Excerpts

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“Such Dystopian Fantasies Aren’t Worth Worrying About Yet”

August 25, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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For the rest of this century (at least), it’s more likely machines will come or our jobs than our lives. The threat of extinction of human beings by superintelligence isn’t in sight, thankfully, but while automation could lead to post-scarcity, if we’re not careful and wise, it might instead stoke societal chaos.

In his London Review of Books essay about machine learning, Paul Taylor writes about the potential of this field, while acknowledging it’s not certain how well it will all work out despite early promise. The short-term issue, he believes, may be between haves and have-nots as it applies to computing power. An excerpt:

The solving of problems that until recently seemed insuperable might give the impression that these machines are acquiring capacities usually thought distinctively human. But although what happens in a large recurrent neural network better resembles what takes place in a brain than conventional software does, the similarity is still limited. There is no close analogy between the way neural networks are trained and what we know about the way human learning takes place. It is too early to say whether scaling up networks like Inception will enable computers to identify not only a cat’s face but also the general concept ‘cat’, or even more abstract ideas such as ‘two’ or ‘authenticity’. And powerful though Google’s networks are, the features they derive from sequences of words are not built from the experience of human interaction in the way our use of language is: we don’t know whether or not they will eventually be able to use language as humans do.

In 2006 Ray Kurzweil wrote a book about what he called the Singularity, the idea that once computers are able to generate improvements to their own intelligence, the rate at which their intelligence improves will accelerate exponentially. Others have aired similar anxieties. The philosopher Nick Bostrom wrote a bestseller, Superintelligence (2014), examining the risks associated with uncontrolled artificial intelligence. Stephen Hawking has suggested that building machines more intelligent than we are could lead to the end of the human race. Elon Musk has said much the same. But such dystopian fantasies aren’t worth worrying about yet. If there is something to be worried about today, it is the social consequences of the economic transformation computers might bring about – that, and the growing dominance of the small number of corporations that have access to the mammoth quantities of computing power and data the technology requires.•

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“The Newly Discovered Planet Doesn’t Yet Have A Name”

August 24, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Much has already been written abut the jaw-dropping discovery of “another Earth” near Proxima Centauri, something that seemed likely to happen sooner or later and has now occurred. My favorite words on the topic were penned by Olaf Stampf of Spiegel. He understands the magnitude of the finding while cautioning that even with the development of fusion propulsion, reaching our sister planet in a reasonable time frame is still a bridge too far. Perhaps it’s a better-than-ever time for the human-less probes to Alpha Centauri suggested by Ken Kalfus and being developed by Yuri Milner, with their destination shortened by just a bit. Presently, pretty much all space exploration should be handled by machines, anyhow.

The opening:

The faraway world exists in constant twilight. Although its nearby blood-red dwarf star only provides one tiny fraction of our sun’s light, its warmth might still be enough to create a life-sustaining climate.

But is there really life on this newly detected planet? Nobody knows — at least not yet. Only one thing is certain: Because of the darkness, animals and plants would look different from the ones we know from Earth. Trees and shrubs would have pitch-black leaves, as if they’d been burned. The alien flora would need to be darkly colored to use the dim starlight for its photosynthesis.

And what about higher forms of life, like animals or intelligent beings? It’s very possible that exotic organisms exist on the planet. Given that it is several million years older than the Earth, it would have had enough time for life to develop.

On the other hand, it would also have to repeatedly withstand hellish conditions. Its sun is a so-called flare star, a cosmic fire-breather that tends to produce apocalyptic eruptions of plasma. All of the planet’s oceans, rivers and lakes may well have long since evaporated.

The newly discovered planet doesn’t yet have a name, but the red dwarf star around which it circles is famous: Proxima Centauri, our nearest fixed star, only 4.24 lightyears away — our sun’s closest neighbor.

That’s what makes this finding so scientifically exciting.•

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“He Was Denounced As ‘An Ugly Human Scum Worse Than A Dog’”

August 24, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Just a whisper bigger in land mass than Pennsylvania, North Korea is a Digital Age Orwellian state that knows only one Big Brother and his name is Kim Jong-un. He does not tolerate sibling rivalry.

In reviewing a raft of titles in the New York Review of Books about the nation ruled by Dear Respected Comrade, political scientist Andrew J. Nathan questions if President Obama’s “strategic patience” will pay off with ungodly wealth inequality and economic sanctions provoking a surrender of nukes or the fall of the tyrannical government. It’s far from assured, with China betting against, not seeing a chance for reforms similar to its own taking root in its neighbor. Nathan agrees with that latter assessment, writing that “North Korea is more like East Germany than it is like China.”

An excerpt:

As the end of his own life approached, Kim Jong-il in turn needed to find a successor among his three male offspring. (He also had four daughters, who today occupy posts of varying responsibility in the regime.) Observers had originally expected the succession to fall upon the eldest, Kim Jong-nam (born in 1971). Jong-nam, however, was the offspring of Jong-il’s first long-term consort (it is not clear whether Jong-il ever formally married any of his companions), whom the patriarch Kim Il-sung disliked. Moreover, in 2001, Jong-nam was caught by Japanese immigration officials entering the country on a forged Dominican passport, accompanied by a wife, child, and nanny. The forged passport was nothing unusual for North Korean elites, but apparently Jong-nam’s reason for using it—to bring his family to visit Tokyo Disneyland—confirmed in his father’s eyes that he lacked the necessary toughness to wield power. Jong-nam was sent into exile, and reportedly spends much of his time in the Chinese gambling city of Macau. He has given several press interviews expressing his disapproval of “hereditary succession.” Chinese guards, I have been told, protect him from potential North Korean assassins. It is not clear who supports him.

Kim Jong-il’s second son, Kim Jong-chul, was also found inadequate, according to a gossipy book by the family’s Japanese former sushi chef, because he was too “effeminate.” That left Jong-un, born in 1984, although his official birthday has been adjusted to 1982 to continue the mystical parallelism with his grandfather’s and father’s birth years. Jong-un was not academically talented, and during his secondary education at a private school in Switzerland he is said to have been obsessed with basketball and other sports. But he was short-tempered and domineering, characteristics suitable for inheriting a dictatorship. In 2009, word appeared that a “new genius of leadership had emerged from within the ancient lands of Korea.” Jong-un’s appearance was groomed to resemble his grandfather’s—including his bouffant haircut. Observers speculate that he was encouraged to gain weight for this purpose; according to intelligence reports he may now be suffering from health problems related to obesity.

The most serious threat to Jong-un’s authority was his uncle. The husband of Kim Jong-il’s only sister, Jang Song-taek had accumulated broad influence, serving among other things as vice-chairman of the National Defense Commission, the controller of Pyongyang’s foreign exchange resources, and the regime’s chief contact with China.5Many viewed him as a regent, and he held a potential threat over Jong-un’s head in the form of a close relationship with the exiled older half-brother Jong-nam, who could potentially have replaced the younger sibling at the head of the party and state.

On December 8, 2013, two years after Jong-un came to power, the young ruler arranged for Jang to be seized by uniformed guards in front of hundreds of high-ranking officials who had been summoned to an enlarged meeting of the ruling party’s Political Bureau. Jang was accused of “anti-party, counter-revolutionary factional acts,” of conducting numerous extramarital affairs, and of other crimes. He was denounced as “an ugly human scum worse than a dog” and executed by firing squad (not, as was rumored at the time, by antiaircraft guns or ravenous dogs). Many of his followers were killed or sent to labor camps, some reports say along with their spouses, children, and grandchildren. Jang’s wife may or may not have approved of her adulterous husband’s execution; she is said to be suffering from dementia and has appeared silently in public a handful of times since the purge.•

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“They Offered A Template For Blowing Up Everything”

August 24, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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I’ve said my piece on more than one occasion on the demise of Gawker (most recently here), but Farhad Manjoo has an interesting take in his latest New York Times “State of the Art” column, arguing that the spirit and style of Nick Denton’s former flagship has so infused the media landscape that Peter Thiel’s petty revenge failed even if it seemed to succeed. In a sense, he won a battle after the war had already been decided.

