Excerpts

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“Part Of The Reason For AlphaGo’s Success Is That It Is Partly Self Taught”

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

It’s too early to say if DeepMind’s obliteration of Go champion Lee Se-dol will prove to have wide-ranging applications that go far beyond the board, but it does show the prowess of self-learning AI. AlphaGo played millions of games on its own, and it could easily play billions more and improve further. Practice may not make perfect, but it can seriously diminish mistakes.

As AI expert Stuart Russell says in an AFP article, the triumph “shows that the methods we do have are even more powerful than we first thought.” That means we can move faster sooner, but where we’re headed is undetermined. An excerpt:

Until just five months ago, computer mastery of the 3,000-year-old game of Go, said to be the most complex ever invented, was thought to be at least a decade off.

But then AlphaGo beat European Go champ Fan Hui, and its creators decided to test the programme’s real strength against Lee, one of the game’s all-time masters.

Game-playing is a crucial measure of AI progress — it shows that a machine can execute a certain “intellectual” task better than humans.

Advance for science

A key test was when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997.

The game of Go is more complex than chess, and has more possible board configurations than there are atoms in the Universe.

Part of the reason for AlphaGo’s success is that it is partly self taught — having played millions of games against itself after initial programming to figure out the game and hone its tactics through trial and error.

“It is not the beginning of the end of humanity. At least if we decide we want to aim for safe and beneficial AI, rather than just highly capable AI,” Oxford University future technology specialist Anders Sandberg said of Lee’s drubbing.

“But there is still a lot of research that needs to be done to get things right enough that we can trust (and take pride in!) our AIs.”

Tags: Stuart Russell

“Today We Appear To Be Going Further And Further Into Uncharted Territory”

March 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Donald Trump, Bull Connor with a spray tan, has turned the American electoral process into a bumfight.

His violence-stoking rhetoric is being condemned even by fellow GOP hopefuls, including the rudderless Marco Rubio. Of course, the Florida Senator simultaneously tried to lay blame for the Trump campaign fracases on the divisiveness of Barack Obama, when the President’s chief sin seems to be that he’s black. It was never Obama’s tan suit that outraged those on the right but his tan skin.

Watching Trump yesterday, sweaty and frightened, ducking from a protestor who charged the stage, reminds that he trolled the President relentlessly with his Birther garbage, charging him with the phantom crime of occupying the White House illegally, which could have easily incited some unstable person into a reckless act. Trump clearly didn’t care nor has he been worried about encouraging his supporters to inflict violence on peaceful protesters during his disgusting campaign. Shaun King of the NYDN was the first to point out that someone is going to get killed at one of the rallies, and now John Marshall of the Talking Points Memo has published similar sentiments. An excerpt:

Today we appear to be going further and further into uncharted territory. After the cancellation of Trump’s event yesterday in Chicago, we had the incident at the rally in Dayton, Ohio in which a protestor, Thomas Dimassimo, jumped the security perimeter surrounding Trump and tried to rush the speaking platform. Dimassimo was charged with disorderly conduct and inducing panic and later released on bail. At a subsequent event and on Twitter, Trump claimed that Dimassimo was tied to ISIS, apparently on the basis of a hoax video his staff found on Youtube. At yet another event this evening Trump called for the mass arrest of protestors, noting that arrest records would leave an “arrest mark” and “ruin the rest of their lives.” Trump also repeatedly blamed “communist” Bernie Sanders for what now appear to be the almost constant protests and disruptions at his rallies.

This evening at an event in Kansas City there were numerous protest interruptions inside the rally and a chaotic scene outside in which, according to a report on MSNBC, police used pepper spray on at least one group of protestors.

For all the talk about Mussolini, let alone Hitler, George Wallace is the best analog in the last century of American politics – the mix of class politics and racist incitement, the same sort of orchestrated ratcheting up of conflict between supporters and protestors. As all of this has unfolded over the course of the day there have been numerous instances of Trump supporters calling for protestors to “go back to Africa” and another on video calling on them to “go to fucking Auschwitz.”

Is the man invoking Nazi concentration camps in that video an anti-Semite or just a ramped hater in a frenzy of provocation? I’m not sure we know. And as I’ll argue in a moment, in a climate of incitement and crowd action, it doesn’t necessarily matter.

It may sound like hyperbole. But this is the kind of climate of agitation and violence where someone will end up getting severely injured or killed. I do not say that lightly.•

Tags: Donald Trump, John Marshall, Shaun King

“The Brain Is An Information-Processing Machine”

March 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Consciousness is explainable, not now, but eventually. When “eventually” occurs I don’t know.

In one of his characteristically smart and demystifying articles about how the human brain works, Michael Graziano writes in The Atlantic that many of our current theories of consciousness rely on our (incorrect) intuitions and are embedded with flourishes that flatter us.

The most surprising line he writes is this one: “When I talk to other scientists about the study of consciousness, very often the first thing I’m asked to explain is why the topic is worth scientific attention.” That’s stunning. I think the two most interesting questions humans can answer are 1) What’s out there (in space)? and 2) What’s in here (in our brains)? Everything else seems not trivial but far less important.

An excerpt about a better approach to studying brain function:

Here’s how we can construct theories that do a better job of explaining, even if they appeal less to our biases and intuitions. The brain is an information-processing machine. It takes in data, transforms it, and uses it to help guide behavior. When that machine ups and says, “Hey, I have a conscious experience of myself and the things around me,” that assertion is based on data computed in the brain. As scientists we can ask a series of basic questions. How did the machine arrive at that self-description? What’s the specific, adaptive use of that self-description? What networks in the brain compute that type of information? These are all scientifically approachable questions. And we are beginning to see specific, testable theories that can answer them. The theories that show the most promise are sometimes called metacognitive theories. They are theories of how the brain computes information about itself and its own processes.

The brain constructs packets of information, virtual models, that describe things in the world. Anything useful to monitor and predict, the brain can construct a model of it. These simulations change continuously as new information comes in, and they’re used to guide ongoing behavior. For example, the visual system constructs rich, detailed models of the objects in the visual world—a desk, a car, another person. But the brain doesn’t just model concrete objects in the external world. It also models its own internal processes. It constructs simulations of its own cognition.

And those simulations are never accurate. They contain incomplete, sometimes surreal information. The brain constructs a distorted, cartoon sketch of itself and its world. And this is why we’re so certain that we have a kind of magic feeling inside us.•

Tags: Michael Graziano

“Russia May Have The Will To Go Nuclear, But It Probably Lacks The Means”

March 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Nuclear spaceships aren’t a new proposition. In the late 1950s, a group of American scientists, including Freeman Dyson, worked on Project Orion, a plan to boom us to Mars by 1965 and Saturn by 1970. It didn’t seem outlandish scientifically, but the work had to be scrapped after the signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, which forbid nuclear-powered space exploration.

Of course, a rogue state with enough knowledge and money could still go for it, and Russia, unsurprisingly, is interested in being that nation. The former Soviet Union long worked on their own nuke-space schemes, and the interest has reawakened. From Nick Stockton at Wired:

The engines the Soviets and Americans were developing during the Space Race, on the other hand, had at least double a chemical rocket’s specific impulse. Modern versions could likely do even better. Which means spaceships would be able to carry a lot more fuel, and therefore fire their thrusters for a longer portion of the trip to Mars (bonus: artificial gravity!). Even better, a thermal fission spaceship would have enough fuel to decelerate, go into Martian orbit, and even return to Earth.

Calling for a fission mission to Mars is great for inspiring space dreamers, but Russia’s planned engine could have practical, near-term applications. Satellites need to fire their thrusters every so often to stay in their ideal orbits (Also, to keep from crashing to Earth). Sokov thinks the main rationale for developing a nuclear thermal engine would be to allow for more of these orbital corrections, significantly increasing a satellite’s working lifespan. Fission power would also give probes more maneuverability. “One civilian application is to collect all the space junk,” says Sokov. “You are free to think of other, perhaps not as innocent applications.”

Russia may have the will to go nuclear, but it probably lacks the means.•

_____________________________

“First time we tried it, the thing took off like a bat out of hell.”

