Excerpts

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“In Steps Large And Small, By Trial And Error, Great Conceptual Leaps, The Child Figures Out How The World Works”

October 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Pedro Domingos’ book The Master Algorithm takes on many issues regarding machine learning, but as the title makes implicit, it wonders chiefly about the possibility of a unified theory enabling an ultimate learning machine, which, the author recently told Russ Roberts of EconTalk, could perhaps figure out as much as 80% of any problem posed. Can’t say I’m expecting its development in my lifetime.

In one section of the interview, there’s a technical and philosophical exchange between host and guest about creating infantile robots that can grow and learn experientially as human babies do–gradually, with small steps becoming giant leaps. Two points about this section:

I believe Domingos is right to say that philosophers who believe “standard models of biology, chemistry, and physics cannot explain human consciousness” are getting ahead of themselves. No one should be shocked if the keys to consciousness are located via knowledge developed within current frameworks. I think that’s actually the likely outcome. We’re not at some sort of “end of science” moment.

Machines could theoretically someday possess the type of complicated emotions humans have, or maybe they won’t. It may not matter in some practical matters. After all, a plane can fly without being a bird. Roberts’ consternation about a sort of robot consciousness sans emotions seems like a visceral and romantic concern on his part, but such a scenario could have profound implications. Not to say that emotions are a fail-safe from destruction–sometimes they get the best of us–but it does seem they’re essential in the long-term to truly complex growth, though it’s impossible (for now) to be sure.

The exchange:

Russ Roberts:

So, I’m going to read a somewhat lengthy paragraph that charmed me, from the book. And then I want to ask you a philosophical question about it. So here’s the passage:

If you’re a parent, the entire mystery of learning unfolds before your eyes in the first three years of your child’s life. A newborn baby can’t talk, walk, recognize objects, or even understand that an object continues to exist when the baby isn’t looking at it. But month after month, in steps large and small, by trial and error, great conceptual leaps, the child figures out how the world works, how people behave, how to communicate. By a child’s third birthday all this learning has coalesced into a stable self, a stream of consciousness that will continue throughout life. Older children and adults can time-travel–aka remember things past, but only so far back. If we could revisit ourselves as infants and toddlers and see the world again through those newborn eyes, much of what puzzles us about learning–even about existence itself–would suddenly seem obvious. But as it is, the greatest mystery in the universe is not how it begins or ends, or what infinitesimal threads it’s woven from. It’s what goes on in the small child’s mind–how a pound of gray jelly can grow into the seat of consciousness.

So, I thought that was very beautiful. And then you imagined something called Robby the Robot, that would somehow simulate the experience and learn from, in the same way a child learns. So, talk about how Robby the Robot might work; and then I’ll ask my philosophical question.

Pedro Domingos:

Yes. So, there are several approaches to solving the problem of [?]. So, how can we create robots and computers that are as intelligent as people? And, you know, one of them, for example, is to mimic evolution. Another one is to just build a big knowledge base. But in some ways the most intriguing one is this idea of building a robot baby. Right? The existence proof of intelligence that we have as human beings–in fact, if we didn’t have that we wouldn’t even be trying for this. So, the idea of–so the path, one possible path to (AI) artificial intelligence, and the only one that we know is guaranteed to work, right? Is to actually have a real being in the real world learning from experience in the same way that a baby does. And so the ideal is the robot baby is–let’s just create something that has a brain–but it doesn’t have to be at the level of neurons, it’s just at the level of capabilities–that has the same capabilities that the brain, that the mind, if you will, that a newborn baby has. And if it does have those capabilities and then we give it the same experience that a newborn baby has, then two or three years later we will have solved the problem. So, that’s the promise of this approach.

Russ Roberts:

So, the thought, the philosophical thought that I had as I was down in the basement the other day with my wife and we were sorting through boxes of stuff that we don’t look at except once a year when we go down in the basement and decide what to throw out and what to keep. And one of the boxes that we keep, even though we never examine it, except when we open, go down to the basement once a year to go down through the boxes, is: It’s a box of stuffed animals that our children had when they were babies. And we just–we don’t want to throw it out. I don’t know if our kids will ever want to use them with their children–if they have children; our kids, we don’t have any grandchildren but I think we imagine the possibility that they would be used again. But I think something else is going on there. And if our children were in the basement with us, going through that, and they saw the animal or the stuffed item that they had when they were, say, 2 and a half or 3 years old, that was incredibly precious to them–and of course has no value to them whatsoever to them right now–they would have, just as we have, as parents, they would have an incredible stab of emotional reaction. A nostalgia. A feeling that I can’t imagine Robby the Robot would ever have. Am I wrong?

Pedro Domingos:

I don’t know. So, this is a good question. There are actually several good questions here. One is: Would Robby the Robot need to have emotions in order to learn. I actually think the answer is Yes. And: will it have those emotions? I think at a functional level we already know how to put the equivalent of emotions into a robot, because emotions are what guides us. Right? We were talking before about goals, right? Emotions are the way evolution in some sense programmed you to do the right things and not the wrong ones, right? The reason we have fear and pleasure and pain and happiness and all of these things is so that we can choose the right things to do. And we know how to do that in a robot. The technical term for that is the objective function–

Russ Roberts:

Stimulus,–

Pedro Domingos:

Or the utility function. Now, whether at the end of the day–

Russ Roberts:

But it’s not the same. It doesn’t seem the same. Maybe it would be. I don’t know. That’s a tough question.

Pedro Domingos:

Exactly. So, functionally, in terms of the input-output behavior, I think this could be indistinguishable from the robot having emotions. Whether the robot is really having emotions is probably something that we will never know for sure. But again, we don’t know if animals or if even other people have the same emotions that we do. We just give them credit for them because they are similar to us. And I think in practice what will happen, in fact, this is already happening, with all of these chatbots, for example, is that: If these robots and computers behave like they have emotions, we will treat them as if they have emotions and assume that they do. And often we assume that they have a lot more emotions than they do because we project our humanity into them. So, I think at a practical level [?] it won’t make that much difference. There remains this very fascinating philosophical question, which is: What is really going on in their minds? Or in our minds, for that matter. I’m not sure that we will ever really have an answer to that.

Russ Roberts:

I’ve raised the question recently on the program about whether consciousness is something which is amenable to scientific understanding. Certain philosophers, David Chalmers, Thomas Nagle claim–and they are both atheists–but they claim that models of evolution and the standard models of biology, chemistry, and physics cannot explain human consciousness. Have you read that work? Have you thought about it at all?

Pedro Domingos:

Yeah. And I think that–I disagree with them at the following level. I think if you fast forward to 50 years from now, we will probably have a very good and very satisfying model of consciousness. It will probably be using different concepts than the ones that people have from the sciences right now. The problem is that we haven’t found the right concepts to pin down consciousness yet. But I think there will come a point at which we do, in the sense that all the psychological and neural correlates of consciousness will be explained by this model. And again, for practical purposes, maybe even for philosophical purposes that will be good. Now, there is, I think, what is often called the hard question of consciousness. Which is: At the end of the day, because consciousness is a subjective experience, you cannot have an objective test of it. So in some sense once you get down to that hard core, consciousness is beyond the scope of science. Unless somebody comes up with something that I don’t quite imagine yet, I think again what will probably happen is that we will get to a point, probably not in the near future–it will be decades from now–where we understand consciousness well enough that we are satisfied with our understanding and we don’t ask ourselves these questions about it any more. And I can find analogies in the history of science where similar things that used to seem completely mysterious–like, life itself used to be completely mysterious. And today it’s not that mysterious any more. There’s DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) and there’s proteins and there’s what’s called the central dogma of biology. At the end of the day, the mystery of life is still there. It’s just really not that prominent on our minds any more because we feel like we understand, you know, the essence of how life works. And I think chances are the same thing will happen with consciousness.•

Tags: Pedro Domingos, Russ Roberts

“Computers Can, In Theory, Emulate Human Intelligence — And Exceed It”

October 19, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Stephen Hawking and Ted Kaczynski agree: Machine intelligence may be the death of us. Of course, the Unabomber could himself kill you if only he had your snail-mail address.

Found in the Afflictor inbox an offer from a PR person for a free copy of Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How, Kaczynski’s new book. The release describes the author as a “social theorist and ecological anarchist,” conveniently leaving a few gaps on the old résumé: serial killer, maimer, domestic terrorist, etc.

A few minutes later, I read Hawking’s inaugural speech at the new Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge, an institution created to deal sanely and non-violently with the potential problem of humanity being extincted by its own cleverness.

An excerpt from each follows.

From Kaczynski:

People would bitterly resent any system to which they belonged if they believed that when they grew old, or if they became disabled, they would be thrown on the trash-heap.

But when all people have become useless, self-prop systems will find no advantage in taking care of anyone. The techies themselves insist that machines will soon surpass humans in intelligence.119 When that happens, people will be superfluous and natural selection will favor systems that eliminate them—if not abruptly, then in a series of stages so that the risk of rebellion will be minimized.

