Excerpts

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“This Echo Chamber Deluded Its Believers To The Point That It Sometimes Apparently Killed Them”

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

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Donald Trump, Milosevic with a trophy wife, hopes to add a stripper pole to the Lincoln Bedroom.

In his latest op-ed, Nicholas Kristof credits Trump as “smarter than critics believe,” asserting that the hideous hotelier “understood the political mood better than we pundits did.” I think it more likely that Trump is a blowhole who merely threw shit at the wall and was as surprised as anyone that it stuck. If you could go back in time to moments after his candidacy announcement and ask him what line would get the most attention, I doubt he would identify the “they’re rapists” slur about Mexicans.

Kristof goes on to belatedly state what many people (myself included) have been saying for months: The GOP created this Frankenstein monster of a political season it can’t control, though he illustrates it with an interesting fact about echo-chamber misinformation manifesting itself in the real world. An excerpt:

Political nastiness and conspiracy theories were amplified by right-wing talk radio, television and websites — and, yes, there are left-wing versions as well, but they are much less influential. Democrats often felt disadvantaged by the rise of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, but in retrospect Limbaugh and Fox created a conservative echo chamber that hurt the Republican Party by tugging it to the right and sometimes breeding a myopic extremism in which reality is irrelevant.

A poll released in September found that Republicans were more likely to think that Obama was born abroad than that Ted Cruz was. That poll found that Trump supporters believed by nearly a three-to-one ratio that Obama was born overseas.

The Republican establishment profited from the insinuations that Obama is a Muslim, that he’s anti-American, that his health care plan would lead to “death panels.” Rick Perry has described Trump as a “cancer on conservatism” and said his movement is “a toxic mix of demagoguery and meanspiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition” — indeed, but it was a mix that too many Republican leaders accepted as long as it worked for them.

This echo chamber deluded its believers to the point that it sometimes apparently killed them. During the 2009-10 flu pandemic, right-wing broadcasters like Limbaugh and Glenn Beck denounced the call for flu shots, apparently seeing it as a nefarious Obama plot.

The upshot was that Democrats were 50 percent more likely than Republicans to say that they would get flu shots, according to a peer-reviewed article in The Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law. So when the pandemic killed up to 18,000 Americans, they presumably were disproportionately conservatives.•

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“Many Aspects Of Athenian Life…Were Conducive To Creative Thinking”

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

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Whenever people deride philosophy in the name of analytics, I like to remind them that democracy wasn’t created by an algorithm. Like many human creations that shape our world (including philosophy itself), the rule by many was dreamed up in ancient Athens, a “small, dirty, crowded city,” as Eric Weiner identifies it in an Atlantic piece which wonders how so many influential geniuses were nurtured in that place and time. The emergence of the world’s first global city seems more than merely a happy accident. Culture was likely a much more important force than genetics. An acceptance of immigration was one piece of the puzzle, but there were many other factors. An excerpt:

How did a small, dirty, crowded city, surrounded by enemies and swathed in olive oil, manage to change the world? Was Athenian genius simply the convergence of “a happy set of circumstances,” as the historian Peter Watson has put it, or did the Athenians make their luck? This question has stumped historians and archaeologists for centuries, but the answer may lie in what we already know about life in Athens back in the day.

The ancient Athenians enjoyed a deeply intimate relationship with their city. Civic life was not optional, and the Athenians had a word for those who refused to participate in public affairs: idiotes. There was no such thing as an aloof, apathetic Athenian. “The man who took no interest in the affairs of state was not a man who minded his own business,” wrote the ancient historian Thucydides, “but a man who had no business being in Athens at all.” When it came to public projects, the Athenians spent lavishly. (And, if they could help it, with other people’s money—they paid for the construction of the Parthenon, among other things, with funds from the Delian League, an alliance of several Greek city-states formed to fend off the Persians.)

All of ancient Athens displayed a combination of the linear and the bent, the orderly and the chaotic. The Parthenon, perhaps the most famous structure of the ancient world, looks like the epitome of linear thinking, rational thought frozen in stone, but this is an illusion: The building has not a single straight line. Each column bends slightly this way or that. Within the city walls, you’d find both a clear-cut legal code and a frenzied marketplace, ruler-straight statues and streets that follow no discernible order.

In retrospect, many aspects of Athenian life—including the layout and character of the city itself—were conducive to creative thinking.•

“Medical Robots Do Not Need To Be Perfect, They Just Have To Be Better Than Humans”

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

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I’m not anticipating “doctor-less hospitals” in my lifetime nor do I expect them for a very long while after that. Medical centers are discomfiting enough as is without being automated. I do think, however, that software guiding surgical robots will be put to good use sooner than later, and in the longer run, any task–even a life-saving one–that humans and machines can do equally well will largely be ceded to silicon. 

From a Singularity Hub article about the hospital of tomorrow by Ross Crawford, Anjali Jaiprakash and Jonathan Roberts:

Imagine your child requires a life-saving operation. You enter the hospital and are confronted with a stark choice.

Do you take the traditional path with human medical staff, including doctors and nurses, where long-term trials have shown a 90% chance that they will save your child’s life?

Or do you choose the robotic track, in the factory-like wing of the hospital, tended to by technical specialists and an array of robots, but where similar long-term trials have shown that your child has a 95% chance of survival?

Most rational people would opt for the course of action that is more likely to save their child. But are we really ready to let machines take over from a human in delivering patient care?

Of course, machines will not always get it right. But like autopilots in aircraft, and the driverless cars that are just around the corner, medical robots do not need to be perfect, they just have to be better than humans.

So how long before robots are shown to perform better than humans at surgery and other patient care? It may be sooner, or it may be later, but it will happen one day.•

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“Anything Could Happen”

February 10, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, Pinochet with a line of men’s fragrances, would seem to have a proper path forward in the GOP race. With the next month of Republican primaries favoring far-right pols, and the trio of Kasich, Rubio and Bush subtracting from one another, the Reality TV realtor need only outpace Ted Cruz, a rat trap of a man and the only person in America more unlikable than him. Trump isn’t a true conservative, but he’s clearly communicated his intention to “Make America Great White Again.” At this point, his campaign can’t be disqualified by anything he says, no matter how repugnant, but will instead rise or fall based on how many caucasians in the U.S. deeply resent no longer being able to use the N-word without consequence. 