Tags: Nick Stockton

“This Is A New Surveillance Capitalism”

March 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Attempting to narrow the wealth gap by having corporations make micropayments to citizens for their information seems to me a morally bankrupt system even if it achieves the unlikely and saves some from actual bankruptcy. There has to be a better way, though whether we’re unwittingly working for Facebook and Google for free or accepting bits of coins for our efforts, it’s hard to see how we avoid this privacy-obliterating system we’ve built. We live in a very anti-government time, but corporations are far more pervasive and invasive and will only grow more so as the Internet of Things becomes the thing. We may eventually miss Big Brother.

I’m looking forward to reading Nicholas Carr’s forthcoming book, Utopia Is Creepy, which has the best title ever, and I credit him with pointing me toward Shoshana Zuboff’s Frankfurter Allgemeine essay “The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism.” As she writes, “the very idea of a functional, effective, affordable product as a sufficient basis for economic exchange is dying,” and what is replacing it is spooky as hell. The Harvard professor’s article is devastating not for imagining a dark future that might be if things go horribly wrong but for laying out where we’re headed if we just incrementally build on the status quo.

The opening:

Google surpassed Apple as the world’s most highly valued company in January for the first time since 2010. (Back then each company was worth less than 200 billion. Now each is valued at well over 500 billion.) While Google’s new lead lasted only a few days, the company’s success has implications for everyone who lives within the reach of the Internet. Why? Because Google is ground zero for a wholly new subspecies of capitalism in which profits derive from the unilateral surveillance and modification of human behavior. This is a new surveillance capitalism that is unimaginable outside the inscrutable high velocity circuits of Google’s digital universe, whose signature feature is the Internet and its successors. While the world is riveted by the showdown between Apple and the FBI, the real truth is that the surveillance capabilities being developed by surveillance capitalists are the envy of every state security agency. What are the secrets of this new capitalism, how do they produce such staggering wealth, and how can we protect ourselves from its invasive power?

“Most Americans realize that there are two groups of people who are monitored regularly as they move about the country. The first group is monitored involuntarily by a court order requiring that a tracking device be attached to their ankle. The second group includes everyone else…”

Some will think that this statement is certainly true. Others will worry that it could become true. Perhaps some think it’s ridiculous. It’s not a quote from a dystopian novel, a Silicon Valley executive, or even an NSA official. These are the words of an auto insurance industry consultant intended as a defense of “automotive telematics” and the astonishingly intrusive surveillance capabilities of the allegedly benign systems that are already in use or under development. It’s an industry that has been notoriously exploitative toward customers and has had obvious cause to be anxious about the implications of self-driving cars for its business model. Now, data about where we are, where we’re going, how we’re feeling, what we’re saying, the details of our driving, and the conditions of our vehicle are turning into beacons of revenue that illuminate a new commercial prospect.•

Tags: Nicholas Carr, Shoshana Zuboff

“Trump Might Be Reading From A Script Prepared In 1854”

March 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Donald Trump, equal parts Chairman Mao and Vince McMahon, knows nothing, but is he a Know Nothing?

The Stalin of steaks has flourished thanks to virulent anti-immigrant speech in a country that’s grown rich on the backs of immigrants (and forced immigrants known as slaves). That might sound strange, but as disconcerting as it is, it’s not a new thing. The strain against the Other always lurks in the underbelly of the country, sometimes rearing to the surface.

In a New Statesman article, Ben Wilson recalls an unhappy time much like our own: the 1850s. An excerpt:

Trump would certainly have found the 1850s a congenial time. This was one of the most explosive periods in modern history, with proliferating technologies, shifting patterns of trade and migration on a colossal scale. At a time when the US was entering the global economy, many saw themselves as victims of the new world order. As cities were rapidly reshaped by new industries and tens of thousands of newcomers, many native-born Americans believed their wages, their way of life and even their country were being taken from them. And there were plenty of politicians ready to egg on their discontent, provoking racial prejudices to garner votes.

Today, Trump might be reading from a script prepared in 1854. The American political establishment was shocked in that year when a new political movement known as the Know Nothings sensationally won a series of local and Congressional elections. Started in secret as the Order of the Star Spangled Banner (it got its memorable moniker from the instruction given members to deny any involvement), the movement had prepared the ground well. Look at your cities, the Know Nothings told voters, with its squalor and drunkenness; look at your falling wages. Who was to blame? The answer was simple. The Know Nothings alleged that immigrants, many of them Irish Catholics, were responsible for an upsurge in crime, particularly sexual and violent crime. And as Catholics who supposedly owed their allegiance to the Pope, the migrants would fundamentally alter the character of the Protestant United States. Sound familiar?

The parallels between the Know Nothings and Trump are a reminder that populist nationalism lies close to the surface of American politics, remaining dormant most of the time.•

Tags: Ben Wilson, Donald Trump

“What About The Ecological Niche The Mosquito Fills?”

March 10, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

No one likes bees stings, but everyone likes bees. We all want to save the bees.

New technologies may ultimately give us the option to rescue, revive, reconfigure or eradicate species, which sounds like a great power to have–and a chilling one. It may not bring back mammoths anytime soon or maybe ever, but it likely will have significant impact on life on Earth as we learn to take the reigns of evolution for ourselves and other species.

Yohann Koshy of Vice interviewed Ashley Dawson, author of Extinction: A Radical History, which argues, among other things, that the development of such new tools may imbue us with the belief that we can elide any capitalism-created crisis.

An excerpt about CRISPR:

Question:

Are there any examples of this technology being put to good ends?

Ashley Dawson:

Last week, I was at Princeton, and I spoke to a scientist from MIT. He’s one of a few people who is trying to use CRISPR technology to genetically engineer the extinction of the Anopheles mosquito, which is responsible for carrying malaria, Dengue fever, Zika, and lot of horrible viruses and diseases.

I’m still trying to figure out where I stand on that. More than 700,000 people die every year of malaria, mostly in poor and vulnerable populations. So if you can do something to eradicate the disease, perhaps it’s OK. But then what about the ecological niche the mosquito fills? What about how the use of these technologies could be proliferated?

Some people think this technology, CRISPR, is so dangerous it should be treated like nuclear technology—that it shouldn’t be widely available. The problem with scientists is they often don’t look at the broader political-economic questions. The reason Zika has gotten so much traction in a place like Brazil is because as deforestation happens, you get human populations in closer proximity to wild species of various different kinds, some of which function as disease vectors. So the prevalence of the disease in certain areas is connected to resource extraction, which is, in turn, coming from corporations that the governments like the United States are supporting.•

Tags: Ashley Dawson, Yohann Koshy

“He’s Not Really In Russia In His Mind”

March 10, 2016 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

I don’t trust the NSA or Oliver Stone with our information.

It was clear long before Edward Snowden to any American paying attention that our government had overreached into our privacy in the aftermath of 9/11. It’s not that there aren’t real dangers that need to be investigated, but treating every citizen like a threat is another kind of threat.

Stone is a very gifted filmmaker whose work seems informed by chemicals he (over-)experimented with as a youth. It’s galling that so many took his overheated JFK hokum seriously for so long and that some still do. His films are interesting provided no one uses them as history lessons.

That means the director’s upcoming take on Snowden should be…interesting? Well, let’s not prejudge.

Stephen Galloway of the Hollywood Reporter has an article about Stone’s paranoid approach to the making of the movie, which might be warranted in this case. He recently said this of the production: “We moved to Germany, because we did not feel comfortable in the U.S….we felt like we were at risk here.” An excerpt:

When Stone (whose films include Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Wall Street) was first approached to make the movie, he hesitated. He had been working on another controversial subject, about the last few years in the life of Martin Luther King Jr., and did not immediately wish to tackle something that incendiary again.

“Glenn Greenwald [the journalist who worked with Poitras to break the Snowden story] asked me some advice and I just wanted to stay away from controversy,” he said. “I didn’t want this. Be that as it may, a couple of months later, the Russian lawyer for Snowden contacts me via my producer. The Russian lawyer told me to come to Russia and wanted me to meet him. One thing led to another, and basically I got hooked.”

