Excerpts

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“His Views Were Often At Odds With The Majority Of The AI Community”

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

26minsky-obit-web-facebookJumboThe Humanities has had “physics envy” for quite awhile, trying to turn literature and such into a science for some silly reasons rooted in insecurity. It’s probably less understood outside academic circles that AI also long hoped to be like physics, wrapping up staggering complexities into a few laws. Marvin Minsky wasn’t a believer in such tidiness. A Fold article collects thoughts about the recently deceased AI pioneer from some of his colleagues. One, MIT Professor Patti Maes, recalls his parrying with popular beliefs in the field. An excerpt:

Explorations of Consciousness and Longevity

Some of Marvin’s most fascinating work was around the idea of the Mind As Society and the nature of consciousness. Throughout this work, what stood out was his enormous respect for the human.

“When a person says ‘I’m not a machine’, they’re showing a lack of respect for people….because we are the greatest machine in the world.”

He was curious about the fuzzy ideas people hold about the nature of consciousness and marveled at how we can effectively navigate the world without the slightest idea of how we were doing it.

“The mystery of consciousness to me is not ‘Isn’t it wonderful that we’re conscious’, but it’s the opposite. Isn’t it wonderful that we can do things like talk and walk, and understand without having the slightest idea of how it works.”

He also focused on health and longevity, speaking of immortality as a perfectly reasonable goal. He thought deeply about everything from the priorities we should have as a species to body part replacement.

From Pattie Maes:

“Marvin was always a true original, out-of-the-box thinker. While he is of course widely recognized as one of the founders of the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), his views were often at odds with the majority of the AI community.

For many decades, and even today, AI was plagued by “physics envy.” Researchers sought a few universal principles or mechanisms that could model or produce human-like intelligence. Marvin constantly reminded us that the real solution was likely to be a lot more complex. He described a myriad of different mechanisms that may be involved in producing intelligence in his books ‘The Society of Mind’ and ‘The Emotion Machine’ and emphasized the importance of giving computers large amounts of ‘common sense knowledge’, a problem few AI researchers, even today, have attempted to tackle.

I suspect that gradually the field will come to align with his views, recognizing that his views and writings have a timeless and deep quality.”•

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“It Feels Dangerous Over Here”

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

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If the polls are correct, most Americans believe in gun ownership but also desire in sensible laws governing that right, that responsibility. Studies even show the bulk of NRA members in agreement with background checks and not selling arms to those on terrorist watch lists and such. It’s always puzzled me that moderate gun owners don’t splinter off from the NRA, the second-most powerful fringe group in America (congratulations, Republican Party!). 

In a Financial Times essay, the novelist Richard Ford, a longtime gun owner, thinks what I’ve just described is a fairy tale, that the majority of us do favor insane gun laws. Perhaps, though it seems most of us have been removed from a discussion that goes on in Washington between lobbyists (with money) and lawmakers (with pockets). Ford himself looks at our facacta political landscape and believes it’s time to stop being locked into being loaded. An excerpt:

America is getting nuttier and nuttier. Every election cycle I notice how less governable it seems. Now the thuggish Donald Trump or the gargoyle-ish Ted Cruz may be our next president. What’s that about? Congress basically doesn’t work any more. Hundreds of our citizens were killed or wounded in mass shootings last year. Thanks to President Barack Obama and a lot of other right-thinking people, relations between blacks and white Americans (frictive, violent and unjust for centuries) are now prominently and more accurately in our view, and are improving. But white, undereducated men (the core group of handgun owners in our country), are living less long, are suffering increased alcoholism, drug abuse and stress. Black Americans know this experience very well in their own history. These white men don’t feel they’re keeping up with either their parents’ generation or with the people they normally compare themselves to (often African-Americans). Nine per cent of these men are unemployed. They’re cynical — with some reason — about their government. They feel too many things in the country aren’t going their way, and that they can’t control their lives. They fear change. Yet they sense the change they fear may have already occurred. Crime and gun violence are actually down in the US. But gun ownership is up. The NRA would say the latter statistic occasions the former. Me . . . I just say it feels dangerous over here.

I don’t cite these facts to engender undue sympathy for any particular American demographic slice. I personally do have some empathy for these white men, as well as for black teenagers mercilessly murdered by white police officers. And for lots of other people, too. I’m a novelist. Empathy is kinda my job. My version of liberty in the American republic is consonant with the view held by the cunningly named US appellate judge Learned Hand; which is, that the spirit of liberty is that spirit which is not too sure it’s right. What I feel, though, is what many Americans feel now — people I agree with and people I decidedly don’t — namely, we sense we’re approaching a tipping point in our liberties, a point at which good is being intolerably held hostage by not good, a point we need to back away from while we still can.•

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“The Potential Good And Bad Consequences Are Staggering”

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

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When someone asks if machines can someday become conscious, my first thought is always this: Well, if that’s what they choose.

I intend that answer somewhat, though not entirely, glibly. Machines will achieve superintelligence long before consciousness, so who knows if we or they execute their awakening, if it should ever occur. Similarly, I believe bioengineering will allow humans to achieve a heretofore unapproached IQ level. Not soon, but someday.

AI, it is often said by very brilliant people, is our conqueror awaiting on the horizon, but I think it’s a distance beyond the further limits of our current perception. When we do get close enough to see them, they may resemble us. They will be another version of ourselves, a new “human” resulting from a souped-up evolution of our own design. We will be the end of us.

Of course, I could be completely wrong. We’re likely to find out the answer, however, since computers and science are probably too decentralized for curiosity to be checked. 

David Gelernter watched AlphaGo’s recent smashing triumph and now fears AI more than he does women who work outside the home. In his WSJ essay “Machines That Will Think and Feel,” he argues that “superhuman robots” will become reality once scientists appreciate that emotion is as vital to their creation as rational thought. An excerpt:

AI prophets envision humanlike intelligence within a few decades: not expertise at a single, specified task only but the flexible, wide-ranging intelligence that Alan Turing foresaw in a 1950 paper proposing the test for machine intelligence that still bears his name. Once we have figured out how to build artificial minds with the average human IQ of 100, before long we will build machines with IQs of 500 and 5,000. The potential good and bad consequences are staggering. Humanity’s future is at stake.

Suppose you had a fleet of AI software apps with IQs of 150 (and eventually 500 or 5,000) to help you manage life. You download them like other apps, and they spread out into your phones and computers—and walls, clothes, office, car, luggage—traveling within the dense computer network of the near future that is laid in by the yard, like thin cloth, everywhere.

AI apps will read your email and write responses, awaiting your nod to send them. They will escort your tax return to the IRS, monitor what is done and report back. They will murmur (from your collar, maybe) that the sidewalk is icier than it looks, a friend is approaching across the street, your gait is slightly odd—have you hurt your back? They will log on for you to 19 different systems using 19 different ridiculous passwords, rescuing you from today’s infuriating security protocols. They will answer your phone and tactfully pass on messages, adding any reminders that might help.

In a million small ways, next-generation AI apps will lessen the friction of modern life. Living without them will seem, in retrospect, like driving with no springs or shocks.

