Excerpts

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“[It’s] A Loose But Growing Christian Movement That Teaches Followers They Can Become Wealthy And Successful Through Faith”

July 25, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Videos | Permalink

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I don’t blame anyone for being a capitalist in America, not a Carnegie or a Kardashian or any lower-case striver. But there’s always been something squeamish about those who mix aspirationalism with evangelism, and that belief system has never been more pronounced than right now, with the “prosperity gospel” movement having made a special guest appearance at last week’s Republican National Convention in the person of Rev. Mark Burns, who loves Jesus Christ, Donald Trump and Benjamin Franklin, in some order.

From Jack Jenkins at Think Progress:

A NEW KIND OF RELIGIOUS KINGMAKER

Burns is not your rank-and-file right-wing evangelical minister, but a preacher of the so-called “prosperity gospel,” a loose but growing Christian movement that teaches followers they can become wealthy and successful through faith — and by giving money to their church. Although “health and wealth” clerics head up churches that boast memberships in the tens of thousands, they have historically avoided divisive political conversations.

That was, at least, until the rise of Trump. In a twist that has perplexed and angered many leaders of the traditional Religious Right, the mogul has surrounded himselfwith a cadre of jet-setting prosperity gospel preachers throughout his campaign, snubbing the old-time religion of traditional conservative Christians in favor of the glitzy theology of ministers who share his adoration of the Almighty Dollar.

And now, with Burns speaking before the RNC, the prosperity gospel — long dismissed by progressive and conservative Christians alike as flawed or even heretical — is having its political moment.

“This is the culmination of several decades of building political capital within the prosperity gospel movement,” Kate Bowler, an expert on the prosperity gospel and author of Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, told ThinkProgress. “This is a new political moment for the prosperity gospel — it’s a really remarkable moment.”•

“We are electing a person in Donald Trump who believes in the name of Jesus Christ.”

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“Decline Can Be As Self-Sustaining As Success”

July 25, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Capturing greatness is rare enough, recapturing it even more unlikely. 

Someday Silicon Valley will also founder, the way former Industrial Era powers Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Detroit did. Clusters built around a narrow type of enterprise almost always do, since specialization can be wonderfully beneficial for a while but has a relatively short shelf life. Once the boom goes bust, bringing it back is almost impossible. Cities like New York that are open for business in a broad way have a better shot at continued prosperity, their fickleness and willingness to constantly tear down an asset.

From the Economist piece “Silicon Valley 1.0“:

Cleveland is a reminder that decline can be as self-sustaining as success. There are three reasons why clusters fail. One is that they over-specialise in products that are later improved elsewhere. Sheffield stuck to steelmaking even as others learned to make it better and cheaper. A second is that they complacently fail to upgrade their productivity. Detroit succumbed to Japanese carmakers in the 1970s and 1980s because it thought more about providing its cars with ornate fins (and its workers with gold-plated benefits) than it did about their performance. The third is that they suffer from an external shock from which they fail to recover, as could be the case with the City of London in the wake of Brexit.

Naomi Lamoreaux, an economic historian at Yale University, says Cleveland falls into the third category. It led in a wide variety of industries into the 1920s, including cars, chemicals, paints and varnishes, machine tools and electrical machinery as well as iron and steel. It spent money on R&D. But then came a series of external shocks. The Depression destroyed the local financial institutions that had supported Cleveland’s start-ups. Regulations adopted in its wake gave New York’s banks such a competitive advantage that local capital markets withered. The federal government’s wartime policy of dispersing manufacturing industry eroded the city’s industrial base.

Fanning the flames of hate

Cleveland’s decline became self-reinforcing. Firms downsized, closed or relocated. The inner city fell prey to crime and dysfunction. The white middle-class moved to suburbia. Politicians responded not with pragmatic ideas for reform but by whipping up anger and resentment, which only hastened white- and business-flight. Dennis Kucinich, the mayor in 1977-79, who much later ran for president, refused to privatise the electric utility and, in 1978, took the city into bankruptcy. A once-proud city was mocked as “the mistake on the lake”. To cap it all, Cleveland paid the price for its earlier successes: by 1969 the Cuyahoga River was so polluted that it caught fire, an event that is still celebrated in one of its local brews, Burning River Pale Ale.

The city’s story is also a warning that rebuilding clusters is fiendishly hard.•

“So How Shall We All Live?”

July 25, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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The writer Calum Chace, an all-around interesting thinker, is conducting a Reddit AMA based on his new book, The Economic Singularity, which sees a future–and not such a far-flung one–when human labor is a thing of the past. It’s certainly possible since constantly improving technology could make fleets of cars driverless and factories workerless. In fact, there’s no reason why they can’t also be ownerless. 

What happens then? How do we reconcile a free-market society with an automated one? In the long run, it could be a great victory for humanity, but getting from here to there will be bumpy. A few exchanges follow.

Question:

So it seems to me that most of the benefit of capitalism for working-class people come from jobs. Companies need a workforce, and are willing to pay for it. So a lot of the profit gets spread around to a lot of people.

If a few companies could break this model on a large scale, by leveraging automation to allow a relatively small core group of employees to operate a national or international corporation, then that would force everyone to do it in order to stay competitive.

I’m assuming that this is some of what you’re talking about in the book (just guessing from the title and an amazon summary).

I could see the first fully (>98%) automated company making waves in a decade or two. People on /r/futorology like to wax utopian, but a company with <100 employees and billions in automated infrastructure isn’t going to allow themselves to be operated for the public good. The product might be cheap, but it’s not free, and that company is no longer employing enough people to matter.

They’ll have a global reach (through subcontracted shipping companies) coupled with automated vehicles that don’t need to sleep or visit family. They can legally exist in whichever country is cheapest tax-wise, and still destroy the competition on the other side of the globe.

So, lots of rambling. But that’s my question, basically.In your opinion, what might the replacement for capitalism look like?

Calum Chace:

Yes, I think you’ve identified exactly the first stage of the argument. Intelligent machines are probably going to render most of us unemployable.

So how shall we all live? The answer, initially at least, will be some form of Universal Basic Income (UBI) which is often discussed here and at a sister Reddit page specifically on the subject. UBI will have to be paid for by taxes, and that raises some tricky questions about how the rich people who pay the taxes are going to respond.

I am fundamentally optimistic. The people who are going to be richest are those who own the AI, since that will generate much of the value throughout the economy. The likes of Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates etc etc don’t seem to me to be primarily motivated by money, but by an excitement about the future and a desire to see it arrive sooner.

So I don’t think they will want the rest of us to starve. The mechanism by which UBI is phased in, and how it pans out across international boundaries are going to take a lot of detailed planning. Which we haven’t started yet.

Question:

I also think people are underestimating VR & crowdsourcing’s role.

If VR makes things like microtasking more attractive to do and enables the microtaskers (crowd-workers) to do more, then flexwork/ gig-work might become even more popular. I have an ebook that I’m finishing up now that explores this a little bit (& even ties it to robotics).

Do you have any guesses for VR and the future of work?

Calum Chace:

Yes, I talk about the gig economy (microtasking) in my book. A report by PwC says that 7% of US adults are already engaged in it. I’m not sure whether the experience is so great for most of them at the moment, though. Are they “micro-entrepreneurs” or “instaserfs” – members of a new “precariat”? Either way, it will probably get bigger.

It’s hard to avoid waxing lyrical about the potential impact of VR. Oculus Rift has made nothing like the splash since its launch this year a lot of people (including me) expected it to, but it’s probably just obeying Amara’s Law, that we tend to over-estimate the effect of a technology in the short run and under-estimate the effect in the long run.