In Moscow, Stone met multiple times with Snowden, who has been living in exile in Russia since evading the U.S. government’s attempts to arrest him for espionage. “He’s articulate, smart, very much the same,” he said. “I’ve been seeing him off and on for a year — actually, more than that. I saw him last week or two weeks ago to show him the final film.”

He added: “He is consistent: he believes so thoroughly in reform of the Internet that he has devoted himself to this cause … Because of the Russian hours, he stays up all night. He’s a night owl, and he’s always in touch [with the outside world], and he’s working on some kind of constitution for the Internet with other people. So he’s very busy. And he stays in that 70-percent-computer world. He’s on another planet that way. His sense of humor has gotten bigger, his tolerance. He’s not really in Russia in his mind — he’s in some planetary position up there. And Lindsay Mills, the woman he’s loved for 10 years — really, it’s a serious affair — has moved there to be with him.”•

Tags: Edward Snowden, Oliver Stone, Stephen Galloway

“We Were Pretty Shocked”

March 10, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Demis Hassabis’ DeepMind was 20 years in the making, and its trouncing of Go champion Lee Se-dol was a plateau but still only prelude. “I think for perfect information games, Go is the pinnacle,” Hannabis has said, though the greater goal is to redirect the AI advances toward healthcare, virtual assistants, robotics, etc.

After the Google AI’s Game 1 triumph, Hassabis sat down with Sam Byford of Verge for an interview, which is very much worth reading. Perhaps most interesting is that even the developers didn’t really know exactly where AlphaGo was going, which is promising and a little worrisome.

An excerpt:

Sam Byford:

So for someone who doesn’t know a lot about AI or Go, how would you characterize the cultural resonance of what happened yesterday?

Demis Hassabis:

There are several things I’d say about that. Go has always been the pinnacle of perfect information games. It’s way more complicated than chess in terms of possibility, so it’s always been a bit of a holy grail or grand challenge for AI research, especially since Deep Blue. And you know, we hadn’t got that far with it, even though there’d been a lot of efforts. Monte Carlo tree search was a big innovation ten years ago, but I think what we’ve done with AlphaGo is introduce with the neural networks this aspect of intuition, if you want to call it that, and that’s really the thing that separates out top Go players: their intuition. I was quite surprised that even on the live commentary Michael Redmond was having difficulty counting out the game, and he’s a 9-dan pro! And that just shows you how hard it is to write a valuation function for Go.

Sam Byford:

Were you surprised by any of the specific moves that you saw AlphaGo play?

Demis Hassabis:

Yeah. We were pretty shocked — and I think Lee Se-dol was too, from his facial expression — by the one where AlphaGo waded into the left deep into Lee’s territory. I think that was quite an unexpected move.

Sam Byford:

Because of the aggression?

Demis Hassabis:

Well, the aggression and the audacity! Also, it played Lee Se-dol at his own game. He’s famed for creative fighting and that’s what he delivered, and we were sort of expecting something like that. The beginning of the game he just started fights across the whole board with nothing really settled. And traditionally Go programs are very poor at that kind of game. They’re not bad at local calculations but they’re quite poor when you need whole board vision.•

Tags: Demis Hassabis, Sam Byford

“Computer, One. Human, Zero.”

March 10, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The psychologist Gary Marcus urged caution when Google AI recently defeated a good, but not champion, Go player. Most of qualifications still pertain still pertain, but DeepMind just deep-sixed Lee Se-dol, one of the world’s best players. The human competitor noticed the psychological component of the game was noticeably absent, even disconcerting. “It’s like playing the game alone,” he said.

Below is Choe Sang-hun and John Markoff’s New York Times report of the competition, followed by Bruce Weber’s 1997 correspondence about Garry Kasparov’s Deep Blue defeat.

____________________________

From Choe and Markoff:

SEOUL, South Korea — Computer, one. Human, zero.

A Google computer program stunned one of the world’s top players on Wednesday in a round of Go, which is believed to be the most complex board game ever created.

The match — between Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo and the South Korean Go master Lee Se-dol — was viewed as an important test of how far research into artificial intelligence has come in its quest to create machines smarter than humans.

“I am very surprised because I have never thought I would lose,” Mr. Lee said at a news conference in Seoul. “I didn’t know that AlphaGo would play such a perfect Go.”

Mr. Lee acknowledged defeat after three and a half hours of play.

Demis Hassabis, the founder and chief executive of Google’s artificial intelligence team DeepMind, the creator of AlphaGo, called the program’s victory a “historic moment.”•

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Garry Kasparov held off machines but only for so long. He defeated Deep Thought in 1989 and believed a computer could never best him. But by 1997 Deep Blue turned him–and humanity–into an also-ran in some key ways. The chess master couldn’t believe it at first–he assumed his opponent was manipulated by humans behind the scene, like the Mechanical Turk, the faux chess-playing machine from the 18th century. But no sleight of hand was needed.

Below are the openings of three Bruce Weber New York Times articles written during the Kasparov-Deep Blue matchup which chart the rise of the machines.

From “Computer Defeats Kasparov, Stunning the Chess Experts” on May 5:

Responding to defeat with the pride and tenacity of a champion, the I.B.M. computer Deep Blue drew even yesterday in its match against Garry Kasparov, the world’s best human chess player, winning the second of their six games and stunning many chess experts with its strategy.

Joel Benjamin, the grandmaster who works with the Deep Blue team, declared breathlessly: “This was not a computer-style game. This was real chess!”

He was seconded by others.

“Nice style!” said Susan Polgar, the women’s world champion. “Really impressive. The computer played a champion’s style, like Karpov,” she continued, referring to Anatoly Karpov, a former world champion who is widely regarded as second in strength only to Mr. Kasparov. “Deep Blue made many moves that were based on understanding chess, on feeling the position. We all thought computers couldn’t do that.”•

From “Wary Kasparov and Deep Blue Draw Game 3” on May 7:

Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, opened the third game of his six-game match against the I.B.M. computer Deep Blue yesterday in peculiar fashion, by moving his queen’s pawn forward a single square. Huh?

“I think we have a new opening move,” said Yasser Seirawan, a grandmaster providing live commentary on the match. “What should we call it?”

Mike Valvo, an international master who is a commentator, said, “The computer has caused Garry to act in strange ways.”

Indeed it has. Mr. Kasparov, who swiftly became more conventional and subtle in his play, went on to a draw with Deep Blue, leaving the score of Man vs. Machine at 1 1/2 apiece. (A draw is worth half a point to each player.) But it is clear that after his loss in Game 2 on Sunday, in which he resigned after 45 moves, Mr. Kasparov does not yet have a handle on Deep Blue’s predilections, and that he is still struggling to elicit them.•

From “Swift and Slashing, Computer Topples Kasparov” on May 12:

In brisk and brutal fashion, the I.B.M. computer Deep Blue unseated humanity, at least temporarily, as the finest chess playing entity on the planet yesterday, when Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, resigned the sixth and final game of the match after just 19 moves, saying, “I lost my fighting spirit.”

The unexpectedly swift denouement to the bitterly fought contest came as a surprise, because until yesterday Mr. Kasparov had been able to summon the wherewithal to match Deep Blue gambit for gambit.

The manner of the conclusion overshadowed the debate over the meaning of the computer’s success. Grandmasters and computer experts alike went from praising the match as a great experiment, invaluable to both science and chess (if a temporary blow to the collective ego of the human race) to smacking their foreheads in amazement at the champion’s abrupt crumpling.

“It had the impact of a Greek tragedy,” said Monty Newborn, chairman of the chess committee for the Association for Computing, which was responsible for officiating the match.

It was the second victory of the match for the computer — there were three draws — making the final score 3 1/2 to 2 1/2, the first time any chess champion has been beaten by a machine in a traditional match. Mr. Kasparov, 34, retains his title, which he has held since 1985, but the loss was nonetheless unprecedented in his career; he has never before lost a multigame match against an individual opponent.

Afterward, he was both bitter at what he perceived to be unfair advantages enjoyed by the computer and, in his word, ashamed of his poor performance yesterday.

“I was not in the mood of playing at all,” he said, adding that after Game 5 on Saturday, he had become so dispirited that he felt the match was already over. Asked why, he said: “I’m a human being. When I see something that is well beyond my understanding, I’m afraid.”•

Tags: Choe Sang-Hun, John Markoff

“What If We Could Use This Technology Not To Bring Extinct Species Back To Life But To Save Species That Are Alive Today?”