But we don’t have the vaguest idea what an IQ of 5,000 would mean.•

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“Factories Have Been Coming Back, But The Jobs Haven’t”

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

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In this nativist political season, Donald Trump has promised he’d use taxes to force American companies to not relocate factories overseas, but many of them are glad to stay and others are happily returning. The jobs aren’t coming back, mind you, just the factories. The work is being outsourced beyond our species, with machines taking over most of the tasks. That trend will only continue apace, regardless of where the physical plants are located. That’s the real political issue, the increase in automation, and one that’s been almost completely ignored on the trail. That’s probably because there are no easy answers.

From “Manufacturing Is Never Coming Back,” by Ben Casselman at Five Thirty Eight:

A plea to presidential candidates: Stop talking about bringing manufacturing jobs back from China. In fact, talk a lot less about manufacturing, period.

It’s understandable that voters are angry about trade. The U.S. has lost more than 4.5 million manufacturing jobs since NAFTA took effect in 1994. And as Eduardo Porter wrote this week, there’s mounting evidence that U.S. trade policy, particularly with China, has caused lasting harm to many American workers. But rather than play to that anger, candidates ought to be talking about ways to ensure that the service sector can fill manufacturing’s former role as a provider of dependable, decent-paying jobs.

Here’s the problem: Whether or not those manufacturing jobs could have been saved, they aren’t coming back, at least not most of them. How do we know? Because in recent years, factories have been coming back, but the jobs haven’t. Because of rising wages in China, the need for shorter supply chains and other factors, a small but growing group of companies are shifting production back to the U.S. But the factories they build here are heavily automated, employing a small fraction of the workers they would have a generation ago.•

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“The Company Is Testing Pizza Delivery By Robot In New Zealand”

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

pizza-large_trans++3480UNUU8UfSxDSaY1n7MGcv5yZLmao6LolmWYJrXnsDescribed by Domino’s corporate execs as “cheeky and endearing” and a “road to the future,” the DRU robot has begun delivering the sludge the company calls pizza. Better to pull a tire from the rolling machine and gnaw on it.

Delivering pies is drudgery and sometimes dangerous, but it is an entry point into the economy for workers, and when the task is transitioned to robots it will leave a hole in the job market that won’t be easy to replace. The same goes for drivers (trucks, taxi, limo, etc.) when autonomous cars are perfected. Progress is good, but it comes with a price that must be addressed.

From Rhiannon Williams at The Telegraph:

Robots have changed our lives in many ways, from advancing our healthcare and automating our factory lines, to taking on dangerous tasks and even taking our place in warfare.

Now Domino’s have developed possibly the greatest use for robots yet – safe and secure pizza delivery in what the company claims is a world first.

The company is testing pizza delivery by robot in New Zealand, known as the Domino’s Robotic Unit (DRU). The three-foot tall battery-powered unit contains a heated compartment for storing up to 10 pizzas, and is capable of self-driving up to 12.5 miles, or 20 km from a shop.

The robot sports sensors for detecting obstacles on its route, and customers are given a unique code to key into the pizza compartment once it arrives at their house to prevent thieves from trying to steal its goods en route.•

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“The Chinese Government Wants To Know About Everything”

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

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Was reading an article, “Botox and Driverless Cars to Spearhead China Growth,” and thinking the obvious, that despite a disdain for democracy, China has become Western in so many ways, especially technological ones. Of course, our new tools also threaten to make the West resemble China’s autocracy, even if it’s more corporatocracy than governmental. Smartphones are the first step, but driverless cars and the Internet of Things will move us so far into the machine, make it so easy for every step–even thought–to be tracked, that it will be impossible to withdraw. These advances will do great things, but there will be costs.

The opening of G. Clay Whittaker’s Daily Beast piece about China’s Minority Report mission:

China has a new strategy in fighting crime, ripped from science fiction and hastily pasted at the top of the list of paranoia-inducing concepts.

It’s called pre-crime. It goes further than sting operations, counterterrorism, or any other government action to preempt criminal activity ever before.

Like the 2002 film Minority Report, China wants to fight crimes before they happen. They want to know they’ll happen before they’re planned—before the criminal even knows he’s going to be part of them. Bloomberg Business reported that the Communist Party “has directed one of the country’s largest state-run defense contractors, China Electronics Technology Group, to develop software to collate data on jobs, hobbies, consumption habits, and other behavior of ordinary citizens to predict terrorist acts before they occur.”

The Chinese government wants to know about everything: every text a person sends, every extra stop they make on the way home. It’s designed for dissidents, but it means that they’ll know every time a smoker buys a pack of cigarettes, how much gas a car owner uses, what time the new mom goes to bed, and what’s in the bachelor’s refrigerator.

It’s a scary thought, especially when you consider that the main target of Chinese pre-crime efforts wouldn’t be “terrorists,” murderers, rapists, or child molesters, but rather dissidents of every shape and size.•

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“Technology May Be Even More Precise Than Human Employees”

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

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Collars white and blue will be impacted by automation in the coming decades, the question being whether enough new jobs will be created to make up for the losses of lawyers and livery drivers. 

Two passages follow, one from a Business Insider piece by Kate Taylor on Carl’s Jr. CEO Andy Puzder who boldly stepped into the future (and put his foot in the mouth) in announcing he wants to open an Eatsa-esque automated location, while simultaneously bashing humans laborers, those pests, and their requests for living wages and basic rights. The second excerpt comes from a Financial Times article by Jane Croft about the projected technological transition in the legal profession that will favor some while displacing others.

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From Business Insider:

First and foremost, the technology has to work every time. For the time being, Puzder doesn’t think that it’s likely that any machine could take over the more nuanced kitchen work of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s.

But for more rote tasks like grilling a burger or taking an order, technology may be even more precise than human employees.

“They’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case,” says Puzder of swapping employees for machines.

…

Puzder says that a restaurant that’s 100% automated would have one big plus for millennials: no social interaction.

“Millennials like not seeing people,” he says. “I’ve been inside restaurants where we’ve installed ordering kiosks … and I’ve actually seen young people waiting in line to use the kiosk where there’s a person standing behind the counter, waiting on nobody.”•

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From Financial Times:

Around 114,000 jobs in the legal sector are likely to become automated in the next 20 years as technology transforms the profession, a new study has found.

Automation, changes in the demands from clients and the rise of millennials in the workplace will alter the types of skills sought after by law firms, according to the new study by Deloitte which predicts a tipping point for law firms by 2020.

Technology has already contributed to a reduction of around 31,000 jobs in the sector including roles such as legal secretaries, the report said, as it predicted that another 39 per cent of jobs are at “high risk” of being made redundant by machines in the next two decades.

The sector is currently growing; there has been an overall increase of approximately 80,000 jobs — most of which are higher skilled and better paid, such as barristers and solicitors.

The study also predicts a healthier future for highly skilled lawyers. It points to projections by the Warwick Institute for Employment Research which estimates that 25,000 extra workers will be needed in legal activities sector between 2015 and 2020.•

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“Oooo, Does Coca-Cola Know That I Masturbated?”