In that long run I can well imagine VR bringing about the long-awaited death of geography, but it’s probably going to take a while yet. Meanwhile, I’m not sure it will have that much impact on overall levels of employment, other than adding some because of all the virtual experiences that need to be created.

Question:

I think the outcome can be wonderful: a world of radical abundance.

Calum Chace:

I very much agree with you there, I think that all (7 billion + of us globally) are going to be vastly richer from all of this.

For example, when AI can administer the expertise of top doctors & consultants to everyone on the planet for pennies, this is wealth unlike humanity has ever known before.

I wonder though, on the road to this future, are we in for some quite chaotic breaks from the past.

Exactly, and the sooner we start thinking seriously about where we want to get to and how best to get there, the more likely we are to make the journey successfully.

I think the more people who are aware of what is coming, the better. I’m encouraged by the remarkable sea-change in awareness of AI progress that has already occurred. The publication of Bostrom’s Superintelligence led to high-profile comments by the three wise men (Hawking, Musk and Gates) and the publication of Ford’s Rise of the Robots was another seminal moment.

Like a lot of people here, I’ve been talking about the huge importance of AI to anyone who would listen for years and years. I got a lot of benign virtual pats on the head. Now people are listening.

Self-driving cars will probably be the canary in the coal mine. Once they are common sights, people won’t be able to avoid thinking seriously about what is coming.

But we need a positive narrative about the good things that can happen so that the response isn’t panic, or a rush into the embrace of the next populist demagogue who happens along.•

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“He Stresses This Does Not Mean The End Of Eating For Pleasure”

July 24, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Rob Rhinehart’s Soylent is a tougher sell in developed countries with endless food magazines and cooking shows, though those chugging Red Bulls and wolfing down Devil Dogs shouldn’t look askance at the meal-replacement beverage. The beverage would seem to hold special promise as a sustenance provider in places where scarcity still reigns supreme.

Two excerpts follow from Tom Braithwaite’s smart Financial Times profile of Rhinehart, who somehow manages to live off the grid while living in Los Angeles.

Rhinehart is convinced we will start to abandon three meals a day and instead sip functional foods whenever we need to. “Being wrapped up in breakfast, lunch, dinner came from an agricultural society and the industrial revolution. We don’t work on farms, we don’t work on assembly lines and I don’t think we should eat like we do. I think people will switch to eating when hungry rather than eating on a schedule.”

He stresses this does not mean the end of eating for pleasure. “You get home from work, you’re not in the mood to cook or you’re running out the door in the morning, you don’t have time, but then Friday or Saturday night rolls around and you want to go out with your friends. That’s what I think we’ll move towards.”•

One foot in the future and one foot in the past seems to sum up Rhinehart. His latest project is building a home in Los Angeles, off the grid. This is surprisingly possible in one of the world’s most urban environments. He found disused land in an unfashionable part of town and plonked a shipping container in it, which he now lives in.

This might be eccentric but it’s not a millionaire’s whimsy. The land was cheap because it is not served by electricity or water; the shipping container was $1,500. Rhinehart proudly says he is not wealthy — whatever his paper worth, he draws a fairly modest salary.

“Do you wanna see a picture?” he says, passing me his phone. “The only drawback is the area’s still a little rough, so it got graffitied.”

The container’s power is solar-generated. Of course there is no need for a kitchen. Rhinehart is currently relying on a “Porta Potty” but has hopes for advances in new toilets that vaporise waste. He once tried to save water by taking an antibiotic to minimise trips to the toilet. “I massacred my gut bacteria,” he wrote in his blog.•

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“Pandemonium Broke Out With Wild Clapping And Cheering”

July 24, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

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The VCR, which helped the masses shift time and become programmers, is no more, with the last company that produced the technology, Japan’s Funai Corporation, bowing from the anachronistic business.

Excerpts follow from 1) Jonah Engel Bromwich’s New York Times article “The Long, Final Goodbye of the VCR,” and 2) Lillian Ross’ 1970 New Yorker piece (subscription required) about the Cartrivision system, which offered a proto-Netflix service.

From Bromwich:

In 1956, Ampex Electric and Manufacturing Company introduced what its website calls “the first practical videotape recorder.” Fred Pfost, an Ampex engineer, described demonstrating the technology to CBS executives for the first time. Unbeknown to them, he had recorded a keynote speech delivered by a vice president at the network.
 
“After I rewound the tape and pushed the play button for this group of executives, they saw the instantaneous replay of the speech. There were about 10 seconds of total silence until they suddenly realized just what they were seeing on the 20 video monitors located around the room. Pandemonium broke out with wild clapping and cheering for five full minutes. This was the first time in history that a large group (outside of Ampex) had ever seen a high-quality, instantaneous replay of any event.”

Fred Pfost “First Public Video Tape Recorder Demonstrations” (Web 84) Video by Audio Engineering Society (AES)
 
At the time, the machines cost $50,000 apiece. But that did not stop orders from being placed for 100 of them in the week they debuted, according to Mr. Pfost. “This represented an amount almost as great as a year’s gross income for Ampex,” he wrote.
 
The first VCRs for homes were released in the 1960s, and they became widely available to consumers in the 1970s, when Sony’s Betamax and JVC’s VHS formats began to compete. VHS gained the upper hand the following decade; but Sony stopped producing Betamax cassette tapes only in 2016.•

From Ross’ conversation with Cartrivison executive Samuel Gelfman, who realized way back then what a disruptive technology he was working with:

“What is Cartrivision?” we asked.

“One of the greatest instruments of social change–the greatest, I would say, since the printing press,” Mr. Gelfman said. “Our set is a color-television set, but it’s also a cartridge-television. With this set, you can have your own cartridge library. You slip a cartridge in the slot, press the button, and watch up to two hours of your own choice of movie. A great football game. Anything you want. What’s more, we’ve built in an off-the-air recorder to pick up shows when you’re not at home. It doubles as a camera with a portable microphone. You can make your movies and have instant replay. We’ll sell you the set for between eight and nine hundred dollars. Our cartridges–blank ones–from nine-ninety-eight for a fifteen-minute tape to twenty-four ninety-eight for a two-hour tape. The movie cartridges we’ll rent. Three dollars for overnight. What’s important is for the first time we’re going to be able to provide what you want to see. You don’t have to worry about sponsors anymore.”•

Here’s a What’s My Line? episode in which the system is demonstrated by company spokesperson Art Rosenblatt in 1972, the year it came to the market and the one before it was pulled.

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“I Am, For The First Time Since I Began Covering American Politics, Genuinely Afraid”

July 22, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Unlike most Americans who aspire to the Presidency, Donald Trump would like to break the world’s kneecaps with a ball-peen hammer. 

The 2016 GOP convention, political torture porn, has at last concluded, and its main kooky message lingers: The world is a dangerous place, especially for those white and blue, and at an extremely evil time like this, we need someone even more evil, a remorseless figure who will do unthinkable things, and that person is strongman Trump. He will protect us, this orange supremacist, this synthesis of Mussolini and Mayor McCheese. 

Never mind that the GOP flag-bearer’s behavior resembles that of a mentally ill person, a delusional sociopath, or that crime and economic statistics make it plain that the last eight years have been very good to America, from low murder rates to high Wall Street earnings. Even wealth distribution, that stubborn ill, has been adjusted somewhat under President Obama. Wage rates remain sluggish as they’ve long been, but it’s a mistake to view this election as one about money. It’s identity politics to the utmost and the attempt by one awful person to sell a violent culture war. It could work. If Trump loses horribly, it’s a death in the gutter for the modern GOP. If he wins, our entire country will have fallen from the curb.