March 9, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

There exists a band of far-flung thinkers who dream of humans repopulating and restoring the natural world via de-extinction (read here and here). It would be a regenesis, though it’s easier said than done. Even though such things aren’t currently doable, I wouldn’t say that they’re permanently impossible, not if we’re talking about the very long run. But we’re not likely digging ourselves out of our Anthropocene hole with such things.

In an excellent Five Books Interview on the topic of de-extinction, evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro pours cold water on the reawakening of the woolly mammoth and other animals and birds that have bid the Earth adieu, pointing out not just the practical difficulties but also the ethical concerns. I’ve read two of the titles she chose, E.O. Wilson’s The Diversity of Life and Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, both of which are certainly worth the time.

Before getting to her selections, the author of How to Clone a Mammoth explains exactly why we can’t do just that and why we shouldn’t even if we could. An excerpt:

Question:

If we were able to bring a mammoth back, what would the purpose of that be?

Beth Shapiro:

If we pretend, for a moment, that it’s technically possible – which it isn’t – and that it’s ethically ok – which it isn’t – why might we want to bring a mammoth back to life? Well, for me there are two reasons. The first is ecological. Elephants play a very important role in their ecosystem, they’re the biggest herbivore that exists. They wander around knocking down the big things and allow the habitat – the grasslands – to regenerate themselves. There’s no reason to suspect a mammoth wouldn’t have done the same thing.

There’s a Russian scientist called Sergey Zimov who has a park in North-Eastern Siberia called ‘Pleistocene Park‘. The Pleistocene was the geological interval that existed before the current one, which is the Holocene, sometimes the Anthropocene. It was the age of Ice Age Giants and he is preparing this park for the return of Ice Age Giants and so far he has bison and horses and five different species of deer. He doesn’t have mammoths yet, but he is making up for that using large road-rolling machinery. What he’s found in this Pleistocene Park of his is that where he has these grazing herbivores – bison, horses, deer – just by virtue of wandering around on the permafrost, digging up the soil, recycling nutrients, spreading the seeds around they have actually changed that habitat. They have reestablished the rich grasslands that used to be there during the time of these Ice Age Giants, creating the habitat that they themselves need to survive. Not only are these animals there and quite happy, but he’s also noted that things like saiga antelope have come to visit the park because there’s loads of stuff for them to eat there. He argues that giant herbivores are still a missing component that would really help to push this environment over the edge. There’s a potentially compelling ecological reason to bring mammoths back to life.

The next reason is more sentimental. Few of us are willing to imagine a world without elephants, but Asian elephants are endangered. Every year there are fewer of them. Their habitat is continuing to disappear as human populations grow. We’re having trouble stopping poachers taking them for their ivory. What if we could use this technology, this same swapping out of genes technology, not to bring a mammoth back to life, but to change an elephant a little bit so that it has some of the evolutionary adaptations that a mammoth had? Say, adaptations that allow it to survive somewhere cold. Elephants are a tropically adapted species, mammoths lived in the Arctic. If we could swap out some of the elephant gene and allow elephants to live in Europe, or Siberia, then we could create new habitat for elephants where they could survive while we tried to fix whatever mess is going on in their natural habitats. What if we could use this technology not to bring extinct species back to life but to save species that are alive today and yet in danger of becoming extinct because of changes to their habitat that are often caused by us?•

Tags: Beth Shapiro, E.O Wilson, Elizabeth Kolbert

“Trade May Be His Single Biggest Concern – Not White Supremacy”

March 9, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

While I agree with Thomas Frank that few things are more out of touch than New York Times editorials–remember Maureen Dowd’s awful, cackling Donald Trump interview?–I can’t support his contention in the Guardian that the average Trump supporter isn’t chiefly and deeply racist. The first thing you hear from his voters isn’t that the fascist condo salesman is strong on trade but rather that “he isn’t politically correct.” Or that “he speaks the truth.” Those lines seem a dog whistle for bigotry considering the statements he’s made. His nativist blame game is the exploitation of not only economic fears but also of racial ones. Mostly the latter, I believe. Maybe the trouble with Kansas is, at long last, Kansans.

From Frank:

Stories marveling at the stupidity of Trump voters are published nearly every day. Articles that accuse Trump’s followers of being bigots have appeared by the hundreds, if not the thousands. Conservatives have written them; liberals have written them; impartial professionals have written them. The headline of a recent Huffington Post column announced, bluntly, that “Trump Won Super Tuesday Because America is Racist.” A New York Times reporter proved that Trump’s followers were bigots by coordinating a map of Trump support with a map of racist Google searches. Everyone knows it: Trump’s followers’ passions are nothing more than the ignorant blurtings of the white American id, driven to madness by the presence of a black man in the White House. The Trump movement is a one-note phenomenon, a vast surge of race-hate. Its partisans are not only incomprehensible, they are not really worth comprehending.

* * *
Or so we’re told. Last week, I decided to watch several hours of Trump speeches for myself. I saw the man ramble and boast and threaten and even seem to gloat when protesters were ejected from the arenas in which he spoke. I was disgusted by these things, as I have been disgusted by Trump for 20 years. But I also noticed something surprising. In each of the speeches I watched, Trump spent a good part of his time talking about an entirely legitimate issue, one that could even be called leftwing.

Yes, Donald Trump talked about trade. In fact, to judge by how much time he spent talking about it, trade may be his single biggest concern – not white supremacy. Not even his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, the issue that first won him political fame. He did it again during the debate on 3 March: asked about his political excommunication by Mitt Romney, he chose to pivot and talk about … trade.•

Tags: Donald Trump, Thomas Frank

“Companies [Could] Go For The Carlos Slim Option”

March 9, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The 2008 financial collapse was a tipping point for most workers in countries transitioning from Industrial to Information economies. Jobs have returned to a good extent, but the wages and conditions have, at best, flatlined. As we move deeper into an age of automation and one in which gigantic companies need software but few FT workers (e.g., Uber), living has become difficult for many and retirement off the table.

In a Financial Time article, Michael Skapinker considers five possible future scenarios in a world where the whistle never blows, the workday never truly ends. An excerpt:

Companies go for the Carlos Slim option. In 2014, the Mexican telecoms magnate, said that, instead of retiring, older workers should cut back to three days a week.

Everyone gains. The company holds on to older workers’ skills while cutting the cost of employing them. The workers have more leisure.

This scenario appears to have more to recommend it than any other, although it does depend on older workers being able to afford the reduction in working hours.

Older people working shorter weeks could step back from senior positions. They could also do different jobs for the company.

The Financial Times reported this week on a former manager at Nissan in Sunderland, in the north-east of England who, at 67, conducts tours of the plant. He does not work for Nissan. He has retired and works for an outside agency that runs the tours.•

Tags: Carlos Slim, Michael Skapinker

“Nanobots Will Be Available To Everyone”

March 9, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Critical though I sometimes am of the aggressive timelines of Ray Kurzweil’s predictions, I acknowledge finding him endlessly interesting. The Singularitarian-in-Chief sat down with Neil deGrasse Tyson in Manhattan for a public conversation about all things future. Kurzweil thinks tomorrow’s nanotechnologies will be broadly accessible to all classes as smartphones are today, which is probably true, but his argument that this availability will limit wealth inequality doesn’t seem to follow. Smartphones, after all, have not been equalizers.

From Jose Pagliery and Hope King at CNN Money:

CNNMoney asked Kurzweil: What happens to inequality in this future? Will brain superpowers and health be limited to the rich?

“Yeah, like cell phones,” Kurzweil responded. “Only the rich have access to these technologies — at a point in time when they don’t work.”

Industry perfects products for mass consumption, Kurzweil noted. And the tech will inevitably get cheaper. As computer makers keep doubling the number of chips on a circuit board, the “price performance of information technology” doubles every year, he said.

“Nanobots will be available to everyone,” Kurzweil said. “These technologies are ultimately democratized because they keep getting less and less expensive.”