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

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In the passage I posted from his recent Reddit AMA, Douglas Rushkoff, who’s just published Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, engaged in an esoteric exchange about possible economic outcomes in our newly wired world. In a FiveThirtyEight podcast hosted by Jody Avirgan, the author notes that corporations collecting metadata, part of our paranoid-making contemporary financial reality, is creepy even if it studies us as parts of groups rather than as individuals. An excerpt:

Jody Avirgan:

We obsess about the creepiness of a corporation or a government kind of knowing about us as individuals, but you say that the part that creeps you out the most is the metadata notion — to think of yourself as grouped, not as an individual.

Douglas Rushkoff:

When people think of privacy, they think of the content rather than the context. So the privacy is like, “Oooo, does Coca-Cola know that I masturbated?”

Jody Avirgan:

I don’t know why Coca-Cola would want to know that, but I bet someone in Coca Cola is trying to figure it out.

Douglas Rushkoff:

And they do. And they do. Believe me, statistically they know.

Jody Avirgan:

I will never be able to forget that notion.You’ve just implanted that in my head.

Douglas Rushkoff:

[Laughs] That’s the social programming of the activist in media trying to plant memetic constructs that slowly deteriorate our brand imagery. It’s not the specific thing that they’re going to find out, it’s the groups that you’re in, it’s the metadata. So that, when you see the study that Facebook knows with 80 percent accuracy whether an adolescent boy is going to [come out as] homosexual in the next six months — that’s weird. Companies know things about you that you don’t yet know yourself, and they only know them in terms of probability. The world that you see is being configured to a probable reality that you haven’t yet chosen.•

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“Just Imagine A Small Lunar Base At One Of The Lunar Poles”

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

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Brian Clegg doesn’t believe a moon colony could be profitable, but what if new technologies and better financial planning rendered the project relatively inexpensive? And what if the non-economic gains, at least the immediate ones, could benefit us in numerous other ways?

Jurica Dujmovic of Marketwatch pointed me toward a New Space article by Alexandra Hall, Chris McKay and John Cumbers, which proposes just such a low-cost lunar settlement be established. They believe recent advances in launch capacity and lessons learned from the International Space Station could seriously shave costs.

An excerpt:

Just imagine a small lunar base at one of the lunar poles operated by NASA or an International Consortium and modeled according to the U.S. Antarctic Station at South Pole. The crew of about 10 people would consist of a mixture of staff and field scientists. Personnel rotations might be three times a year. The main activity would be supporting field research selected by peer-reviewed proposals. Graduate students doing fieldwork for their thesis research would dominate the activity. No one lives at the base permanently but there is always a crew present. The base is heavily supported by autonomous and remotely operated robotic devices.

The activities at this Moon base would be focusing on science, as is the case in the Antarctic. It could provide an official U.S. Government presence on the Moon and its motivation would be rooted in U.S. national policy—again as are the U.S. Antarctic bases. A lunar base would provide a range of technologies and programmatic precedents supporting a long-term NASA research base on Mars.

None of these ideas is new, but given that all prior assumptions for execution revolved around such an activity consuming all or most of the NASA budget for decades, then progress has been extremely limited.

Now imagine that the cost of such a lunar base was within NASA’s existing deep space human spaceflight budget of $3–4 billion per year. Suddenly it would be an easy sell and would receive no opposition from the sections of the space community that are focused on other destinations.

The logic that low cost changes the terms of the debate about a NASA Moon base and enables a consensus path forward to establishing a base also applies to private/commercial endeavors. When the cost of a short stay on the Moon drops into the tens of millions of dollars per person, it starts to tap into the same market that has given us private spaceflight participants to the International Space Station (ISS). Furthermore, the presence of a government base is also the presence of a customer on the Moon—a factor that can stimulate the development of services, supplies, and technology to the benefit of all.•

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“The More You Ask Of Viv, The More It Will Get To Know You”

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

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With his AI enterprise, Viv, Dag Kittlaus is not trying to create Frankenstein but Igor, a digital assistant that goes far beyond Siri (which he co-created), one that attaches a pleasing voice to a “giant brain in the sky.” It’s not easy, however, for technologists to discuss such heady enterprises without offering phrases, like the one in the headline, embedded with unintended meanings.

From Marco della Cava’s USA Today piece about technology talk at SXSW, which featured Steven Levy questioning Kittlaus:

When the moderator, tech author Steven Levy, asked Kittlaus if in fact supercomputers might not take over for entrepreneurs, using their digital brains to create things faster than humans, [Dag] Kittlaus nodded.

“Yes, it will happen,” he said. “It’s just a matter of when.”

Kittlaus, it can be argued, is hastening the arrival of that day. Later this year, he will unveil Viv, an open source and cloud-based personal assistant that will allow humans “to talk to the Internet” and have the Internet talk back.

“The more you ask of Viv, the more it will get to know you,” he said. “Siri was chapter one, and now it’s almost like a new Internet age is coming. Viv will be a giant brain in the sky.”

Kittlaus said Viv would differ from Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Amazon’s Echo by being able to make mental leaps.

For example, asking Viv “What’s the weather near the Super Bowl” would cause it to “write its own program to find the answer, one that first determines where the Super Bowl is, and then what the weather will be in that city,” he said.•

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“I Have Wanted That To Be The Future For…Forever”

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

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Steve Wozniak just completed one of his wide-ranging AMAs at Reddit, providing thoughtful commentary on myriad subjects. On the state of the company he cofounded, he admires Tim Cook’s management though he has misgivings about the Apple Watch (and who doesn’t!). The Woz longs for the day when we can talk to machines that know us as well as–even better than–our human friends, which will be wonderful and creepy. In the Apple/FBI scrum, he comes down on the side civil liberties, which is unsurprising if you know his history. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

What is Tim Cook doing right/wrong, in your opinion?

Steve Wozniak:

Tim Cook is acknowledging the employees of Apple and the customers of Apple as real people. He is continuing a strong tradition that Steve Jobs was known for of making good products that help people do things they want to do in their life, and not taking the company into roads of, “Oh, we’ll make all our money like by knowing you and advertising to you.” We’ll make good products. And you know, I started out as a hardware product guy, so I’m glad to see that.

I worry a little bit about – I mean I love my Apple Watch, but – it’s taken us into a jewelry market where you’re going to buy a watch between $500 or $1100 based on how important you think you are as a person. The only difference is the band in all those watches. Twenty watches from $500 to $1100. The band’s the only difference? Well this isn’t the company that Apple was originally, or the company that really changed the world a lot. So it might be moving, but you’ve got to follow, you know. You’ve got to follow the paths of where the markets are.

Everything else, I’m very approving of Tim Cook, because every time we have a new iOS update, I’m very happy that it’s doing things that really affect people. Like transferring calls from my phone to my computer, etc. I really love even the Airplay, and all that. So, I love the software, and I love the hardware, and nothing’s letting me down. So I approve very strongly of Tim Cook and the new Apple. I dearly miss Steve Jobs too, but, that’s all.

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Question:

What are your thoughts on the FBI/DOJ vs Apple ordeal at the moment?

Steve Wozniak:

All through my time with personal computers from the start, I developed an attitude that things like movement towards newer, better technologies – like the Macintosh computer, like the touchscreen of the iPhone – that these were making the human more important than the technology. We did not have to modify our ways of living. So the human became very important to me. And how do you represent what humanity is?