The opening of Ezra Klein’s sobering Vox piece about the horrifying rise of an American fascist:

Tonight, Donald J. Trump accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for president of the United States.

And I am, for the first time since I began covering American politics, genuinely afraid.

Donald Trump is not a man who should be president. This is not an ideological judgment. This is not something I would say about Mitt Romney or Marco Rubio. This is not a disagreement over Donald Trump’s tax plan or his climate policies. This is about Trump’s character, his temperament, his impulsiveness, his basic decency.

Back in February, I wrote that Trump is the most dangerous major candidate for president in memory. He pairs terrible ideas with an alarming temperament; he’s a racist, a sexist, and a demagogue, but he’s also a narcissist, a bully, and a dilettante. He lies so constantly and so fluently that it’s hard to know if he even realizes he’s lying. He delights in schoolyard taunts and luxuriates in backlash.

He has had plenty of time to prove me, and everyone else, wrong. But he hasn’t. He has not become more responsible or more sober, more decent or more generous, more considered or more informed, more careful or more kind. He has continued to retweet white supremacists, make racist comments, pick unnecessary fights, contradict himself on the stump, and show an almost gleeful disinterest in building a real campaign or learning about policy.

He has, instead, run a campaign based on stoking fear and playing to resentment. His speech tonight invoked a nightmarish American hellscape that doesn’t actually exist. His promise to restore order made him sound like the aspiring strongman his critics fear him to be. “I have a message for all of you: the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end,” he said. “Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored.”•

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“Tesla Is Designing ‘The Machine That Makes The Machine'”

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

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Every time I start to criticize Elon Musk, I remember to be thankful he’s not Peter Thiel.

Walter Isaacson famously named Benjamin Franklin when searching for an historical antecedent for Musk, but the Tesla-Space X-Hyperloop-aspiring-Martian billionaire seem to have his heart set on being a multi-planetary Thomas Edison.

In his just-released “Master Plan, Part Deux,” Musk expounds on a vision that would be daunting if it was being attempted by a wonderfully funded Bell Labs or NASA or even a superpower government let alone a struggling private company. The sections on solar roofs and autonomous transport are particularly fascinating.

As Will Oremus writes in a Slate column, one aspect of Musk’s ambitions didn’t make big news despite having world-changing implications. An excerpt:

On Wednesday night, Elon Musk announced a new master plan for his company. It is the philosophical successor to his original master plan, published 10 years ago when few had heard of Tesla and fewer cared. If that first plan seemed implausibly audacious, this one borders on schizophrenic—a compendium of goals so futuristic and disparate that it would be a marvel for any company to achieve one of them, let alone all. They include (deep breath):

  • Building at least four all-new models: a “new kind of pickup truck,” a compact SUV, a semi truck, and a bus-like mass transport vehicle that delivers its passengers from door to door. They’ll all be fully electric, of course.
  • Developing and implementing a fully autonomous driving system that will require no human involvement. The system will have such redundancy that a failure of any part of the driving system will not compromise its ability to navigate safely.
  • Creating a car-sharing platform through which Tesla owners can, at the tap of a button, rent out their self-driving vehicle to a “Tesla shared fleet” when they’re not using it. Others can then summon the car for a ride, generating income for its owner which can help to pay off the price of buying it.
  • Merging Tesla and SolarCity, the country’s largest solar power company, and together developing a seamlessly integrated system that can both capture and store solar power on your rooftop, turning your home into its own energy utility. And then “scale that throughout the world.”

Not even cracking the top four objectives in the new plan is Musk’s recently stated intention to essentially reinvent the mass production process, developing a heavily automated factory that can churn out cars five to 10 times more efficiently than before. In other words, Musk writes, Tesla is designing “the machine that makes the machine—turning the factory itself into a product.”•

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“The Machine Is Just The Brush”

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

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When I first became aware of Chuck Close’s portraiture, long before his artistic and personal metamorphosis, the work immediately seemed to me pointillism for the computer age, his very human hand–seriously compromised following a massive seizure–somehow capable of producing pixels. 

As amazing as Close’s parade of faces are, it would be different, even troubling, for some if they’d been painted with a computer rather than a brush attached to flesh. They might be viewed as inferior even if the pictures looked exactly the same. That’s because we tend to value the skills we know more than emergent ones.

In “There Is No Difference Between Computer Art and Human Art,” a provocative Aeon essay, Oliver Roeder argues for the erasure of the line between algorithms making art and music and people doing so. He writes: “‘Computer art’ doesn’t really exist in an any more provocative sense than ‘paint art’ or ‘piano art’ does. The algorithmic software was written by a human, after all, using theories thought up by a human.”

Well there is some difference between the two, as there is between oral histories and those published by a printing press. That doesn’t mean the work with a digital tool attached is lesser, however. It can be greater.

An excerpt:

Visual art, too, has been subjected to algorithms for decades now.Two engineers created this image – probably the first computer nude – at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, somewhere geographically between Coltrane and Kim, in 1966. The piece was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1968.

The New York Times reviewed one of the first exhibitions of computer art, in 1965 (just a few months after Coltrane’s recording session) featuring work by two scientists and an IBM #7094 digital computer, at a New York gallery, now long shuttered. ‘So far the means are of greater interest than the end,’ the Times wrote. But the review, by the late Stuart Preston, goes on to strike a surprisingly enthusiastic tone:

No matter what the future holds – and scientists predict a time when almost any kind of painting can be computer-generated – the actual touch of the artist will no longer play any part in the making of a work of art. When that day comes, the artist’s role will consist of mathematically formulating, by arranging an array of points in groups, a desired pattern. From then on, all will be entrusted to the deus ex machina. Freed from the tedium of technique and the mechanics of picture-making, the artist will simply ‘create’.

The machine is just the brush – a human holds it. There are, indeed, examples of computers helping musicians to simply ‘create’.•

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“He Has Been Known To Wait Five Minutes In Order To Get Into A Dog Show At Half Price”

July 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Videos | Permalink

If you don’t count money, J. Paul Getty wasn’t a very rich man.

Wealthy beyond imagination back when a billion dollars was a billion dollars, Getty was a strange and miserly sort with five marriages and a procession of troubled heirs. His thriftiness, if you would call it that, seemed to come not from wisdom but from a dark place. The opening of a People article from 40 years ago about the man who, by some measures, had it all:

In deepening solitude, like some melancholy Dickensian recluse, Jean Paul Getty offers the frailest of shoulders on which to rest the title of World’s Richest Man. At 81, he speaks in a low, croaking monotone, his face a sunken mask of old age. When his left hand trembles violently from Parkinson’s disease, his right must come quivering to restrain it. And his conversation, fitful and laborious, trails off into lingering silences. 

But the fertile brain that assembled one of the oil world’s great empires has lost neither its cunning nor its grasp. During the current energy crisis—in which the value of Getty’s oil leases spirals astronomically as great ships laden with his liquid treasure bear it to the oil-parched industrial nations—the gnome of Surrey paces his Tudor palace, monitoring the nerve centers of the financial world. 

The son of a prosperous Minneapolis lawyer who moved to Oklahoma and promptly struck oil, Getty was only 21 when he began buying and selling oil leases himself. He made $40,000 his first year, and his first million a few months after that. When the Depression hit he had enough to buy millions of shares of collapsed oil stocks, acquiring fortunes in oil reserves and fresh cash. In 1949, just before seizing control of the giant Tidewater Oil Co., he arranged a deal with Saudi Arabia’s King Saud, predecessor of the present King Faisal, obtaining half-interest for the next 60 years in a raw swath of land called the Neutral Zone. The area was considered bleakly unpromising, but, typically, Getty brought in the gushers. Moving to London to be nearer his Middle East operations, he has never returned to America. 