That’s probably true to a good extent, but I wonder if the most key ingredient, the thing that made Gawker sometimes so good and at other moments so bad, survives the site. That was its very raffishness, the dicey and daring spirit that always made it a place people could go to afflict the comfortable. Admittedly, such important scoops rarely materialized on the site, with reflexive dart throwing more the reality, but the possibility existed. Manjoo lists a raft of legacy publications influenced by Gawker, but none of them have adopted this aspect of the ethos. That will usually be for the best but occasionally not.

From Manjoo:

Even if you avoided Gawker, you can’t escape its influence. Elements of its tone, style, sensibility, essential business model and its work flow have colonized just about every other media company, from upstarts like BuzzFeed and Vox to incumbents such as CNN, The New Yorker and The New York Times.

The most important innovation Gawker brought to news was its sense that the internet allowed it to do anything. It was one of the first web publications to understand that the message was the medium — that the internet wasn’t just a new way to distribute words, but that it also offered the potential for creating a completely new kind of publication, one that had no analogue in the legacy era of print.

This sounds like a basic realization, but it wasn’t obvious to most online publishers. I know this firsthand. In the 2000s, I worked at three different magazines that were based entirely online — Wired News (the online arm of Wired Magazine), Salon and Slate. Looking back now, I can tell that even though we were doing good work, we weren’t doing much that was really different from what came before. A typical Salon or Slate article was 600 to 1,500 words long. Generally, a writer wrote a few times a week. We took the weekends off. Though we wrote online, in most ways we were really putting out a relatively fast paced magazine, just without ink and paper.

Gawker did not invent blogging, but Nick Denton, its founder, was among the first to recognize that blogs were a transformational technical innovation. They offered a template for blowing up everything about how news was created and delivered.•

“The United States Was Once Among The Tallest Countries In The World”

August 23, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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To live longer, be tall but not that tall. Giants don’t last too long, their hearts worn out by working to support a great burden, but you wouldn’t want to live in a shrinking state like North Korea–a “nation of racist dwarfs” as the late Christopher Hitchens put it with his trademark indelicacy. A country of reasonably tall people–like Holland, for example–is a sign of good health and long lifespans. 

Americans used to be relative giants in the world, but now we stand diminished, ranking 40th among nations in height. Why? Perhaps because the U.S. lacks the social safety nets and child welfare of the Dutch. From Dan Kopf’s Priceonomics piece “Where Are the Tallest People in the World?“:

The United States was once among the tallest countries in the world. 

According to the data, Americans born in 1896 were the 3rd tallest in the world, and as recently as 1951, Americans were 10th. But the second half of the 20th Century was a period of sharp relative decline for American height. Today, the United States ranks 40th, and the height of the average American (5’ 7”) is no greater today than it was for those born in 1950.

The most likely culprit for this decline is that child health in the United States has worsened compared to other developed countries. One study found that Americans grow less during infancy and late adolescence than their North European counterparts, which points to a comparative weakness in pre- and post-natal care and the diets of American children. The economist and height researcher Richard Steckel suspects that the “crowding out” of fruits and vegetables by American snack foods is an important contributor to this height stagnation.

Immigration is often cited as a reason for the United States fall in the rankings, but empirical research that accounts for the effects of immigration also show Americans’ height stagnating.•

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“The Funny Thing Is, It Is Already Here”

August 23, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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A common theme in Christoper Mims’ smart WSJ column about the soft launch of sorts of the Internet of Things and Maarten Rikkens’ interesting Research Gate Q&A with The City of Tomorrow author Carlo Ratti is that the future is arriving with a whimper, not a bang. A world enabled by the IoT will be very different even if it doesn’t look any different. You’ll hardly notice it at first blush. You might even forget about it once you do. That’s great for practical matters and less so for issues of privacy. To my mind, that’s always been the promise and peril of such a ubiquitous, essentially invisible network.

From Mims:

Everyone is waiting for the Internet of Things. The funny thing is, it is already here. Contrary to expectation, though, it isn’t just a bunch of devices that have a chip and an internet connection.

The killer app of the Internet of Things isn’t a thing at all—it is services. And they are being delivered by an unlikely cast of characters: Uber Technologies Inc., SolarCity Corp., ADT Corp., andComcast Corp., to name a few. One recent entrant: the Brita unit ofClorox Corp., which just introduced a Wi-Fi-enabled “smart” pitcher that can re-order its own water filters.

Uber and SolarCity are interesting examples. Both rely on making their assets smart and connected. In Uber’s case, that is a smartphone in the hands of a driver for hire. For SolarCity, the company’s original business model was selling electricity directly to homeowners rather than solar panels, which requires knowing how much electricity a home’s solar panels are producing.

Here is another example: On June 23, Comcast said it would acquire a unit of Icontrol Networks Inc., which helps set up smart homes for clients. The company, founded in 2004, prides itself on being “do it for you” instead of “do it yourself,” as are most home-automation systems, says Chief Marketing Officer Letha McLaren.

Understanding that most people want to solve problems without worrying about the underlying technology was crucial, she says.•

From Rikkens:

Question:

Your book mentions that it is increasingly difficult to divorce the physical space from the digital. Does this mean that all aspects of city design should factor in IoT? Or are some aspects of city design divorced from its influence?

Carlo Ratti:

From an architectural point of view, I do not think that the city of tomorrow will look dramatically different from the city of today — much in the same way that the Roman ‘urbs’ is not all that different from the city as we know it today. We will always need horizontal floors for living, vertical walls in order to separate spaces and exterior enclosures to protect us from the outside. The key elements of architecture will still be there, and our models of urban planning will be quite similar to what we know today. What will change dramatically is the way we live in the city, at the convergence of the digital and physical world. IoT will have its biggest impact on the experience of the city, not necessarily its physical form.•

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“Such Is The Stuff Of Tama Janowitz’s Life”

August 23, 2016 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

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You can’t be it for very long, and it’s probably not so much fun when you are.

In the 1980s, when New York still had a literary scene that felt central and significant, Tama Janowitz was the It Girl, chronicling and satirizing members of the striving class as they rose and fell in an unforgiving city ever-more consumed with money. Slaves that wanted to be masters, they were hungry, and by the modern vernacular, they were thirsty.

Janowitz’s own ascension to acclaimed author on the talk-show circuit whose work was adapted for the big screen was as unlikely as any, despite her talent. She was blessed. But no matter how public the success, life intervenes, the party ends. For Janowitz, it extends far beyond no longer being able to sell books that get talked about, which only a handful of serious fiction writers can still manage. In her new memoir, Scream, she details dealing with a parent’s dementia and legal battles with a sibling, among other personal calamities. It’s a long way from Letterman appearances–and a lot more interesting, as struggles usually are. 

Two excerpts follow, one from Janowitz’s best-selling bygone era and another from a review of her memoir.

The opening of Dinah Prince’s 1986 New York cover story on Tama Janowitz, written at a time when the city decided that money could buy it happiness but when literature still had a place in the discussion:

On the day before her party at the Milkbar, Tama Janowitz was in a panic. Lisa E. who had organized the affair to celebrate Janowitz’s new book of short stories,Slaves of New York, called to say she had just bought a new dress. It was long and blue and had big sexy cutouts beneath each breast.

“I was like, ‘She’s got a new dress?!‘ Janowitz recalls. “I really wanted one.”

After Janowitz hung up, the 29-year-old author tried to tell herself she would be perfectly presentable. She could wear her black velvet miniskirt and the sequined top an ex-boyfriend had got her from fashion designer Stephen Sprouse in exchange for a painting. 

“It was cute; I mean, it would have been fine,” she says.

Janowitz’s newest beau, a Texas oilman named Brady Oman, was in town for the party. When he heard about Lisa E.’s dress, he took Janowitz shopping in the East Village and SoHo.

“We ran all over looking for dresses,” Janowitz says. “He took me into IF, and, I mean, they were really pretty. But $1,500 for some froufrou thing?”

Two hours before the party, Janowitz called Paige Powell, an advertising associate at Interview.

“Paige, I have nothing to wear!” she said.

Powell met the writer and her new boyfriend at Texarkana with an armload of dresses. In the ladies’ room, Janowitz modeled a scarlet dress with one bare shoulder and a tutu that billowed from her hip.

