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“It Is A Little Bit Surreal To Know That You Are In Your Own Little Spaceship And A Few Inches From You Is Instant Death”

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

Scott Kelly, who’s nearing the end of a one-year stint aboard the International Space Station, just conducted an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. Because the astronaut and his inquisitors are human, many of the questions had to do with urine, food and sleep. A few exchanges follow.

________________________________

Question:

What is the largest misconception about space/space travel that society holds onto?

Scott Kelly:

I think a lot of people think that because we give the appearance that this is easy that it is easy. I don’t think people have an appreciation for the work that it takes to pull these missions off, like humans living on the space station continuously for 15 years. It is a huge army of hard working people to make it happen.

________________________________

Question:

During a spacewalk what does it feel like having nothing but a suit (albeit a rather sophisticated one) between you and space?

Scott Kelly:

It is a little bit surreal to know that you are in your own little spaceship and a few inches from you is instant death.

________________________________

Question:

Upon completing your year in space, if the offer was on the table, would you do a two-year space mission in the future? And why? Would it depend on the mission (Moon, Mars, ISS again)?

Scott Kelly:

It would definitely depend on the mission. If it was to the moon or Mars, yeah I would do it.

________________________________

Question:

What’s the creepiest thing you’ve encountered while on the job?

Scott Kelly:

Generally it has to do with the toilet. Recently I had to clean up a gallon-sized ball of urine mixed with acid.

________________________________

Question:

Why do you always have your arms folded?

Scott Kelly:

Your arms don’t hang by your side in space like they do on Earth because there is no gravity. It feels awkward to have them floating in front of me. It is just more comfortable to have them folded. I don’t even have them floating in my sleep, I put them in my sleeping bag.

________________________________

Question:

Could you tell us something unusual about being in space that many people don’t think about?

Scott Kelly:

The calluses on your feet in space will eventually fall off. So, the bottoms of your feet become very soft like newborn baby feet. But the top of my feet develop rough alligator skin because I use the top of my feet to get around here on space station when using foot rails.

________________________________

Question:

What’s it like to sleep in 0G? It must be great for the back. Does the humming of the machinery in the station affect your sleep at all?

Scott Kelly:

Sleeping here is harder here in space than on a bed because the sleep position here is the same position throughout the day. You don’t ever get that sense of gratifying relaxation here that you do on Earth after a long day at work. Yes, there are humming noises on station that affect my sleep, so I wear ear plugs to bag.

________________________________

Question:

Does the ISS have any particular smell?

Scott Kelly:

Smells vary depending on what segment you are in. Sometimes it has an antiseptic smell. Sometimes it has an odor that smells like garbage. But the smell of space when you open the hatch smells like burning metal to me.

________________________________

Question:

What will be the first thing you eat once you’re back on Earth?

Scott Kelly:

The first thing I will eat will probably be a piece of fruit (or a cucumber) the Russian nurse hands me as soon as I am pulled out of the space capsule and begin initial health checks.

________________________________

Question:

What ONE thing will you forever do differently after your safe return home?

Scott Kelly:

I will appreciate nature more.•

Tags: Scott Kelly

“The ‘Total’ Office Heralds The Rise Of A New Technocracy”

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

The technocratic office space has some of its roots in Fascist Italy, in the work of Italo Balbo, though Mussolini’s Air Minister wasn’t overly concerned like Google and Facebook are now with swallowing up employees’ lives by smothering them with amenities (though he did have coffee delivered to their desks via pneumatic tubes!). He just wanted the “trains” to run on time.

For lot of workers in today’s Gig Economy, the office has disappeared, the software serving as invisible middleman. The inverse of that reality is the sprawling technological wonderlands that are campuses from Apple to Zappos (which actually tried to reinvent downtown Las Vegas), with their amazing perks and services aimed to make managers and engineers feel not just at home but happy, incentivizing them to remain chained, if virtually, to their desks.

In a smart Aeon essay, Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey traces the history of today’s all-inclusive technological “paradises,” isolationist attempts at utopias in a time of economic uncertainty and fear of terrorism, to yesteryear’s enclosed company towns and college campuses.

