Excerpts

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“There’s Already An Evolution Taking Place Inside Of Cuba”

March 29, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Friendships are fragile things.

In his just-concluded trip to Cuba, President Obama met with Che Guevara’s ghost but was denied Fidel Castro in the flesh. Brother Raoul, now running the show more or less, was likewise refused a conflict-free visit by his American counterpart, who shook with one hand and pointed accusingly with the other. The most tense moment of a trip that ended well occurred in the Grand Theater in Havana. From Veit Medick in Spiegel:

The theater became quieter when Obama began to address more sensitive issues, such as political constraints and the lack of a private economy in Cuba. It was a bit much for Castro, but a necessary evil. After all, the Cubans also made their points during the visit. Obama had to pose for a photograph in front of an image of Che Guevara, he had to make appearances in the Palace of the Revolution, and during a joint press conference, Castro tried to lift the president’s arm into the air to form a victory salute. Now it was Castro’s turn.

“There’s already an evolution taking place inside of Cuba,” Obama said to Castro, who was sitting in the first row. By that point, mostly the Americans were clapping. Those in the Cuban section of the audience, sitting in the right half of the auditorium, apparently didn’t dare to applaud. They had clearly been chosen very carefully, and the speech was being broadcast on national television.

Following a half-hour speech, Obama disappeared after receiving a brief round of applause. Castro stepped onto the balcony again. The mood was tremendous, as the crowd chanted “Raúl! Raúl!” The American delegation looked a little bewildered. Socialism was alive and well, at least a little.

Throughout the state visit, the mood remained as wave-like as it was in the theater — sometimes good, sometimes bad, and then good again. On Sunday, when Raúl Castro did not appear at the airport for the arrival of Obama on Air Force One, some Americans did not seem so pleased. On Monday, the two leaders visited the memorial to freedom fighter Jose Martí, and it almost seemed as if they had been doing this for decades “It is a great honor to pay tribute to Jose Martí, who gave his life for independence of his homeland,” Obama wrote in the guestbook. The Cubans were satisfied.

At the ensuing press conference in the Palace of the Revolution, when Obama encouraged journalists to ask questions, it was Castro’s turn to look dissatisfied.•

Tags: Barack Obama, Fidel Castro, Raoul Castro, Veit Medick

“Her Signature Was Tension Disguised As Pride”

March 29, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Videos | Permalink

Nancy Reagan married well. A starlet who never came close to shuffling free of the suffix, she wed a marginally more successful Hollywood player who graduated from the studio system to the political machine. He enjoyed shocking success, first in the California Governor’s mansion and then the White House.

As an older First Lady, she always displayed grace and looked the part, advised the children to simply “just say no” the way a grandmother can because she doesn’t have the responsibility of actually raising the kids. She was a mixed blessing for the country, asinine with astrology and awful on AIDS but admirable with Alzheimer’s. Perhaps most importantly, she was on the right side of history when a thaw in the Cold War seemed possible. The stars were aligned correctly.

The opening of the great critic Tom Carson’s MTV obituary of the First Lady:

Once upon a time, a now-forgotten saloon singer named Francis Albert Sinatra recorded a tune called “Nancy (With the Laughing Face).” A sentimental fellow whenever he wasn’t threatening mayhem to anyone who dared to criticize him, Frank thought it had been composed in honor of his newborn daughter, and the songwriters decided they’d let him roll with that illusion. It wasn’t the truth, but it was only a song.

Decades later, “Nancy (With the Laughing Face)” entered political history. Now a lot burlier, more reliant on toupees, and even more prone to threatening mayhem to anyone who dared to criticize him, the self-same Frank Sinatra sang it — with revised lyrics — at Ronald Reagan’s inaugural. What’s a bungled notion of hailing your daughter compared to celebrating the new first lady of the United States?

The sad thing is that Nancy Reagan’s face was never exactly renowned for its bubbly gift of childish laughter. She did have a nice smile, like a superbly arranged bunch of white bullets greeting you below two anxious, frozen blueberries. But spontaneity wasn’t her specialty. The facial expression she was most famous for — others had tried, but she perfected it — was the Adoring Wife as Ronnie made one more of his gazillion speeches. At least on TV, her signature was tension disguised as pride.

She had reasons for the tension. Yet she also had reasons for the pride.•

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Sinatra, that erstwhile Liberal Democrat, supporting his Hollywood buddy Reagan at the 1980 Republican Convention. “Harry Truman played the piano…Nixon played the piano…they could entertain you also,” he said in defense of the aspiring Actor-in-Chief. Chris Wallace and Lynn Sherr do the honors. Lousy audio, but still worth it.

Tags: Nancy Reagan, Ronald Reagan, Tom Carson

“The Lid Of Pandora’s Box Is Starting To Open”

March 28, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

AI can kill all of you humans, and Sir Clive Sinclair will not give a fig. The British computer and EV pioneer has been predicting since the 1980s that one fine morning we’ll be eliminated by self-designing intelligent machines even more unfeeling than ourselves, but he’s not letting it ruin his day. Che sera sera, you carbon-based beings. As you were. Two excerpts follow: 1) The opening of Sinclair’s 1984 “Predictions on Our Computerized Future,” and 2) a passage from Leo Kelion’s 2014 BBC piece about the inventor.

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From Sinclair:

Four thousand million years ago, when the universe was only half the size it is now and the solar system only five million years old, a singular thing happened–life. By some ineluctable process in the primordial soup, stirred by fierce cosmic rays and bolts of lightning, carbon compounds of strange complexity formed and reformed, growing in subtlety until they came to transmute sunlight and to replicate. For a billion years these first bacteria, so mysteriously conjured, clumping together to form living reefs called stromatolites, where the only life. Yet three billion years later they evolved into mankind.

I said that the event that started this process was singular and so, for all we know, it was. But so it will not long remain. All life is carbon based and carbon is exceptional in the variety of compounds it leads to, providing organisms with a rich choice of building materials. If we ever discover life on other planets we would not be surprised to find it similarly based on carbon, but it might not be so.

When I was a boy I read science fiction stories and in those days a common theme was the discovery of a life form strangely different from ours. A popular idea was for life based not on carbon compounds but on silicon on the grounds, I believe, that silicon too can form a wealth of products, many of them physically useful. Soon, I suggest, those stories will seem strangely prescient, for silicon based life will exist. IT will not have emerged from millions of years of trial and error in energetic protoplasm but from a mere century or less of man’s endeavour I am suggesting that the path the silicon based electronics industry is on will lead to life.

The human brain contains, I am told, 10 thousand million cells, and each of these may have a thousand connections. Such enormous numbers used to daunt us and cause us to dismiss the possibility of making a machine with human-like ability, but now that we have grown used to moving forward at such as pace we can be less sure. Quite soon, in only 10 or 20 years perhaps, we will be able to assemble a machine as complex as the human brain, and if we can, we will. It may then take us a long time to render it intelligent by loading in the right software or by altering the architecture, but that too will happen.

It think it certain that in decades, not centuries, machines of silicon will arise first to rival and then surpass their human progenitors. Once they surpass us they will be capable of their own design. In a real sense they will be reproductive. Silicon will have ended the long monopoly of carbon. And ours too, I suppose, for we will no longer be able to deem ourselves the finest intelligence in the knwon universe. In principle, it could be stopped. There will be those who try, but it will happen nonetheless. The lid of Pandora’s box is starting to open.•

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From the BBC:

His ZX Spectrum computers were in large part responsible for creating a generation of programmers back in the 1980s, when the machines and their clones became best-sellers in the UK, Russia, and elsewhere.

