Predictions for the next century from the Ladies Home Journal in 1900, some spot-on and ridiculous, courtesy of Buzzfeed and Reddit. (Click on image a couple of times to read large-scale version.)
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I’ve never used illegal drugs, but my experience with people who have is that, members of the Grateful Dead excepted, heavy LSD users are the biggest assholes, even worse than cokeheads. Maybe because they’ve briefly glimpsed the world through cleansed doors of perception and are disappointed by the reality they face when they come down? But most likely it’s just because they’re assholes. From Jon Wiener’s Los Angeles Review of Books interview with neurologist Oliver Sacks, who’s neither an asshole nor a heavy user of drugs, a conversation about the doctor’s long-ago experimentation with acid:
“Jon Weiner:
When and how did you first come to take LSD?
Oliver Sacks:
I think it was a few months after I smoked that joint. There was a lot of LSD around. In one of the early experiences I had with LSD, recklessly, I had mixed it with some other drugs and topped it off with some cannabis. I’d been reading about the color indigo, and was puzzled by the fact that no two people seemed to agree on what indigo was. Newton added indigo to the spectrum because he thought the spectrum ought to have seven colors, as the musical scale has seven notes.
Anyhow I got stoned on acid. And when I was really high, I said, ‘I want to see indigo, now!’ And, as if thrown by a paintbrush, a huge, trembling, pear-shaped drop of purest indigo appeared on the wall in front of me. It seemed wonderfully luminous, and sort of numinous at the same time. So much so that I thought, ‘This is the color of heaven. This must be the color which Giotto tried to get into his paintings but could never get. And maybe he couldn’t get it because it doesn’t exist.’
I lent toward this in a sort of rapture, and it suddenly disappeared, leaving me with an immense sense of loss. I had had a sense of bliss or rapture, almost orgasm, seeing the indigo.
For months after, I kept looking for indigo. I went to a mineralogical museum and looked at azurite, which is often described as indigo. But it was nothing like what I had seen when stoned.
I did see indigo again, curiously. I was at a concert, listening to some Monteverdi. And I was enraptured by the music, thrown into a sort of ecstasy. The concert was in the Egyptology gallery of a museum in New York, and in the interval I went out and saw some of the lapis lazuli things. And they were indigo. And I thought, ‘It really exists.’ But then, after the concert, I went again, and it wasn’t indigo. I’ve never seen it since.'”
Tags: Jon Wiener, Oliver Sacks
I would trust a pilotless aircraft just as much as a piloted one–perhaps more. Maybe at least one of the people on the ground controlling the plane isn’t falling-down drunk? Your average aviator ain’t exactly Sully Sullenberger. And you know how Jet Blue pilots tend to joke that they were just testing the plane’s new tires after they do a crappy job landing and bounce down the runway? You know how everyone laughs because they’re happy they’re not dead? I really don’t think it’s funny. From the Economist, an excerpt from an article about unmanned flight:
“It is potentially a huge new market. America’s aviation regulators have been asked by Congress to integrate unmanned aircraft into the air-traffic control system as early as 2015. Some small drones are already used in commercial applications, such as aerial photography, but in most countries they are confined to flying within sight of their ground pilot, much like radio-controlled model aircraft. Bigger aircraft would be capable of flying farther and doing a lot more things.
Pilotless aircraft could carry out many jobs at a lower cost than manned aircraft and helicopters—tasks such as traffic monitoring, border patrols, police surveillance and checking power lines. They could also operate in conditions that are dangerous for pilots, including monitoring forest fires or nuclear-power accidents. And they could fly extended missions for search and rescue, environmental monitoring or even provide temporary airborne Wi-Fi and mobile-phone services. Some analysts think the global civilian market for unmanned aircraft and services could be worth more than $50 billion by 2020.
Whatever happens, pilots will still have a role in aviation, although not necessarily in the cockpit. ‘As far as the eye can see there will always be a pilot in command of an aircraft,’ says Lambert Dopping-Hepenstal, the director of ASTRAEA. But that pilot may be on the ground and he may be looking after more than one unmanned aircraft at the same time.