You know what, I have things in my head, some very special people in my life that I don’t talk about, that mean so much to me from the past. Those little things that I keep in my head are my little secrets. It’s a part of my important world, my whole essence of my being. I also believe in honesty. If you tell somebody, “I am not snooping on you,” or, “I am giving you some level of privacy; I will not look in your drawers,” then you should keep your word and be honest. And I always try to avoid being a snoop myself, and it’s rare in time that we can look back and say, “How should humans be treated?” Not, “How can the police run everything?”

I was brought up in a time when communist Russia under Stalin was thought to be, everybody is spied on, everybody is looked into, every little thing can get you secretly thrown into prison. And, no. We had our Bill of Rights. And it’s just dear to me. The Bill of Rights says some bad people won’t do certain bad things because we’re protecting humans to live as humans.

So, I come from the side of personal liberties. But there are also other problems. Twice in my life I wrote things that could have been viruses. I threw away every bit of source code. I just got a chill inside. These are dangerous, dangerous things, and if some code gets written in an Apple product that lets people in, bad people are going to find their way to it, very likely.

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Question:

What is your opinion on how immersive our technology is becoming? We use computers in some form, almost constantly. Do you ever feel in your own life you that it becomes overwhelming?

Steve Wozniak:

I have that feeling all the time because I like a nice, quiet, simple life. I grew up shy. I’m more into products than I’m into socializing. And I do not carry around my phone answering every text message instantly. I am not one of those people.

I wait until I’m alone in my places and get on my computer and do things where I think I’m more efficient. I really see a lot of people that are dragged into it, but you know, I don’t criticize them. When you have change, it’s not that the change in how people are behaving different to you is bad or good, it’s just different.

So that’s sort of the modern way, and you know the millennials, every generation wants to criticize the next generation for missing out on things like personal human contact, but I’ll tell you a little story. When we started Apple, Steve Jobs and I talked about how we wanted to make blind people as equal and capable as sighted people, and you’d have to say we succeeded when you look at all the people walking down the sidewalk looking down at something in their hands and totally oblivious to everything around them!

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Question:

What is your favorite up and coming gadget? Anything people don’t know about yet?

Steve Wozniak:

Well, I would think probably one of them is certainly the Oculus Rift, or any of the VR headsets. I love putting mine on and watching a basketball game live; it was just an experience that you can’t believe. Sometimes I come out of a VR world, take off the helmet, and I can’t believe I’m actually sitting in my office, at a desk at home. So, that’s one of the big ones.

Right now, Amazon Echo; it’s getting so popular among the people that use it and they speak so highly of it, and it’s so inexpensive. I see a lot of developers that went into smartphones jumping onto that. It’s a platform, and when you have a platform that everybody else is writing apps for and connecting to, basically they’re advertising your company as much as you are.

Obviously, I’m very interested in the evolution of self-driving cars. Right now, the assist that they give you for keeping in your lane and cruise control…the cruise control started back in 2004 actually, adjusting your distance. I love driving my Tesla so much, I just smile! I sit there in the driver’s seat, and I kinda look over at my wife, and I just smile. I’m so happy, not using my hands or feet. So, I think the progression towards self-driving cars is going to be a good one. But it falls into that category of AI.

Now, the AI that impresses me, I fell in love 10 years ago – well not 10 years ago, but whenever it started; Siri was an app you could buy for the iPhone, and I bought it. And for one year, Apple didn’t have it. I just spoke of it as the app that changed my life, because I get to live as a human, saying things out of my head the way I would to another human, and a machine understands me. And I have wanted that to be the future for…forever.

Actually, ever since our Newton message pad, where I could type in, “Sara, dentist, Tuesday, 2 PM,” and click the assist button, and it would open up the calendar; Tuesday at 2 PM, it would put the word dentist, and it would grab Sara out of my contact list. I hand wrote with my own muscles a message for myself, for a human, and a machine understood me. So, I want that to get better and better; machines understanding what we mean, so that we can eventually communicate with them as our best, most trusted friends that know our own hearts and souls better than other humans.•

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“Look Closer, However, And Russia’s Victory Rings Hollow”

March 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Historically, Mussolini may be the template for the odious Donald Trump, but on the contemporary world stage, he most resembles Vladimir Putin. Russia’s swaggering, macho coward makes loud noises to drown out the death rattle of outdated foreign and domestic policies lifted from the twentieth century. The American idiot may be a make-believe mafioso as opposed to Putin’s very real murderous thug, but the similarities are still disconcerting. Of course, in addition to not realizing Putin a poisoner and pistolman by proxy, Trump seems to not have noticed the Russian president is on increasingly shaky ground. 

From the Economist:

JUBILANT crowds waved Russian flags; homecoming pilots were given fresh-baked bread by women in traditional dress. Judging by the pictures on television, Vladimir Putin won a famous victory in Syria this week. After his unexpected declaration that the campaign is over, Mr Putin is claiming credit for a ceasefire and the start of peace talks. He has shown off his forces and, heedless of civilian lives, saved the regime of his ally, Bashar al-Assad (though Mr Assad himself may yet prove dispensable). He has “weaponised” refugees by scattering Syrians among his foes in the European Union. And he has outmanoeuvred Barack Obama, who has consistently failed to grasp the enormity of the Syrian civil war and the threat it poses to America’s allies in the Middle East and Europe.

Look closer, however, and Russia’s victory rings hollow. Islamic State (IS) remains. The peace is brittle. Even optimists doubt that diplomacy in Geneva will prosper (see article). Most important, Mr Putin has exhausted an important tool of propaganda. As our briefing explains, Russia’s president has generated stirring images of war to persuade his anxious citizens that their ailing country is once again a great power, first in Ukraine and recently over the skies of Aleppo. The big question for the West is where he will stage his next drama.

Make Russia great again

Mr Putin’s Russia is more fragile than he pretends. •

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“That’s A Lot Of Competition, All In A Short Span, For American Factory Workers”

March 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Outsourcing has traditionally meant jobs moving outside of a country, but more and more it will mean they move outside the species. Increasing automation will likely put more stress on workers, though no one can surely say how much, as nobody knows precisely when driverless cars or delivery drones or robot bellhops will reach critical mass. President Obama addressed the issue, if briefly, in his last State of the Union:

Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction. What is true — and the reason that a lot of Americans feel anxious — is that the economy has been changing in profound ways, changes that started long before the Great Recession hit and haven’t let up. Today, technology doesn’t just replace jobs on the assembly line, but any job where work can be automated. Companies in a global economy can locate anywhere, and face tougher competition. As a result, workers have less leverage for a raise. Companies have less loyalty to their communities. And more and more wealth and income is concentrated at the very top.

All these trends have squeezed workers, even when they have jobs; even when the economy is growing. It’s made it harder for a hardworking family to pull itself out of poverty, harder for young people to start on their careers, and tougher for workers to retire when they want to. And although none of these trends are unique to America, they do offend our uniquely American belief that everybody who works hard should get a fair shot.•

Most of the focus in this sadly nativist American political season hasn’t been on looming technological unemployment but on blaming and bashing other countries, chiefly China. It’s not that trade deals don’t matter–of course they do–but part of our declining manufacturing base has to do with emerging economies simply becoming more competitive by developing sophisticated systems and taking dicey shortcuts (terrible air pollution, sky-high cancer rates, dangerous work conditions, etc.) that we wouldn’t accept.