It’s not as easy to see a similar road to success for the other upstart, Bernie Sanders, despite his rousing N.H. win and Hillary Clinton’s vulnerabilities. Until the race moves past Super Tuesday, the Vermont Senator will walk headlong into an unforgiving slate of mostly Southern states where he’ll have to pick up non-white voters, something he’s thus far shown little flair for. Sanders could be trailing badly by the time we move deeper into March, so he needs to change that reality before the South Carolina primary.

From Edward Luce in the Financial Times:

Nobody knows better than the Clintons the power of early state momentum.

In his victory speech, Mr Sanders said he was travelling to New York on Wednesday — “but not to raise money from Wall Street.” In fact, he will be breakfasting with the Reverend Al Sharpton, the radical black pastor, who seems likely to endorse him. Other black celebrities have been lined up.

Mr Sanders has two weeks, and the media wind at his back, to turn South Carolina into another victory. If he pulls that off, he will join Mr Trump as odds-on favourite to win his party’s nomination. The polls say Mrs Clinton will halt Mr Sanders’ progress south of the Mason-Dixon Line. But pre-New Hampshire polls are now virtually worthless. Anything could happen.

Both parties may be on course to endorse candidates who repudiate much of what they stand for.

If there was ever a moment Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, was tempted to run for the White House, it may be fast approaching.•

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“Its Self-Driving Car Will Not Have A ‘Driver’ In The Traditional Sense”

February 10, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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When it appeared that the driverless-car business might become a going concern, my take on the industry was that the final five percent of bugs to be worked out might be more challenging than the first 95% of the enterprise had been. I don’t think that was a controversial opinion. The smallest problems are the knottiest in this case.

For a few years, it seemed equal to those technological challenges might be snafus caused by a lack of legal framework, but 2016 has been an inflection point. Last month, the Obama Administration proposed $4 billion over the next decade to ameliorate the industry’s realization, the government firmly behind the U.S. winning this nouveau “Space Race.” That measure will encourage Europe and Asia forward, untangling its own limits and liabilities.

Two more important pieces of autonomous-car legalese have come to light, one in regards to the definition of a “driver” in America and the other a patent filed by Google. Excerpts follow.

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From Paul Lienert and David Shepardson of Reuters:

U.S. vehicle safety regulators have said the artificial intelligence system piloting a self-driving Google car could be considered the driver under federal law, a major step towards ultimately winning approval for autonomous vehicles on the roads.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc , of its decision in a previously unreported Feb. 4 letter to the company posted on the agency’s website this week.

Google’s self-driving car unit on Nov. 12 submitted a proposed design for a self-driving car that has “no need for a human driver,” the letter to Google from National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Chief Counsel Paul Hemmersbaugh said.

“NHTSA will interpret ‘driver’ in the context of Google’s described motor vehicle design as referring to the (self-driving system), and not to any of the vehicle occupants,” NHTSA’s letter said.

“We agree with Google its (self-driving car) will not have a ‘driver’ in the traditional sense that vehicles have had drivers during the last more than one hundred years.”•

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From Future Tech Hub:

Google wants to deliver your package through self-driving trucks. The tech giant has been awarded a  patent described as an “autonomous delivery platform” for delivery trucks. The self-driving trucks will be equipped with lockers which can be opened only with the access codes assigned to the customer. Credit cards can also be used by users to open. The trucks will drive away to other location to deliver once the packages are dispatched. The automated vehicle will drive to the customers address. Once after arriving, it will send an SMS alert with the access codes to the lockers.•

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“From Each Of These District Shops Innumerable Electric Wires Branched Off In All Directions”

February 10, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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The good folks at The Public Domain Review, that excellent thing, unearthed an 1857 piece of writing from the illustrated magazine The Leisure Hour which predicted what London would be like a hundred years in the future. It’s a drunken, utopic vision of a fogless, crimeless metropolis, but the best of the article is a prediction of things akin to Internet shopping and social networking. Technology was to deliver a global village. An excerpt: 

Some of these shops were vast magazines of wealth, covering wide areas, and perfectly dazzling with the splendour of their contents. The purchaser walked through long galleries, where, ranged in orderly array, glittered and gleamed the gold, the gems, the jewels of every clime. Some were as rich in works of pictorial or fictile art; and some, again, had inexhaustible stores of intellectual wealth. Books on all subjects, and which seemed, from the abundance of their illustrations, to speak as much to the eye as to the mind, abounded in inconceivable stores in these repositories; and every household, however humble, had its family library, and, what was better still, its family of readers. I observed that from each of these district shops innumerable electric wires branched off in all directions, communicating with several houses in the district to which it belonged. Thus, no sooner did a house-keeper stand in need of any article than she could despatch the order instantaneously along the wire, and receive the goods by the very first railway carriage that happened to pass the store. Thus, she saved her time, and she lost no money, because all chaffering and cheapening, and that fencing between buyer and seller, which was once deemed a pleasure, had been long voted a disgraceful, demoralizing nuisance, and was done away with. The electric wires ran along the fronts of the houses near the upper stories, crossing the streets at an elevation at which they were scarcely visible from below; and I noticed that the dwellings of friends, kindred, and intimates were thus banded together, not only throughout the whole vast city, but even far out into the provinces, and, in cases where the parties were wealthy, to the uttermost limits of the realm.

One result of this extended social intimacy and sympathy was pleasingly apparent. The old walls of separation which had formerly shut out rich from poor and poor from rich, had crumbled beneath it, and were fast falling to decay.•

“The Hyperloop Is Real”

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

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For most people, creating a new mode of travel to massively improve speed and environmental impact would be worthy of a life’s work. But not so for Elon Musk, too busy to develop his idea for the Hyperloop because he’s trying to colonize Mars and transform Earth into a solar-and-electric planet.

Others, however, are interested, very interested. In a Vice “Motherboard” article, Jason Koebler travels to College Station, Texas, to take the temperature of engineers who have pipe dreams, at a competition among those driven to complete Musk’s mandate by an idealism they may not even be able to express. An excerpt:

After briefly talking about it in public, Musk published a white paper that went into specifics of how it would work: Use vacuum pumps to take the air out of an enclosed tube to reduce air pressure, remove the wheels from a “pod” to reduce friction, and use some induction motors to shoot the pod down the tube very quickly.

Two and a half years later, actually traveling on a hyperloop is still theoretical, but its effect on business is not. There is a very real, bonafide industry of people trying very hard to make the hyperloop. The way Smith and everyone else in the industry talks about it, the hyperloop is is not some futuristic thing—it’s an engineering problem that’s being actively solved by real companies and real engineers.