Commercial flights carrying freight and express parcels might one day also lose their on-board pilots. But would even the most penny-pinching cut-price airline be able to sell tickets to passengers on flights that have an empty cockpit? More realistically, those flights might have just one pilot in the future. Technology has already relieved the flight deck of a number of jobs. Many early large aircraft had a crew of five: two pilots, a flight engineer, a navigator and a radio operator. First the radio operator went, then the navigator, and by the time the jet era was well under way in the 1970s flight engineers began to disappear too. Next it could be the co-pilot, replaced by the autonomous flight systems now being developed.”
When people are turned down for a jobs at Arby’s they become movie-theater employees. One such worker just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few exchanges follow.
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Question:
Answer:
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Question:
Why do I have to wait to see Andrew Bujalski’s film Computer Chess when I want to see it right now? From Indiewire:
“Set around 1980, Computer Chess is the fictional account of the computer programmers and chess players that tested artificial intelligence through computer-human chess tournaments. These were the days of Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov, slightly before the IBM computer Deep Blue took reign.
But Bujalski’s film is not about these real-life people; it’s an exploration of the environment he imagines for these programmers. Speaking with indieWIRE, Bujalski says, ‘We’ve certainly done research, and a few people in that community have talked to us and helped us out. We’re not setting up to do a documentary or a slavish interpretation of the truth. I certainly have tremendous respect for those guys and for what they accomplished. I hope some of that will come through whether or not we get it right for them.’
Though Bujalski says he was never a computer nerd, he admits this film is a way of him exploring the geek that never was. ‘Perhaps deep down it’s my attempt to vicariously peek into the fantasy braniac life I ought to have pursued as a kid.’
Speaking with Indiewire, he elaborated on arriving to the story: ‘I was only a little kid at this time. I saw the same headlines as everyone else did about Deep Blue. I was never terribly invested in the topic in those days. The idea for the film really came when I was at the New England Mobile Book Fair — Newton Highlands, MA. They have this great remainders section. I’ve been going to that bookstore since I was a kid. There are books waiting for someone to love them, and many of them have been there for 25-30 years, if not longer. I found a book on chess trivia — it was $1 or $2. I’m not nearly enough of a chess enthusiast to buy it at full price. The book was from 1986 or so and there was a section on computer chess trivia. It started to plant images in my head, of these guys and what they were up to.'”
Tags: Andrew Bujalski
In 1992, AI legend Marvin Minsky believed that by the year 2023 people would be able to download the contents of their brains and achieve “immortality.” That was probably too optimistic. He also thought such technology would only be possible for people who had great wealth. That was probably too pessimistic. From an interview that Otto Laske conducted with Minsky about his sci-fi novel, The Turing Option:
“Otto Laske:
I hear you are writing a science fiction novel. Is that your first such work?
Marvin Minsky:
Well, yes, it is, and it is something I would not have tried to do alone. It is a spy-adventure techno-thriller that I am writing together with my co-author Harry Harrison. Harry did most of the plotting and invention of characters, while I invented new brain science and AI technology for the next century.
Otto Laske:
At what point in time is the novel situated?
Marvin Minsky:
It’s set in the year 2023.
Otto Laske:
I may just be alive to experience it, then …
Marvin Minsky:
Certainly. And furthermore, if the ideas of the story come true, then anyone who manages to live until then may have the opportunity to live forevermore…
Otto Laske:
How wonderful …
Marvin Minsky:
… because the book is about ways to read out the contents of a person’s brain, and then download those contents into more reliable hardware, free from decay and disease. If you have enough money…
Otto Laske:
That’s a very American footnote …
Marvin Minsky:
Well, it’s also a very Darwinian concept.
Otto Laske:
Yes, of course.
Marvin Minsky:
There isn’t room for every possible being in this finite universe, so, we have to be selective …
Otto Laske:
And who selects, or what is the selective mechanism?
Marvin Minsky:
Well, normally one selects by fighting. Perhaps somebody will invent a better way. Otherwise, you have to have a committee …
Otto Laske:
That’s worse than fighting, I think.”
