Excerpts

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“The Field Of Artificial Intelligence Has A Long History Of Over-Promising And Under-Delivering”

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

John Markoff doesn’t think technology is prone to the work of a blind watchmaker, but I’m not so sure. It would be great if rational thinking governed this area, but technology seems to pull us as much as we push it. Competition, contrasting priorities and simple curiosity can drive us in directions that may not be best for us, even if they are best for progress in a larger sense. The progress of intelligence, I mean. We’re not moths to a flame, but it’s difficult for a mere human being to look away from an inferno.

In his latest New York Times article, Markoff argues that superintelligence is not upon us, that most if not all of us will not live to see the Singularity. On this point, I agree. Perhaps there’ll emerge a clever workaround that allows Moore’s Law to continue apace, but I don’t think that guarantees superintelligence in a few decades. Anyone alive in 2016 who’s planning their day around conscious machines or radical life extension, twin dreams of the Singularitarians, will likely wind up sorely disappointed.

An excerpt:

Recently several well-known technologists and scientists, including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates, have issued warnings about runaway technological progress leading to superintelligent machines that might not be favorably disposed to humanity.

What has not been shown, however, is scientific evidence for such an event. Indeed, the idea has been treated more skeptically by neuroscientists and a vast majority of artificial intelligence researchers.

For starters, biologists acknowledge that the basic mechanisms for biological intelligence are still not completely understood, and as a result there is not a good model of human intelligence for computers to simulate.

Indeed, the field of artificial intelligence has a long history of over-promising and under-delivering. John McCarthy, the mathematician and computer scientist who coined the term artificial intelligence, told his Pentagon funders in the early 1960s that building a machine with human levels of intelligence would take just a decade. Even earlier, in 1958 T he New York Times reported that the Navy was planning to build a “thinking machine” based on the neural network research of the psychologist Frank Rosenblatt. The article forecast that it would take about a year to build the machine and cost about $100,000.

The notion of the Singularity is predicated on Moore’s Law, the 1965 observation by the Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, that the number of transistors that can be etched onto a sliver of silicon doubles at roughly two year intervals. This has fostered the notion of exponential change, in which technology advances slowly at first and then with increasing rapidity with each succeeding technological generation.

At this stage Moore’s Law seems to be on the verge of stalling.•

Tags: John Markoff

“I Think There Is Little Doubt That We’re Probably On The Threshold Of A Whole New Revolution”

April 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I don’t give a screw about Star Trek, the TV series or films, but creator Gene Roddenberry was obviously a special guy and not only for his progressive outlook on race and gender. In a 1976 Penthouse interview conducted by Linda Merinoff, Roddenberry laid out the next 40 years of our society, from the Internet to email to swarms and crowdsourcing to the decline of the traditional postal service to online learning to the telecommunications revolution. Some of his longer-term thoughts on the natural evolution of humans were disquieting even to him. Three excerpts follow.

Penthouse:

What is happening to television as a piece of mechanical equipment?

Gene Roddenberry:

I think there is little doubt that we’re probably on the threshold of a whole new revolution in telecommunications. We are now experimenting with mating television sets with print-out devices, think of TV mated with a Xerox-type machine in which probably our newspapers will ultimately be delivered. It’s a much more efficient system. The minute you put the newspaper to bed electronically, you can then push a button and any house that subscribes to the service can have the thing rolled right out of the TV set. We’re also experimenting, in some cities already, with mating television with simple computers and the home will be run by a home-computing feature. You’ll do your billing on it, your banking, probably a great part of your shopping. I think it is inescapable that we mate TV with reproducing devices, that it will become our postal system of the future, almost certainly our telephone or videophone. So I see television going in either of two directions. One is that it can become that opiate we fear. Or, used properly, it can be a way for all people, everywhere, to have access to all the recorded knowledge of all humanity.

Penthouse:

Where do you think mankind is heading?

Gene Roddenberry:

There’s a theory I have that I’ve been making notes on for a couple of years now and intend to write a book on it sometime in the future. You often hear the question, “I wonder what the next dominant species will be?” I think that completely unnoticed by practically all people is the fact that the next dominant species on earth has already arrived and has been with us for some time. And this is a species that I call socio-organism. It first began to make its appearance when men started to gather together in tribal groups, and then city-states, and more lately in nations, giant corporations, and so on. The socio-organism is a living organism that is made up of individual cells–which are human beings. In other words the United States of America is a socio-organism. It is made up of 200 million cells, many of them become increasingly specialized just as the cells in our body do. Furnish food, take away waste products, or the nerves–the sight, the thinking, the planning. Your local PTA is also a small socio-organism. General Motors and ITT are socio-organisms. The interesting thing about this new creature is that unlike all the past life forms, one cell in a socio-organism can be a member of several of these socio-organisms. Also, they do not have to live in physical proximity with each other as in our bodies. It sounds a rather foolish sci-fi thing to say that General Motors is a living organism. But if you take a few steps back and view it from this point of view, you begin to discover that the evolution of this socio-organism almost exactly parallels everything we know about Darwinian evolution.

Briefly, Darwinian evolution is fairly generally accepted, that the first life forms on earth were individual cells floating on the warm soup seas of the time. Finally, through chance and other factors, groups of these cells discovered that by being gathered together they could get their food more efficiently, protect themselves, and become dominant over the single-cell amoebas. With humans, exactly the same thing happened. More and more individual units began to get more and more specialized. As it became more complex, with more and more highly specialized units, the creature became more and more powerful, was capable of protecting itself, taking care of its individual cells. This is a process of accumulating interdependence. The frightening thing about viewing humankind now, this way, is that the socio-organisms are really becoming more dominant than the individual. In Red China they are teaching the very lessons that our bodies have, over the centuries, taught to its cells–that we can no longer exist for ourselves. We must exist for the whole. But you can see the same thing in the United States. People now live the corporate morality. If I join a corporation, my duty is to the corporation. If the corporation says lie, cheat, steal, move here, do that, I must do it because my duty is to the whole. So if indeed civilization is following the laws of Darwinian evolution, you can predict ahead a few centuries or a few dozen or hundred centuries, until a time in which the independent individual will have totally vanished and this planet will be inhabited by totally specialized cells who function as part of these giant, living things. The great battle and great decision we humans face is whether to let this continue until we become faceless, totally interdependent organisms. Whether this is good or bad I don’t know. You might, if it were possible, talk to a cell of my heart and say, “Look cell, are you happy?” It seems to have adapted well. Maybe this is the way it suppose to be. Maybe there is some form of mass mind, mass consciousness, when a socio-organism reaches its final form, and we will be part of it and perfectly happy to be part of it. There may be contentments and happiness in this that we presently can’t visualize. I fear it because I can’t visualize it being better than remaining a free individual. I also fear the fact that if I remain, and insist on remaining totally independent and free, that the way things are going I am to be treated as a cancer cell by the socio-organisms around me, which will find it necessary to eradicate me because I endanger the organism.

Penthouse:

What is one’s purpose in this socio-organism? Just to survive?

Gene Roddenberry:

No. My purpose… that’s a hard question. I’ll try to answer it. My purpose is to live out whatever my function may be as a part of the whole that is God. I am a piece of Him. I believe that all intelligence is a part of the whole and it may be a great cyclical thing in which we have to go on, evolving, perfecting, until we reach the point where we are God, so that we can create ourselves so that we know we existed in the first place.

Penthouse:

You’ve said that you felt that Star Trek was a very optimistic show. Are you still that optimistic in the 70’s about the future of mankind?

Gene Roddenberry:

Yes, but I think that if we have an earth of the Star Trek century, it will not be an unbroken, steady rise to that kind of civilization. We’re in some very tough times. Our twentieth-century technological civilization has no guarantees that it is going to stay around for a long time. But I think man is really an incredible creature. We’ve had civilizations fall before and we build a somewhat better one on the ashes every time. And I’d never consider the society we depicted in Star Trek necessarily a direct, uninterrupted outgrowth of our present civilization, with its heavy emphasis on materialism. I think But my optimism is not for our society. It’s for our essential ingredient in humankind. And I think we humans will rebuild and, if necessary, we’ll lose another civilization and rebuild again on top of that until slowly, bit by bit, we’ll get there.•

“Now It’s What You Can Do With Machine Learning”

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

We can spend our time discerning patterns, but with the surfeit of information at our avail, no one has that much time.

Quentin Hardy of the New York Times, who does reliably excellent reporting about technology, has penned a piece about where the relationship between AI and business may be headed, with an emphasis on recognizing, sorting, mapping and teaching. Whether this means we’ll require a new class of workers or merely new algorithms to make sense of the mountains of data, no one can say for sure, but someone or something will have to explain the new normal. Both carbon and silicon will likely be required, at least initially.