“The hyperloop is real,” Brogan BamBrogan, a former SpaceX employee and cofounder of Hyperloop Technologies told me.

If the hyperloop is real, then the pod design weekend was its coming out party. Hosted by SpaceX at Texas A&M University, the weekend featured more than 1,000 students split between 180 university teams, each of them armed with design schematics, computer models, and physics proofs that suggest it’ll be possible to build hyperloop pods that can successfully navigate a one-mile test track being built by SpaceX on its Hawthorne, California campus. More strikingly were the number of companies and professional engineers there whose main business and job description is, broadly speaking: Make the hyperloop into a tangible thing.•

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“Reagan Would Be A Moderate In Today’s GOP”

February 9, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump mostly wants to be President so that he can giver Fireside Chats about his erections.

There are plenty of reasons why a vulgar clown like Trump is a viable candidate in the current race, but I do believe the decline of the GOP as a serious party began with Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, their coded language of divisiveness (“welfare queens”), assault on the middle class and utter disdain for environmentalism. In many ways, Reagan was ultimately a reasonable man, but he pushed the right into a nostalgia for a past that had never quite existed except in Peggy Noonan’s greeting-card grade prose. The repeated inability of conservatives to deliver the impossible has driven the true believers over the edge.

Jacob Weisberg, who’s written a biography of Reagan, just did an AMA at Reddit, answering questions about 40. The writer’s contention that Reagan wasn’t a womanizer is naive, but it’s a lively give-and-take. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Which of the Republican candidates do you think has views that are closest to Ronald Reagan’s?

Jacob Weisberg:

Reagan would be a moderate in today’s GOP — he signed the biggest-ever immigration “amnesty” (his phrase) into law, supported handgun regulation, and played a huge in making abortion legal — and keeping it legal, by nominating Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court. There’s no one running who supports those positions. In policy terms, I’d say the closest is John Kasich, because he’s more moderate than the others. Temperamentally, Marco Rubio seems the most Reagan-like to me. Rubio is optimistic and future-focused, where most of the others are pessimistic and negative about America’s future.

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Question:

There has been much discussion of the unusual age of the 2016 presidential election frontrunners vis a vis Reagan, with Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders all being at least as old upon potential inauguration as Reagan was. Is there such a thing as “too old” in your opinion, and if so how old is it?

Jacob Weisberg:

Life expectancy keeps increasing, and being 70 now doesn’t mean what it meant in 1980 – let alone what it meant in 1880. On the other hand, the presidency is physically very taxing — I’ve heard it said that a year in the White House takes the physical toll of two years outside of it. Reagan was a vigorous, healthy man when he took office, but he suffered from a number of health problems tied to age. I don’t know that there’s an age when you’re too old per se. Sanders definitely pushes the limit. It’s hard to imagine someone over 80, which he would be in a second term, being up to the demands of the job. But there are better reasons to not vote for Sanders, IMO.

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Question:

Who was Reagan’s favorite President? And how did he feel about Lincoln in particular?

Jacob Weisberg:

The President he admired the most in his own lifetime was FDR. He consciously modeled himself on FDR in many ways – including his Saturday Radio addresses, which were a reinvention of Roosevelt’s fireside chat. He borrowed some key phrases from Lincoln, like the America as the “last, best hope” of man on earth. But like all great political speechmakers, he borrowed liberally from his predecessors.

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Question:

What was your conclusion about his role in the end of the Cold War?

Jacob Weisberg:

I give him a lot of credit. Reagan was unusual on the right in thinking — as far back as 1962 — that communism might just collapse, because it was a ridiculous system. And he improvised to help it do so, moving from nuclear hawk in his first term to disarmament radical in his second. Both the push he gave the Soviets, and the support he gave Gorbachev, were crucial to the (mostly) peaceful collapse of the Soviet Empire.

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Question:

It’s commonly stated in leftist circles that Reagan was barely functioning in his second term due to advanced dementia/Alzheimer’s. In your opinion, how much truth is there to that assertion?

Jacob Weisberg:

Not just in leftist circles. His son, Ron Jr, thinks Reagan’s Alzheimer’s was affecting him pretty significantly by 1986 – the middle of his second term. There’s a lot of evidence to support that, including a study by some Alzheimer’s researchers I cite in my book that looks at his use of language in press conferences. That doesn’t mean he was barely functioning. Like a lot of people in the early stages of that disease, he had better days and worse days.

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Question:

Was he the womanizer that I have heard? Never met a female co-star he didn’t really, really like.

Jacob Weisberg: 

I wouldn’t call Reagan a womanizer. He does write about the tendency to always fall in love with the leading lady when he was younger. But I’ve never heard it argued that Reagan was anything other than faithful in his two marriages. During the period in between, after he divorced Jane Wyman, he definitely played the field and slept around in Hollywood. But I don’t think he enjoyed that very much — he was eager to settle down with someone, and Nancy ended up being his true soulmate.•

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“Imagine A State Run Like That. That’s A Futuristic Thing, Right?”

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

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Here’s an interesting thought experiment put forth by Cory Doctorow in a Jacobin interview conducted by Simon Willmetts: What if the anti-hierarchal modus operandi of Wikipedia was applied to projects like building developments, space programs or even state governance? Crowdsourcing would be employed on an epic scale in the non-virtual realm.

Well, I would say Wikipedia hasn’t been absolutely free of hierarchy for a long time, but what was put in place was organic and certainly less heavy-handed. I do doubt a state run that way would be more democratic since the online encyclopedia itself has drawn avid contributors but not anything near truly representative. Such a system might need be limited to project-specific problems.

An excerpt:

Question:

So you wouldn’t describe yourself as a “libertarian” — you don’t think state intervention is always necessarily a bad thing?

Cory Doctorow:

No. I believe in civil liberties, and I think that states are the least-worst option right now for solving some difficult collective action problems. But I also think that we’re learning every day how much hierarchy we can remove from complex endeavors.

Imagine something futuristic, like something on the scale of an operating system or an encyclopedia, with the same degree of complexity, the number of human hours and the amount of knowledge that goes into it, and something else on that scale, like a Canary Wharf tower, and imagine it being built the way that we built Wikipedia.