Tags: Marvin Minsky, Otto Laske
From Andrew Hacker’s New York Review of Books critique of a trio of new volumes about predictive powers, including The Signal and the Noise, written by political polling wunderkind Nate Silver:
“The Signal and the Noise is in large part a homage to Thomas Bayes (1701–1761), a long-neglected statistical scholar, especially by the university departments concerned with statistical methods. The Bayesian approach to probability is essentially simple: start by approximating the odds of something happening, then alter that figure as more findings come in. So it’s wholly empirical, rather than building edifices of equations. Silver has a diverting example on whether your spouse may be cheating. You might start with an out-of-the-air 4 percent likelihood. But a strange undergarment could raise it to 50 percent, after which the game’s afoot. This has importance, Silver suggests, because officials charged with anticipating terrorist acts had not conjured a Bayesian ‘prior’ about the possible use of airplanes.
Silver is prepared to say, ‘We had some reason to think that an attack on the scale of September 11 was possible.’ His Bayseian ‘prior’ is that airplanes were targeted in the cases of an Air India flight in 1985 and Pan Am’s over Lockerbie three years later, albeit using secreted bombs, plus in later attempts that didn’t succeed. At the least, a chart with, say, a 4 percent likelihood of an attack should have been on someone’s wall. Granted, what comes in as intelligence is largely ‘noise.’ (Most intercepted conversations are about plans for dinner.) Still, in the summer of 2001, staff members at a Minnesota flight school told FBI agents of a Moroccan-born student who wanted to learn to pilot a Boeing 747 in midair, skipping lessons on taking off and landing. Some FBI agents took the threat of Zacarias Moussaoui seriously, but several requests for search and wiretap warrants were denied. In fact, an instructor added that a fuel-laden plane could make a horrific weapon. At the least, these ‘signals’ should have raised the probability of an attack using an airplane, say, to 15 percent, prompting visits to other flight schools.”
Tags: Andrew Hacker, Nate Silver, Thomas Bayes
The opening of “A Robot in Every Home,” Bill Gates’ famous 2007 Scientific American piece which compared the nascent robotics industry to computers of the Homebrew era:
“Imagine being present at the birth of a new industry. It is an industry based on groundbreaking new technologies, wherein a handful of well-established corporations sell highly specialized devices for business use and a fast-growing number of start-up companies produce innovative toys, gadgets for hobbyists and other interesting niche products. But it is also a highly fragmented industry with few common standards or platforms. Projects are complex, progress is slow, and practical applications are relatively rare. In fact, for all the excitement and promise, no one can say with any certainty when–or even if–this industry will achieve critical mass. If it does, though, it may well change the world.
Of course, the paragraph above could be a description of the computer industry during the mid-1970s, around the time that Paul Allen and I launched Microsoft. Back then, big, expensive mainframe computers ran the back-office operations for major companies, governmental departments and other institutions. Researchers at leading universities and industrial laboratories were creating the basic building blocks that would make the information age possible. Intel had just introduced the 8080 microprocessor, and Atari was selling the popular electronic game Pong. At homegrown computer clubs, enthusiasts struggled to figure out exactly what this new technology was good for.”
••••••••••
Homebrew Computer Club in 1978:
Tags: Bill Gates
I don’t always agree with Evgeny Morozov, but I always find him to be thought-provoking. In his new Financial Times piece, “Google Should Not Choose Right and Wrong” (free registration required), the technologist suggests that the search giant should be forced to accept checks and balances. A passage about the intrusiveness of Google Now:
“At the end of each month, Google happily reports – without you ever asking for it! – how many miles you’ve walked or cycled. This intervention is no simple weather trivia. Here Google assumes that walking is more important – perhaps, even more moral – than, say, driving. It explicitly ‘bakes’ morality into its app, engaging in what one might term ‘algorithmic nudging.’
Had governments advocated such surveillance-powered interventions, many would find them intrusive, not least because their terms must be subject to public debate. Are we measuring the right things? Are we unfairly blaming individuals for failures of institutions? Walking is undoubtedly easier in Manhattan than in the suburbs of Los Angeles.
With Google at the helm, however, resistance is minimal. We don’t mind our phones spying on us – at least not when Google needs this data to tell us about flight delays. Likewise, we have been persuaded by Google’s efforts to recast the information it collects as objective and simply existing “out there” – in nature – unaffected by their recording devices or systems of measurement.