An excerpt:

Over the last decade, smartphones, social networks and cloud computing have moved from feeding the growth of companies like Facebook and Twitter, leapfrogging to Uber, Airbnb and others that have used the phones, personal rating systems and powerful remote computers in the cloud to create their own new businesses.

Believe it or not, that stuff may be heading for the rearview mirror already. The tech industry’s new architecture is based not just on the giant public computing clouds of Google, Microsoft and Amazon, but also on their A.I. capabilities. These clouds create more efficient and supple use of computing resources, available for rent. Smaller clouds used in corporate systems are designed to connect to them.

The A.I. resources [Google Compute Engine head Diane B.] Greene is opening up at Google are remarkable. Google’s autocomplete feature that most of us use when doing a search can instantaneously touch 500 computers in several locations as it guesses what we are looking for. Services like Maps and Photos have over a billion users, sorting places and faces by computer. Gmail sifts through 1.4 petabytes of data, or roughly two billion books’ worth of information, every day.

Handling all that, plus tasks like language translation and speech recognition, Google has amassed a wealth of analysis technology that it can offer to customers. Urs Hölzle, Ms. Greene’s chief of technical infrastructure, predicts that the business of renting out machines and software will eventually surpass Google advertising. In 2015, ad profits were $16.4 billion.

“In the ’80s, it was spreadsheets,” said Andreas Bechtolsheim, a noted computer design expert who was Google’s first investor. “Now it’s what you can do with machine learning.”•

Tags: Andreas Bechtolsheim, Diane B. Greene, Quentin Hardy

“Railway Buffs Are Getting Up Close And Personal With The New Superfast Maglev Train”

April 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

For the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo, Japan is promising–perhaps overpromising–driverless taxis, robot assistants, instant language translation, etc. In the “et cetera” category is next-level maglev trains, which may reach a world-record 374 mph. Railroad geeks, a global phenomenon, are excited and turning out at viewing posts for test runs.

From Asahi Shimbun:

FUEFUKI, Yamanashi Prefecture–Railway buffs are getting up close and personal with the new superfast maglev train after two special observation platforms overlooking a test line were opened to the public last month.

In addition to seeing the ultimate in train technology speed past at close quarters, observers can also take in the beautiful backdrop of the expanse of the Kofu Basin and the peaks of the Southern Japan Alps.

As most parts of the test line has been carved underground through mountains, the observation platforms provide rare photo opportunities and places to wait for the test train.

The Yamanashi maglev test line is for what will be called the Linear Chuo Shinkansen, and when it goes into service it will allow passengers to travel between Tokyo and Nagoya in just 40 minutes.

One of the lookouts, the Hanatoriyama observatory, is in a park called “Linear no Mieru Oka” (hill where the linear motor train can be seen). The park spreads out over 2,900 square meters including the area for car parks for visitors.•

“This Is As Real As Mud”

April 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

There are numerous reasons for the surprising success of Donald’s Trump’s racist bumfight of a campaign, something even the hideous hotelier himself didn’t really want. He impetuously entered the race to “burnish his brand,” which stinks like a cheap cologne concocted from sewer water. A troll NEVER really wants to be king.

The emotional homunculus was subsequently aided by myriad factors: the the drift into the fringe by the GOP base, the initially overcrowded field of lacklustre candidates, a racist backlash to the first African-American President and struggling media companies gladly accepting free content, no matter how ugly or inappropriate the Reality TV show was. It’s not that cable news should have ignored the rise of Trump, but it shouldn’t have abetted it to erase the red ink, either. But there was CNN, Jeff Zucker’s clown car of infotainment, pretending populism in the name of the bottom line, and Maureen Dowd realizing far too late that Trump had never been a “fun brand” and had actually become something fascistic. They were not alone in their opportunism or blissful ignorance.

Two passages about this Baba Booey of an election season, one from Markus Feldenkirchen in Spiegel and a couple of David Remnick quotes from The Hollywood Reporter.

From Feldenkirchen:

The political culture that is emerging here is a mixture of primary school, mafia, and porn industry. It alternates between cries of “He started it!,” brawls, misogyny, and penis size comparison. It’s almost as if guests at a formal dinner, where basic table manners were a given, suddenly began to belch and break wind without restraint. America is currently experiencing not only political but also moral bankruptcy. Dirty tricks are not new in US election campaigns, but the new lows to which the candidates are currently stooping are unprecedented.

It’s not just the two bullies at the top who are to blame. Their rise was made possible through a decline in values such as decency, honesty, tolerance and fairness — a process that has been hastened by the Republican Party more than anyone else. For too long, it has pursued fiscal, economic and social policies that served only companies and the rich, the financial backers of their election campaigns. At the same time, millions of Americans slid into precarity. Cultural declines are often the consequence of real economic decline. Propriety isn’t the primary concern of those with financial worries, those who are embittered and living without hope. Instead, the neglected long for a culture of radicalism and coarseness. Destruction, they believe, may presage something better.

Over the course of decades, the Republicans have likewise built up a culture of contempt for public goods and services. They argue for educational policies that exclude the non-privileged, instead pushing them towards stultification and barbarization. They allow billionaires like the Koch brothers to direct the party’s policy and appoint it’s key candidates. A few years ago, Republicans furthermore embraced the radical and destructive Tea Party movement, thus marking the party’s departure from any semblance of moderation.It is too late to turn back the clock.•

From Remnick:

“Donald Trump, for decades, occupied a kind of comic space in the New York ego-scape,” [Remnick] continued. “He was the guy who discovered, ‘If I just say outrageous things and behave like a cartoon of Louis XIV, I will become enormously famous. It doesn’t matter that I’m wrong or it doesn’t matter that I’m ill-informed and it doesn’t matter that I’m even racist. Some portion of people will find this hilarious.’ But now it’s not a question of whether or not he gets to put his name on the side of a skyscraper. It’s whether he has the nuclear codes.”

Not surprisingly, The New Yorker’s coverage of the presidential candidate has been withering. Remnick penned a piece in the March 14 issue of the magazine that dredged up some Trump bon mots that would make even the shameless billionaire wince (marveling about Melania’s bowel movements or his willingness to have sex with Princess Diana). “This is not a Seth Rogen movie; this is as real as mud,” Remnick wrote.

Regardless of the outcome, the 2016 presidential campaign will go down in the annals of politics thanks to Trump, Remnick told THR.

“I can’t believe that in 100 years, we won’t remember the bizarre, frightening, hilarious — did I mention bizarre? — quality of this race, and it begins and ends with Donald Trump,” he added. “You have an American demagogue getting very close to the Republican nomination. This is as close as an American demagogue has gotten to power in history. George Wallace, Huey Long, all those people never got as close as Donald Trump. We may laugh and find it all a gas. And for journalists, it’s a kind of welfare program. Everybody’s ratings get boosted and people read about it and everybody’s happy, but it’s pretty damn frightening.”•

Tags: David Remnick, Markus Feldenkirchen

“The Party Has Mobilized Its Unique And Extensive Network Of Surveillance, Security, And Secret Police”

April 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

During the 1930s, a surprising number of American captains of industry looked longingly at Mussolini’s Italy and even Hitler’s Germany. What they thought they saw was indomitable power. How can we compete with well-coordinated Fascism and totalitarianism, they churlishly asked, with our impudent U.S. laborers? They’ll eat our lunch.

Although Mussolini met with the business end of a meat hook and Hitler died a bunker-based suicide, modern China has aroused those feelings of jealousy all over again in some of our current pouty plutocrats. There is some cause for envy. It’s awe-inspiring what that nation has done in short order, with its headlong dive through the Industrial Age and into the Digital one. Tens of millions have been lifted from abject poverty through mass, manic urbanization, though the day-to-day costs have been steep. It’s striking, though, that while the world’s highest cancer rates and the planet’s worst air pollution receive plenty of attention, the new money has seemingly papered over how sick the larger system is. Authoritarianism is still antithetical to human nature.

Xi Jinping’s current tough-on-crime crusade, aided by cutting-edge sensors and algorithms, is more a political purge than a righteous reckoning for the corrupt. It’s Mao married to modern technology.

The opening of “Crackdown in China,” Orville Schell’s excellent NYRB article:

“As a liberal, I no longer feel I have a future in China,” a prominent Chinese think tank head in the process of moving abroad recently lamented in private. Such refrains are all too familiar these days as educated Chinese professionals express growing alarm over their country’s future. Indeed, not since the 1970s when Mao still reigned and the Cultural Revolution still raged has the Chinese leadership been so possessed by Maoist nostalgia and Leninist-style leadership.

