Excerpts

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“Trolls Are Also Distinguished From Their Predecessors By Seeming Not To Recognize Any Limits”

December 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink


The problem with anarchy is that it has a tendency to get out of control.

In 2013, Eric Schmidt, the most perplexing of Googlers, wrote (along with Jared Cohen) the truest thing about our newly connected age: “The Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history.”

Yes, indeed.

California was once a wild, untamed plot of land, and when people initially flooded the zone, it was exciting if harsh. But then, soon enough: the crowds, the pollution, the Adam Sandler films. The Golden State became civilized with laws and regulations and taxes, which was a trade-off but one that established order and security. The Web has been commodified but never been truly domesticated, so while the rules don’t apply it still contains all the smog and noise of the developed world. Like Los Angeles without the traffic lights.

Our new abnormal has played out for both better and worse. The fan triumphed over the professional, a mixed development that, yes, spread greater democracy on a surface level, but also left truth attenuated. Into this unfiltered, post-fact, indecent swamp slithered the troll, that witless, cowardly insult comic.

The biggest troll of them all, Donald Trump, the racist opportunist who stalked our first African-American President demanding his birth certificate, is succeeding Obama in the Oval Office, which is terrible for the country if perfectly logical for the age. His Lampanelli-Mussolini campaign also emboldened all manner of KKK 2.0, manosphere and alt-right detritus in their own trolling, as they used social media to spread a discombobulating disinformation meant to confuse and distract so hate could take root and grow. No water needed; bile would do.

In the wonderfully written essay “Schadenfreude with Bite,” Richard Seymour analyzes the discomfiting age of the troll. An excerpt:

The controlled cruelty of the wind-up didn’t need trolls to invent it. In the pre-internet era, it perhaps seemed more innocent: Candid Camera; Jeremy Beadle duping a hapless member of the public. The ungovernable rage of the unwitting victim is always funny to someone, and invariably there is sadistic detachment in the amusement. The trolls’ innovation has been to add a delight in nonsense and detritus: calculated illogicality, deliberate misspellings, an ironic recycling of cultural nostalgia, sedimented layers of opaque references and in-jokes. Trolling, as Phillips puts it, is the ‘latrinalia’ of popular culture: the writing on the toilet wall.

Trolls are also distinguished from their predecessors by seeming not to recognise any limits. Ridicule is an anti-social force: it tends to make people clam up and stop talking. So there is a point at which, if conversation and community are to continue, the joke has to stop, and the victim be let in on the laughter. Trolls, though, form a community precisely around the extension of their transgressive sadism beyond the limits of their offline personas. That the community consists almost entirely of people with no identifying characteristics – ‘anons’ – is part of the point. It is as if the laughter of the individual troll were secondary; the primary goal is to sustain the pleasure of the anonymous collective.

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For most organised trolls, having an explicit political affiliation or moral cause goes against the basic principle that commitment to anything other than the lulz is suspect. However, for ‘gendertrolls’, a term coined by Karla Mantilla, the objective is clamorously counter-feminist. It is to silence publicly vocal women by swarm-like harassment, misogynistic insults (such epithets as ‘cunt’ and ‘whore’), ‘doxxing’ (exposing the details of someone’s offline life), and threats of rape and murder. As Mantilla sees it, there is nothing unique about this behaviour: it isn’t ‘about the internet’, but a continuation of the ‘long history of men harassing and denigrating women as a means of trying to drive out potential competitors’. It is a ‘mass cultural response to women asserting themselves [in] previously male-dominated areas’.

The new inflection that the internet appears to make possible is the trolls’ disavowal of moral commitment, which depends on a strict demarcation between the ‘real’ offline self, and online anonymity. I am not what I do, as long as I do it online.•

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“We Shouldn’t Try And Protect Jobs; We Should Protect Workers”

December 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Less than 10% of U.S. jobs now reside in manufacturing, but the continued erosion of that sector has sent a shock to our system. No amount of Carrier deals, both economically and politically dubious, will make America manufacture again, and things could get far more shocking if other areas of employment quickly disappear into the zeros and ones.

For instance: What if the more plentiful positions in service, which seem particularly prone to automation, should begin to quickly vanish? In a smart Quartz Q&A conducted by Eshe Nelson, economist Richard Baldwin, author of The Great Convergence, warns that globalization’s most profound disruption is imminent and no legislation will likely be able to prevent its arrival (and we’d be injured in other ways even if it could).

To mitigate the downside, Baldwin suggests “we have to look for inspiration from northern European countries who have comprehensive retraining, help with housing, help with relocation.” It’s a tall order, but shortcuts likely won’t do.

An excerpt:

Question: 

What about Donald Trump’s promise to bring back US manufacturing jobs? He made a deal to keep nearly 1,000 jobs at the Carrier gas-furnace factory by offering a big tax break.

Richard Baldwin: 

We shouldn’t try and protect jobs; we should protect workers. It’s really a fool’s errand to struggle with because after a year or two those jobs will still go. Either they will be replaced by robots or they’ll move to Mexico or China. If Carrier becomes inefficient from being forced to stay in the US, its business will go to competitors in Japan or Germany.

Question: 

So even if we put up trade barriers, the jobs we protect will be for robots, not people? 

Richard Baldwin:

Absolutely. There are jobs for people, even in manufacturing these days, but not for the low-skilled people who have been dispossessed by this. Their jobs were routine and the easiest to replace with automation. The first thing to do is accept the 21st–century reality that no matter what you do, these jobs aren’t coming back.

Question: 

An important aspect of your book is that we still have the so-called third phase of globalization to come, which will drive down the cost of moving people.

Richard Baldwin: 

There are two technologies that are key: telepresence and telerobotics. They exist but are expensive and clunky. Telepresence is half of a table with life-size screens, good light, lots of cameras, and microphones. Then the other half of the table is somewhere else. When people sit at the table you have a very strong impression that they are in the same room.

Question: 
 

So the “movement” of people is not physical?

Richard Baldwin:

It’s a substitute for being there. It’s Skype that’s really, really good.

The second is telerobotics. There are a couple of well-known ones. One is the surgeon operating at a 100-kilometer distance from the patient. But you can imagine that hotel rooms in London could be cleaned by people driving robots sitting in Kenya or Buenos Aires or wherever, for a tenth of the cost here. That’s coming, and it will be very disruptive.

Question:  

What happens to the chart on global income distribution during this phase of globalization?

Richard Baldwin:

It keeps going down.•

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“Perhaps Life Is Something That Happens Not On A Planet But To A Planet”

December 15, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In “Why Most Planets Will Either Be Lush or Dead,” David Grinspoon’s wonderfully lucid Nautilus piece about the Gaia hypothesis which was excerpted from his book Earth in Human Hands, the writer suggests that “once life has taken hold of a planet, once it has become a planetary‐scale entity (a global organism, if you will), it may be very hard to kill.”

We’re sure trying our damndest to off ourselves, what with a climate-change denier heading into the White House and China choking on its insta-modernity. It’s possible that even if “life as a whole persists” and our worst impulses don’t bring us to full species collapse, a global Easter Island, that scenarios could play out in which millions or hundreds of millions perish and quotidian existence is transformed into something harsh and traumatic. The survivors would be a scarred people on scarred earth. Just because humans have spent a couple million years or so as part of a feedback system that has seen life on the planet persevere doesn’t mean we can’t also turn out the lights.

From Grinspoon:

As far as we can tell, around the time when life was starting on Earth, both Venus and Mars shared the same characteristics that enabled life to get going here: They were wet, they were rocky, they had thick atmospheres and vigorous geologic activity. Comparative planetology seems to be telling us that the conditions needed for the origin of life might be the norm for rocky worlds. One real possibility is that Mars or Venus also had an origin of life, but that life did not stick, couldn’t persist, on either of these worlds. It was not able to take root and become embedded as a permanent planetary feature, as it did on Earth. This may be a common outcome: planets that have an origin of life, perhaps even several, but that never develop a robust and self‐sustaining global biosphere. What is really rare and unusual about Earth is that beneficial conditions for life have persisted over billions of years. This may have been more than luck.

When we stop thinking of planets as merely objects or places where living beings may or may not be present, but rather as themselves living or nonliving entities, it can color the way we think about the origin of life. Perhaps life is something that happens not on a planet but to a planet: It is something that a planet becomes.

Think of life as analogous to a fire.  If you’ve ever tried to start a campfire, you know it’s easy to ignite some sparks and a little flicker of flame, but then it’s hard to keep these initial flames going. At first you have to tend to the fire, blowing until you’re faint, to supply more oxygen, or it will just die out. That’s always the tricky part: keeping it burning before it has really caught on. Then it reaches a critical point, where the fire is really roaring. It’s got a bed of hot coals and its heat is generating its own circulation pattern, sucking in oxygen, fanning its own flames. At that point it becomes self-sustaining, and you can go grab a beer and watch for shooting stars.