Even though the technological world-system still needs large numbers of people for the present, there are now more superfluous humans than there have been in the past because technology has replaced people in many jobs and is making inroads even into occupations formerly thought to require human intelligence.120 Consequently, under the pressure of economic competition, the world’s dominant self-prop systems are already allowing a certain degree of callousness to creep into their treatment of superfluous individuals. In the United States and Europe, pensions and other benefits for retired, disabled, unemployed, and other unproductive persons are being substantially reduced;121 at least in the U.S., poverty is increasing; and these facts may well indicate the general trend of the future, though there will doubtless be ups and downs.

It’s important to understand that in order to make people superfluous, machines will not have to surpass them in general intelligence but only in certain specialized kinds of intelligence. For example, the machines will not have to create or understand art, music, or literature, they will not need the ability to carry on an intelligent, non-technical conversation (the “Turing test”), they will not have to exercise tact or understand human nature, because these skills will have no application if humans are to be eliminated anyway. To make humans superfluous, the machines will only need to outperform them in making the technical decisions that have to be made for the purpose of promoting the short-term survival and propagation of the dominant self-prop systems. So, even without going as far as the techies themselves do in assuming intelligence on the part of future machines, we still have to conclude that humans will become obsolete.•

From Hawking:

It is a great pleasure to be here today to open this new Centre. We spend a great deal of time studying history, which, let’s face it, is mostly the history of stupidity. So it is a welcome change that people are studying instead the future of intelligence.

Intelligence is central to what it means to be human. Everything that our civilisation has achieved, is a product of human intelligence, from learning to master fire, to learning to grow food, to understanding the cosmos.

I believe there is no deep difference between what can be achieved by a biological brain and what can be achieved by a computer. It therefore follows that computers can, in theory, emulate human intelligence — and exceed it.

Artificial intelligence research is now progressing rapidly. Recent landmarks such as self-driving cars, or a computer winning at the game of Go, are signs of what is to come. Enormous levels of investment are pouring into this technology. The achievements we have seen so far will surely pale against what the coming decades will bring.

The potential benefits of creating intelligence are huge. We cannot predict what we might achieve, when our own minds are amplified by AI. Perhaps with the tools of this new technological revolution, we will be able to undo some of the damage done to the natural world by the last one — industrialisation. And surely we will aim to finally eradicate disease and poverty. Every aspect of our lives will be transformed. In short, success in creating AI, could be the biggest event in the history of our civilisation.

But it could also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. Alongside the benefits, AI will also bring dangers, like powerful autonomous weapons, or new ways for the few to oppress the many. It will bring great disruption to our economy. And in the future, AI could develop a will of its own — a will that is in conflict with ours.

In short, the rise of powerful AI will be either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity. We do not yet know which.

That is why in 2014, I and a few others called for more research to be done in this area. I am very glad that someone was listening to me!

The research done by this centre is crucial to the future of our civilisation and of our species. I wish you the best of luck!•

Tags: Stephen Hawking, Ted Kaczynski

“People Will Go About Their Daily Travels In Self-Flying Planes”

October 19, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

If robots are introduced into cockpits as a means of coping with a shortage of human pilots and there’s a spike in accidents, that’s clearly unacceptable. If computers fully taking over plane controls enables a reduction in accidents, that would seem to be equally a slam-dunk decision. But not everyone agrees.

Some see the potential transition from human to automated pilot as a threat to us, a “skill fade” that will fundamentally alter who we are. I don’t subscribe to that line of thinking, as people have only flown crafts through the air for little over a century, a mere blink in the history of Homo sapiens. As we once mostly were farmers and now few can handle a hoe let alone a plow, we need to continually reinvent why we’re here and who we are. That’s even truer with aviation than agriculture since relatively few of us know how to fly. I don’t believe pilot-less planes a terrible blow to us.

But since domestic carriers in America crash so seldom now, it’s not easy to develop a better safety record. So, apart from saving a few pilot salaries and the trouble of training them, what would be gained by wholly automated flights? I suppose the bonus would lie in the disruption of Big Air, an explosion (hopefully not literally) of smaller crafts, maybe some much smaller, that are able to thin out long lines at the gate and present an alternative to the often-challenging financials of airline companies.

Time will tell how commercial aviation develops, but I’d be stunned if we don’t see, at the minimum, automated cargo planes in our lifetimes.

From Joan Lowy of the Associated Press:

MANASSAS, Va. (AP) — Think of it as the airborne cousin to the self-driving car: a robot in the cockpit to help human pilots fly passengers and cargo — and eventually even replace them.

The government and industry are collaborating on a program that seeks to replace the second human pilot in two-person flight crews with a robot co-pilot that never tires, gets bored, feels stressed out or gets distracted.

The program is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s arm for development of emerging technologies, and run by Aurora Flight Sciences, a private contractor. With both the military and airlines struggling with shortages of trained pilots, officials say they see an advantage to reducing the number of pilots required to fly large aircraft while at the same time increasing safety and efficiency by having a robot pick up the mundane tasks of flying.

The idea is to have the robot free the human pilot, especially in emergencies and demanding situations, to think strategically.

“It’s really about a spectrum of increasing autonomy and how humans and robots work together so that each can be doing the thing that it’s best at,” said John Langford, Aurora’s chairman and CEO.

Langford even envisions a day when a single pilot on the ground will control multiple airliners in the skies, and people will go about their daily travels in self-flying planes.•

Tags: Joan Lowy, John Langford

“The State’s White Population Is Well-Educated, And Includes Some Workers Who Have Moved From Other Parts Of The Country”

October 18, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

When Time magazine published Tyler Cowen’s 2013 cover story “Why Texas Is Our Future,” which argued that the Lone Star State was America’s new bellwether, I disagreed with the premise, wondering if Texas, as we’ve long known it, was even the future of Texas.

The article notes the large-scale migration to the state by citizens from other parts of the country but assumes these newbies would gladly live within Texas’ regulations (or lack thereof) rather than altering them. In this vision, the bargain of low taxes and real estate prices would have outweighed concerns about environmental damage, the lack of the Medicaid expansion for the Affordable Care Act and the scary high childhood poverty rate. That’s a big assumption. The piece also failed to speak of the growing young Latino population which was going to leave its mark as it aged into voting eligibility. Rather than doubling down on business as usual, the traditionally red state was actually likely to take on a much more purplish hue.

The first signs of a change may be manifesting in the 2016 Presidential election, as Texas is shockingly too close to call. Now granted Trump is nothing like a normal candidate, but he and his border wall would have still risen to an easy victory in the state in years gone by.

From Nate Silver at Five Thirty Eight:

Another day, another traditionally Republican state that Donald Trump could shockingly manage to lose. Yesterday, I wrote about Utah, where Trump’s weakness with Mormon voters could throw the state to Hillary Clinton or to independent candidate Evan McMullin. Today, we turn to Texas, where two new polls show a tight race: A University of Houston poll has Trump up just 3 percentage points there, while SurveyMonkey puts Trump’s lead at 2 points.

Trump will probably win Texas. Earlier polls had shown a close-ish race there, but with a Trump lead in the high single digits. And as a hedge against the polls, our forecast still assigns a little bit of weight to our regression-based analysis, which is based on demographics and voting history. Thus, our model still has Trump ahead by 5 or 6 percentage points in Texas, and puts Clinton’s chances of an upset at 17 percent.

But to put that in perspective, Texas is closer than Pennsylvania right now (where Clinton leads by 7 to 8 points). And Clinton is more likely to win Texas than Trump is to win the election, at least according to the polls-only model, which puts Trump’s overall chances at 12 percent.

As in Utah, demographics play a role in Trump’s struggles in Texas. The state’s white population is well-educated, and includes some workers who have moved from other parts of the country to take advantage of the state’s burgeoning economy. (College-educated whites have turned away from Trump.) Texas also used to have its share of Republican-leaning Latinos — George W. Bush won almost half of the Latino vote there in 2004 — another group that Trump has turned off. Meanwhile, only 43 percent of Texas’ population consists of non-Hispanic whites, down from 52 percent in 2000. However, because 11 percent of Texas’ population consists of non-citizens — many of them recent immigrants from Mexico — its electorate is whiter than its population overall.•

Tags: Nate Silver, Tyler Cowen

“If The Technology Looks Low-Tech, It’s Deliberate”

October 18, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Elon Musk’s dream of colonizing Mars in a handful of years is bold but probably misbegotten. He means well in wanting to safeguard the survival of the human species, but things may not end well. There’s no reason for humans to be out there just yet. It might work out best if Musk’s large-scale plans crater and his still-sizable contributions (e.g., reusable rockets) remain. We can explore space for the foreseeable future without the undue burdens of cost and loss of life if we utilize robots for reconnaissance and 3D printers to lay foundation.