And even if Kurzweil thinks AI will probably replace many of today’s workers, he’s optimistic about future jobs for humans. But when Tyson pressed him to name specific jobs, Kurzweil was stumped. After all, no one in 1910 could predict today’s computer chip designers and website developers.•

Tags: Hope King, Jose Pagliery, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Ray Kurzweil

“This Was Going To Be A Technological, Computerized Nightmare!”

March 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

In 1973, the former child preacher Marjoe Gortner was hired by OUI, a middling vagina periodical of the Magazine Age, to write a deservedly mocking article about the American visit of another youthful religious performer, the 16-year-old Maharaj Ji, an adolescent Indian guru who promised to levitate the Houston Astrodome, a plot that never got off the ground. More than any other holy-ish person of the time, the Indian teenager would have fit in quite nicely in Silicon Valley of our time. He was a technocrat who believed he could disrupt and improve the world. Sound familiar? Two excerpts from the resulting report, which profiled the futurist cult leader.

____________________________

The guru’s people do the same thing the Pentecostal Church does. They say you can believe in guru Maharaj Ji and that’s fantastic and good, but if you receive light and get it all within, if you become a real devotee-that is the ultimate. In the Pentecostal Church you can be saved from your sins and have Jesus Christ as your Saviour, but the ultimate is the baptism of the Holy Ghost. This is where you get four or five people around and they begin to talk and more or less chant in tongues until sooner or later the person wanting the baptismal experience so much-well, it’s like joining a country club: once you’re in, you’ll be like everyone – else in the club.

The people who’ve been chanting say, “Speak it out, speak it out,” and everything becomes so frenzied that the baptismalee will finally speak a few words in tongues himself, and the people around him say, “Oh, you’ve got it.” And the joy that comes over everybody’s faces! It’s incredible. It’s beautiful. They feel they have got the Holy Spirit like all their friends, and once they’ve got it, it’s forever. It’s quite an experience.

So essentially they’re the same thing pressing on your eyes while your ears are corked, and standing around the altar speaking in tongues. They’re both illuminating experiences. The guru’s path is interesting, though. Once you’ve seen the light and decided you want to join his movement, you give over everything you have–all material possessions. Sometimes you even give your job. Now, depending on what your job is, you may be told to leave it or to stay. If you stay, generally you turn your pay checks over to the Divine Light Mission, and they see that you are housed and clothed and fed. They have their U. S. headquarters in Denver. You don’t have to worry about anything. That’s their hook. They take care of it all. They have houses all over the country for which they supposedly paid cash on the line. First class. Some of them are quite plush. At least Maharaj Ji’s quarters are. Some of the followers live in those houses, too, but in the dormitory-type atmosphere with straw mats for beds. It’s a large operation. It seems to be a lot like the organization Father Divine had back in the Thirties. He did it with the black people at the Peace Mission in Philadelphia. He took care of his people-mostly domestics and other low-wage earners–and put them up in his own hotel with three meals a day.

The guru is much more technologically oriented, though. He spreads a lot of word and keeps tabs on who needs what through a very sophisticated Telex system that reaches out to all the communes or ashrams around the country. He can keep count of who needs how many T-shirts, pairs of socks–stuff like that. And his own people run this system; it’s free labor for the corporation.

____________________________

The morning of the third day I was feeling blessed and refreshed, and I was looking forward to the guru’s plans for the Divine City, which was soon going to be built somewhere in the U. S. I wanted to hear what that was all about.

It was unbelievable. The city was to consist of ‘modular units adaptable to any desired shape.’ The structures would have waste-recycling devices so that water could be drunk over and over. They even planned to have toothbrushes with handles you could squeeze to have the proper amount of paste pop up (the crowd was agog at this). There would be a computer in each communal house so that with just a touch of the hand you could check to see if a book you wanted was available, and if it was, it would be hand-messengered to you. A complete modern city of robots. I was thinking: whatever happened to mountains and waterfalls and streams and fresh air? This was going to be a technological, computerized nightmare! It repulsed me. Computer cards to buy essentials at a central storeroom! And no cheating, of course. If you flashed your card for an item you already had, the computer would reject it. The perfect turn-off. The spokesman for this city announced that the blueprints had already been drawn up and actual construction would be the next step. Controlled rain, light, and space. Bubble power! It was all beginning to be very frightening.•

____________________________

“The Houston Astrodome will physically separate itself from the planet which we call Earth and will fly.”

“I Totally Understand Why A 20-Year Old Would Choose To Do Astrophysics Rather Than Literature”

March 8, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Faulting literature for not being astrophysics is like disparaging Louis Armstrong for not being a great hockey player. It’s really missing the point.

The humanities do what they do, and science does what it does. They’re both valid and useful. It’s not that the Digital Humanities has nothing to teach, but trying to understand the novel mainly through quantification will yield minimal returns. Literature isn’t a science and the academics who’ve tried to turn it into one have birthed a Frankenstein, but not an interesting one like Frankenstein.

The Stanford scholar Franco Moretti may not care for the DH term (“digital humanities means nothing”) but as much as anyone he’s the face of it. An exchange from Melissa Dinsman’s LARB interview with him:

Question:

People often speak of digital work (and more frequently the digital humanities) as a means of making the humanities relevant for the 21st-century university. Do you think this statement is a fair assessment of digital work and its purpose? Do you think it is fair to the humanities to say that DH will come in on a white horse and save the humanities from itself?

Franco Moretti:

Neither one. The humanities will need to save themselves, and not only for the crass reason that going to university can cost an insane amount of money, so students choose to go into business, medicine, economics, etc., to remake the money as soon as possible. It’s not just that, although that cannot be simply dismissed. In the 20th century the natural sciences have produced some amazingly stunning and beautiful theories in physics, and genetics, and in biology. The humanities have produced nothing of this sort. Literature, art, in a sense even political history (mostly in a horrendous way), have produced enormously interesting objects, but the study of these objects, that is to say the disciplines of the humanities — the study of literature, the study of history — have lagged behind. The humanities have lagged behind in conceptual imagination and in boldness. I totally understand why a 20-year old would choose to do astrophysics rather than literature. It’s so much more interesting in many ways, just for the pleasure of the intelligence. That is what the humanities have to work on.•

Tags: Franco Moretti, Melissa Dinsman

“Even George Jetson Takes His Briefcase To Work Every Day”

March 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Serious discussion about Guaranteed Basic Income in America stretches back at least as far as Richard Nixon, whose administration’s advocacy for it and universal health insurance would today make the 37th President a sort of Sanders-esque figure.

When people initially learn Silicon Valley technologists are fully in favor of GBI, they’re often surprised and grateful, but this largesse comes with a caveat. To a good degree, it’s driven by a Libertarian streak that aims to vanish social safety nets (the welfare state, as it’s often referred to) and the bureaucracy that attends it. That would include all forms of government healthcare. That’s a problem since, as we’ve seen, health insurance left to the free market is an unmanageable expense for many, and that would be true even with an income floor.

In a NYT conversation about basic income between columnists Farhad Manjoo and Eduardo Porter, the latter questions whether we’re headed for an Utopian work-free world or one with plenty of poorly paid drudgery in which the BGI math doesn’t add up. An excerpt:

I read your very interesting column about the universal basic income, the quasi-magical tool to ensure some basic standard of living for everybody when there are no more jobs for people to do. What strikes me about this notion is that it relies on a view of the future that seems to have jelled into a certainty, at least among the technorati on the West Coast.

But the economic numbers that we see today don’t support this view. If robots were eating our lunch, it would show up as fast productivity growth. But as Robert Gordon points out in his new book, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” productivity has slowed sharply. He argues pretty convincingly that future productivity growth will remain fairly modest, much slower than during the burst of American prosperity in mid-20th century.

A problem I have with the idea of a universal basic income — as opposed to, say, wage subsidies or wage insurance to top up the earnings of people who lose their job and must settle for a new job at a lower wage — is that it relies on an unlikely future. It’s not a future with a lot of crummy work for low pay, but essentially a future with little or no paid work at all.

The former seems to me a not unreasonable forecast — we’ve been losing good jobs for decades, while low-wage employment in the service sector has grown. But no paid work? That’s more a dream (or a nightmare) than a forecast. Even George Jetson takes his briefcase to work every day.•

Tags: Eduardo Porter

“It Is An Uprising Borne By The White Lower And Middle Classes”

March 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

I asked this question last September: If Donald Trump grew a small, square mustache above his lip, would his poll numbers increase yet again?

