Excerpts

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“Our Species Would Come To Depend On The Actions Of Machine Superintelligence”

February 16, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, who thinks the sky may be fake or falling, has a new title, Superintelligence, which is about the Singularlity, out later this year. An excerpt from Bookseller about it, and then a passage from a 2007 New York Times article in which I first encountered Bostrom’s version of our world as a computer simulation.

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From Bookseller:

“’Everyone wonders when we’ll create a machine that’s as smart as us—or maybe just a little bit smarter than us. What people can fail to realise is that’s not the end of the process, rather [it’s] the beginning,’ [Oxford University Press science publisher Keith] Mansfield commented. ‘The smart machine will be capable of improving itself, becoming smarter still. Very quickly, we may see an intelligence explosion, with humanity left far behind.’

Just as the fate of gorillas now depends more on humans than on gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species would come to depend on the actions of machine superintelligence, Bostrom’s book will argue.”

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From “Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch,” by John Tierney:

“Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or ‘posthumans,’ could run ‘ancestor simulations’ of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.

There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.

The math and the logic are inexorable once you assume that lots of simulations are being run. But there are a couple of alternative hypotheses, as Dr. Bostrom points out. One is that civilization never attains the technology to run simulations (perhaps because it self-destructs before reaching that stage). The other hypothesis is that posthumans decide not to run the simulations.

‘This kind of posthuman might have other ways of having fun, like stimulating their pleasure centers directly,’ Dr. Bostrom says. ‘Maybe they wouldn’t need to do simulations for scientific reasons because they’d have better methodologies for understanding their past. It’s quite possible they would have moral prohibitions against simulating people, although the fact that something is immoral doesn’t mean it won’t happen.’

Dr. Bostrom doesn’t pretend to know which of these hypotheses is more likely, but he thinks none of them can be ruled out.”

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“They Will Help Fuel An International Market In Reproductive Technology”

February 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Generations into the future, no one will understand why we grew so livid when athletes used PEDs because everyone will be using them–as well as next-level methods of enhancement. The Financial Times has an article full of predictions from a trio of economists about life in 2114. An astute passage from Stanford’s Alvin Roth on the subject of human progress:

“The biggest trend of future history is that the world economy will keep growing and becoming more connected. Material prosperity will increase and healthy longevity will rise. While greater prosperity will not eliminate competition, it will give people more choices about whether and how hard to compete. Many will opt for a slower track, spending more time accumulating youthful experiences. Retirement will be a longer part of life and new forms of retirement will emerge.

For those who wish to compete, there will be technological developments to help them. Some of these, such as performance-enhancing drugs, are becoming available today but are widely regarded as repugnant. That repugnance seems likely to fade.

While we may continue to cancel sporting victories won with the help of drugs, we are unlikely to resist cancer cures or software or theorems produced with the assistance of drugs that aid concentration, memory or intelligence. Safe performance-en­hancing drugs may come to be seen as akin to good nutrition. Drugs may not be optional in future competitive careers. When assistant professors of economics in 2114 fall behind their expected production of an article per week, their department chair may suggest they increase their dosage of creativity-enhancing or attention-focusing drugs to increase their chance of tenure. And some drugs – memory enhancers, say – may be seen not as performance enhancers but as cures for things we did not previously think of as diseases.

Similar to the way drugs will allow us to improve our own performance, increased understanding of foetal development will allow parents to select or manipulate some of the genetic endowment of their children. Some of these options will remain repugnant even as they become more widely available, while others may come to be seen as part of careful child rearing. To the extent that these technologies are subject to legal limitations in some places but not others, they will help fuel an international market in reproductive technology. We already see the beginnings of such a market, as access to fertility treatments, and markets for eggs, sperm and surrogate wombs are more available in the US and India than in many places, drawing ‘fertility tourists.'”

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“It’s All So Brand New That There’s Nothing To Go By Yet”

February 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Steve Ditlea, who wrote the 1981 Inc report about Apple Computers banishing typewriters from its offices, published a piece in the same publication the following year about the birth of the software industry. One of the players he mentions was Gary Kildall, a star-crossed software pioneer who was elbowed aside by Microsoft and died young after some sort of mysterious injury suffered in a biker bar in Monterrey. An excerpt from Ditlea’s article, when Kildall and others were trying to code the future:

“In 1976, Bill Gates, then 20, and Paul Allen, 23, were running a company they had started the year before in Gates’s college dorm in Boston. That same year, Gary Kildall, 34 was starting a company in his backyard toolshed in California. Tony Gold, 30, was still a credit officer at a New York City bank. Dan Fylstra, 25, was starting at the Harvard Business School. Dan Bricklin, 25, was getting ready to apply to business schools in Massachusetts, and Bob Frankston, 27, was working as a computer programmer near Boston.

All seven of these people started and now run companies that produce and/or publish software for personal computers. All five of their companies — whose combined revenues just missed $50 million in 1981 — are doubling or tripling in size each year. All of these entrepreneurs are, or soon will be, millionaires. All are likely to be the leaders of the personal-computer software industry — quoted during economic crisis, looked up to by future business-school students.

The five companies they founded have created a new industry from scratch. And now they’ve been joined by as many as 1,000 more companies offering for sale some 5,000 software programs. The pressures to stay on top in the industry are intense. Some of the biggest companies in the country have turned their attention to micro software in recent months. Professional investors are scrambling to pour millions of dollars of venture capital into the leading companies. And the independents — only a dozen or so had sales of more than $1 million in 1981 — are straining to stay out in front.

‘It’s a tremendous business to be part of,’ says Mike Belling, 32, who bought the three-month-old Stoneware Inc. in June 1980 with his partner, Kenneth Klein, 42. ‘But it has its pitfalls, like cars used to. It’s all so brand new that there’s nothing to go by yet. There’s no history to tell you how many copies of a program to produce, for instance.’

Five years ago, the micro-software industry didn’t exist.”•

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“These Games Would Be The First ‘Free-Enterprise, Private-Sector Olympics'”

February 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The Olympics weren’t always a corporate event treated like a telenovela on TV–that began in 1984. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and IOC organizer Peter Ueberroth took a Games no one wanted and put it in the black by drowning it in corporate green. It was a financial success, though it changed the event for good. Ueberroth’s Olympic glory led him to be named Time’s “Man of the Year” and become MLB Commissioner, his five-year run marred by the collusion scandal, which not only broke the rules but was also a colossal misunderstanding of baseball economics. The opening of “The Branding of the Olympics,” Hua Hsu’s Grantland article about 1984’s changing of the guard:

“Tom Bradley liked to tell the story of how he watched the 1932 Olympics through the fence of Los Angeles’s Memorial Coliseum. He was 14 at the time, and the pageantry and spectacle of it all offered a welcome reprieve from the uncertain world around him. There was no Great Depression, no future, no worries — just these races he could still recall in startling detail nearly 50 years later. He could never have imagined that an African American might one day be mayor of this growing city and that it would be him. It could never have occurred to him that this moment of pure astonishment would become part of a story he would tell over and over — a story that would change the Games forever.