I wonder if the first life on a planet isn’t like those first sparks and those unsteady little flames. The earliest stages of life may be extremely vulnerable, and there may be a point where, once life becomes a planetary phenomenon, enmeshed in the global flows that support and fuel it, it feeds back on itself and becomes more like a self‐sustaining fire, one that not only draws in its own air supply, but turns itself over and replenishes its own fuel. A mature biosphere seems to create the conditions for life to continue and flourish.•

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“The Ability To Talk To Your Room Is Effortlessly Convenient”

December 15, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Surveillance Capitalism is the wave of the future, we’re told, but it could more accurately be called Ambient Capitalism.

To me, surveillance suggests pursuit, a sort of cat-and-mouse game. But more and more we won’t make a squeak as we rest snugly in the pocket of new technologies trying to divine our preferences. As these algorithms quietly do their calculating in living rooms and supermarkets, we’ll hardly know they’re there, anticipating the needs we never knew we had, erasing the lines between private and public. It will be the final shift from a world in which we were primarily citizens to one where we’re chiefly consumers. We’ll have fully been eased inside the machine.

From  Sarah Buhr at TechCrunch:

The Wynn Las Vegas hotel is adding an Amazon Echo to every one of its 4,748 rooms. A first for a hotel to do and a great way to market both the hotel and the Echo device.

However, it also means, should you stay there, you’ll have a built-in surveillance device potentially listening in on all your conversations whenever you are in the room. Call me crazy but there might be a few guests who don’t want Amazon listening in on their wild Vegas weekend.

The irony is sweet, given Wynn Resorts Steve Wynn’s press statement on why he chose to add an Echo to every room:

“If I have ever seen anything in my 49 years of developing resorts that has made our job of delivering a perfect experience to our guests easier and help us get to another level, it is Alexa. The ability to talk to your room is effortlessly convenient,” Wynn stated.

But with all that chatter comes Alexa’s ability to upload what you are saying to the cloud. Echo has a listening component that is activated simply by speaking out loud, making it the perfect spy device — not only for Amazon marketing purposes but also for hackers and the government to get information about you without your permission.•

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“He Believed Silicon Valley Technologists Were The Brightest And Best Americans. He Was Wrong.”

December 15, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Ever since Apple’s “Think Different” ad in 1997, the one in which Steve jobs used Gandhi’s image to sell marked-up consumer electronics made by sweatshop labor, Silicon Valley business titans have been celebrated the way astronauts used to be. Jobs, who took credit for that advertising campaign which someone else created, specifically wondered why we put on a pedestal those who voyage into space when he and his clever friends were changing the world–or something–with their gadgets. He believed technologists were the best and brightest Americans. He was wrong.

Some of the Valley’s biggest names filed dourly into Trump Tower yesterday in a sort of reverse perp walk. It was the same, sad spectacle of Al Gore’s pilgrimage, which was answered with Scott Pruitt, climate-change denier, being chosen EPA Chief. Perhaps they made the trek on some sort of utilitarian impulse, but I would guess there was also some element of self-preservation, not an unheard of sense of compromise for those who see their corporations as if they were countries, not only because of their elephantine “GDPs,” but also because of how they view themselves. I don’t think they’re all Peter Thiel, an emotional leper and intellectual fraud who now gets to play out his remarkably stupid theories in a large-scale manner. I’ve joked that Thiel has a moral blind spot reminiscent of Hitler’s secretary, but the truth is probably far darker. 

What would have been far more impressive would have been if Musk, Cook, Page, Sandberg, Bezos and the rest stopped downstairs in front of the building and read a statement saying that while they would love to aid any U.S. President, they could not in this case because the President-Elect has displayed vicious xenophobia, misogyny and callous disregard for non-white people throughout the campaign and in the election’s aftermath. He’s shown totalitarian impulses and has disdain for the checks and balances that make the U.S. a free country. In fact, with his bullying nastiness he continues to double down on his prejudices, which has been made very clear by not only his words but through his cabinet appointments. They could have stated their dream for the future doesn’t involve using Big Data to spy on Muslims and Mexicans or programming 3D printers to build internment camps on Mars. They might have noted that Steve Bannon, whom Trump chose as his Chef Strategist, just recently said that there were too many Asian CEOs in Silicon alley, revealing his white-nationalistic ugliness yet again. They could have refused to normalize Trump’s odious vision. They could have taken a stand.

They didn’t because they’re not our absolute finest citizens. Khizr and Ghazala Khan, who understand the essence of the nation in a way the tech billionaires do not, more truly represent us at our most excellent. They possess a wisdom and moral courage that’s as necessary to us as the Constitution itself. The Silicon Valley folks lack these essential qualities, and without them, you can’t be called our best and brightest.•

“The Future Of Incarceration Is To Not Be Called Incarceration”

December 14, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Why put more police on the streets when we can turn all of America into a police state? We can all do time together. Build walls, create ethnic registries, neutralize any part of the press that might raise a hackle about our new demagogic abnormal. Make the whole thing a prison, especially for the non-white among us. That seems to be the mentality of the moment.

If we survive this stupid, scary era and someday find our better angels, prison reform, a surprisingly bipartisan topic, needs to be taken seriously, with mentally ill people placed in proper facilities rather than warehoused behind bars, and drug use decriminalized even if it’s not fully legalized. Whether or not the U.S. takes this necessary leap, other nations surely will. 

John Surico’s smart Vice article “What Will the Future of Incarceration Look Like?” explores the noble, common-sense fixes proposed by the “Reimagining Prison” initiative. An excerpt:

Mentally-ill inmates not only take up a good chunk of who’s behind bars in this country, but also provide serious challenges when it comes to staff unequipped for the challenge

The outgoing sheriff Michael J. Ashe Jr., who oversees the county jail in Hampden County, in Massachusetts, is considered to be a pioneer in this field—someone who witnessed massive incarceration growth throughout his time there, since he started in 1974. He reacted with measures that are just now becoming the mainstream, like stress rehabilitation, college-level classes, and required hours of rehabilitation, or vocational training.

“As state hospitals continue to close—and even though we still have some of the best mental health hospitals in the world—the last place these individuals need to be is in a correctional facility,” Ashe told the room. “So I really feel these things will need to be addressed in the years ahead.”

For guidance on what is, perhaps, the best way to punish, Baz Dreisinger traveled around the world to see, and maybe even learn from, how other countries treat their prison populations. Her journey resulted in a book, Incarcerated Nations, which sheds light on the philosophy behind American incarceration and how it stands apart globally.

In Singapore, Dreisinger, who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said there’s an ad campaign aimed at hiring formerly incarcerated individuals, sort of like a “ban-the-box” promotional. In Norway, she added, one of the prisons actually seems more like a cattle farm, with open space and no bars. And in South Africa, she attended a restorative justice seminar in a prison that is considered to be one of its nastiest.

“The future of incarceration is to not be called incarceration,” she told me after the panel. “I think what I wanted to emphasize is that it’s about reenvisioning and reimagining justice.”

“So for me, the future has little to do with prisons—the word ‘incarceration’ itself, and the space we’re standing in,” she continued. “So I envision a system that is grounded in community courts, reparative systems, truth and reconciliation commissions, and ‘facilities,’ insofar as absolutely necessary, which is always involving a really small number of people.”•

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“In 2050 Your Digital Life And Your Real Life Will Be Almost Seamless”

December 14, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I don’t worry so much about the development of superintelligence as I do a lack of basic intelligence.

Liberal government is in retreat in 2016, and America now has a climate-change denier as President-Elect even as China, with its atrocious air pollution and scary cancer rates, should be serving as a fossil-fuel cautionary tale. Sometime it seems the phones have gotten smart and the people have not.

Our powerful new tools, with all their potential for greatness, have bedeviled us in a variety of ways, exacerbating wealth inequality and making it possible for some nations to remotely tamper in the elections of others. The tech advancements that further emerge will also be both boon and bane. A hammer is a tool or a weapon depending on how you swing it, and all the virtual swords will be double-edged.

In forecasting our world in 2050 in a smart Datamation piece, Donald Prell doesn’t ignore the species-ending potential of global warming, though he takes a techno-optimist’s view of tomorrow, believing answers will emerge before the questions kill us.

His line about the seamlessness of actual and virtual life I quoted in the headline, however, seems to me as much a threat as a promise. Perhaps we shouldn’t forget the difference, maybe it’s not best to be able to squeeze a VR tour of the Holocaust into our lunch break. Time will tell if removing the borders was wise, though they likely will vanish.

An excerpt:

The Internet of today has instantaneously allowed people-to-people contact worldwide.  In 2050 all of the world’s population will be in touch with each other, making the world borderless.  However, there will be problems; privacy will have become obsolete, our private information will all be part of public records on the Internet.  A new international body – combining the present ICANN in California and the International Telecommunication  Union  (ITU)  in  Geneva – will  be  regulating  privacy, security, standards and all of the technological attributes of the Internet.