From a post by Neil Irwin at the New York Times “Upshot”:

One study found that Chinese imports from 1999 to 2011 cost up to 2.4 million American jobs.

That said, it’s easy to assign too much of the blame for the collapse of manufacturing employment to China or trade more broadly. Hundreds of millions of workers across the globe — many of whom were in dire poverty a generation ago — have become integrated into the world economy. That’s a lot of competition, all in a short span, for American factory workers.

At the same time, factory technology has advanced so that a company can make more stuff with fewer workers. The number of manufacturing workers in the United States has been declining as a share of all jobs nearly continuously since 1943, and the total number of manufacturing jobs peaked in 1979; China’s trade with the United States didn’t really take off until the 1990s.

In other words, trade has been an important economic force over the last few decades, and the deepening of the United States’ ties with China is one of the most important developments in global economics of the last generation. But to look at China as the sole force affecting the ups and downs of American workers misses the mark.•

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“This Is The Story Of The Most Exciting Technology You’re Ever Likely To Encounter”

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

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From typewriters to automobiles to personal computers, new tools pretty much always go through an early, unstable period of fits and starts. Now is no different. The Internet of Things and Augmented Reality are two ideas in possession of game-changing properties but also an assortment of obstacles to surmount. 

In his latest Wall Street Journal column, Christopher Mims touts the latter as “the future” and reports it could possibly arrive sooner than we’d expect, noting the well-funded competition among Silicon Valley giants and startups. “Perhaps AR’s biggest hurdle will be human,” he writes, stating that overcoming computing challenges may be simpler than winning hearts and minds. Even if takes longer than, say, a decade, the technology is surely more doable than the hardware required to realize a lot of our futuristic dreams. I only fear that its arrival will somehow mean more and bigger Trump.

The opening:

This is the story of the most exciting technology you’re ever likely to encounter, which could transform how we interact with computers in the 21st century.

That is a big claim. But I’ll bet that five, 10, 20 years from now, I’ll be able to point to this column and say, “I told you so.”

I’m talking about augmented reality, or AR. It’s often misunderstood or mischaracterized, and has been overshadowed by its cousin, virtual reality. Moreover, the best-known example of AR, Google Glass, has largely been a failure so far.

To understand AR, imagine a display that sits, not on your desk or in your hand, but in front of your eyes. Today, these displays are unwieldy, ranging from bulkier versions of safety glasses to something akin to a bicycle helmet. They have other limitations, such as a narrow field of view, relatively poor resolution and problems with lag.

But many technologists believe that within five years, these displays will be able to project a virtual screen on every surface.•

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“Part Half-Decayed Empire On Ice And Part Gas Station”

March 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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“Thuggish kleptocracy upheld by state-sponsored murder” is probably the way I’d describe Russia under Vladimir Putin, a capo with nuclear capabilities whose odious criminal record will only grow in retrospect, when the much-needed autopsy is finally performed. If Nixon had a “credibility gap,” Putin has an incredible, gaping one. No one knows precisely where all the bodies are buried, only that there’s death in the air, mixed with the scent of oil pulled from yesterday’s wells. 

In a New York Review of Books piece, Masha Gessen tries to make sense of it all, wondering if the term “mafia state” is the most apt description. The opening:

Is Russia a fascist state? A totalitarian one? A dictatorship? A cult of personality? A system? An autocracy? An ideocracy? A kleptocracy? For two days last week, some of the best Russian minds (and a few non-Russians) met in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, to debate the nature of the Putin regime and what it may turn into when Putin is no longer in power, whenever and however that may come to pass. The gathering was convened by chess champion and politician Garry Kasparov, who, like the overwhelming majority of the roughly four hundred participants, is living in exile. People came from the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Malta, and the Baltic states, but Vilnius was chosen for its geographic and symbolic proximity to Russia.

“Part half-decayed empire on ice and part gas station,” a description offered by political scientist Lilia Shevtsova, was probably the most colorful, but the current fashion among the Russian intellectual class is to call Russia a “hybrid regime,” one that combines elements of dictatorship and democracy. Unlike just about all other available definitions of Putinism, this one contains a kernel of hope: it suggests that the regime’s tiny democratic elements can be strengthened and used to weaken the dictatorship part.•

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“His Hoaxes Attempted To Make Some Kind Of Political Commentary”

March 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

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There’s something wrong with people who play pranks. It seems like fractured sexual energy fashioned into a whoopee cushion. But as any longtime reader of this site knows, I’m fascinated by the legendary hoaxster Alan Abel, a blend of Lenny Bruce and Allen Funt whose deadpan presentation bedeviled broadcasters when TV was the primary American media. Abel’s gift is being able to divine our desires and fears before we can name them, and then reflect them through ridiculous stunts that are obviously fake yet fool the masses because of the collective holes in our souls. More than anyone else, he’s the cultural antecedent to Sacha Baron Cohen.

In a smart Priceonomics post, Zachary Crockett profiles man who is–and isn’t–serious. The opening (followed by video of a few Abel hoaxes):

On May 27, 1959, a mysterious, bespectacled man in a suit appeared on The Today Show. After briskly introducing himself, he turned to the camera and told America of his mission: to “clothe naked animals for the sake of decency.”

The man went by the name of G. Clifford Prout, and he claimed to be the president of an organization called The Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (S.I.N.A.). Naked animals, he harped, were “destroying the moral integrity of our great nation” — and the only solution was to cover them up with pants and dresses.

Prout’s impassioned speech did not fall on deaf ears: within days, S.I.N.A. attracted more than 50,000 members. For the next four years, the organization and its leader topped news headlines, made the rounds on talk shows, and spurred heated debates among pundits.

But S.I.N.A. was not real: it was the invention of Alan Abel, history’s greatest media hoaxster.

Over his 60-year “career” as a professional hoaxster, Abel orchestrated more than 30 high-profile stunts — from faking his own death to convincing the press he had the world’s smallest penis. He tricked top New York Times reporters, trolled Walter Cronkite, and weaseled his way into tens of thousands of print publications and talk shows.

His hoaxes attempted to make some kind of political commentary — on censorship, backwards moral standards, or the vapidity of daytime television. But often, they would be taken literally, riling up supporters and revealing ugly truths about America. He preyed on the media’s hunger for juicy stories, and ultimately revealed its gullibility.•

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A funny and prescient piece of performance art in which Abel responded to an ad placed by a 1999 HBO show seeking men willing to discuss their genitalia. Abel presented himself as a 57-year-old musician with a micro-penis. The hoaxer was ridiculing the early days of Reality TV, in which soft-headed pseudo-documentaries were offered to the public by cynical producers who didn’t exactly worry about veracity. Things have gotten only dicier since, as much of our culture, including news, makes no attempt at objective truth, instead encouraging individuals to create the reality that comforts or flatters them. Language is NSFW, unless you work in a gloryhole.

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In this ridiculous interview from basic cable decades ago, Abel satirized our wish for fame, youth and immortality, marrying the emerging celebrity culture to new scientific possibilities. He pretended that he’d created a sperm bank in which only stars like John Wayne and Johnny Carson were allowed to make deposits. And he was going to cryogenically freeze a young woman and tour her body across America. Everyone would be a star and live forever.