We know the sad answer now. A candidacy that began with a bigoted proclamation accusing Mexicans of being rapists has grown into a full-fledged racist, nativist campaign that ejects African-Americans at stump speeches and vows to ban all 1.6 billion Muslims in the world from entering our immigrant country. It’s the ugliest, saddest face America has to show, and a surprising one since even those who doubted the election of President Obama signaled a post-racial nation never could have guessed that this many white citizens missed using ethnic slurs without consequence. Trump followers explain their adoration for the bully by exclaiming, “He says what I wish I could say,” and considering the words he’s chosen, it’s clear where their minds are at. Since his politics are often at odds with true conservatism, it’s revealed the GOP has long been about prejudice, not policy. “Make America Great Again” can easily be read as “Make America White Again.”

If Trump’s ascension marks the end of the modern Republican Party, it’s a death in the gutter. If he were to actually become President, America itself will have fallen from the curb.

From Holger Stark at Spiegel:

Trump’s unexpected success is part of a political revolt that has taken hold in America in recent months, and is shifting all known parameters. It is an uprising borne by the white lower and middle classes, and it is directed against the liberal establishment, President Barack Obama and the political correctness of the post-modern age — but also against a Republican Party, which the party rebels believe is part of the ailing system. Deeply religious Christians, the so-called Evangelicals, whose ancestors came from Europe and who helped create the United States, are the core of this uprising.

At the beginning of this election campaign, there were several things that were considered inalienable truths in political America. One of those was the recognition that the United States is a land of immigration, that its population is becoming more colorful, multicultural and multiethnic.

Bucking Convention

The lesson seemed clear: Those who hope to win elections must absolutely win the support of these groups of voters. The structure of the American population has changed radically. Blacks make up 12.9 percent of the population today and Hispanics more than 17 percent, with their share steadily increasing. Whites are predicted to become a minority by 2050. This democratic shift contributed significantly to President Barack Obama’s election victory in 2012. His challenger, Mitt Romney, managed to win just a quarter of Latino votes. A mere 6 percent of African-Americans voted for him.

Trump has studied these numbers carefully and drawn his conclusions, albeit against all the conventional rules of Washington political advisers. His campaign targets white, overwhelmingly Christian voters, who have felt marginalized and threatened for some time. Trump calls them “the silent majority.”

Some 70 percent of Americans are still Christians, and one in four US citizens, or about 80 million, are Evangelical Christians. However, only 27 million Evangelicals voted in the last presidential election, while the rest stayed home.

“Trump and Cruz both aim to energize this white, Christian core group, which is why they are not seeking compromise on issues, but have adopted harsh rhetoric instead,” says David Brody, chief Washington correspondent for the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). “If one of them manages to convince only five to 10 million Evangelical non-voters to go to the polls, he’ll be able to take over the Republican Party and defeat the Democrats.”•

Tags: Donald Trump, Holger Stark

“Has There Been A Problem Or Challenge That’s Made You, As A Billionaire, Feel Completely Powerless?”

March 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In America, ridiculously rich people are considered oracles, whether they deserve to be or not.

Bill Gates probably earns that status more than most. He was a raging a-hole when engaged full time as a businessperson at Microsoft, but he’s done as much good for humanity as anyone likely can in his 2.0 avuncular philanthropist rebooting. Gates just did one of his wide-ranging Reddit AMAs. A few exchanges follow.

_____________________________

Question:

What do you see human society accomplishing in the next 20 years? What are you most excited for?

Bill Gates:

I will mention three things.

First is an energy innovation to lower the cost and get rid of green house gases. This isn’t guaranteed so we need a lot of public and private risk taking.

EDIT: I talked about this recently in my annual letter.

Second is progress on disease particularly infectious disease. Polio, Malaria, HIV, TB, etc.. are all diseases we should be able to either eliminate of bring down close to zero. There is amazing science that makes us optimistic this will happen.

Third are tools to help make education better – to help teachers learn how to teach better and to help students learn and understand why they should learn and reinforce their confidence.

_____________________________

Question:

Hey Bill! Has there been a problem or challenge that’s made you, as a billionaire, feel completely powerless? Did you manage to overcome it, and if so, how?

Bill Gates:

The problem of how we prevent a small group of terrorists using nuclear or biological means to kill millions is something I worry about. If Government does their best work they have a good chance of detecting it and stopping it but I don’t think it is getting enough attention and I know I can’t solve it.

_____________________________

Question:

What’s your take on the recent FBI/Apple situation?

Bill Gates:

I think there needs to be a discussion about when the government should be able to gather information. What if we had never had wiretapping? Also the government needs to talk openly about safeguards. Right now a lot of people don’t think the government has the right checks to make sure information is only used in criminal situations. So this case will be viewed as the start of a discussion. I think very few people take the extreme view that the government should be blind to financial and communication data but very few people think giving the government carte blanche without safeguards makes sense. A lot of countries like the UK and France are also going through this debate. For tech companies there needs to be some consistency including how governments work with each other. The sooner we modernize the laws the better.

_____________________________

Question:

Some people (Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, etc) have come out in favor of regulating Artificial Intelligence before it is too late. What is your stance on the issue, and do you think humanity will ever reach a point where we won’t be able to control our own artificially intelligent designs?

Bill Gates:

I haven’t seen any concrete proposal on how you would do the regulation. I think it is worth discussing because I share the view of Musk and Hawking that when a few people control a platform with extreme intelligence it creates dangers in terms of power and eventually control.

_____________________________

Question:

How soon do you think quantum computing will catch on, and what do you think about the future of cryptography if it does? Thanks!

Bill Gates:

Microsoft and others are working on quantum computing. It isn’t clear when it will work or become mainstream. There is a chance that within 6-10 years that cloud computing will offer super-computation by using quantum. It could help use solve some very important science problems including materials and catalyst design.

_____________________________

Question:

You have previously said that, through organizations like Khan Academy and Wikipedia and the Internet in general, getting access to knowledge is now easier than ever. While that is certainly true, K-12 education seems to have stayed frozen in time. How do you think the school system will or should change in the decades to come?

Bill Gates:

I agree that our schools have not improved as much as we want them to. There are a lot of great teachers but we don’t do enough to figure out what they do so well and make sure others benefit from that. Most teachers get very little feedback about what they do well and what they need to improve including tools that let them see what the exemplars are doing.

Technology is starting to improve education. Unfortunately so far it is mostly the motivated students who have benefited from it. I think we will get tools like personalized learning to all students in the next decade.

A lot of the issue is helping kids stay engaged. If they don’t feel the material is relevant or they don’t have a sense of their own ability they can check out too easily. The technology has not done enough to help with this yet.

_____________________________

Question:

What’s a fantasy technological advancement you wish existed?

Bill Gates:

I recently saw a company working on “robotic” surgery where the ability to work at small scales was stunning. The idea that this will make surgeries higher quality, faster and less expensive is pretty exciting. It will probably take a decade before this gets mainstream – to date it has mostly been used for prostate surgery.

In the Foundation work there are a lot of tools we are working on we don’t have yet. For example an implant to protect a woman from getting HIV because it releases a protective drug.

Question:

What’s a technological advancement that’s come about in the past few years that you think we were actually better off without?

Bill Gates:

I am concerned about biological tools that could be used by a bioterrorist. However the same tools can be used for good things as well.