Nobody wanted the 1984 Summer Olympics.1 But the success of those Games revitalized the possibilities of such global spectacles. We take it for granted nowadays that hosting big, expensive, and complicated events like the Olympics or World Cup is a desirable thing for cities and nations. They have become ways of announcing a regime’s makeover or burnishing a national brand; at the very least, politicians and developers invoke hosting duties as an official mandate to raze like hell. In the late 1970s, though, the Olympics weren’t seen as profitable or peaceful. Violence had marred the 1968 and 1972 Summer Olympics. The 1976 Montreal Games overran their budget so drastically that the debts weren’t paid off until 2006. When it came time in 1978 to find a host for the 1984 Games, the only cities that expressed interest were Tehran — which withdrew before making a formal bid — and Los Angeles.

Taxpayers and city officials balked at Bradley’s proposal to bring the Games to L.A., especially as tales of Montreal’s financial woes began to circulate. But Bradley used that unwillingness to his advantage, agreeing that taxpayers should not have to bear the burden of the Games and floating the possibility instead that they be staged without any direct public funding. The city’s existing facilities were sufficient, and corporate sponsors could pay for whatever else needed to be built. The rest of the operating budget would come from ticket sales, television, merchandising, and licensing.

Besides the initial Games in 1896, no Olympics had been underwritten entirely by private money. And other than the 1932 Games in Los Angeles and 1948 Games in London, no Olympics had ever reported a profit.2 In 1980, Peter Ueberroth, who had been appointed to head the L.A. Olympic committee, explained to the New York Times that these Games would be the first ‘free-enterprise, private-sector Olympics, with no taxpayer money.'”

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The 1932 L.A. Games that Bradley watched as a child:

The 1984 Games, featuring a UFO:

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“Until Quite Recently Rapid Communication, Information Acquisition, And Knowledge Sharing…Were Essentially Limited To The Planet’s Elite”

February 14, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I agree with Douglas Hofstadter that today’s AI isn’t true AI because it can’t really think, but the machines we have (and are soon to have) possess an amazing utility. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, authors of The Second Machine Age, believe as most do, that the near-term Computer Age will be rocky, but they’re more sanguine about long-term prospects. They see the Google Glass as half full. An excerpt from their new Atlantic piece:

“Today, people with connected smartphones or tablets anywhere in the world have access to many (if not most) of the same communication resources and information that we do while sitting in our offices at MIT. They can search the Web and browse Wikipedia. They can follow online courses, some of them taught by the best in the academic world. They can share their insights on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and many other services, most of which are free. They can even conduct sophisticated data analyses using cloud resources such as Amazon Web Services and R, an open source application for statistics.13 In short, they can be full contributors in the work of innovation and knowledge creation, taking advantage of what Autodesk CEO Carl Bass calls ‘infinite computing.’

Until quite recently rapid communication, information acquisition, and knowledge sharing, especially over long distances, were essentially limited to the planet’s elite. Now they’re much more democratic and egalitarian, and getting more so all the time. The journalist A. J. Liebling famously remarked that, ‘Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.’ It is no exaggeration to say that billions of people will soon have a printing press, reference library, school, and computer all at their fingertips.

We believe that this development will boost human progress. We can’t predict exactly what new insights, products, and solutions will arrive in the coming years, but we are fully confident that they’ll be impressive. The second machine age will be characterized by countless instances of machine intelligence and billions of interconnected brains working together to better understand and improve our world. It will make mockery out of all that came before.”

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“Amazon Has Successfully Fostered The Idea That A Book Is A Thing Of Minimal Value”

February 14, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I think the culture is much fuller, not narrower, in this wired and connected time. The “barbarians” have finally stormed the gates, and the whole system has been decentralized. That’s a good thing. But I suppose it depends on how you define “culture.” In “Cheap Words,” George Packer’s latest New Yorker piece, he looks at the battle between Amazon and publishers over the value of books and the nature of their distribution. Toward the end, the writer makes this more macro point:

“This conversation, though important, takes place in the shallows and misses the deeper currents that, in the digital age, are pushing American culture under the control of ever fewer and more powerful corporations.”

I don’t agree with that because I’m defining “culture” differently than Packer, but the writer makes a lot of excellent points on the micro level about the great book battle, because being able to get books cheaply now is wonderful but could have future implications. An excerpt:

“Lately, digital titles have levelled off at about thirty per cent of book sales. Whatever the temporary fluctuations in publishers’ profits, the long-term outlook is discouraging. This is partly because Americans don’t read as many books as they used to—they are too busy doing other things with their devices—but also because of the relentless downward pressure on prices that Amazon enforces. The digital market is awash with millions of barely edited titles, most of it dreck, while readers are being conditioned to think that books are worth as little as a sandwich. ‘Amazon has successfully fostered the idea that a book is a thing of minimal value,’ [Dennis] Johnson said. ‘It’s a widget.’

There are two ways to think about this. Amazon believes that its approach encourages ever more people to tell their stories to ever more people, and turns writers into entrepreneurs; the price per unit might be cheap, but the higher number of units sold, and the accompanying royalties, will make authors wealthier. Jane Friedman, of Open Road, is unfazed by the prospect that Amazon might destroy the old model of publishing. ‘They are practicing the American Dream—competition is good!’ she told me. Publishers, meanwhile, ‘have been banks for authors. Advances have been very high.’ In Friedman’s view, selling digital books at low prices will democratize reading: ‘What do you want as an author—to sell books to as few people as possible for as much as possible, or for as little as possible to as many readers as possible?’

The answer seems self-evident, but there is a more skeptical view. Several editors, agents, and authors told me that the money for serious fiction and nonfiction has eroded dramatically in recent years; advances on mid-list titles—books that are expected to sell modestly but whose quality gives them a strong chance of enduring—have declined by a quarter. These are the kinds of book that particularly benefit from the attention of editors and marketers, and that attract gifted people to publishing, despite the pitiful salaries. Without sufficient advances, many writers will not be able to undertake long, difficult, risky projects. Those who do so anyway will have to expend a lot of effort mastering the art of blowing their own horn. ‘Writing is being outsourced, because the only people who can afford to write books make money elsewhere—academics, rich people, celebrities,’ Colin Robinson, a veteran publisher, said. ‘The real talent, the people who are writers because they happen to be really good at writing—they aren’t going to be able to afford to do it.'”