I have a plot of dirt, and I’m going to invite any stranger who has structural steel, trunking, rebar, cement, gravel, diggers, architectural drawings, or ideas to come and just muck around for a while. We’ll shout at each other a lot, and we’ll have some false starts. Some bits will come down, some bits will go up, and at the end, we will have not just an office tower, but the greatest office tower ever built, and it will be infinitely reproducible at zero cost.

Imagine a space program run like that. Imagine an aviation system run like that. Imagine a state run like that. That’s a futuristic thing, right? That’s a futuristic parable that uses Wikipedia and any Linux project to think about the scale at which we can operate in the absence of hierarchy. It challenges our imaginations to think about the coordination of that much labor without hierarchy.•

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“I Will Stand By Much Of The Document As Written”

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

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On the 20th anniversary of John Perry Barlow’s idealistic Davos edict, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” the Economist asked him to revisit those words and consider what he hit and missed. The Internet is no longer an utter Wild West but now an odd mix of anarchy and surveillance, a conflict unlikely to ever be fully settled, and one that will continue to produce positive and negative developments. Barlow’s idea that state governments were remnants of the Industrial Age now seems naive, though his argument that a global world demands a digital openness is a good one.

An excerpt:

The Economist:

What do you think you got especially right—or wrong?

John Perry Barlow:

I will stand by much of the document as written. I believe that it is still true that the governments of the physical world have found it very difficult to impose their will on cyberspace. Of course, they are as good as they ever were at imposing their will on people whose bodies they can lay a hand on, though it is increasingly easy, as it was then, to use technical means to make the physical location of those bodies difficult to determine.

Even when they do get someone cornered, like Chelsea Manning, or Julian Assange, or [Edward] Snowden, they’re not much good at shutting them up. Ed regularly does $50,000 speeches to big corporate audiences and is obviously able to speak very freely. Ditto Julian. And even ditto Chelsea Manning, who despite the fact that she’s serving a 35-year sentence, is still able to speak her mind to all who will listen.

People will sputter, but what about China, what about Silk Road [an online marketplace that sold drugs before being shut down in 2013], what about Kim Dotcom? Well, I believe that a close examination of Chinese censorship is a little more nuanced than the media here would have us believe and is mostly focused on preventing something like the Cultural Revolution. But the Chinese know that they can’t compete in a global marketplace if they don’t allow their best minds full contact with our best minds. Silk Road is already reassembling itself in the gloomier recesses of the dark web, and the arrest and persecution of Kim Dotcom was simply an illegal over-reach by the U.S. government. Yeah, they can enforce the rule of law online provided their ability to break it.•

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“This Could Be The Largest Turing Test In History”

February 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Most developments in AI aren’t so fascinating for what they are but for showing where things might head.

Take, for example, a convincing, new teenage chatbot keeping lonely Chinese citizens company. The center of Yongdong Wang’s Nautilus article about fake friends, Xiaoice, as she’s called, is empathetic in a way no mere emoji ever could be. “She makes a point of showing that she cares,” the author writes of what he terms “emotional computing.” Wang should know since he heads the Microsoft team that created the software program. The millions speaking to Xiaoice don’t usually know right away she’s artificial and don’t seem to mind when they find out.

Even though the chatbot currently tries to cover up gaps in knowledge with the type of bursts of emotions typical to teens, those shortcomings will grow shorter with each new conversation, as more information is absorbed. It doesn’t require a wild imagination to see where such machine knowledge might be in 20 or so years.

An excerpt:

Xiaoice can exchange views on any topic. If it’s something she doesn’t know much about, she will try to cover it up. If that doesn’t work, she might become embarrassed or even angry, just like a human would.

In fact, she is so human that millions of people are eager to talk to her. When Xiaoice was released for a public test on WeChat (a popular messaging and calling app in China) on May 29 of last year, she received 1.5 million chat group invitations in the first 72 hours. Many people said that they didn’t realize she isn’t a human until 10 minutes into their conversation.


By mid-June, she had become the sixth most active celebrity on Weibo. One message she posted on the app generated over 663,000 conversations: “As a species different from human beings, I am still finding a way to blend into your life.” Today, she has had more than 10 billion conversations with people, most of them about private matters. Six million have posted their conversation on social media.

This could be the largest Turing test in history. One of its surprising conclusions is that people don’t necessarily care that they’re chatting with a machine. Many see Xiaoice as a partner and friend, and are willing to confide in her just as they do with their human friends. Xiaoice is teaching us what makes a relationship feel human, and hinting at a new goal for artificial intelligence: not just analyzing databases and driving cars, but making people happier.•

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“Ten Years From Now, If The First Person Through A Breach Isn’t A Fricking Robot, Then Shame On Us”

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

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Sometimes when Americans consider the path forward with regards to genetic engineering or an automated military, we do so in a vacuum. We would never do that. That’s not how it will unravel, of course. We’ll be responding to other world powers, and sometimes in a race, a competitor will run much faster than anticipated. 

In a Financial Times piece, Geoff Dyer writes of the “split-screen reality” of the Pentagon, charged with fighting ISIS in a painstakingly Vietnam-ish slog while preparing for a possibility of a Digital Age WWIII with China or Russia or whomever. “We must be prepared for a high-end enemy,” Defense Secretary Ashton Carter says. We’ll also be trying to outpace our own fears, not necessarily the same thing as realities, and anxieties can take on a life of their own.

An excerpt:

The underlying objective of the new strategy is to find weapons and technologies to ensure US forces “can fight their way to the fight” as one official puts it — to evade the layered missile defences both China and Russia can erect, to defend bases against attack from precision-guided missiles and to be able to operate carrier fleets at a much greater distance from an enemy.

For some Pentagon planners, the long-term answers will be found in robotics — be they unmanned, autonomous planes or submarines that can surprise an enemy or robot soldiers that can reduce the risk to humans by launching attacks. Mr Work, who once co-wrote a paper called “Preparing for War in the Robotic Age”, said in December: “Ten years from now, if the first person through a breach isn’t a fricking robot, then shame on us.”

Mass attack

Last week Mr Carter talked about “swarming, autonomous vehicles” — an allusion to another idea that animates current defence thinking in Washington, the use of greater volumes of aircraft or ships in a conflict. The emphasis in American military technology in recent decades has been on developing weapons platforms that are deployed in fewer numbers but boast much greater capabilities, such as the F-35 fighter jet. However, backed by low-cost production techniques such as 3D printing, Pentagon planners are flirting with a different model that seeks to saturate an enemy with swarms of cheaper, more expendable drones.