Today, with enormous personal holdings in stock in the parent Getty Oil Co. and a controlling interest in nearly 200 other concerns, the octogenarian billionaire has accumulated wealth beyond precise calculation. Yet until 1957, when Fortune named him the richest living American, he was virtually unknown to the public. 

One reason, perhaps, is that he has never been inclined to philanthropy. No foundation bears his name, and he has indicated that when he dies his fortune will be plowed back into his businesses. 

“Money is like manure,” Getty once said. “You have to spread it around or it smells.” Often, in his case, this has been a dictum observed in the breach. Though he paid a modest fortune for Sutton Place, his 72-room mansion outside London, he prudently outfitted it with a pay telephone. “The guests won’t mind paying for their calls,’ he said, ‘and as for the deadbeats, I couldn’t care less.” He never accepts mail with postage due and rarely carries more than $25 in pocket money. He has been known to wait five minutes in order to get into a dog show at half price, and to avoid a restaurant rather than pay a cover charge. “I pay the going rate,” he explained, “but I don’t see any reason for paying more than you have to.”

Getty’s legendary parsimony extends even to eminent friends of long standing. He and the Earl of Warwick have lunched together regularly for 35 years. Lest either pay a bill out of turn, the two share a little black book in which they keep track of all their meetings, the cost of each lunch and whose turn it is to pick up the check.•

In the 1970s, the industrialist spoke on behalf of E.F. Hutton.

“He Believes It’s A Once-In-A-Lifetime Opportunity To Weaken America’s Attachment To Democratic Government”

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

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Peter Thiel is the single best argument for a return to the draconian progressive tax rates of the Eisenhower Administration. A think-skinned, monopoly-loving billionaire Libertarian who cares way more for his ideology than, you know, actual humans, he’s gone so far as to make Gawker seem sympathetic. 

A gay immigrant as a grinning Republican and Trump delegate would be puzzling were it anyone, but it’s even more so for Thiel, who clearly doesn’t support most of the candidate’s lip service to populist policy. In an Inc. article, Jeff Bercovici attempts to explain the PayPal co-founder’s support of Trump with a theory he himself labels seemingly crazy: The journalist believes Thiel may be trolling democracy itself. Perhaps or maybe he just wants his taxes lowered. An excerpt:

It’s hard to believe Thiel is going all in on Trump only–or at least mainly–because he thinks Trump will make a good president. What might his real reason be?

I have a guess. It sounds crazy, but bear in mind we’re talking about someone who thinks there’s a real possibility he will never die; who pays college kids to drop out; who wants to establish a colony at sea free from the laws of any nation; who thinks capitalism and competition can’t coexist. If it doesn’t sound crazy to someone, it’s probably too quotidian to have issued from the mind of Peter Thiel.

I think Peter Thiel supports Donald Trump because he believes it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to weaken America’s attachment to democratic government.

I’m not accusing Thiel of any ambitions he hasn’t more or less copped to. In an often-quoted 2009 essay, Thiel declared, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”•

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“I Believe He Could Have Been Stopped Early”

July 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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The press and Republicans didn’t exactly help matters in regards to the political rise of the hideous hotelier Donald Trump. 

The former initially treated him as cheap summer programming and misrepresenting him as an irreverent, naughty uncle rather than the deeply racist, seeming sociopath he is. But the media didn’t make Trump the GOP nominee–the people did. The Republican establishment been pandering to the racist heart of America for decades, and it turns out there were far more people with Angry White Person’s disease than previously diagnosed. More than economics, that’s what Trump tapped into: unearned privilege under threat. He’s a rich person who feels ripped off because of all he lacks inside, and the same is true today of a good chunk of the country.

Fellow Republicans also didn’t try to drive Trump’s clown car off course for far too long, everyone thinking it was all an elaborate joke, and if they just avoided the scrum, they’d be okay. I doubt, however, it would have made much of a difference if they had acted sooner. John Kasich, exceedingly conservative and eminently electable, never had a prayer of gaining the nomination. Republicans weren’t voting for policy or principles but rather for hatred and nativism. They chose their messenger, their nominee, for very clear reasons. When you select the candidate who mocked POWs and the disabled, and bragged about the size of his dong during a debate, there can be no mistake.

Not everyone agrees, however, with my contention that wags and pols aren’t responsible for Trump’s candidacy. Excerpts follow from: 1) Carl Bernstein insisting at Real Clear Politics that Matt Drudge could have stopped Trump, which I think is preposterous, and 2) Jeffrey Goldberg’s immaculately written Atlantic article, which suggests more moderate members of the GOP could have prevented the “Make America White Again” movement, which I also doubt.

From Carl Bernstein’s comments:

“One of the interesting things we’ve seen in this campaign is FOX has driven Trump’s candidacy less than Matt Drudge,” the legendary journalist said Wednesday on CNN. “Drudge is really a great new factor in this election in terms of media. He is — Drudge, that site has been unapologetically in Trump’s pocket from the beginning. And I would say a large measure of why Donald Trump is the nominee goes to Matt Drudge in much the way that FOX has — when you use the word kingmaker, I’m not sure it goes quite far that way, but it is an influence unequalled.”

Goldberg’s sharply written opening:

The neediness of politicians has always fascinated me; the pathological desire for relevance; the plasticity of belief in the service of self-aggrandizement; the depths plumbed in order to stave off insignificance, which can be as frightening as non-existence itself. One of my favorite politicians, Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, is almost morbidly needy. His desire for attention made him into a brilliant retailer, mainly of himself, but also of his ideas, and intermittently, of his state. His neediness made him greatly entertaining. But it also caused him to betray his own principles.

I recognize that it took millions of Republican primary voters to bring America to this frightening moment, a moment in which a preposterous grifter of authoritarian bent whose mental health is the subject of pervasive and anxious speculation, has become a major-party nominee for president. But it was men like Christie who were indispensable in the creation of this moment. Donald J. Trump could have been stopped. I believe he could have been stopped early, by a concerted effort to unify the party behind a single, viable, non-fraudulent candidate; and he could have been stopped late, if Republicans like Christie had not crumpled before Trump. A handful of honorable men did, in fact, try to stop him. But they were too few in number, and too marginal to make a difference. Collectively, the most influential and smartest Republican elected officials—people who fall into the general category of Them That Knew Better—just might have been able to devise a way to prevent what is happening from happening. But abdication of responsibility and self-debasement in the pursuit of power were the order of the day.•

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“When There’s Something New And Creative Being Done, It’s Usually Done By One (Or Perhaps Two) People”

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

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In promoting his new book, Idea Makers, Stephen Wolfram conducted an AMA at Reddit, using the opportunity to push back at the idea of the collective hive mind as greater than the lone genius.

There’s been a justifiable argument in recent times, sometimes politically motivated, that the individual creator of groundbreaking work in science and technology isn’t so important because others were simultaneously coming to the same conclusions. That’s true, though it still doesn’t make the case for group thinking. Crowds may possess wisdom, Wikipedia could not have been amassed by the individual, but Wolfram believes breakthroughs are the specialty of singles or couples.

An exchange:

Question:

How much commonality is there between legendary mathematicians/scientists from ages ago and more modern scientists? Culture has changed a hell of a lot between 1816 and 2016, would those legendary scientists from centuries past be significantly changed if they were brought up in this more modern environment?