An excerpt:

Google boasts more than 2 million job applicants a year. National media hailed its office plans as a ‘glass utopia’. There are hosts of articles for businesspeople on how to make their offices more like Google’s workplace. A 2015 CNNMoney survey of business students around the world showed Google as their most desired employer. Its campus is a cultural symbol of that desirability.

The specifics of Google’s proposed Mountain View office are unprecedented, but the scope of the campus is part of an emerging trend across the tech world. Alongside Google’s neighbourhood is a recent Facebook open office on their campus that, as the largest open office in the world, parallels the platform’s massive online community. Both offices seem modest next to the ambitious and fraught effort of Tony Hsieh, CEO of the online fashion retailer Zappos, to revitalise the downtown Las Vegas area around Zappos’ office in the old City Hall.

Such offices symbolise not just the future of work in the public mind, but also a new, utopian age with aspirations beyond the workplace. The dream is a place at once comfortable and entrepreneurial, where personal growth aligns with profit growth, and where work looks like play.

Yet though these tech campuses seem unprecedented, they echo movements of the past. In an era of civic wariness and economic fragility, the ‘total’ office heralds the rise of a new technocracy. In a time when terrorism from abroad provokes our fears, this heavily-planned workplace harks back to the isolationist values of the academic campus and even the social planning of the company town. As physical offices, they’re exceptional places to work – but while we increasingly uphold these places as utopic models for community, we make questionable assumptions about the best version of our shared life and values.•

Tags: Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey

“Essentially He Saw Himself As An Artist Of The Void”

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

Often the other side of extreme beauty is something too horrible to look at. One of the abiding memories of my childhood is seeing a brief clip of 73-year-old Karl Wallenda plunging to his death one windy day in San Juan. Why was that old man up on a wire? How did he even get to that age behaving in such a way?

French daredevil Tancrède Melet didn’t reach senior status, having earlier this month, at age 32, suffered a deadly fall from grace from a hot-air balloon. Similarly to Philippe Petit, he thought himself more philosopher and artist than extreme athlete, though intellectualizing didn’t soften his crash landing. An erstwhile engineer, he climbed to the sky to escape the air-conditioned nightmare, and he managed that feat, if only for a short while.

A thoughtful Economist obituary celebrates the audacity that abbreviated Melet’s life, which is one way to look at it. An excerpt:

Essentially he saw himself as an artist of the void, weaving together base-jumping, acrobatics and highlining to make hair-raising theatre among the peaks. Love of wildmélanges had been encouraged by his parents, who took him out of school when he was bullied for a stammer and, instead, let him range over drawing, music, gymnastics and the circus. Though for four years he slaved as a software engineer, he dreamed of recovering that freedom.

“One beautiful day” he threw up the job, bought a van, and took to the roads of France to climb and walk the slackwire. In the Verdon gorges of the Basses-Alpes he fell in with a fellow enthusiast, Julien Millot, an engineer of the sort who could fix firm anchors among snow-covered rocks for lines that spanned crevasses; with him he formed a 20-strong team, the Flying Frenchies, composed of climbers, cooks, musicians, technicians and clowns. These kindred spirits gave him confidence to push ever farther out into empty space.

Many thought him crazy. That was unfair. He respected the rules of physics, and made sure his gear was safe. When he died, by holding on too long to the rope of a hot-air balloon that shot up too fast, he had been on the firm, dull ground, getting ready. It looked like another devil-prompted connerie to push the limits of free flight, but this time there was no design in it. He was just taken completely by surprise, as he had hoped he might be all along.•

Tags: Tancrède Melet

“Teaching Machines Flooded The Market, And Backlash Soon Followed”

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

It’s perplexing that video games aren’t used to teach children history and science, though the economics aren’t easy. A blockbuster game on par with today’s best offerings can cost hundreds of millions to develop and design, and that’s a steep price without knowing if such software would be welcomed into classrooms.

In addition to cost, there’s always been a prejudice against learning devices because they seem to reduce students into just more machines. That’s not altogether false if you consider that B.F. Skinner saw pupils as “programmable.” In an Atlantic article by Jacek Krywko looks the latest attempts at the making of mind-improving machines, which will not only teach language but also “monitor things like joy, sadness, boredom, and confusion.” Such robot social intelligence is thought to be the key difference: Don’t try to make the students more like machines but the machines more like the students.