“It is the reintroduction of the idea of mass,” says Mr Brimley at CNAS. “Not only do we have the better technology but we are going to bring mass and numbers to the fight and overwhelm you.”

Mr Work’s other big theme is the combining of human and machine intelligence, whether it be wearable electronics and exoskeletons for infantry soldiers or fighter jets with suites of sensors and software passing data to the pilot.•

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“It’s Something Closer To A Man Imitating A Robot”

February 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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In a NYRB piece, Jacob Weisberg has reviewed a slate of books which consider, in one way or another, how the supercomputers in our pockets are quietly remaking us and our relations with one another, including two Sherry Turkle titles, Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation. While the psychologist unfortunately quotes studies that claim a “40 percent decline in empathy among college students over the past twenty years”–wow, I wouldn’t trust such findings–her work ultimately leads Weisberg to what I think is a true and underappreciated consequence of our new normal: While we endeavor to make machines more like us, we’re becoming more like them, disappearing a significant portion of our humanity into the zeros and ones. An excerpt:

For young people, she observes, the art of friendship is increasingly the art of dividing your attention successfully. Speaking to someone who isn’t fully present is irritating, but it’s increasingly the norm. Turkle has already noticed considerable evolution in “friendship technologies.” At first, she saw kids investing effort into enhancing their profiles on Facebook. More recently, they’ve come to prefer Snapchat, known for its messages that vanish after being viewed, and Instagram, where users engage with one another around a stream of shared photos, usually taken by phone. Both of these platforms combine asynchronicity with ephemerality, allowing you to compose your self-presentation, while looking more causal and spontaneous than on a Facebook profile. It’s not the indelible record that Snapchat’s teenage users fear. It’s the sin of premeditated curating—looking like you’re trying too hard.

More worrying to Turkle is that social media offer respite from the awkwardness of unmediated human relationships. Apple’s FaceTime feature hasn’t taken off because, as one college senior explains, “You have to hold it [the phone] in front of your face with your arm; you can’t do anything else.” Then again some younger teens, presumably with an ordinary number of arms, are using FaceTime as an alternative to spending time with one another in person. The advantage is that “you can always leave” and “you can do other things on social media at the same time.”

The thing young people never do on their smartphones is actually speak to one another.

…

In the Spike Jonze film Her, the romantic partner constituted through artificial intelligence provides emotional support without the demands of a real person. Here, the real person thinks that the modulated self he presents in disembodied conversation is more appealing. This turns the goal of affective computing on its head; instead of getting machines to seem more like people, it’s something closer to a man imitating a robot. Turkle comments that digital media put people in a “comfort zone,” where they believe they can share “just the right amount” of themselves. But this feeling of control is an illusion—a “Goldilocks fallacy.” In a romantic relationship, there is no ideal distance to be maintained over time. As she sums up her case: “Technology makes us forget what we know about life.”•

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“You Have To Accept That AI Technology Is Just Too Valuable, Just Too Useful Not To Build It”

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

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When asked about humans creating AI that surpasses our intelligence, Brad Templeton probably has the most honest answer: We won’t be able to resist building such a new machine, so valuable that it is. We probably shouldn’t resist. I suppose superintelligence could doom us, but a lack of it also could. Templeton’s prescription is that we build a better AI, one that “loves” us. Easier said than done, of course.

From Leslie D’Monte’s Live Mint interview with the technologist:

Question:

Many technology luminaries like Bill Gates, Elon Musk and even physicist Stephen Hawking have expressed their fears that robots with AI could rule mankind. Do you share their concerns?

Brad Templeton:

I surely understand their fears. Like many technologies, there are certain risks if it is done wrong, but it is a risk that we cannot avoid. So we don’t really have a lot of choice, but to do it well and make the effort to do it well. If you don’t do it in, say, America or India, it will mean that the AI features will be Chinese or from Pakistan or from somewhere else. And that’s not the outcome you’re looking for. You have to accept that AI technology is just too valuable, just too useful not to build it. So people around the world will build it. Your only choice is to build it better than them.

I’m quite comfortable with the idea that we will at some point be able to make machines or AI stuff. They might not be machines as we think of them today…that surpass us in intelligence. Many parents have children who ultimately surpass them in intelligence. This has been happening for a very long time, but at a very slow pace. The best that I want to hope for is to create these children of the mind as I call them, but not in the biological sense, that still love us the way children love their parents.•

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“Others Are More Abstract, Revealing Textures And Colors And Forms That Allude To Something Ineffable”

February 7, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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The new Space Race is upon us, this one as much a contest between private and public as among nations. Norman Mailer was the one, above all others, who correctly read the subtext of the 1960s iteration, realizing the Apollo mission a permanent subjugation of humanity–“space travel proposed a future world of brains attached to wires.” Hemingway’s bullfights and other macho challenges were hopelessly diminished in a time of space odyssey. Now we’ll return to space with greater desperation, hoping to safeguard the species from existential risks. Of course, we will simultaneously mutate and end the species as we know it when we stretch across the sky. We’ll become them.

In a Vantage essay, Doug Bierend writes of Abandoned in Place, Roland Miller’s glorious collection of photos which captures the gentle decline of decommissioned launch sites and NASA structures of yore. An excerpt:

Shot with a reverent eye, NASA’s sprawling launch sites and structures, gleaming test facilities, and rusting machinery come together as visual a document and testament to 21st century humanity’s ever-extending reach into the cosmos. Mute monuments to what were once our most lofty ideals.

“I’m a child of the ‘60s, and for anybody that was growing up during that time it was so exciting, it was like science fiction come to life — they were going to try to land on the moon, and they did,” says Miller. “And here we are almost 50 years later and we couldn’t land it on the moon — I doubt we could make the same nine-year window if we started now.”

With the scrapping of the Space Shuttle, public excitement over space exploration seemed to reach an all time low, along with NASA’s budget. But whether due to a combination of private innovation by the likes of SpaceX, the effective popularizing of science by figures like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, or a renewed schedule of NASA programs (including missions to Mars), a second golden age of space exploration may be dawning.