Google’s power and temptation to do good are only poised to increase. As its services are integrated under one umbrella – maps, emails, calendars, videos, books – it knows even more about our moral failings. And as Google begins to mediate our interactions with the built environment – through its self-driving cars, smart glasses, smartphones – the scope for ‘algorithmic nudging’ also expands.”
••••••••••
“All that information is ready at the exact moment you actually need it”:
Tags: Evgeny Morozov
I’m always fascinated by fakes, pranksters, counterfeiters and confidence artists of all sorts, so it’s no surprise I loved “The Great Swindle,” Roger Scruton’s excellent new Aeon essay about false scholarship, art and philosophy. The opening:
“A high culture is the self-consciousness of a society. It contains the works of art, literature, scholarship and philosophy that establish a shared frame of reference among educated people. High culture is a precarious achievement, and endures only if it is underpinned by a sense of tradition, and by a broad endorsement of the surrounding social norms. When those things evaporate, as inevitably happens, high culture is superseded by a culture of fakes.
Faking depends on a measure of complicity between the perpetrator and the victim, who together conspire to believe what they don’t believe and to feel what they are incapable of feeling. There are fake beliefs, fake opinions, fake kinds of expertise. There is also fake emotion, which comes about when people debase the forms and the language in which true feeling can take root, so that they are no longer fully aware of the difference between the true and the false. Kitsch is one very important example of this. The kitsch work of art is not a response to the real world, but a fabrication designed to replace it. Yet both producer and consumer conspire to persuade each other that what they feel in and through the kitsch work of art is something deep, important and real.
Anyone can lie.”
Tags: Roger Scruton
More about the harsh realities of gun control in the nascent days of 3D printers, this time from Devin Coldewey at Techcrunch:
“If you were to attempt to write a law governing media copyright in 1998, would you attempt to do so without acknowledging the existence of the Internet and compression methods like MPEG-1? Any law crafted under such restrictions would be laughably incomplete.
Likewise, if you were to discuss a law that allows or restricts the creation and distribution of firearms, would you attempt to do so without acknowledging the existence of 3D-printed weapons and the ability to transfer blueprints for them online?
Here’s the problem, though. Like the digitization of music, the digitization of objects, guns or otherwise, is a one-way street. Every step forward is ineffaceable. Once you can make an MP3 and share it online, that’s it, there’s no going back — the industry is changed, just like that. Why should it be different when you reduce a spoon, a replacement part, a patented tool, or a gun to a compact file that can be reproduced using widely-available hardware? There’s no going back. So what is ‘control’ now?
Will ISPs use deep packet inspection to watch for gun files being traded? Will torrent sites hosting firearm files be taken down, their server rooms raided? Will all the ineffectual tactics of digital suppression be tried again, and fail again?
Will 3D printers refuse to print parts, the way 2D ones are supposed to refuse to print bills? Will printers have to register their devices, even when those devices can print themselves? How is it proposed that control is to be established over something that can be transferred in an instant to another country, and made with devices that will soon be as common as microwaves?
Part of the discussion has to be that, government or otherwise, there can be no more control over printed guns than there can be over printed spoons. Regulation or banning of firearms, whether you think the idea is good or bad, will soon be impossible.” (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: Devin Coldewey
From an interview at Guernica about technology and art with critic Paul Stephens, a passage about Bob Brown’s proposal eight decades ago for an e-reader:
“Guernica:
Information overload is a hot topic; we all struggle with being bombarded. You look backwards to Gertrude Stein, Stéphane Mallarmé, Walter Benjamin, T. S. Eliot—at the way the modernists who were also on the cusp of a technology explosion dealt with information and how it was conveyed via new channels. Some, like Stein, embraced this bombardment; others, like Pound and Eliot, did not. How can we return to Stein and relate that to having an iPhone?
Paul Stephens:
A major impetus for the book was my research on Bob Brown, who described a pocket reading machine in 1930. A friend and disciple of Stein, Brown was thinking about the new technologies of microfilm and sound film, and the possibility that it would soon be possible to transmit poem texts instantaneously by means of radio. He put together an anthology that asked poets to write what he called ‘readies,’ parallel to the ‘talkies,’ which had just revolutionized film. The anthology included writers like Stein, Pound, William Carlos Williams, and the Italian futurist F.T. Marinetti, and probed how poetry would change if it were sped up. He was never able to construct the device, but did publish the anthology.