A passage about the Skinner’s failed attempts in the 1950s at making education more robotic:

His new device taught by showing students questions one at a time, with the idea that the user would be rewarded for each right answer.

This time, there was no “cultural inertia.” Teaching machines flooded the market, and backlash soon followed. Kurt Vonnegut called the machines “playthings” and argued that they couldn’t prepare a kid for “one-millionth of what is going to hit him in the teeth, ready or not.” Fortune ran a story headlined “Can People Be Taught Like Pigeons?” By the end of the ‘60s, teaching machines had once again fallen out of favor. The concept briefly resurfaced again in the ‘80s, but the lack of quality educational software—and the public’s perception of mechanized teachers as something vaguely Orwellian—meant they once again failed to gain much traction.

But now, they’re back for another try.

Scientists in Germany, Turkey, the Netherlands, and the U.K. are currently working on language-teaching machines more complex than anything [Sydney] Pressley or Skinner dreamed up.•

Tags: B.F. Skinner, Jacek Krywko, Sydney Pressley

“We Too Want More Freedom”

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

Some structures survive because they’re made of sturdy material and some because of enduring symbolism. Chinese real-estate billionaire Zhang Xin doesn’t possess the hubris to believe her buildings, even those designed by Pritzker winners, will survive the Great Wall, but she’s hopeful about her nation’s future despite present-day economic turbulence. Zhang thinks the country must be more open politically and culturally, perhaps become a democratic state, and has invested heavily toward those ends by funding scholarships for students to be educated at top universities all over the world.

An excerpt from Bernhard Zand’s Spiegel interview with her:

Spiegel:

Zhang Xin, if China’s economy was an enterprise and you were running it, how would you make your company fit for the future?

Zhang Xin:

No economy, no company, in fact no individual can develop its full potential today without embracing two fundamental trends — globalization and digitalization. They will dominate for quite some time to come.

Spiegel:

What does this mean for China?

Zhang Xin:

It means that the country needs to continue opening up and keep connecting. It needs to realize that the world has become one. The old concept of isolation, the idea that you can solve your problems on your own does not work anymore — neither in cultural, economic, nor political terms. Isolation means a lack of growth. I grew up in China at a time when the country was completely isolated. That era is over.

…

Spiegel:

When countries prosper economically there comes a time when its people start asking for greater political participation. Will this eventually happen in China, too?

Zhang Xin:

I said before that the Chinese no longer crave so much for food and accommodation, but they do crave democracy. I stand by that. I don’t know which model China will follow. But the higher our standard of living, the higher our levels of education, the further people will look around. And we can see which level of openness other societies enjoy. We are no different — we too want more freedom. The question is: How much freedom will be allowed?

Spiegel:

Today the silhouettes of your buildings dominate the skylines of Beijing and Shanghai, almost serving as a signature of modern China. Have you ever wondered how long these buildings will continue to stand tall and just how sustainable these structures that you have created together with your architects will be?

Zhang Xin:

We have become so quick and effective in building things today. It would be easy to build another Pyramid of Giza or another Great Wall. But these buildings haven’t withstood the test of time because of their building quality. They stand tall because they have a symbolic value, they represent a culture. I’m afraid what we are building today will not have the same impact and sustainability of the architecture of a 100, 500 or 1,000 years ago. The buildings of those days were miracles. We don’t perform such miracles today. So we should be a little more modest. For my part, I’ll be glad to show one of my buildings one day to my grandchildren and say: I’m proud of that.•

Tags: Bernhard Zand, Zhang Xin

“Mr. Rumsfeld Can’t Code”

January 24, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Strategy would not seem to be Donald Rumsfeld’s strong suit.

Despite that, the former Dubya Defense Secretary marshaled his forces and created an app for a strategic video game called “Churchill Solitaire,” based on actual card game played incessantly during WWII by the British Prime Minister. If you’re picturing an ill-tempered, computer-illiterate senior barking orders into a Dictaphone, then you’ve already figured out Rumsfeld’s creative process. At least tens of thousands of people were not needlessly killed during the making of the app.