At the time, he forecast that software run on silicon was destined to end ‘the long monopoly’ of carbon-based organisms being the most intelligent life on Earth.

So it seemed worth asking him what he made of Prof Stephen Hawking’s recent warning that artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.

“Once you start to make machines that are rivalling and surpassing humans with intelligence it’s going to be very difficult for us to survive – I agree with him entirely,’ Sir Clive remarks.

“I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing. It’s just an inevitability.”

So, should the human race start taking precautions?

“I don’t think there’s much they can do,” he responds. “But it’s not imminent and I can’t go round worrying about it.”

It marks a somewhat more relaxed view than his 1984 prediction that it would be ‘decades, not centuries’ in which computers ‘capable of their own design’ would rise.•

“Isaac Is More Than Just A Whimsical Tribute To Mr. Asimov”

March 28, 2016 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Speaking of Joseph Engelberger, here’s the opening of a 1982 NYT article by Barnaby J. Feder and a video about the recently deceased roboticist’s development of the machine caretaker, ISAAC, which was meant to help astronauts and disabled people alike in completing tasks. It could roll, lift, cook and talk a little. It was a first-phase project done in conjunction with NASA and at the time promised that “when a more svelte Mark II goes into production, it will serve everyday around the clock at a cost of approximately $1.00 per hour.” That was supposed to occur in the 1990s, though the target date was too aggressive.

From Feder:

DANBURY, Conn. — FOUR decades ago, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov’s robot stories caught the imagination of a Columbia University physics student named Joseph F. Engelberger. Sometime in 1985, a robot named in Mr. Asimov’s honor is likely to be serving coffee to Mr. Engelberger and other directors of the nation’s first and largest industrial robot manufacturer.

Now a prototype in the company’s research laboratory, Isaac the Robot is being designed to do more than traverse the board room serving coffee. Mr. Engelberger also wants Isaac to provide snacks prepared in the adjoining kitchen’s microwave oven and wash dishes.

Mr. Engelberger’s company, Unimation Inc., has no plans to market Isaac, or similar robots, but Isaac is more than just a whimsical tribute to Mr. Asimov. Mr. Engelberger envisions Isaac – a mobile, improved version of the programmable manipulator, or PUMA robot, the company already sells – as the forerunner of a new generation of domestic and commercial service robots that Unimation and other robotics companies will begin selling during the 1990’s.

The right to be an out-of-the-closet visionary is one of the relished and hard-won benefits that the 56-year-old Mr. Engelberger has earned for his pivotal role in bringing the robot industry to life, both in the United States and abroad.

Actually, it was George C. Devol, not Mr. Engelberger, who developed and patented the basic technology on which the industry is founded. But since meeting Mr. Devol in 1956, Mr. Engelberger has preached the gospel that ”smart” machines were the key to getting people out of dangerous or tedious production jobs and a key to improving productivity. And his company, a subsidiary of the Condec Corporation of Old Greenwich, Conn., turned out the first robots that industry was willing to buy.

As a result, no robotics gathering today would be considered complete without the presence of the crew-cut, bow-tied Mr. Engelberger and his blunt observations about competitors, customers and robots themselves. ”He is as important to the industry as he is to the company, in some respects more so,” said Laura Conigliaro, the Bache Halsey Stuart Shields analyst who is Wall Street’s best known robotics expert. ”He is a spokesman and a showman, and he is good at it.”

”He was the one that listened,” said Mr. Devol, who now runs a robot leasing and consulting business from his home in Fort Ladderdale, Fla. Mr. Devol recalls numerous efforts to interest established companies in his work, including some, such as I.B.M., that have recently entered the now rapidly growing robotics field.

”George Devol was unable to restrain himself from spilling the whole dream out, which scared most businessmen off,” said Mr. Engelberger during an interview last week at Unimation’s headquarters. ”I kept myself from talking about some of the things that have happened, which he envisioned.”

The ”whole dream” is emerging now that robots have achieved acceptance in an increasing variety of industrial tasks – from materials handling to painting and welding – and are rapidly being improved to the point that more difficult jobs, such as assembly, will be economically feasible. More important, as computer-machine tool hybrids capable of being reprogrammed to adapt to changing conditions, they have been recognized as a key building block in the flexible, highly automated factory of the future.

It took American industry a long time to catch on.•

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“ISSAC, Will You Please Help Me Up?”

Tags: Barnaby J. Feder, George Devol, Joseph Engelberger, Laura Conigliaro

“That Trend Is Only Going To Go In One Direction”

March 28, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The physicist and entrepreneur Joseph F. Engelberger, who died late last year, was a pioneering industrial roboticist. In 1978, he predicted in the pages of Penthouse it would take 100 years before blue collar workers would be replaced by automation. He peevishly blamed labor unions and politics for the slow transition, though the scientist didn’t offer many suggestions for what the newly unemployed would do to survive. Well, factories have, to a great degree, fallen to our silicon sisters far ahead of that schedule, and workers with white collars are also being watched opportunistically by the bionic eye.

As Erica Phillips writes in her WSJ article, Labor has so far been able to largely forestall robotics at American shipping terminals, but the arrow is pointed in one direction, and that’s toward Engelberger’s vision of the future. An excerpt:

Many in the industry believe automation, which boosts terminal productivity and reliability while cutting labor costs, is critical to the ability of ports to cope with the surging trade volumes and the huge megaships that are beginning to arrive in the U.S. Analysts estimate the technology can reduce the amount of time ships spend in port and improve productivity by as much as 30%.

“We have to do it for productivity purposes, to stay relevant and to be able to service these large ships,” said Peter Stone, a member of TraPac’s board.

Yet the TraPac site is one of only four cargo terminals in the U.S. using the technology. That is fewer automated terminals than there are at the Port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands alone.

Supporters of robotic cargo handling are getting a new showcase this month with the phased-in opening of an automated terminal at the Port of Long Beach, next door to the Los Angeles port. At a cost of over $1 billion to complete and the capacity to handle 3.3 million 20-foot container units—nearly half of the entire port’s volume last year—the Orient Overseas (International) Ltd. site is a big bet on the future.

A successful operation in Long Beach could persuade other U.S. ports to follow, said Mark Sisson, a senior port planner with infrastructure-development group Aecom. “The industry at a global level is rushing hard into this technology,” he said. “That trend is only going to go in one direction. It’s just a question of timing.”

Experts in port-terminal infrastructure and operations say the U.S. has been slow to adopt the technology because of years of resistance by longshore labor unions. Some studies have shown robotic cargo handling can reduce the need for longshore labor by as much as 50%.•

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Engelberger conducts a demo for Johnny Carson in 1966, at the 9:09 mark.

Tags: Erica Phillips, Joseph Engelberger

“Online Is Simply There, Waiting”

March 28, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

When it comes to the Internet, we’re still in the prelude stage. So far, we’re only partly inside the machine and the machine is only partly inside us. But just you wait. As Tom Chatfield points out in one of his typically smart, elucidating BBC pieces, the term “online” is already redundant. We’re never anything but. His opening:

If I’m driving along in my car listening to GPS directions from Google Maps, am I online or offline? How about when I’m sitting at home streaming movies on demand? Skip forward a few years: if I’m dozing in my driverless car while my smartphone screens messages and calls, do words like “offline” and “online” even make sense?