Amazingly enough, it was prophetic of some of the developments we’ve seen with smartphones. For instance, they got rid of punctuation and compressed words—a lot of the poems looked like textese, a sub-language we’re now increasingly familiar with. Bob Brown claimed to get the idea from reading Stein’s Tender Buttons on Wall Street in 1914 and looking at a stock ticker at the same time, which is just mind-blowing to me. The stock ticker was an extraordinary invention—essentially a horizontal scroll that conveyed instantaneous price data over long distances in real time, not unlike Stein’s notion of a ‘continuous present.’ The fractured, cubist syntax of Stein seemed like language in motion to Brown. He thought her modernist experiments were a parallel development to reading facilitated by machines, and he predicted that our pace of reading would accelerate.”
Tags: Bob Brown, Paul Stephens
The idea that women ever have to pay for sex confounds, but a Los Angeles man who is a male escort (or so he claims) who only services females (or so he claims) just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few excerpts follow.
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Most of my clients are between 25-45 years old. I have been with girls I would say were 9/10 and down to 4/10 (due to weight issues). Most of them are professionals who are too busy with work, or have useless husbands, or just want to get the deed done and be done with it.
Usually it consists of dinner or coffee to get to know each other and so I can get a feel for what they are expecting. After that we go a private place and I try to fulfill whatever needs they have.
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Question:
How does one get into your line of work? How important are looks for men in your field?
Answer:
I actually got into the line of work after working at massage spa. Women would leave me their numbers and after meeting with them a few would offer to pay me for my services since they thought I was an escort.
Looks are very important on my end since a women can get any regular guy to sleep with them. I am at the gym 5 days week, I keep up the cleanliness and grooming on a daily basis. Most of the girls are looking for a muscular man which is the hardest part since my frame in general is small. It took me 2 years to gain 40lbs of muscle; I am 6′ and 205 lbs with 7% body fat.
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Question:
What are your prices like? How do you find new clients?
Answer:
Question:
Worst encounter?
Answer:
I have a lot of bad encounters but the worst was with a girl who was roughly 200 lbs and 5’2″. She wanted it in the back but I couldn’t since her butt was literally in the way. I ended up giving her the money back and never heard from her again.
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Answer:
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There’s another excellent post at the Paleofuture blog, this one about Motopia, a never realized insta-city which completely separated pedestrian and automobile. It was designed in 1960 by British landscape architect Geoffrey Allan Jellicoe. The opening:
“‘No person will walk where automobiles move,’ is how British architect Geoffrey Alan Jellicoe described his town of the future, ‘and no car can encroach on the area sacred to the pedestrian.’
Jellicoe was talking to the Associated Press in 1960 about his vision for a radically new kind of British town—a town where the bubble-top cars of tomorrow moved freely on elevated streets, and the pedestrian zipped around safely on moving sidewalks. For a town whose main selling point was the freedom to not worry about getting hit by cars, it would have a rather strange name: Motopia.
Planned for construction about 17 miles west of London with an estimated cost of about $170 million, Motopia was a bold—if somewhat impractical plan—for a city built from the ground up. The town was envisioned as being able to have a population of 30,000, all living in a grid-pattern of buildings with an expanse of rooftop motorways in the sky. There would be schools, shops, restaurants, churches and theaters all resting on a total footprint of about 1,000 acres.“
Tags: Geoffrey Alan Jellicoe
In an Op-Ed in USA Today, New York’s Mayor Bloomberg has some common-sense proposals for tightening gun laws in a way that doesn’t encroach upon the rights of law-abiding gun owners. Of course, it doesn’t address the huge amount of assault weapons already in circulation in the U.S., and there really isn’t an answer for that. Anyhow, I wasn’t aware that the ATF hasn’t had a director since the Bush Administration. An excerpt:
“The president should make a recess appointment to fill the vacancy at the top of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), which has been without a director for six years. The country would be outraged if the Department of Homeland Security went six years without a confirmed director. Leaving the ATF without a director is also a public safety threat.”