She walked out in the dress, and it met with the approval of everyone in the restaurant,’ Powell says.

After finishing her steak, Janowitz headed to the party.

“Oh God, I tried to be nervous and thought, Well, I’ll just pretend it’s a party for somebody else,” she says. She descended the red neon-bathed staircase into the Milkbar and instantly became the center of attention. She was photographed by Newsweek, Details, and NY Talk. Patrick McMullan, a downtown paparazzo, posed her beside comedian Howie Mandel.

“I was like, I didn’t know who the person was,” she says. “Some geek who obviously didn’t know who I was and didn’t care to know who I was. But there he was, getting his picture taken with me. I said to him, ‘Howie, I’m waiting for my left breast to fall out of my dress.’ He was totally uninterested.”

Back in her tiny Horatio Street studio apartment by 2 A.M., Janowitz and Oman folded out the couch and went to bed. A few hours later, the shower curtain collapsed in the bathroom. This set off a series of ear-piercing howls from her Yorkshire terriers, Lulu and Beep-beep. Finally, after everyone got back to sleep, the phone rang at 6 A.M.

“Some guy called looking for his boyfriend,” she says, “thinking I had run off with his boyfriend.”

Such is the stuff of Tama Janowitz’s life.•

The opening of the NYT review of Scream, penned by Ada Calhoun:

“Look for the helpers” in times of tragedy, Mister Rogers advised. “If you look for the helpers, you’ll know that there’s hope.” The calamity-prone author Tama Janowitz employs an opposite strategy, focusing on those she believes are out to get her and nurturing a gimlet-eyed loathing for her fellow man. “Try as I might,” she writes, “for me, other human beings are a blend of pit vipers, chimpanzees and ants, a virtually indistinguishable mass . . . sniffing their fingers and raping.”

Janowitz’s 1986 story collection, Slaves of New York, described a culture of material striving. To make rent, its characters embraced prostitution, both professional and circumstantial. Her 2004 essay collection, Area Code 212, and various of her comic novels have satirized New York social climbers’ ruthless pursuit of wealth and nice apartments. This memoir — which spans her childhood (partly spent in 1968 Israel, where her family was booted from a hotel for not paying), her adventuresome youth (she had a fling with a 63-year-old Lawrence Durrell when she was 19), her career struggles and successes, and her more recent life as caretaker to her dying mother — shows that she comes by her obsession with money honestly.

As a quirky lit-world “it girl” (her charming, wacky Letterman appearances hold up), Janowitz enjoyed a glamorous lifestyle. But she always positioned herself as a misfit outsider. Not for nothing did Janowitz appear in her heyday on the cover of New York magazine beside a slab of meat. Here she punctures myths of the erstwhile art-party scene. Studio 54 was indeed hip, she writes, though you had to be careful on the dance floor, lest you slip, or somebody “suddenly shove a popper up your nose.”
 
Now, exiled in upstate New York, coping with her beloved mother’s decline and embroiled in a series of real estate-based dramas, she enjoys little besides horseback riding and mocking the psychotic organization of her local supermarket.•

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“It Was, Like, My Whole Life So It’s Hard To Break Out, You Know…”

August 22, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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The more we accept a value system–and we all adhere to one or another to some extent–the harder it is to extract ourselves from it. Because what are we if not the things we’ve always been told we are? After the foundations crumble beneath our feet and the churches and casinos fall to earth, what’s left? Who are we, then? We’re newborns again, but ones with confusing memories, and there’s nobody to nurture us. Sans street signs and road maps, we begin to move again, cautiously at first, even though we feel hopelessly lost.

The Economist has a really good article about Mormons who gather together for support after losing their religion. It’s not a surprising turn of events for people raised to be part of a particularly close network. As the piece indicates, leaving the faith itself is no easy chore, especially in Utah, so overlapping are religion and culture. The opening:

IF YOU visit a long, brightly-lit cafeteria in South Salt Lake, Utah, on a Sunday morning, you can hear a low babble of conversations, over steaming mugs, eggs and pastry, between people who have only just met but seem keen to share their experiences. In a typical conversation (reported with permission), a 45-year-old woman called Sally Benson chatted to Casey Rawlins, a man 11 years her junior, about a difficult move they had both made: leaving the Mormon faith.  She explains that she “made the break” on the first day of 2013: “It was, like, my whole life so it’s hard to break out, you know…”  Her new friend is sympathetic; he explains that he made a similar decision a few years earlier, even though most of his friends and family were Mormon. “You have to change your whole social group,” he recalls.

These chats are not the result of random encounters. The cafeteria is a meeting place for “Postmormons and Friends”, one of several groups with the stated aim of guiding people through the difficulties, whether practical, social or psychological, of ceasing to practise the Mormon religion. Those strains can be especially acute in Utah where the majority of people belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS).•

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“[It] Looks Increasingly Like A Reality Distortion Field”

August 22, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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For all his hubris, Elon Musk certainly has a noble vision for a better and cleaner world, one in which a species in peril wisely pivots before we’re all buried beneath a global Easter Island. Of course, knowing what should be isn’t the same as making it so. In trying to turn humanity away from using fossil fuels to power its shelter, transportation and commerce, Musk is trying to do on his own what would seem the heaviest lifting even for the biggest states in the world. Colonizing Mars, another of his goals, might be easier.

In an MIT Technology Review piece, Richard Martin suggests Musk may be like Tesla–the man, not the car company–dreaming too big in trying to electrify the world. Other pundits have weighed in on the other end of the spectrum and no one can truly say what the outcome will be, but Musk’s hyper-ambitious goal has always been a long shot, hasn’t it? The most positive scenario that’s also realistic might be that Musk exhorts us to turn to solar and electric, even if his own efforts fail.

From Martin:

Musk’s grand vision for an integrated solar-plus-electric-vehicle behemoth, meanwhile, looks increasingly like a reality distortion field. The opening of the massive solar-panel factory the company is building in Buffalo, New York, has already been pushed back to mid-2017. Some analysts have estimated that the factory is likely to lose as much as $150 million a year once it reaches full production.

What’s more, there is little indication that huge numbers of people are clamoring for the ability to equip their homes with SolarCity panels, a Tesla Powerwall battery, and a charging system for their Teslas. In short, SolarCity’s latest moves could be a signal that merging two companies with combined 2015 losses of $1.6 billion might not be such a great idea after all.
 
SolarCity and other rooftop solar providers rolled to early success on a river of easy money, as banks, emboldened by generous federal subsidies, showed their willingness to underwrite customer-friendly lease deals. The extension of the investment tax creditlate last year heralded a new phase of strong growth for solar power, but companies like SolarCity and SunEdison, which filed for bankruptcy in April, have had a hard time benefiting from it as their market continues to change underneath them. Mostly ignored in yesterday’s layoff news was a separate filing in which the company said it will offer up to $124 million in “solar bonds”—at terms much less favorable to the company than previous such offerings.

SolarCity’s restructuring may well be looked back on as the first wobble that presaged the collapse of Musk’s would-be electric empire.•

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“As Always, Power Is Needed In Order To Hold The Powerful To Account”

August 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

TORONTO, ON - JUNE 21: Toronto Mayor Rob Ford held a press conference at City Hall Friday afternoon in response to possible provincial funding cuts to the city. (Lucas Oleniuk/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

It was better to have Gawker than not have it.

The flagship site of Nick Denton’s former media empire often operated under a fog of institutional delusion the last few years, outing a Condé Nast media exec who wasn’t bothering anyone, and treating a Hulk Hogan sex tape as if its exposure was vital to the survival of the country. These were true believers who began believing the wrong things. Even at its recent Irish wake of a farewell party, one of the top editors actually invoked the name of Capt. Humayun Khan when speaking of sacrifices made by the blog’s young staffers. Seeming to realize the wrong-mindedness of the notion mid-paragraph, he pivoted, saying: “Not that the sacrifices here come close to losing a loved one, but it is a sacrifice to be a 23-year-old kid and to find your name on a complaint from Hulk Hogan.” Oy gevalt.