Everyone will be having fun using Virtual Reality.  If you and your friends decide to play a game about World War II, you all will have the option of hopping off the couch and join with the troops storming the beaches of Normandy.  A university professor at UCLA will meet with his or her colleagues from MIT and the University of London in one office to discuss the mater at hand.

Augmented Reality (AR) will allow those using special hardware to view the real world environment in which reality is modified by a computer. Imagine a  construction worker  using  an  AR helmet  on  the  construction site, or an architect viewing his plans for a building while visiting the site where the building is to be constructed.  Medical school students taking physiology will visualize different systems of the body in three dimensions.  With AI-powered robots having more computational  power than the human brain, it’s likely that by 2050 we will be able to  upload  digital  versions of our brains and be able to exist in that dynamic form forever!  Which brings up the question: what does life mean?

In 2000 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first robotic surgical tool.  The da Vinci Surgical System couples a robot with telepresence technology, allowing a surgeon to be in one location and the patient, along with the surgical robot in another.  By 2050, for some operations, the surgeon will not be needed – Dr. Robot will handle the total operation.  Smart drugs will enhance cognitive brain function and neural connectivity while strengthening the prefrontal cortex and boosting memory and recall.

In 2050, robots will play a major  role in  monitoring  and  caring for our planet.  Bee bots will assist in the pollination of crops that we previously relied on biological bees to perform.  Using special optics, including infrared  cameras, robots will be  used  where humans fear  to  tread.  Artificial intelligence coupled with advanced sensors will enable the robots to become decision-makers, which will allow them to be used in many occupations.

3D printers will be common in every household. Simple objects a person might need will be created by a computer/printer filled with different compounds similar to ink, which will allow it to create in a few minutes an object that is requested.   The blueprints  for objects  will come from a public database, available online.

A computer bought in 2050 will be a billion times more powerful than the one I am using now to  write  this article.  That means several computersin 2050 will have the same computing power as all the computers existing today!

Almost invisible pervasive computers will be everywhere: buildings, highways, vehicles, even in the clothing we wear.  In 2050 your digital life and your real life will be almost seamless.•

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“There’s No Other Way To Explain Obama’s Inability To Imagine This Nation Could Elect Donald Trump”

December 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Hope is usually audacious but sometimes misplaced.

Without that feeling of expectation in a country founded on white supremacy that has never erased institutional racism, Barack Hussein Obama would certainly have never been elected President of the United States, not once, let alone twice. But his hope has also served as an escape hatch for white Americans who wanted to not only ignore the past but also the present. By stressing the best in us, Obama overlooked the worst of us, and that worst has never gone away.

It’s doubtful he behaved this way merely due to political opportunism: Obama seems a true believer in America and the ideals it espouses but has never lived up to. I love him and Michelle and think they’re wonderful people, but the nation has never been as good as they are, and even on a hopeful day I’m unsure we even aspire to be.

From “The Problem With Obama’s Faith in White America,” a painfully true Atlantic essay by Tressie McMillan Cottom:

The black president that Ta-Nehisi Coates describes is one who thinks he could have ever really “embraced” or “chosen” blackness. He seems to truly believe that he exercised some great act of charity and agency in adopting black cool. My first black president seems to think that he can raise his daughters to believe in systemic racism without legitimizing the idea of systemic reparations. He thinks that he can be his brother’s keeper without changing the world that keeps his brothers in bad jobs, poor neighborhoods, bad educational options, and at the bottom of the social hierarchy. My first black president seems to think he can have black cool without black burden. For all his intimacies with his white mother and white grandparents, my first black president doesn’t appear to know his whites.

There’s no other way to explain Obama’s inability to imagine this nation could elect Donald Trump. Those of us who know our whites know one thing above all else: whiteness defends itself. Against change, against progress, against hope, against black dignity, against black lives, against reason, against truth, against facts, against native claims, against its own laws and customs. Even after Donald Trump was elected, Obama told Coates that all is not lost. He is still hopeful about the soul of white America. He said nothing about the soul of black America. That is where my hope resides. It is where my faith has always resided.•

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“We’ve Been Having A Kind Of Mars Moment Lately”

December 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

The recently departed John Glenn worried about war being waged in outer space, and wherever humans go, chaos, as well as creativity, will surely follow. While Elon Musk has unilaterally decided that direct democracy will govern Mars (and, hey, how nice for him!), we’ll also launch far less savory arrangements into the stratosphere.

In the Trump years, if awful priorities and utter incompetence don’t ground our further forays into the final frontier–sadly, that’s the most likely outcome–you may see beauty pageants on Mars, Saturn’s rings dipped in cheap gold paint and low-gravity golf courses on the moon, where everyone can drive the ball like the pre-Calligula Tiger Woods.

Actually, voyaging into space may become more necessary than ever if, say, you want to flee a nuclear war with China or escape a fossil-fuel dystopia dotted with internment camps. Just thinking out loud here.

The New York Times has a thoughtful consideration of the nebulous state of NASA in the time of Trump, which was written by Dennis Overbye, whose smart, graceful articles about space exploration I’ve been reading since I was a kid. Now we’re both old, and I mostly blame him. The opening:

Two weeks after a presidential election that could have vaulted him to the head of NASA, John Grunsfeld reached across his peanut curry at a small restaurant on the Far West Side of Manhattan, grabbed my notebook and sketched out a plan for a trip to Mars.

Dr. Grunsfeld, astronomer, astronaut, and former associate administrator of NASA, was in town to promote a National Geographic TV series about Martian exploration. On his shirt was a picture of a space shuttle and the Hubble Space Telescope.

We’ve been having a kind of Mars moment lately. Audiences filled theaters last year to watch Matt Damon as The Martian. Personalities as diverse as President Obama and Elon Musk have declared the Red Planet the next great destination.

In the days leading up the election, Dr. Grunsfeld said, NASA was thinking about a Mars mission to get ready for the transition. He himself was rumored to be on the short list to run the space agency should Hillary Clinton have won.

“NASA has never had a scientist as administrator; you and I would have had fun,” he said.

Now, nobody knows where NASA’s rockets are going on their biblical smoke pillars. Donald J. Trump’s one mention of the space program during his campaign was to tell a kid that potholes on Earth need fixing first.•

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“How Long Will It Be Before You, Too, Lose Your Job To A Computer?”

December 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

It’s not a sure thing automation permanently obviates a wide swath of human workers, sending most of us to the exit or the dustbin. Perhaps it’s not different this time than it was during the Industrial Age, with machines relieving us of our jobs and new and better ones emerging in their stead. 

The pace of epochal change matters greatly. For instance: Driverless capability may not be hugely damaging if it becomes widespread in five decades but is probably a real threat should that time frame be adjusted down to 20 years. No one has yet developed a suitable Plan B if too many positions disappear too rapidly or if enough new work doesn’t develop.

Not all labor has to be disappeared for society to capsize. Only enough citizens have to be directly disrupted for all of us to feel the ramifications. As we’ve seen with manufacturing and will likely soon witness in the service, transportation and delivery sectors, among others, just enough pieces of the foundation need fall away for desperation to take hold.

Complicating matters, today’s technologists aren’t working on half-measures, not the way banks wanted to keep tellers as they added ATMs. Jeff Bezos wants supermarkets 100% free of cashiers, and Tesla and Google and Uber want cars that commandeer the wheel completely.

That could lead to an even greater race to the bottom. More McJobs done by yesterday’s high school juniors being handled by today’s senior citizens–until those positions too are decimated. Bellhops and truckers won’t all be able to be uniformly upskilled overnight, and they aren’t points on a flow chart but people who need to feed their families. 

MIT’s David Autor has said that the problem of mass automation would be “one of distribution, not of scarcity.” True enough, but that’s no small problem.

Two excerpts follow from two smart articles on the topic, one that sees the Google Glass as half-full and another which does not.

The opening of Chris Mims’ WSJ piece “Automation Can Actually Create More Jobs“:

Since the 1970s, when automated teller machines arrived, the number of bank tellers in America has more than doubled. James Bessen, an economist who teaches at Boston University School of Law, points to that seeming paradox amid new concerns that automation is “stealing” human jobs. To the contrary, he says, jobs and automation often grow hand in hand.

Sometimes, of course, machines really do replace humans, as in agriculture and manufacturing, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology labor economist David Autor in a succinct and illuminating TED talk, which could have served as the headline for this column. Across an entire economy, however, Dr. Autor says that’s never happened.

The threat that machines pose to workers is in the news again, after an election that turned on the frustration of working-class voters. Last week, Amazon.com Inc. introduced Amazon Go, a store without cashiers.