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In a 1970s scam, the wiseacre posed as a tennis-loving sheik, playing off America’s fear and loathing of newly minted OPEC millionaires, at a time when our post-WWII lustre had faded. Abel created the character of Prince Emir Assad, who competed in a Pro-Am tourney.

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Abel pulled a prank during the economic downturn of the early 1990s in which he pretended to be a financially desperate man willing to sell his kidneys and lungs. The ruse was eagerly devoured by news media because it toyed furiously with the fear of falling being experienced by a shrinking American middle class, which was under extreme pressure from a dwindling manufacturing base, anti-unionists and technology-driven downsizing. Things have clearly grown even worse.

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“Suddenly The Plane Hit A Patch Of Nasty Turbulence”

March 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Years ahead of a Presidential election season, major news organizations run articles about the futures of the parties, those candidates who may someday be king because of a demographic trend or quirk of history. It’s almost always a fool’s errand because predicting politics so many news cycles away usually makes a mockery of the messenger. And you never know how someone, no matter how good they look in a mirror or on paper, will respond to the trail, a bruising, unforgiving thing–a microscope, a cudgel. For every Barack Obama, there are many Fred Thompsons, Chris Christies and Bobby Jindals.

The New York Times Magazine, which has played this handicapping game–Mark Warner, anyone?–assigned the great writer Mark Leibovich the task of penning the postmortem of the latest can’t-miss prospect who did just that, Marco Rubio, the “choirboy rebel” whose progress (and regress) he’s followed for six years. A Republican Party looking to make inroads with Hispanic voters was supposed to embrace the Great Not-Exactly-White Hope with the conservative bona fides, but while Mom and Dad just adored him, the other kids clearly did not. The piece was published a couple of days before the Florida primary, but by then the sun had gone down.

The opening:

The last time I saw Marco Rubio in person, he seemed to be on the verge of inheriting the charred Republican earth. It was Feb. 22, the day before theNevada caucuses. We were aboard Rubio’s campaign plane, flying from Reno, Nev., to Las Vegas. Rubio is 44, but he can sometimes come off like an overgrown and hyperactive boy, jiggling his leg when he is otherwise still. He seemed to be in a sunny mood.

“This was a great day for us,” said Rubio, who had not yet resorted to making pee-pee jokes about the Donald. At the time, consensus was building among the pundit geniuses (whose consensuses are, of course, always correct) that Rubio was now the preferred alternative to Donald J. Trump.
 
As Rubio crisscrossed Nevada with his retinue of local dignitaries — Nevada’s lieutenant governor and a former governor, a congressman and a senator — it seemed as if every hour brought another endorsement from another vintage piece of the Republican furniture: Orrin Hatch, Bob Dole, a senator from Indiana, the governor of Arkansas. The night before at a rally in North Las Vegas, Rubio strode, chest out, onto a stage crowded with validators — 17 of them in all. They included a casino’s buffet of Nevada pols, someone from a reality TV show called “Pawn Stars” and Donnie Wahlberg: once a New Kid on the Block, now a lapsed golden boy who was going all in for Marky Marco.

Suddenly the plane hit a patch of nasty turbulence. It started bouncing and shaking, as if we were flying through a blender.•

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“Novelists, Like Dictators, Have Long Reigns”

March 15, 2016 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

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In addition to being among the best novels ever written in English, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov’s story of monstrous love, is, shockingly, the Great American Novel, which at first blush seems absurd. How did a newcomer who’d just begun experiencing the country process so much so soon, so that he could write a work that was of us yet was also able to brutally satirize us? Perhaps it took an immigrant with wide eyes to truly see our immigrant nation.

James Salter turned out some beautiful pieces for People magazine during that publication’s infancy, usually profiling other great writers of earlier generations who’d recused themselves to some state of exile. In 1975, he persuaded a reluctant Nabokov, living in Switzerland two years before his death, to sit for an interview. Salter recorded the writer’s dislike for many things: fame, hippies, Dostoevsky, etc. It’s not a portrait of only one novelist but also of a different time for writers in general, when they could still find a home among the remnants of a less-disposable age. An excerpt:

Novelists, like dictators, have long reigns. It is remarkable to think of Nabokov’s first book, a collection of love poems, appearing in his native Russia in 1914. Soon after, he and his family were forced to flee as a result of the Bolshevik uprising and the civil war. He took a degree at Cambridge and then settled in the émigré colony in Berlin. He wrote nine novels in Russian, beginning with Mary, in 1926, and includingGlory, The Defense, and Laughter in the Dark. He had a certain reputation and a fully developed gift when he left for America in 1940 to lecture at Stanford. The war burst behind him.

Though his first novel written in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, in 1941, went almost unnoticed, and his next, Bend Sinister,made minor ripples, the stunning Speak, Memory, an autobiography of his lost youth, attracted respectful attention. It was during the last part of 10 years at Cornell that he cruised the American West during the summers in a 1952 Buick, looking for butterflies, his wife driving and Nabokov beside her making notes as they journeyed through Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, the motels, the drugstores, the small towns. The result was Lolita, which at first was rejected everywhere, like many classics, and had to be published by the Olympia Press in Paris (Nabokov later quarreled with and abandoned his publisher, Maurice Girodias). A tremendous success and later a film directed by Stanley Kubrick, the book made the writer famous. Nabokov coquettishly demurs. “I am not a famous writer,” he says, “Lolita was a famous little girl. You know what it is to be a famous writer in Montreux? An American woman comes up on the street and cries out, ‘Mr. Malamud! I’d know you anywhere.’ ”

He is a man of celebrated prejudices. He abhors student activists, hippies, confessions, heart-to-heart talks. He never gives autographs. On his list of detested writers are some of the most brilliant who have ever lived: Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Faulkner and Henry James. His opinions are probably the most conservative, among important writers, of any since Evelyn Waugh’s. “You will die in dreadful pain and complete isolation,” his fellow exile, the Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin, told him. Far from pain these days and beyond isolation, Nabokov is frequently mentioned for that same award. “After all, you’re the secret pride of Russia,” he has written of someone unmistakably like himself. He is far from being cold or uncaring. Outraged at the arrest last year of the writer Maramzin, he sent this as yet unpublished cable to the Soviet writers’ union: “Am appalled to learn that yet another writer martyred just for being a writer. Maramzin’s immediate release indispensable to prevent an atrocious new crime.” The answer was silence.

Last year Nabokov published Look at the Harlequins!, his 37th book. It is the chronicle of a Russian émigré writer named Vadim Vadimych whose life, though he had four devastating wives, has many aspects that fascinate by their clear similarity to the life of Vladimir Vladimirovich. The typical Nabokovian fare is here in abundance, clever games of words, sly jokes, lofty knowledge, all as written by a “scornful and austere author, whose homework in Paris had never received its due.” It is probably one of the final steps toward a goal that so many lesser writers have striven to achieve: Nabokov has joined the current of history not by rushing to take part in political actions or appearing in the news but by quietly working for decades, a lifetime, until his voice seems as loud as the detested Stalin’s, almost as loud as the lies. Deprived of his own land, of his language, he has conquered something greater. As his aunt in Harlequins! told young Vadim, “Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!” Nabokov has done that. He has won.