As different leaders have come and gone, China specialists overseas have become accustomed to reading Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tea leaves as oscillating cycles of political “relaxation” and “tightening.” China has long been a one-party Leninist state with extensive censorship and perhaps the largest secret police establishment in the world. But what has been happening lately in Beijing under the leadership of Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping is no such simple fluctuation. It is a fundamental shift in ideological and organizational direction that is beginning to influence both China’s reform agenda and its foreign relations.

At the center of this retrograde trend is Xi’s enormously ambitious initiative to purge the Chinese Communist Party of what he calls “tigers and flies,” namely corrupt officials and businessmen both high and low. Since it began in 2012, the campaign has already netted more than 160 “tigers” whose rank is above or equivalent to that of the deputy provincial or deputy ministerial level, and more than 1,400 “flies,” all lower-level officials.¹ But it has also morphed from an anticorruption drive into a broader neo-Maoist-style mass purge aimed at political rivals and others with differing ideological or political views.

To carry out this mass movement, the Party has mobilized its unique and extensive network of surveillance, security, and secret police in ways that have affected many areas of Chinese life.•

Tags: Orville Schell, Xi Jinping

“The New Era Of Megaleaks Is Already Underway”

April 5, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Despite Snowden’s leak, governments will continue to have powerful tools of surveillance and will likely use them often despite any legislation. But it isn’t a one-sided fight.

As the eye-popping Panama Papers demonstrate, we’ve permanently moved into an era of cat-and-mouse games among governments, corporations and private citizens, with encryption tools and smaller and more powerful microchips allowing the lone leaker to be the mouse that roared–to even become the feline.

Andy Greenberg’s Wired article details how the “Mother of All Megaleaks,” which makes Assange seem a relatively small matter, began simply with a mysterious message sent to a German newspaper reporter. The writer also explains how technology has enabled such revelations to grow in frequency, size and impact. An excerpt:

The leaks are bound to cause ripples around the world—not least of all for Mossack Fonseca itself. The firm didn’t respond to a request for comment from Wired, but it wrote to the Guardian that “many of the circumstances you cite are not and have never been clients of Mossack Fonseca” and that “we have always complied with international protocols … to assure as is reasonably possible, that the companies we incorporate are not being used for tax evasion, money laundering, terrorist finance or other illicit purposes.” Another letter posted to WikiLeaks’ Twitter feed, meanwhile, purports to show how the firm has responded to its own clients:

Mossack Fonseca and its customers won’t be the last to face an embarrassing or even incriminating megaleak. Encryption and anonymity tools like Tor have only become more widespread and easy to use, making it safer in some ways than ever before for sources to reach out to journalists across the globe. Data is more easily transferred—and with tools like Onionshare, more easily securely transferred—than ever before. And actual Moore’s Law continues to fit more data on smaller and smaller slices of hardware every year, any of which could be ferreted out of a corporation or government agency by a motivated insider and put in an envelope to a trusted journalist.

The new era of megaleaks is already underway: The Panama Papers represent the fourth tax haven leak coordinated by the ICIJ since just 2013.•

Tags: Andy Greenberg

“In Utopia There Will Be Wide Stretches Of Cheerless Or Unhealthy Or Toilsome Or Dangerous Land”

April 5, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

H.G. Wells thought you couldn’t really have utopias without a dystopias. The visionary writer believed you needed to aspire to the former and parcel out space for the latter, separate pristine living spaces from the despoiled, industrialized areas that would be exploited to support them. (It’s an idea Larry Page endorses.) Even in a post-industrial landscape, progress will similarly be a mixed blessing. The future is bright–and dark.

A brief excerpt from Wells’ 1905 “A Modern Utopia”:

But in Utopia there will be wide stretches of cheerless or unhealthy or toilsome or dangerous land with never a household; there will be regions of mining and smelting, black with the smoke of furnaces and gashed and desolated by mines, with a sort of weird inhospitable grandeur of industrial desolation, and the men will come thither and work for a spell and return to civilisation again, washing and changing their attire in the swift gliding train. And by way of compensation there will be beautiful regions of the earth specially set apart and favoured for children; in them the presence of children will remit taxation, while in other less wholesome places the presence of children will be taxed.•

“His Vision Of The Future Was Nonetheless Optimistic”

April 5, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Utopians tend to overpromise.

Techno-utopians go even further. It’s not that Singularitarians with bold plans for transforming medicine or transportation are making theoretically impossible claims, but they sure have aggressive timeframes and seem to think tomorrow will be smooth as can be. But it’s a world with wrinkles and probably needs to be.

Perhaps by the end of the century, we’ll live in a post-scarcity society with robot assistants and miraculous medicine, though there’ll still be problems–stubborn old ones, new ones, ones we can’t yet imagine. We’re far from perfect, and our machines won’t be flawless, either. Progress is wonderful, but it’s not an arrow pointed toward the heavens.

From Nick Romeo’s Daily Beast piece about Singularity University:

It’s common for tech industry rhetoric to invoke the ideal of a better world, but since its 2008 inception, Singularity University has articulated an astonishingly ambitious series of goals and projects that use technological progress for philanthropic ends. Medicine is just one of many domains that [co-founder Peter] Diamandis wants to fundamentally change. He and others at Singularity are also working to develop and support initiatives that will provide universal access to high-quality education, restore and protect polluted environments, and transition the economy to entirely sustainable energy sources.

His audience was a group of 98 executives from 44 countries around the world; each had paid $14,000 to attend the weeklong program at Singularity University’s NASA Research Park campus in Mountain View, California. As Diamandis moved through the sectors of the economy that artificial intelligence would soon dominate—medicine, law, finance, academia, engineering—the crowd seemed strangely energized by the prospect of its imminent irrelevance. Singularity University was generating more than $1 million of revenue by telling its prosperous guests that they would soon be surpassed by machines.

But his vision of the future was nonetheless optimistic. Diamandis believes that solar energy will soon satisfy the demands of the entire planet and replace the market for fossil fuels. This will mean fewer wars and cleaner air. Systems for converting atmospheric humidity into clean drinking water will become cheap and ubiquitous. The industrial meat industry will also vanish, replaced by tastier and healthier laboratory-grown products with no environmental downsides. He also predicts that exponential increases in the power of AI would soon render teachers and universities superfluous. The best education in the world will become freely available to anyone.•

Tags: Nick Romeo, Peter Diamandis

“They Are Wheelers And Dealers”

April 5, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Gary Silverman’s excellent Financial Times article includes passages about repossessed monkeys and Ukrainian trophy wives, as all good stories about the odious Trump campaign must.

The piece is about the corrosive candidate’s political point man in Vegas, his billionaire business partner Phil Ruffin, who would be a wonderfully entertaining Horatio Alger figure if he wasn’t working his damndest to elect an American Mussolini. A “Cadillac-and-redhead man” is how the journalist describes his subject, who in the ’50s repossessed a surly simian for a Texas department store and in the Aughts acquired a second wife, an Eastern European beauty queen 46 years his junior.

Ruffin hated the monkey and loves his bride but lacks any kind of passion for politics. He promised his buddy he’d back him, however, and a deal’s a deal.

An excerpt:

A wiry, wily Wichita, Kansas, native who was 147 pounds when he was winning titles as a high school wrestler, Mr Ruffin is the stylistic opposite of his brash buddy from New York. He wears wire-rim glasses. His thinning hair, dyed a deep orange, falls haphazardly across his scalp, unlike Mr Trump’s structured coiffure.

They are the kind of Americans who inspired historian Walter McDougall’s description of the US as a nation of “hustlers”, by which he meant “builders, doers, go-getters, dreamers, hard workers, inventors, organisers (and) engineers” as well as “self-promoters, scofflaws, occasional frauds and peripatetic self-reinventors”.

Both trace their family histories in the US to the frontier. Mr Trump is the grandson of a German immigrant who took part in the Alaska gold rush before settling in New York. Mr Ruffin’s paternal grandfather left Lebanon for Oklahoma, where Mr Ruffin’s father recalled witnessing the 1924 gunfight that took the life of Bill Tilghman, the legendary gunslinger and marshal of Dodge City, Kansas.

Neither Mr Trump nor Mr Ruffin has created a smartphone app or commanded an enterprise of the complexity of a General Electric, a Goldman Sachs or a Google. They are wheelers and dealers in real estate, hotels, casinos and whatever else comes their way. Theirs is a milieu where money is made by seizing moments, squeezing contractors, battling creditors, and “pushing and pushing and pushing,” as Mr Trump put it in The Art of the Deal, his 1987 book.