From Julian E. Barnes at the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Rumsfeld can’t code. He doesn’t much even use a computer. But he guided his young digitally minded associates who assembled the videogame with the same method he used to rule the Pentagon—a flurry of memos called snowflakes.

As a result, “Churchill Solitaire” is likely the only videogame developed by an 83-year-old man using a Dictaphone to record memos for the programmers.

At the Pentagon, Mr. Rumsfeld was known for not mincing words with his memos. Age hasn’t mellowed him.

“We need to do a better job on these later versions. They just get new glitches,” reads one note from Mr. Rumsfeld. “[W]e ought to find some way we can achieve steady improvement instead of simply making new glitches.”

Other notes were arguably more constructive, if still sharply worded.

“Instead of capturing history, it is getting a bit artsy,” he wrote in one snowflake in which he suggested ways to make the game better evoke Churchill—including scenes from World War II and quotes from the prime minister, changes that made it into the final game.•

______________________

“One of the strangest interviews I’ve ever done.”

Tags: Donald Rumsfeld, Errol Morris, Julian E. Barnes

“It’s A Salacious Tale Of Revenge And Espionage”

January 24, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Outside of North Korea, perhaps only Donald Trump is unconvinced of the treachery of Vladimir Putin, a capo with nuclear capabilities. When the Russian tyrant is someday gone from the kleptocracy, the evil he administered, both in plain sight and beneath the surface, will be tallied and described, and it will likely be even worse than feared. The body count won’t be Stalinesque, but the horrible intent will be similar.

His royal heinous is so awful that no one even looks twice at this point when the Kremlin is implicated in political assassination. We’ve crossed that threshold.

The opening of Julia Ioffe’s New York Times Magazine piece “Alexander Litvinenko and the Banality of Evil in Putin’s Russia“:

Today, a retired British High Court judge named Robert Owen published a 328-page report on the 2006 death in London of Alexander Litvinenko, a former agent of Russia’s Federal Security Service, the F.S.B. Nine years after Litvinenko went bald and wasted away in a London hospital bed, from poisoning with a rare radioactive isotope, Owen’s report found that there was “strong circumstantial evidence of Russian state responsibility” and that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and the head of the F.S.B. likely sanctioned the murder.

It’s a salacious tale of revenge and espionage, straight out of a John le Carre novel: an F.S.B. man turned whistleblower meets in a posh London hotel with his former colleagues, who slip polonium 210 into his green tea. Investigators find a clump of debris laced with the radioactive stuff in a sink drainpipe a few floors above, near where one of the F.S.B. men was staying. The other suspected assassin gave Litvinenko’s wealthy benefactor, the banished oligarch Boris Berezovsky, a T-shirt that said, “nuclear death is knocking your door [sic].”

And yet, in Russia the report merited little more than a yawn.•

Tags: Alexander Litvinenko, Julia Ioffe, Vladimir Putin

“How Did You Get Involved In This Strange, Curious Future Business?”

January 23, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

In 1993, three years before his death, a shaky Dr. Timothy Leary was hired by ABC to interview fellow drug user Billy Idol about the new album (remember those?) Cyberpunk. From his first act as an LSD salesman, Leary was intrigued by the intersection of pharmaceuticals and technology. After a stretch in prison, the guru reinvented himself as a full-time technologist, focusing specifically on software design and space exploration. One trip or another, I suppose.

Given the year this network special (which also featured the Ramones and Television) was broadcast, it’s no surprise the pair sneer at the marketing of the Generation X concept. Leary offers that cyberpunk means that “we have to be smarter than people who run the big machines.” Or maybe it means that we can purchase crap on eBay until the Uber we ordered arrives. Leary tells Idol that his music is “changing middle-class robot society.” Oh, Lord. Well, I’ll give the good doctor credit for saying that computers would rearrange traditional creative and economic roles.

This Q&A runs for roughly the first ten minutes, and while the footage may be of crappy quality, it’s a relic worth the effort.

Tags: Billy Idol, Timothy Leary

“A Startup Is Using Brain-Scan Technology To Map The Relationship Between Cognition And Athletic Performance”

January 22, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Baseball-projection systems were generally woeful in 2015.