That being said, if you go through site’s fourteen year’s worth of posts one by one and delete the many frivolous entries, the majority were on the right side of history and politics, targeting abuses of power. The platform also served as an amazing training ground for young writers and editors who gradually fanned across the media landscape, many of them wonderfully talented. In the big picture, Gawker was always better than no Gawker.

In any picture, Peter Thiel does not emerge from this episode looking good. You don’t get to claim the moral high ground when you’re an advocate for–a delegate of!–a bigoted buffoon like Donald Trump, who’s mocked the disabled and POWs, slandered Mexicans and threatened to ban Muslims. Rationalizing that you’re doing so because “we need to solve real problems instead of fighting fake culture wars” is just so much nonsense, even if Thiel is too buried under his horseshit theories to realize it. Trump is himself trying to rise to power by virtue of fighting a fake culture war in which he’s demonized and disqualified anyone who’s not white, a process the GOP nominee began in earnest five years ago with his Birther bullshit. Was there ever a faker culture war than that? 

By bankrolling Hogan’s lawsuit, Thiel scored the most dubious of victories, shuttering one company and sending a chill wind blowing across an already embattled independent media landscape. He may have prevented some from making unkind or unnecessary remarks, but he also provided comfort to those abusing power, safe in the knowledge that there will be fewer voices willing to question them. 

From Jane B. Singer at The Conversation:

The obvious implication for entrepreneurial news organisations is that they must do their utmost to adhere to both ethical responsibilities and legal requirements – not just because it’s the right thing to do but also because their own future depends on it. That is emphatically not to say they should be timid nor that they should pull their punches. It is to say that they should be exceptionally careful to get the story right – and to get it in the right way.

But there is a clear implication for “legacy” news outlets, as well. Despite the proliferation of competition right across the media spectrum, they remain the ones best able to withstand the pressures of those who would prefer they curtail their reporting or, better still, go away altogether. As always, power is needed in order to hold the powerful to account – and to ensure that such accounting reaches public attention.

Staff cutbacks and financial pressures, along with other factors, have meant a well-documented decline in in-depth journalism by legacy outlets in recent years. Some of that gap is indeed being filled by passionate journalists at digitally savvy start-ups, and their work benefits us all.

But as the demise of Gawker reminds us, few if any start-ups – even those that are profitable, with a well-established reputation and following – rest on reliably solid economic ground. In an age of welcome journalistic flowering, the expertise, influence and still relatively rich resources of the mainstream media remain vital social assets that must not be squandered.•

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“Travel Beyond The Solar System Is An Enterprise For Post-Humans”

August 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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The Scientific American piece “20 Big Questions about the Future of Humanity” is loads of fun, setting the huge issues (consciousness, space colonization, etc.) before top-shelf scientists. The only disappointment is University of New Mexico professor Carlton Caves stating that human extinction via machine intelligence “can be avoided by unplugging them.” One can only hope he was being flippant, though it’s not a useful response regardless. Three entries:

1. Does humanity have a future beyond Earth?
“I think it’s a dangerous delusion to envisage mass emigration from Earth. There’s nowhere else in the solar system that’s as comfortable as even the top of Everest or the South Pole. We must address the world’s problems here. Nevertheless, I’d guess that by the next century, there will be groups of privately funded adventurers living on Mars and thereafter perhaps elsewhere in the solar system. We should surely wish these pioneer settlers good luck in using all the cyborg techniques and biotech to adapt to alien environments. Within a few centuries they will have become a new species: the post-human era will have begun. Travel beyond the solar system is an enterprise for post-humans — organic or inorganic.”
—Martin Rees, British cosmologist and astrophysicist

3. Will we ever understand the nature of consciousness?
“Some philosophers, mystics and other confabulatores nocturne pontificate about the impossibility of ever understanding the true nature of consciousness, of subjectivity. Yet there is little rationale for buying into such defeatist talk and every reason to look forward to the day, not that far off, when science will come to a naturalized, quantitative and predictive understanding of consciousness and its place in the universe.”
—Christof Koch, president and CSO at the Allen Institute for Brain Science; member of the Scientific American Board of Advisers

10. Can we avoid a “sixth extinction”?
“It can be slowed, then halted, if we take quick action. The greatest cause of species extinction is loss of habitat. That is why I’ve stressed an assembled global reserve occupying half the land and half the sea, as necessary, and in my book ‘Half-Earth,’ I show how it can be done. With this initiative (and the development of a far better species-level ecosystem science than the one we have now), it will also be necessary to discover and characterize the 10 million or so species estimated to remain; we’ve only found and named two million to date. Overall, an extension of environmental science to include the living world should be, and I believe will be, a major initiative of science during the remainder of this century.”
—Edward O. Wilson, University Research Professor emeritus at Harvard University•

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“Does The Internet Dream Of Itself?”

August 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Staring into the maw of an active volcano in Guadeloupe is inherently more dramatic than Googling or Tweeting, but it’s the latter that ultimately may have a larger-than-Krakatoa effect on the world. Werner Herzog, who was brave and foolish enough to drag a small camera crew to the gurgling La Soufrière in 1976, has now turned his attention to another unpredictable and potentially explosive source, though this time a human-made one, the Digital Revolution.

In a New York Times review, A.O. Scott trains his immaculate writing on the director’s latest, the impressionistic Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World. The piece is far from a pan, though the critic asserts the auteur’s attempts to introduce poetry and wonder into the topic do not always survive the facts of our algorithmic era.

An excerpt:

The devices in our hands and on our desks, and the invisible, ubiquitous networks that link them, are often seen to be ushering us toward utopia or hastening the arrival of the apocalypse. Mr. Herzog, an unseen interviewer with an unmistakable voice, seems receptive to both views. He listens to scientists and entrepreneurs celebrate the expansion of knowledge and learning that the digital revolution has brought forth, and to others who lament the erosion of privacy and critical-thinking skills. The physicist Lucianne Walkowicz explains how a solar flare could bring the whole network — and with it our super-technologized way of life — crashing down in a matter of days. On the other hand, we might build self-driving cars, perfect artificial intelligence applications that permanently erase the boundary between people and machines or even create colonies on Mars.

At times, Mr. Herzog’s imagination leaps beyond even the more startling speculations of his subjects. He is not so much credulous as excitable, given to interrupting the prose of researchers and analysts with flights of poetry. He tries to press some of them to predict the future, something scientists are generally reluctant to do. And he poses a question that charms and stumps many of them: “Does the internet dream of itself?”

As its title suggests, “Lo and Behold” is to some extent Mr. Herzog’s dream of the internet. Divided into 10 brief chapters, it is impressionistic rather than comprehensive. Many of the ideas are familiar, and some important aspects of life in the digital era are examined superficially or not at all. Though Edward Snowden’s name is dropped, there is not much attention to surveillance or spying, and the uses and abuses of connectivity as a tool of corporate and state power are barely explored.

The interviews seem to have been conducted over a few years, which gives a curiously dated feeling to parts of the film. Sebastian Thrun, a founder of the online learning company Udacity, enthuses about the transformative potential of his courses, but the widely reported failure of those courses to realize their supposed potential does not come up. Skepticism is really not Mr. Herzog’s thing.•

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“The Historic Departure Here Is In Arguing Legitimacy Over Policies”

August 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

After an exhaustive search, Michael Wolff finally located two Americans more unlikable than him–Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton–and he’s not letting go.

Wolff recently wrote a really good Hollywood Reporter profile of Trump, who desperately needs a food taster, but you’ll pry that pint of Häagen-Dazs from his cold, dead hands. In the same publication, he now writes of the final leg of a contest between two figures many voters see as a racist comb over versus a lying pantsuit, though anyone finding parity in the misdeeds of Trump, a virulently bigoted Berlusconi who aims to be a Mussolini, and Clinton, a politically expedient person but a solid Washington practitioner who’ll likely keep the trains running on time, is forcing a false equivalency.

It’s an entertaining piece as Wolff’s always are, though as is often the case with the writer, everyone in the article but him is depicted as an unknowing dolt. Additionally, Wolff’s portrayal of Trump voters as struggling, uneducated whites buys into a narrative that’s way overstated. His line that makes most sense is that it’s odd Hillary seems so driven to be likable in an election where that quality seems to not be an asset. Wolff ultimately gives Trump a greater chance at victory than any other major pundit or pollster.