“We negotiate all the time,” says Mr Ruffin. “We negotiate something every week.”•

Tags: Donald Trump, Gary Silverman, Phil Ruffin

“How Shall The New Environment Be Programmed Now That We Have Become So Involved With Each Other?”

April 4, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Marshall McLuhan is dead, of course, and so is Jerome Agel, the “producer” of the oracle’s most famous book, 1967’s The Medium Is The Massage: An Inventory of Effects. The only principal from the project still with us is its revolutionary graphic designer, Quentin Fiore, who turned 96 in February. The artist subsequently worked on books by or about Buckminster Fuller, Stanley Kubrick and Jerry Rubin. How are you these days, Quentin Fiore?

McLuhan not only named the Global Village but also feared it. And there’ll be no retreat. Facebook, for one, may fall into steep decline, become a virtual ghost town, but it won’t matter one bit. The new arrangement is only going to grow deeper. An ominous passage from early in the book which proved awesomely prophetic:

How much do you make? Have you ever contemplated suicide? Are you now or have you ever been…? I have here before me…Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know. The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions–the patterns of mechanistic technologies–are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval by the electrically computerized dossier bank–that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early ‘mistakes.’ We have already reached a point where remedial control, born out of knowledge of media and their total effects on all of us, must be exerted. How shall the new environment be programmed now that we have become so involved with each other, now that all of us have become the unwitting work force for social change? What’s that buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing?•

“I Think About This Sort Of Problem Happening In Orbit”

April 4, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Will robots rise up and kill humans? Only if it’s a just universe.

I’m only half-kidding about that.

Maybe Weak AI will someday unwittingly cause a cascading disaster that dooms or us, or Strong AI, should it be developed, will take an instant disliking to our messy breathing and snuff it out, but even far short of these doomsday scenarios, it’s awfully difficult for carbon and silicon to simply be coworkers. A freestyle-chess collaboration between humans and robots will probably be necessary for progress on Earth in the short- and medium-term, and it’s even trickier when these two partners are blasted into space.

In an essay at The Conversation, space roboticist Riccardo Bevilacqua thinks about the difficulty of collaboration out there. “The question for the future,” he writes, “is how we transmit intent between humans and robots, in both directions.” An excerpt:

When I bought an autonomous vacuum cleaner, one that roams the house on its own, I thought I was going to save time and be able to enjoy a book or a movie, or play longer with the kids. I ended up robot-proofing every room, making sure wires and cables are out of the way, closing doors, placing electronic signposts for the robot to follow and much more – often daily. I cannot fully understand or predict what the system will do, so I don’t trust it. As a result, I play it safe, and spend time doing things to accommodate the needs I imagine the robot might have.

As a space roboticist, I think about this sort of problem happening in orbit. Imagine an astronaut on a spacewalk, working on repairing something damaged on the outside of the spacecraft. Several tools might be needed, and parts to mend or replace others. An autonomous spacecraft could serve as a floating toolbox, holding parts and tools until they’re needed, and staying close to the astronaut as she moves around the area needing to be fixed. Another robot could be clamping parts together before they are permanently fastened.

How will these robots know where they’ll be needed to go next, to be useful but not in the way? How will the astronaut know whether the robots are planning to move to the place she actually needs? What if something comes loose unexpectedly – can the person and the machinery figure out how to stay out of each other’s way while handling the situation efficiently?•

Tags: Riccardo Bevilacqua

“High-Speed Chases Could Become A Thing Of The Past”

April 4, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Interesting Marketwatch article by Martin Libicki about the potential driverless age allowing law enforcement to override controls of cars. I only have one question: Why would the autos need to be driverless for this to occur?

Cars are already rolling computers and will only continue to be developed in that direction. Such machines can be hacked, and it would make sense that police will eventually have the ability to externally take control of a computerized car. I think the plausibility of this scenario will ultimately come down to what society finds acceptable when we write laws, not to the advent of autonomous vehicles.

From Libicki:

It is time to start thinking about the rules of the new road. Otherwise, we may end up with some analog to today’s chaos in cyberspace, which arose from decisions in the 1980s about how personal computers and the Internet would work.

One of the biggest issues will be the rules under which public infrastructures and public safety officers may be empowered to override how autonomous vehicles are controlled.

It is not hard to imagine why they might want such override power. One is for traffic control. As AVs proliferate there are many advantages to having them talk with intelligent roadways, the better to use scarce freeway space. Controls may also be imposed to leave lanes clear for emergency vehicles or crowded busses. Road conditions that are hard to detect by AV sensors, like weather-related lane closures, may also be more efficiently and fairly handled by having roadways or emergency crews redirect AVs away from problematic lanes, as well as around police, fire, and EMS activity. Overrides could be used to restrict certain vehicles from sensitive locations, like military sites.

More intrusive controls may be called for to deal with crime. For instance, high-speed chases could become a thing of the past.•

Tags: Martin Libicki

“The ’80s Deserve Mark Kostabi”

April 4, 2016 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

In the Breitbart.com post, I mentioned Mark Kostabi’s 1980s high jinks, in which the artist employed a cadre of rotating wage slaves to provide him with ideas and get paint on their hands so he wouldn’t have to. It was vicious commentary on the soulless cash grab of both the art world and Manhattan in that decade, which also allowed the painter a prime place in the gold rush. It was audacious and shameless and disgusting and perfect.

Here’s the opening sharply written 1988 People piece about the artist by Michael Small:

I don’t use people. But I allow them to serve me—Mark Kostabi

A clerk answers the phone in a Manhattan studio and asks painter Mark Kostabi if he wants to take the call. “It’s one of my sleazy customers,” Kostabi cheerily informs a reporter. “He just bought 24 paintings for $122,000 total.” Without informing the customer, Kostabi punches a button to broadcast the conversation over a speaker. “Mark, you’re gonna be a giant in this industry, bigger than a giant!” the caller raves and offers to buy Kostabi dinner. With a Cheshire cat grin, Kostabi accepts, then asks his benefactor, “Are you going to bring wads of cash for me? I hope so.”

The ’80s deserve Mark Kostabi. In a time when owning certified art has become both a popular investment and a surefire source of power and fame, Kostabi, 27, raises hype to undreamed of levels of crassness. So consumed is he with deals and his image that he has no time left over for painting. Instead he pays other artists $4.50 to $10.50 an hour to imitate the style of his earlier works. His 24-year-old fiancée, a former hairstylist known as Fontaine, earns $300 a week sketching ideas; other hirelings enlarge her drawings on canvas, forge Kostabi’s signature and come up with titles. Two shifts of seven painters produce about six canvases a day, which Kostabi sells for $4,000 to $30,000 apiece. So far in 1988, he has earned more than $1 million.

Clearly he hasn’t done it with flattery. “Anyone who buys my paintings is a total fool,” says Kostabi. “But the more I spit in their faces, the more they beg me to sell them another painting.”

The spat-upon are by no means non-entities. Among the owners of Kostabi’s works, which usually show faceless mannequins armed with such mundane images as cash registers or toilet plungers, are New York’s Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. His paintings have appeared on a Smith Barney brochure and Bloomingdale’s shopping bags. His new book, Sadness Because the Video Store Was Closed, makes his paintings available to anyone with $19.95. Kostabi says that Sly Stallone paid $20,000 for two of the book’s originals, one showing two women making love. “He went for the T&A paintings,” notes Kostabi.

To say that some people dislike these works is an understatement. “Kostabi’s paintings are so bad that they even subvert the good name of ‘bad painting,’ ” an Artforum reviewer complained in 1986. Not so fast, other experts retort. “Mark has staked out a valid conceptual idea of art, dealing with status and the hypocrisy of the art world,” says Richard Fishman, a Brown University art professor who invited Kostabi to address his classes. Critic Vivien Raynor has praised Kostabis in the New York Times for their “glistening, sometimes morbid, sometimes witty fantasies.”

Kostabi hates to acknowledge any artist as an inspiration, but he admits his mass production schemes are traceable to the Renaissance, when Rubens hired lesser artists to do the details on his paintings. Kostabi’s hunger for publicity, on the other hand, is pure Warhol. “To me, fame is love,” says Kostabi. “And I need love.” But unlike Warhol, who spoke to everyone without revealing anything, Kostabi will answer any personal question. “I don’t mind if you portray me as a totalitarian wretch,” he says. “Whatever it takes to get me on the talk show circuit.”