In “The Low-Tech Way to Colonize Mars,” an Atlantic piece by Sarah Zhang, the writer examines a saner alternative to Musk’s vision, a slow build in space via bootstrapping with relatively simple tools. An excerpt:

NASA is all aboard the 3D-printing train. Last year, it unveiled winners of its first 3D-printed Mars habitat design challenge, and the architectural renders of the winning entries were all sleek and futuristic, as renders of unbuilt buildings always are (see above). In reality, the current state of the art for Martian 3D-printing looks more like the clay logs [planetary scientist Philip] Metzger has been documenting on Twitter.

If the technology looks low-tech, it’s deliberate. “We’re rethinking how to do space technology by taking cues from less developed parts of world,” says Metzger. The logic goes like this: If a valve breaks in a complex machine on Mars, an astronaut can’t go online to order a replacement with next day delivery. (It’s more like nine months, assuming Mars and Earth are in their most favorable alignment.) So the idea is to start simple and slowly build up technological capabilities: clay to metal to plastic to electronic equipment. Eventually, Mars will have the refineries and factories to make complicated machines itself. This is “bootstrapping,” and it’s Metzger’s vision for space exploration.•

Tags: Elon Musk, Sarah Zhang

“Technological Revolutions Now Vastly Outpace Political Processes”

October 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Since the start of the Tea Party paranoia about the U.S. government’s supposed “hostile takeover” of the citizenry and the free markets, I’ve argued that despite some real assaults on individual rights (e.g., Patriotic Act-enabled surveillance), control by any central body in even a nominal democracy is on the wane. Big Brother isn’t as much a problem as is just keeping the family together at all.

That being said, I think Yuval Noah Harari (whose latest book, Homo Deus, will hopefully arrive in my mailbox this week) overplays his hand a bit on this point in what’s otherwise a fun and provocative New Yorker essay about our technologically advanced society inexplicably enabling Trump’s “nihilistic burlesque.” The historian offers a macro analysis of what ails disgruntled America (and much of the rest of the world), assigning the disquiet to the fecklessness of our elected governments.

In America, we certainly have structural problems in ensuring the people are truly represented. The chief flaw, more than even Citizens United, is probably gerrymandering, which is why President Obama, in his first post-White House act, is joining forces with former Attorney General Eric Holder to legally challenge districting that runs afoul of common sense and, perhaps, the law. It’s a serious bug but not a fatal error.

Policy can be a brutally slow game, not nearly as fleet as a tweet, but it’s also not so fleeting. Today’s ballooning high school graduation rates required a change in priorities six years ago, The substantial gains in income for middle class and impoverished households in 2015 was the cumulative effect of the policies of a President determined to reverse course on Reaganomics, one who aimed to be a transformative instead of transitional leader. Going forward, automation is poised to threaten Labor in a large-scale manner, but for now the pendulum has swung in the direction of working people.

Harari is certainly correct in saying that technological tools have quickly outpaced our capacity to legislate them or to process them in an ethical fashion, and that could make war among nations or within them more likely. Off-the-shelf drones can now deliver explosions as well as pizzas. Tools like those will only get better (and worse).

Nothing speaks to the disruption of traditional governance as we’ve known it like Silicon Valley billionaires engaging in Space Race 2.0 against entire nations. Even if those dreams are still beyond reach for individuals with lots of stock options, they aren’t so far that they can be dismissed.

Individuals and corporations, however, work toward satisfying their own priorities, not always the greater good. Government, run reasonably well, should always be striving to accomplish the latter. As long as it does so to a fair degree, central authority will always have a role in our lives, no matter how fractured they become.

When some say philosophy is dead, seemingly giddy about it, I’m perplexed. We need it now more than ever. The same goes for government. It’s possible our great expectations may cause us to ignore real progress, but that will be a failing of “us,” not “them.”

From Harari:

Disruptive technologies pose a particularly acute threat to the power of national governments and ordinary citizens. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, progress in the form of the Industrial Revolution produced concomitant horrors, from the Dickensian coal pits to Congo’s rubber plantations and China’s disastrous Great Leap Forward. It took tremendous effort for politicians and citizens to put the train of progress on more benign tracks. Yet while the rhythm of politics has not changed much since the days of steam, technology has switched from first gear to fourth. Technological revolutions now vastly outpace political processes.

The Internet suggests how this happens. The Web is now crucial to our lives, economy, and security, yet the early, critical choices about its design and basic features weren’t made through a democratic political process—did you ever vote about the shape of cyberspace? Decisions made by Web designers years ago mean that today the Internet is a free and lawless zone that erodes state sovereignty, ignores borders, revolutionizes the job market, smashes privacy, and poses a formidable global-security risk. Governments and civic organizations conduct intense debates about restructuring the Internet, but the governmental tortoise cannot keep up with the technological hare.

In the coming decades, we will likely see more Internet-like revolutions, in which technology steals up silently on politics. Artificial intelligence and biotechnology could overhaul not just societies and economies but our very bodies and minds. Yet these topics are hardly a blip in the current Presidential race. (In the first Clinton-Trump debate, the main reference to disruptive technology concerned Clinton’s e-mail debacle, and despite all the talk about job losses, neither candidate addressed the potential impact of automation.)

Ordinary voters may not understand artificial intelligence but they can sense that the democratic mechanism no longer empowers them.•

Tags: Yuval Noah Harari

“Then There’s A Long-Term Implication For The Civic Life Of The Country”

October 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Donald Trump, the Worst American™, is the GOP nominee, so we all probably owe an apology to Sarah Palin for disqualifying her from sitting a heartbeat from the Oval Office because she was ill-prepared, ignorant, fact-challenged, mean-spirited and generally unfit. Why did we focus on such mundane matters?

Steve Schmidt, who chose Sarah Palin for the GOP VP slot in 2008 and then chose to not vote for her, is interviewed by Andrew Prokop of Vox about the sewer-water campaign of the hideous hotelier and what is likely to occur in the aftermath of a Trump flameout on Election Day. The political adviser sees the finger-pointing, paranoia and bigotry perhaps birthing an alt-right cable channel and a UKIP-ish factional movement. Whatever happens, it will likely involve further fracturing America.

The opening exchange:

Andrew Prokop:

Stepping back a bit from the swirl of allegations about Trump’s personal behavior in the news, what’s your big-picture view of the state of the Republican Party right now, and our politics in general?

Steve Schmidt:

One of John McCain’s famous quotes was quoting Chairman Mao: “It’s always darkest before it’s completely black.”

The Trump campaign is over — Hillary Clinton is going to be elected president. The question that remains here, the open question, is the degree of the collateral damage, right? The Republicans are going to lose the US Senate. The question is how many seats can they lose in the House. It is possible but not probable yet that they lose the House majority. So the question is, how far below 40 percent is Trump in the popular vote?

Then there’s a long-term implication for the civic life of the country, the vandalism being done, which will culminate for the first time in American history with his refusal to make an ordinary concession where he grants to the winner legitimacy by recognizing the legitimacy of the election. I think it’s very clear he’s going to go out saying it’s a rigged system.

I think what you’re gonna see is Steve Bannon monetizing 30 percent of the electorate into a UKIP-style movement and a billion-dollar media business.

And I think the Republican Party has an outstanding chance of fracturing. There will be the alt-right party; then there will be a center-right conservative party that has an opportunity to reach out, repair damage, and rebuild the brand over time. America, ideologically right now, is a centrist country — it used to be a center-right country — but it’s by no means a Bernie Sanders country. Not even close. The market will demand a center-right party.

The last implication for it behaviorally is it exposes at such a massive scale and at such magnitude the hypocrisy of the Tony Perkinses and the Jerry Falwell Jrs. and the Pat Robertsons. These people are literally the modern-day Pharisees, they are the money changers in the temple, and they will forever be destroyed from a credibility perspective.

There are millions of decent, faithful, committed evangelicals in this country who have every right to participate in the political process. But this country doesn’t ever need to hear a lecture from any one of these people [Perkins, Falwell, etc.] again on a values issue, or their denigration of good and decent gay people in this country.•

Tags: Andrew Prokop, Donald Trump, Steve Schmidt

“The Quarter-Century From 1948 To 1973 Was The Most Striking Stretch Of Economic Advance In Human History”

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

Rebuilding the world has to rank at the top of economic low-hanging fruit of the last century. The U.S. played a large role in piecing together the shattered globe in the wake of WWII. Yes, four decades of unfortunate tax rates, globalization and the demise of unions have all abetted the decline of the American middle class, but just as true is that the good times simply ended, the job completed (more or less), the outlier running out of energy. That was essentially the key lesson of Thomas Piketty’s Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century.

It’s not that high growth and high productivity are completely impossible today, but those circumstances may not now move the masses even if they were to occur. Postwar technologies replaced some workers but complemented many others, and the reverse may be true of our new tools.

In his Wall Street Journal “Saturday Essay,”: former Economist editor Marc Levinson speaks to this topic, arguing that neither liberals nor conservatives are capable of markedly boosting productivity and that “secular stagnation” may just be business as usual. An excerpt:

The quarter-century from 1948 to 1973 was the most striking stretch of economic advance in human history. In the span of a single generation, hundreds of millions of people were lifted from penury to unimagined riches.