Three days later, President-elect Donald Trump nominated Andy Puzder, chief executive of CKE Restaurants Holdings Inc., the parent company of Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. chains, to be secretary of labor. Mr. Puzder has said that self-serve ordering kiosks, like those recently unveiled by McDonald’s Corp., will help his company eliminate workers.

Such developments are worrying. But a long trail of empirical evidence shows that the increased productivity brought about by automation and invention ultimately leads to more wealth, cheaper goods, increased consumer spending power and ultimately, more jobs.•

From Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker piece “Our Automated Future“:

How long will it be before you, too, lose your job to a computer? This question is taken up by a number of recent books, with titles that read like variations on a theme: The Industries of the Future, The Future of the Professions, Inventing the Future. Although the authors of these works are employed in disparate fields—law, finance, political theory—they arrive at more or less the same conclusion. How long? Not long.

“Could another person learn to do your job by studying a detailed record of everything you’ve done in the past?” Martin Ford, a software developer, asks early on in Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (Basic Books). “Or could someone become proficient by repeating the tasks you’ve already completed, in the way that a student might take practice tests to prepare for an exam? If so, then there’s a good chance that an algorithm may someday be able to learn to do much, or all, of your job.”

Later, Ford notes, “A computer doesn’t need to replicate the entire spectrum of your intellectual capability in order to displace you from your job; it only needs to do the specific things you are paid to do.” He cites a 2013 study by researchers at Oxford, which concluded that nearly half of all occupations in the United States are “potentially automatable,” perhaps within “a decade or two.” (“Even the work of software engineers may soon largely be computerisable,” the study observed. )

The “threat of a jobless future” is, of course, an old one, almost as old as technology. The first, rudimentary knitting machine, known as a “stocking frame,” was invented in the late sixteenth century by a clergyman named William Lee. Seeking a patent for his invention, Lee demonstrated the machine for Elizabeth I. Concerned about throwing hand-knitters out of work, she refused to grant one. In the early nineteenth century, a more sophisticated version of the stocking frame became the focus of the Luddites’ rage; in towns like Liversedge and Middleton, in northern England, textile mills were looted. Parliament responded by declaring “frame breaking” a capital offense, and the machines kept coming. Each new technology displaced a new cast of workers: first knitters, then farmers, then machinists. The world as we know it today is a product of these successive waves of displacement, and of the social and artistic movements they inspired: Romanticism, socialism, progressivism, Communism.

Meanwhile, the global economy kept growing, in large part because of the new machines. As one occupation vanished, another came into being. Employment migrated from farms and mills to factories and offices to cubicles and call centers.

Economic history suggests that this basic pattern will continue, and that the jobs eliminated by Watson and his ilk will be balanced by those created in enterprises yet to be imagined—but not without a good deal of suffering. If nearly half the occupations in the U.S. are “potentially automatable,” and if this could play out within “a decade or two,” then we are looking at economic disruption on an unparalleled scale. Picture the entire Industrial Revolution compressed into the life span of a beagle.

And that’s assuming history repeats itself. What if it doesn’t? What if the jobs of the future are also potentially automatable?♦

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“The Political Upheavals Of 2016 Have Forced Economists To Reconsider”

December 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

What is the best way to treat the inequities of globalization and technological disruption? Universal Basic Income and government spending on education are often suggested as panaceas, even if neither seems very likely to triumph in America, where the political will is lacking. And let’s not forget that UBI programs are not all created equally. Some are downright pernicious. In general, investment in education pays myriad dividends, though should enough lower-skill postions rapidly disappear, it will be be impossible to quickly upskill everyone from a blue collar to a white one.

In a Financial Times column, Gavyn Davies writes about the “losers of globalization” and the challenge of finding a way up for those pushed out. An excerpt:

The political upheavals of 2016 have forced economists to reconsider. The final shape of what is now called “populism” is not yet entirely clear. It does not seem to fit easily on the traditional right/left, or liberal/conservative, spectrum. This is why two of the most obvious benefits of the political revolution, Theresa May and Donald Trump, are hard to categorize in this regard.

There does, however, seem to be one unifying theme and that is a resurgence in economic nationalism, with a collapse in support for internationalism or globalisation. Since the “elites” are seen as the main beneficiaries of globalisation in the developed economies, this has gone hand in hand with anti-elitism and a rejection of advice from “experts”. The latter could easily develop into anti-rationalism, which would surely prove disastrous in the long term.

Economists have now recognised these dangers, and a new consensus has started to emerge. There has been (almost) no change in the overwhelming belief that free trade and globalisation are good things for society as a whole. But it is now much more widely accepted that the losers from these changes can be more numerous, more long lasting and more politically assertive than previously thought.

The new consensus holds that the gains from globalisation can only be defended and extended if the losers are compensated by the winners. Otherwise, pockets of political resistance to the process of globalisation will begin to overwhelm the gainers, even though the latter remain in the majority.

While the compensation principle seems clear enough, the complexity of actually getting it done is much greater. As Jared Bernstein says, the rust belt needs help, but it is not clear how to help the rust belt. Nor is it at all obvious that there would be a political or economic consensus supporting some of the most obvious measures that could be adopted, at least on the scale that would be needed to make a noticeable difference.•

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“This Is Wishful Thinking. It Isn’t Going To Happen.”

December 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a recent Guardian essay, Stephen Hawking identified our age as the “most dangerous time for our planet.” Considering climate change, wealth inequality, the retreat of liberal democracy, and, perhaps, a re-embrace of nuclear proliferation, the physicist may very well be correct. While I thought his prescriptions to address the widening chasm between haves and have-nots were noble, they didn’t seem realistic to me. I have serious concerns that we’re increasingly taking a horrifying path.

In a Washington Post op-ed, Vivek Wadhwa feels similarly about Hawking’s best intentions. He suggests a better answer might be citizens having a greater voice in the nature of the technological tools shaping our future, though I’m dubious if that will make a dent, either. Technology isn’t often directed by a succession of sober-minded, rational choices. An excerpt:

Technology is the main culprit here, widening the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. As Hawking explained, automation has already decimated jobs in manufacturing and is allowing Wall Street to accrue huge rewards that the rest of us underwrite. Over the next few years, technology will take more jobs from humans. Robots will drive the taxis and trucks; drones will deliver our mail and groceries; machines will flip hamburgers and serve meals. And, if Amazon’s new cashierless stores are a success, supermarkets will replace cashiers with sensors. This is not speculation; it is imminent. (Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

The dissatisfaction is not particularly American. With the developing world coming online with smartphones and tablets, billions more people are becoming aware of what they don’t have. The unrest we have witnessed in the United States, Britain and, most recently, Italy will become a global phenomenon.

Hawking’s solution is to break down barriers within and between nations, to have world leaders acknowledge that they have failed and are failing the many, to share resources and to help the unemployed retrain. But this is wishful thinking. It isn’t going to happen.

Witness the outcome of the elections: We moved backward on almost every front. Our politicians will continue to divide and conquer, Silicon Valley will deny its culpability, and the very technologies, such as social media and the Internet, that were supposed to spread democracy and knowledge will instead be used to mislead, to suppress and to bring out the ugliest side of humanity.•

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“I Think One Of The Main Things Is The Idea Of No Spectators”

December 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Ken Kesey responded this way when asked if psychedelics had injured him: “You don’t get anything for free.”

Buried in Timothy Leary’s original 1960s “Turn on, tune in, drop out” college lecture tour was the defrocked academic’s belief that while the mind-bending strength of LSD was needed to awaken the “beloved robots” from society’s lockstep sleepwalk, he didn’t think pharmaceuticals would long be required or even desired to liberate hearts and minds. Leary felt computer software or space exploration or some other “high” would allow people to escape conformity.

We’re 50 years on from the famous (and infamous) Trips Festival in San Francisco, the first real gathering of hippies, with Owsley Stanley providing the dosage and the Grateful Dead the volume. All those years later, America has a President-Elect reminiscent of Mussolini and a populace that’s largely turned cruel. Is that because not enough people became enlightened or due to progress and regress being constantly at war? The latter, I think.

Regardless, a golden-anniversary celebration of the seminal event will be attended by one of its original organizers Stewart Brand. He was interviewed by Gabe Meline of KQED about the occasion. Below is an excerpt from that Q&A and a piece from Brand’s 1967 Psychedelic Review article about a peyote-fueled Native American church meeting he attended.

From KQED:

Question:

You’re someone who often thinks about, and talks about, the future. This going to be thinking and talking about the past — 50 years ago. How does it feel to look back?

Stewart Brand:

Well, the Long Now Foundation, where I am President and have been mainly occupied for the last 20 years — we are focused on continuity. The Trips Festival was a continuity event. It was kind of a transitional event from one period of art in the Bay Area to another period. A lot of what it was expressing then is, I think, still very present — certainly in Burning Man, and in certain relationships that artists have to each other, and, increasingly, that engineers have to each other in the Bay Area. The interaction of engineers and artists, there was a certain amount of it at the Trips Festival and there’s certainly a lot more now. It’s part of the Bay Area’s ongoing contribution to culture and society.