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“The Result Is What One Executive Calls ‘The Most Computerized Company In The World'”

February 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From a 1981 Inc. article by Steve Ditlea that covered Apple Computers’ decision to disappear the typewriter from its desks and make space for the “office of the future”:

“Apple Computer Inc. practices what it preaches. Without fanfare, the firm has inaugurated the workplace of the future by putting its personal computers on most of its employees’ desks. The company almost eliminated typewriters, abolished the job title of secretary, and instituted a more efficient and pleasant work environment.

In a memo circulated last year, then-president Mike Scott ushered in a new age in office procedures. ‘EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY!! NO MORE TYPEWRITERS ARE TO BE PURCHASED, LEASED, etc., etc. Apple is an innovative company. We must believe and lead in all areas. If word processing is so neat, then let’s all use it! Goal: by 1-1-81, NO typewriters at Apple… We believe the typewriter is obsolete. Let’s prove it inside before we try and convince our customers.’

Combined with conventional data processing run on a Digital Equipment Corp. minicomputer system, the result is what one executive calls ‘the most computerized company in the world,’ a revolutionary development even by the high-tech standards of California’s Santa Clara County (a.k.a. Silicon Valley).

There are now no more than 20 typewriters left in the 2,200 employee firm. Instead of typewriters, the several hundred employees involved in composing or disseminating letters, memos, documents, or reports use a typewritersized Apple II with built-in keyboard, a pair of add-on disk drives, a video monitor, and Apple Writer, the company’s own disk-stored word processing software. Word processing has gained a foothold in many businesses, but never before has a firm so completely done away with typewriters by executive fiat. …

The Apple way is best exemplified by chairman of the board and co-founder Steve Jobs, a dark-haired 26-year-old, who in grey workshirt and slacks this particular morning could easily be mistaken for a maintenance worker. Instead he’s the holder of the largest single block of Apple stock, some 7.5 million shares worth about $163 million at recent market prices.

When Steve Jobs speaks, it is with the ‘gee-whiz’ enthusiasm of someone who sees the future and is making sure it works. He explains the decision to put an Apple computer on every desk as part of an overall desire to institute a more humane workplace. ‘Not only do our area associates have the freedom to do more rewarding, enriching tasks, they have the chance to get involved in solving problems that can ultimately affect the success of the entire company.’

As for worker fears that office automation may lead to greater unemployment, he insists the opposite is true, with personal computers opening up jobs for Apple employees.”

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In 1967, Walter Cronkite imagined the remote office of the future:

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“Murray Acts As A Kind Of Father Figure To The Saturday Night Live Alumni”

February 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Bill Murray’s interview with Charlie Rose a couple days ago was a nice complement to his recent Ask Me Anything. I thought the most interesting part was when he explained to the host how he caught “Oscar fever” at the time of Lost in Translation. Murray, of all people, being disappointed in not winning an Oscar was a disappointment in itself, so it’s great he has more perspective now.

The opening of “The Rumpled Anarchy of Bill Murray,” a 1988 New York Times Magazine article by Timothy White, which misunderstood the comic’s cerebral nature for a Zen-like one, and opens with the first-ever reunion of SNL alumni:

“AS HOLLYWOOD parties go, the one in full swing this past spring in a handsome, Georgian Revival home off Sunset Boulevard was an anomaly.

No agents circulated, no studio executives haunted the hallways. The food was lasagna and fried chicken; the beverages, Mexican beer and bottled seltzer – with the seltzer proving the more popular. Instead of dizzying references to ‘gross points,’ ‘back-end deals,’ scripts ‘in turnaround’ and multimillion-dollar movie deals, the talk concerned the fortunes of Chicago sports teams and New York rock bands, and the only ‘creative products’ under scrutiny were baby pictures.

If any aspect of ‘the industry’ was being bantered about, it was the return to the employment ranks of the party’s co-host, Bill Murray, who had, earlier that day, finished filming for Scrooged – an outlandish adaptation of the Dickens Christmas classic that will be released on Wednesday. Coincidentally, three other film comedies featuring other former Saturday Night Live regulars were then nearing completion: Coming to America, starring Eddie Murphy; Caddyshack II, starring Chevy Chase, and My Stepmother Is an Alien, starring Dan Aykroyd. To celebrate this serendipitous event, Murray and Peter Aykroyd, an actor-composer who is Dan’s younger brother, had decided on this first-time-ever gathering of Saturday Night Live alumni.

A picture of genial abandon in rumpled khakis, football jersey and sneakers, Murray was urging Dan Aykroyd, Laraine Newman and Chevy Chase to drop their ‘reserves of cool’ on the dance floor and ‘get down!’ Murray’s warmth is disarming. Chase, for instance, once considered Murray a rival, and the feeling was mutual. Murray was hired at Saturday Night Live in January 1977, just five weeks after Chase left for a movie career. The pressure Murray felt in trying to supplant his predecessor flared into backstage fisticuffs when Chase returned as a guest host for the third season of Saturday Night Live. Now, the two are thoroughly at ease with each other. Even Eddie Murphy, a Saturday Night Live latecomer whose box-office magnetism eclipses that of most of his associates, is meek in Murray’s presence.

Bill Murray is considered by his colleagues to be a man who has made peace with any private demons he might have had, someone who has brought his personal life and his career into enviable concord. Slightly disheveled and projecting what Richard Donner, the director of Scrooged, calls ‘a woolly Zen wisdom,’ Murray acts as a kind of father figure to the Saturday Night Live alumni.”

 

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“Artificial Intelligence Is A Slippery Term”

February 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Douglas Hofstadter, cognitive scientist and author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, explains why Watson and Siri aren’t true AI and why the field lost its way decades ago, in a Q&A conducted by William Herkewitz at Popular Mechanics, which has a terribly designed website. The opening:

“Question:

You’ve said in the past that IBM’s Jeopardy-playing computer, Watson, isn’t deserving of the term artificial intelligence. Why?

Douglas Hofstadter:

Well, artificial intelligence is a slippery term. It could refer to just getting machines to do things that seem intelligent on the surface, such as playing chess well or translating from one language to another on a superficial level—things that are impressive if you don’t look at the details. In that sense, we’ve already created what some people call artificial intelligence. But if you mean a machine that has real intelligence, that is thinking—that’s inaccurate. Watson is basically a text search algorithm connected to a database just like Google search. It doesn’t understand what it’s reading. In fact, read is the wrong word. It’s not reading anything because it’s not comprehending anything. Watson is finding text without having a clue as to what the text means. In that sense, there’s no intelligence there. It’s clever, it’s impressive, but it’s absolutely vacuous.

Question:

Do you think we’ll start seeing diminishing returns from a Watson-like approach to AI?