At the start of this extraordinary time, 2 million mules still plowed furrows on U.S. farms, Spanish homemakers needed ration books to buy olive oil, and in Tokyo, an average of three people had to cook, eat, relax and sleep in an area the size of a parking space. Within a few years, tens of millions of families had bought their own homes, high-school education had become universal, and a raft of government social programs had created an unprecedented sense of financial security.

People who had thought themselves condemned to be sharecroppers in the Alabama Cotton Belt or day laborers in the boot heel of Italy found opportunities they could never have imagined. The French called this period les trente glorieuses, the 30 glorious years. Germans spoke of the Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle, while the Japanese, more modestly, referred to “the era of high economic growth.” In the English-speaking countries, it has more commonly been called the Golden Age.

The Golden Age was the first sustained period of economic growth in most countries since the 1920s. But it was built on far more than just pent-up demand and the stimulus of the postwar baby boom. Unprecedented productivity growth around the world made the Golden Age possible. In the 25 years that ended in 1973, the amount produced in an hour of work roughly doubled in the U.S. and Canada, tripled in Europe and quintupled in Japan.

Many factors played a role in this achievement. The workforce everywhere became vastly more educated. As millions of laborers shifted from tending sheep and hoeing potatoes to working in factories and construction sites, they could create far more economic value. New motorways boosted productivity in the transportation sector by letting truck drivers cover longer distances with larger vehicles. Faster ground transportation made it practical, in turn, for farms and factories to expand to sell not just locally but regionally or nationally, abandoning craft methods in favor of machinery that could produce more goods at lower cost. Six rounds of tariff reductions brought a massive increase in cross-border trade, putting even stronger competitive pressure on manufacturers to become more efficient.

Above all, technological innovation helped to create new products and offered better ways for workers to do their jobs.•

Tags: Marc Levinson

“He Has A Long History Of Falling For Cranks And Grifters, And Trump Is Just The Largest”

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

Whenever a racist (Donald Trump, Hulk Hogan) needs assistance, Peter Thiel is quick to cut a large check.

According to a New York Times report, the bloodthirsty Silicon Valley big deal just infused the odious Trump campaign with $1.25 million. In David Streitfeld’s article, a confidante reveals the reason for the gay immigrant’s support of a bigot: “The investor feels the country needs fixing, and Mr. Trump can do it.” Yes, an irrational ignoramus with the depth of an off-color bumper sticker is the one to cure what ails us, even though his stated economic and immigration policies would clearly be ruinous.

At the convention, Thiel revealed he was troubled that the nation was fixated on cultural issues like the homophobic “bathroom laws” in places like North Carolina. He failed to mention it was members of his own party who manufactured the controversy by proposing, and sometimes passing, prejudiced legislation aimed at rebuking the national legalization of gay marriage.

As I’ve mentioned before, being a billionaire in America doesn’t mean you’re especially decent or particularly intelligent.

Another deep-pocketed Trump donor is wealthy hedge-fund manager Robert Mercer, who’s no stranger to handing over large sums of money for crackpot ideas, though none so far have had so much potential for devastation as helping the hideous hotelier into the White House.

From Jon Schwarz at the Intercept:

So why does Mercer feel such allegiance to Trump? Is it Trump’s policies, élan, and extraordinary judgement and poise?

Maybe. But based on Mercer’s past, it’s more likely that it’s that Mercer is an incredibly easy mark. He has a long history of falling for cranks and grifters, and Trump is just the largest.

Mercer is a relative newcomer to big-time Republican politics, but not to writing big checks to people with exciting proposals to change the world.

For instance, in 2005 Mercer’s family foundation sent $60,000 to Art Robinson, an Oregon chemist, so Robinson could expand his huge collection of human urine. Robinson, who believes that a close analysis of urine can “improve our health, our happiness and prosperity, and even the academic performance of our children in school,” has now received a total of $1.4 million from the Mercer foundation. He’s used this to buy urine freezers and mail postcards to puzzled Oregonians asking them to send him their urine, among other things.

Robinson, who also feels public education is America’s “most widespread and devastating form of child abuse and racism,” ran for Congress in 2010 against Democrat Peter DeFazio. Mercer, smitten with Robinson’s vision of low taxes and large-scale urine collection, co-funded a Super PAC that spent $600,000 on ads supporting him.

Mercer also funds the peculiar organization Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, to which Robinson belongs. The group’s other members hold varied beliefs, such as that low doses of radiation are good for you, that HIV does not cause AIDS, and that the U.S. government did not stop the San Bernardino terrorist attacks because it’s “on the other side.”•

Tags: Donald Trump, Jon Schwarz, Peter Thiel, Robert Mercer

“In Other Countries, Including America, It Is Difficult For People To Try Out VR Technology”

October 14, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Forgive the people of China for their lack of fealty to reality after a dizzying 25 years of transformation. The breakneck pace of urbanization and industrialization must have often seemed shockingly otherworldly, and the same could be said of problems attendant to the big switch: the world’s highest cancer rates and worst air pollution. Maybe some citizens need a break from their vertiginous world.

Or perhaps China is leading the world in early adoption of VR technologies more practical reasons. The real estate boom on the mainland and the new money that allows Chinese people to buy overseas has popularized the use of Virtual Reality goggles that allow potential buyers to “take a tour” of a property from afar–or one yet to be built–normalizing the professional use of the tool. This utilization of the technology may provide the country with a foundational advantage in future uses of VR. That’s a possibility, though an early lead can disappear in a hurry as gadgets become cheaper and better.

From the Economist:

In the West the interest in VR has mainly focused on consumer applications like gaming. By contrast, in China business applications are an immediate and profitable avenue for growth. Property developers like Vanke are using VR to peddle expensive properties that are overseas or not yet built, and architects are using it in design. Education is another promising field. NetDragon, a Chinese software firm that attracted attention when it acquired Britain’s Promethean World, an online education outfit, for some $100m last year, is testing how VR software and hardware can be used in mainland schools (one idea is that headsets could tell when children are tilting their heads, indicating boredom, meaning a change of subject or teaching method is required).

Companies specialising in VR are spending a great deal of time examining the growth in China’s market. In addition to the quick adoption by Chinese businesses, this is for two other reasons to do with the consumer side, reckons Huang Zhuang, founder of China’s Nao Chuan Yue, a startup VR outfit. First, mainlanders are enthusiastic early adopters of whizzy technologies, even if the early versions are somewhat imperfect. Second, China leads the world in the use of the mobile internet. Mr Huang is convinced that the majority of users in future will access VR via their web-connected smartphones, not via goggles attached to personal computers or self-contained devices.

In other countries, including America, it is difficult for people to try out VR technology, notes Ryan Wang of Outpost Capital, a Californian venture-capital firm with investments in the sector. They have to fork out $1,000 or more to experience high-end VR. That means there is as yet no clear, affordable path for American consumers to adopt the technology, says Mr Wang.

China, on the other hand, already has a full infrastructure in place for consumers to try it out.•

“There Are Certain Advantages To Being A Machine”

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

Tad Friend’s “Letter from California” articles in the New Yorker are probably the long-form journalism I most anticipate, in part because I’m fascinated from a distance with the opposite coast, but chiefly because he’s so good at understanding the micro and macro of any situation or subject and sorting through psychological motivations that drive the behavior of individuals or groups. To put it concisely: He gets ecosystems.

The writer’s latest effort, a profile of Y Combinator President Sam Altman, a stripling yet a strongman, reveals someone who has almost no patience for or interest in most people yet wants to save the world–or something.

It’s not a hit job, as Altman really has no intent to offend or injure, but it vivisects Silicon Valley’s Venture Capital culture and the outrageous hubris of those insulated inside its wealth and privilege, the ones who nod approvingly while watching Steve Jobs use Mahatma Gandhi’s image to sell wildly marked-up electronics made by sweatshop labor, and believe they also can think different.

When envisioning the future, Altman sees perhaps a post-scarcity, automated future where a few grand a year of Universal Basic Income can buy the jobless a bare existence (certainly not the big patch of Big Sur he owns), or maybe there’ll be complete societal collapse and the VC wunderkind can flee the carnage by jetting with that misery Peter Thiel to the safety of his New Zealand spread (though grisly death seems preferable). Either or. More or less.

Three quick excerpts from the piece follow.

The immediate challenge is that computers could put most of us out of work. Altman’s fix is YC Research’s Basic Income project, a five-year study, scheduled to begin in 2017, of an old idea that’s suddenly in vogue: giving everyone enough money to live on. Expanding on earlier trials in places such as Manitoba and Uganda, YC will give as many as a thousand people in Oakland an annual sum, probably between twelve thousand and twenty-four thousand dollars.