The answer, I think, is that they make about as much sense as asking me today whether I have recently had any non-electric experiences. Electricity is so much a part of our world that it makes sense to ask how we use it – but no longer if or when we do. It’s a given.

The first time I went online, in the 1990s, it felt like a journey. I hooked my PC up to a space-age box called a modem, linked my modem to a phone line, and carefully instructed it to dial up the Internet Service Provider who would connect me to the World Wide Web. Much beeping and bleeping later, I was online in my own home: a miracle of modernity! Or rather, my computer was online – the only object in my home, and quite possible within a 10-mile radius, that had an internet connection.

Two decades later, this vanished world sounds like a kind of joke; a primitive realm of ritualised waiting and bizarrely isolated computation. You don’t really “go” online in 2016. Online is simply there, waiting.•

Tags: Tom Chatfield

“He Will Change What It Means To Be A Republican”

March 28, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Nicholas Confessore is one of the amazingly talented and dedicated group of New York Times political reporters who’ve covered the 2016 American Presidential election better than I think any national election in this country has ever been covered by any news organization. In “How the G.O.P. Elite Lost Its Voters to Donald Trump,” Confessore writes about the Republican power structure having the candidate selection process torn from its grip. There’s a lot of good stuff about how the party lost touch with its working-class base, but I think the article–like almost all articles this odd season–misses one valuable point: Donald Trump is essentially a modern Republican, the substance the same even if the style is markedly different.

Trump uses unvarnished, hateful language, substituting dog bites for dog whistles, and his wedge issues are married to populism more than social issues, but he’s still a wealthy person trying to pick the pockets of lower-income people and shift the money to those who already have plenty. His tax schemes and health-care plans assuredly would send the U.S. in that direction. Trump may seem like a different thing because he wasn’t anointed from on high, but he’s the new boss, same as the old boss.

From Confessore:

As the Republican Party collapses on itself, conservative leaders struggling to explain Mr. Trump’s appeal have largely seized on his unique qualities as a candidate: his larger-than-life persona, his ability to dominate the airwaves, his tough-sounding if unrealistic policy proposals. Others ascribe Mr. Trump’s rise to the xenophobia and racism of Americans angry over their declining power.

But the story is also one of a party elite that abandoned its most faithful voters, blue-collar white Americans, who faced economic pain and uncertainty over the past decade as the party’s donors, lawmakers and lobbyists prospered. From mobile home parks in Florida and factory towns in Michigan, to Virginia’s coal country, where as many as one in five adults live on Social Security disability payments, disenchanted Republican voters lost faith in the agenda of their party’s leaders.

In dozens of interviews, Republican lawmakers, donors, activists and others described — some with resignation, some with anger — a party that paved the way for a Trump-like figure to steal its base, as it lost touch with less affluent voters and misunderstood their growing anguish.

“This is absolutely a crisis for the party elite — and beyond the party elite, for elected officials, and for the way people have been raised as Republicans in the power structure for a generation,” said Ari Fleischer, who served as press secretary for President George W. Bush. “If Donald Trump wins, he will change what it means to be a Republican.”•

Tags: Donald Trump, Nicholas Confessore

“I Saw An Enormous Statue Of Myself, Lying In The Desert, Mouth Open As If I Were Dead. I Entered My Mouth.”

March 27, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In the 1960s and 1970s, when alternative lifestyles began to bleed from the American margins to the center, novelist Leo Litwak was there to observe these new practices up close, turning his reconnaissance into trippy magazine articles. Below are two examples.

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The impetus for change in 1969’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice comes from two of the titular characters attending guerrilla psychological workshops at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur. Two years prior, Leo Litwak, the novelist, journalist and book reviewer, brought his considerable writing skills to the alternative-therapy retreat for a New York Times Magazine story. A section from “Joy Is the Prize” in which the author is awakened to a repressed memory from WWII:

I never anticipated the effect of these revelations, as one after another of these strangers expressed his grief and was eased. I woke up one night and felt as if everything were changed. I felt as if I were about to weep. The following morning the feeling was even more intense.

Brigitte and I walked down to the cliff edge. We lay beneath a tree. She could see that I was close to weeping. I told her that I’d been thinking about my numbness, which I had traced to the war. I tried to keep the tears down. I felt vulnerable and unguarded. I felt that I was about to lose all my secrets and I was ready to let them go. Not being guarded, I had no need to put anyone down, and I felt what it was to be unarmed. I could look anyone in the eyes and my eyes were open.

That night I said to Daniel: “Why do you keep diverting us with your intellectual arguments? I see suffering in your eyes. You give me a glimpse of it, then you turn it off. Your eyes go dead and the intellectual stuff bores me. I feel that’s part of your strategy.”

Schutz suggested that the two of us sit in the center of the room and talk to each other. I told Daniel I was close to surrender. I wanted to let go. I felt near to my grief. I wanted to release it and be purged. Daniel asked about my marriage and my work. Just when he hit a nerve, bringing me near the release I wanted, he began to speculate on the tragedy of the human condition. I told him: “You’re letting me off and I don’t want to be left off.”

Schutz asked if I would be willing to take a fantasy trip.

It was later afternoon and the room was already dark. I lay down, Schutz beside me, and the group gathered around. I closed my eyes. Schutz asked me to imagine myself very tiny and to imagine that tiny self entering my own body. He wanted me to describe the trip.

I saw an enormous statue of myself, lying in the desert, mouth open as if I were dead. I entered my mouth. I climbed down my gullet, entering it as if it were a manhole. I climbed into my chest cavity. Schutz asked me what I saw. “It’s empty,” I said. “There’s nothing here.” I was totally absorbed by the effort to visualize entering myself and lost all sense of the group. I told Schutz there was no heart in my body. Suddenly, I felt tremendous pressure in my chest, as if tears were going to explode. He told me to go to the vicinity of the heart and report what I saw. There, on a ledge of the chest wall, near where the heart should have been, I saw a baby buggy. He asked me to look into it. I didn’t want to, because I feared I might weep, but I looked, and I saw a doll. He asked me to touch it. I was relieved to discover that it was only a doll. Schutz asked me if I could bring a heart into my body. And suddenly there it was, a heart sheathed in slime, hung with blood vessels. And that heart broke me up. I felt my chest convulse. I exploded. I burst into tears.

I recognized the heart. The incident had occurred more than 20 years before and had left me cold.•

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Litwak spent some quality time in the ’60s and ’70s writing about American dreamers, from Ronald Reagan to Walt Disney to Werner Erhard. For his fascinating 1972 New York Times Magazine piece, “Rolfing, Aikido, Hypnodramas, Psychokinesis, and Other Things Beyond the Here and Now” (subscription required), Litwak attended the Association for Humanistic Psychology meeting at Squaw Valley, becoming familiar with all manner of back-cracking, mind-bending, life-altering methods. An excerpt:

The insistence upon active audience participation keeps the meetings from becoming dull. I attended a hypnodrama session at the Hofbrau, an A-frame, chalet-type building, with scripted placards advertising the menu hanging from the walls (“Hier gibts fondue”). The Hofbrau was jammed. We were to be hypnotized, and were then to participate in a hypnodrama. We encircled the fieldstone fireplace in the center of the large dining hall as Ira Greenberg of the Carmelito, Calif., State Hospital led the session. He described hypnosis as a “control of our controls.” It was a technique, he said, that enabled us to concentrate deeply and regress to forgotten states; once these states were recalled, hypnodrama could be used to act them out, enabling us finally to gratify the unsatisfied nurture needs of infancy.