Tags: Michael Bloomberg
I watched reruns of the original 1960s Jetsons episodes when I was a kid, but I was unaware until now that the program ran for just one season. That’s amazing considering how much it’s still a part of the culture. When, for example, people talk about Elon Musk’s dreams of the Hyperloop, the show is used as a reference point. From a post about the 24 classic episodes at the Paleofuture blog at the Smithsonian:
“It was 50 years ago this coming Sunday that the Jetson family first jetpacked their way into American homes. The show lasted just one season (24 episodes) after its debut on Sunday September 23, 1962, but today The Jetsons stands as the single most important piece of 20th century futurism. More episodes were later produced in the mid-1980s, but it’s that 24-episode first season that helped define the future for so many Americans today.
It’s easy for some people to dismiss The Jetsons as just a TV show, and a lowly cartoon at that. But this little show—for better and for worse—has had a profound impact on the way that Americans think and talk about the future.”
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The original 1963 ABC promo for the show:
From “No Flying Cars, But the Future Is Bright,” Virginia Postrel’s contrarian Bloomberg piece, which provides an incrementalist’s argument to those who feel we’ve failed to realize the bold technological visions of the ’50s and ’60s:
“The glamorous future included no digital photography or stereo speakers tiny enough to fit in your ears. No forensic DNA testing or home pregnancy tests. No ubiquitous microwave ovens or video games or bar codes or laser levels or CGI-filled movies. No super absorbent polymers for disposable diapers — indeed, no disposable diapers of any kind.
Nor was much business innovation evident in those 20th century visions. The glamorous future included no FedEx or Wal- Mart, no Starbucks or Nike or Craigslist — culturally transformative enterprises that use technology but derive their real value from organization and insight. Nobody used shipping containers or optimized supply chains. The manufacturing revolution that began at Toyota never happened. And forget about such complex but quotidian inventions as wickable fabrics or salad in a bag.
The point isn’t that people in the past failed to predict all these innovations. It’s that people in the present take them for granted.
Technologists who lament the ‘end of the future’ are denigrating the decentralized, incremental advances that actually improve everyday life. And they’re promoting a truncated idea of past innovation: economic history with railroads but no department stores, radio but no ready-to-wear apparel, vaccines but no consumer packaged goods, jets but no plastics.” (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: Virginia Postrel
It’s difficult to say at this point if the survivalist subculture had anything to do with the huge cache of assault weapons that were used in the Connecticut massacre, but a lot of Americans believe we’re on the verge of imminent collapse. That belief, of course, seems to have no root in reality. The opening of “Newtown and the Doomsday Preppers,” J.M. Berger’s new Foreign Policy article:
“In the wake of a terrible tragedy like Friday’s elementary school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, most people immediately begin groping for answers.
On Sunday, a family member claimed that Nancy Lanza, mother of 20-year-old gunman Adam Lanza, owned the guns used in the shooting because she was some manner of survivalist. The reasons Adam Lanza did what he did may well be complex. But if the report proves to be true — and many, many reports about the Lanzas have not — it may provide context for his actions.
Survivalism, sometimes referred to as ‘doomsday prepping’ or simply ‘prepping,’ is a movement based on the fear that society is on the brink of imminent, or at least foreseeable, collapse and that it’s sensible to prepare for that possibility.
‘Survivalist’ is a very broad category, and it includes a strikingly diverse collection of people, many of whom, it should be emphasized, are perfectly nice and have fears that are simply amplified versions of those that keep mainstream Americans awake at night. There are at least tens of thousands of prepper families in the United States, covering a broad range of practices, most of which are not particularly unreasonable.
Someone who closely followed the preparedness guidelines issued by the Department of Homeland Security, the Centers for Disease Control, or FEMA might find themselves the butt of ‘survivalist’ jokes from their friends and family. But those friends would have been grateful to have a prepper friend if they lived in certain parts of the East Coast when Hurricane Sandy struck.