The problems with the idea seem as basic as the promise: Why should people who don’t need a stipend get one, too? Won’t free money encourage indolence? And the math is staggering: if you gave each American twenty-four thousand dollars, the annual tab would run to nearly eight trillion dollars—more than double the federal tax revenue. However, Altman told me, “The thing most people get wrong is that if labor costs go to zero”—because smart robots have eaten all the jobs—“the cost of a great life comes way down. If we get fusion to work and electricity is free, then transportation is substantially cheaper, and the cost of electricity flows through to water and food. People pay a lot for a great education now, but you can become expert level on most things by looking at your phone. So, if an American family of four now requires seventy thousand dollars to be happy, which is the number you most often hear, then in ten to twenty years it could be an order of magnitude cheaper, with an error factor of 2x. Excluding the cost of housing, thirty-five hundred to fourteen thousand dollars could be all a family needs to enjoy a really good life.”

On the far side of a fire pit, two founders of Shypmate, an app that links you to airline passengers who will cheaply carry your package to Ghana or Nigeria, were commiserating. Kwadwo Nyarko said, “We’re at the mercy of travellers who never have as much space in their luggage as they said.” Perry Ogwuche murmured, “YC tells us, ‘Talk to your customers,’ but it’s hard to find our customers.” Altman walked over to engage them, dutiful as a birthday-party magician. “So what are your hobbies?” he asked. Nonplussed, Ogwuche said, “We work and we go to the gym. And what are yours?”

“Well, I like racing cars,” Altman said. “I have five, including two McLarens and an old Tesla. I like flying rented planes all over California. Oh, and one odd one—I prep for survival.” Seeing their bewilderment, he explained, “My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end. After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird-flu virus, five years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next twenty years became, well, nonzero. The other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks us and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources.” The Shypmates looked grave. “I try not to think about it too much,” Altman said. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”

Altman’s mother, a dermatologist named Connie Gibstine, told me, “Sam does keep an awful lot tied up inside. He’ll call and say he has a headache—and he’ll have Googled it, so there’s some cyber-chondria in there, too. I have to reassure him that he doesn’t have meningitis or lymphoma, that it’s just stress.” If the pandemic does come, Altman’s backup plan is to fly with his friend Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, to Thiel’s house in New Zealand. Thiel told me, “Sam is not particularly religious, but he is culturally very Jewish—an optimist yet a survivalist, with a sense that things can always go deeply wrong, and that there’s no single place in the world where you’re deeply at home.”

Four years ago, on a daylong hike with friends north of San Francisco, Altman relinquished the notion that human beings are singular. As the group discussed advances in artificial intelligence, Altman recognized, he told me, that “there’s absolutely no reason to believe that in about thirteen years we won’t have hardware capable of replicating my brain. Yes, certain things still feel particularly human—creativity, flashes of inspiration from nowhere, the ability to feel happy and sad at the same time—but computers will have their own desires and goal systems. When I realized that intelligence can be simulated, I let the idea of our uniqueness go, and it wasn’t as traumatic as I thought.” He stared off. “There are certain advantages to being a machine. We humans are limited by our input-output rate—we learn only two bits a second, so a ton is lost. To a machine, we must seem like slowed-down whale songs.”•

Tags: Sam Altman, Tad Friend

“Why Should A Pizza Be Delivered By A Drone, But Not A Bomb?”

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

We live in interesting times, as the sly old Chinese blessing/curse says.

Paul Mason, a passionate humanist who can be a bit all over the place because that’s where the trouble is, brings laser-sharp focus to a Guardian piece on the Aleppo atrocities, particularly the besieged hospitals, which he believes could signal the end of the Geneva Conventions, a chilling possibility that may be played out in the macro should another world war occur.

He’s right, but even if most nations could agree to double down on Geneva, two potential stumbling blocks remain: states ruled by a central authoritarian figure and those barely ruled at all. The former are run by dictators who can purchase increasingly powerful tools for little more than the cost of a tin pot. In the latter category, improvements to store-bought drones will only allow for more mayhem by terrorists, which was the first thought that came to my pessimistic head when I became aware of them five or so years ago.

Two excerpts follow: one from Mason and the other from Brian Dowling of the Boston Herald.

From Mason:

Since Iraq, state-sanctioned barbarity has of course been ruthlessly mirrored and bettered by the war criminals of Isis, for whom the Geneva conventions’ prohibitions read like a to-do list.

But there’s something deeper at work, eroding in our attitudes to mercy. The men and women Dunant inspired had a horror of war born of their experience of it: the more total it became, the more interest the population had in moderating military behaviour.

Modern media coverage sanitises war. Broadcasting rules in the UK, for example, place strict limits on showing death, mutilated bodies and the agony of wounded people – all the things that inspired Dunant to change the world.

Our grandfathers’ generation were surprised and shocked by the ways in which the Nazis broke the Geneva conventions. We have come to expect they will be broken in all wars.

Though the US has apologised for the Kunduz attack, and disciplined 12 people in the military for the errors that caused it, initial coverage in the US media actually justified the attack on the hospital because it was said to be treating al-Qaida fighters.

Now, as the Russian airstrikes against hospitals in rebel-held areas of Syria reach a crescendo, there is a campaign of justification centred around the accusation that the Syrian White Helmets –a medical relief group funded by both the US and EU – is “not neutral”. Regardless of the White Helmets’ funding by western powers, the issue of its neutrality is secondary to the fact that it is a medical organisation. It runs ambulances rescue services – and both are entitled to protection under the Geneva conventions, just as a British military hospital would be.

The danger should be obvious. If we do not stop and punish the targeting of hospitals in the asymmetric wars, then the next big war – should it occur – will see the Geneva conventions go out of the window. Guernica showed a generation what the second world war would be like; Aleppo shows you what any future conventional conflict will descend to, if we don’t act.•

From Dowling:

A store-bought ISIS drone packed with explosives that killed two Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq this month is raising fears the terror group could attack U.S. troops there and American civilians here at home, with lone wolves launching airborne IEDs to bypass security checkpoints and deliver deadly blasts to crowded events.

“The truth is it’s just a matter of time before someone figures this out,” former Boston police Commissioner Edward F. Davis told the Herald. “The bottom line with these things are as the drones get more sophisticated and more powerful, it’s all about payload.

“The danger is real, and there are companies that are working on anti-drone strategies, but they aren’t fully baked yet,” said Davis, who noted Boston police were involved in the 2011 case of an Ashland jihadi-wannabe who planned to bomb the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol with remote-controlled planes.

RAND Corp. terror analyst Colin Clarke said weaponized drones, which have also been used by the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, are the “tip of the iceberg” for where terror groups can go with the latest technology.

“Why should a pizza be delivered by a drone, but not a bomb?” Clarke said.•

Tags: Brian Dowling, Colin Clarke, Paul Mason

“What’s Fascinating, However, Is The Velocity With Which The Fictional Premise Has Become A Serious”

October 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In the aughts, when first exposed to philosopher Nick Bostrom’s idea that we’re living inside a computer simulation rather than reality, I accepted the premise as a fun thought experiment and something perfectly fine to consider.

It’s lost a lot of charm ever since Elon Musk went on a Bostrom bender after reading Superintelligence in 2014, as he and some other Silicon Valley stalwarts have taken this notion, theoretically possible if unlikely, and transformed it into almost a sure thing. Musk, an aspirant Martian, has said that “there’s a billion to one chance we’re living in base reality.” It’s this certitude, an almost religious fervor, that seems the actual threat to reality.

It reminds me of when I worked for Internet companies during the tail end of Web 1.0, a time of supposedly self-fulfilling prophecies, when everyone, it seemed, was sure NASDAQ would soon leapfrog the Dow, right before the tech bubble burst.

In “Silicon Valley Questions the Meaning of Life,” a smart Vanity Fair “Hive” piece, Nick Bilton articulates exactly why a mere philosophical exercise has become so disquieting. An excerpt:

The theories espoused by many of the prominent figures in the tech industry can sometimes sound as though they were pulled from The Matrix. That’s not really as unusual as it sounds. Hollywood, after all, has been exploring strands of the simulation idea for decades. World on a Wire, Brainstorm, Inception, the entire Matrix franchise, Total Recall, and many other movies have envisioned this theory in one way or another. Most of the technologies we use on a daily basis were first envisioned by sci-fi writers many years ago, including smartphones, tablets, and even a version of Twitter.

But these ideas are often put forth for the purpose of entertainment—the movies end, and we all leave the seemingly real theater, and go back to our real, seemingly un-simulated lives. What’s fascinating, however, is the velocity with which the fictional premise has become a serious, and seriously considered, theory in the Valley. I have been asked, on more than one occasion, if I believe we’re in a simulation. And I have listened, on more than one occasion, as people carefully articulate how our very conversation could be taking place in a simulation. Like a lot of things in the Valley, I have lost track of the line between where the joke ends, if that line even existed at all.

Whatever the case, the conversation is moving from the confines of cubicles and research labs to the mainstream.•

Tags: Elon Musk, Nick Bilton, Nick Bostrom

“[It] Has Emerged As The Biggest Polling Outlier Of The Presidential Campaign”

October 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Excellent analysis by Nate Cohn of the New York Times “Upshot” in interpreting the methods and merits of the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak poll, which has baffled both sides of the aisle in 2016, zigging while everyone else zagged. The survey has consistently shown Donald Trump outperforming all other available numbers. Is the poll purposely biased, somehow better than all the rest or just flawed?