We removed our shoes and lay on the floor flat on our backs. We were instructed to relax. We began with the toes and very gradually worked up to the head. We were assured that the process was pleasant. We were asked to imagine a yardstick within our minds. We slowly counted down the yardstick until we came to the number which we felt represented the depth of our hypnosis. We tried to sink beneath this number. There were a few snores. We were urged to stay awake. We then began a fantasy trip. We flew up the mountain that was behind the Hofbrau; we were told to soar above the crest and enjoy the flight. We then settled down near the crest by a cave; entered inside and walked down a corridor passing several doors, stopping at that one which enclosed a place we had always wished to enter. We passed through this door, looked around, left the cave, descended to the Hofbrau and then awoke. We assembled in groups of five to discuss the experience. An elderly couple, a trifle disgruntled, denied that they were hypnotized and were skeptical that anyone else was. I myself felt quite relaxed and refreshed. A good many of those in the audience said they had been in deep trances.

A hypnodrama was then staged, based on a young woman’s fantasy. When she had been asked to pass through the door to her special place, her fantasy was that she had entered her high-school lavatory; a woman attendant sat at the threshold and refused to acknowledge her; she felt deeply disturbed. Roles were assigned to volunteers. The young lady was returned to hypnosis. She again passed through the door and confronted the impassive woman attendant. She burst into tears, and begged for a demonstration of affection. The attendant rose to comfort her. At the moment of revelation I had to leave for an appointment with the A.H.P. officers who were to brief me on the current state of humanistic psychology.•

“We’re So Obsolete In Cyber

March 27, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Donald Trump, Jean-Marie Le Pen with a neckwear line, was born into wealth and connections yet feels gypped.

He often expresses this inner void in terms of politics. In the 1980s, when he was a vocal opponent of President Ronald Reagan, he felt Japan was being allowed to rip us off. Now it’s China, Mexico and any nation not overwhelming us with gifts of oil and treasure. We need more. Well, he needs more. And nothing will ever be enough, because endless amounts of bragging and petroleum and steak meat can’t make up for a lack of parental love.

In the New York Times, Maggie Haberman and David E. Sanger interviewed Trump about foreign policy. The GOP candidate extended his feelings of personal inadequacy to the topic of cyberwar, revealing an appalling lack of knowledge on the topic. An excerpt:

David Sanger:

The question was about cyber, how would you envision using cyberweapons? Cyberweapons in an attack to take out a power grid in a city, so forth.

Donald Trump:

First off, we’re so obsolete in cyber. We’re the ones that sort of were very much involved with the creation, but we’re so obsolete, we just seem to be toyed with by so many different countries, already. And we don’t know who’s doing what. We don’t know who’s got the power, who’s got that capability, some people say it’s China, some people say it’s Russia. But certainly cyber has to be a, you know, certainly cyber has to be in our thought process, very strongly in our thought process. Inconceivable that, inconceivable the power of cyber. But as you say, you can take out, you can take out, you can make countries nonfunctioning with a strong use of cyber. I don’t think we’re there. I don’t think we’re as advanced as other countries are, and I think you probably would agree with that. I don’t think we’re advanced, I think we’re going backwards in so many different ways. I think we’re going backwards with our military. I certainly don’t think we are, we move forward with cyber, but other countries are moving forward at a much more rapid pace. We are frankly not being led very well in terms of the protection of this country.•

“You Can Engineer Yourself Out Of Any Situation”

March 27, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Perhaps the future will come screaming across the sky, or maybe it will just putter along.

Nevada just became the first state to experience an FAA-approved drone delivery, which may be a harbinger of a different near-term future the way the first online purchase (a copy of the Sting CD Ten Summoner’s Tales) was in 1994. But ground-bound delivery robots on wheels, the tortoise in the race, can also cheaply get groceries and goods to consumers and could be formidable competition. Probably there’s room for both.

From Michael Laris’ Washington Post piece about Starship Technologies‘ autonomous “rolling suitcases” perhaps coming to our nation’s capital soon:

There were no chirpy little R2-D2 sounds, just the quiet churn of bureaucracy starting to roll as [Council Secretary Nyasha] Smith stamped in the legislation. “I want it to speak with me. I want it to have a relationship with me!” [Councilwoman Mary] Cheh said.

As does Allan Martinson, Starship’s chief operating officer, who saw some 6,000 firms as a venture capitalist before deciding to join the robotic delivery startup. This is no phantom product that will have fizzled in a year, he said.

“It’s a real, tangible, solid thing,” Martinson said. “You can engineer yourself out of any situation. That’s the philosophy of this company.”

Martinson said the robots began rolling autonomously last month through parts of London and Tallinn, Estonia’s capital, using proprietary digital maps and sophisticated software. They can also be guided over the web by an operator if they get stumped on their way. To make delivery cheap — from $1 to $3 dollars a trip, hopefully dropping to under $1, company executives said — engineers are trying to keep the hardware basic. That means no laser-pulsing LIDAR, an expensive surveying technology used in many driverless car prototypes.

“It’s basically a mobile phone on wheels,” Martinson said. Its low speed and weight — 4 miles per hour and 40-pounds max — also short-circuit safety concerns, he added. “It’s basically a rolling suitcase. If you go home and try to kill yourself with a suitcase, you’d have to be very inventive.”•

“The Companies Are Engaged In A ‘Platform War'”

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

The Deep Learning defeat of a human Go champion has coincided with AI research booming in the U.S. like never before, with millions being thrown at freshly minted Ph.D.s in the field and small startups announcing the very immodest goal of “capturing all human knowledge.” Everyone is making a big bet on the sector’s future, and, of course, almost all will go bust. The competition, however, will lead to progress.

The opening of a NYT article by John Markoff and Steve Lohr:

SAN FRANCISCO — The resounding win by a Google artificial intelligence program over a champion in the complex board game Go this month was a statement — not so much to professional game players as to Google’s competitors.

Many of the tech industry’s biggest companies, like Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft, are jockeying to become the go-to company for A.I. In the industry’s lingo, the companies are engaged in a “platform war.”

A platform, in technology, is essentially a piece of software that other companies build on and that consumers cannot do without. Become the platform and huge profits will follow. Microsoft dominated personal computers because its Windows software became the center of the consumer software world. Google has come to dominate the Internet through its ubiquitous search bar.

If true believers in A.I. are correct that this long-promised technology is ready for the mainstream, the company that controls A.I. could steer the tech industry for years to come.

“Whoever wins this race will dominate the next stage of the information age,” said Pedro Domingos, a machine learning specialist and the author of The Master Algorithm, a 2015 book that contends that A.I. and big-data technology will remake the world.•

Tags: John Markoff, Steve Lohr

“It’s About The Capability To Design And Build On-Demand”

March 25, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

It would seem Alphabet decided to sell robotics maker and Youtube sensation Boston Dynamics because of that outfit’s dedication to humanoid machines. It’s probably not just a matter of economics. While the company’s grown more circumspect about expenses since its restructuring, it retains plenty of businesses unlikely to pay off immediately–or ever. No, the other reason is probably because AlphaDog and Petman and their progenies will be best suited to military operations and the Google guys have vowed to not become part of that industrial complex.