“I get up at 6 o’clock,” he says. He dabs at his eyes. “I work until 9. Then we have breakfast together. Then I take a bath. Perhaps an hour’s work afterward. A walk, and then a delicious siesta for about two-and-a-half hours. And then three hours of work in the afternoon. In the summer we hunt butterflies.” They have a cook who comes to their apartment, or Véra does the cooking. “We do not attach too much importance to food or wine.” His favorite dish is bacon and eggs. They see no movies. They own no TV.

They have very few friends in Montreux, he admits. They prefer it that way. They never entertain. He doesn’t need friends who read books; rather, he likes bright people, “people who understand jokes.” Véra doesn’t laugh, he says resignedly. “She is married to one of the great clowns of all time, but she never laughs.”

The light is fading, there is no one else in the room or the room beyond. The hotel has many mirrors, some of them on doors, so it is like a house of illusion, part vision, part reflection, and rich with dreams.•

“I Don’t Believe Consciousness Is Necessary For Human-Level Artificial Intelligence”

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

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In a smart Gizmodo post, George Dvorsky rifles through numerous myths about AI, separating what he believes fact from fiction. One item particularly caught my eye. It has to do with machines “coming alive,” achieving consciousness.

Working to understand consciousness in humans is a fascinating pursuit, and trying to transfer this state on to machines is a fraught if likewise absorbing business. But is it necessary for machines to be self-aware like we are to surpass us? Probably not.

I think such a passing of the torch is possible in the very long term, but it’s probably no more needed for AI to knock us from atop the food chain than it is for planes to flap their wings like birds to fly. Machines will attain superintelligence long, long before consciousness.

A excerpt: 

Myth: “Artificial intelligence will be conscious.”

Reality: A common assumption about machine intelligence is that it’ll be conscious—that is, it’ll actually think the way humans do. What’s more, critics like Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen believe that we’ve yet to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), i.e. an intelligence capable of performing any intellectual task that a human can, because we lack a scientific theory of consciousness. But as Imperial College of London cognitive roboticist Murray Shanahan points out, we should avoid conflating these two concepts.

“Consciousness is certainly a fascinating and important subject—but I don’t believe consciousness is necessary for human-level artificial intelligence,” he told Gizmodo. “Or, to be more precise, we use the word consciousness to indicate several psychological and cognitive attributes, and these come bundled together in humans.”

It’s possible to imagine a very intelligent machine that lacks one or more of these attributes. Eventually, we may build an AI that’s extremely smart, but incapable of experiencing the world in a self-aware, subjective, and conscious way. Shanahan said it may be possible to couple intelligence and consciousness in a machine, but that we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that they’re two separate concepts.

And just because a machine passes the Turing Test—in which a computer is indistinguishable from a human—that doesn’t mean it’s conscious. To us, an advanced AI may give the impression of consciousness, but it will be no more aware of itself than a rock or a calculator.•

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“A Robot Never Tells A Lie”

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

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There’s no doubt that AI can have an amazing positive impact on the world, but it comes with costs. I’m not so concerned with most of the skill-loss we’ll experience since that’s always been a part of the human experience, the shedding of previously primary talents in favor new ones. There’s short-term risk, but I think in the longer run we’re talking about a natural progression. My greater concerns are the ethical ones that might result from software handling formerly human tasks. As sure as there’s prejudice embedded in most of us, there will be some (probably unwittingly) built into smart machines. Will it be more unimpeachable coming from our silicon sisters because they give off the air of indifference?

We also don’t know if we’re headed for a world sans work or one without enough jobs to support our economic systems. The latter, which seems more likely for the foreseeable future, could provoke serious turbulence or even societal collapse if public policy wasn’t nimble enough to deal with the transition. How quickly that changeover should occur will weigh heavily on how significant our response must be.

Two excerpts follow: 1) A paragraph from Ethan Wolff-Mann’s Time article in which a roboticist supports the false idea of robots necessarily being ethical, and 2) Madhumita Murgia of The Telegraph quoting Eric Schmidt, in his AlphaGo afterglow, about the evolutionary nature of job-killing machines.

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From Time:

It may not be long, for example, until androids replace sales associates. According to Osaka University professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, Japanese men don’t like talking with staff at stores because they might get pressured after they indicate they’re interested in making a purchase. “But they don’t hesitate to talk to the android,”he said at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, adding that a “robot never tells a lie, and that is why the android can sell lots of clothes.”

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From The Telegraph:

Few company chairmen could justify taking a 10- hour flight to travel 5,638 miles to watch a board game being played. But Eric Schmidt could.

The Alphabet chairman last week took the trip from Google’s holding company’s headquarters in California to Seoul, South Korea, to watch world Go champion Lee Se-dol go head to head with AlphaGo, an algorithm created by Google-owned British artificial intelligence company DeepMind, over five rounds of the ancient east Asian board game. 

“When I was a young computer scientist in the Seventies, there were many claims that we would beat human intelligence. None of it happened,” Schmidt said over a gourmet Chinese meal a few hours before the first Go game. “Now there is a sense that AI [artificial intelligence] has finally arrived.”

…

Now that a machine has beaten a Go grand master at a game he’s been playing professionally for 20 years, surely there is a concern that AI-fuelled robots will be able to replace humans in other areas, hurting jobs? 

“There’s no question that as [AI] becomes more pervasive, people doing routine, repetitive tasks will be at risk,” Schmidt says. 

“I understand the economic arguments, but this technology benefits everyone on the planet, from the rich to the poor, the educated to uneducated, high IQ to low IQ, every conceivable human being. It genuinely makes us all smarter, so this is a natural next step.”

A natural next step for Alphabet, perhaps, but for those whose jobs may be displaced by robots and the like, Schmidt may yet have to do some convincing.•

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“This Will Be Done Without Any Invasive Surgery Or Dramatic Changes To The Brain”

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

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WTF, Maxim is still in business! Who knew? The other vital question: Why?

Well, whatever the reason for its continued survival, the publication has an article by Brandon Friederich offering five tech prognostications from engineer/inventor Dr. Ian Pearson, who claims 85% accuracy when predicting 10-15 years down the road. He for sure foresaw our text-friendly society back 25 years ago, though I haven’t gone over all of his calls to verify his conversion rate. Fellow futurist Ray Kurzweil, for instance, has touted his precision in seeing the next big thing, though a close inspection of his record reveals some jaw-dropping gaffes. I don’t know if Pearson has similarly gaping potholes in his path to tomorrow, though he’s clearly a colorful thinker.

The following is the first item from the list of visions (which also predicts “talking pets”):

1. INTERCONNECTED BRAINS 

This is exactly what it sounds like. According to Pearson, we’re nearing a point where people will have the ability to communicate telepathically from any where on earth through a sort of global server that interfaces with the brain. That means that instead of using Google or Siri to find answers to life’s trivial questions, you’ll just have to think about it, and the answer will be made available over a network. And the best part is that all of this will be done without any invasive surgery or dramatic changes to the brain.