Stephen Wolfram:

Yes, things have certainly changed a lot from 1816 to 2016. (Note that the book does include quite a few recent people too.)

One important practical feature is that people are on average living longer. Ada Lovelace and Ramanujan, for example, would almost certainly have lived decades longer with modern healthcare. So would George Boole.

About the actual doing of math and science: well, we have computers now, and they make a huge difference. But another thing is that math and science as fields are much bigger. They’ve always had a certain amount of institutional structure, and many of the people I wrote about had to overcome inertia from that structure to get their ideas out. But I think in well established areas, that’s a bigger effect today. I’ve been very fortunate to be a “private scientist” outside of institutional constraints most of the time. But most scientists aren’t in that situation. And it tends to be awfully difficult to get genuinely new ideas funded etc., particularly in the better-established areas.

I have to say that the vast majority of major advances tend to come when fields are fairly new, and when they’re aren’t many people in them. And there are always new fields coming up. But “standard fields” that everyone’s heard of tend to be quite big by the time everyone’s heard of them.

In the big well-established fields today, lots of people work in large collaborations. But the fact is that big ideas tend to be created by individual people (or sometimes a couple of people)—not big collaborations. Those ideas often make use of lots of work done by collaborations, etc. But when there’s something new and creative being done, it’s usually done by one (or perhaps two) people. And these days I have the sense that people don’t really understand that any more: they assume that unless it’s a big collective thing, it can’t be right. It was a different story when math and science were smaller.•

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“It Looks As If The Space Economy Will End Up Pretty Much Like The One On Earth”

July 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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I’m always surprised economies, for all their failings, work as well as they do. Similarly, I’m continually shocked more people don’t commit murder. I suppose I’m a pessimist.

Life on Earth is complicated, and it likewise will be out there when we start traveling regularly in space, attempting to set up colonies and mine asteroids. There’ll be crushing mishaps and perhaps direct democracy and trillionaires. What a brave new world that will be.

In the Financial Times, John Thornhill writes of far-flung finances, thinking about the need for regulation when we fan out among the stars. He’s not hopeful we’ll do better on the moon or Mars. An excerpt:

To stimulate fresh thinking, Nasa challenged economists, including the Nobel Prize-winning Eric Maskin and Mariana Mazzucato, to examine the economic development of low earth orbit, or “commercial space”. Their suggestions were published this month.

The critical question is how the public sector best interacts with the private sector. In 2011, Nasa set up the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space to encourage public institutions and commercial enterprises to use the ISS as a platform for innovation. The economists have several good ideas for this. Comprehensive databases could be created to record space research. Smarter insurance could help entice thinly capitalised start-up companies. Biotech firms could be incentivised to exploit a microgravity environment.

But based on most of the contributions to Nasa, it looks as if the space economy will end up pretty much like the one on earth, where the cash-strapped public sector remains in thrall to the private sector. The worry is that the infrastructure costs will be socialised while the profits are privatised.

That would be a shame.•

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“Silicon Valley Has Faced False Starts With A.I. Before”

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

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Mere consumerism can’t explain the whole of innovation, as I’ve mentioned. Cool gadgets you can slide into your pocket are good things, but they’re not everything. 

Silicon Valley’s investment in smartphones and social media is tapering, as Artificial Intelligence, from driverless cars to robot workers, has, urged on by Deep Learning, come into fashion, writes John Markoff of the New York Times. Is it all a bubble? Probably somewhat, but a lot of actual foundation can be laid during such a time of exuberance. 

In Markoff’s book Machine of Loving Grace, he held that we could make a conscious choice between A.I. and Intelligence Augmentation, but when different companies and countries are competing with so much on the line, such questions often answer themselves. 

An excerpt:

In the most recent shift, the A.I. idea emerged first in Canada in the work of cognitive scientists and computer scientists like Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun during the previous decade. The three helped pioneer a new approach to deep learning, a machine learning method that is highly effective for pattern recognition challenges like vision and speech. Modeled on a general understanding of how the human brain works, it has helped technologists make rapid progress in a wide range of A.I. fields.

How far the A.I. boom will go is hotly debated. For some technologists, today’s technical advances are laying the groundwork for truly brilliant machines that will soon have human-level intelligence.

Yet Silicon Valley has faced false starts with A.I. before. During the 1980s, an earlier generation of entrepreneurs also believed that artificial intelligence was the wave of the future, leading to a flurry of start-ups. Their products offered little business value at the time, and so the commercial enthusiasm ended in disappointment, leading to a period now referred to as the “A.I. Winter.”

The current resurgence will not fall short this time, said several investors, who believe that the economic potential in terms of new efficiency and new applications is strong.

“There is no chance of a new winter,” said Shivon Zilis, an investor at Bloomberg Beta who specializes in machine intelligence start-ups.•

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“What Are The Things You Need To Be Prepared For When You Step Into Office?”

July 19, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Briefly, Cleveland was a city of champions. Then the Republican National Convention came to town.

Donald Trump, a whiter version of the Pillsbury Doughboy, welcomed his Fellini-esque family and friends to an auto-da-fé of an opening night. Antonio Sabato Jr., who lacks gravitas even by the modest standards of an underwear model, assured everyone during a TV interview that President Obama is Muslim, making him seem a sure thing for wacko-of-the-night honors, having clearly edged out Chachi and Melania. It was Iowa Congressman Steve King who ultimately beat back the competition, crediting caucasians with building civilization, which, of course, isn’t true and doesn’t mention that we “contracted out” most of our labor.

Veep also-ran Lt. General Mike Flynn was also given the platform, quickly subduing it and choking the life from it in his burly forearms. In a Spiegel interview, Flynn refers to Trump an an “underdog,” a strange descriptor for someone who inherited millions and had his daddy bail him out when he made a casino go broke.

An excerpt:

Spiegel:

Can you explain Trump’s fascination for strong leaders like Vladimir Putin or Saddam Hussein, whom he recently praised as an effective hunter of terrorists?

Mike Flynn:

He respects people who are selfish about their country. Putin is a guy who is very selfish about Russia and about the Russian federation, and he understands the history of his country. You can’t say, “I don’t like you.” You’ve got to respect him. He’s a world leader.

Spiegel:

Is Putin a reliable partner for America?

Mike Flynn:

Putin will be a reliable partner for certain things for the United States, yes. Absolutely. We need to have a relationship from the top to the bottom, same with China.

Spiegel:

Trump just urged Saudi Arabia and Japan to become nuclear powers as well. With comments like that, is he not encouraging a dangerous nuclear arms race?

Mike Flynn:

The threat of nuclear warfare is very, very low. Trump is no fool, and he sees the world as a globalized world. In the conversation we’re having right now, we’re talking about historical aspects of regions of the world, so sort of world history. It’s not that he needs a lesson in world history, but it’s very important that you understand the history of Europe, the history of Africa, the history of the Middle East. What are the trends that we could expect to see in the next few years, like the next 10 to 50? Will there be another major war? Will there be a war between China and the United States? We talked a lot about that, and we talked about sort of what were the “What Ifs?” What are the potentials, and what are the things you need to be prepared for when you step into office?•

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“No Limit, No”

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

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Gerontologist Aubrey de Grey has a wife who accepts his two younger girlfriends, so of course he wants to live forever.

His quest for immortality is so fervent it leads him to sometimes make proclamations too bold: In 2004, the scientist said “the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already.” Not likely. De Grey would likely blame the lack of large-scale funding from governments, GMOs and individuals in the research he and other like-minded souls are doing–and he has a point. We waste an awful lot of money on killing that might be better spent on other things, defeating cancer and Alzheimer’s among them. Certainly Silicon Valley has gotten into the game in recent years.