An excerpt:

The Democrats’ strongest card was to present Trump as an existential threat and to foresee the breakdown of democracy’s fail-safe mechanisms. This also was quite an alarming approach. The guttural “Lock her up!” chants at the RNC seemed extreme enough. But in a way, the Democrats’ position was much more radical. Trump cannot be allowed; Trump is immoral; Trump is — the ultimate disqualifier — insane. In other words, if Duck Dynasty-type voters carry the day in November, that would not be an example of democracy but a failure of it.

The historic departure here is in arguing legitimacy over policies. In this, the Democrats appear to have two fears. The first is that traditional political techniques don’t work anymore and that Trump has significantly more mastery over the new techniques. The Democrats have spent $68 million on advertising so far. Trump: $6 million. How do you fight someone who doesn’t have to spend? The second is that the party’s own policies, pushed left by Bernie Sanders and focused on usually undependable young voters, are up against a backlash that it doesn’t know how to defuse and is opposed to accommodating — a protest vote by culturally adrift, undereducated white voters without precise political moorings, an identity group the Democrats hardly knew had an identity (this already may be a cliched portrait of the Trump voter, a broad approximation of people whom the media doesn’t know). As President Obama acknowledged, seeming to scratch his head, it’s not right nor left anymore, but something much more fundamental and frightening — but beyond that, he seemed as clueless as anyone.

The Democrats’ approach, in a convention whose television ratings outpaced the Republicans until the final day (Trump himself remains a bigger draw than Hillary) was to argue that there is an onrushing Trump apocalypse, but not to address any of the issues causing people to vote for the apocalypse. “Some people are angry, I get that,” said former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, but, more clearly, she was wholly bewildered, and not getting at all — along with the entire lineup of Democratic speakers — whatever it is that’s bothering Trump voters. In fact, if anything, the Democrats doubled down on many of the issues and cultural currents that seem most threatening to the Trump side, rather believing that Trump’s illegitimacy gave them the freedom to go increasingly left.

One drawback of successful propaganda is that instead of fooling everybody else, you only fool yourself.•

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“He Predicts That Crisis Will Hit By The Middle Of This Century”

August 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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If self-appointed Libertarian overlord Grover Norquist, a Harvard graduate with a 13-year-old’s understanding of government and economics, ever had his policy preferences enacted fully, it would lead to worse lifestyles and shorter lifespans for the majority of Americans. He’s so eager to Brownback the whole country he’s convinced himself, despite being married to a Muslim woman, there’s conservative bona fides in Trump’s Mussolini-esque stylings and suspicious math.

In 2014, Norquist made his way to the government-less wonderland known as Burning Man, free finally from those bullying U.S. regulations, the absence of which allows Chinese business titans to breathe more freely, if not literally. Norquist’s belief that the short-term settlement in the Nevada desert is representative of what the nation could be every day is no less silly than considering Spring Break a template for successful marriage. He was quote as saying: “Burning Man is a refutation of the argument that the state has a place in nature.” Holy fuck, who passed him the peyote? Norquist wrote about his experience in the Guardian. Maileresque reportage, it was not. An excerpt:

You hear that Burning Man is full of less-than-fully-clad folks and off-label pharmaceuticals. But that’s like saying Bohemian Grove is about peeing on trees or that Chicago is Al Capone territory. Burning Man is cleaner and greener than a rally for solar power. It has more camaraderie and sense of community than a church social. And for a week in the desert, I witnessed more individual expression, alternative lifestyles and imaginative fashion than …. anywhere.

The demand for self-reliance at Burning Man toughens everyone up. There are few fools, and no malingerers. People give of themselves – small gifts like lip balm or tiny flashlights. I brought Cuban cigars. Edgy, but not as exciting as some “gifts” that would have interested the federal authorities.

I’m hoping to bring the kids next year.

On my last day of my first Burning Man, at the Reno airport, a shoeless man (he had lost his shoes in the desert) was accosted by another dust-covered Burner carrying sneakers: “Take these,” he said. “They are my Burning Man shoes.” The shoeless man accepted the gift with dignity.•

In an excellent Financial Times piece, Tim Bradshaw broke bread in San Francisco with Larry Harvey, co-founder of Burning Man and its current “Chief Philosophic Officer,” who speaks fondly of rent control and the Bernie-led leftward shift of the Democratic Party. Grover Norquist would not approve, even if Harvey is a contradictory character, insisting he has a “conservative sensibility” and lamenting the way many involved in social justice fixate on self esteem. An excerpt:

I ask if he feels, after 30 years, that Burning Man’s ideals are starting to be felt beyond the desert. “I’d like to mischievously quote Milton Friedman,” he says, invoking the rightwing economist. “He said change only happens in a crisis, and then that actions that are undertaken depend on the ideas that are just lying around.” With the “discontents of globalisation” set to continue, he predicts that crisis will hit by the middle of this century. “I think there really is a chance for sudden change.” However, I struggle to pin him down on exactly which Burners’ ideas he hopes will be “lying around” when it does.

Most Burners are fond of recalling tall tales of fake-fur-clad excess, elaborately customised “art cars” and monster sound systems. This year’s art installations include a 50-ft “space whale”, the head and hands of a giant man appearing to rise from the sand, and part of a converted Boeing 747 that its new owners say is now a “mover of dreams”. Harvey likes to survey the art — and the rest of his creation — from a high platform close to the centre of the event at First Camp, the founders’ HQ. But instead of recounting hedonistic tales, he is much more eager to talk about organisational details, such as Black Rock City’s circular layout, “sort of like a neolithic temple”.

Indeed, Harvey insists he has a “conservative sensibility” and is “not a big fan of revolution”. “Do I sound like a hippie? I’m not!” And he bristles at being called anti-capitalist, although he hung out with the hippies on Haight Street in 1968. “I was there in the spring, autumn and winter of love, but I missed the summer,” he says, due to being drafted into the US army. “It was apparent to me that it was all based on what Tom Wolfe called ‘cheques from home’. The other source that shored it up was selling dope. I thought, that isn’t sustainable.”•

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“So Far, Parker Has Handled The Crisis Shrewdly”

August 19, 2016 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

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It’s understood The Hollywood Reporter is an industry trade journal that addresses above all else the business of movies, but Stephen Galloway’s article on the Nate Parker ugliness from the aspect of how the director and Fox Searchlight can best do damage control is bizarre and offensive. For a journalist to write from inside an imaginary public relations war room about the optimum tactics to use to ensure a movie “can survive a rape-trial scandal” is just jaw-dropping, especially since the woman who charged Parker and his Birth of a Nation co-writer Jean Celestin didn’t survive, having committed suicide in 2012. It’s the strangest set of priorities.

An excerpt:

First, it’s crucial for the filmmaker to separate his life from the message of his film, about the horrific treatment of slaves — and by extension all African-Americans — in our society. That means Searchlight likely will have to abandon its plans to tie the movie’s marketing to him. The messenger may be flawed; the message isn’t. Now the message must be central to the movie’s campaign.

Second, Parker must demonstrate that he is a changed man. Penitence works far better than protests of innocence. The Birth of a Nation must be presented as his redemption story, a mea culpa rather than a personal triumph.

Third, Parker must deploy the men and women who know him and have worked with him to testify to his decency. That means not only his wife but also such luminaries as Denzel Washington, who gave him a break on The Great Debaters, and Oprah Winfrey, herself the victim of sexual abuse.

So far, Parker has handled the crisis shrewdly.•

In the New York Times, Roxane Gay has a deep and nuanced op-ed explaining why she can’t separate the art from the behavior of the artist, which would consign Pablo Picasso and Anne Sexton and Errol Flynn, among many others, to mothballs, but which is a very understandable reaction. An excerpt:

Mr. Parker is being forced to publicly reckon with his past, and he is doing a lousy job. I want to have empathy for him, but everything he says and does troubles me. You see, what happened in 1999 was a “painful moment” in his life. Most of what he has to say about that “painful moment” involves how he felt, how he was affected. The solipsism is staggering.