Douglas Hofstadter:

I can’t really predict that. But what I can say is that I’ve monitored Google Translate—which uses a similar approach—for many years. Google Translate is developing and it’s making progress because the developers are inventing new, clever ways of milking the quickness of computers and the vastness of its database. But it’s not making progress at all in the sense of understanding your text, and you can still see it falling flat on its face a lot of the time. And I know it’ll never produce polished [translated] text, because real translating involves understanding what is being said and then reproducing the ideas that you just heard in a different language. Translation has to do with ideas, it doesn’t have to do with words, and Google Translate is about words triggering other words.

Question:

So why are AI researchers so focused on building programs and computers that don’t do anything like thinking?

Douglas Hofstadter:

They’re not studying the mind and they’re not trying to find out the principles of intelligence, so research may not be the right word for what drives people in the field that today is called artificial intelligence. They’re doing product development.

I might say though, that 30 to 40 years ago, when the field was really young, artificial intelligence wasn’t about making money, and the people in the field weren’t driven by developing products. It was about understanding how the mind works and trying to get computers to do things that the mind can do. The mind is very fluid and flexible, so how do you get a rigid machine to do very fluid things? That’s a beautiful paradox and very exciting, philosophically.”

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“The Ugly Get Screwed”

February 13, 2014 in Excerpts | Permalink

I’m personally most attracted to women who are slender and pretty–though my version of pretty might differ from yours–but I would never hire someone on that basis or give them any professional favoritism. I don’t think that’s always the case, however. I remember that when Tina Brown was the Editor-in-Chief of the New Yorker, she would comment that “cuteness” was a factor in hiring writers. Perhaps she was just making a flippant remark, but the thriving cosmetic-surgery industry suggests that many believe good-looking people enjoy an unfair advantage because of their big, gorgeous heads. The opening of “The Ugly Truth,” Jonny Thakkar’s Aeon essay which examines the underlying meaning of beauty and obesity and braces and Botox:

“The faces and forms of oppression are many, but nearly all of them flow from injustice, the treatment of people otherwise than they deserve. It’s hard to say what exactly any one person deserves, of course, but in the modern world we tend to think that desert is somehow related to what people can control. The colour of your skin is not up to you, for example, so treating you badly on its basis is oppressive. The treatment in question doesn’t have to be explicit: a society that marginalises homosexuals might not be as oppressive as one that imprisons them, but it is oppressive nonetheless. Sexuality and race are fairly obvious fault lines for oppression, as are class and gender. But if oppression is treating people otherwise than they deserve, there’s another category that tends to slip under our radar, namely the oppression of the ugly.

We don’t choose the configuration of our facial features any more than we choose our skin colour, yet people discriminate based on looks all the time. As the psychologist Comila Shahani-Denning put it, summarising research on the topic in Hofstra Horizons in 2003: ‘Attractiveness biases have been demonstrated in such different areas as teacher judgments of students, voter preferences for political candidates and jury judgments in simulated trials … attractiveness also influences interviewers’ judgments of job applicants.’ From the toddler gazing up at the adult to the adult gazing down at the toddler, we ruthlessly privilege the beautiful. The ugly get screwed.

The ancient Greeks had no problem with this. As the 19th-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt remarked: ‘Not only were the Greeks most strongly affected by beauty, but they universally and frankly expressed their conviction of its value.’ At one point in Homer’s Iliad, a rabble-rousing commoner named Thersites challenges Agamemnon’s authority and is quickly clobbered by Odysseus, whose disdain for the upstart is utterly uncompromising: ‘Out of all those who came beneath Ilion there is no worse man than you are.’ What is telling is that Homer’s own description of Thersites basically substitutes ‘ugliest’ for ‘worst’:This was the ugliest man who came beneath Ilion. He was bandy-legged and went lame of one foot, with shoulders stooped and drawn together over his chest, and above this his skull went up to a point with the wool grown sparsely upon it.”•

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“There’s No One Alive I Can’t Beat”

February 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Garry Kasparov is the John Henry of the Computer Age, “dying” on behalf of us all in a race against a machine despite his utter confidence in the efficacy of humankind. But even before computers were in the room, Bobby Fischer was likewise defeated by a machine, and it was him, the string of code he possessed off by just a little, just enough. He could make plans, but he didn’t plan on a ghost in the machine. There was only one person Fischer couldn’t beat, and it was himself. The opening of Ralph Ginzburg’s 1962 Harper’s article, “Portrait of a Genius As a Young Chess Master“:

“RUSSIA’S traditional hold on World Championships in chess is about to be challenged by the United States in the person of an eighteen-year-old boy from Brooklyn named Bobby Fischer. Bobby has been United States Chess Champion for four years. He won the title at the age of fourteen, the youngest player ever to do so. He has since successfully defended his title three times and has won virtually every major chess title in the country.

In an international tournament at Bled, Yugoslavia, last summer, he astonished the chess world by defeating Russia’s Mikhail Tal in his only game against this former World Champion. The present World Champion, Mikhail Botvinnik, did not participate in the tournament. Fischer is aching to play Botvinnik. ‘I know that I deserve to be World Champion and I know I can beat Botvinnik,’ he has said. ‘There’s no one alive I can’t beat.’

Fischer may have his chance early in 1963 when the triennial chess World Championship will be played. He will first have to win two preliminary international tournaments, the Inter-Zonal and the Candidates, in 1962. Many of America’s leading chess authorities agree with Lisa Lane, the twenty-four-year-old Women’s Chess Champion of the United States. ‘I’m sure that Bobby can beat Botvinnik,’ she has said. ‘There’s never before been a chess player with such a thorough knowledge of the intricacies of the game and such an absolutely indomitable will to win. I think Bobby is the greatest player that ever lived.’

John W. Collins columnist for Chess Life and Chess Review and one of the country’s most highly respected chess annotators, has written: ‘Bobby is the finest chess player this Country ever produced. His memory for the moves, his brilliance in dreaming up combinations, and his fierce determination to win are uncanny. Not only will I predict his triumph over Botvinnik but I’ll go further and say that he’ll probably be the greatest chess player that ever lived.'”

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“A Software Program (An AI) Can — Will — Be Believably Human And Lovable”

February 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of Ray Kurzweil’s compelling review of the Oscar-nominated Her, a near-future film he sees as nearer than most do:

“Her, written, directed and produced by Spike Jonze, presents a nuanced love story between a man and his operating system.

Although there are caveats I could (and will) mention about the details of the OS and how the lovers interact, the movie compellingly presents the core idea that a software program (an AI) can — will — be believably human and lovable.

This is a breakthrough concept in cinematic futurism in the way that The Matrix presented a realistic vision that virtual reality will ultimately be as real as, well, real reality.

Jonze started his feature-motion-picture career directing Being John Malkovich, which also presents a realistic vision of a future technology — one that is now close at hand: being able to experience reality through the eyes and ears of someone else.