Question:

You mentioned Burning Man. What other things grew out of the ideology at the Trips Festival?

Stewart Brand:

I think one of the main things is the idea of no spectators. The idea that an audience shows up to a certain kind of event expecting to do something, not just to see something. Raves came on through that. People came to the Trips Festival in outfits, and stoned, and prepared to dance. There was not much seating in Longshoreman’s Hall. There was a great big floor with scaffolding in the middle, where Ken Kesey and Ken Babbs and I were dangling. That floor was always filled with people doing stuff. It was at its best when the Grateful Dead, newly named the Grateful Dead, were playing. That’s why we did a reprise Sunday night of their amazing show on Saturday night.•

From Psychedelic Review:

The meeting is mandala-form, a circle with a doorway to the east. The roadman will sit opposite the door, the moon-crescent altar in front of him. To his left sits the cedarman, to his right the drummer. On the right side as you enter will be the fireman. The people sit around the circle. In the middle is the fire.

A while after dark they go in. This may be formal, filling in clockwise around the circle in order. The roadman may pray outside beforehand, asking that the place and the people and the occasion be blessed.

Beginning a meeting is as conscious and routine as a space launch countdown. At this time the fireman is busy starting the fire and seeing that things and people are in their places. The cedarman drops a little powder of cedar needles and little balls, goes down the quickest. In all cases, the white fluff should be removed. There is usually a pot of peyote tea, kept near the fire, which is passed occasionally during the night. Each person takes as much medicine as he wants and can ask for more at any time. Four buttons is a common start. Women usually take less than the men. Children have only a little, unless they are sick. 

Everything is happening briskly at this point. People swallow and pass the peyote with minimum fuss. The drummer and roadman go right into the starting song. The roadman, kneeling on one or both knees, begins it with the rattle in his right hand. The drummer picks up the quick beat, and the roadman gently begins the song. His left hand holds the staff, a feather fan, and some sage. He sings four times, ending each section with a steady quick rattle as a signal for the drummer to pause or re-wet the drumhead before resuming the beat. Using his thumb on the drumhead, the drummer adjusts the beat of his song. When the roadman finishes he passes the staff, gourd, fan and sage to the cedarman, who sings four times with the random drumming. So it goes, the drum following the staff to the left around the circle, so each man sings and drums many times during the night.•

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“Some Expeditions Will Be Like Going To War”

December 12, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In 1969, the year of the Apollo moon landing, Oriana Fallaci said this about John Glenn: “The second time I saw him, after his fall, he was a better man, I thought, not playing the Boy Scout so much.” 

The fall she spoke of was literal, mostly.

That was five years after the astronaut’s forced retirement by NASA, the government fearing a Gagarin-ish demise in space for the Viking hero would be too severe a stress test for the program and the country itself. Glenn, a civilian again, decided to reinvent himself through politics, vying for a Senate seat in Ohio. Early in the campaign, he tumbled in his bathroom at home, sustaining a serious head injury, one that wrecked his equilibrium. Glenn, who was confined for two months in the aerospace medical clinic in San Antonio, said, “I only ask this: that I may walk a little in a room that isn’t a merry-go-round.” He knew he would never step on the moon and it seemed dubious whether he’s be able to pace a rug.

Glenn eventually healed, returned to politics, failed at first, then eventually achieved success in that realm and in business. But in the latter ’60s, as Fallaci described him, he was a “used astronaut, an unsuccessful politician, a tired, sick disappointed man.”

The first time the two met, Glenn was still an astronaut and he sat for an interview with Fallaci for what would become her excellent book on the U.S. Space Program, If the Sun Dies. At one point the discussion turned to religion and the alien life forms that astronauts, perhaps even the devoutly Christian Glenn himself, might encounter. The passage:

“Science in general has never proved that there is life on other planets. But space flights can–and how. And the day you meet unimaginable creatures on another planet–let’s call them ‘beings-of-unknown-appearance’–how will you explain the Genesis story, Colonel, sir?”

“The Bible doesn’t deny life on other worlds. Indeed, I’ll tell you I’d be very much surprised to not find what you call ‘beings-of-unknown-appearance’ on other planets. We’ll find them–perhaps in the form of beings or worms, although you can be certain that one day, among the millions and millions of celestial bodies, we’ll find man too. But I can imagine creatures that don’t develop with our cycle of water and carbon, creatures that feed on rocks, for example, and have no blood or tissues or organs: and the Bible says nothing to deny this. It doesn’t deny that God might have created them too in His own image and after His likeness. It doesn’t deny the possibility of loving them as true Christians.”

“And what if it were necessary to kill them, to exterminate them, these worms or rock brothers who have no blood or tissues or organs…would you find that painful, Colonel?”

Again he leaned his elbow on the arm of the chair. Again he raised his hand to his forehead. Bradbury was so far away, Father.

“No, I don’t think so. It would be sad; it grieves me even to think about it. But I could do it. I’m a man who doesn’t want to see anybody die, not even in war. But some expeditions will be like going to war, and the essence of war is death. And then, excuse me, but what makes you think we might have to exterminate the ‘beings-of-unknown-appearance’ on other planets?”

“Because they might be hostile to us. They might be far from happy to see us come, Colonel.”

“I’m optimistic: they might be completely friendly. They might also be good, pleased to see us, and we might not have to exterminate them at all. Of course…of course I would be suspicious when I saw them, ready to defend myself…I don’t know…Certainly, if some exist in our own solar system…My God…they surely exist in other solar systems, but we won’t be going to other solar systems in your lifetime or in mine. At best this will be a hundred, two hundred years from now, and a hundred or two hundred years are not many, I know, but enough to leave me with painful questions.”•

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“Fewer Pointed Hoods, More Khaki Pants”

December 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

An angle used to dismiss the idea that the Make America White Again message resonated with a surprising, depressing number of citizens has been to point out that some Trump supporters also voted for Obama. I think that argument is simplistic. Some bigots aren’t so far gone that they can’t vote for a person of a race they look down on if they feel it’s in their best interests financially or otherwise. That is to say, some racially prejudiced whites voted for President Obama. Trump appealed to them to find their worst selves. Many did.

Likewise the Trump campaign emboldened far worse elements, including white nationalists and separatists and anti-Semites. Thinking they’d been perhaps permanently marginalized, these hate groups are now updating their “brand,” hiding yesterday’s swastikas and burning crosses and other “bad optics,” and referring to themselves not as neo-Nazis but by more vaguely appealing monikers like “European-American advocates.” It’s the same monster wrapped in a different robe, the mainstreaming of malevolence, and they won’t again be easily relegated to the fringe regardless of Trump’s fate.

In the New York Times piece “An Alt-Right Makeover Shrouds the Swastikas” by Serge F. Kovaleski, Julie Turkewitz, Joseph Goldstein and Dan Barry, the journalists explore a beast awakened and energized by Trump’s ugly campaign. It’s a great piece, though we should all probably stop calling these groups by their preferred KKK 2.0 alias of “alt-right.” An excerpt:

Let us pause. Not even two years ago, white supremacists like Mr. Schoep would rant from the fringe of the fringe, their attention-desperate events rarely worth mention. Today, though, the Schoeps of America are undergoing a rebranding, as part of the so-called alt-right: a grab bag of far-right groups generally united by the belief that white identity has become endangered in what they deride as this era of dangerous diversity and political correctness.

The deceptively benign phrase “alt-right” now peppers the national conversation, often in ways that play down its fundamental beliefs, which have long been considered intolerant and hateful. The term’s recent prevalence corresponds with the rise of President-elect Donald J. Trump; alt-right leaders say his inflammatory statements and Twitter habits in the campaign energized, even validated, their movement.

The movement is also acutely image-conscious, seeing the burning crosses, swastikas and language of yesteryear as impediments to recruitment. Its adherents talk of “getting red-pilled,” a reference to the movie “The Matrix,” in which the protagonist ingests a tablet that melts away artifice to reveal the truth. New, coded slurs have emerged. Fewer pointed hoods, more khaki pants.

But the alt-right movement is hardly monolithic…•

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“You Feel Like You’ve Walked Into Another World”

December 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Brute efficiency is more closely associated with fascism than democracy, and there are reasons for that. Main one: Humans aren’t machines, not yet at least.

While Mussolini and Bilbao dreamed of workers emulating robots, incredibly cheap and powerful microchips have made it possible for today’s technologists to eliminate the middle man and woman. Not that everyone in Silicon Valley is as heinous as Peter Thiel, who has a moral blind spot reminiscent Hitler’s secretary. Many want a brighter tomorrow for all, but their disruptions run counter to that goal, exacerbating wealth inequality, suppressing wages and potentially eliminating millions of jobs–entire industries, even–without creating suitable replacements. That may not, strictly speaking, be their responsibility, but their futures, as surely as ours, depend on it or the emergence of some other suitable solution. 

