the Irish would refer to as ‘the troubles’ ” very much with him, they in fact provided one of the underpinnings for his new project.

”Anytime you’re involved in legal matters, as I was with my divorce and Personal Best, you feel like a criminal, which made it particularly easy to identify with McCussick,” Mr. Towne says of Sunrise’s protagonist. Played by Mel Gibson, Dale McCussick is a longtime drug dealer who is desperately trying to get out of the business. His best friend since high school, Nick Frescia (Kurt Russell), also has a more than nodding acquaintance with drugs; he is a cop who’s just been named head of narcotics for Los Angeles County. And both men have the most passionate of interests in Jo Ann Vallenari (Michelle Pfeiffer), the hostess of a trendy South Bay restaurant.

”It’s a movie about the use and abuse of friendship,” Mr. Towne says. ”It’s natural to have occurred to someone who has close friends in Hollywood. People in the movie business don’t hesitate to say: ‘We go back a long way. You owe me one.’ I owe you one what?”

As with Chinatown, Mr. Towne has chosen to make his points within the framework of an elaborately plotted melodrama. ”I think melodrama is always a splendid occasion to entertain an audience and say things you want to say without rubbing their noses in it,” he says. ”With melodrama, as in dreams, you’re always flirting with the disparity between appearance and reality, which is a great deal of fun. And that’s also not unrelated to my perception of my life working in Hollywood, where you’re always wondering, ‘What does that guy really mean?”’

With his close-cropped salt-and-pepper beard, tousled graying hair and soft, almost hypnotic voice, the 53-year-old Mr. Towne could pass for a particularly potent counterculture guru, and, in fact, in an industry starved for wise men, he is often cast in that role. His near-legendary uncredited contributions to scripts other people wrote include restructuring Bonnie and Clyde and creating the Al Pacino-Marlon Brando tomato-garden scene in The Godfather, which Francis Coppola acknowledged in his Oscar acceptance speech.•

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“The Robot Can Lead Them To The Aisle Where An Item Is Located”

October 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The promise of in the 1920s of automated department stores with robot salespeople was a false one, the technology nowhere near complete. But the robo-staff is ready for its close-up now, as Lowe’s is testing out the nouveau machinery in some of its stores. From Mae Anderson at Phys.org:

“The robots are coming. Lowe’s is testing whether new bots on wheels can improve its customer service, like helping a shopper find a match for something as simple as a nail.

Four robots are being tested an Orchard Supply Hardware store owned by Lowe’s Companies Inc. in San Jose, California.

The robots dubbed OSHbots look like white columns with two large black screens on either side of them, and wheels to help them move. They are equipped with 3D cameras so they can scan and identify items. And customers can research items they want to buy on their screen. Then the robot can lead them to the aisle where an item is located.

‘They’re based on making a science fiction story a reality,’ said Kyle Nel, executive director of Lowe’s Innovation Lab.

The robots also have a database of what inventory is in stock at the store, so they can let customers know if something is out of stock or not.

‘People can come in with a random screw and say Mr. Robot, I need more of these, and if we do have it in the store, they can find it,’ Nel said. The robots can speak in English and Spanish.”

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“Do You Believe That Those Who Behead Others Are Good Muslims?”

October 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

An Islamic State recruiter calling himself Abu Sattar, who brings potential warriors into the fold to smite the infidels or some such bullshit, sat for an interview with Hasnain Kazim of Spiegel. Why? Was it a part of recruitment? Was it a different need? An excerpt:

“Spiegel:

Do you believe that those who behead others are good Muslims?

Abu Sattar:

Let me ask you this: Do you believe that those who launch air strikes on Afghan weddings or who march into a country like Iraq on specious grounds are good Christians? Are those responsible for Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib good Christians?

Spiegel:

You are dodging the question. The events you speak of were not undertaken in the name of a religion and were heavily criticized in the West. Once again: What is a good Muslim for you? What kinds of people are you recruiting?

Abu Sattar:

A Muslim is a person who follows Allah’s laws without question. Sharia is our law. No interpretation is needed, nor are laws made by men. Allah is the only lawmaker. We have determined that there are plenty of people, in Germany too, who perceive the emptiness of the modern world and who yearn for values of the kind embodied by Islam. Those who are opposed to Sharia are not Muslims. We talk to the people who come to us and evaluate on the basis of dialogue how deep their faith is.”