With emerging eye-mounted displays that project images onto the wearer’s retinas and also look out at the world, we will indeed soon be able to do exactly that. When we send nanobots into the brain — a circa-2030s scenario by my timeline — we will be able to do this with all of the senses, and even intercept other people’s emotional responses.”

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“Its Short-Term Effects Could Be Devastating For American Workers”

February 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

After a steep decline in manufacturing, the U.S, has an opportunity to drive the future of the sector. But there’s a catch: You and I may not be necessary. The rapid growth of robotics in America may largely close factories to human hands. We’ll be richer in the aggregate, but those riches will not be distributed very much to workers. Good in the long run but not so much now. From Amar Toor at Verge:

“Some see automated manufacturing as a potential boon for the US economy, a way to lure companies back to American soil with the promise of higher productivity and lower labor costs. But others fear that the push could displace the last vestiges of middle-class American manufacturing workers at a time of high unemployment and soaring inequality.

‘The pace and scale of this encroachment into human skills is relatively recent and has profound economic implications,’ MIT economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee wrote in their 2011 book Race Against the Machine. In the book, the authors argue that technology has destroyed more American jobs at a faster pace than it’s created new ones, leading to higher unemployment and stagnant median incomes despite higher productivity levels. Although they conclude on an optimistic note, arguing that technological change will yield benefits in the long run, Brynjolfsson and McAfee say its short-term effects could be devastating for American workers.”

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“The Olympics Will Take Us To The Moon, To Mars!”

February 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Thinking about the impact of the Olympics on host cities reminds me of Frank Deford’s great 1970 Sports Illustrated profile of then-Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau whose unwavering will brought a subway system, a World’s Fair, Major League Baseball and, yes, the Olympics to his city. It should be noted, however, that the construction of the Olympic buildings was bungled horribly and cost overruns left the citizens indebted for three decades. The opening:

“One bright day in the summer of 1970, shortly after Montreal had obtained the 1976 Olympics but in the months just before the city annexed Vermont and then acquired the Vatican to place up on Mont-Royal (the Orange Bowl, after all, seemed so lonely up there with only the Bolshoi Ballet and the Ganges River for company), the mayor of Montreal sat in City Hall and faced down another skeptic. This he does with aplomb, for it is a whole world of skeptics that the mayor endures, and thus he has much practice in the endeavor. The mayor’s working philosophy is: ‘Problems are solved en route,’ and, of course, since Vietnam this is not the most popular mode of operation everywhere. The mayor is not deterred.

Having warmed up at some length, he waves for effect and declares: ‘The Olympics will do even more for Montreal than Expo ’67. Seventy-six is only a target, and we won’t stop. Seventy-six is the means, not the end. Sixty-seven was just taking us into orbit, but the Olympics will take us to the moon [he waves], to Mars! I feel it! I feel it! And I’m not wrong when I feel as strongly as this. There is no challenge too big for Montreal, because, like the Olympics, we are acting with the spirit of Baron de Coubertin, we are acting in a humanistic way. The city possesses an environment, an ambience that can be felt. ‘Montreal is en route to becoming The City of the world. Twenty years from now, no matter what happens, it will have achieved this position, and it will be referred to in all parts of the world as The City.’

Now make no mistake, the mayor of The (incipient) City is a politician. His office is testament to that. There is the portrait of Queen Elizabeth juxtaposed with a crucifix. There are the flowers that adorn the room in bunches, while nestled among them is the mayor’s 125-pound bull mastiff, Due, whose elegiac face does not betray the fact that he could eat for lunch, if he were so disposed, all the flowers, the artifacts and the entire Quebec separatist movement. But if the symbols around the man add up to a balanced display, there is no compromise in the mayor. Charles Bronfman, vice-president of Seagrams, Ltd. and chairman of the baseball Expos, observes: ‘However much he sounds it, the mayor is never a huckster. He is altogether sincere. He has drives that are unusual and dreams that others of us cannot understand.’

This means that when the mayor says Montreal is going to sprint ahead and leave crossroads like Paris and New York back with Terre Haute, he is not putting you on. He means it. Also, all those enigmatic celestial references to the Olympics are not being emitted just for florid effect. It is worth recalling that at about this same point in the planning stage for Expo ’67, the mayor had already decided to make a permanent exposition of it—though he neglected to let anyone else in on this revelation for some time. Expo ’67 is now Man and His World and is still drawing people to Montreal.

After a certain amount of watching His Honor, one instinctively recalls what Cassius Clay used to say after various correct predictions: ‘If I tell you a fly can pull a plow, hitch him up.’ The mayor brought a world’s fair to Montreal in record time after Moscow reneged on the project. He lured major league baseball into expanding outside the U.S., and happily watched the team prosper and even play well amid predictions of financial and artistic calamity. He took the Olympics away from the U.S. and Russia and left another world power, personified by Charles de Gaulle, put down in a stunning speech after De Gaulle had suggested French Canada might want to, more or less, separate itself from Canada. He built a cultural palace and a subway system in a world where nobody constructs anything that lasts. With a sprinkle of flowers and trees on almost every street, he encouraged a greenhouse of a town to bloom in a place that had been another kind of house for the whole Western world.

The mayor’s name is Jean Drapeau.”

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“The Igman Ski Jumps Sat In Ruins, But The Base Was Full Of Campers Playing Football”

February 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

When happens to the tent when the circus leaves town, especially if it’s the greatest show on Earth? The Olympics are a mixed blessing locally because they promise massive infrastructure improvements in only a few years, but they also can indebt a host city, displace citizens and cause environmental damage. And the march of history (e.g., war) can quickly undo any of the good, make something grotesque from it. Jon Pack and Gary Hustwit of the Olympic City Project photograph hosts years after the Games are over to see what the event has wrought. A couple of exchanges from an Ask Me Anything they just did at Reddit.

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“Question:

In your opinion, are the Olympics have a positive or negative long-term effects on the cities hosting it?

Jon Pack and Gary Hustwit:

That a complex question, because it really depends on your point of view. Barcelona’s 1992 Olympics is held up as having a positive effect on the city, since they were able to redevelop the waterfront area and turn the beach into a huge tourist draw. They were also able to do 30 years of planned infrastructure improvements in 5 years, using the Games as the impetus. But there are many citizens who were displaced by the new development there, or complain that the improvements are really just for the sake of tourism, their rents are higher now, etc.

Every city/country has their own reasons for hosting the Olympics, some just want to prove they can do it, that they’re a global city. For some it’s a public relations move (how many of us had heard of Sochi before this year? In the project, we’ve tried not to express an opinion one way or the other, if it’s positive or negative, but try to give a feel for what these cities are like now, a few years or decades after the Games.