Two excerpts follow from new pieces on our technologically enhanced Gilded Age.

From Alexandra Suich of the Economist “1843”:

San Francisco is having its Manhattan moment. Buildings are stretching skyward, and people are moving here in swarms to seek their fortunes. [Ken] Fulk is helping reimagine the city’s interiors. He came to prominence in 2013 with the opening of The Battery, a private club, which quickly became an after-hours destination for techies, who linger in banquettes beneath the main lounge’s exposed-brick walls.

But most of Fulk’s business is designing private houses for the city’s wealthy technorati. His clients include Mark Pincus of the gaming company Zynga; Kevin Systrom of the photo-sharing app Instagram; Jeremy Stoppelman of Yelp, the online review site; and Michael and Xochi Birch, who sold their social network, Bebo, for $850m in 2008 and now own The Battery. While minimalist interiors are in vogue, Fulk’s signature style is bold, eclectic and gleefully maximalist. “With contemporary design, you feel like you walked into a hotel room,” says Systrom. “With Ken, you feel like you’ve walked into another world.”

Fulk uses loud colours, lush materials and found objects that infuse spaces with playfulness and whimsy. He loves taxidermy and furniture with a backstory. His own office in San Francisco’s SoMa neighbourhood, called the Magic Factory, has doors salvaged from a mental institution and an aeroplane. On the main floor is a shop where clients can peruse some of Fulk’s discoveries. He has two cabinets that were used to archive specimens at the British Museum, and a stuffed musk ox that he bought from a museum in Kansas City when it closed its dioramas. San Francisco is pulled between extreme wealth, poverty and counter-culture, and there are competing elements within Fulk’s own work too. “Like the city itself, there’s a tension between high and low,” he says.•

From Maya Kosoff at Vanity Fair “Hive”:

While Amazon has already supplemented many of its warehouse employees with machines, Amazon Go stores will almost certainly require the presence of some number of human staff. Still, Amazon appears to be moving decisively toward replacing workers with automation wherever possible. Since 2014, The Los Angeles Times reports, Amazon has added 50,000 warehouse workers but also more than 30,000 robots, causing hiring to slow at its warehouses. Nor is Amazon the only tech company with plans to eventually automate as many jobs as possible. Earlier this year, Uber bought an automated trucking start-up called Otto, which recently completed its first delivery—a beer run—largely without the assistance of its human driver. Although Otto has described its self-driving technology as a way to help truckers on long cross-country trips, Uber C.E.O. Travis Kalanick hasn’t been shy in the past about his vision to eliminate commercial drivers in the future. “The reason Uber could be expensive is because you’re not just paying for the car—you’re paying for the other dude in the car,” he said in 2014. “When there’s no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle.”

Not everyone in Silicon Valley is sanguine about a future where millions of retail or trucking jobs have been replaced by machines. A growing number of tech leaders, Y Combinator’s Sam Altman among them, have begun advocating for a universal basic income: a guaranteed minimum stipend that the government would pay to everyone, ensuring some cushion as technological change roils the labor market, and allowing workers to develop new skills. Altman might want to start by focusing on the 3.5 million cashiers in America, who could soon join the 3.5 million truck drivers in having to worry about a robot taking their job. That economic anxiety is part of the reason why Donald Trump, who promised to bring back manufacturing jobs from overseas, won the presidential election last month. But outsourcing is only part of the picture. In the end, it won’t be globalization, but automation, that will transform the U.S. economic landscape. Look no further than your friendly local Amazon Go store, coming soon to a neighborhood near you, to see that future in action.•

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“It Is Hardly Alone In Using Its Raw Data To Come To Strange And Wildly Erroneous Assumptions”

December 9, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

  • Is it worse if algorithms fishing through the polluted waters of the Internet are great at perceiving our personalities or if they’re just so much bilge? Maybe the efficacy we grant them is the problem regardless of their level of accuracy.
  • After I purchased a copy of Mark Twain’s Roughing It from Amazon in 2014, the ghosts in Jeff Bezos’ machine recommended to me Prepper’s Pantry: The Survival Guide To Emergency Water & Food Storage. Missed by that much.
  • In 2012, Target had eerie success in using data analysis to divine personal details, famously suggesting maternity-type purchases to a teen whose parents did not even know yet she was pregnant. But surprising insight in some cases doesn’t mean universal proficiency has been achieved.
  • Online video advertising is a bubble–get people to watch three seconds and get paid!–but perhaps something similarly suspect is happening when Facebook sells your supposed personality profile and preferences. Are they really just pushing false assumptions?
  • Whether we’re talking about predicting criminality based on facial features, hiring an employee or picking the next book to read, machines may seem smarter than humans, but that may not be so, at least not yet.

In one passage from “They Have, Right Now, Another You,” one of her regular excellent commentaries about our new tools and what they’ve wrought, Sue Halpern of the New York Review Books looks into the black mirror and sees something strange–a stranger. An excerpt:

While Facebook appears to be making seriously wrong and misdirected assumptions about me, and then cashing in on those mistakes, it is hardly alone in using its raw data to come to strange and wildly erroneous assumptions. Researchers at the Psychometrics Centre at Cambridge University in England have developed what they call a “predictor engine,” fueled by algorithms using a subset of a person’s Facebook “likes” that “can forecast a range of variables that includes happiness, intelligence, political orientation and more, as well as generate a big five personality profile.” (The big five are extroversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism, and are used by, among others, employers to assess job applicants. The acronym for these is OCEAN.) According to the Cambridge researchers, “we always think beyond the mere clicks or Likes of an individual to consider the subtle attributes that really drive their behavior.” The researchers sell their services to businesses with the promise of enabling “instant psychological assessment of your users based on their online behavior, so you can offer real-time feedback and recommendations that set your brand apart.”

So here’s what their prediction engine came up with for me: that I am probably male, though “liking” The New York Review of Books page makes me more “feminine”; that I am slightly more conservative than liberal—and this despite my stated affection for Bernie Sanders on Facebook; that I am much more contemplative than engaged with the outside world—and this though I have “liked” a number of political and activist groups; and that, apparently, I am more relaxed and laid back than 62 percent of the population. (Questionable.)

Here’s what else I found out about myself. Not only am I male, but “six out of ten men with [my] likes are gay,” which gives me “around an average probability” of being not just male, but a gay male. The likes that make me appear “less gay” are the product testing magazine Consumer Reports, the tech blog Gizmodo, and another website called Lifehacker. The ones that make me appear “more gay” are The New York Timesand the environmental group 350.org. Meanwhile, the likes that make me “appear less interested in politics” are The New York Times and 350.org.

And there’s more. According to the algorithm of the Psychometrics Centre, “Your likes suggest you are single and not in a relationship.” Why? Because I’ve liked the page for 350.org, an organization founded by the man with whom I’ve been in a relationship for thirty years!

Amusing as this is, it’s also an object lesson, yet again, about how easy it is to misconstrue and misinterpret data.•

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“People Don’t Want The Right Answers. They Want A Story.”

December 9, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

 

The media was flawed, Facebook irresponsible, the FBI reckless and Russia devious, but it’s still the American people mostly to blame for electing as President an unqualified, bigoted sociopath, thereby creating the single biggest threat in more than half a century to our liberty (an admittedly unevenly distributed good throughout our history). It was an unforced error, a self-lacerating act, and we will pay for it dearly, not just for four years but for decades.

Unburdened by shame and unhampered by facts, Donald Trump is at best a robber baron and at worst an American Mussolini. If the former unfolds, we’ll be dining on little more than bread and Kardashians. Should the latter become reality, we’ll have retroactively lost World War II and the Cold War.

Wondering how nearly 63 million citizens could have behaved boneheaded enough to make Brexit seem a bad hair day, Gary Silverman of the Financial Times interviewed Michael Lewis about his new book, The Undoing Project, which analyzes the work of Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and may help explain our Election Day massacre.

Lewis believes the human desire for exaggerated stories over cool statistics is in part responsible for the political ascent of the Simon Cowell-ish strongman, though the author, an admittedly wonderful writer, has sometimes himself been known to err on the side of narrative.

An excerpt:

The two psychologists are known for their work on “heuristics”, mental shortcuts that enable people to process all the information coming our way but can cause us to make mistakes. They are the cognitive equivalents of optical illusions — tricks played by the mind rather than by the eye.

A classic case involves what the psychologists dubbed “anchoring”. People given five seconds to estimate the product of 8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1 will provide far higher numbers than those asked to multiply 1x2x3x4x5x6x7x8 in the same time period. Seeing the bigger numbers first skews their thinking. A similar result is obtained if subjects are asked whether Mahatma Gandhi was more than 114 years old when he died or 35. People in the first group will provide a higher estimate of his age at death.