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“Americans Have A Higher Chance Of Marrying Kim Kardashian Than Dying Of Ebola”

October 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Zero Americans have died so far on U.S. soil from the Ebola virus, but the media, politicians and the public have all acted like wackjobs about the non-epidemic. Sure, we should be providing as much aid as possible to Liberia and other effected states, but we shouldn’t live in fear in America, something we seem to have done almost constantly since 9/11, which has led only to bad policy. Those concerned about Ebola or some other potential plague taking hold stateside should push for the Affordable Care Act to be truly universal and demand that congress allow President Obama to name a Surgeon General, something Republicans have refused to do as a way of hampering Obamacare. From Edward Luce in the Financial Times:

“Based on the death rate so far, Americans have a higher chance of marrying Kim Kardashian than dying of Ebola – or so the tweet goes. But the uneven tug of war between the federal government, which is sticking to scientific talking points, and politicians on the stump, who are falling one by one to an epidemic of panic, is no joke. More than 45 per cent of Americans believe that either they, or close friends and relatives, will contract Ebola, according to the Kaiser family foundation. More than three-quarters support imposing a US travel ban on flights to and from Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Though led by Republicans, the panic is becoming bipartisan. In the past few days, three US states – New York, Illinois and New Jersey – have imposed a 21-day quarantine on anyone who has had contact with an Ebola patient. Two have Democratic governors, both of whom are facing re-election next week. In the midterm congressional elections, Democratic candidates are scrambling to repudiate President Barack Obama’s opposition to a travel ban. Among these are Kay Hagan, the embattled Democratic senator from North Carolina, and Jeanne Shaheen, who faces a tough fight in New Hampshire.”

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“Even Draconian Restrictions Of Childbirth, Pandemics Or A Third World War Would Still Leave The World With Too Many People”

October 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

While WWIII, plague or other large-scale disasters would result in a humanitarian crisis, none of those calamities would do much to slow down the growth of global population, which is currently headed toward 10 billion by 2100. From Mark Tran at The Guardian:

“The pace of population growth is so quick that even draconian restrictions of childbirth, pandemics or a third world war would still leave the world with too many people for the planet to sustain, according to a study.

Rather than reducing the number of people, cutting the consumption of natural resources and enhanced recycling would have a better chance of achieving effective sustainability gains in the next 85 years, said thereport published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

‘We were surprised that a five-year WW3 scenario, mimicking the same proportion of people killed in the first and second world wars combined, barely registered a blip on the human population trajectory this century,’ said Prof Barry Brook, who co-led the study at the University of Adelaide, in Australia. …

Brook, now at the University of Tasmania, said policymakers needed to discuss population growth more, but warned that the inexorable momentum of the global human population ruled out any demographic quick fixes to our sustainability problems.

‘Our work reveals that effective family planning and reproduction education worldwide have great potential to constrain the size of the human population and alleviate pressure on resource availability over the longer term,’ he said. ‘Our great-great-great-great grandchildren might ultimately benefit from such planning, but people alive today will not.'”

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“I Started To Witness The Ruthless Machinations Of A Libertarian Monopoly”

October 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In an L.A. Weekly article, an anonymous Uber driver reveals the company’s scorched-earth strategy, in which its massive capital temporarily rewards drivers and passengers, putting its competition in the gutter. An excerpt:

“Fast-forward to a month later where I found myself ‘Lyfting’ around L.A. as a driver, relatively impressed with the functionality of the app and the casual rapport I was having with passengers. Most were proud converts (‘Taxis suck! Thank God for ridesharing!’) and I couldn’t blame them. Despite the absurd mustache calling card on my front bumper, it was easy-peasy and the money wasn’t bad. I even made a friend or two.

Then, suddenly, a strange passenger appeared. His destination was only a couple blocks away and he used that distance to ‘refer’ me to UberX, claiming I’d get $500 for joining and driving 20 rides plus zero commission for the first month. I had no dog in this fight and money talks, so I did it.

Passenger X was smart. He made his commission for bringing me to the dark side. He knew how to work the system to his advantage. As it turns out, so did Uber.

Once I joined Uber, there seemed to be no looking back. I scored $500 for joining, $500 or $250 for referring friends to the platform, $40 per hour guarantees on Friday and Saturday nights. My first night I made about $300, mainly due to a 7.5 surge price on a trip from West Hollywood to downtown L.A. which cost the passenger more than $100. Unethical? You betcha. Did I care? Not a bit! I finally had a part-time gig that paid like it was full-time. I could make more in a weekend than some people make all week. Having worked many dismal minimum wage jobs, this was a godsend. But even God knows the devil is in the details.