For whatever excesses de Grey and his colleagues are guilty of, I’m with them in the big picture. Those of us today won’t likely live to see the benefits, but what a nice thing to do for our descendants, to give them more time. They’ll probably be able to work through any wrinkles that attend the great benefits.

De Grey just did an AMA at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

Question:

Are there any well-known people who support human longevity? Couldn’t the support of people like Bill Gates or Elon Musk considerably boost funding of any projects?

Aubrey de Grey:

We have support from a few celebrities, such as Steve Aoki and Edward James Olmos, but we definitely need more. Yes, any billionaire would do!

Question:

Has Elon Musk ever spoken with Dr. dr Grey or anyone else from SENS on matters related to radical life extension?

Aubrey de Grey:

Briefly, a decade ago. I’d sure love to speak with him again.

Question:

A question about cancer:

Many people claim that most cancers are lifestyle related.

I sometimes find it difficult to convince these people that funding cancer research is of paramount importance as they tend to be bogged down in an ‘either/or’ way of thinking:

“We should put the emphasis on environmental/lifestyle/societal changes instead of spending even more money on research (…or stuffing people with even more medicines)”

So my question is: out of the ~1,700,000 cancers diagnosed every year in the US, is there a consensus on how many could be avoided with better lifestyle (not smoking, healthy diet, limited exposure to household & cosmetic chemical products, limited exposure to pollution etc.)? 10%? 50? 90?

Aubrey de Grey:

There’s a wide range of opinion; I tend to agree with Bruce Ames that lifestyle matters rather little with the exception of smoking.

We should do our best to remove whatever is present in the environment that might contribute to cancer, no doubt. But still we can’t ever remove all harmful agents 100%. For instance, how can we remove HPV from the environment? We have vaccines to help prevent HPV infections but even those are not effective against every strain. So what do we tell patients with cervical cancer? We cannot focus on just prevention or just therapy. Both should be worked on. Not sure about percentages, but if there is a change you can make to your lifestyle that decreases your chances of getting cancer by 10% then by all means do it!

Question:

Do you think there is a limit to how long you can keep the human body going for, even with aging defeated? i wonder when our brain will run out of room for memories… or maybe we will start erasing old memories once we have reached X number of years old?

Also, and this one’s more personal, do you think supplement pills and vitamin pills and algae powder pills are worth taking if you already have basic food needs and exercise needs fulfilled? i have heard of people not eating as much vegetables because they think the pills make up for it. Are they making a grave error?

Aubrey de Grey:

No limit, no. We already erase memories – it’s called “forgetting”! A varied and balanced diet is always better than relying on supplements.

Question:

I am among the minority of people who have said at a every young age that I want to live a very long time, 150+, but all my friends and family all say they would never want to live that long. How do we change people’s perception of growing old and make them think long term?

Aubrey de Grey:

That’s the wrong thing to try to convince people of. Instead, convince them that the diseases of old age are inseparable from the aspects of age-related ill-health that we don’t label as diseases, so that the only way we’ll ever “cure” Alzheimer’s etc is by defeating the whole lot together. Then they won’t be distracted by the unnerving side-effect that they might end up living a long time.•

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“We Can’t Know What We Will Discover”

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

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In “Beyond 120,” a really good Tablet article about radical life extension, Ted Mann reveals he’s come to believe game-changing, age-defying treatments are reaching critical mass, thanks in large part to expanding computational power being applied to the big questions of genetics and biology. The problem he sees is a serious disconnect between discovery and distribution, a product of societal systems not keeping pace with an explosion of science.

An excerpt:

We don’t intuitively grasp exponential rates of change. It’s hard for us to handle and examine them with our imagination because we have little or no experience of them in daily life. Exponential growth in knowledge creation is what’s happening, and this is not merely new knowledge being created faster than before.

Yet knowledge is fundamentally different from a thing, like an iPhone; as the product of a creative process, according to the quantum computational physicist David Deutsch, who has written of this extensively, it is unpredictable in principal. We can’t know what we will discover, nor therefore can we anticipate the dangers that powerful new technologies will present.

As computational techniques and technologies become more deeply integrated into all the sciences, as Deutsch predicts, what we are currently seeing is a rapid change in the rate of creation of new, objectively true knowledge. Deutsch also points out, as a matter of fact, not speculative opinion, that at some point an increasing rate of change of knowledge creation must turn exponential. That’s a physical law. If our knowledge creation processes aren’t disrupted by rising social disorder, increasing political polarization, economic disaster, or any other reason, then they must transform our world more dramatically, rapidly, and irreversibly than internal combustion engines, electricity, the transistor, and nuclear energy have already done.

Yet our existing social institutions and our legal and regulatory structures date in many cases to the 1700s and before. Legal, political, and economic structures were intended to accommodate a much slower, arithmetical, additive, rate of change. The absence of trained reporters at the science desks of major networks and news organizations is also huge problem and a direct consequence of the decay of our traditional news outlets, which were rooted in 16th-century technology and flattened by the digital age.•

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“Does It Matter That We Might Be Living In A Simulation?”

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

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Once humans conjured a Creator, they placed him in the past, in the beginning, the progenitor of us all. But what if a supreme being exists at the far end of the narrative? Many have wondered about this possibility, that some superintelligence controls us from the future, but decades ago theoretical physicist Jack Sarfatti tried to prove it on a scientific basis, believing it may be possible for us to construct a “future machine.” 

“If the future machine works, we become gods,” he said in Alex Cain’s “Jack Sarfatti’s Future Machine,” an article in the inaugural 1984 issue of High Frontiers, which billed itself as the “Space Age Newspaper of Psychedelics, Science, Human Potential, Irreverence & Modern Art.” Sarfatti had a vision for the future (and the past and present) that was incredibly FAR and decidedly OUT, a precursor to Nick Bostrom’s idea (and Elon Musk’s contention) that we are merely creations of tomorrow’s intelligence, prone to its plans for us, characters in its game.

Sarfatti was central to the synthesis of early hacker culture and the final drops of the acid-soaked one, attempting to drive the Further bus through a wormhole. In the ’84 piece, Sarfatti made this proposal: “That’s the real meaning of Abraham’s covenant with God, in the Old Testament. God is simply the intelligence of the future, talking backwards in time to the prophets. That’s what revelation is all about, in this theory. Jesus Christ was a time-traveler from the future. Let’s put it this way. Jesus himself may have been born of Mary, but his mind was imprinted by the superintelligence.” If a 2011 Vice article is any indication, Sarfatti still clings to his unproven belief and doesn’t suffer fools–or even polite, intelligent interviewers–gladly.

On the same topic, Joshua Rothman recently penned a smart New Yorker blog post, using Musk’s Bostrom bender as a jumping-off point to ponder the possibility that all the men and women are merely players in a game–a simulated game from the future. The writer wonders if it matters if we live in a simulation, which it does, for two important reasons: 1) If such a god exists, responsible for genocide and natural disasters, he isn’t just an absentee father but rather a child abuser, and 2) Calvinism in cyberspace would remove all agency from humans. An excerpt:

Does it matter that we might be living in a simulation? How should we feel about that prospect? Artists and thinkers have come to various conclusions. The idea of living as a “copy” in a simulated world was explored, for example, in “Permutation City,” a 1994 novel by the science-fiction writer Greg Egan, which imagines life in the early days of simulation-creation. The protagonist, a computer scientist named Paul Durham, becomes his own guinea pig, scanning his brain into a computer to create two Pauls; while the original Paul remains in the real world, the digital Paul lives in a simulated one, which is a little like a modern video game. Standing in his simulated apartment and looking at a painting—Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights”—Paul can’t quite forget that, when he turns around, the simulation will stop rendering it, reducing it to “a single gray rectangle” in an effort to save processing cycles. If we live in a simulated world, then the same thing could be happening to us: Why should a computer simulate every atom in the universe when it knows where our eyes aren’t looking? Simulated people have reasons to be paranoid.