To Lewis, Trump has been dropping anchors like a battleship commander. After the election, for instance, Trump not only alleged that his opponent Hillary Clinton had received illegal votes, but that she had received “millions” of them. He offered no proof, but he used a big number. Putting all those zeroes in people’s heads can pay off later on, Lewis says, in much the same way as a lawyer seeking astronomical damages in a lawsuit can expect a larger pay-off than a litigant taking a more measured approach at the outset. “Trump anchors everything in this crazy number. He will always say the crazy number because the negotiation happens around the crazy number.”

Trump’s frequent use of violent imagery takes advantage of what is known as the “availability” heuristic. People make decisions based on memories. But more vivid information — the name of a celebrity, for example, as opposed to that of another person — is easier to recall, giving it greater weight in decision-making. When Trump speaks of gruesome Isis executions or murders committed by undocumented immigrants, he is providing voters with more memorable information than dry facts and figures. 

“A vivid story about something an illegal immigrant did is going to have much more of an effect than statistics about illegal immigrants and crime,” Lewis says. “People don’t want the right answers. They want a story. They don’t think in statistical terms.”•

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“We Should Not Dismiss The Idea Too Quickly”

December 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Libertarians, it seems to me, are perpetual adolescents when it comes to politics. They see idealism where I see immaturity. Laws and regulations will always be less than perfect, but I still trust those things a great deal more than corporations, Silicon Valley billionaires and those who get hard when reading about Dickensian boot-blacking factories.

Before forming a political alliance with far-right wingnuts and white nationalists, Peter Thiel, a rich man and a very, very poor one, had been out front among technologists in supporting the wet dream known as seasteading, hoping to swim away from those pesky regulations so that he could, I suppose, breathe as easily as the Chinese. Perhaps there would be no “soulless children” there expecting free lunches.

More specifically, Thiel and others in 2008 established the Seasteading Institute to build a floating nation in the ocean, many nautical miles beyond regulation, where Burning Man could walk on water. This planned “soaktopia” never worried me, except for revealing a scary mindset, a longing by some for a runaway free market here on solid ground. Thiel himself ultimately came back to earth and worked toward exactly that goal. For the non-superrich, the next four years may not go so well.

In a Bloomberg View piece, Tyler Cowen extols the virtues of seasteading, believing retired people could float away their golden years on endless cruises, which seems to ignore both human psychology and the immense number of seniors in the population. An excerpt:

Although seasteading is sometimes viewed as an extension of self-indulgent Silicon Valley utopianism, we should not dismiss the idea too quickly. Variants on seasteading led to the founding of the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with the caveat that conquest was involved, as these territories were not unsettled at the time. Circa 2016, there is a potential seasteading experiment due in French Polynesia (more information here). The melting of the Arctic ice may open up new areas for human settlement. Chinese construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea raises the prospect that the private sector, or a more liberty-oriented government, might someday do the same. Along more speculative lines, there is talk about someday colonizing Mars or even Titan, a moon of Saturn. On the intellectual front, a book about seasteading, by Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman, is due out in March of 2017.

Seasteading obviously faces significant obstacles. The eventual constraint is probably not technology in the absolute sense, but whether there is enough economic motive to forsake the benefits of densely populated human settlements and the protection of traditional nation-states. Many nations have effective corporate tax rates in the 10- to 20-percent range, which doesn’t seem confiscatory enough to take to the high seas for economic motives alone. Furthermore, current outposts such as Dubai, Singapore and the Cayman Islands offer varied legal and regulatory environments for doing business, in addition to the comforts of landlubber society. More and more foreign businesses are incorporating in Delaware to enjoy the benefits of American law. So, for all the inefficiencies and petty tyrannies of the modern world, seasteading faces pretty stiff competition.

Counterintuitively, I see the greatest promise for seasteading as a path toward more rather than less human companionship.•

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“People Are Afraid Of The Future, Of The Unknown”

December 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Sadly, John Glenn, spaceman and Senator, has died at 95.

Glenn and his fellow astronauts of the 1960s were not in it for the money. They made an annual base salary of $13,000, which was supplemented to a degree by benefits and a small fee they shared from a Life magazine contract. Not bad pay in those days but certainly not commensurate with the risks endured. 

Glenn, who piloted the Mercury 6, the first successful U.S. attempt to put a manned spaceship into orbit, explained his participation in the burgeoning space program in a 1961 Life cover story:

“A lot of people ask,” he reflected recently, “why a man is willing to risk hat, tail and gas mask on something like this. Well, we’ve got to do it. We’re going into an age of exploration that will be bigger than anything the world has ever seen. I guess I’m putting my family up against some risks. I could do other jobs which might increase my life expectancy. But this could help my kids, too. I want them to be better off than I was as a young man. With risks you gain.

“I’ve got a theory about this,” Glenn continued, speaking with great care. “People are afraid of the future, of the unknown. If a man faces up to it and takes the dare of the future, he can have some control over his destiny. That’s an exciting idea to me, better than waiting with everybody else to see what’s going to happen.”•

From his New York Times obituary by John Noble Wilford, who also wrote the paper’s 1969 “Men Walk On Moon” front-page article:

In just five hours on Feb. 20, 1962, Mr. Glenn joined a select roster of Americans whose feats have seized the country’s imagination and come to embody a moment in its history, figures like Lewis and Clark, the Wright brothers and Charles Lindbergh.

To the America of the 1960s, Mr. Glenn was a clean-cut, good-natured, well-grounded Midwesterner, raised in Presbyterian rectitude, nurtured in patriotism and tested in war, who stepped forward to risk the unknown and succeeded spectacularly, lifting his country’s morale and restoring its self-confidence.

It was an anxious nation that watched and listened that February morning, as Mr. Glenn, 40 years old, a Marine Corps test pilot and one of the seven original American astronauts, climbed into Friendship 7, the tiny Mercury capsule atop an Atlas rocket rising from the concrete flats of Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The Cold War had long stoked fears of nuclear destruction, and the Russians seemed to be winning the contest with their unsettling ascent into outer space. Two Russians, Yuri A. Gagarin and Gherman S. Titov, had already orbited Earth the year before, overshadowing the feats of two Americans, Alan B. Shepard and Virgil I. Grissom, who had been launched in separate missions only to the fringes of space.

What, people asked with rising urgency, had happened to the United States’ vaunted technology and can-do spirit?•

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“Reversing The Trend Toward Greater Concentrations Of Income…Might Be, In Fact, Nearly Impossible”

December 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

President Obama ran the most pro-Labor Administration of the past fifty years, which led to great gains in household income for middle-class and impoverished citizens. That went almost ignored, especially during the recent election. But his measures didn’t in any way curb wealth inequality, which actually accelerated during his tenure. Some argue that an increasingly yawning gap between haves and have-nots is fine as long as those at the bottom are progressing, but that’s nonsense. Having such a disparity erodes democracy and allows some to further game the system for themselves.

In “A Dilemma for Humanity: Stark Inequality or Total War,” Eduardo Porter cites Walter Scheidel’s new book, The Great Leveler, as he wonders if anything can corral runaway inequity, arguing that history says such a situation only ends through violent upheaval of one kind or another.

I do believe policy could counteract current wealth inequality as it did during the Gilded Age, but it would take the best of circumstances politically, and for the next four years at least we’re going to have the worst. If the choice of Andy Puzder today as Labor Secretary is any indication, it will be catastrophic. He’s just the latest joke on the white working-class voters who trusted Trump, whose victory has quickly revealed itself to be the single biggest troll of our time.

From Porter:

History — from Ancient Rome through the Gilded Age; from the Russian Revolution to the Great Compression of incomes across the West in the middle of the 20th century — suggests that reversing the trend toward greater concentrations of income, in the United States and across the world, might be, in fact, nearly impossible.

That’s the bleak argument of Walter Scheidel, a professor of history at Stanford, whose new book, The Great Leveler (Princeton University Press), is due out next month. He goes so far as to state that “only all-out thermonuclear war might fundamentally reset the existing distribution of resources.” If history is anything to go by, he writes, “peaceful policy reform may well prove unequal to the growing challenges ahead.”

Professor Scheidel does not offer a grand unified theory of inequality. But scouring through the historical record, he detects a pattern: From the Stone Age to the present, ever since humankind produced a surplus to hoard, economic development has almost always led to greater inequality. There is one big thing with the power to stop this dynamic, but it’s not pretty: violence.

The big equalizing moments in history may not have always have the same cause, he writes, “but they shared one common root: massive and violent disruptions of the established order.”•

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“Attacking The American Political System Was The Highest Prize Of All”

December 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

It was a galling affront, even unfathomable, to Garry Kasparov when it was said that machines would one day conquer humans in chess. As World Champion, he considered it his responsibility to protect the species from this indignity. He was shocked when he failed.