In an interview with Deadline.com, the entertainment news site, Mr. Parker said: “I’ve got five daughters and a lovely wife. My mom lives here with me; I brought her here. I’ve got four younger sisters.” He offers up the women in his life as incontrovertible evidence of goodness or, perhaps, redemption. But no matter how much he wishes it to be so, his women cannot erase his past. He went so far as to bring his 6-year-old daughter to an interview where he knew he would be questioned about the circumstances surrounding the rape trial — a strange, manipulative and even cynical choice. To this day, he believes he did nothing wrong, though he also says he has “grown” and is a “changed” man.•

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“They Started Hanging Around A Lot Where They Weren’t Wanted…I Didn’t Dig That Too Much”

August 19, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Sports | Permalink

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With the publication of Jeffrey Toobin’s Patty Hearst book, American Heiress, here’s a 1975 Jesus H. Christ! episode of Geraldo Rivera’s long-ago talk show, Good Night America, which focused on the FBI’s aggressive attempts to capture the at-large Symbionese Liberation Army hostage-cum-soldier, the newspaper scion getting at that point more ink than anyone in the country.

What’s most interesting is that hippie-ish basketball player Bill Walton, then with the Portland Trail Blazers, was hassled by the Feds who believed he knew where “Tania” was hiding. The host taped an interview in San Francisco with the NBA star and speaks in studio to sportswriters Jack and Micki Scott and attorney William Kunstler. Watch here.•

“The Goal: To Replace Uber’s More Than 1 Million Human Drivers With Robot Drivers—As Quickly As Possible”

August 18, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Either there’s a collective delusion among those racing to successfully complete driverless capability (not impossible), or we’re going to have autonomous vehicles on roads and streets in the next decade.

If that time frame proves correct, these self-directing autos will hastily make redundant taxi, rideshare, bus, truck and delivery drivers and wreak havoc on the already struggling middle class. That doesn’t mean progress should be unduly restrained, but it does mean we’re going to have to develop sound policy answers. 

Not everyone is going to be able to transition into coding or receive a Machine Learning Engineer nanodegree from Udacity. That’s just not realistic. Because of Washington gridlock, we’ve bypassed a golden opportunity to rebuild our infrastructure at near zero interest over the last eight years. It may soon be imperative to push forward not only to save fraying bridges but also faltering Labor.

Excerpts follow from: Maya Kosoff’s Vanity Fair “Hive” piece about Ford’s ambitious plans for wheel-less cars by 2021, and 2) Max Chafkin’s Bloomberg Businessweek article on Uber’s driverless fleet launching this year in Pittsburgh.

From Kosoff:

The world of autonomous vehicles is riddled with hypotheticals. It’s not immediately clear when Uber and Lyft will have self-driving cars (or what will happen to their drivers when they do), but both companies have made it clear that at some point, they see autonomous ride-hailing fleets as the future of their business. The same can be said about Tesla, Google’s self-driving cars, Apple’s top-secret car project, and automakers like General Motors, which haspartnered with Lyft. All these companies must first face novel regulatory hurdles, and few have given the public a hard deadline for when they can expect to see self-driving cars on the road.

Ford, however, is breaking from the pack and marking a date on its calendar: 2021, the carmakerannouncedTuesday. Ford’s self-driving cars won’t have gas or brake pedals or a steering wheel, the company says. And the car is being made specifically for ride-hailing services—it seems Ford is trying to out-Uber Uber. (Uber, for its part,unveiled a self-driving Ford Fusionearlier this year, andreportedlyapproached a number of automakers about partnerships, before taking astrategic investmentfrom Toyota.)

Five years isn’t much time to get a fully-functioning, fully-autonomous vehicle to market, but Ford is moving quickly.•

From Chafkin:

Near the end of 2014, Uber co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick flew to Pittsburgh on a mission: to hire dozens of the world’s experts in autonomous vehicles. The city is home to Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics department, which has produced many of the biggest names in the newly hot field. Sebastian Thrun, the creator of Google’s self-driving car project, spent seven years researching autonomous robots at CMU, and the project’s former director, Chris Urmson, was a CMU grad student.

“Travis had an idea that he wanted to do self-driving,” says John Bares, who had run CMU’s National Robotics Engineering Center for 13 years before founding Carnegie Robotics, a Pittsburgh-based company that makes components for self-driving industrial robots used in mining, farming, and the military. “I turned him down three times. But the case was pretty compelling.” Bares joined Uber in January 2015 and by early 2016 had recruited hundreds of engineers, robotics experts, and even a few car mechanics to join the venture. The goal: to replace Uber’s more than 1 million human drivers with robot drivers—as quickly as possible.

The plan seemed audacious, even reckless. And according to most analysts, true self-driving cars are years or decades away. Kalanick begs to differ. “We are going commercial,” he says in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. “This can’t just be about science.”

Starting later this month, Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved.•

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“You Don’t Know What’s Around That Corner”

August 18, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

This undated image provided by Amazon.com shows the so-called Prime Air unmanned aircraft project that Amazon is working on in its research and development labs. Amazon says it will take years to advance the technology and for the Federal Aviation Administration to create the necessary rules and regulations, but CEO Jeff Bezos said Sunday Dec. 1, 2013, there's no reason Drones can't help get goods to customers in 30 minutes or less. (AP Photo/Amazon)

If young Americans fortunate to be living in a cool city and on a path to six-figure salaries are sick with worry, how should truck drivers and bellhops be feeling?

Kirk Johnson of the New York Times penned a piece about millennial coders-in-training in Seattle concerned about the swerves awaiting them tomorrow even though thus far they’re the lucky ones. You could say they lack a sense of history about the level of challenges Americans have had in the past–and you’d be right–but they do have a point. If driverless cars and elevator-riding robots are coming for delivery people and hotel employees, respectively, then isn’t it possible that soon coding itself will be an undesired skill? And that’s just one anxiety, before figuring in our poisonous political season, rampant gun violence, geopolitical headaches, etc. Despite all that, millennials in Syria would still love to trade places with them.

The opening:

SEATTLE — Part of Jillian Boshart’s life plays out in tidy, ordered lines of JavaScript computer code, and part in a flamboyant whirl of corsets and crinoline. She’s a tech student by day, an enthusiastic burlesque artist and producer by night. “Code-mode” and “show-mode,” she calls those different guises.

“My mother got stage fright for me,” she said on a recent night while talking about her childhood performances and dreams. She looked like a 1940s starlet in a tight, black sequined dress, a red rose pinned into her red hair. “I like to be prepared,” she said. “I like to be in control.”

At age 31, she seems to be. This year she won a coveted spot at a nonprofit tech school for women here, whose recent graduates have found jobs with starting salaries averaging more than $90,000. Seattle, where she came after college in Utah to study musical theater, is booming with culture and youthful energy.

But again and again, life has taught Ms. Boshart, and others in her generation, that control can be elusive. In the dot-com crash of the early 2000s, her family lost the college savings they had been putting aside for her. Her father, a nurse, was laid off after 35 years on the job. Her sister and brother-in-law lost their house in the throes of the Great Recession. And very little in the world around Ms. Boshart has led her to feel a sense of comfort and ease: not the soaring costs of living in Seattle, not the whirlwind roar of reinvention in the tech world, certainly not the barbed clamor of national politics. Even for someone who seems to have drawn one of her generation’s winning hands, it feels like a daunting time to be coming of age in America.

“I don’t just expect things to unfold, or think, ‘Well, now I’ve got it made,’ because there’s always a turn just ahead of you and you don’t know what’s around that corner,” she said.•

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“The Blogosphere Will Have Developed Into A Powerful Economic Engine That Has All But Driven Newspapers Into Oblivion”

August 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Once upon a time, traditional newspaper companies feared the blogosphere would put them out of business. In retrospect, that was a hopeful outcome.

The concern that a type of written content would be undone by another lesser one didn’t came to pass, most blogs never coming close to profitable, It was the new platform itself that broke the promise the print business had always rested upon. Once the advertising process was quantified, the clicks counted, the dollars that disappeared could not be replaced online money. The dream could no longer be sold. The whole system was cratered by the technological shift, not a surfeit of snark. Still, some today think the New York Times might be spared the worst if it adapts Jon Stewart’s witty tone. That’s where we stand now.