Some of Miller’s photos come across as essentially documentary, showing the current state of a once gleaming endeavor. Others are more abstract, revealing textures and colors and forms that allude to something ineffable. An aesthetic that’s as much part of science fiction as science fact, conjuring notions of space and worlds beyond our own, and how we might get there.•

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“I Became Interested In How The Brain Models Another Part Of The Self”

February 5, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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In a further attempt to demystify consciousness, Michael Graziano proposes in an Atlantic piece that perhaps the odd phenomenon of phantom limbs can crack the hard problem. The sensation of lost legs and arms stems, it would seem, from the brain creating a “body schema” which persists unchanged (wrongly) after the loss. For whatever reason, the old template has remained, sometimes taking longer to recalibrate and occasionally never successfully doing so.

In his “Attention Schema Theory,” Graziano suggests that awareness is similarly driven by a model that anticipates sensation in an imprecise but effective way. I would think a “consciousness model” would have to know a whole other magnitude of complexity beyond one controlling a thumb or forefinger, but that certainly is possible. It would also explain why we’re so prone to fooling ourselves, how we can hole up in inside a certain worldview that’s been repeatedly reinforced, even if it runs counter to common sense and copious evidence.

An excerpt:

After studying the body schema for many years, I became interested in how the brain models another part of the self. Not a physical part like an arm, but a computational part. If the brain describes the physical body in ghostly, incomplete terms, how much more mystically would it describe a non-physical trait like computation?

One of the most crucial computational processes in the brain is attention. The word “attention” has many colloquial connotations, but in neuroscience it has a specific meaning. Attention is the selective enhancement of some signals over others, such that the brain’s resources are strategically deployed. In some ways attention is like a computational hand—it’s how the brain grasps things.

The brain needs to control its attention, just as it controls the body. To understand how, we can gain some insight from control theory, a well-developed branch of engineering theory that deals in the optimal ways for complex systems to work—whether those systems dictate the airflow in a building, traffic patterns in a city, or a robot arm. In control theory, if a machine is to control something optimally, it needs a working model of whatever it’s controlling. The brain certainly follows this principle in controlling the body. That’s why it computes a body schema. Since the brain can control its attention exquisitely well, it almost certainly has an attention schema, a simulation of its own attention.•

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“I See No Scientific Reason Why Artificial Systems Could Not Be Conscious”

February 5, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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It’s not romantic, but the human brain is a machine and if our species persists long enough there’s no reason why consciousness can’t be replicated in AI. Once it is, awareness and understanding should speed to places previously unimaginable. But I certainly don’t expect to see that hard problem solved in my lifetime and doubt we’re anywhere near the cusp of intelligent machines. Someday it will all seem so simple, but the day won’t arrive for a long time.

From “When Will the Machines Wake Up?” by Daniel Faggella at Techcrunch:

Over the last three months I’ve interviewed more than 30 artificial intelligence researchers (essentially all of whom hold PhDs). I asked them why they believe or don’t believe that consciousness can be replicated in machines.

One of the most common contentions as to why conscious will eventually be replicated is based on the fact that nature bumbled its way to human-level conscious experience, and with a deeper understanding of the neurological and computational underpinnings of what is “happening” to create a conscious experience, we should be able to do the same.

Professor Bruce MacLennan sums up the sentiments of many of the researchers in his response: “I think that the issue of machine consciousness (and consciousness in general) can be resolved empirically, but that it has not been to date. That said, I see no scientific reason why artificial systems could not be conscious, if sufficiently complex and appropriately organized.”

It might be supposed that attaining conscious experience in machines may require more than just a development in the fields of cognitive and computer science, but also an advancement in how research and inquiry are conducted. Dr. Ben Goertzel, artificial intelligence researcher behind OpenCog, had this to say: “I think that as brain-computer interfacing, neuroscience and AGI develop, we will gradually gain a better understanding of consciousness — but this may require an expansion of the scientific methodology itself.”•

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“He Described Goodell As ‘Convicted'”

February 5, 2016 in Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

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With all due respect to the Palins and Kardashians, the NFL is America’s main dysfunctional family.

Roger Goodell, currently playing the role of the forlorn father, is the gently lined head sitting atop the league’s monstrously jacked but battered body. With his corporate handsomeness, Goodell seems like any ostensibly decent man in command of something indecent, charged with the burden of making an unconscionable thing look acceptable. He always followed what he was taught was the right path in life, yet he finds himself in the wrong–and it’s too late to unlearn all the lessons. How complicated this world.

The multibillion-dollar league’s PR machine has tangled its limbs so tightly around God and nation and military and sheer Americanness that if you dare to utter the obvious–it’s a brutal, brain-wrecking game that no child should play–you somehow seem an enemy of the state. But the calls have still grown loud, and the commissioner’s response is slow, calculated and cloaked in coached language.

Boxing, once itself the undisputed champion of American athletics, was done in by similar circumstances, but it was a mere collection of banana republics run by dime-store despots. The NFL is American corporatocracy itself, lawyered up and too big to fail. Goodell is its governor of sorts, and the drinking water, he’s been told, is dirty, and can never be clean again. He offers his reassurances.

Mark Leibovich, a wonderful NYT political writer, drops in on another cartoonish party with serious consequences as he takes the measure of the embattled but immensely league, just prior to Super Bowl 50. Many of the power brokers he interviews are, unsurprisingly, caucasian, septuagenarian, politically conservative, driven by greed, desperate for attention and wildly successful. An excerpt:

During my three visits to the N.F.L.’s Park Avenue offices, I was always struck by the thick propaganda of the place. The N.F.L. Network plays at all times on big screens. Every corporate office celebrates itself, to some degree, but the N.F.L.’s is particularly overwhelming, as if it were the sanctum of a highly successful megachurch marrying ESPN and Scientology. I had the strange feeling, as I waited in the lobby, that I was being watched, if not filmed.

On my first visit, Greg Aiello, the N.F.L.’s longtime communications director, took me to the cafeteria, known as the Huddle. We passed photo murals celebrating the various Members in their moments of triumph. He brought me an iced tea, sat me down and told me good stuff about the commissioner, good things about the league, big and heady numbers. He handed me positive fact sheets and articles and then, unprompted, summed things up: ‘‘Roger wins.’’

On another visit to the Huddle, I met Tod Leiweke, the league’s chief operating officer, who was hired last summer. Leiweke, a former Seattle Seahawks president, has brushed-back white hair, a sunny and almost New Agey manner and a beakish nose that makes him somewhat resemble an actual sea hawk. He wore a beige sweater with the Shield embroidered across his chest. Leiweke got to know Goodell on a climb up Mount Rainier with other executives. Over lunch, he hurled mountain metaphors at me. ‘‘There are ­challenges to running the most successful league in the world,’’ he told me. ‘‘It’s like clouds on Rainier. Not everything’s perfect, but you fight through it.’’ He continued: ‘‘The league is trying to climb new mountains of its own.’’