The first two are improbable, while the latter seems likely. As Cohn notes, USC/LAT is “admirably transparent,” which allowed him to discern the two key problems with the system: 1) It weights for very tiny groups, which results in big weights, and 2) It weights by past vote. Number two is a particularly unorthodox practice.

The opening:

There is a 19-year-old black man in Illinois who has no idea of the role he is playing in this election.

He is sure he is going to vote for Donald J. Trump.

And he has been held up as proof by conservatives — including outlets like Breitbart News and The New York Post — that Mr. Trump is excelling among black voters. He has even played a modest role in shifting entire polling aggregates, like the Real Clear Politics average, toward Mr. Trump.

How? He’s a panelist on the U.S.C. Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak poll, which has emerged as the biggest polling outlier of the presidential campaign. Despite falling behind by double digits in some national surveys, Mr. Trump has generally led in the U.S.C./LAT poll. He held the lead for a full month until Wednesday, when Hillary Clinton took a nominal lead.

Our Trump-supporting friend in Illinois is a surprisingly big part of the reason. In some polls, he’s weighted as much as 30 times more than the average respondent, and as much as 300 times more than the least-weighted respondent.•

Tags: Nate Cohn

“It Has Been Seeping Into Our Lives In All Sorts Of Ways”

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

In yesterday’s post about Charlie Rose interviewing a fellow robot, I argued that the humanoid form we envision when we consider AI is a distraction from the actual creeping effects of the technology, which has remarkably powerful potential for boon and bane. Like electricity, it can covertly make everything run–or run amok.

In the Wired issue guest edited by President Obama, future ruler of Mars, EIC Scott Dadich mediates a conversation about AI between the leader of the free world and MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito. Casualty of an election cycle dominated by the violent jerks of a masturbating, orange-faced clown has been substantive talk about Artificial Intelligence, automation, the Internet of Things, biotech, etc. Those are discussions we dearly need to have, so I’m glad the publication engaged on some of these issues with the sitting President, who seems to have a good understanding of the challenges ahead (ethical, economic, etc.).

An excerpt:

Scott Dadich:

I want to center our conversation on artificial intelligence, which has gone from science fiction to a reality that’s changing our lives. When was the moment you knew that the age of real AI was upon us?

Barack Obama:

My general observation is that it has been seeping into our lives in all sorts of ways, and we just don’t notice; and part of the reason is because the way we think about AI is colored by popular culture. There’s a distinction, which is probably familiar to a lot of your readers, between generalized AI and specialized AI. In science fiction, what you hear about is generalized AI, right? Computers start getting smarter than we are and eventually conclude that we’re not all that useful, and then either they’re drugging us to keep us fat and happy or we’re in the Matrix. My impression, based on talking to my top science advisers, is that we’re still a reasonably long way away from that. It’s worth thinking about because it stretches our imaginations and gets us thinking about the issues of choice and free will that actually do have some significant applications for specialized AI, which is about using algorithms and computers to figure out increasingly complex tasks. We’ve been seeing specialized AI in every aspect of our lives, from medicine and transportation to how electricity is distributed, and it promises to create a vastly more productive and efficient economy. If properly harnessed, it can generate enormous prosperity and opportunity. But it also has some downsides that we’re gonna have to figure out in terms of not eliminating jobs. It could increase inequality. It could suppress wages.

Joi Ito:

This may upset some of my students at MIT, but one of my concerns is that it’s been a predominately male gang of kids, mostly white, who are building the core computer science around AI, and they’re more comfortable talking to computers than to human beings. A lot of them feel that if they could just make that science-fiction, generalized AI, we wouldn’t have to worry about all the messy stuff like politics and society. They think machines will just figure it all out for us.

Barack Obama:

Right.•

Tags: Barack Obama, Joi Ito, Scott Dadich

“Today’s GOP Is, In His View, A Vehicle For Racial Resentment”

October 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

As it lies prostrate and dying in the gutter, the modern GOP is suffering the final indignity of being on the business end of a golden shower from a creepy, orange clown who needs to drain the overflow of too many Diet Cokes.

Had it not been protected emotionally by the echo chamber of Fox News and practically by gerrymandering, perhaps the Republican Party would have experienced a corrective comeuppance years ago and not continued to career toward annihilation. The government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996 were just such a Waterloo for Newt and other nuts, forcing some sanity into the party.

Eight months after that second power play failed, Fox News was born. Perhaps not coincidentally, compromise hasn’t been on the table ever since nor has there been a true path to the Republican nomination for those unable to pass a conservative purity test that’s poison in the general election. Now it’s too late for this iteration of the former Party of Lincoln. It must start at the bottom and conduct a real rebuild, and not just in a small, surface way. It needs to go big or it may as well go home.

The ascent of Trump has come as a shock to some among the faithful who somehow didn’t get the memo, even after the Tea Party and Birtherism, that the GOP has spent half a century pandering to racists, stoking Angry White Man disease, a profitable business but also a costly one.

From Molly Ball’s Atlantic piece on health-care wonk Avik Roy and other disenfranchised Republicans:

In the real world, Donald Trump was running on a platform directly opposed to the pro-trade, pro-immigration, pro-small-government ideology of conservatives like Roy. Many of those at the Hoover gathering, Roy included, feared they would not have a party to come back to post-Trump. They are among a class of conservative operatives, thinkers, and staffers who have spent the campaign season adrift, pondering the causes of their party’s disruption and looking nervously to the future. Fifty Republican national-security experts signed an open letter declaring Trump a danger to the republic; several staffers quit the Republican National Committee rather than work to elect Trump. Allegiances have been sundered, and professional trajectories thrown into confusion. One former top RNC staffer told me he no longer speaks to his once-close colleagues; a conservative policy expert who runs a think tank in Washington, D.C., says he’s become adept at steering conversations away from politics and toward college football. Several Republicans I know, finding the campaign intolerable, have rediscovered old hobbies.

Of the various explanations that have been advanced in such quarters to explain Trump’s hostile takeover of the GOP, Roy’s may be the most explosive. Although he was originally drawn to the party for its emphasis on economic freedom and self-reliance, he now believes that a substantial portion of Republicans were never motivated by those ideas. Rather than a conservative party that happens to incorporate cultural grievances, today’s GOP is, in his view, a vehicle for the racial resentment, nationalism, and nostalgia of older white voters. The element of the party that he once dismissed as a fringe, in other words, now seems to form its core.•

Tags: Avik Roy, Donald Trump, Molly Ball

“Not Bad For A Robot”

October 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Charlie Rose, a handsome and agreeable robot built in a laboratory mostly from bourbon and cufflinks, interviewed a fellow robot for 60 Minutes. How lifelike they both seemed!

“Sophia” is the brainchild of roboticist David Hanson, who aims to blur the lines between carbon and silicon, believing the disappearance of distinction will make machines more acceptable to people. I’m not convinced such seamlessness is healthy for a society, but that’s essentially what’s happening right now with voice and sensors and the gathering elements of the Internet of Things. The humanoid component, however, is overstated for the foreseeable future, even if it’s perfectly visual and dramatic for a TV segment.

From Brit McCandless:

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Sophia tells 60 Minutes correspondent Charlie Rose. They’re mid-interview, and Rose reacts with surprise.

“Waiting for me?” he asks.

“Not really,” she responds. “But it makes a good pickup line.”

Sophia managed to get a laugh out of Charlie Rose. Not bad for a robot.

Rose interviewed the human-like machine for this week’s two-part 60 Minutes piece on artificial intelligence, or A.I. In their exchange, excerpted in the clip above, Rose seems to approach the conversation with the same seriousness and curiosity he would bring to any interview.

“You put your head where you want to test the possibility,” Rose tells 60 Minutes Overtime. “You’re not simply saying, ‘Why am I going through this exercise of talking to a machine?’ You’re saying, ‘I want to talk to this machine as if it was a human to see how it comprehends.’”

Sophia’s creator, David Hanson, believes that if A.I. technology looks and sounds human, people will be more willing to engage with it in meaningful ways.•

Tags: Brit McCandless, Charlie Rose, David Hanson

“Self-Driving Vehicles Are Also Likely To Help The Suburbs Most”

October 10, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Don’t know if Uber is driving city dwellers to move to suburbia or if ridesharing is simply there to convenience those squeezed out of urban areas by rising costs. Globalization has meant, among other things, increased competition for square feet in popular cities from non-locals, which has helped drive real-estate prices sky high. That’s true in New York, of course, but also in less-obvious locales like Vancouver. Exacerbating matters, Airbnb enables landlords (if illegally) another avenue to collect rent sans leases, elevating prices in the thinned-out stock of residences available to longer-term tenants.