I started to witness the ruthless machinations of a libertarian monopoly. While evading most taxi regulations and delving into ethically murky waters, Uber was aggressively trying to eliminate the competition, free-market style. It wasn’t exactly subtle: ‘Earn $500 for referring Lyft drivers!’ Hmm. The money was good, but where was it coming from? How long could it last? And at what expense? The answers, respectively, are Google, not long and everyone’s expense.

I’ll elaborate.”

“There Is No Positive Economic Impact From Hosting”

October 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Olympics costs cities far more to host than it returns in revenue. Supposedly, the aura of the Games will make up for the shortfall, magically transforming any metropolis into a tourist magnet. Try telling that to the people of Montreal, which spent big on the 1976 Games and paid for it for next 30 years. In fact, that’s been the experience of most hosts over the last four decades.

In a post at The Conversation, Andrew Zimbalist, the Smith economist who’s long proven the financial folly of American cities building publicly funded stadiums for pro-sports teams, explains why authoritarian countries currently have a great shot at attracting the five-ring circus:

“The games’ promoters, however, claim the real payoff comes in increased tourism, foreign investment and trade. As my own research confirms, the difficulty with this assertion is that there is little evidence to back it up. London and Beijing, for instance, each experienced a drop in tourism when they hosted the summer games. That is, the increase in tourism for the Olympics was more than offset by a decrease in normal tourism, as people decided to stay away from the crowds and high prices. To be sure, the large majority of scholarly studies concludes that there is no positive economic impact from hosting.

There is growing evidence that the IOC has overplayed its hand. The number of bidders for the Winter Olympics has gone steadily down from nine in 1995 for the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City to just two in 2014 for the 2022 Games, and for the summer Olympics from 12 in 1997 for the 2004 games in Athens to three in 2013 for the 2020 games in Tokyo.

Potential bids for the 2022 Winter Olympics from Krakow, Stockholm, Munich, Davos, Lviv and Oslo were withdrawn in 2013 and 2014. This leaves only two authoritarian countries, Kazakhstan and China, in the hosting competition. Many analysts have concluded that democratic governments can no longer get away with wasting billions of dollars on dubious Olympic glory.”

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“It Looks Like Google Lives In Its Own Space-Time”

October 27, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In trying to name Google’s Achilles’ heels, is a cloistered workforce among them? I don’t know that Bell Labs technologists were out mixing with the hoi polloi either, but that outfit was a government sponsored monopoly that didn’t have to worry about competition. From Frédéric Filloux at Quartz:

“Google’s disconnect from the outside world keeps growing. More than ever, it looks like an insulated community, nurturing its own vision of the digital world, with less and less concern for its users who also happen to be its customers. It looks like Google lives in its own space-time (which is not completely a figure of speech since the company maintains its own set of atomic clocks to synchronize its data centers across the world independently from official time sources). 

You can actually feel it when hanging around its vast campus, where large luxury buses coming from San Francisco pour out scores of young people, mostly male (70%) mostly white (61%), produced by the same set of top universities (in order: Stanford, UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, UCLA…) They are pampered, with free food, on location dental care, etc. They see the world through the mirrored glass of their offices, their computer screens and the reams of data that constitute their daily reality.

Google is a brainy but also messy company where the left hemisphere ignores what the other one does. Since the right one (the engineers) is particularly creative and productive, the left brain suffers a lot.”

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“These Vehicles Are Much More Useful And Commercially Viable Than People May Expect”

October 27, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Brad Templeton is a consultant for Google’s driverless-cars division, so he has a dog–a car–in this race, but I think his response to Lee Gomes’ recent Slate piece about the disappointment of autonomous cars, the idea that they may never be viable, is pretty reasonable. Vehicles will be incrementally more robotic and independent in the near-term, offering automated parking and autopilot on highways, and in the longer term, when the final 5% of the process is figured and infrastructure is retrofitted, their function will be even greater. From Templeton:

“Fully functional robocars that can drive almost everywhere are not coming this decade, but nor are they many decades away. But more to the point, less-functional robocars are probably coming this decade — much sooner than these articles expect, and these vehicles are much more useful and commercially viable than people may expect.