There’s also something melancholy about the idea of simulated life: the thrill of achievement is compromised by the possibility that everything has already happened to our descendants. (Presumably, they find it interesting to watch us fight the battles they have already lost or won.) This sense of belatedness is the theme of “The Talos Principle,” a somber and captivating video game by the Croatian studio Croteam. In the game, a plague has begun to wipe out humanity and, in a desperate bid to preserve something of our history and culture, human engineers have built a small simulated world populated by self-editing computer programs. Over time, the programs improve themselves, and you play as their descendent, a conscious program living long after the demise of humanity. Wandering through picturesque ruins of human civilizations (Greece, Egypt, Gothic Europe), you encounter fragments of ancient human texts—“Paradise Lost,” the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Kant, Schopenhauer, e-mails, blog posts—and wonder what it’s all about. The game suggests that simulated life is inescapably elegiac. Even if Elon Musk succeeds in colonizing Mars, he won’t be the first one to do so. History, in a sense, has already happened.•

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“I Cannot Vouch For Every Detail That He Recounts In His Manuscript”

July 17, 2016 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

The excerpt from Gay Talese’s The Voyeur’s Motel that unfortunately ran recently in the New Yorker was more than enough for me–way more than enough–and I won’t be investing the time to read the dodgy book. Absent journalistic and personal ethics, the story has been further muddied by revelations of fabrications that basic reportage would have uncovered. Excuses have been made, but the work is stained by the worst excesses of New Journalism, which opened the craft to a wider style, sure, but also made reporting prone to dubious veracity and methods. It’s odd the piece ended up in the New Yorker, which under David Remnick has largely been an impenetrable fortress against such slipshod narratives.

Jack Shafer has read the book so we don’t have to, reviewing it for the New York Times. His opening:

The average reader will greet more with anger than sadness Gay Talese’s disclosure — almost halfway through his book The Voyeur’s Motel — that the detailed sex journal underpinning this zany work of nonfiction can’t be trusted. 

Talese — whose use of the tools of fiction to propel factual accounts helped found New Journalism in the 1960s — drops the self-impeaching evidence casually. Calling into doubt the veracity of his book, Talese writes that the suburban Denver motel owner Gerald Foos claims to have started observing and transcribing the private business of his guests in 1966, peering down at them through 6-by-14-inch surveillance grates he installed in the ceilings of a dozen rooms of his 21-unit motel. The problem with the Foos account, Talese adds, is that he didn’t buy Manor House Motel until 1969, meaning that he must have imagined several years of the wild motel bed-sports described in his journal. 

Further evidence that the Foos story is cooked: “And there are other dates in his notes and journals that don’t quite scan,” Talese writes, stating that Foos “could sometimes be an inaccurate and unreliable narrator.” 

Ordinarily when a journalist discovers profoundly discrediting testimony like this, he utters “Whoa,” itemizes the discrepancies and digs deeper. But not so Talese, who only shrugs at the revelation that his main source has lied to him without detailing the fibs. “I cannot vouch for every detail that he recounts in his manuscript,” he writes.

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“Stupid Seems To Be Everywhere These Days”

July 16, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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In an Esquire interview conducted by Luke O’Neil, Jesse Ventura claims to be weary of stupid Americans, but who else buys the idiotic conspiracy theories he peddles to gain attention and money? Only Alex Jones has profited more from the gullibility of the masses. It’s not exactly a harmless vocation, either, since his 9/11 Truther nonsense encourages citizens with a loose grasp on reality to be further governed by such garbage. It’s not that Ventura doesn’t ever address any genuine coverups or such, but that actually makes it worse, intermingling horseshit with honesty, as if there really were no difference between the two.

An excerpt from the Q&A’s introduction:

John Kerry once said, “In America, you have a right to be stupid.” Nowhere is that more true than in the world of politics. That quote leads off Sh*t Politicians Say, the latest book from Jesse Ventura, a man who knows of what he speaks.

In the book, the onetime governor of Minnesota, Vietnam veteran, actor, professional wrestler, media personality, and current icon of libertarian-hued, conspiracy-minded wokeness, walks us through a collection of some of the dumbest things U.S. politicians have said throughout history. And things have only gotten stupider over time. 

“Stupid seems to be everywhere these days,” Ventura writes. “Some believe it’s because the human race is getting stupider and stupider with every passing year. Me? …I’d like to thank television, the internet, social media, and the 24-hour news cycle for bringing more stupid to the public consciousness more efficiently than ever before.”•

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“There Is No Major New Innovation On The Horizon”

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

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Maybe Nick Bilton has been dining with Peter Thiel too much, but he feels, as the prickly PayPal cofounder does, that technology is in a creative torpor. In his latest Vanity Fair “Hive” piece, the journalist looks at the Pokémon Go pandemonium, which has mobilized more people than Turkey’s coup attempt, as proof Americans are waiting for the roar of the next cool tool and settling for Augmented Reality Meowiths. 

Perhaps. But that may be a confusion of real progress and our desire for gadgets, which are often used more as toys than tools. Sometimes those two dovetail, as in the case of the iPhone, but actual advances don’t necessarily arrive on schedule nor fit in a pocket–it’s not just about consumerism. True game-changers aren’t uniformly just fun and games.

An excerpt:

Sure, the game is fun. But it’s not necessarily indicative of a larger trend in augmented reality, a technology that goes back over a decade. Rather, it’s symptomatic of a much larger problem in the tech industry: that there is no major new innovation on the horizon. We have quietly slipped into an era of technological stagnation, where the next several years will bring few meaningful changes to the industry. The reason for this, and the larger problem that investors should be worried about, is that today’s technological advances have hit a ceiling, or are pretty close to one. It’s not that the visionaries are out of ideas, or that they are unaware of what consumers want next. Instead, it’s that the limitations of physics are preventing today’s tech companies from releasing things that today’s consumers are pining for. The ideas behind driverless cars are here, the technology not so much. The same is true for virtual reality, where you have to be plugged into a wall to really experience it’s power. Or for wearable gadgets, or Siri, which are too lethargic and inaccurate to be true products—yet.

Even the technology we readily use today isn’t in need of an upgrade. Our smartphone cameras are sharp enough. Our iPads are fast enough. Our laptops are thin enough. While the electronics industry has been trying to cram 3-D television and curved televisions and not-very-smart “smart televisions” down our throats for the past several years, most people have ignored these advances. The 50-plus-inch TV we paid $500 for at Best Buy is thin enough and crisp enough. There is nothing that TV-makers can offer that will entice us to run out to buy a new one. There is no new social-media platform on the horizon, either. According to a study last month, people in more than than half a dozen countries are spending less time on most social sites. We don’t need another Twitter. We don’t want another Facebook. Snapchat is fun enough.