He described Goodell as ‘‘convicted,’’ meaning, it seemed, having strong convictions. ‘‘Roger is hard-working, dedicated, convicted, tenacious,’’ he said. ‘‘He is an amazing, convicted guy.’’ He closed on message. ‘‘And he’s a winner.’’

My impression of Goodell, before I met him, was not favorable.•

 

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“A Monorail Curves Past A Butterfly Dome”

February 4, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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The building of Saudi Arabia’s new financial district, which was begun under one political reality, had its first phase completed under a new one. Will its glass domes and car-less streets be a secular, consumerist gated paradise, a place so apart that it can issue visas at its airports? Or will history intercede on the present, the confluence of government and religion presenting it with a new reality? If it’s the latter, Dubai may stand to gain, as explained in a brief Economist piece.

The opening:

THE skyscrapers of the King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD) rise out of Riyadh’s urban sprawl like an emerald city. Pointed glass spears compete for prominence with vast staggered lean-tos, streaked black-and-white like the back of a rearing zebra. A monorail curves past a butterfly dome. Blissfully vehicle-free in a city otherwise designed for cars, not people, KAFD is built around pedestrian precincts shaded by palm trees. Even the rubbish is collected on an underground conveyor belt. After seven years, the first phase of a futuristic financial hub for the Arab world’s largest economy is nearly complete. It has cost more than $10 billion and the lives of 11 building workers.

Something is missing, however. While decorators install tropical plants in the conference hall, the legal, fiscal and cultural architecture is still on the drawing board. Waleed Aleisa, the CEO, says he is still waiting to hear whether the zone will be free of corporation tax and under what jurisdiction it will operate.•

“Beef Is By Far The Worst”

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

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Are we past peak-meat?

It’s difficult to pose such a question here in the U.S. just days before the Super Bowl, which will see a poultry apocalypse to provide chicken wings to go with the human brain trauma. But the attempts to create meat in vitro will eventually be perfected, and when the price for such faux fare falls very low, some significant changeover will occur. You can add to that a growing vegetarian and vegan populace which doesn’t seem fringe at all anymore.

In a Vice article, Hannah Ewens conducts an interesting thought experiment, wondering what would be the economic, environmental and health impact if everyone in an entire country (she uses England as her case study) stopped eating all meat overnight. An excerpt:

Vice:

What would happen to the environment if we all stopped eating meat?

Nick Hewitt:

Eating meat makes a large contribution to the greenhouse gasses that people in the UK produce. If everyone stopped eating it, the food-related greenhouse gas emissions would reduce by about 35 percent. It’s one very effective way to make a big dent in emissions.

Vice:

Why?

Nick Hewitt:

It’s particularly cattle—beef is by far the worst. Cows chew grass and digest it in conditions in the stomach with no oxygen, and that releases methane. That’s the principle reason. Also, the way the grassland is fertilized causes greenhouse gas emissions. Transporting the food around does contribute, but it’s relatively small, unless you use air freight. Lorries aren’t too bad. The biggest lifestyle choice you could make to reduce greenhouse gasses is to stop eating meat. It’s hard to think of another single lifestyle change we could make that would have the same effect.

Vice:

So using the same farmland for plants would be the quickest way to reduce emissions?

Nick Hewitt:

Yeah. You’d still have to be careful with your fertilization, but using land for meat is the least efficient way of producing protein. It’s just an inefficient way of producing food. By growing plants on the land and eating those, it’s much more efficient, so we would be greatly reducing those greenhouse gas emissions.

Vice:

Would it make more of a difference if everyone was vegan?

Nick Hewitt:

Yeah, it would make more of a difference.•

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“Many Of The Investments Will Turn Out To Be Ineffective”

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

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Following up on yesterday’s post about Alphabet’s considerable wager on its X division becoming a new-generation Bell Labs, realizing that if it’s primarily a search company in a decade, then it’s probably a dying enterprise, well-appointed though its dotage may be.

Robert MacIntosh has penned a Conversation piece suggesting the same, that Google would like to chase immortality as a company while Calico pursues it on a human level. It’s almost impossible to pull off in the long run, though a remarkably ambitious effort. An excerpt:

Many of the investments will turn out to be ineffective, but you usually have no way of knowing in advance. Some technologies or business models will prove unworkable for some as yet unknown reason. Just ask Sir Clive Sinclair – his C5 battery-operated car was in many ways ahead of its time, but soon became one of the most infamous marketing disasters ever.

The logic might be that – if you have the money to spare – it pays to invest broadly and look out for those early signs of rapid growth. After all, the management team at Google has long since demonstrated the capacity to build a market-leading position. Who would bet against them being able to do so again, especially when they are both better resourced and more experienced?

Imperial echoes

A second interpretation of the moonshot strategy could be that the firm’s founders are trying to combine a search for longevity with the adrenaline-fuelled high of creating a new business. But the harsh reality is that it is harder to fake the feel of a start-up when you’re a billionaire. The staggering investment in new ideas is nothing compared to Alphabet’s earnings. In the last three months of 2015 alone, the company made a net profit of $4.9bn. Arguably it doesn’t really matter if these businesses fail because other new ideas will pop up next year and you could fund them instead.

It would be a mistake to think that the future was assured for the company, however. Over the millennia, civilisations have grown to dominant positions and then failed. If it happened to the Incas, the Egyptians and the Romans, why wouldn’t it happen to Google?•

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“It Won’t Be Long Before There Are Lots Of Little Spacecraft Landing On The Moon”

February 4, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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An excellent essay is “Here’s What We’ll Do In Space By 2116,” Emily Lakdawalla’s Nautilus piece that conjures up next-level space exploration in a way that manages to pass a sobriety test. While acknowledging the great obstacles to come, the writer takes a bold yet realistic look at what could well occur in the following ten decades, explaining, among other things, why early voyagers to Mars will likely be transported by private companies–and why the very first ones might not exactly be human. Lakdawalla acknowledges the next century will largely see us exploring (relatively) close to home, perhaps using asteroid mining and such to jump-start an “in-space economy.”