There are many challenges facing developers, and those challenges will keep them busy refining products for a long time to come. Most of those challenges either already have a path to solution, or constrain a future vehicle only in modest ways that still allow it to be viable. Some of the problems are in the ‘unsolved’ class. It is harder to predict when those solutions will come, of course, but at the same time one should remember that many of the systems in today’s research vehicles where in this class just a few years ago. Tackling hard problems is just what these teams are good at doing. This doesn’t guarantee success, but neither does it require you bet against it.

And very few of the problems seem to be in the ‘unsolvable without human-smart AI’ class, at least none that bar highly useful operation.”

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“Aldrin Wants The Mars Explorers Of Tomorrow To Stay There”

October 27, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Buzz Aldrin, who survived a mission to the moon and an est workshop, wants to send pioneers to Mars and leave them there for awhile, perhaps not permanently as some others have suggested, but for a good, long spell. From Abby Phillip at the Washington Post:

“Buzz Aldrin has been on a mission to the moon. But these days, the legendary Apollo 11 astronaut is fixated on one thing: Getting humankind to Mars — and keeping them there for a long time.

Aldrin has some ideas about what a human mission to the red planet should look like. And unlike his triumphant return to Earth, Aldrin wants the Mars explorers of tomorrow to stay there. Potentially, for a very long time.

‘It [will] cost the world — and the U.S. — billions and billions of dollars to put these people there, and you’re going to bring them back?’ Aldrin said during a panel discussion at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this week. ‘What are you going to do when you bring them back here that can possibly compare [to] the value that they would be if they stayed there and Mars wasn’t empty? And then, they helped to work with the next group and it builds up a cadre of people. ‘When we’ve got 100 — or whatever it is — then we start bringing people back.'”

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“Robot Learning Is Going To Be Greatly Accelerated”

October 27, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Cloud robotics is an absolute must if driverless cars and the Internet of Things are going to take off, but it’s also an invitation to mayhem, heretofore unimagined acts of terrorism and war. In Quentin Hardy’s New York Times interview with Berkeley roboticist Ken Goldberg, various angles of the topic are analyzed. The opening: 

“Question:

What is cloud robotics?

Ken Goldberg:

Cloud robotics is a new way of thinking about robots. For a long time, we thought that robots were off by themselves, with their own processing power. When we connect them to the cloud, the learning from one robot can be processed remotely and mixed with information from other robots.

Question:

Why is that a big deal?

Ken Goldberg:

Robot learning is going to be greatly accelerated. Putting it a little simply, one robot can spend 10,000 hours learning something, or 10,000 robots can spend one hour learning the same thing.

Question:

How long has this been around?

Ken Goldberg:

The term ‘cloud robotics’ was coined in 2010 by James Kuffner, who was at Carnegie Mellon and then went to Google. I had been doing robot control over the Internet since the mid-90s, with a garden people could connect to, then plant seeds or water their plants.

The cloud is different from my Internet ‘telegarden,’ though. The cloud can have all the computation and memory stored remotely. That means all of the endpoints can be lightweight, and there is a huge collective benefit. These robots can address billions of behaviors and learn how to do important things quickly.

Question:

What are some examples of this?

Ken Goldberg:

Google’s self-driving cars are cloud robots. Each can learn something about roads, or driving, or conditions, and it sends the information to the Google cloud, where it can be used to improve the performance of other cars.

Health care is also very promising: Right now radiation treatments involve putting a radioactive seed next to a tumor, using a catheter that has to push through other tissue and organs. The damage could be minimized if the catheter worked like a robot and had motion planning to avoid certain objects. Tedious medical work, like suturing a wound, might be done faster and better. Giving intravenous fluids to Ebola patients is difficult and risks contamination; some people are looking at ways a robot could sense where a vein is and insert the needle.

Another area is household maintenance, particularly with seniors. Robots could pick up clutter, which would help elderly people avoid falling and hurting themselves.”

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“It Is A Glimpse Into The Future That Will Inspire Wonder In Some People”

October 27, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Windowless planes, something maybe just a decade away, doesn’t refer to aircraft completely closed but the opposite. In an effort to reduce plane weight, the windows would be gone from the fuselage and lightweight screens on the inside would show what’s on the exterior, making it feel like a house of glass. Of course, some of us would rather not look. From Shane Hickey at the Guardian:

“It is a glimpse into the future that will inspire wonder in some people but perhaps strike terror into the heart of the nervous flyer: a windowless plane that nonetheless allows passengers to see what’s going on outside, as well as checking their email and surfing the net.