“It definitely will not be opening up your head and sticking a chip in it,” said Pearson.  “With just an injection… tiny little nanotechnology-based particles will float through your bloodstream across the blood-brain barrier and connect to the neurons themselves. They will be able to pick up electrical signals directly from those neurons and feed them outside into the IT, and your brain basically becomes part of the IT system.”•

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“They Can Create An Android That Is Capable Of Uploading Someone’s Personality”

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

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Speaking of immortality, some see a side door into forever, which is to essentially capture the “code” of an individual human brain and upload it into a computer, hologram, robot, and perhaps in the long run, a carbon-based “replacement body.” Of course, even if it becomes possible, a personality transferred into a new “container” is changed by the unfamiliar wrapping. It isn’t the same thing but a simulacrum, a xerox copy on a new sheet of paper.

Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov is someone who hopes to upload himself into eternity and is spending heavily to try to make it happen. From Kate Palmer at The Telegraph:

Web entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov is behind the “2045 Initiative,” an ambitious experiment to bring about immortality within the next 30 years by creating a robot capable of storing human personalities.

The group of neuroscientists, robot builders and consciousness researchers say they can create an android that is capable of uploading someone’s personality.

Mr Itskov, who has made a reported £1bn from his Moscow-based news publishing company, is the project’s financial backer.

They believe that robots can store a person’s thoughts and feelings because brains function in the same way as a computer.

It would work by uploading a digital version of a human brain to an android – effectively rebooting a person’s mind – which would take the form of a robotic copy of a human body or, once technology has developed, a hologram with a full human personality.•

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“The Mechanisms Of Aging Can Be Treated”

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

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Aubrey de Grey’s wife hasn’t killed him despite the fact that he lives with his two younger girlfriends, so it’s hard to blame the guy for feeling immortal.

In the 2014 documentary The Immortalists, the radical gerontologist’s fascinating personal and professional lives were on display. In that film, de Grey discussed why he feels we’re close to defeating death, which will allow him to frolic forever in his Northern California idyll with his Eves, but I will (regretfully) argue he’s wrong. I’d like him (and the rest of us) to have eternal life, but I doubt those of us breathing today will know an endless summer. There’s nothing theoretically impossible about, at least, extending life significantly, but it will require time, which is the one thing we don’t have. At any rate, it’s a growth industry with ballooning funding.

From Lucy Ingham at Factor-Tech:

It’s an exciting time to be working in ageing research. New findings are coming thick and fast, and although eliminating the process in humans is still some way away, studies regularly confirm what some have suspected for decades: that the mechanisms of ageing can be treated.

“It’s an amazingly gratifying field to be part of,” says biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, chief science officer and founder of SENS Research Foundation, the leading organisation tackling ageing. “It moves on almost every week at the moment.”

At the start of February, for example, a study was published that had hugely significant findings for the field.

“There was a big announcement in Nature showing that if you eliminate a certain type of cell from mice, then they live quite a bit longer,” says de Grey. “Even if you do that elimination rather late; in other words when they’re already in middle age.”

For those following the field, this was exciting news, but for de Grey, it was concrete proof that ageing can be combated.

“That’s the kind of thing that I’ve been promoting for a long time, and it’s been coming but it’s been pretty tricky to actually demonstrate directly. This was really completely unequivocal proof of concept,” he says. “So of course it motivates lots of work to identify ways to do the same thing in human beings. These kinds of things are happening all the time now.”•

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“This is not science fiction.”

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“Are There Are No Windows?! How Will Be Breathe?”

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

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If Hyperloops are built and become part of the public infrastructure, they won’t have actual windows but virtual ones. It’s not as horrifying as Sky Deutschland’s “Talking Windows” concept which can beam advertisements inside the heads of travelers using a bone-conduction technology, but the “augmented” scenery we’ll look at will be a step removed from real. It’s a progression of us being even deeper inside the machine.

From Liz Tracy at Inverse:

Any claustrophobe looks at the tube and asks: “Are there are no windows?! How will be breathe?” Well, CEO of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, Dirk Ahlborn, addressed the issue of “passenger experience” at his “Crowdsourcing the Hyperloop” presentation during South By Southwest Interactive on Sunday in Austin.

Ahlborn announced that though there won’t be actual windows, virtual ones are planned for the hyperloop.

The CEO called them “interactive panels” with which you can “look out” at “motion capture technology.” This will allow you to see what it actually looks like outside. “Based on your position, we’re actually manipulating the image,” Ahlborn said. He showed a short video which defined them as “augmented windows,” which also seem to show how fast you’re going and at which spot you’re at in the loop.

“It’s psychologically really important and great to have the possibility to look out the window,” Ahlborn noted, but also it’s about a generally enhanced customer experience.•

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“It Was An Information Transformation”

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

Most consider the technological changes of the 19th century more foundational than ours but also slower to proliferate, but the latter wasn’t always so. Consider that the Pony Express was established in 1860 and had been made completely obsolete by telegraphy by 1861, a rush from cradle to grave without the benefit of a dotage. That same year the Civil War began and President Lincoln, an early adopter, was soon sleeping in the telegraph office in the War Department next to the White House. Every era had been an Information Age in one way or another, but some fundamental things had changed and they were speed and connectivity.

In an excellent Newsweek article, journalist Kevin Maney looks back at the mid-19th century technological boom and sees a reflection of our own tumultuous political times. He believes wealth inequality has been stoked by the jolting transition from industrialization to digitalization in much the same as it was in the 1850s when we moved from an agrarian economy to one of factories. The North reached for the future with innovative inventions while the South doubled down on a farm-based economy powered by slavery. Soon enough, the center could not hold.

There’s truth to Maney’s theory, though I think there’s more at play and don’t believe the shocking displays of bigotry and xenophobia we’ve recently witnessed can be wholly explained by our puzzling new economic reality. Such sad things predated AI and apps. As he argues, though, great leadership and policy will be necessary to help us traverse unsure terrain before we can arrive at what may be a post-scarcity society.

The opening:

A technological revolution killed the Whig Party in 1850. A new one is blasting the GOP into splinters in 2016.

Amazingly, none of the presidential candidates talk much about technology, yet our software-eats-the-world whirlwind drives everything that’s cleaving the country and throwing its politics into chaos. The parallels to the dynamics of the 1850s are a little scary. After all, the Whigs’ self-destruction was a prelude to the Civil War.

Like today, the technological revolution in the mid-1800s ushered in a disruptive new era of connectivity, and transportation technology was key. Before the 1800s, getting anywhere—or exchanging any information over distance—involved horses, mud roads or boats. Movement was so hard that almost all business in America stayed local and small, and much of it was centered on agriculture.

Then, starting around 1810, the country paved roads and built canals. Robert Fulton invented the steamboat in 1807, and within a couple of decades mountains of goods were flowing upstream. The monster agent of change was the railroads. The country built rail lines with the same alacrity that would go into building the Web during the dot-com boom. By 1860, the U.S. boasted more miles of rail than the rest of the world combined.

Oh, and in the 1830s Samuel Morse invented the telegraph. By 1860, telegraph lines spanned the continent. You couldn’t quite sit in Boston and Skype your dad at the California Gold Rush, but prices and business data could cross states in a flash. It was an information transformation.

All of this changed life and economics in ways we can relate to today.•

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