Predictions are really difficult in a sport that features athletes hitting a round ball with a round bat, in which small differences in eyesight are so key and a couple of injuries or trades can make all the difference. Despite the statistical revolution, it’s hard to say what will happen. And the things that are pretty evident are known by every franchise. How to get an edge?

There’s no doubt the veritable data arms race between clubs, which Branch Rickey birthed during the Cold War, is becoming even more information-rich as technology and biotech play an increasingly bigger role. Brains as well as elbows are to be X-rayed. The deeper you dig, the more returns may be diminishing, but perhaps you strike gold.

Fangraphs, creator of some of those awful 2015 projections, has an article by Adam Guttridge and David Ogren about next-level data collection, explaining what teams are doing to try to acquire significantly more info than fans or their fellow front offices. An excerpt:

Third-party companies are supplying a wealth of data which previously didn’t exist. The most publicized forms of that have been Trackman and Statcast. The key phrase here is data, as opposed to supplying new analysis. Data is the manna from which new analysis may come, and new types or sources of data expand the curve under which we can operate. That’s a fundamentally good thing.

There’s a wave of companies providing something different than Statcast and Trackman. While Statcast and Trackman are generally providing data that’s a more granular form of information which we already have — i.e. more detailed accounts of hitting, fielding, or pitching — others are aiming to provide information in spaces it hasn’t yet been available. A startup named DeCervo is using brain-scan technology to map the relationship between cognition and athletic performance. Wearable-tech companies like Motus and Zepp aim to provide detailed, data-centric information in the form of bat speed, a pitcher’s arm path, and more. Biometric solutions like Kitman Labs are competing to capture and provide biometric data to teams as well.

The solutions which provide more granular data (Trackman, Statcast, and also ever-evolving developments from Baseball Info Solutions) are of perhaps unknown significance. They offer a massive volume of data, but it’s an open question as to whether it yet offers significant actionable information, whether it has value as a predictive/evaluative tool rather than merely a descriptive one.•

Tags: Adam Guttridge, David Ogren

“Mr. Page Is Hardly The First Silicon Valley Chief With A Case Of Intellectual Wanderlust”

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

Larry Page didn’t start Google (now Alphabet) primarily to help you find the nearest car wash. It was always intended to be an AI company. So much the better that the very thing that supplied the search giant with its gazillions in ad revenue was also collecting information that could be used for the creation of machine intelligence. But even by the lofty standards of the original mission statement, Page has moved far further afield, ambitiously angling to create driverless cars, colonize space and even “cure death.” I’ll bet the under on that last one.

In a smart New York Times article, Conor Dougherty profiles the unorthodox CEO who eschews earnings calls but not robotics conferences, hoping to remake our world–and other ones. An excerpt:

Larry Page is not a typical chief executive, and in many of the most visible ways, he is not a C.E.O. at all. Corporate leaders tend to spend a good deal of time talking at investor conferences or introducing new products on auditorium stages. Mr. Page, who is 42, has not been on an earnings call since 2013, and the best way to find him at Google I/O — an annual gathering where the company unveils new products — is to ignore the main stage and follow the scrum of fans and autograph seekers who mob him in the moments he steps outside closed doors.

But just because he has faded from public view does not mean he is a recluse. He is a regular at robotics conferences and intellectual gatherings like TED. Scientists say he is a good bet to attend Google’s various academic gatherings, like Solve for X and Sci Foo Camp, where he can be found having casual conversations about technology or giving advice to entrepreneurs.

Mr. Page is hardly the first Silicon Valley chief with a case of intellectual wanderlust, but unlike most of his peers, he has invested far beyond his company’s core business and in many ways has made it a reflection of his personal fascinations.

He intends to push even further with Alphabet, a holding company that separates Google’s various cash-rich advertising businesses from the list of speculative projects like self-driving cars that capture the imagination but do not make much money. Alphabet companies and investments span disciplines from biotechnology to energy generation to space travel to artificial intelligence to urban planning.•

Tags: Conor Dougherty, Larry Page

“Call It Unreality TV”

January 22, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Donald Trump, a mix of Mussolini and QVC host, is loathsome to different people for different reasons.