In a vision of what the next generation of commercial aircraft could look like in little more than a decade, windows would be replaced by full-length screens allowing constant views of the world outside. Passengers would be able to switch the view on and off according to their preference, identify prominent sights by tapping the screen or even just surf the internet.

The early-stage concept for the windowless plane, based on technology used in mobile phones and televisions, hails from the Centre for Process Innovation (CPI), an organisation with sites across north-east England that works with companies to develop new products. It imagines how large, hi-definition, ultra thin and lightweight displays could form the inside of the fuselage, displaying images of the exterior from cameras mounted on the plane’s exterior.

But the real ambition echoes a constant quest in the aviation industry: how to reduce weight, which would cut fuel consumption, thereby bringing down fares. According to the CPI, for every 1% reduction in the weight of an aircraft, there is a saving in fuel of 0.75%.”

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“What Could Go Wrong?”

October 27, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Just because Julian Assange is a megalomaniacal creepbag doesn’t mean he’s wrong about everything. He’s most certainly not. In a Newsweek excerpt from his book When Google Met Wikileaks, Assange recounts his 2011 meeting with that company’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and Ideas Director Jared Cohen, and his subsequent realization that the search giant enjoys a cozy relationship with the inner sanctums of D.C.’s biggest power brokers, even the White House. I don’t doubt that Google, the de facto Bell Labs of our time and likely in possession of more information than any other entity in the history of Earth, is indeed ensconced in politics (and vice versa), though I would caution against thinking the Silicon Valley behemoth is some sort of shadow government. In his black-and-white way of viewing the world, Assange needs his foes to be as massive as his ego, and he wants to see Google as an indomitable force shaping our world. While it has some influence–and I wish corporations didn’t have any entrée into such quarters–I think Assange is overestimating the company’s importance as a world-maker to inflate his own. In fact, if Google is mainly a search company a decade or two from now, it won’t have much sway at all–it’ll probably be in a lot of trouble. A passage about Assange’s research into Cohen’s role in geopolitics:

“Looking for something more concrete, I began to search in WikiLeaks’ archive for information on Cohen. State Department cables released as part of Cablegate reveal that Cohen had been in Afghanistan in 2009, trying to convince the four major Afghan mobile phone companies to move their antennas onto U.S. military bases. In Lebanon, he quietly worked to establish an intellectual and clerical rival to Hezbollah, the ‘Higher Shia League.’ And in London he offered Bollywood movie executives funds to insert anti-extremist content into their films, and promised to connect them to related networks in Hollywood.

Three days after he visited me at Ellingham Hall, Jared Cohen flew to Ireland to direct the ‘Save Summit,’ an event co-sponsored by Google Ideas and the Council on Foreign Relations. Gathering former inner-city gang members, right-wing militants, violent nationalists and ‘religious extremists’ from all over the world together in one place, the event aimed to workshop technological solutions to the problem of ‘violent extremism.’ What could go wrong?

Cohen’s world seems to be one event like this after another: endless soirees for the cross-fertilization of influence between elites and their vassals, under the pious rubric of ‘civil society.’ The received wisdom in advanced capitalist societies is that there still exists an organic ‘civil society sector’ in which institutions form autonomously and come together to manifest the interests and will of citizens. The fable has it that the boundaries of this sector are respected by actors from government and the ‘private sector,’ leaving a safe space for NGOs and nonprofits to advocate for things like human rights, free speech and accountable government.

This sounds like a great idea. But if it was ever true, it has not been for decades. Since at least the 1970s, authentic actors like unions and churches have folded under a sustained assault by free-market statism, transforming ‘civil society’ into a buyer’s market for political factions and corporate interests looking to exert influence at arm’s length. The last forty years have seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy.”

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“He Suddenly Decided It Was Obsolete”

October 27, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The New York Times started to go electric during the 1970s, beginning on the task of computerizing its newsroom to simplify production, but Marshall McLuhan was already dismayed by the antiquated way he had to consume the information. From a 1976 Barbara Rowes People article:

“For years, while he waited for breakfast, McLuhan read the New York Times, until he suddenly decided it was obsolete. ‘The complicated layout of the Times is 19th-century. To get through the whole damn thing would take at least a week. In the electronic age people want information quickly.’ He now picks up the news of the day from the Toronto Globe and Mail.“

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