Even without the search giant, though, the military in America (and other countries) will continue to move forward with drones and robotics and even bioengineering because of the fear that THEY may get these tools before WE do. It’s a new arms race, albeit one with robotic limbs.

From Phil Goldstein’s Fed Tech report on 3D-printed drones possibly coming soon to a military near you:

Eric Spero, an acting team lead in the Army Research Lab’s (ARL) Vehicle Technology Directorate, pushed the AEWE to take a closer look at his team’s tests.

“We saw the trajectories of two beneficial technology areas converging in the future,” Spero said, according to the Army release. “The technologies are 3D printing and small unmanned aircraft systems, sometimes referred to as drones.”

In chaotic battlefield environments, the two technologies could provide soldiers with greater flexibility to accomplish missions that require drones. Spero says that his team’s work is not actually about drones, but rather about using 3D printing to let soldiers create useful technologies on the fly.

“It’s about the capability to design and build on-demand. The concept takes advantage of 3D printing as a future enabler and positions us, as the U.S. military, to take advantage of increasingly better manufacturing technologies,” Spero said.

Spero notes in a white paper that 3D-printed drones could give soldiers in the field an edge — on the fly, as it were.•

Tags: Eric Spero, Phil Goldstein

“There Are Over 300 People Hanging Out In Vats Of Liquid Nitrogen”

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

I don’t want to be in a box or an urn, because why? But what about a freezing tube? Cryonics is a long shot, a moonshot, but of course, steep odds are better than none if immortality is the kind of thing that matters to you. Even before science could make the gigantic leap to reanimate your remains, you would first have to “survive” eons of natural disasters, empire collapse, corporate malfeasance and plain, old indifference. It also assumes that humans of the future, supercharged by bioengineering, will care about waking the “cave people” for anything more than research purposes. They will have to value us the way we value ourselves, which is unlikely. So there’s almost no chance it would work. Almost.

In 1962, James Bedford became the first cryonaut, but the business has never boomed. In a Wait But Why post, Tim Urban looks at the philosophical and practical questions that attend the practice. An excerpt:

When Robert Ettinger was a kid in the 1930s, he read a lot of science fiction, and he assumed that with the world advancing the way it was, scientists would surely have a cure for aging at some point during his lifetime. He would live to see a world where sickness was a thing of the past and death was something people chose to do voluntarily, at a time of their choosing.

But thirty years later, aging and involuntary death were still very much a thing, and Ettinger, by then a physics professor, realized that science might not solve these problems in time for him to reap the benefits. So he started thinking about how to hack the system.

If, rather than being buried or cremated after his death, he could instead be frozen in some way—then whenever the scientists did eventually get around to conquering mortality, they’d probably also have the tools and know-how to resuscitate him, and he could have the last laugh after all.

In 1962, he wrote about this concept in a book called The Prospects of Immortality, and the cryonics movement was born.

The first person to give cryonics a try was James Bedford, a psychology professor who died of cancer in 1967 at the age of 73 and is doing his thing in a vat of liquid nitrogen in Arizona as you read this. Others slowly began to follow, and today, there are over 300 people hanging out in vats of liquid nitrogen.•

Tags: James Bedford, Robert Ettinger, Tim Urban

“The Promise Of The Digital Age Is Being Hijacked By A Rampant Form Of Old-Style Capitalism”

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

There’s an obvious question without an easy answer of whether traditional economic systems will be able to service the needs of the 21st century, at least the needs of those people who aren’t, in Romney-speak, corporations. Early in the Industrial Age, capitalism’s brutish excesses were curbed by labor unions and newspaper muckrakers and tax codes. In the Digital Age, many of those safety nets have come undone, and it’s not clear if they would have on their own been adequate to deal with the gathering storm.

The Uber business model produces some good at high costs, destabilizing businesses and replacing solid jobs with piecework. AI’s continued development will likely bring exceptional benefits to us but also further hollow out the middle. Even if some plans for automation fall by the wayside, enough will probably succeed to upset Labor, causing industries to rise and fall with shocking speed.

If, for example, driverless autos can be perfected in the next 20 years and proliferate, tens of millions of jobs will quickly be gone from every developed country in trucking, taxis, delivery, etc. In fact, a driverless taxi fleet needn’t even have an owner. The cars could “own” themselves, using the fares to automatically pay for repairs and purchase new vehicles. The operation could entirely run itself. Prices for trips from such outfits will be cheap, which is a good thing, since you might not have a job.

From Antony Funnell’s smart Radio National’s Future Tense piece about the question of capitalism in the Digital Age:

University of Maryland legal academic Frank Pasquale, who focuses on the ethical, legal and social implications of information technology, calls them the ‘Silicon Valley oligarchs’.

‘I think the fundamental problem is that people don’t like to face up to the reality of monopolisation,’ says Pasquale, speaking about the global rise of Uber, Airbnb and other so-called sharing economy companies. ‘It’s much more convenient to believe the comforting myth that these markets are always contestable.

‘A firm like Uber is an appeal to venture capitalists—speculative capital—that wants to see massive returns via monopolisation. Let’s not mistake the business model here. The model here is for one of these firms to come in and to take over various aspects of commerce, to take over the rides that are in an area, to take over availability of non-hotel rooms to sleep in, et cetera. I think that this is really a perversion of the original aspirations of the sharing economy.’

The perils of corporate capitalism ‘running on digital steroids’

For Pasquale, the rise of the oligarchs signals lost potential—the opportunity to enhance genuine sharing and competition through the use of new technologies. But leading US media theorist Douglas Rushkoff goes one step further. In his newly released book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, he warns that the promise of the digital age is being hijacked by a rampant form of old-style capitalism, a modus operandi akin to that of the robber-barons of the 19th century.•

Tags: Antony Funnell, Douglas Rushkoff, Frank Pasquale

“As He Lay Dying Alexander Litvinenko Solved His Own Murder And Foresaw The Future”

March 24, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

In the 1950 noir D.O.A., hopelessly poisoned California accountant Frank Bigelow races to name his murderer before the end of his life and the end of the credits. In the B-movie’s chilling contrivance, murder is a lesser horror than the death of truth. It was the potential paucity of resolution that unnerved the most.

In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, murdered bodies and truth rest uneasily in adjoining plots. In 2006, former FSB officer and dissident Alexander Litvinenko became a real-life Bigelow after downing a drink dosed with polonium-210 at the Millennium Hotel in London. His investigation of the Kremlin as a kleptocracy would abruptly come to a close. He did manage, more or less, to solve his own killing before the radioactive chemical ended him, but the truth hardly mattered. The mafia state remained in place and has since only grown worse. His widow’s crusade to achieve a measure of justice led this year to the assassination being linked directly to Putin, but at this point, the machinations of his mafia state are met if not with shrugs then with knowing, silent nods.