Take good people for instance: They despise Trump because he’s a lying, egotistical, demeaning, manipulative, racist, xenophobic, sexist misery. There are coke dealers who are more honest. The man is a human waste product.

Now let’s consider terrible people like Glenn Beck and L. Brent Bozell III: They abhor Trump because he isn’t “legitimately conservative.” Well, that’s true, but it probably should be at least #453 on the list of reasons to not support him. That would be like Democrats saying that John Wilkes Booth wasn’t a good representative of their party because of his questionable stance on land taxes. Of course, you can’t expect much from Beck, a cynical salesman of gold-plated bunkers, or Bozell, who once referred to President Obama as looking like a “skinny ghetto crackhead.”

Those shitbags are two of the right-wingers enlisted for a National Review “Against Trump” cover story. In all fairness, some of the essayists do make a moral case as well against hideous hotelier. From Mona Charen:

In December, Public Policy Polling found that 36 percent of Republican voters for whom choosing the candidate “most conservative on the issues” was the top priority said they supported Donald Trump. We can talk about whether he is a boor (“My fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well documented, are various other parts of my body”), a creep (“If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her”), or a louse (he tried to bully an elderly woman, Vera Coking, out of her house in Atlantic City because it stood on a spot he wanted to use as a garage). But one thing about which there can be no debate is that Trump is no conservative—he’s simply playing one in the primaries. Call it unreality TV.

Put aside for a moment Trump’s countless past departures from conservative principle on defense, racial quotas, abortion, taxes, single-payer health care, and immigration. (That’s right: In 2012, he derided Mitt Romney for being too aggressive on the question, and he’s made extensive use of illegal-immigrant labor in his serially bankrupt businesses.) The man has demonstrated an emotional immaturity bordering on personality disorder, and it ought to disqualify him from being a mayor, to say nothing of a commander-in-chief.

Trump has made a career out of egotism, while conservatism implies a certain modesty about government. The two cannot mix.

Who, except a pitifully insecure person, needs constantly to insult and belittle others including, or perhaps especially, women? Where is the center of gravity in a man who in May denounces those who “needlessly provoke” Muslims and in December proposes that we (“temporarily”) close our borders to all non-resident Muslims? If you don’t like a Trump position, you need only wait a few months, or sometimes days. In September, he advised that we “let Russia fight ISIS.” In November, after the Paris massacre, he discovered that “we’re going to have to knock them out and knock them out hard.” A pinball is more predictable.

Is Trump a liberal? Who knows? He played one for decades — donating to liberal causes and politicians (including Al Sharpton) and inviting Hillary Clinton to his (third) wedding. Maybe it was all a game, but voters who care about conservative ideas and principles must ask whether his recent impersonation of a conservative is just another role he’s playing. When a con man swindles you, you can sue—as many embittered former Trump associates who thought themselves ill used have done. When you elect a con man, there’s no recourse.•

Tags: Donald Trump, Glenn Beck, L. Brent Bozell III, Mona Charen

“Its Gently Beeping Radio Signal Heralded A New And Very Uncertain World”

January 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Losing the first leg of the Space Race ultimately proved beneficial to the U.S. The jolt of the Soviet Sputnik 1 success spurred the government to establish DARPA and fund the ARPANET, which, of course, eventually became the Internet.

Another profound consequence of the Cold War satellite race was the creation of Astrobiology, a field that couldn’t quite form until Sputnik’s brilliant blast provided it with its raison d’être. In a beautifully written Nautilus piece, Caleb Scharf traces the branch’s beginnings, which were propelled in the late 1950s by forward-thinking American scientist Joshua Lederberg, who, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, saw the future and thought it might be murder. His work and warnings put our forays into the final frontier, as Scharf writes, in “bio-containment lockdown,” which was fortunate.

By the 1990s, the mission of astrobiology had morphed and become immense, and it will likely grow larger still as we press further across the universe.