Some people think Hoverboards were bad because they caught on fire. I never got to try one.•

Tags: Bill Gates

“My Knee Always Hurts When I Am Sad”

March 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Oriana Fallaci conducted a famously contentious 1963 interview with Federico Fellini, which marked the brutish end of what had been a lively friendship begun in the previous decade, the director’s ego and the journalist’s envy getting the best of the moment. In the preface, Fallaci wrote of Fellini’s colorful experiences in New York City when he lived there in 1957. The passage:

I have known Fellini for many years; to be precise ever since I met him in New York for the American première of his movie The Nights of Cabiria, at which time became good friends. In fact, we often used to go eat steaks at Jack’s or roast chestnuts in Times Square, where you could also do target shooting. Then, from time to time, he would turn up at the apartment I shared in Greenwich Village with another girl called Priscilla to ask for a cup of coffee. The homely brew would alleviate, though I never understood why, his nostalgia for his homeland and his misery at his separation from his wife Giulietta. He would come in frantically massaging his knee, “My knee always hurts when I am sad. Giulietta! I want Giulietta!” And Priscilla would come running to look at him as I’d have gone running to look at Greta Garbo. Needless to say, there was nothing of Greta Garbo about Fellini, he wasn’t the monument he is today. He used to call me Pallina, Little Ball. He made us call him Pallino, sometimes Pallone, Big Ball. He would go in for innocent extravagances such as weeping in the bar of the Plaza Hotel because the critic in the New York Times had given him a bad review, or playing the hero. He used to go around with a gangster’s moll, and every day the gangster would call him at his hotel, saying, “I will kill you.” He didn’t understand English and would reply, “Very well, very well,” so adding to his heroic reputation. His reputation lasted until I explained to him what “I will kill you” meant. With half an hour Fellini was on board a plane making for Rome.

He used to do other things too, such as wandering around Wall Street at night, casing the banks like a robber, arousing the suspicions of the world’s most suspicious police, so that finally they asked to see his papers, arrested him because he wasn’t carrying any, and shut him up for the night in a cell. He spent his time shouting the only English sentence he knew: “I am Federico Fellini, famous Italian director.” At six in the morning an Italian-American policeman who had seen La Strada I don’t know how many times said, “If you really are Fellini, come out and whistle the theme of La Strada.” Fellini came out and in a thin whistle–he can’t distinguish a march from a minuet–struggled through the entire soundtrack. A triumph. With affectionate punches in the stomach that were to keep him on a diet of consummé for the next two weeks, the policemen apologized and took him back to his hotel with an escort of motorcycles, saluting him with a blare of horns that could be heard as far away as Harlem.•

“He Also Quickly Found Himself In The Midst Of A Scientific Battle That To His Mind Was Of The Greatest Political And National Interest”

March 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Thomas Jefferson was never a soldier, but he fought for Americans in numerous ways. After the new nation won its independence, the Founding Father squared off in France against those who believed the United States’ plants and animals inferior to Europe’s, which of course was wholly ignorant, but unenlightenment shapes the world if it has enough believers.

Jefferson’s efforts involved, among other things, a giant moose skeleton. From Andrea Wulf in the Atlantic:

In Paris, in between negotiations of commercial treaties, arranging loans and composing diplomatic dispatches, Jefferson purchased the latest scientific books, visited famous gardens and met the greatest thinkers and scientists of the age. He also quickly found himself in the midst of a scientific battle that to his mind was of the greatest political and national interest. His weapons were native North American trees, weights of mammals, a panther pelt, and the bones and skin of a moose.

For years, Jefferson had been furious about a theory that the French called the “degeneracy of America.” Since the mid-eighteenth century several French thinkers had insisted that flora and fauna degenerated when “transplanted” from the Old to the New World. They noted how European fruits, vegetables and grains often failed to mature in America and how imported animals refused to thrive. They also insisted that American native species were inferior to European plants and animals. One of the offending scientists was Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, the most famous naturalist in the world and the author of the 36–volume magisterial Histoire Naturelle. In the 1760s and 1770s Buffon had written that in America all things “shrink and diminish under a niggardly sky and unprolific land.”

As Buffon’s theories spread, the natural world of America became a symbol for its political and cultural significance—or insignificance, depending on the point of view. Hoping to restore America’s honor, and elevate his country above those in Europe, Jefferson set out to prove that everything was in fact larger and superior in the New World.•

Tags: Andrea Wulf, Thomas Jefferson

“Computers Are Still Decades Away From Developing The Sort Of Abilities They’d Need To Enslave Or Eliminate Humankind”

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

Will machines eventually grow intelligent enough to eliminate humans? One can only hope so. I mean, have you watched the orange-headed man discuss the length of his ding-dong at the GOP debates?

In all seriousness, I think the discussion about humans vs. machines is inherently flawed. It supposes that Homo sapiens as we know them will endlessly be the standard. Really unlikely. If our Anthropocene sins don’t doom us, we’ll likely have the opportunity to engineer a good part of our evolution, whether it’s here on Earth or in space. (Alien environments we try to inhabit will also change the nature of what we are.) Ultimately, it will be a contest between Humans 2.0 and Strong AI, though the two factions may reach detente and merge.

For the time being, really smart researchers teach computers to teach themselves, having them use Deep Learning to master Pac-Man and such, speeding the future here a “quarter” at a time. From an article about the contemporary London AI scene by Rob Davies in the Guardian:

Murray Shanahan, professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial, believes that while we should be thinking hard about the moral and ethical ramifications of AI, computers are still decades away from developing the sort of abilities they’d need to enslave or eliminate humankind and bringing Hawking’s worst fears to reality. One reason for this is that while early artificial intelligence systems can learn, they do so only falteringly.

For instance, a human who picks up one bottle of water will have a good idea of how to pick up others of different shapes and sizes. But a humanoid robot using an AI system would need a huge amount of data about every bottle on the market. Without that, it would achieve little more than getting the floor wet.

Using video games as their testing ground, Shanahan and his students want to develop systems that don’t rely on the exhaustive and time-consuming process of elimination – for instance, going through every iteration of lifting a water bottle in order to perfect the action – to improve their understanding.

They are building on techniques used in the development of DeepMind, the British AI startup sold to Google in 2014 for a reported £400m. DeepMind was also developed using computer games, which it eventually learned to play to a “superhuman” level, and DeepMind programs are now able to play – and defeat – professional players of the Chinese board game Go.

Shanahan believes the research of his students will help create systems that are even smarter than DeepMind.•

Tags: Murray Shanahan, Rob Davies

“Advances That Would Take Decades Now Happen In Years, Sometimes Months”

March 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

It’s no secret that regulation, not traditionally the nimblest of things, has trouble keeping pace with technology, but Vivek Wadhwa states the case well in a new Washington Post column. He points out that decisions made on these thorny questions are often done emotionally–would Tim Cook be willingly working with the government if there had been a terrorist attack on Apple headquarters?–but the bigger issue is the briskness with which our tools are progressing. Think about how quickly drones and driverless have morphed in just the past few years. Wadhwa uses another example: the iPhone. An excerpt:

It takes decades, sometimes centuries, to reach the type of consensus that is needed to enact the far-reaching legislation that Congress will have to consider. Laws are essentially codified ethics, a consensus that is reached by society on what is right and wrong. This happens only after people understand the issues and have seen the pros and cons.

Consider our laws on privacy. These date back to the late 1800s, when newspapers first started publishing gossip. They wrote a series of intrusive stories about Boston lawyer Samuel Warren and his family. This led his law partner, future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, writing a Harvard Law Review article “The Right of Privacy” which argued for the right to be left alone. This essay laid the foundation of American privacy law, which evolved over 200 years. It also took centuries to create today’s copyright laws, intangible property rights, and contract law. All of these followed the development of technologies such as the printing press and steam engine.

Today, technology is progressing on an exponential curve; advances that would take decades now happen in years, sometimes months. Consider that the first iPhone was released in June 2007. It was little more than an iPod with an embedded cell phone. This has evolved into a device which captures our deepest personal secrets, keeps track of our lifestyles and habits, and is becoming our health coach and mentor. It was inconceivable just five years ago that there could be such debates about unlocking this device.•

Tags: Vivek Wadhwa

“Without An O.K. From The Astrologer, Air Force One Did Not Take Off”

March 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

President Reagan and First Lady Nancy relied heavily on astrology, a fairly benign if boneheaded practice in Hollywood but a troubling one in the White House. The stars were luckily aligned properly for beneficial international relations during the Administration, particularly with the Soviets, though it was still something of a shock to the country when news of the voodoo surfaced during the end of the President’s second term. Two excerpts follow, one from a 1988 People piece about the revelation and an excerpt from Douglas Martin’s 2014 New York Times obituary of Joan Quigley, stargazer to the Reagans.