Preppers go beyond the average household’s disaster preparedness regime of having a couple flashlights with batteries in them. Their precautions can include everything from keeping a supply of canned goods to stocking generators and building elaborate bunkers. Many preppers also keep guns and a supply of ammunition in anticipation of the breakdown of law and order, as well as for hunting after the local Whole Foods has been abandoned to looters.”
Tags: J.M. Berger
It was surprising to hear that Ray Kurzweil has accepted the position of Director of Engineering at Google. He seems at the point in his career where he’d want to be independent not an employee, but I suppose there are lots of things you can do with Google’s resources that you can’t accomplish on your own. From Neal Ungerleider at Fast Company:
“Ray Kurzweil is best known these days as the world’s foremost Singularity evangelist and as a prophet of a whizbang, techno-utopian future. However, Kurzweil first came to tech fame as a machine-learning guru whose groundbreaking work on voice recognition and optical character recognition changed computing and laid the groundwork for everything from Siri to desktop scanners.
Now, Kurzweil has a new home: Google. On Friday, Google announced that Kurzweil is their newest Director of Engineering. Kurzweil started at Google today with a focus on new machine-learning and language-processing projects.
‘In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic,’ Kurzweil said in a statement. ‘Fast forward a decade–Google has demonstrated self-driving cars, and people are indeed asking questions of their Android phones. It’s easy to shrug our collective shoulders as if these technologies have always been around, but we’re really on a remarkable trajectory of quickening innovation, and Google is at the forefront of much of this development.'”
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The Kurzweil Reading Machine, 1977:
The future futurist plays his computer composition on TV, 1965:
Tags: Neal Ungerleider, Ray Kurzweil
I posted something a couple months back about Zappos founder Tony Hsieh spearheading a reimagining of raffish Downtown Las Vegas as a Jane Jacobs-ish walkable community for the Information Age. It’s a tall order. Here’s an excerpt from another piece about Hsieh and his master plan, this time from Greg Beato at Reason:
“In December 2010, Hsieh announced that Zappos.com was planning to move its thousand-plus employees from an office park in Henderson, Nevada, to the old Las Vegas City Hall, a transition that will happen sometime later this year. When it does, Hsieh won’t be commuting. In 2011, he leased 50 units in a luxury high-rise in the neighborhood, and he and some of his Zappos.com co-workers moved in. He’s hoping more will follow—Zappos.com employees and anyone else who wants to live in a lively, community-oriented urban neighborhood near his eight-acre worksite. It’s something he calls The Downtown Project.
Primarily bankrolled by Hsieh, The Downtown Project plans to invest $350 million in up to 200 small businesses, dozens of tech start-ups, and a diverse mix of other public resources and amenities. The ultimate goal: To create the sort of dense, walkable, mixed-used Shangri-La championed by the urban theorist Jane Jacobs in her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Put another way, Hsieh would like to make downtown Las Vegas a more compelling social network, a feature-rich platform that encourages frequent chance encounters, fruitful knowledge exchange, and over the long term, greater innovation and productivity. Where abandoned liquor stores now fester, yoga studios shall one day bloom.
In a town where development typically takes the form of another massive casino resort, Hsieh’s dream is a fairly radical vision. But Las Vegas has already replicated Egyptian pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, and the New York skyline, so why not thriving urban neighborhoods like San Francisco’s Mission District or Brooklyn’s Williamsburg?
Call it a venture-capital take on urban locavorism.”
Tags: Greg Beato, Tony Hsieh
One segment from Popular Mechanics‘ new “110 Predictions for the Next 110 Years” feature:
“WITHIN 20 YEARS…
Self-driving cars will hit the mainstream market.
Battles will be waged without direct human participation (think robots or unmanned aerial vehicles).
The first fully functional brain-controlled bionic limb will arrive.
WITHIN 30 YEARS…
All-purpose robots will help us with household chores.
Space travel will become as affordable as a round-the-world plane ticket.
Soldiers will use exoskeletons to enhance battlefield performance.
WITHIN 40 YEARS…
Nanobots will perform medical procedures inside our bodies.
WITHIN 50 YEARS…
We will have a colony on Mars.
Doctors will successfully transplant a lab-grown human heart.
We will fly the friendly skies without pilots onboard.
And renewable energy sources will surpass fossil fuels in electricity generation.