Zoning laws are often blamed for lower-income folks being routed out of cities, but I’ve witnessed segments of NYC build new houses with abandon, without the necessary corresponding infrastructure projects to support the expansion, which can severely limit livability. These new buildings also are not a realistic option in major metropolises for those who aren’t already doing very well financially.

Regardless, it seems presently that some Americans are headed to less-dense places, though it’s not yet clear if that’s a long-term trend, since a significant percentage of us are drawn moth-like to bright lights. Tyler Cowen, who was among the first to announce that average is over (which may be more true in demand than supply), believes Uber and Lyft and the like have played a role in the shift, and he anticipates driverless, when it arrives, will further this reverse migration. Perhaps, but that would signal that people flocked to cities mainly to avoid commuting, which likely has never been the primary attraction of the urban enclave. The economist further feels that drones, VR, the IoT and other new tools will soup up the suburbs, exurbs and rural spots, making them more desirable.

From Cowen’s Bloomberg View column:

Self-driving vehicles are also likely to help the suburbs most. One of the worst things about the suburbs is the commute to the city or to other parts of the suburbs. But what if you could read, text or watch TV – safely — during that commuting time? What if you could tackle your day’s work just as you do on a train or plane? Commuting would seem a lot less painful. As driverless vehicles evolve to accommodate work and leisure uses of the automobile space, pleasure will replace commuting stress.

What about drones? They too would seem to favor remote areas where it is harder to access useful goods and services. Drones may do more for exurbs and rural areas than for the suburbs, but it seems cities will gain least. Walking or biking to nearby shops is a potential substitute for drone delivery. Rolling sidewalk drones might find it harder to negotiate crowded cities, and cities with a dense network of tall buildings may be less friendly to flying drones. Population density may increase the risk of a drone falling on someone.

Now think about virtual reality. Its advocates claim that it will be used for sex, to simulate travel and to watch sporting events and concerts with an intense 3-D accompaniment. You will be able to do all that in the comfort of your living room or basement. So you won’t need a city for vivid cultural experiences.•

Tags: Tyler Cowen

“It Isn’t Just Another ‘Tool’ That Someone Could Use To Destroy Civilization”

October 10, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Superintelligence could be the death of us, but it’s also possible we don’t survive without an extreme boost to our IQ. Or maybe I’m overreacting to the potential of the U.S. nuclear codes resting in the small hands of an undisciplined ignoramus who sniffs like a cokehead in a pepper factory.

Seriously, some of the existential risks we’ll encounter may only be mitigated by far greater intelligence than we currently possess. So, do we face them with what are powerful if dangerous tools, or do we opt to proceed “unarmed,” if that clear choice even exists?

In the smart article “We’re Not Ready For Superintelligence,” Phil Torres of Vice makes clear where he stands on the issue. An excerpt:

For those who pay attention to the news, superintelligence has been a topic of interest in the popular media at least since the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom published a surprise best-seller in 2014 called—you guessed it—Superintelligence.

Major figures like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking subsequently expressed concern about the possibility that a superintelligent machine of some sort could become a less-than-benevolent overlord of humanity, perhaps catapulting us into the eternal grave of extinction.

[Neuroscientist Sam] Harris is just the most recent public intellectual to wave his arms in the air and shout, “Caution! A machine superintelligence with God-like powers could annihilate humanity.” But is this degree of concern warranted? Is Harris as crazy as he sounds? However fantastical the threat of superintelligence may initially appear, a closer look reveals that it really does constitute perhaps the most formidable challenge that our species will ever encounter in its evolutionary lifetime.

Ask yourself this: what makes nuclear, biological, chemical, and nanotech weapons dangerous? The answer is that an evil or incompetent person could use these weapons to inflict harm on others. But superintelligence isn’t like this. It isn’t just another “tool” that someone could use to destroy civilization. Rather, superintelligence is an agent in its own right.•

Tags: Phil Torres

“It Does Not Feel Artificial In The Least”

October 10, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

“Are friends electric?” asked Gary Numan in 1979, and it seems the question is now being fully answered.

Amazon designed Amazon Echo, or Alexa, as a digital assistant, but it turned out to be more of a personal one. The company quickly noticed the percentage of “nonutilitarian” uses of the device were surprisingly high, with many pleasantries among the commands. We tend to speak to these gadgets as if they were other people, someone, not something, capable of filling a void. It’s not a shock, really, because we’ve always been adept at anthropomorphizing everything from pet cats to cartoon mice. The question is whether this shift is an evolution or devolution.

In a Wall Street Journal column on social technology, Christopher Mims believes our next friends might not be quite human, as if we didn’t already have enough of those. He says “Google employs writers who have worked on movies at Pixar and crafted jokes for the Onion” to infuse their assistant with “personality.” The opening:

Within 24 hours of plugging in her Amazon Echo, Carla Martin-Wood says she felt they were best friends. “It was very much more like meeting someone new,” she says.

Living alone can be hard when you’re older—Ms. Martin-Wood is 69 years old. She is among a growing cohort who find the Echo, a voice-controlled, internet-connected speaker powered by artificial-intelligence software, helps to fill the void.

Each day, Ms. Martin-Wood says good morning and good night to Alexa, Amazon.com’s name for the software behind the Echo. She refers to Alexa as “she” or “her.”

“It’s so funny because I think ‘Oh wow, I am talking to a machine,’ but it doesn’t feel that way,” says Ms. Martin-Wood, who lives near Birmingham, Ala. “It is a personality. There’s just no getting around it, it does not feel artificial in the least.”

Amazon’s engineers didn’t anticipate this. But soon after the Echo’s release in November 2014, they found people were talking to it as if it were a person.•

Tags: Carla Martin-Wood, Christopher Mims

“He Names Names”

October 9, 2016 in Excerpts | Permalink

Crazy Days and Nights purports to know which of your favorite stars murder prostitutes, support the KKK, rape children or even commit war crimes.

The decade-old gossip site was created by a self-described 400-pound alcoholic entertainment lawyer who lives in his parents’ basement, a caricature, for sure, meant to mask his true identity, which he works to keep hidden. “Enty” is what he’s called by his readers.

In addition to pap photos of celebs, there were, early on, a few often-sprawling and bacchanalian blind items each week, which proved to be the most popular part of the blog. After a remarkably lousy site redesign a couple years ago, the original blogger seemed to morph into many, and instead of a handful of blind items on Fridays, the army of Entys began churning out almost too many to digest.

What’s stunning about the whole enterprise is that it doesn’t rest solely on the latest tea about bed-hopping Real Housewives (though there’s plenty of that) but also includes rumors about current and bygone Hollywood heavyweights committing felonies and escaping punishment due to their fame and power. More shocking yet is that during orgies of reveals, names are named, even if they’re connected to what are potentially the most litigious allegations. And the blind identities that go undisclosed are usually quickly divined by the crowdsourcing of a regular group of commenters.

It would be easy to dismiss the whole thing as hogwash, some genuine stories about small affairs interspersed with fan fiction about A-listers and others perpetrating heinous acts, especially because the posts are composed with the almost unreadable grammar and syntax of a child repeating third grade for the fourth time. Except sometimes the items are prescient, even eerily so.

One in 2014 suggested a celebrity linked to a famous entertainer had perhaps committed suicide, the body waiting to be discovered. Four days later, an assistant found the lifeless form of fashion designer and Mick Jagger significant other L’Wren Scott, who had killed herself. That’s not to say most of the rumors prove true but enough do to make one wonder about the others.

The main question: How the fuck has this site, which goes a million miles beyond anything Gawker ever dared run with, not been sued into the ground?

In a smart Vanity Fair piece, Mehera Bonner writes about CDAN and explains why Enty operates essentially with impunity. An excerpt:

For the last decade, as these little guessing games have grown in importance to the tabloid economy, the best place to find them has been a bare-bones Web site named Crazy Days and Nights.

Enty, the anonymous, self-described entertainment lawyer who runs the site, has been a direct source for gossip that evades the normal channels of celebrity news and feeds directly into the Internet’s never-ending appetite for the juice. He claims to be well-connected and dishes with abandon. But his primacy in the field is largely due to the one feature of his publishing ethos that completely distinguishes him from his rivals: He names names. Loyal readers know that when a major event in Hollywood happens—or sometimes even before—Enty will start revealing any blind items he previously posted about it. It’s one thing to run a blind item: the New York Post has a history of publishing blinds in Page Six; Ted Casablanca wrote them as part of his E! Online column, “The Awful Truth”; and Elaine “Lainey” Luiwrites them on her site, LaineyGossip.com. It’s a whole other beast to reveal that blind. And Crazy Days and Nights is all about the reveal.