From “Time for the Last Post,” Trevor Butterworth’s 2006 Financial Times piece about the threat of the weblog:

As syndicated radio host and law professor Hugh Hewitt wrote in the conservative Weekly Standard last August, “It is hard to overstate the speed with which the information reformation is advancing – or to overestimate its impact on politics and culture. The mainstream media is a hollowed-out shell of its former self when it comes to influence, and when advertisers figure out who is reading the blogs, the old media is going to see their advertising base drain away, and not slowly.”

We are witnessing “the dawn of a blogosphere dominant media”, announced Michael S. Malone, who has been described as “the Boswell of Silicon Valley”. “Five years from now, the blogosphere will have developed into a powerful economic engine that has all but driven newspapers into oblivion, has morphed (thanks to cell phone cameras) into a video medium that challenges television news and has created a whole new group of major media companies and media superstars. Billions of dollars will be made by those prescient enough to either get on board or invest in these companies.”

Even the ne plus ultra of American public intellectuals, Richard Posner, senior lecturer in law at the University of Chicago, former chief judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, declared blogging to be “the latest and perhaps gravest challenge to the journalistic establishment” (although it is worth noting that Judge Posner decided to publish his meditation in The New York Times Book Review rather than on his own blog).

But as with any revolution, we must ask whether we are being sold a naked emperor. Is blogging really an information revolution? Is it about to drive the mainstream news media into oblivion? Or is it just another crock of virtual gold – a meretricious equivalent of all those noisy internet start-ups that were going to build a brave “new economy” a few years ago?

Shouldn’t we just be a tiny bit sceptical of another information revolution following on so fast from the last one – especially as this time round no one is even pretending to be getting rich?•

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“These U.S. Presidential Elections Were Fun Once”

August 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, both George Steinbrenner and George Wallace, has rebooted his jackbooting campaign yet again, this time recruiting vituperative Breitbart News overlord Steve Bannon, perhaps the only white American who feels as inexplicably cheated as the candidate. It will not go well.

This backstage machinations were occurring yesterday even as Trump, the most bigoted and hateful and oppressive major-party American Presidential nominee perhaps ever, was publishing a Facebook post announcing “we will reject bigotry and hatred and oppression in all its forms.” It was no doubt maddening to the Archie Bunker-ish buffoon that he was being urged to reach out beyond his usual whites-only “yes” network. Those moderating episodes, however erratic they may have been, are now likely over.

In the Spiegel commentary “An International Disaster,” Marc Pitzke’s says the fun of the primary season is long over, though I haven’t thought there was anything fun about Trump since he began his racist Birther publicity tour in 2011. The opening:

These US presidential elections were fun once. Particularly on the Republican side: At one point during the primaries, there were 17 candidates running around, including obscure current and former governors, a retired brain surgeon with sleepy eyes, the inevitable Rick Santorum — and Donald Trump, who once impersonated a successful businessman on a reality show.

Now he’s impersonating a presidential candidate. That, too, used to be fun. He played a wretched character who humiliated anyone who stood in his way: immigrants, women, Muslims, the disabled, veterans and his Republican rivals, who keeled over one by one — “Little Marco,” “Low-Energy Jeb,” “Lyin’ Ted.”

It was fantastic reality TV, generating fantastic ratings, fantastic headlines, fantastic page views. Haha, that Trump! Look what he’s said this time! All that fun made us forget that we were talking about the world’s most powerful office.

But now the fun is over. Trump has long since shown his true side. And behold, this wretched character wasn’t an act after all. It wasn’t a mask he wore for the primaries. That wretched character was Trump. It is Trump. There is no good Dr. Jekyll behind the evil Mr. Hyde. Donald Trump is Hyde, the monster minus Jekyll, devoid of compassion, contrition, self-control.

And that’s not funny anymore.•

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“Technology Will Soon Impact Our Own Biology”

August 17, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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If our species survives in the long run, some things are probably inevitable: 3D-printed organs, computer chips treating brain diseases, drug delivery via nanoparticles. These will certainly be positive developments. The trickier aspect arrives when we shift from treating what are clearly biological flaws to opting for augmentation, that moment when humanness itself is viewed as a “failing.”

Paul Armstrong of Forbes addresses these issues in a Q&A with futurist Gerd Leonhard, author of the soon-to-be published Technology vs. Humanity: The Coming Clash Between Man and Machine. It’s a good exchange, with Leonhard voicing concern about tools moving from inside our chest pockets to inside our chests. He argues humans are ill-prepared for a future where machines achieve superintelligence.

The opening:

Paul Armstrong:

You say humanity will change more in the next 20 years than it has in the last 300. Why do you think this is true when most technological advances seem to have had little to do with humans themselves and rather the effect they have or problems they have created for themselves?

Gerd Leonhard:

Technology is always created by humans and in turn re-defining what we can and will do. Every single technological change is now impacting humanity in a much deeper way than ever before because technology will soon impact our own biology, primarily via the rise of genome editing and artificial intelligence. Technology is no longer just a tool we use to achieve something – we are actually (as McLuhan predicted) becoming tools (ie. technology) ourselves. Some of my futurist colleagues call this transhumanism – something I personally think we should examine with great caution. Yet, exponential technological development in sectors such as computing and deep learning, nano-science, material sciences, energy (batteries!) etc means that beyond a doubt we are quickly heading towards that point where computers / robots / AI will have the same processing power as the human brain (10 quadrillion CPS – connections per second), the so-called singularity, in probably less than 10 years. When this happens we will need to decide of we want to ‘merge’ with the machines or not, and the stance I am taking in this book is clear on that discussion: we should embrace technology but not become it, because technology is not what we seek, it’s how we seek!•

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“There’s Just One Catch”

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

I’ve mentioned before that one of the unspoken downsides to the unhinged stylings of walking dunce cap Donald Trump is that we’ve been unable to have a serious, adult conversation about the challenges facing us, economic and otherwise, during this election season.

Case in point: The reshoring of manufacturing in America will not allow us to recapture a giant number of high-paying jobs, not with automation reaching the first stages of maturity. Some corporations and analysts speak excitedly of a collaboration between humans and machines, the two working hand in robotic hand, but that is at best for the near term, with just a few positions for us now and even fewer down the line. If factories are no longer going to provide such solid middle-class positions, what is? 

It would be great to ask this question of Hillary Clinton when she speaks about bringing outsourced work home, but it’s tough to focus on such issues since she’s running against a madman.

From Don Lee at the Los Angeles Times:

Here’s a little reality check on the current presidential campaign and promises by both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to bring back jobs from overseas.

It’s about a private Michigan company called Ranir, which makes, among other things, the business end of electric toothbrushes. After spending two years and millions of dollars to reengineer its toothbrush heads, Ranir brought back fully one-fifth of that production from China to its facility in Grand Rapids.

It’s precisely the kind of thing that both Clinton and Trump, with varying degrees of emphasis and policy prescriptions, have pledged to accelerate as a way to cure America’s blue-collar woes. Using tougher trade policies with China and others to restore the nation’s manufacturing sector will bring home jobs, the theory goes.

Ranir’s experience appears to back up such assumptions at first blush. After all, now it is American workers who are busy around the clock churning out 13,000 toothbrush heads a day for Wal-Mart, Walgreens and other retailers.

There’s just one catch: Thanks to the new robotic manufacturing process that Ranir adopted, it takes only four workers at the American plant to do the same job that almost certainly required dozens more in China.•

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“He’s 250 Years Old But Looks And Feels 30”

August 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Soon or later (and I’d bet the latter), life will be radically extended, which will be wonderful, though great quantity doesn’t necessarily guarantee equal quality. Even beyond the very practical questions of initially costly miracle medical treatments becoming available during a time of yawning wealth inequality, philosophical queries abound: Would infinite chances reduce the meaning of all of them? If procrastination knew no costs, would a need to achieve diminish? When there’s no more midlife crisis, will the whole thing seem like a crisis?

The end of aging will surely be complicated ethically, economically and culturally, but considering the enormous positives such an advance would deliver, it’s a cross we can bear.