Though Kostabi’s employees generally find him entertaining, he is not known for his generosity. In 1987 Diana Gentleman, a former model and music student, beat out 75 artists who answered Kostabi’s newspaper ad for someone to supply him with ideas. Less than six months later she stormed out sobbing. “I realized that I was being exploited beyond my imagination,” Gentleman says. “In the first two months I put out 300 drawings, and I wasn’t earning enough to support myself. I found out recently that one of my drawings was turned into a painting that is now in the Guggenheim. He never bothered to tell them that.” Replies Kostabi: “Legally they are my paintings. The artists work on my time, and they’re paid for it.” Well, most of them are. He doesn’t worry about job applicants who send ideas that he uses for nothing.

Among those who do get paid is Claude, 24, who now earns $9 an hour, and has been turning out three to six Kostabis a week for a year. Though his own intricate works are priced at $200 to $2,000, his Kostabis sell for up to $30,000. If that bothers him, he’s not letting on. “It’s a fun job compared to being a waiter,” Claude says. “And I don’t feel that I need recognition. It’s his artistic statement, his name, his reputation.”

Ironically, most of the hip, good-looking painters who now call Kostabi boss are just the sort who would have intimidated him as a nerdy teenager in Whittier, Calif. The third of four children born to Kaljo Kostabi, a maker of brass musical instruments, and his wife, Rita, a fund-raiser, Mark dropped his Estonian first name, Kalev, but otherwise flunked conformity dismally. “I thought I was the ugliest guy in my high school,” he says, “and I was definitely a weirdo. I would stand up on tables in front of the class and scream and spout off.” He studied art for a few years at Fullerton College and at Cal State Fullerton and flunked a business-economics marketing course. “Nobody understood that I could sell things by insulting people, which is what I did for class demonstrations,” he says. “But it worked, and that’s just what I do now.”

Heading to Manhattan in 1982, Kostabi quickly put his chutzpah to work.•

Tags: Mark Kostabi, Michael Small

“That Person Does Not Exist. It Is A Collective Consciousness Of Various Different People Who Come And Go.”

April 3, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Taking a Kostabi-ish assembly-line approach to writing is nothing new for big-name popular novelists who become small industries. James Patterson has long been the commander of a brigade of potboiler-producing privates and Robert Ludlum’s estate hasn’t allowed his death to slow “his” output. These are light entertainments, though, and no one is trying to fool anyone, so no harm is seemingly done.

It’s a different thing, however, for a journalist to surreptitiously sign his name to work turned out by a team, using an approach similar to the one employed by the resolutely unfunny Fat Jewish in collecting the “best” jokes about how white girls order Starbucks. Breitbart.com, a conservative site that reads like the offspring of Matt Drudge and a Chernobyl zookeeper, apparently does something of the sort. According to a BuzzFeed piece by Joseph Bernstein, the prickish provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos takes credit for the efforts of a stable of unpaid interns. It’s crowdsourcing in a sense, though the many are hidden and the one not what he appears to be.

The opening:

A leading voice of the new “alt-right,” Breitbart.com tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos, does not write many of the articles that appear under his byline on the conservative news site, two sources who have worked directly with him told BuzzFeed News.

These sources — a former intern and someone who has worked with Yiannopoulos for years both in and outside of the Breitbart News Network — as well as a video taken from a private chat offer a glimpse behind the curtain of one of a new movement’s leading provocateurs. The sources also suggest that much of the commentator’s work is written by a bevy of mostly unpaid personal interns.

Yiannopoulos confirmed in an interview with BuzzFeed News that he has “about 44” interns — “a mix of paid and unpaid” — writing and conducting research for him. But he denied that other people write stories for him start to finish.

“Two people write Breitbart stuff for me,” he told BuzzFeed News, but “ghostwriting is too great a word.” He said that the majority of his interns are researchers and that some write speeches for him. “I have two books coming out this year,” he said. “It’s completely standard for someone with a career like mine to have researchers and assistants and ghostwriters.”

Yet the sources who came forward to BuzzFeed News tell a different story. “Milo Yiannopoulos is not one person,” said the Breitbart employee. “That person does not exist. It is a collective consciousness of various different people who come and go.”•

Tags: Joseph Bernstein, Milo Yiannopoulos

“Technology Will Render Such A Shift Inevitable”

April 3, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Silicon Valley technologists are mythologized for birthing products in their garages, but considering the room serving as a makeshift workspace, cars are conspicuously not among those goods. Will 3D printing change that?

Will there come a day when a handful of engineers and designers in grad school are able to turn an automotive startup into a going concern, without massive factories and thousands of employees? Let’s say driverless makes vehicles lighter and cheaper and these latter-day Henry Fords dream up a better vehicle. They raise VC to purchase their own 3D printers or offload the production responsibility to companies that specifically handle that chore. Can they make a car that’s competitively priced? Can hundreds or thousands of such small-scale companies exist and compete? It’s already being tried, but can it succeed? Today’s costs make it almost impossible to envision presently, but you could have said the same of computer hardware a decade before Homebrew tinkerers began repurposing their garages.

Even if automaking isn’t markedly decentralized by 3D printers, much of manufacturing will likely be. It will have good and bad effects on the economy, as these outfits won’t produce a ton of assembly-line positions, but they will likely lower consumer costs greatly. It’s progress with an asterisk.

The opening of “How 3-D Printing Will Make Manufacturing in America Great Again,” a Newsweek piece by Kevin Maney:

If the folks at 3D Hubs are right, presidential candidates can stop fulminatingabout bringing back manufacturing from China or Bangladesh or wherever.

Technology will render such a shift inevitable. In the next decade, the whole business dynamic that makes it a good idea for a lot of U.S. companies to manufacture overseas will go poof. The very concept of a big honkin’ factory will eventually become as anachronistic as a typing pool.

Instead, companies are going to custom-make most things in small factories right in your neighborhood or town, close enough so you could go pick up your stuff, or maybe have it dropped onto your porch by a drone. Factories will essentially get broken up, scattered and made local. As 3D Hubs co-founder Bram de Zwart puts it, “Why would you put a thousand machines in one place when you can put one machine in a thousand places?”

Such is the promise of “distributed manufacturing.” The World Economic Forum last year named it one of the most important technology trends to watch. It is expected to have a mighty impact on jobs, geopolitics and the climate. And while massive distributed factories might seem a little far-fetched in 2016, a handful of companies are starting to make it happen.•

Tags: Bram de Zwart, Kevin Maney

“Where Do You Start The Movie?”

April 3, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Donald Trump, equal parts George Steinbrenner and George Wallace, has made it clear that there will be riots if he doesn’t get the GOP nomination. There will likely be riots even if he does. There’ll be riots.

The cancerous candidate sat for an interview with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of the Washington Post, and while it doesn’t make Trump answer for his racist and xenophobic comments and peculiar policy positions, it is fascinating as a psychological portrait of a delusional megalomaniac who doesn’t even understand his own motivations. His extremely logorrheic explanation of why he entered politics isn’t exactly analogous to Ted Kennedy’s famous waterloo when he was unable to express why he wanted to be President during his 1979 joust with Jimmy Carter, but I think it does confirm suspicions that Trump impetuously entered the race because he’s an unhappy man whose need for attention can’t be sated. Thanks to a perfect storm of GOP craziness, he wound up the clear frontrunner, even if his path to delegate majority is increasingly difficult to find.

If it succeeds as a personality profile, the interview fails on other grounds. One passage that’s somehow making news is a Trump prediction the Post reporters were remiss in not effectively addressing. It’s this:

“I’m talking about a bubble where you go into a very massive recession. Hopefully not worse than that, but a very massive recession.”•

If it sounds familiar, that’s because Trump periodically releases such sky-is-falling mouthfarts which almost always turn out to be wrong. Here’s another one from 2012:

Billionaire Donald Trump says the U.S. economy is poised for “massive inflation” and is warning investors to take steps now to protect themselves.•

Someday the hideous hotelier will be correct in a stopped-clock-being-right-twice-a-day fashion, but it won’t be because of any knowledge. Woodward and Costa should have pushed back at this proclamation.

The opening:

Bob Woodward:

And the real first question is, where do you start the movie of your decision to run for president? Because that is a big deal. A lot of internal/external stuff, and we’d love to hear your monologue on how you did it.

Donald Trump:

Where do you start the movie? I think it’s actually — and very interesting question — but I think the start was standing on top of the escalator at Trump Tower on June 16, which is the day — Bob, you were there, and you know what I mean, because there has. . . . I mean, it looked like the Academy Awards. I talk about it. There were so many cameras. So many — it was packed. The atrium of Trump Tower, which is a very big place, was packed. It literally looked like the Academy Awards. And . . . .

Bob Woodward:

But we want to go before that moment.

Donald Trump:

Before that? Okay, because that was really . . . .