In Peter Pomerantsev’s LRB review of Luke Harding’s new book, A Very Expensive Poison, British PM David Cameron is charged with obfuscating the case in order to not upset London’s rise to world’s foremost financial capital. The opening:

As he lay dying Alexander Litvinenko solved his own murder and foresaw the future. A professional detective on his last case, with himself as the victim, he worked out that he had been poisoned in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair, by another former KGB detective, Andrei Lugovoi. He had thought they were partners, investigating the connections between Putin’s Kremlin, organised crime and money laundering in Europe but, he now realised, Lugovoi was still taking orders from the people they were investigating. As Litvinenko’s hair came out in clumps, as he found it increasingly hard to open his mouth to talk, as he became yellow and shrivelled, he cursed himself for letting his guard down: he had assumed he was safe after receiving asylum and citizenship in the UK. But solving the crime, Litvinenko understood, was only the beginning. Would the British government risk undermining its financial interests by investigating his death properly?

‘Of course I understand the West wants to get gas and oil from Russia,’ he told inspectors from Scotland Yard who interviewed him in hospital, ‘but one shouldn’t be involved in political activity if one doesn’t have political beliefs. And beliefs can’t be traded for gas and oil. Because when a businessman is trading he’s trading with his money but when a politician is trading he is trading with the sovereignty of his country and the future of his children.’ The transcripts of Litvinenko’s interviews were released last year; he was clearly trying hard to win the police over to his cause. He was good at speeches. ‘In case there is from the top administrative pressure for political reasons,’ he said, ‘be firm … bring this case to the end.’ The men from Scotland Yard were impressed by his faith in them: ‘Last month I was granted British citizenship and I very much love this country. Possibly I may die, but I will die as a free person, and my son and wife are free people. And Britain is a great country.’

Litvinenko died four days later, on 23 November 2006. Six hours before it happened Scotland Yard got a phone call from the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston. Their tests showed he was ‘terribly contaminated’ with polonium, a metal four hundred times more radioactive than uranium and which can only be manufactured in a nuclear plant. It had very nearly been the perfect assassination: polonium isn’t picked up by Geiger counters and doctors had followed many false leads – ricin? thallium? – in trying to identify the mystery poison. When polonium was first suggested by urine tests it was dismissed as an anomaly caused by the plastic container.

But now that polonium had been confirmed it was a cinch for investigators, dressed in radiation-proof suits, to follow the radioactive trail, with equipment capable of detecting alpha radiation, through Mayfair, Heathrow, and on the plane Lugovoi had flown in on from Moscow.

Tags: Alexander Litvinenko, Luke Harding, Peter Pomerantsev

“Humans, On The Other Hand, Can Be Immensely Flexible”

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

In 2011, President Obama made a pilgrimage to Silicon Valley and asked tech titans what it would be required to reshore factories making iPhones and such. The NYT recalled a conversation between Obama and Steve Jobs:

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.•

Jobs may have been correct, if for the wrong reasons. The plants actually are moving back to the U.S. in increasing numbers, though there’s a question as to how many jobs will be returning with them and how many will be swallowed up by automation, which has lowered costs enough so that those plants can come home at all. The further question is how many of the positions that escape the rise of the machines will be prone to further automation.

In a Techcrunch article, Jim Rock reports there’s reason for hope, at least in the immediate future, as near-term robots won’t likely have the flexibility human workers possess. An excerpt:

Although the experts cannot agree on exactly how many robots will enter the economy, it’s safe to say that America’s workforce — from the manufacturer’s factory floor to the open office of a law firm — will look very different once the technology is fully integrated. You must do two things to be a truly valuable worker in this environment: embrace technology and be adaptable.

As millennials age into the workplace, the idea of embracing technology is starting to seem a little more passé. Most office workers know how to use email, run a word processor and maybe even set up a three-way call on their Polycom. As robots enter the workplace, though, knowing the intricacies behind the technology that runs them will become an increasingly coveted skill set.

This is not to say that all white-collar workers should enroll in engineering night classes, but knowing how technology works at a base level will make you better at your job — a job that will more and more likely rely on interacting with robots. Employers need to actively promote training programs that empower employees to work more effectively with new tech.

The second trait that future professionals should focus on is adaptability. Reid Hoffman, co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, shares a story about his visit to the Huawei plant in Shenzhen, China:

I was expecting, as a Silicon Valley technologist, that it would be a complete line of robots…Roughly 60 percent of it was automated and 40 percent of it was still people. You say, ‘Is that just because of low cost?’ No. These are actually high-pay, high-skill jobs. The answer is actually that, in the future, adaptability is key, and people are more adaptable. So when they set up the machine line and it’s all machines, there is a huge amount of retooling to shift from line one to line two, whereas the people are much more easy to shift.”

As robots enter the workforce, most will be extremely proficient at one or two specific tasks. Humans, on the other hand, can be immensely flexible when it comes to how we work.•

“The Bubbles Were Accurately Measured By Specially Built Calipers”

March 24, 2016 in Excerpts, Sports, Videos | Permalink

The former baseball catcher Joe Garagiola, who sadly just died, was thought of as very American and very nice during a flush time in our country when that was more than enough for a minor celebrity to enjoy a long, well-compensated career.

His unspectacular MLB stint concluded in 1954, and the final statistics were not kind, though he enjoyed a remarkably successful second act as a talking head on TV, a business less built in those years on gaudy numbers than on enduring relationships with corporate suits and sponsors. Garagiola was clearly more steady than spectacular behind a microphone, merely showing up and not annoying anyone, unless you were peeved by amiable mediocrity. At any rate, he seemed like a solid guy. Across the years he announced pro wrestling and baseball, hosted game shows, kept the seat warm for Johnny Carson and pitched all manner of products, including President Gerald Ford, another pleasant and middling Midwestern fellow, whom he fervently supported in his failed 1976 bid to retain the White House. Below are three videos from Garagiola’s TV work.

_______________________________

In 1975, Garagiola hosted a remarkably stupid and wonderful bubble-gum blowing competition among baseball players, which was sponsored by Bazooka, a brand of gum favored by hobos during World War II. They should have used the “specially built calipers” to measure Philadelphia catcher Tim McCarver’s head, which was the size of a medicine ball.

Watch Sally Field wince as she’s introduced as the “Flying Nun” on a 1971 game show hosted by Garagiola.

John Lennon later described his 1968 appearance with Paul McCartney on a Tonight Show episode substitute hosted by Garagiola (along with the reliably loopy Tallulah Bankhead) as the “most embarrassing thing I’ve ever been on,” which is saying something, because he’d been on Yoko Ono. (The archival video is pretty much ruined, so it’s just the audio I’ve embedded.)

“Is Biological Intelligence Really A Universal Dead-End, Destined To Give Way To Machine Supremacy?”

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

Sir Martin Rees wrote these words last year: “Few doubt that machines will gradually surpass more and more of our distinctively human capabilities—or enhance them via cyborg technology. Disagreements are basically about the timescale.”

Count astrobiologist Caleb Scharf as one of the so-called few doubters. In an Aeon piece, he argues that the Singularity may not be near (or even far) and an explosion of intelligence that dwarfs the Cambrian not exactly a done deal. Scharf believes we could possibly become a hive-mind state that settles rather than an exponential one that soars. Or maybe we opt for “turning away from machine fantasies, back to a quieter but more efficient, organic existence.” My very inexpert brain disagrees with both notions, but it’s an excellent essay.