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Question:

I’ve been to the Sarajevo site, which is pretty disturbing; tons of the open spaces were used for graves during the war in the 90s, and everything else is practically falling apart.

Which city, in your opinion, has done the best job of reusing and refurbishing former olympic sites?

Jon Pack:

Yes, Sarajevo is an especially sad case. It’s impossible to separate the Games’ legacy from the war. Most of the Olympic structures were destroyed or damaged significantly. But I found the people to be amazingly resilient; almost everyone would tell me a harrowing story of that time and then follow it up with a dark joke. When I was there in the summer, I found most of the sites being used in some way. The bobsleigh track had some picnickers, skaterboarders and tourists around, for instance. The Igman ski jumps sat in ruins, but the base was full of campers playing football. It seems like they may not have the money to rebuild the sites, but they’re making the best of it.

Gary Hustwit:

There are plenty of interesting re-uses of Olympic sites in different cities, I don’t think I could say any one city has done it all well. But we’ve seen some bizarre ones. Lake Placid couldn’t get federal funding to build athlete housing for the ’80 Winter Games, but the government would fund a new prison. So they built a prison, housed the athletes and officials in it, and after the Games were over the prisoners moved in. It’s still a working prison today.”

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“Over Half Of All Hitmen Got Less Than $9K For Their Services”

February 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I know lots of folks in the New York media world, so there’s at least a half-dozen people I’d like to punch right in the face. But for those of you looking to up the ante, there’s a bargain to be had. From “How Much Does a Hitman Cost?” at Priceonomics:

“In 2003 researchers at the Australian Institute of Criminology dug through a decade’s-worth of old newspaper records, undercover police operations, and homicide databases to study the price and motivations of hiring a hitman.

According to this study, the average payment to a hired killer was about $15K (converted to US dollars) and over half of all hitmen got less than $9K for their services.”

“The Idea Of Gene Therapy Is At Last Looking As If It May Become Science Fact”

February 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Genes introduced into the body via virus or other means to repair other damaged genes is now a reality in some cases. How quickly can the field progress? Will there be a boom period of exponential growth? When will such methods be able to treat simple aging rather than mutations? I think we’ll be waiting awhile. The opening of a new Economist article:

“IT SOUNDS like science fiction, and for years it seemed as though it was just that: fiction. But the idea of gene therapy—introducing copies of healthy genes into people who lack them, to treat disease—is at last looking as if it may become science fact.

The field got off to a bad start, with the widely reported death of an American liver patient in 1999. In 2003 some French children who were being treated with it for an immune-system problem called SCID developed leukaemia. Since then, though, things have improved. Indeed one procedure, for lipoprotein lipase deficiency (which causes high levels of blood fats, with all the problems those can bring), has been approved, in Europe, for clinical use.

The most recent success, announced last month in the Lancet, was of an experimental treatment for choroideremia, a type of blindness. This is caused by mutation of the gene for a protein called REP1. Without REP1, the eye’s light receptors degenerate. Robert MacLaren of Oxford University used a virus to deliver working versions of the REP1 gene to the most light-sensitive part of the retina. Five of the six participants in the trial duly experienced an improvement in their sensitivity to light. Two were so improved that they could read more letters than previously on a standard eye chart.”

“The Oji-Cree Eagerly Embraced These New Tools”

February 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

At the New Yorker blog, Timothy Wu challenges Kevin Kelly’s premise that “technology wants what life wants” by detailing the difficulties of the traditional Oji-Cree people, who have been tethered to tech for only fifty years. It’s an interesting analysis of the nature of technological and biological forces, but I’m more on the side of Kelly in believing that technology ultimately possesses an evolutionary nature. While biology leads us to improve and adapt in the big picture, there’s an awful lot of collateral damage along the way. Technology is likely the same and shouldn’t be judged by a different standard. An excerpt:

“The Oji-Cree have been in contact with European settlers for centuries, but it was only in the nineteen-sixties, when trucks began making the trip north, that newer technologies like the internal combustion engine and electricity really began to reach the area. The Oji-Cree eagerly embraced these new tools. In our lingo, we might say that they went through a rapid evolution, advancing through hundreds of years of technology in just a few decades.

The good news is that, nowadays, the Oji-Cree no longer face the threat of winter starvation, which regularly killed people in earlier times. They can more easily import and store the food they need, and they enjoy pleasures like sweets and alcohol. Life has become more comfortable. The constant labor of canoeing or snowshoeing has been eliminated by outboard engines and snowmobiles. Television made it north in the nineteen-eighties, and it has proved enormously popular.

But, in the main, the Oji-Cree story is not a happy one. Since the arrival of new technologies, the population has suffered a massive increase in morbid obesity, heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes. Social problems are rampant: idleness, alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide have reached some of the highest levels on earth. Diabetes, in particular, has become so common (affecting forty per cent of the population) that researchers think that many children, after exposure in the womb, are born with an increased predisposition to the disease. Childhood obesity is widespread, and ten-year-olds sometimes appear middle-aged. Recently, the Chief of a small Oji-Cree community estimated that half of his adult population was addicted to OxyContin or other painkillers.

Technology is not the only cause of these changes, but scientists have made clear that it is a driving factor.“

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“Some Of The 155 Captives Have A Vision Of Life After A Dozen Years In American Detention Without Charge Or Trial”

February 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

There are few things more un-American than Guantanamo Bay, which isn’t to say that all of the prison’s detainees are innocent victims. But if you have enough evidence to hold them, you have to charge them. Of course, no one wants to be the person to free Gitmo inmates and have one or more of them participate in a terrorist act. That would never be forgotten. But we can’t go on this way. It’s bad all around. 

The opening of an article by Carol Rosenberg in the Miami Herald about the elaborate post-Guantanamo plans drawn up by a quintet of prisoners:

“No, it’s not a kibbutz. But the crude jailhouse plans for a ‘Milk & Honey’ farm business in Yemen are suggestive of one.

Five war-on-terror captives locked up inside Guantánamo prison have designed a self-sufficient agricultural business west of Yemen’s capital, Sana’a. They envision a community of 200 families, 100 farmhouses, 10 cows, 500 chickens, 50 sheep, a honey bee subsidiary and computer system powered by windmills.

The would-be entrepreneurs drew up the 75-page prospectus before the prison hunger strike. But it recently emerged from U.S. military censorship at an opportune time — as the Obama administration searches for ways to safely send some prisoners home to Yemen and close the Pentagon’s costly prison camps in Cuba.

And, while the quirky business model makes no mention of the potent al-Qaida franchise that U.S. officials fear will attract freed Yemeni prisoners, it does illustrate that some of the 155 captives have a vision of life after a dozen years in American detention without charge or trial.”