The opening:

Astronomy and biology have been circling each other with timid infatuation since the first time a human thought about the possibility of other worlds and other suns. But the melding of the two into the modern field of astrobiology really began on Oct. 4, 1957, when a 23-inch aluminum sphere called Sputnik 1 lofted into low Earth orbit from the desert steppe of the Kazakh Republic. Over the following weeks its gently beeping radio signal heralded a new and very uncertain world. Three months later it came tumbling back through the atmosphere, and humanity’s small evolutionary bump was set on a trajectory never before seen in 4 billion years of terrestrial history.

At the time of the ascent of Sputnik, a 32-year-old American called Joshua Lederberg was working in Australia as a visiting professor at the University of Melbourne. Born in 1925 to immigrant parents in New Jersey, Lederberg was a prodigy. Quick-witted, generous, and with an incredible ability to retain information, he blazed through high school and was enrolled at Columbia University by the time he was 15. Earning a degree in zoology and moving on to medical studies, his research interests diverted him to Yale. There, at age 21, he helped research the nascent field of microbial genetics, with work on bacterial gene transfer that would later earn him a share of the 1958 Nobel Prize.

Like the rest of the planet, Australia was transfixed by the Soviet launch; as much for the show of technological prowess as for the fact that a superpower was now also capable of easily lobbing thermonuclear warheads across continents. But, unlike the people around him, Lederberg’s thoughts were galvanized in a different direction. He immediately knew that another type of invisible wall had been breached, a wall that might be keeping even more deadly things at bay, as well as incredible scientific opportunities.

If humans were about to travel in space, we were also about to spread terrestrial organisms to other planets, and conceivably bring alien pathogens back to Earth. As Lederberg saw it, either we were poised to destroy indigenous life-forms across our solar system, or ourselves. Neither was an acceptable option.•

_______________________________

“This is the beginning of a new era for mankind.”

Tags: Caleb Scharf, Joshua Lederberg

“You Don’t Want A Cop Arresting Anyone When They Haven’t Done Anything Wrong”

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

Prejudice in the justice system is acknowledged to be a bad thing, but is the slippery slope of predictive analytics much different?

Schools and social services have always strived to identify children who might be headed for trouble, and that’s a good thing, but algorithms now being used in this area seem to have a flawless authority when identifying some minors as criminals-in-waiting. Couldn’t that system guide policing to pre-judge? Should we have to defend ourselves from guilt before having done anything wrong?

From Matt Stroud’s Pacific•Standard piece, “Should Los Angeles County Predict Which Children Will Become Criminals?“:

When people talk about predictive analytics—whether it’s in reference to policing, banking, gas drilling, or whatever else—they’re often talking about identifying trends: using predictive tools to intuit how groups of people and/or objects might behave in the future. But that’s changing.

In a growing number of places, prediction is getting more personal. In Chicago, for example, there’s the “heat list”—a Chicago Police Department project designed to identify the Chicagoans most likely to be involved in a shooting. In some state prison systems, analysts are working on projects designed to identify which particular prisoners will re-offend. In 2014, Rochester, New York, rolled out its version of L.A. County’s DPP program—with the distinction that it’s run by cops, and spearheaded by IBM—which offered the public just enough information to cause concern.

“It’s worrisome,” says Andrew G. Ferguson, a law professor at the University of the District of Columbia who studies and writes about predictive policing. “You don’t want a cop arresting anyone when they haven’t done anything wrong. The idea that some of these programs are branching into child welfare systems—and that kids might get arrested when they haven’t done anything wrong—only raises more questions.”

Ferguson says the threat of arrest poses a problem in all the most widely reported predictive programs in the country. But he acknowledges that there are valid arguments underpinning all of them.•

“Old Man Trump Knows Just How Much Racial Hate He Stirred Up”

January 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

It’s not all bad news for Track Palin in the wake of his domestic violence charges. The Yankees just offered him a contract.

After Sarah Palin’s asinine attempt yesterday to blame President Obama for her son’s recent arrest, it made me wonder if Obama was also responsible for Track’s alleged legal problems from a decade ago, before he enlisted. The Palin boy must have been suffering from (PTSD) Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

In the usual perplexing Palin fashion, she accused Obama of “not supporting the troops” as she was endorsing Donald Trump, the only national American politician in memory to actually demean the troops. How perfect.