I wonder if the retired Russian grandmaster is even more stunned about the recent global turn of events, as numerous countries have tried to retreat from globalization, reviving the natavistic, xenophobic and isolationist tendencies associated with the dark forces of World War II and the Cold War, though this time the reliably noble are also in retreat, as is liberal democracy itself. Russia has returned to autocracy and the U.S. may not be too far behind. And the Kremlin, with hacks and leaks, had a hand in that latter outcome.

In an excellent Playboy interview conducted by Alexander Bisley, Kasparov speaks about the ghosts of yesterday’s politics now haunting the twenty-first century, saying, “The past always returns in one form or another. There are periods in which the past even becomes the dominating factor in the present. Right now we are going through a moment like that because we don’t have a vision for the future.” He also discusses what he believes will happen to Russia at the time of Putin’s inevitable fall from power.

The opening:

Playboy:

After Trump’s election, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a state-run news agency that “there were contacts” with the Trump team, saying “Obviously, we know most of the people from his entourage.” Do you believe Russia is responsible for Trump’s election?

Garry Kasparov:

The whole story of the rise of Donald Trump is extraordinary. Putin believes that if you’re strong enough and if your opponent is not responding, you can go as far as you want. For Putin, who’s always looking for an opportunity to show his strength and militancy, attacking the American political system was the highest prize of all. Now, President Barack Obama is very much reaping the harvest of his weak foreign policy because Russia tried to demonstrate its political might by attacking the very foundation of American democracy. It’s a fact that Russia definitely helped Donald Trump to be elected by revealing all these emails that were hacked, stolen from John Podesta and the DNC. Maybe Russia went even beyond that.

Playboy:

Extraordinarily, the NSA Director Michael Rogers said that there was “a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”

Garry Kasparov:

I agree that’s extraordinary. You have one of the top security chiefs of the United States pointing at Russia. Clearly it’s Russia. If this is correct, that means it comes as close as one can imagine to a declaration of war. The very mechanism of American democracy—the foundation of power—was in danger by interference of a hostile foreign power. And what did Obama do? Nothing.

Playboy:

Shouldn’t this be a bipartisan national security issue?

Garry Kasparov:

I’m surprised Chuck Schumer isn’t demanding a full-scale congressional investigation. Where are the Democrats?•

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“These Two Forms Of Superhuman Intelligence—Alien And Artificial—May Not Be So Distinct”

December 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Until deep into the twentieth century, most popular dreams of ETs usually centered on biology. We wanted new friends that reminded us of ourselves or were even cuter. When we accepted we had no Martian doppelgangers, a dejected resignation set in. Perhaps some sort of simple cellular life existed somewhere, but what thin gruel to digest.

Then a new reality took hold: Maybe advanced intelligence exists in space as silicon, not carbon. It’s postbiological.

If there are aliens out there, Sir Martin Rees feels fairly certain they’re conscious machines, not oxygen-hoarding humans. It’s just too inhospitable for beings like us to travel beyond our solar system. He allows that cyborgs, a form of semi-organic post-humans, could possibly make a go of it. But that’s as close a reflection of ourselves we may be able to see in space. 

Soon enough, that may be true as well on Earth, a relatively young planet on which intelligence may be in the process of shedding its mortal coil. Another possibility: Perhaps intelligence is also discarding consciousness.

In “It May Not Feel Like Anything To Be an Alien,” Susan Schneider’s smart Nautilus article, the author asserts that “soon, humans will no longer be the measure of intelligence on Earth” and tries to surmise what that transition will mean. The opening:

Humans are probably not the greatest intelligences in the universe. Earth is a relatively young planet and the oldest civilizations could be billions of years older than us. But even on Earth, Homo sapiens may not be the most intelligent species for that much longer.

The world Go, chess, and Jeopardy champions are now all AIs. AI is projected to outmode many human professions within the next few decades. And given the rapid pace of its development, AI may soon advance to artificial general intelligence—intelligence that, like human intelligence, can combine insights from different topic areas and display flexibility and common sense. From there it is a short leap to superintelligent AI, which is smarter than humans in every respect, even those that now seem firmly in the human domain, such as scientific reasoning and social skills. Each of us alive today may be one of the last rungs on the evolutionary ladder that leads from the first living cell to synthetic intelligence.

What we are only beginning to realize is that these two forms of superhuman intelligence—alien and artificial—may not be so distinct. The technological developments we are witnessing today may have all happened before, elsewhere in the universe.•

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“The Slow And Gradual Nature Of Populist-Fueled Democratic Backsliding Is Difficult To Counter”

December 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

If we are hollow men (and women), American liberty, that admittedly unevenly distributed thing, may be over after 240 years. And it could very well end not with a bang but a whimper.

Those waiting for the moment when autocracy topples the normal order of things are too late. Election Day was that time. It’s not guaranteed that the nation transforms into 1930s Europe or that we definitely descend into tyranny, but the conditions have never been more favorable in modern times for the U.S. to capitulate to autocracy. The creeps are in office, and the creeping will be a gradual process. Don’t wait for an explosion; we’re living in its wake.

From “How Democracies Fall Apart,” Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz’s smart Foreign Affairs article on the illiberal impulse going viral:

Post–Cold War populists such as Chávez, Putin, and Erdogan took a slow and steady approach to dismantling democracy. These leaders first come to power through democratic elections and subsequently harness widespread discontent to gradually undermine institutional constraints on their rule, marginalize the opposition, and erode civil society. The playbook is consistent and straightforward: deliberately install loyalists in key positions of power (particularly in the judiciary and security services) and neutralize the media by buying it, legislating against it, and enforcing censorship. This strategy makes it hard to discern when the break with democracy actually occurs, and its insidiousness poses one of the most significant threats to democracy in the twenty-first century.

The steady dismantling of democratic norms and practices by democratically elected leaders, what we call “authoritarianization,” marks a significant change in the way that democracies have historically fallen apart. Data on authoritarian regimes show that until recently, coups have been the primary threats to democracy. From 1946 to 1999, 64 percent of democracies failed because of such insurgencies. In the last decade, however, populist-fueled authoritarianization has been on the rise, accounting for 40 percent of all democratic failures between 2000 and 2010 and matching coups in frequency. If current trends persist, populist-fueled authoritarianization will soon become the most common pathway to autocracy.

Even more disheartening, the slow and gradual nature of populist-fueled democratic backsliding is difficult to counter. Because it is subtle and incremental, there is no single moment that triggers widespread resistance or creates a focal point around which an opposition can coalesce.•

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“I Imagine That The World’s Best-Kept Secrets…Will One Day Sit In Plain Sight”

December 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

What surprises me most about the new abnormal isn’t that surveillance has entered our lives but that we’ve invited it in.

For a coupon code or a “friend,” we’re willing to surrender privacy to a corporate state that wants to engage us, know us, follow us, all to better commodify us. In fact, we feel sort of left out if no one is watching.

It may be that in a scary world we want a brother looking after us even if it’s Big Brother, so we’ve entered into an era of likes and leaks, one that will only grow more profoundly challenging when the Internet of Things becomes the thing.

In a wonderful New York Times essay, William Gibson considers privacy, history and encryption, those thorny, interrelated topics. An excerpt:

I have ideas about history, more than I have about privacy, and it is here that my confusion deepens exponentially. I believe that our ability to create history, to transcend generations via our extraordinary prosthetic equivalents of memory, is the most remarkable thing about us. Unless we’ve forgotten something, lost it to history, we’ve yet to encounter another species capable of the same thing. Should the F.B.I. or other agencies be able to unlock the iPhones of terrorists? To be able to do so makes them able to unlock yours or mine. Should I be able to encrypt documents in such a way that the F.B.I. can’t decrypt them? If I can, terrorists can as well. (Not that I necessarily accept terrorism as the ultimate fulcrum in such arguments, but it’s become the one most often employed.)

In the short term, the span of a lifetime, many of us would argue for privacy, and therefore against transparency. But history, the long term, is transparency; it is the absence of secrets. So we are quite merciless, as historians, when it comes to the secrets of the past, the secrets of the dead. We come to know them with an intimacy impossible in their day. It would be unthinkable for us to turn away from their secrets, to allow the Iceman his privacy or to not scan beneath the bitumen to recover an Egyptian priestess’s tattoos.

And here, to complete my tangle of confusion, is encryption, no doubt aggravated by my inability to understand the concept mathematically. I assume (perhaps incorrectly) that the future is all too liable to have its way with today’s most sophisticated encryption technology. I imagine that the world’s best-kept secrets — those of both private citizens and state institutions — will one day sit in plain sight on whatever it is that our descendants display data on.

Privy to that information while looking back at us, our ancestors will know us differently than we currently know ourselves, just as we now know the Victorians quite differently from how they knew themselves.•

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