WITHIN 60 YEARS…
Digital data (texts, songs, etc.) will be zapped directly into our brains.
We will activate the first fusion power plant.
And we will wage the first battle in space.
WITHIN 100 YEARS…
The last gasoline-powered car will come off the assembly line.”
IBM has published its new “5 in 5” list, which predicts the new technologies are right around the corner. Below is an excerpt of one of them followed by the official video.
“Taste: Digital taste buds will help you to eat smarter
What if we could make healthy foods taste delicious using a different kind of computing system that is built for creativity?
IBM researchers are developing a computing system that actually experiences flavor, to be used with chefs to create the most tasty and novel recipes. It will break down ingredients to their molecular level and blend the chemistry of food compounds with the psychology behind what flavors and smells humans prefer. By comparing this with millions of recipes, the system will be able to create new flavor combinations that pair, for example, roasted chestnuts with other foods such as cooked beetroot, fresh caviar, and dry-cured ham.
A system like this can also be used to help us eat healthier, creating novel flavor combinations that will make us crave a vegetable casserole instead of potato chips.
The computer will be able to use algorithms to determine the precise chemical structure of food and why people like certain tastes. These algorithms will examine how chemicals interact with each other, the molecular complexity of flavor compounds and their bonding structure, and use that information, together with models of perception to predict the taste appeal of flavors.
Not only will it make healthy foods more palatable — it will also surprise us with unusual pairings of foods actually designed to maximize our experience of taste and flavor. In the case of people with special dietary needs such as individuals with diabetes, it would develop flavors and recipes to keep their blood sugar regulated, but satisfy their sweet tooth. ”
Interesting piece by Jared Diamond at the Daily Beast on the “hunter-gatherer” method of child-rearing. An excerpt:
“I find myself thinking a lot about the New Guinea people with whom I have been working for the last 49 years, and about the comments of Westerners who have lived for years in hunter-gatherer societies and watched children grow up there. Other Westerners and I are struck by the emotional security, self-confidence, curiosity, and autonomy of members of small-scale societies, not only as adults but already as children. We see that people in small-scale societies spend far more time talking to each other than we do, and they spend no time at all on passive entertainment supplied by outsiders, such as television, videogames, and books. We are struck by the precocious development of social skills in their children. These are qualities that most of us admire, and would like to see in our own children, but we discourage development of those qualities by ranking and grading our children and constantly telling them what to do. The adolescent identity crises that plague American teenagers aren’t an issue for hunter-gatherer children. The Westerners who have lived with hunter-gatherers and other small-scale societies speculate that these admirable qualities develop because of the way in which their children are brought up: namely, with constant security and stimulation, as a result of the long nursing period, sleeping near parents for several years, far more social models available to children through allo-parenting, far more social stimulation through constant physical contact and proximity of caretakers, instant caretaker responses to a child’s crying, and the minimal amount of physical punishment.”
Tags: Jared Diamond
A pair of probes are going to be purposely crashed into the moon by NASA. From the Guardian:
“Two spacecraft orbiting the moon are ending their mission by crashing into a lunar mountain at almost 4,000mph.
The twin gravity recovery and interior laboratory (Grail) probes, known as Ebb and Flow, have spent almost a year mapping the moon’s gravity in unprecedented detail.
With their fuel running low, US space agency NASA took the decision to stage a ‘controlled descent and impact.’
The alternative would have been to let the probes crash randomly which may have damaged places of historic interest, such as the Apollo landing sites.”
I’d like to credit the author of this sobering Economist essay about guns in America, but the geniuses at that publication don’t believe writers deserve bylines. Anyhow, an excerpt:
“The American gun debate takes place in America, not Britain or Japan. And banning all guns is not about to happen (and good luck collecting all 300m guns currently in circulation, should such a law be passed). It would also not be democratic. I personally dislike guns. I think the private ownership of guns is a tragic mistake. But a majority of Americans disagree with me, some of them very strongly. And at a certain point, when very large majorities disagree with you, a bit of deference is in order.
So in short I am not sure that tinkering with gun control will stop horrible massacres like today’s. And I am pretty sure that the sort of gun control that would work—banning all guns—is not going to happen.” (Thanks Browser.)