Bob Woodward:

Because, other words, there’s an internal Donald with Donald.

Robert Costa:

Maybe late 2014 or before you started hiring people?

Donald Trump:

Well, but that was — okay, but I will tell you, until the very end. . . . You know, I have a good life. I built a great company. It’s been amazingly — I’m sure you looked at the numbers. I have very little debt, tremendous assets. And great cash flows. I have a wonderful family. Ivanka just had a baby. Doing this is not the easiest thing in the world to do. People have — many of my friends, very successful people, have said, “Why would you do this?”

Bob Woodward:

So is there a linchpin moment, Mr. Trump, where it went from maybe to yes, I’m going to do this? And when was that?

Donald Trump:

Yeah. I would really say it was at the beginning of last year, like in January of last year. And there were a couple of times. One was, I was doing a lot of deals. I was looking at very seriously one time, not — they say, oh, he looked at it for many — I really, no. I made a speech at the end of the ’80s in New Hampshire, but it was really a speech that was, it was not a political speech. But because it happened to be in New Hampshire . . . .

Bob Woodward:

And that guy was trying to draft you.

Donald Trump:

And he was a very nice guy. But he asked me. And he was so intent, and I made a speech. It was not a political speech, anyway, and I forgot about it.

Bob Woodward:

And that was the real possibility? Or the first . . . .

Donald Trump:

Well no, the real possibility was the Romney time, or the Romney term. This last one four years ago. I looked at that, really. I never looked at it seriously then. I was building my business, I was doing well. And I went up to New Hampshire, made a speech. And because it was in New Hampshire, it was sort of like, Trump is going to run. And since then people have said, Trump is going to run. I never was interested. I could almost say at all, gave it very little thought, other than the last time, where Romney was running.•

Tags: Bob Woodward, Donald Trump, Robert Costa

“If God Is In The Details Then This Would Seem To Be An Atheist’s Building”

April 2, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Was really floored by the sudden and shocking death in Miami of Zaha Hadid, one of the planet’s handful of brand-name architects, the foremost female in the profession and probably the most famous Iraqi in the world. She was often referred to as a “diva” because of her tempestuousness, the cost overruns and, yes, her gender. But everyone working on that level, every Gehry and Meier, is a diva because they’re artists operating in a highly commercial form and have great responsibility to function. It’s a struggle to protect the vision, the beauty, which can warp and shrink under various pressures. They’re not saints, as nobody working in the hundreds of millions, even billions, can be, but there was something of the angels in many of Hadid’s buildings. She made tiny spots on the globe look different and better. Their impact spread beyond those few acres.

From John Winter’s 1993 AR piece on the unveiling of the Vitra Fire Station, when Hadid made the leap beyond paper architect:

The first building by a serious architect is always a major event, and perhaps it is appropriate that this one is realised in that part of the world where, from Rudolf Steiner to Gunter Behnisch, the rule of the right angle has often been set aside. In this case Hadid’s startling imagery of exploding parallelograms has been faithfully carried through to the finished building. The parallelograms are in control and the functions occur in the spaces between them.

The building appears to work well enough and to be well built but this is not an architecture that is dominated by programme or love of construction. Instead, it owes much to the formal idea. The form is heroic and this is a heroic building, like the pre-war buildings of Le Corbusier or the post-war work of Mies – or, if you prefer, like Stonehenge or Gloucester choir. The architects of all these buildings shared a private skill of knowing precisely what to do and the ability to get it done without compromise.

The fire station was seen as having to turn the route and blot out the surrounding buildings. To achieve the latter, the building was made very long so that it became an enclosing fence; to achieve the former, lines are made in the surrounding landscape and the planes of the building are angled in such a way as to lead you round the corner. These planes are of in situ concrete with the bolt holes exposed in the Kahnian manner. Half a dozen planes form the plan, and their height generates the depth for spanning large openings – 32 m over the garage doors and 29 m in a curved beam above the back window of the ground floor.

Space flows infinitely and there are no enclosed rooms, but freestanding, wavy, stainless steel lockers which partition off the changing areas for male and female firefighters. These areas are punctuated by scattered, Ronchamp-style windows. Roof slabs were poured in boarded formwork with no bolt holes, and the floor slab is split open to admit the staircase, a split emphasized by an adjacent crack which forms an artificial light source and defines the limit of the room above.

Slabs thicken to enclose services and lights and to receive an internal lining of insulation and plaster where required. The building is only heated intermittently, so insulation is internal to achieve a fast response. Many spaces are not heated, and these, together with internal walls, are left as exposed concrete. Where there is plaster it is mostly white, with a gold end wall and some walls painted in dark, earthy hues.

After Zaha Hadid left the AA she began tutoring. For a time she collaborated in the OMA office, but has not undergone the usual apprenticeship of young architects who spend years detailing under the supervision of a more experienced architect. So she has never been exposed to conventional ways of doing things, and the fire station is put together like no other building.

If God is in the details then this would seem to be an atheist’s building. Many details are eliminated, there are no skirtings, no door frames, no floor finishes, no light fittings. In line with the main generative concept, doors are simply planes that slide past their surroundings. Lighting takes the form of fluorescent strips in continuous slots embedded in the ceilings or floor, usually placed to throw light on to a wall, transforming it into a glowing plane.•

Tags: John Winter, Zaha Hadid

“What The Candidates Should Be Focusing On…Are Emerging Technologies”

April 1, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Donald Trump wants to make America great again. You remember those halcyon days, right? Girls Gone Wild entrepreneur Joe Francis had not yet been incarcerated, the Bumfight producers hadn’t been sued and the hazards of Purple Drank were not fully appreciated. It was 2011, and it was ours.

Mitt Romney’s biggest moral failing during the last Presidential campaign may have been his dalliance with Birtherism stemming from his partnership with the megalomaniac Trump, but his greatest practical misstep was decrying government investment in alternative energy, going so far as to bury Tesla which had received a loan from the Obama stimulus. Elon Musk’s outfit wasn’t insolvent like Solyndra, paid back the borrowed money early and will be providing thousands of good jobs for Americans in its battery and solar plants in Nevada and New York. That is, of course, not even mentioning the dire need for replacing fossil fuels as we heat and melt even faster than feared.

This stance is but one of the disastrous decisions the GOP has doubled down on in the current egregious election season, with Trump the leader of the ugly mob. No, he didn’t start it, but he boiled the lies down to their purest and most dangerous form, selling the return of yesterday’s manufacturing base when it’s tomorrow’s high-tech positions that must be won.

From Issie Lapowsky’s Wired piece about the blowhard’s bad ideas about Apple and economics:

Still, it stands to reason that Trump would cling to this talking point. His campaign, exit polls show, has been largely buoyed by the populist anger of the so-called white working class, roughly defined as white working adults without a college degree. These are the people who once staffed the factories of the Rust Belt and the mines of coal country, and their opportunities have taken a big hit from the flow of manufacturing jobs overseas, as well as competition from new generations of immigrants and the rise of technology as a more efficient substitute for manual labor.

The number of voters who meet the “white working class” definition is shrinking. In 1980, 65 percent of voters were white and lacked a college education. In 2012, it was just 36 percent. But it’s been a powerful constituency for Trump, nonetheless, one that he’d be far less dominant without.

Which is why, despite the fact that as a businessman Trump is likely all too aware that upending Apple’s supply chain would be unfeasible, he continues to make grand claims about the company. With this promise, Trump is pandering to his base, promising to restore the kinds of jobs that were once a key part of the American Dream.

But Trump’s promises if realized, would actually hurt the very people he’s promising to help, experts say. That’s because today, those once dependable jobs on the assembly line have been reduced to low-wage, low-skill commodity labor. If Trump—or any of the presidential candidates—really want to help the working class, researchers say, they would be wise to focus less on the types of jobs the US has already lost and more on the industries the US is uniquely poised to create.

Forget Apple. Focus on Tesla

Trump isn’t wrong to see the tech industry as a potential creator of manufacturing jobs in America. He’s just looking at the wrong parts of the tech industry. What the candidates should be focusing on instead, says Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, are emerging technologies like robotics, electric vehicles, and autonomous aviation.•

Tags: Elon Musk, Issie Lapowsky

“It’s Sort Of Soft Fascism In A Way”

April 1, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Adrienne LaFrance’s Atlantic article “What Is a Robot?” is one of my favorite pieces thus far in 2016. As the title suggests, the writer tries to define what qualities earns a machine the name “robot,” a term perhaps not as slippery as “existential” but one that’s nebulous nonetheless. The piece does much more, presenting a survey of robotics from ancient to contemporary times and asking many questions about where the sector’s current boom may be leading us.