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“Can You Describe Your New Role At Microsoft?”

February 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Bill Gates’ As Me Anythings are always among the best, with wide-ranging and intelligent discussion. A few exchanges from the most recent one at Reddit.

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Question:

Hey Bill, have you made any plans to artificially prolong your life? Honest.

Bill Gates:

No I don’t. Other people think about that but I wouldn’t want to extend my last few years unless that is happening for most people.

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Question:

I’d just like to know, what is something you enjoy doing that you think no one would expect from you?

Bill Gates:

Playing Bridge is a pretty old fashioned thing in a way that I really like. I was watching my daughter ride horses this weekend and that is also a bit old fashioned but fun. I do the dishes every night – other people volunteer but I like the way I do it.

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Question:

If you were a current computer science student what area would you start studying heavily?

If you feel like expanding on that, why do you think this area deserves the attention and how do you see it changing the technology game in the next 10 years?

Bill Gates:

The ultimate is computers that learn. So called deep learning which started at Microsoft and is now being used by many researchers looks like a real advance that may finally learn. It has already made a big difference in video and audio recognition – more progress in the last 3 years than ever before.

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Question:

Hey Bill, if you didn’t go into computers and later found Microsoft, what do you think you would be doing?

Bill Gates:

I considered law and math. My Dad was a lawyer. I think though I would have ended up in physics if I didn’t end up in computer science.

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Question:

Any luck with the condom-design competition?

Bill Gates:

This is a sensitive topic. The idea was that men don’t like the current design so perhaps something they would be more open to would allow for less HIV transmission. We still haven’t gotten the results. One grantee is using carbon nanotubes to reduce the thickness.

"This is a sensitive topic."

“This is a sensitive topic.”

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Question:

Any advice on how entrepreneurs of today and tomorrow should go about balancing business and philanthropy… or do they have to succeed first in order to give later?

Bill Gates:

Just creating an innovative company is a huge contribution to the world. During my 20’s and 30’s that was all I focused on. Ideally people can start to mix in some philanthropy like Mark Zuckerberg has early in his career. I have enjoyed talking to some of the Valley entrepreneurs about this and I am impressed and how early they are thinking about giving back – much earlier than I did.

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Question:

Can you describe your new role at Microsoft?

Bill Gates:

I am excited about how the cloud and new devices can help us communicate and collaborate in new ways. The OS won’t just be on one device and the information won’t just be files – it will be your history including being able to review memories of things like kids growing up. I was thrilled Satya [Nadella] asked me to pitch in to make sure Microsoft is ambitious with its innovation. Even in Office there is a lot more than can be done.

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Question:

How do you feel about the NSA and its oversight of computer usage?

Bill Gates:

This is a complex issue. Privacy will be increasingly important as cameras and GPS sensors are gathering information to try and be helpful. We need to have trust in the way information is protected and gathered. There is a role for the government to try and stop crime and terrorism but it will have to be more open. I do think terrorism with biological or nuclear weapons is something we want to minimize the chance of.•

 

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“It Doesn’t Make Much Sense To Do It At The Genetic Level At This Point”

February 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Rustam Muhamedov of Uzbekistan’s Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry has announced that his country will begin genetic testing of children to determine their athletic potential. It’s something that could potentially work at some point in the future, but it presently seems a pipe dream. In an article by Ron Synovitz and Zamira Eshanova in the Atlantic, SI’s David Epstein casts doubt on the project:

“David Epstein, a sports science journalist and author of the best-selling book The Sports Gene, explains that genes are important in terms of athletic achievement and development. But he doubts Muhamedov’s claims that genetic tests can accurately identify future world-champion athletes.

‘Actually, it doesn’t make much sense to do it at the genetic level at this point. What they are trying to do is learn about someone’s physiology. If you want to learn about someone’s physiology, you should test their physiology instead of the genes,’ Epstein says.

‘We have no clue what most genes do. So if you make a decision based on a small number of genes, which presumably is what is going to happen, you’re sort of trying to decide what a puzzle looks like when you’ve only got one of the pieces, or two of the pieces, and you don’t have the other hundred or thousand pieces,’ he adds.”

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“An Apple II Transmits Sounds To The Dolphins”

February 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

More than 20 years after John C. Lilly wrote in LIfe about interspecies communications with dolphins, there were two Omni articles about his work in this area. By the 1980s, computers had entered the discussion. 

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From Owen Davies’ 1983 article “Talking Computer for Dolphins“:

Want to talk to dolphins? The best way may be to talk to a computer first, according to the Human/Dolphin Foundation, in Redwood City, California.

Dr. John Lilly first tried to teach a few dolphins English in the mid-1970s. But Lilly soon found that while the animals were smart, they had trouble under- standing human speech, which uses only a fraction of the enormously wide range of frequencies that dolphins hear. And, although the dolphins tried to speak English, they were physiologically capable of producing only high-pitched, incomprehensible squawks.

Lilly’s answer was to get a computer to translate each species’ speech into sound patterns the other could deal with. In 1977, after three years of work, the foundation developed a computer system capable of translating human words typed on a keyboard into high-frequency sound patterns that dolphins seem to understand; it also analyzed the dolphin sounds and displayed a rough interpretation of them on a computer screen for people to read.

According to physicist John Kert, now working as the foundation’s director, the system is being used to teach dolphins Joe and Rosie simple tasks like jumping, bowing, and recognizing objects on command. The animals have also followed more complex instructions, Kert reports: They can, for instance, swim through a channel to touch a ball with a flipper.

The researchers work with a vocabulary of 30 words, but they soon plan to go up to 128.•

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From “John Lilly: Altered States,” a 1983 interview by Judith Hooper:

John C. Lilly:

We’re using a computer system to transmit sounds underwater to the dolphins. A computer is electrical energy oscillating at particular frequencies, which can vary. and we use a transducer to convert the electrical waveforms into acoustical energy. You could translate the waveforms into any kind of sound you like: human speech, dolphin-like clicks, whatever.

OMNI::

Do you type something out on the computer keyboard and have it transmitted to the dolphins as sound in their frequency range? And do they communicate back to the computer?

John C. Lilly:

Yes, but we actually use two computers. An Apple II transmits sounds to the dolphins, via a transducer, from a keyboard operated by humans. Then there is another computer, made by Digital Equipment Corporation, that listens to the dolphins. A hydrophone, or underwater microphone, picks up any sounds the dolphins make, feeds them into a frequency analyzer, a sonic spectrum analyzer, and then into the computer. So the computer has an ear and a voice, and the dolphin has an ear and a voice. The system also displays visual information to the dolphins.