An excerpt:

Superficially, the logic behind the conjectures about cosmic machine intelligence appears pretty solid. Extrapolating the trajectory of our own current technological evolution suggests that with enough computational sophistication on hand, the capacity and capability of our biological minds and bodies could become less and less attractive. At a certain point we’d want to hop into new receptacles, custom-built to suit whatever takes our fancy. Similarly, that technological arc could take us to a place where we’ll create artificial intelligences that are either indifferent to us, or that will overtake and subsume (or simply squish) us.

Biology is not up to the task of sustaining pan-stellar civilisations or the far-future human civilisation, the argument goes. The environmental and temporal challenges of space exploration are huge. Any realistic impetus to become an interstellar species might demand robust machines, not delicate protein complexes with fairly pathetic use-by dates. A machine might live forever and copy itself perfectly, unencumbered by the error-prone flexibility of natural evolution. Self-designing life forms could also tailor themselves to very specific environments. In a single generation they could adapt to the great gulfs of time and space between the stars, or to the environments of alien worlds.

Pull all of these pieces together and it can certainly seem that the human blueprint is a blip, a quickly passing phase. People take this analysis seriously enough that influential figures such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have publicly warned about the dangers of all-consuming artificial intelligence. At the same time, the computer scientist Ray Kurzweil has made a big splash from books and conferences that preview an impending singularity. But are living things really compelled to become ever-smarter and more robust? And is biological intelligence really a universal dead-end, destined to give way to machine supremacy?

Perhaps not. There is quite a bit more to the story.•

Tags: Caleb Scharf

“There’s A Certain Chaos In The World And People Need Something That Has Very Clear Moral Boundaries”

March 23, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In scary times, superheroes and fascists hold appeal. Both are built on a childish desire for easy answers to thorny problems. Never mind that Batman is a disturbed vigilante and Mussolini was only tolerable when hanging upside down from an Esso gas station. Just give us the appearance of strength.

In a really good Salon interview conducted by Scott Timberg, the great writer and artist Daniel Clowes discusses the current adult fascination with Superman and such. An excerpt:

Question:

There’s so much to keep up with. Along with comics, underground and otherwise, there are more superhero movies all the time. You’ve been vocal about your frustration with superheroes.

Daniel Clowes:

I am laughing at the fact that for years, when we were doing “Eightball” and “Hate” and “Love & Rockets” and stuff, we thought, “What we’re doing is really the mainstream stuff. It’s like comics for adults, that a general audience could read… and only the tiniest niche audience of emotional defectives care about superhero comics.”

Question:

Superhero comics seemed to you like some old-world ’50s thing that was dying out.

Daniel Clowes:

Right. And yet they’re dominating our industry. I remember an artist, Bob Burden, saying, “It’s so random. It would be like if all comics were about pilgrims and then we did comics about normal people and we were looked at as the weirdoes.”

So that was our thesis, and then to see with the advent of technology where they could actually make these realistic superhero movies, to see that: No, the entire culture is what the comics shop was in 1985. It repudiates our lofty claims. It says more about our culture than anything else. I’m always kind of saddened when 45-year-old parents of my son’s friends can’t wait to go see “The Avengers.” That shouldn’t be for you. [Laughs]

Question:

The sense that it’s a guilty pleasure or something for kids seems to have disappeared.

Daniel Clowes:

That’s long gone.

Question:

How much does that shift have to do with technology?

Daniel Clowes:

I think there’s a certain chaos in the world and people need something that has very clear moral boundaries, I guess.

Tags: Daniel Clowes, Scott Timberg

“A Majority Of Workers Also Think That Their Own Specific Professions Or Jobs Won’t Be Impacted”

March 23, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

“Nobody knows anything,” William Goldman famously said, in 1983, of the motion-picture industry. I wonder if that analysis remains true.

Hollywood still manufactures bombs, but very few of the tentpoles tank now. There aren’t as many hunches played, which makes the business more stagnant creatively, but most of the big bets come in. More advanced research and marketing and analytics and promotion has made it so, since the artistic merits of comic-book spectaculars are wildly inconsistent.

Can this new reality of film economics be applied to the wider economy? Not exactly, since there are way more variables in play. Black swans will still smack us in the back of the head. A huge meltdown can delay the inevitable–or jump-start it early. But some things are good bets. It seems pretty clear now that there’ll be a major transition in Labor over the rest of this century. Either many jobs–entire industries, actually–disappear and are replaced by ones we’ve yet to imagine, or they vanish and aren’t replaced in the numbers necessary. Although this upheaval is upon us, it would seem politicians in this year’s American Presidential campaign–and the electorate–aren’t aware that manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back and more professions than they might imagine are going away.

From Sam Becker at Cheat Sheet, the world’s worst-designed website:

Social scientists and economists are getting pretty good at reading the tea leaves from available data. When it comes to forecasting future trends in employment and business, we generally have an idea of where things things are headed. Though there are big, unexpected events that occur and throw everything into flux, we can mostly plot out humanity’s course, on a macro level, over the next several decades.

Unfortunately, for a good portion of the world’s poor and working classes, it doesn’t look too good – even though we’re living in a time of unprecedented wealth and technological innovation. That innovation will ultimately replace workers in droves, and some large-scale economic policy shifts are going to be needed to sort things out.

But even as we face the prospect of increasing automation, and fewer employment opportunities, most American workers remain confident – perhaps too confident. A look at some new numbers from Pew Research Center shows that worker sentiment toward the future speaks not just to inflated confidence, but perhaps a sense of denial.

The Pew brief cites a 2013 study from Oxford University, which says that as much as 47% of American jobs are subject to automation in the near future. In other words, as much as half of the American work force may be facing a serious employment crisis, and we’re really doing nothing about it. Using that as a starting point, Pew surveyed Americans to drill further down into this dilemma, and see how Americans feel about the unnerving prospect of mass automation.

As expected, a majority (two-thirds) do expect that within 50 years, robots and computers will take over most of the menial work from human employees. But – and here’s the big hang-up – a majority of workers also think that their own specific professions or jobs won’t be impacted.•

Tags: Sam Becker

“If Half The Stories About Big Sur Were True The Vibrations Of All The Orgies Would Have Collapsed The Entire Santa Lucia Mountain Range”

March 23, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

In Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, Henry Miller, that brilliant kitchen-sink philosopher, writes of being down and out in paradise and loveliness. The money owed him from books he’d published in Europe earlier in the century had vanished into the fog of war. He lived with his family a threadbare existence in the Northern California Valhalla, knowing they were as rich as they were poor. His idyll was disturbed regularly by an uninvited cult of expatriates from the air-conditioned nightmare, who wanted to pile onto the orgies and play naked ping pong. They could be charming or maddening. Miller did find the time, however, to pen incredible riffs about the future of American technology and science and politics.

If there were two writers whose hearts beat as one despite a generational divide, it would have been Miller and Hunter S. Thompson. In 1961, the Gonzo journalist penned a Rogue article about Miller in Utopia, or something like it. Despite the novelist’s larger-than-life presence, Thompson focuses mostly on the eccentricities of the singular region. I found the piece at Totallygonzo.org. Just click on the pages for a larger, readable version.

“The Question Is One Of Time Scales”

March 22, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

It flatters us to believe we’re the end result of an extraordinarily rare evolutionary event, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t so.