On this topic, Vice presents the opening of Eve Herold’s new book, Beyond Human, which wonders about the myriad ramifications of Transhumanism and amortality. There’s a graceful introduction to the piece written by Kate Lowenstein, an excellent person I worked with some years ago. 

Herold’s first two paragraphs:

Meet Victor, the future of humanity. He’s 250 years old but looks and feels 30. Having suffered from heart disease in his 50s and 60s, he now has an artificial heart that gives him the strength and vigor to run marathons. His type 2 diabetes was cured a century ago by the implantation of an artificial pancreas. He lost an arm in an accident, but no one would know that he has an artificial one that obeys his every thought and is far stronger than the original. He wears a contact lens that streams information about his body and the environment to his eye and can access the internet anytime he wants through voice commands. If it weren’t for the computer chips that replaced the worn-out cells of his retina, he would have become blind countless years ago. Victor isn’t just healthy and fit; he’s much smarter than his forebears now that his brain has been enhanced through neural implants that expanded his memory, allow him to download knowledge, and even help him make decisions.

While 250 might seem like a ripe old age, Victor has little worry about dying because billions of tiny nanorobots patrol his entire body, repairing cells damaged by disease or aging, fixing DNA mistakes before they can cause any harm, and destroying cancer cells wherever they emerge. With all the advanced medical technologies Victor has been able to take advantage of, his life has not been a bed of roses. Many of his loved ones either didn’t have access to or opted out of the life-extending technologies and have passed away. He has had several careers that successively became obsolete due to advancing technology and several marriages that ended in divorce after he and his partners drifted apart after 40 years or so. His first wife, Elaine, was the love of his life. When they met in college, both were part of a movement that rejected all “artificial” biomedical interventions and fought for the right of individuals to live, age, and die naturally. For several decades, they bonded over their mutual dedication to the cause of “natural” living and tried to raise their two children to have the same values.•

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“The Government Has To Know What People Are Thinking”

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

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Russian revolutionaries and leaders Joseph Stalin (1879 - 1953), Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870 - 1924), and Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin (1875 - 1946), at the Congress of the Russian Communist Party. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Anatole Konstantin escaped from Stalin’s Soviet Union, for the most part.

Having moved to the U.S. in 1949 as a child refugee after the murder of his father by the secret police, Konstantin became an engineer and entrepreneur, living out an America Dream he wasn’t aware existed until emerging from behind the Iron Curtain. 

I say he escaped “for the most part” because an answer he gave in regards to an Edward Snowden question during a new Reddit AMA seems approving of a surveillance state. Of course, that attitude, perplexingly enough, probably doesn’t place him in the minority in his adopted country.

Question:

Why did your father get executed by the secret police?

Anatole Konstantin:

He was executed because he was corresponding with his parents in Romania and any correspondence with a foreign country made one suspected of being a spy. 50 years after his disappearance, a letter from the KGB informed us of his execution and also that he was being “posthumously rehabilitated,” admitting that he was innocent.

Question:

Was your father given a mock trial prior to his execution, to give the appearance of justice having been served? I’m sorry for your loss, it’s inspiring to hear someone who went through so much hardship make something of themselves.

Anatole Konstantin:

The trials were secret and we didn’t know the results until 50 years later when Gorbachev came to power. The KGB made lists of suspects who were tortured into signing prepared confessions and then were sent to the Gulags or to be executed, usually standing on the edge of a ditch and receiving a bullet in the back of the head.

Question:

What cultural difference shocked You the most?

Anatole Konstantin:

It was the availability of books on different philosophies and points of view. When I went to the library I didn’t know which book to read first and I just stood there.

Question:

How did you get enough funds to make your way to America? How was the trip arranged?

Anatole Konstantin:

I didn’t need any funds. The United Nations Refugee Organization took care of all travel arrangements for displaced persons like myself. At that time the United States admitted 200,000 displaced persons from Europe.

Question:

Any thoughts on the Syrian refugee crisis? Specifically how some Americans are worried that ISIS members can pretend to be refugees to sneak into the US. Did you experience any similar anti-communist backlash when you came to America? My parents were refugees from communist Vietnam, so I’m very interested to hear another refugee’s opinion.

Anatole Konstantin:

The Syrian refugees are victims of religious fanatics. The refugees from Communism were victims of political fanatics. While the motivations are different, they both come from fanatics who do not value human life. When I came I did not experience any backlash; I was more anti-Communist than anybody here.

Question:

What are your thoughts about current events involving Russia, Ukraine, and the US? How do you think the conflict should be resolved?

Anatole Konstantin:

From Putin’s point of view, it’s inadmissible that Ukraine should join NATO. The United States became involved because it was a signatory together with Russia and Ukraine to the agreement that Ukraine surrenders the nuclear weapons on its territory in exchange for guaranteeing its borders. The majority of people in Crimea prefer to be part of Russia rather than Ukraine. Therefore, the question is very complex and if one considers history and the different requirements of the parties, I do not see any reasonable solution.

Question:

What is your opinion of this year’s Presidential election?

Anatole Konstantin:

I think that the choice we have is the worst since I came to the United States in 1949.

Question:

How do you view Edward Snowden and the issue of warrantless surveillance by the NSA?

Anatole Konstantin:

In regards to Snowden, I can’t visualize a country functioning if every citizen could decide what is appropriate and what should be published based on their personal beliefs. The American judicial system is based on punishing acts that have already happened. The challenge now is to be able to prevent these acts from happening in the first place. This means that the government has to know what people are thinking. The difference is that suspects here are still entitled to their day in court.

Question:

Is there anything you miss about the old country?

Anatole Konstantin:

Yes, the people in those countries did a lot of singing. Someone would even sing loudly to themselves depending on how they felt.•

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“The Necessity For Change Opens Up The Possibility Of A Fairer System”

August 15, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Automobiles remade the world, in more ways than we could have initially imagined. Nobody could have predicted the environmental fallout of the internal-combustion engine, for instance, but other effects could have been predicted by anyone not wholly myopic.

Now we’re parked at another precipice, with autonomous cars nearly ready to remake society in a similarly profound way. Along with the great advantages that will attend self-driving vehicles, there’ll come numerous challenges. One of them is a financial jolt to the middle class that will make the slow waning of the last four decades seem relatively rosy.

In a smart Backchannel article, Robin Chase explains that since driverless is ultimately going to happen–and sooner or later, it will–we need to be proactive in steering the economic and social ramifications even as we give up the actual wheel. Part of her prescription for a relatively smooth transition is a radical reworking of capitalism, since a largely automated society that’s also a free-market one cannot be managed by shopworn policy.

An excerpt:

A Capitalism Do-Over. Productivity gains once were the harbinger of improved standards of living, and improved quality of life, but automation brings jobless productivity gains. Self driving cars will be the ultimate example of this: AVs will probably be productively employed and generating revenue about 65 percent of the time, compared to our personal car’s 5 percent. No one can deny that enormous productivity gains are being enjoyed. But with so few associated workers, enjoyed by whom?

As an entrepreneur, I appreciate the hours and years of effort that has gone into building these AVs: the new IP, the many years and huge costs without any revenue to show for it. But I also understand that this is a massive market (trillions of dollars worldwide seems plausible), and the marginal cost of running the software for each of those trips will be close to zero. We need to make sure we distribute this new wealth, by closing corporate tax loopholes and taxing wealth and platforms more effectively.

As we lose more jobs, the necessity for change opens up the possibility of a fairer system, one that minimizes income inequality. A Bureau of Labor Statistics study projected an 83 percent probability of job loss by automation for workers earning less than $20 an hour, and a 34 percent probability for jobs between $20–40 an hour. In the new automated world, does it really make sense to be taxing labor at all? It makes much more sense to be taxing the new technical platforms that are generating the profits, and taxing the wealth of the small number of talented and lucky people who founded and financed these new jobless wonders.

In a world where machines do most of the work, it is time for a universal basic income. This will distribute the gains from productivity, and give more people the opportunity to focus on purposeful, passion-driven work, allowing for the next generation of ideas and technologies to emerge faster.

How we deal with the job loss caused by AVs will be a signature model for how we respond to automation throughout the economy. Even more, it may be the flood that sweeps clean a system that no longer serves the people.•

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