Two points about the article:

It quotes numerous roboticists and those analyzing the field who hold the opinion that a robot must be encased, embodied. I think this is a dangerous position. A robot to me is anything that is given instructions and then completes a task. It’s increasingly coming to mean anything that can receive those basic instructions and then grow and learn on its own, not requiring more input. I don’t think it matters if that machine has an anthropomorphic body like C-3PO or if it’s completely invisible. If we spend too much time counting fingers and toes, we may miss the bigger picture.

Early on, there’s discussion about the master-slave relationship humans now enjoy with their machines, which will only increase in the short term–and may eventually be flipped. The following paragraph speaks to this dynamic: “In the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s 1807 opus, The Phenomenology of Spirit, there is a passage known as the master-slave dialectic. In it, Hegel argues, among other things, that holding a slave ultimately dehumanizes the master. And though he could not have known it at the time, Hegel was describing our world, too, and aspects of the human relationship with robots.” I believe this statement is true should machines gain consciousness, but it will remain a little hyperbolic as long as they’re not. Holding sway over Weak AI that does our bidding certainly changes the meaning of us and will present dicey ethical questions, but they are very different ones than provoked by actual slavery. Further, the human mission being altered doesn’t necessarily mean we’re being degraded.

From LaFrance:

Making robots appear innocuous is a way of reinforcing the sense that humans are in control—but, as Richards and Smart explain, it’s also a path toward losing it. Which is why so many roboticists say it’s ultimately not important to focus on what a robot is. (Nevertheless, Richards and Smart propose a useful definition: “A robot is a constructed system that displays both physical and mental agency, but is not alive in the biological sense.”)

“I don’t think it really matters if you get the words right,” said Andrew Moore, the dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. “To me, the most important distinction is whether a technology is designed primarily to be autonomous. To really take care of itself without much guidance from anybody else… The second question—of whether this thing, whatever it is, happens to have legs or eyes or a body—is less important.”

What matters, in other words, is who is in control—and how well humans understand that autonomy occurs along a gradient. Increasingly, people are turning over everyday tasks to machines without necessarily realizing it. “People who are between 20 and 35, basically they’re surrounded by a soup of algorithms telling them everything from where to get Korean barbecue to who to date,” Markoff told me. “That’s a very subtle form of shifting control. It’s sort of soft fascism in a way, all watched over by these machines of loving grace. Why should we trust them to work in our interest? Are they working in our interest? No one thinks about that.”

“A society-wide discussion about autonomy is essential,” he added.•

Tags: Adrienne LaFrance, Andrew Moore, John Markoff, Neil Richards, William Smart

“I Think Of It As Another Form Of Auschwitz”

April 1, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

You can understand if Kim Jong Un is guilty of emotional eating.

The North Korean tyrant’s ballooning weight, which has caused him to have a Hitchcockian profile and myriad health problems, is pointing to an early grave. It would be good riddance to an absolute monster, but would it lead to a better, freer, saner government? Because of the despot’s young age, you don’t often hear of succession plans should he soon succumb. Considering the great strength of the state’s military, a new strongman would likely be installed, the Orwellian nightmare continued.

In a Reddit Ask Me Anything, Kang Chol-hwan, a former North Korean political prisoner who escaped after a decade, answers questions about his experiences. Two exchanges follow.

_______________________

Question:

What goes on day to day in the jail/concentration camps? Has anyone gotten in-trouble from getting caught with USB sticks?

Kang Chol-hwan:

Daily life in the work camps is very mundane. We wake up at 5 am and are forced to work until sunset. We are given lessons on Kim il-sung and Juche. We are forced to watch public executions. We are physically abused – hit and tortured. I think of it as another form of Auschwitz. These work camps are like products of Nazism, and an abusive government needs elements such as Nazi concentration camps. They just have different ways of killing people.

People have almost gotten caught with the USB sticks. Thankfully, they managed to get out before they were caught. However, they cannot go back to North Korea now. But that’s about it currently. North Korean citizens often get caught using these USB sticks but they are released when they give bribes to the police. I believe it would be about 500 dollars maximum in Pyongyang and about 200~300 dollars in other regions. The problem would be if they are caught and they have no money to bribe their way out.

_______________________

Question:

Do you miss North Korea despite what you endured? And, is there any misconception about North Korea that you would like to share?

Kang Chol-hwan:

I dislike the North Korean government, not the people- so yes, I do miss the people there. North Koreans may seem different because they are brainwashed by the government; but once their thoughts change through the flow of information, they are the same as anywhere else. I think it is lamentable that people think of the North Korean government and North Koreans as one entity. North Koreans may seem loyal to the government, but because they fear the government, they cannot speak their minds. For example, Seungjin Park, the North Korean soccer player during the World Cup, was at the Yodok Political Prisoners Camp with me, but is now acting as the soccer team coach. However, he must hide the fact that he was at the prisoners camp. To learn more about North Korea, you must know something about the nature of North Korea. This is true even when visiting North Korea.•

Tags: Kang Chol-hwan

“New Technologies Do Change Our Perception Of Ourselves”

March 30, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

CRISPR’s surprising success has swept us into an age when it all seems possible: the manipulation of humans, animals and plants, even perhaps of extinct species. Which way forward?

The geneticist George Church, who has long had visions of rejuvenated woolly mammoths and augmented humans, is interviewed about our brave new world at Edge. He realizes some bristle at manipulation of the Homo sapiens germline because it calls into question all we are, but apart from metaphors, there are also very real practical concerns over the games getting messy and possibly dangerous. The good (diseases being edited out of existence, organs being tailored to transplantees, etc.) shouldn’t be dreams permanently deferred, but it is difficult to understand how bad applications will be contained. Of course, the negative will probably unfold regardless, so we owe it ourselves to pursue the positive, if carefully. Church himself is on board with a cautious approach but not one that’s unduly so.

An excerpt:

New technologies do change our perception of ourselves. It used to be new discoveries, and it still is; it’s integrating. If you have a new technology like a telescope, it can cause a discovery about where our planet sits in the universe—whether it’s at the center or not—but more and more frequently in the present, we have new technologies.

Sometimes people ask me why everybody is so worked up about applying CRISPR to the germline of humans. They’re not worked up particularly about applying it to the germline of animals. We just got approval for genetically modified salmon, and plants have been genetically modified for many years now. Even though some people will eat it and some people won’t, the fact is it’s a multibillion dollar business.

Why are humans special? You could say we have the Food and Drug Administration (in multiple countries) that makes sure every new medical technology, whether it’s a medical device or pharmaceutical has to be safe and effective. It does you no good to have a drug that’s safe but does nothing, nor having one that’s very effective but kills people.

What is it that makes germline manipulation of humans special? It’s what you were just getting at—our perception of ourselves. If we feel that we can change any aspect of ourselves, where do you begin and where do you stop? and who sets those rules?

When you’re in a more primitive phase of the technology, you don’t have to ask that question because it seems so far off. We can only make minor changes: a little nip-and-tuck, cure a few vaccines; it doesn’t fundamentally change human nature. But if you ever did get a tool where you could fundamentally change human nature to anything you wanted—any hybrid with any animal properties that you like, hybridization with your inorganic machines that’s more intimate than it is now—that changes our view of ourselves. I guess that’s why people not only want more caution than ever before, which I would concur. They want maybe so much caution that it can never happen. There are many technologies that get banned at one point or another; it’s not unusual. Railroads were banned because trains were colliding with one another, sometimes in the middle of towns.•

Tags: George Church

“The Company Was Working To Perfect Space Hotels Before Private Launch Vehicles Were Ready”

March 30, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

If it weren’t for the lack of tourists, the space-hotel business would be booming.

Someday Airbnb-E.T. will come along and disrupt the inflatable space-hotel industry, but first there has to be such a sector. Inflatables meant for life on Mars and the moon are said to be possible right now–hopefully they’re superior to the average Earth cruise ship–but the stratosphere won’t become a tourist trap until we’re ready for takeoff. Until Musk and many others can put us on another planet, such outfits depend on government contracts with NASA to sustain and develop them.

From Emily Calandrelli’s Techcrunch piece on the topic:

Bigelow Aerospace was founded over 15 years ago by Robert Bigelow who made his fortune from his ownership of the Budget Suites of America. Bigelow originally licensed inflatable habitat technology from NASA after Congress cancelled their expandable habitat project known as TransHab in 2000.

However, the concept of space-based inflatables dates back to the early 60’s. In fact, NASA’s first communications satellite, Echo 1, was a spacecraft based on a balloon design. While the inflatable technology at the time worked sufficiently for satellites, available materials, like rubber, simply wouldn’t cut it for crewed missions.