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From People:

The year was 1980, the mood in the nation restless. American hostages languished in Iran; American athletes were sitting out the Olympics. In the White House, a dithering peanut farmer President looked to be wreaking havoc on the economy. At least, that’s how it appeared to one conservative society lioness out West—whose husband had spent some time in politics but was now between jobs. She felt she had a better man for the office.

Just to be certain, however, she called up a friend, a wellborn San Francisco Republican, from whom she had been taking counsel for several years. The woman, one Joan Quigley, quickly did an astrological chart on Jimmy Carter. Then she got back to Nancy Reagan with good news about her husband’s presidential bid: “I was certain Ronald Reagan wouldn’t have any trouble with him,” says Quigley, who volunteered her services to the campaign and later provided them, on a regular basis, to the Reagan White House.

Throughout this association, the Vassar-educated astrologer with country club manners was—as befits a lady—terribly discreet. By the end of the first term, her fellow astrologers had begun to notice the impeccable celestial timing of many Reagan moves, like the bombing of Libya and his announcement for a second term. “I had astrologer friends calling me saying, ‘Reagan must have had his chart done,’ “Quigley recently confided during an interview in a suite at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel. “I just said, ‘Yes. He must have been consulting someone.’ ”

Last week the soignée soothsayer’s cover was blown by former White House aide Donald Regan. In his just-published book, For the Record, Regan spilled what he insisted was “the most closely guarded domestic secret of the Reagan White House.” To wit: “Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House Chief of Staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise.” Within hours, an avid press had zeroed in on Quigley as the mystery adviser.

If astrology was the Reagans’ little secret, however, it was not very well kept. “I have known since before Reagan was elected that they went to astrologers,” says former Washington Post style reporter Sally Quinn, “and that’s why I’m surprised at all of the surprise and shock.” In fact the Reagans’ interest in astrology goes back to the early ’50s—and amounts to far more than the scanning of newspaper horoscopes that the President once jovially confessed to a reporter. Quigley was only the most recent of several stargazers to enter the Reagans’ domestic orbit and exert the pull of the heavens on decisions great and small.•

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From the Times:

In his 1988 memoir, Donald T. Regan, a former chief of staff for President Ronald Reagan, revealed what he called the administration’s “most closely guarded secret.”

He said an astrologer had set the time for summit meetings, presidential debates, Reagan’s 1985 cancer surgery, State of the Union addresses and much more. Without an O.K. from the astrologer, he said, Air Force One did not take off.

The astrologer, whose name Mr. Regan did not know when he wrote the book, was Joan Quigley. She died on Tuesday at 87 at her home in San Francisco, her sister and only immediate survivor, Ruth Quigley, said.

Mr. Regan said that Miss Quigley — a Vassar-educated socialite who preferred the honorific Miss to Ms. (she never married) — had made her celestial recommendations through phone calls to the first lady, Nancy Reagan, often two or three a day. Mrs. Reagan, he said, set up private lines for her at the White House and at the presidential retreat at Camp David.

Further, Mrs. Reagan paid the astrologer a retainer of $3,000 a month, wrote Mr. Regan, who had also been a Treasury secretary under Reagan and the chief executive of Merrill Lynch.

“Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House chief of staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise,” he wrote in the memoir, For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington.

In an interview with CBS Evening News in 1989, after Reagan left office, Miss Quigley said that after reading the horoscope of the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, she concluded that he was intelligent and open to new ideas and persuaded Mrs. Reagan to press her husband to abandon his view of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” Arms control treaties followed.•

“Right Now, Almost Everyone Is Trying To Game The System”

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

I don’t have to tell you that we’re living in a new and strange economy. The star of a film franchise that makes more than a billion dollars globally is paid six figures and has no real leverage to demand more, whereas Kendall Jenner or Gigi Hadid reportedly earn in that ballpark just for putting a single post on Instagram. Of course, all of the above are lottery winners in this post-collapse world of flat wages and vulnerable workers.

In his recent Reddit AMA, Douglas Rushkoff, author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, engaged in an esoteric give-and-take about where the economy may be heading. He believes restoring the middle class through micropayments unlikely (and it is!), thinking tomorrow will need a better system. Despite the noble thought projects Rushkoff mentions, I can guarantee you the future isn’t TV-less Tandy computers. An excerpt:

Question:

Within a decade we could see mainstream VR/AR with eye-tracking that would lead to complete compartmentalization, observation, and memorization of pretty much all Hierarchical interactions between individuals in all levels of a growing society.

With innovative social networking tools like Synereo, which is pretty much a decentralized Facebook that turns ‘Likes’ into attention-derived cryptocurrency, do you think we’re headed into a digital economy that’s vastly different than today, or are things going to be relatively the same?

Douglas Rushkoff:

We could go in some bizarre new direction like you’re describing. And it would be interesting. It’s a bit like Lanier envisions, where we start getting all sorts of data-mining activities back on the books, and pay people in micro currencies. But I’m thinking it’s likely easier to go in the other direction. I’m interested in getting things off the books. Building connections between people. I don’t like building a society based on the premise that everyone is trying to game the system.

True – right now, almost everyone is trying to game the system. Finance itself is gamified commerce. Derivatives and algorithms gasify that, and so on and so on. Startups are gamified Wall St.

So these new micro-transactional social networks mean to reprogram the value extraction to our own benefit. I just don’t know where the marketers are who are going to support all this in the end. Marketing has never made up more than 5% of GDP. And that’s being generous. I don’t think it can support the entire economy.

I’d rather see communities develop currencies for people to take care of one another, and for us to use those locally, and then use long distance money to buy our iPhones or whatever.

Question:

“I don’t like building a society based on the premise that everyone is trying to game the system.”

This exactly. I don’t mean to sound anti-capitalist, but that’s one of its major flaws – that exploiting people’s weaknesses for financial gain is a good thing.

Douglas Rushkoff:

One horrific factoid I’ve been working on is what would be the cost of an iPhone if it didn’t use the equivalent of slave labor and blood rare-earth minerals. We get these things so relatively cheaply, and it feels as if making these technologies cheaper somehow breaks down the digital divide. But it really just externalizes it to somewhere we don’t see.

It’s a strange project – but I’m wondering if it’s really appropriate to make our tech cheaper at their expense? And wonder if the older stuff we used to use – like my Tandy computer – can do things like this AMA, how is getting TV over my computer really important?•

Tags: Douglas Rushkoff

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Excerpts

“Part Of The Reason For AlphaGo’s Success Is That It Is Partly Self Taught”

“Today We Appear To Be Going Further And Further Into Uncharted Territory”

“The Brain Is An Information-Processing Machine”

“Russia May Have The Will To Go Nuclear, But It Probably Lacks The Means”

“This Is A New Surveillance Capitalism”

“Trump Might Be Reading From A Script Prepared In 1854”

“What About The Ecological Niche The Mosquito Fills?”

“He’s Not Really In Russia In His Mind”

“We Were Pretty Shocked”

“Computer, One. Human, Zero.”

“What If We Could Use This Technology Not To Bring Extinct Species Back To Life But To Save Species That Are Alive Today?”

“Trade May Be His Single Biggest Concern – Not White Supremacy”

“Companies [Could] Go For The Carlos Slim Option”

“Nanobots Will Be Available To Everyone”

“This Was Going To Be A Technological, Computerized Nightmare!”

“I Totally Understand Why A 20-Year Old Would Choose To Do Astrophysics Rather Than Literature”

“Even George Jetson Takes His Briefcase To Work Every Day”

“It Is An Uprising Borne By The White Lower And Middle Classes”

“Has There Been A Problem Or Challenge That’s Made You, As A Billionaire, Feel Completely Powerless?”

“My Knee Always Hurts When I Am Sad”

“He Also Quickly Found Himself In The Midst Of A Scientific Battle That To His Mind Was Of The Greatest Political And National Interest”

“Computers Are Still Decades Away From Developing The Sort Of Abilities They’d Need To Enslave Or Eliminate Humankind”

“Advances That Would Take Decades Now Happen In Years, Sometimes Months”

“Without An O.K. From The Astrologer, Air Force One Did Not Take Off”

“Right Now, Almost Everyone Is Trying To Game The System”

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