On the human side it’s rather ponderous, because we have to punch keys and see letters on a screen. People have tried to make dolphins punch keys, but I don’t think dolphins should have to punch keys. They don’t have these little fingers that we have. So we’d prefer to develop a sonic code as the basis of a dolphin computer language. If a group of dolphins can work with a computer that feeds back to them what they just said — names of objects and so forth — and if we can be the intercessors between them and the computer, I think we can eventually communicate.

OMNI:

How long will it take to break through the interspecies communication barrier?

John C. Lilly:

About five years. I think it may take about a year for the dolphins to learn the code, and then, in about five years we’ll have a human/dolphin dictionary. However, we need some very expensive equipment to deal with dolphins’ underwater sonar. Since dolphins ‘see’ with sound in three dimensions — in stereo — you have to make your words ‘stereophonic words.’

OMNI:

You’ve said that dolphins also use ‘sonar beams’ to look at the internal state of one another’s body, or that of a human being, and that they can even gauge another’s emotional state that way. How does that work?

John C. Lilly:

They have a very high-frequency sonar that they can use to inspect something and look at its internal structure. Say you’re immersed in water and a sound wave hits your body. If there’s any gas in your body, it reflects back an incredible amount of sound. To the dolphin it would appear as a bright spot in the acoustic picture.

OMNI:

Can we ever really tune in to the dolphin’s “stereophonic” world view, or is it perhaps too alien to ours?

John C. Lilly:

I want to. I just did a very primitive experiment — -a Saturday afternoon-type experiment — at Marine World I was floating in an isolation tank and had an underwater loudspeaker close to my head and an air microphone just above me. Both were connected through an amplifier to the dolphin tank so that they could hear me and I could hear them. I started playing with sound — whistling and clicking and making other noises that dolphins like. Suddenly I felt as if a lightning bolt had hit me on the head. We have all this on tape, and it’s just incredible. It was a dolphin whistle that went ssssshhheeeeeooooo in a falling frequency from about nine thousand to three thousand hertz in my hearing range. It started at the top of my head, expanding as the frequency dropped, and showing me the inside of my skull, and went right down through my body. The dolphin gave me a three-dimensional feeling of the inside of my skull, describing my body by a single sound!

I want to know what the dolphin experiences. I want to go back and repeat the experiment in stereo, instead of with a single loudspeaker. Since I’m not equipped like a dolphin, I’ve got to use an isolation tank, electronics, and all this nonsense to pretend I’m a dolphin.•

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“Sir James Dyson Has Outlined His Vision For A New Era Of Household Android Robots”

February 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The problem with robots understanding us is that they’re going to figure out what complete assholes we are. That will suck. Vacuum magnate James Dyson is promising a new wave of silicon servants that will see to our household needs. From Adam Withnall at the Independent:

“The British entrepreneur Sir James Dyson has outlined his vision for a new era of household android robots that will be able to clean the windows, guard property – and, presumably, vacuum the carpet.

This week the inventor will announce the creation of a new £5 million robotics centre at Imperial College London, and he says a technological revolution is coming that will soon see every home in Britain filled with ‘robots that understand the world around them.’

His team of British-based engineers are locked in a race to build the first multi-purpose household android with scientists in Japan, where researchers at Waseda University have already unveiled the Twendy-One robot that can obey voice commands, cook and provide nursing care.”

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Press demo of the Twendy-One:

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“It Is My Firm Conviction That Within The Next Decade Or Two Human Beings Will Establish Vocal Communication With Another Species”

February 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Speaking of our relation to the planet’s other creatures: We have a tendency, even the best of us, to judge our fellow species by how much they’re like us, how much we can make them seem like us. That’s because it flatters us, makes us think we’re the form to be imitated. The opening of a 1961 Life essay about interspecies communication by Dr. John C. Lilly, who would later also be known for his experimentation with LSD and isolation tanks:

“It is my firm conviction that within the next decade or two human beings will establish vocal communication with another species. That species might possibly be from another wold; it could also be from this one. Wherever it comes from, it will be highly intelligent, perhaps even intellectual. 

For several years my colleagues and I have been particularly interested in trying to find out whether or not there is a way to conduct such interspecies dialogues with dolphins. Of all the animals on earth, excepting man, only whales (in whose family dolphins are a member) and elephants have brains big enough to offer any possibility of high-level mental activity. And dolphins, even when they are newly captured, show a unique and positive consideration for humans which makes them most desirable subjects for complex experiments. My research with dolphins has left me with the belief that they do, in effect, talk with one another through the use of sounds, that they may have intelligence of a high order and that they might possibly be taught to understand and react to sounds made by man. It would help, of course, to understand what the dolphins are saying to each other. Some of the sounds can be picked up directly by the human ear when the dolphin rises for air. These sounds vary from loud clicks to creakings, whistles, squawks, quacks and blats. But not all dolphin sounds are immediately audible. Many of them are emitted at such a high frequency that we cannot hear them without special acoustical equipment, and it may very well be that the most meaningful patterns of their ‘speech’ occur at these levels. 

By wiring the dolphins’ tanks and taking down their sounds on tape recordings, I have been able to take part in some fascinating eavesdropping. Creaking noises occur most often underwater at nighttime or when the water is murky. Two dolphins in a tank together frequently make buzzing and whistling sounds back and forth at each other. The conversation between a male and female dolphin in physical contact is often very elaborate, an exchange of barks and squawks. 

If two dolphins are separated in nearby tanks, a dialogue takes place that is eerily like two children whispering back and forth between their rooms. First one will whistle. Then the other will whistle back. Once contact is made the conversation settles down to a regular exchange. The exchange can be made up of slow and steady clicks, or of whistles or of both together. 

Even more interesting is the fact that dolphins seem to try to imitate human sounds they hear and sometimes produce primitive and peculiar copies.”

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“Some Scientists Have Concluded That There Simply Is No Profound Difference Between Us And Other Species”

February 9, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In reviewing a trio of new books for the Financial Times, philosopher Stephen Cave ponders what it is that sets humanity apart. I would say it’s the ability to create and use complex tools, because we certainly suck at swimming and flying and running when compared to other species. We need all the help we can get. The opening:

“You might think that we humans are special: no other species has, for example, landed on the moon, or invented the iPad. But then, I personally haven’t done those things either. So if such achievements are what makes us human then I must be relegated to the beasts, except in so far as I can catch a little reflected glory from true humans such as Neil Armstrong or Steve Jobs.

Fortunately, there are other, more inclusive, ideas around about what makes us human. Not long ago, most people (in the west) were happy with the account found in the Bible: we are made in the image of God – end of argument. But the theory of evolution tells a different story, one in which humans slowly emerged as a twig on the tree of life. The problem with this explanation is that it is much more difficult to say exactly what makes us so different from all the other twigs.

Indeed, in the light of new research into animal intelligence, some scientists have concluded that there simply is no profound difference between us and other species.”

 

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