This is exactly why everyone is obsessing over a game on their smartphones. Consumers are yearning for something else; something new and exciting. But it doesn’t exist.•

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“People Will Continue Dying For The Next Few Years”

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

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José Luis Cordeiro writes in an h+ piece that “indefinite lifespans should be possible in a few decades.” Sounds swell! Until that fine day, however, he suggests we opt for cryopreservation, a relatively inexpensive process that even the most fabulously wealthy among us seldom choose, which shows either a lack of sense or lack of gullibility. In the near future, Cordeiro writes, the frozen ones may be reawakened into eternal life. 

An excerpt 

Toward Immortality

We might soon reach what I call the “death of death”, when death will be basically optional. We might never be completely immortal, since we might always die from accidents, or be killed in many ways, but the objective is to kill involuntary death. Living indefinitely will be possible from both the hardware (biological) side and the software (mental) side.

On the hardware side, English biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey believes that we will soon reach “longevity escape velocity”, which basically means that with continuously increasing lifespans, we will be adding more years to our existence for every additional year that we live. This idea has also been called the “Methuselarity” or “Methuselah Singularity”. Many experiments are currently being done to extend the life, and also rejuvenate, little mice that actually share a big part of our own genome.

On the software side, American engineer and futurist Ray Kurzweil believes that by 2029 an artificial intelligence will pass the Turing Test, and by 2045 the so-called “Technological Singularity” will be reached. That means that artificial intelligence will reach and surpass human intelligence levels, and we will augment and complement with such additional intelligences. We will then connect our biological neocortex to an artificial exocortex, and we will be able to upload and enhance our minds.

Either through our hardware, our software, or both, we will be able to advance towards the idea of the death of death, at least as much as possible, escaping any accidents and avoiding to be killed.

The Bridge Toward Immortality

As discussed earlier, indefinite lifespans should be possible in a few decades, but what can we do until then? The sad truth is that people will continue dying for the next few years, and the only way that we know today to preserve them relatively well is through cryopreservation. Indeed, cryopreservation can be considered as Plan B until we reach Plan A of indefinite lifespans.•

“It Is A Second Half Of The 21st Century Problem”

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

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Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom believes “superintelligence”–machines dwarfing our intellect–is the leading existential threat of our era to humans. He’s either wrong and not alarmed enough by, say, climate change, or correct and warning us of the biggest peril we’ll ever face. Most likely, such a scenario will be a real challenge in the long run, though it’s probably not currently the most paramount one.

In John Thornhill’s Financial Times article about Bostrom, the writer pays some mind to those pushing back at what they feel is needless alarmism attending the academic’s work. An excerpt:

Some AI experts have accused Bostrom of alarmism, suggesting that we remain several breakthroughs short of ever making a machine that “thinks”, let alone surpasses human intelligence. A sceptical fellow academic at Oxford, who has worked with Bostrom but doesn’t want to be publicly critical of his work, says: “If I were ranking the existential threats facing us, then runaway ‘superintelligence’ would not even be in the top 10. It is a second half of the 21st century problem.”

But other leading scientists and tech entrepreneurs have echoed Bostrom’s concerns. Britain’s most famous scientist, Stephen Hawking, whose synthetic voice is facilitated by a basic form of AI, has been among the most strident. “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” he told the BBC.

Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur behind Tesla Motors and an active investor in AI research, tweeted: “Worth reading Superintelligence by Bostrom. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.”

Although Bostrom has a reputation as an AI doomster, he starts our discussion by emphasising the extraordinary promise of machine intelligence, in both the short and long term. “I’m very excited about AI and I think it would be a tragedy if this kind of superintelligence were never developed.” He says his main aim, both modest and messianic, is to help ensure that this epochal transition goes smoothly, given that humankind only has one chance to get it right.

“So much is at stake that it’s really worth doing everything we can to maximise the chances of a good outcome,” he says.•

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“Autonomous Vehicles Will Also Challenge The Very Notion Of Car Ownership”

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

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Driverless cars seem more a matter of when than if, though the ETA differs wildly depending on who’s doing the talking. For the technology to be transformational, the wheel must be torn from the dash, the vehicle in control of itself 100% of the time. Otherwise, it’s a useful tool and one that would still likely reduce deaths, but it won’t be world-changing. If autonomous truly comes to pass, not only will individual vehicle ownership be unnecessary, even fleets of taxis can essentially own themselves.

From the Economist “The World If” issue, an excerpt from “If Autonomous Vehicles Rule the World“:

For a different vision of the driverless future, visit Heathrow airport outside London, and head to a “pod parking” area. Transfers between the car park and terminal are provided by driverless electric pods moving on dedicated elevated roadways. Using a touchscreen kiosk, you summon a pod and specify your destination. A pod, which can seat four people, pulls up, parks itself and opens its doors. Jump in, sit down and press the start button—the only control—and it drives you to your destination, avoiding other pods and neatly parking itself when you arrive, before heading off to pick up its next passengers.

Like riding in the autonomous Audi, travelling by pod is thrilling for the first 30 seconds—but quickly becomes mundane. The difference is that self-driving vehicles that can be summoned and dismissed at will could do more than make driving easier: they promise to overturn many industries and redefine urban life. The spread of driver-assistance technology will be gradual over the next few years, but then the emergence of fully autonomous vehicles could suddenly make existing cars look as outmoded as steam engines and landline telephones. What will the world look like if they become commonplace?

The switch from horse-drawn carriages to motor cars provides an instructive analogy. Cars were originally known as “horseless carriages”—defined, like driverless cars today, by the removal of a characteristic. But having done away with horses, cars proved to be entirely different beasts, facilitating suburbanisation and becoming symbols of self-definition. Driverless vehicles, too, will have unexpected impacts. They will look different. Early cars resembled the carriages from which they were derived, and car design took some years to escape its horse-drawn past. By the same token, autonomous vehicles need look nothing like existing cars. Already, Google’s futuristic pods are on the public roads of California, and some concept designs, liberated from the need to have steering wheels and pedals, have seats facing each other around a table.

Autonomous vehicles will also challenge the very notion of car ownership.•

“When You’re Close To Death We Scan Your Details And Fire Up Your Simulation”

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

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When Russian oligarch Dmitry Itskov vows that by 2045 we’ll be able to upload our consciousness into a computer and achieve a sort of immortality, I’m perplexed. Think about the unlikelihood: It’s not a promise to just create a general, computational brain–difficult enough–but to precisely simulate particular human minds. That ups the ante by a whole lot. While it seems theoretically possible, this process may take awhile.

In his latest excellent Atlantic article, Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano plots the steps required to encase human consciousness, to create a second life that sounds a bit like Second Life. He acknowledges opinions will differ over whether we’ve generated “another you” or some unsatisfactory simulacrum, a mere copy of an original. Graziano’s clearly excited, though, by the possibility that “biological life [may become] more like a larval stage.”

An excerpt:

Let’s presume that at some future time we have all the technological pieces in place. When you’re close to death we scan your details and fire up your simulation. Something wakes up with the same memories and personality as you. It finds itself in a familiar world. The rendering is not perfect, but it’s pretty good. Odors probably don’t work quite the same. The fine-grained details are missing. You live in a simulated New York City with crowds of fellow dead people but no rats or dirt. Or maybe you live in a rural setting where the grass feels like Astroturf. Or you live on the beach in the sun, and every year an upgrade makes the ocean spray seem a little less fake. There’s no disease. No aging. No injury. No death unless the operating system crashes. You can interact with the world of the living the same way you do now, on a smart phone or by email. You stay in touch with living friends and family, follow the latest elections, watch the summer blockbusters. Maybe you still have a job in the real world as a lecturer or a board director or a comedy writer. It’s like you’ve gone to another universe but still have contact with the old one.

But is it you? Did you cheat death, or merely replace yourself with a creepy copy?•

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