Stephen Jay Gould famously asked in 1989 if evolution would play out in the same way if we were able to “rewind the tape of life” to the Cambrian. He was sure it would not, that life was a cascading event that would have headed in a different direction, perhaps a very different one. Others vehemently disagree, thinking that variations would occur, sure, but given enough time, life would have wound up roughly in the same condition.

In a Nautilus article, Zach Zurich takes up the question, believing the answer may lie in outer space. An excerpt:

Does the rarity of any particular sequence of events imply that major shifts in evolution are unlikely to be repeated? The experiments suggest that’s true, but Conway Morris firmly answers, no. “You’d be daft to say that there aren’t accidents of one sort or another. The question is one of time scales,” he says. Given enough years and enough mutating genomes, he believes that natural selection will drive life toward the inevitable adaptations that best fit the organisms’ ecological niche, no matter the contingencies that occur along the way. He believes that one day, all of the E. coli in Lenski’s experiment would evolve to consume citrate, and that all of Liu’s viruses would eventually scale their adaptive Mount Everests. Further, those experiments were conducted in very simple and controlled environments that don’t come close to matching the complex ecosystems that life must adapt to outside the lab. It’s hard to say how real-world environmental pressures might have altered the results.

So far, the biggest shortcoming in all of the attempts to answer the “tape of life” question is that biologists can only draw conclusions based on just one biosphere—the Earth’s. An encounter with extra-terrestrial life would undoubtedly tell us more. Even though alien organisms may not have DNA, they’d likely show similar patterns of evolution. They would need some material that would be passed down to their descendants, which would guide the development of organisms and change over time. As Lenski says, “What’s true for E. coli is also true for some microbe anywhere in the universe.”

Therefore, the same interactions between convergence and contingency might play out on other planets. And if extraterrestrial life faces similar evolutionary pressures to life on Earth, future humans may discover aliens that have convergently evolved an intelligence like ours.⁵ On the other hand, if contingent events build on one another, driving the development of life down unique paths as Gould suggested, extra-terrestrial life may be extraordinarily strange.•

Tags: Conway Morris, Stephen Jay Gould, Zach Zorich

“It’s A Pipe Dream Driven By Greed”

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

It’s said in his NYT obituary that the just-deceased Intel founder Andy Grove “helped midwife the semiconductor revolution” and that “in some ways [he] was considered ‘the father’ of Silicon Valley.” But even the most plugged in of all can’t know everything, can’t collect and decipher information perfectly.

Case in point: Under a quarter century ago, Grove grew frustrated when others argued smartphones could soon become a reality. Peter H. Lewis’ 1992 New York Times article was prescient about the emergence of smartphones, even if it didn’t realize the tools would be for everyone, not just the executive class. Grove, who’s quoted in the piece, was much further off the mark. An excerpt:

Sometime around the middle of this decade no one is sure exactly when — executives on the go will begin carrying pocket-sized digital communicating devices. And although nobody is exactly sure what features these personal information gizmos will have, what they will cost, what they will look like or what they will be called, hundreds of computer industry officials and investors at the Mobile ’92 conference here last week agreed that the devices could become the foundation of the next great fortunes to be made in the personal computer business.

“We are writing Chapter 2 of the history of personal computers,” said Nobuo Mii, vice president and general manager of the International Business Machines Corporation’s entry systems division.

How rich is this lode? At one end of the spectrum is John Sculley, the chief executive of Apple Computer Inc., who says these personal communicators could be ‘the mother of all markets.’

At the other end is Andrew Grove, the chairman of the Intel Corporation, the huge chip maker based in Santa Clara, Calif. He says the idea of a wireless personal communicator in every pocket is “a pipe dream driven by greed.”

These devices are expected to combine the best features of personal computers, facsimile machines, computer networks, pagers, personal secretaries, appointment books, address books and even paperback books and pocket CD players — all in a hand-held box operated by pen, or even voice commands.

Stuck in traffic on a business trip, an executive carrying a personal communicator could send and receive electronic mail and facsimile messages from anywhere in the country. She could also call up a local map on a 3-inch by 5-inch screen, draw a line between her current position (confirmed by satellite positioning signals) and her intended destination, and the device would give her specific driving instructions (as well as real-time warnings about traffic jams or accidents). Certainly, these are just predictions for now, but they sure are fun to think about.•

“There’s A Darker Side To All This, Too”

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

Our information is inside the machine now, but soon we’ll be there, too.

We now enter queries and likes and itineraries into a networked machine that continues to learn more about us and people like us. Soon the Internet of Things will be established, and the machine will escape its casing and live among us, so quiet, not even making a hum, that we’ll barely notice it. Driverless car technology will mature and we’ll be sitting inside a computer which will be inside another computer. In our pockets will be more computers. They’ll all be measuring and tracking, tabulating, taking a pulse, all the time, not just following us but guiding us. The data will be worthwhile, will help us achieve a safer and, in some ways, saner world, but it will be almost impossible to opt out, to be left alone. We’ll be a known quantity. It will seem like progress.

The opening of “How Self-Driving Cars Will Threaten Privacy,” a wonderfully lucid Atlantic essay by Adrienne LaFrance, which opines that the “price of convenience [will be] surveillance”:

Allow me to join you, if I may, on your morning commute sometime in the indeterminate future.

Here we are, stepping off the curb and into the backseat of a vehicle. As you close the car door behind you, the address of your office—our destination—automatically appears on a screen embedded in the back of a leather panel in front of you. “Good morning,” says the car’s humanoid voice, greeting you by name before turning on NPR for you like it does each day.

You decide you’d like a cup of coffee, and you tell the vehicle so. “Peet’s coffee, half-a-mile away,” it confirms. Peet’s, as it turns out, is a few doors down from Suds Cleaners. The car suggests you pick up your dry cleaning while you’re in the neighborhood. “After work instead,” you say. The car tweaks your evening travel itinerary accordingly.

As we run into Peet’s to grab coffee, the car circles the block. Then, we’re back in the vehicle, en route to your office once again. There’s a lunch special coming up at the vegetarian place you like, the car tells you as we pass the restaurant. With your approval, it makes a reservation for Friday. We ride by a grocery store and a list of sale items appears on the screen. With a few taps, you’ve added them to your existing grocery list. The car is scheduled to pick up and deliver your order this evening.

We’re less than a mile from your office now. Just like every morning, your schedule for the morning—a conference call at 10 a.m., a meeting at 11 a.m.—appears on the screen, along with a reminder that today is a colleague’s birthday.

This is the age of self-driving cars, an era when much of the minutiae of daily life is relegated to a machine. Your commute was pleasant, relaxing, and efficient. Along with promising unprecedented safety on public roadways, driverless cars could make our lives a lot easier—freeing up people’s time and attention to focus on other matters while they’re moving from one place to the next.

But there’s a darker side to all this, too.•

Tags: Adrienne LaFrance

“Only The Strongest Men Can Spend Full Days Among Lunatics And Not Become One”

March 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Excerpts follow from two stories published under the “Life Inside” rubric at The Marshall Project. The first is from Nate A. Lindell’s short essay about his experiences behind bars with a woebegone Whitey Bulger, a geriatric wheeled around in his waning days by an ex-Aryan Brotherhood member. The second is from “Inside the Shithouse,” Jeremy Busby’s memory of being flushed down the vortex of the American penal system, finding himself awash in the lunacy of an East Texas prison.