In recent years, advanced materials have made human-rated inflatable habitats possible. Bigelow Aerospace was founded on the premise that space tourists would be interested in staying in space hotels orbiting the Earth. The company successfully launched its first (uncrewed) modules, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, in 2006 and 2007, and they’re both still in orbit today.

Unfortunately, Bigelow Aerospace was a bit ahead of their time. The company was working to perfect space hotels before private launch vehicles were ready to launch people (paying space hotel customers) into orbit. These factors contributed to a mass-layoff of 30-50 employees from their 150-person workforce earlier this year. Even now, human-rated vehicles won’t be ready until 2017 or 2018.

So in the meantime, Bigelow Aerospace has pursued contracts with NASA.•

Tags: Emily Calandrelli, Robert Bigelow

“What Do Our Lives In Today’s World Mean?”

March 30, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

The 1993 version of Hillary Clinton probably would have been far more appreciated in 2016 than this year’s model, but that iteration wasn’t so popular back then. Soon after her husband’s first inauguration, Michael Kelly published “Saint Hillary,” a NYT Magazine article that concerned what Clinton believed was her spiritual mission as the freshly minted First Lady.

Her views seem New Agey in retrospect and were no doubt spurred in part by grief over her father’s death, but Kelly, who was later killed as an Iraq embed, did unwittingly pen the piece at the perfect time to capture the moment prior to the sea change in the culture due to the decentralization of the media, the rise of the Internet and the emergence of Reality TV. It was just before our communications matured and we regressed. Any deep conversation now is just waiting to be trolled. We’re better but we’re worse.

An excerpt:

Driven by the increasingly common view that something is terribly awry with modern life, Mrs. Clinton is searching for not merely programmatic answers but for The Answer. Something in the Meaning of It All line, something that would inform everything from her imminent and all-encompassing health care proposal to ways in which the state might encourage parents not to let their children wander all hours of the night in shopping malls.

When it is suggested that she sounds as though she’s trying to come up with a sort of unified-field theory of life, she says, excitedly, “That’s right, that’s exactly right!”

She is, it develops in the course of two long conversations, looking for a way of looking at looking at the world that would marry conservatism and liberalism, and capitalism and statism, that would tie together practically everything: the way we are, the way we were, the faults of man and the word of God, the end of Communism and the beginning of the third millennium, crime in the streets and on Wall Street, teen-age mothers and foul-mouthed children and frightening drunks in the parks, the cynicism of the press and the corrupting role of television, the breakdown of civility and the loss of community.

The point of all this is not abstract or small. What Mrs. Clinton seems — in all apparent sincerity — to have in mind is leading the way to something on the order of a Reformation: the remaking of the American way of politics, government, indeed life. A lot of people, contemplating such a task, might fall prey to self doubts. Mrs. Clinton does not blink.

“It’s not going to be easy,” she says. “But we can’t get scared away from it because it is an overwhelming task.’

The difficulty is bound to be increased by the awkward fact that a good deal of what Mrs. Clinton sees as wrong right now with the American way of life can be traced, at least in part, to the last great attempt to find The Answer: the liberal experiments in the reshaping of society that were the work of the intellectual elite of . . . Mrs. Clinton’s generation.

THE CRUSADE OF HILLARY Rodham Clinton began on April 6 in Austin, Tex. There, speaking from notes she had scribbled on the plane, she moved swiftly past the usual thanks and jokes to wade into an extraordinary speech: a passionate, at times slightly incoherent, call for national spiritual renewal.

The Western world, she said, needed to be made anew. America suffered from a “sleeping sickness of the soul,” a “sense that somehow economic growth and prosperity, political democracy and freedom are not enough — that we lack at some core level meaning in our individual lives and meaning collectively, that sense that our lives are part of some greater effort, that we are connected to one another, that community means that we have a place where we belong no matter who we are.”

She spoke of “cities that are filled with hopeless girls with babies and angry boys with guns” as only the most visible signs of a nation crippled by “alienation and despair and hopelessness,” a nation that was in the throes of a “crisis of meaning.”

“What do our governmental institutions mean? What do our lives in today’s world mean?” she asked. “What does it mean in today’s world to pursue not only vocations, to be part of institutions, but to be human?”

These questions, she said, led to the larger question: “Who will lead us out of this spiritual vacuum?” The answer to that was “all of us,” all required “to play our part in redefining what our lives are and what they should be.”

“Let us be willing,” she urged in conclusion, “to remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the 20th century, moving into a new millennium.”•

Tags: Hillary Clinton, Michael Kelly

“Trump Never Intended To Be The Candidate”

March 29, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Donald Trump, a classy individual who may soon be taking leaks in White House terlets, never actually wanted to be President.

David Remnick recently scolded himself for not believing that the Trump campaign would be anything more than a couple of months of brand-building before quickly burning out. He shouldn’t be so tough on himself, since that’s all the hideous hotelier himself was planning. He threw lots of shit at the wall–the wall Mexico will be paying for, I suppose–and some of it, shockingly, stuck. If at the conclusion of his campaign announcement speech you told Trump that his “Mexicans are rapists” remark was a winner, he would have been stunned. He’s actually occasionally acknowledged during the campaign that he knew he was making ridiculous comments that should not be taken seriously. But the fascist poseur became a frontrunner and is now in it to win it.

Former Trump strategist Stephanie Cegielski, who’s left the campaign, writes of her former boss in XO Jane. An excerpt:

I don’t think even Trump thought he would get this far. And I don’t even know that he wanted to, which is perhaps the scariest prospect of all.

He certainly was never prepared or equipped to go all the way to the White House, but his ego has now taken over the driver’s seat, and nothing else matters. The Donald does not fail. The Donald does not have any weakness. The Donald is his own biggest enemy.

A devastating terrorist attack in Pakistan targeting Christians occurred on Easter Sunday, and Trump’s response was to tweet, “Another radical Islamic attack, this time in Pakistan, targeting Christian women & children. At least 67 dead, 400 injured. I alone can solve.”

Ignoring the fact that at the time Trump tweeted this (time-stamped 4:37 p.m.) the latest news reports had already placed the number differently at 70 dead, 300 injured, take a moment to appreciate the ridiculous, cartoonish, almost childish arrogance of saying that he alone can solve. Does Trump think that he is making a cameo on Wrestlemania (yes, one of his actual credits)?

This is not how foreign policy works. For anyone. Ever.

Superhero powers where “I alone can solve” problems are not real. They do not exist for Batman, for Superman, for Wrestlemania and definitely not for Donald Trump.

What was once Trump’s desire to rank second place to send a message to America and to increase his power as a businessman has nightmarishly morphed into a charade that is poised to do irreparable damage to this country if we do not stop this campaign in its tracks.

I’ll say it again: Trump never intended to be the candidate. But his pride is too out of control to stop him now.•

Tags: Donald Trump, Stephanie Cegielski

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Excerpts

“The Field Of Artificial Intelligence Has A Long History Of Over-Promising And Under-Delivering”

“I Think There Is Little Doubt That We’re Probably On The Threshold Of A Whole New Revolution”

“Now It’s What You Can Do With Machine Learning”

“Railway Buffs Are Getting Up Close And Personal With The New Superfast Maglev Train”

“This Is As Real As Mud”

“The Party Has Mobilized Its Unique And Extensive Network Of Surveillance, Security, And Secret Police”

“The New Era Of Megaleaks Is Already Underway”

“In Utopia There Will Be Wide Stretches Of Cheerless Or Unhealthy Or Toilsome Or Dangerous Land”

“His Vision Of The Future Was Nonetheless Optimistic”

“They Are Wheelers And Dealers”

“How Shall The New Environment Be Programmed Now That We Have Become So Involved With Each Other?”

“I Think About This Sort Of Problem Happening In Orbit”

“High-Speed Chases Could Become A Thing Of The Past”

“The ’80s Deserve Mark Kostabi”

“That Person Does Not Exist. It Is A Collective Consciousness Of Various Different People Who Come And Go.”

“Technology Will Render Such A Shift Inevitable”

“Where Do You Start The Movie?”

“If God Is In The Details Then This Would Seem To Be An Atheist’s Building”

“What The Candidates Should Be Focusing On…Are Emerging Technologies”

“It’s Sort Of Soft Fascism In A Way”

“I Think Of It As Another Form Of Auschwitz”

“New Technologies Do Change Our Perception Of Ourselves”

“The Company Was Working To Perfect Space Hotels Before Private Launch Vehicles Were Ready”

“What Do Our Lives In Today’s World Mean?”

“Trump Never Intended To Be The Candidate”

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