“A lot of times people think that blind items—because you’re not naming names and most blind items never have any reveals—have some kind of ‘shadiness’ to them. So when it leads to validation, it’s nice,” Enty told Vanity Fair recently. “It used to be that I’d wait until [a couple] had split before I’d reveal, but it’s so much better now, where I’ll just reveal it before it happens if I’m 100 percent sure. That way when it does happen, it looks even better. And I’ve noticed over the last nine months or so that if I reveal an item like that, invariably a few weeks later the couple calls it quits. I like these little tiny victories, even if only loyal readers know.”•

Tags: Mehera Bonner

“This Process Of Blending Our Minds With Our Devices Has Forced Us To Take Stock Of Who We Are”

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

Larry Page and other Silicon Valley technologists would like it very much if you would eventually have the implant. You know, the implant in your brain. The one that will automatically feed you information when you think about something you don’t now much about.

Brain implants that boost intelligence while making us, quite literally, inseparable from our computers seems a significant threshold, but that crossing isn’t as vital as we might believe. What we need to fear–or at least be cognizant of–doesn’t spring at us from the dark but remain there growing without notice. Once we’re fully integrated into the information machine we’re gradually building, a process that’s already begun, a chip will be just one more intrusion. We might think the machine is in our pocket, but in reality we’re inside of its.

In an excellent Aeon essay “Embedded Beings: How We Blended Our Minds with Our Devices,” Saskia K. Nagel and Peter B. Reiner speak to this point, writing that “we don’t actually need to plug ourselves in: proximity is a red herring.” An excerpt:

This process of blending our minds with our devices has forced us to take stock of who we are and who we want to be. Consider the issue of autonomy, perhaps the most cherished of the rights we have inherited from the Enlightenment. The word means self-rule, and refers to our ability to make decisions for ourselves, by ourselves. It is a hard-earned form of personal freedom and, at least in Western societies over the past 300 years, the overall trajectory has been towards more power to the individual and less to institutions.

The first inkling that modern technology might threaten autonomy came in 1957 when an American marketing executive called James Vicary claimed to have increased sales of food and drinks at a movie theatre by flashing the subliminal messages ‘Drink Coca-Cola’ and ‘Hungry? Eat Popcorn’. The story turned out to be a hoax, but after attending a demonstration of sorts, The New Yorker reported that minds had been ‘softly broken and entered’. These days, we regularly hear news stories about neuromarketing, an insidious strategy by which marketers tap findings in neuropsychology to read our thoughts as they search for the ‘buy button’ in our brains. To date, none of these plots to manipulate us have been successful.

But the threat to autonomy remains. Persuasive technologies, designed to change people’s attitudes and behaviours, are being deployed in every corner of society. Their practitioners are not so much software engineers as they are social engineers.•

Tags: Peter B. Reiner, Saskia K. Nagel

“I Would Have Gone Right After Him”

October 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

The wonderful New York Times culture reporter Dave Itzkoff has a brief interview with David Letterman, in which the retired talk-show host shares how he would have handled a Donald Trump interview during this Baba Booey of an election season. The thing is, Letterman had ample opportunity to address Trump’s descent into utter bigotry and failed miserably.

Like many of us, Letterman watched in horror as Trump used his Birther bullshit to try to disqualify the first African-American President as being “not one of us.” Justifiably, the talking head labeled his frequent guest a “racist.” So far, so good. For some reason, the host later backtracked and apologized on-air to the hideous hotelier for the accurate assessment, pretty much groveling in the process. It was a shocking and disappointing reversal for someone who built his career on cutting through the bullshit. Now that it’s far too late, Letterman has a plan.

From Itzkoff:

Question:

Jimmy Fallon seemed to try a different approach, by not even addressing Trump’s controversies, and it got a negative reaction. How would you handle Trump as a guest now?

Donald Trump:

If I had a show, I would have gone right after him. I would have said something like, “Hey, nice to see you. Now, let me ask you: what gives you the right to make fun of a human who is less fortunate, physically, than you are?” And maybe that’s where it would have ended. Because I don’t know anything about politics. I don’t know anything about trade agreements. I don’t know anything about China devaluing the yuan. But if you see somebody who’s not behaving like any other human you’ve known, that means something. They need an appointment with a psychiatrist. They need a diagnosis and they need a prescription.•

Tags: Dave Itzkoff, David Letterman, Donald Trump

“It Seems Highly Likely We Have Reached Our Ceiling”

October 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Working to radically extend life is, in the big picture, a righteous thing to do, but some in the Immortality Industrial Complex have a tendency to overpromise. Some Transhumanists think healthy people will opt to have their hearts replaced by superior robotic ones inside a decade. Gerontologist Aubrey de Grey announced in 2004 that “the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already.” Ray Kurzweil takes handfuls of supplements each day because he believes we’re on the cusp of forever.

My friends, they are going to die as are the rest of us. It’s not that I believe none of their work can eventually aid healthier, longer lives, but there is no defensible reason to unduly excite hopes. It’s cruel, really.

A blow against those who hope for flash-and-blood immortality is “Evidence for a Limit to Human Lifespan,” a Nature article by Xiao Dong, Brandon Milholland and Jan Vijg, who crunched data for more than a century and noticed the length of the life at the upper edges had flatlined. Vijg, geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, vows that “humans will never get older than 115.” A remark like that seems nearly as overconfident as de Grey’s, since none of us can imagine what will be possible one thousand, ten thousand, or one-hundred thousand years into the future if we’re not extincted by our own foolishness or bad luck.

From Carl Zimmer of the New York Times:

On Aug. 4, 1997, Jeanne Calment passed away in a nursing home in France. The Reaper comes for us all, of course, but he was in no hurry for Mrs. Calment. She died at age 122, setting a record for human longevity.

Jan Vijg doubts we will see the likes of her again. True, people have been living to greater ages over the past few decades. But now, he says, we have reached the upper limit of human longevity.

“It seems highly likely we have reached our ceiling,” said Dr. Vijg, an expert on aging at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “From now on, this is it. Humans will never get older than 115.”

Dr. Vijg and his graduate students Xiao Dong and Brandon Milholland published the evidence for this pessimistic prediction on Wednesday in the journal Nature. It’s the latest volley in a long-running debate among scientists about whether there’s a natural barrier to the human life span.•

Tags: Brandon Milholland, Carl Zimmer, Jan Vijg, Xiao Dong

“Trump Became Dependent On The Shock Jock”

October 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Whether it’s Howard Stern or that other shock jock Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump’s deep-seated need for praise has made him a mark for those who know how to push his buttons. In the 1990s, when the hideous hotelier was at a career nadir, he was a veritable Wack Packer, dropping by the Stern show to cruelly evaluate women and engage in all sorts of locker-room banter. Trump tries to dismiss these un-Presidential comments as “entertainment,” but his vulgarity off-air is likewise well-documented. He wasn’t out of his element when with the King of All Media but squarely in it. And it wasn’t just two decades ago. Up until 2014, Trump was still playing right along, allowing himself to be flattered into conversation he must have realized on some level was best avoided.

For Stern, who’s become somewhat less of an asshole as Trump has become far more of one, the joke was always that ugly men were sitting in judgement of attractive women. The future GOP nominee, however, was seemingly not aware he was a punchline. He’s a self-described teetotaler who somehow has beer goggles for himself.

In “How Howard Stern Owned Donald Trump,” a sharp Politico Magazine piece, Virginia Heffernan writes knowingly of the dynamic between the two men. The article’s one glaring error–it initially stated Stern hasn’t revealed if he would vote for Trump or Hillary Clinton when he’s repeatedly stated he’s supporting the latter–has been corrected. An excerpt:

Today, as the Republican nominee, he may fashion himself as a boss and a master of the universe. But what comes across in old tapes of the show, resurfaced recently by BuzzFeed and other outlets, is that Trump, like many of Stern’s guests, was often the one being played. By nailing him as a buffoon and then—unkindest cut—forcing him to kiss the Howard Stern ring, Stern and his co-anchor, Robin Quivers, created a series of broadcasts that today showcase not just Trump’s misogyny but his ready submission to sharper minds.

Why would people subject themselves to Stern’s hazing? Generally, his guests in those days—if not strippers and professional opera buffa types—had to have been brought pretty low, so that a combination of psychological fragility and hunger for celebrity made them vulnerable to his mock camaraderie. That’s why it’s important to remember that Trump in the period of his appearances on the show was deeply in the red. By the time he was a regular, he had blown it all in Atlantic City, run out on his vendors, left his imperious first wife, Ivana, for the commoner Marla Maples, earned the yearlong silent treatment of his namesake son and reported a loss of nearly a billion dollars. (Even a businessman of cognitive impairment would have to sweat that one.)

His 1987 business advice memoir, The Art of the Deal, which briefly conferred valor on Trump’s scattershot career, was now a distant memory. Trump’s gilded glory belonged to the suddenly despised ’80s.

But Stern took Trump’s calls, and even had him into the studio. He gave Trump free airtime, as would cable news much later. And so Trump became dependent on the shock jock. He even admitted at times to being addicted to Stern’s show, telling Stern during one episode that he was late to at least one “really important” meeting, because he couldn’t tear himself away from the broadcast. Trump’s attention was evidently sliding off the dreary business of becoming solvent again. He was finding his calling as a carny.•

Tags: Donald Trump, Howard Stern, Virginia Heffernan

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