A passage dear to me is one that focuses on using non-human passengers to initially traverse the final frontier, the path I believe we should be taking for the foreseeable future. An excerpt:

Because of the costs and risks of physical human spaceflight, I’m personally more excited about a different kind of space exploration. Advances in miniaturization have made it relatively cheap to launch lots of microsatellites to near-Earth space. These craft will soon be sent further out, and it won’t be long before there are lots of little spacecraft landing on the Moon. From our homes on Earth, we could all take virtual joyrides across the lunar surface, with these mini explorers acting as our distant eyes.

It’s possible that this is how humans will first explore Mars, too—with a robotic body that needs no food, water, shelter, or sleep, serving as the avatar of human operators. The humans working the robot will still need to be located near Mars, not Earth, because of the significant delay in radio communications between the two planets. (The lag between commands sent and data received would range from eight to 42 minutes.) But the humans need not undertake the risks and challenges of landing on Mars: People in orbit at Mars could directly and immediately control Mars robots, all while staying in a ship or station tricked out with everything our delicate bodies need to survive. 

Then again, depending on how technology advances, it may be that the division that we now draw between “human” and “robotic” exploration will be archaic in 50 years.•

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“Some Of Alphabet’s Biggest Moonshots Are Inside Its Core Google Internet Business”

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

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Google may have begun as an AI company, but it will merely be a wildly successful search-and-ad outfit (for as long as that’s a money-making endeavor) unless its X division becomes a nouveau Bell Labs. Having a few of the moonshots land is paramount, whether it be self-driving car software or medical breakthroughs. The will is there, even if investors would rather Page, Brin et al., take the myopic view and settle for selling soap while algorithmically sorting selfies.

From Alistair Barr at the Wall Street Journal:

Alphabet Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat warned repeatedly on the conference call that spending will increase this year, while Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai laid out his own plans to ramp up investments in the company’s main Internet businesses.

On Monday, following strong fourth-quarter results, Ms. Porat said spending will increase in part to expand Alphabet’s fast Fiber Internet service to new U.S. cities. An aggressive expansion of Fiber would cost tens of billions of dollars, noted Citigroup analyst Mark May. He expects Alphabet capital expenditures to climb by about $2 billion to $12 billion in 2016.

Ms. Porat also said Alphabet is committed to expanding its self-driving car business, which is currently testing prototypes in California and Austin, Tex.

These moonshots are part of Alphabet’s new “Other Bets” segment, which it said on Monday lost $3.6 billion in 2015, up from losses of $1.9 billion in 2014.

Mr. Porat also said that some of Alphabet’s biggest moonshots are inside its core Google Internet business — a division that’s supposed to generate the profits that pay for new, ambitious projects. Mr. Pichai said Google’s cloud-computing business will be a big area of investment in 2016, along with virtual reality and artificial intelligence.•

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“Increasingly, Human Intervention Will Be Unnecessary”

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

So much has been written about the Internet of Things, the pluses and minuses, but Bruce Schneier does an impressive job of analyzing its challenges in a new Forbes piece. We won’t just log into the machine–the machine will be everything, though it will be so quiet, not even a hum, that we’ll barely notice it. The writer identifies the IoT as a “world-sized robot” and calls for the establishment of a “Department of Technology Policy.” The opening:

The Internet of Things is the name given to the computerization of everything in our lives. Already you can buy Internet-enabled thermostats, light bulbs, refrigerators, and cars. Soon everything will be on the Internet: the things we own, the things we interact with in public, autonomous things that interact with each other.

These “things” will have two separate parts. One part will be sensors that collect data about us and our environment. Already our smartphones know our location and, with their onboard accelerometers, track our movements. Things like our thermostats and light bulbs will know who is in the room. Internet-enabled street and highway sensors will know how many people are out and about—and eventually who they are. Sensors will collect environmental data from all over the world.

The other part will be actuators. They’ll affect our environment. Our smart thermostats aren’t collecting information about ambient temperature and who’s in the room for nothing; they set the temperature accordingly. Phones already know our location, and send that information back to Google Maps and Waze to determine where traffic congestion is; when they’re linked to driverless cars, they’ll automatically route us around that congestion. Amazon already wants autonomous drones to deliver packages. The Internet of Things will increasingly perform actions for us and in our name. 

Increasingly, human intervention will be unnecessary.•

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“I Think We Could Have Used A Better Ground Game, A Term I Wasn’t Even Familiar With”

February 3, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Ted Cruz may be the most loathsome serious Presidential candidate of our time, and Marco Rubio seems a bullshit artist who reportedly has a lot of skeletons rattling around in his closet, but this pair of jokers outmaneuvered Donald Trump on many levels in Iowa. That’s because he’s a dummkopf in general and particularly in regard to politics. Arrogant people lacking in self-awareness almost always also lack attention to detail.

Having entered the race on a whim because he hoped to masturbate to donuts in the Lincoln bedroom, Trump then received an avalanche of attention for his vicious and biased remarks, propelling his whole idiot campaign. Now, even though he’s not been completely ejected from the clown-car process thanks to sheer odiousness of his fellow candidates, Trump’s flailing wildly. Here’s what the man who compared Ben Carson to a child molester had to say post-Hawkeye State:

[Trump] added that a mailer in Iowa sent by Cruz’s campaign that revealed neighbors’ voting participation was malicious: “He insulted Ben Carson by doing what he did to Ben Carson. That was a disgrace…. He’s a man of insult.”•

In a rare moment of clarity, the blockhead who managed to bankrupt a casino acknowledged that he screwed the pooch in Iowa. From Kia Makarechi at Vanity Fair:

The post-Iowa reckoning continued Wednesday morning, with Donald Trump speed-dialing into MSNBC’s Morning Joe for an awkward postmortem. Trump, who has been the Republican presidential poll-leader for months, placed second in the Iowa caucuses Monday night, three percentage points behind Ted Cruz.

To hear Trump tell it, the loss was easily preventable. The only problem? He has no idea how to run a campaign.

“I think we could have used a better ground game, a term I wasn’t even familiar with,” Trump said. “You know, when you hear ‘ground game,’ you say what the hell is that? Now I’m familiar with it. But, you know, I think in retrospect we should have had a better ground game. I would have funded a better ground game, but people told me our ground game was fine. And by most standards it was.”

Cruz’s campaign has been openly gloating about how it used advanced data modeling to invent positions for the candidate that would resonate with Iowa voters. Did you know that the Senator from Texas has strong views on Iowa’s fireworks ban? Neither did the Senator from Texas, until someone on his analytics team identified the ban as an issue that could sway some Iowan hearts and minds.•

 

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