More Trump news: In an excellent Gawker post by Will Kaufman, the writer dug through the Woody Guthrie Archives to find documents about the songwriter’s painful period in the 1950s living in a Beach Haven building owned by the Trump paterfamilias, Fred. It speaks to a real-estate empire built, in part, on racism.

An excerpt:

‘Old Man Trump’s’ color line

Only a year into his Beach Haven residency, Guthrie – himself a veteran – was already lamenting the bigotry that pervaded his new, lily-white neighborhood, which he’d taken to calling “Bitch Havens.”

In his notebooks, he conjured up a scenario of smashing the color line to transform the Trump complex into a diverse cornucopia, with “a face of every bright color laffing and joshing in these old darkly weeperish empty shadowed windows.” He imagined himself calling out in Whitman-esque free verse to the “negro girl yonder that walks along against this headwind / holding onto her purse and her fur coat”:

I welcome you here to live. I welcome you and your man both here to Beach Haven to love in any ways you please and to have some kind of a decent place to get pregnant in and to have your kids raised up in. I’m yelling out my own welcome to you.

For Guthrie, Fred Trump came to personify all the viciousness of the racist codes that continued to put decent housing – both public and private – out of reach for so many of his fellow citizens:

I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project ….

Tags: Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, Track Palin, Will Kaufman, Woody Guthrie

“The Societal Challenges That Come With Suzu’s Graying Population Are Common Throughout Japan”

January 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Daniel Kahneman has argued that the robot revolution, if it comes, will arrive just in time to save China. Realizing such a transition, however, is tougher than promising it, as Foxconn has learned. Perhaps even more urgently requiring robotics in Asia is Japan, which has a graying, homogenous population. Who will do the work and care for the elderly in a country that isn’t based on immigration?

From Mike Ramsey, Miho Inada and Yoko Kubota in the WSJ:

SUZU, Japan—It has been a decade since the train stopped running in a sleepy town at the tip of Japan’s Noto Peninsula, and bus routes have dwindled. The trend limits mobility options for the city’s dwindling rural population of 15,000, nearly half older than 65.

However, Suzu city officials and researchers may have a solution: vehicles that drive themselves.

For months, a white, self-driving Toyota Prius has been zipping along the city’s winding seaside roads. The test car attracts plenty of attention from the community. A bulky spinning sensor mounted to the roof helps the vehicle make critical decisions instead of relying on a researcher from Kanazawa University who is sitting in the driver’s seat.

The societal challenges that come with Suzu’s graying population are common throughout Japan, which leads the world in aging, with one in four people older than 65, compared with 15% in the U.S. and 8% world-wide. The trend is particularly prominent in the countryside, where the young often flee to big cities.

Japan’s car companies,long an engine of the national economy, are looking to tackle the problem of older drivers.•

Tags: Miho Inada, Mike Ramsey, Yoko Kubota

“It’s A Refrain Among GM Executives That In The Next Five To 10 Years, The Auto Industry Will Change As Much As It Has In The Past 50”

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

In 2016, GM promises to begin selling the first affordable EV possessing a 200-mile range. That might merely be a short-term victory for Big Auto, though history seems to suggest otherwise. 3D Printers may ultimately disrupt the business of car manufacture, seriously lower the barrier to entry and allow for the extreme customization of cars, but that may very likely not be the case. If I had been around in the early days of Homebrew, I probably would have felt the same of personal computers or at the very least, software, but I would have been wrong. The same may hold true for the auto sector.

In a Wired cover story about GM seemingly outfoxing Tesla thus far in the EV market, an unlikely twist to be sure, Alex Davies writes about the urgency of the Chevy Bolt’s creation. An excerpt:

These days it’s a refrain among GM executives that in the next five to 10 years, the auto industry will change as much as it has in the past 50. As batteries get better and cheaper, the propagation of electric cars will reinforce the need to build out charging infrastructure and develop clean ways to generate electricity. Cars will start speaking to each other and to our infrastructure. They will drive themselves, smudging the line between driver and passenger. Google, Apple, Uber, and other tech companies are invading the transportation marketplace with fresh technology and no ingrained attitudes about how things are done.

The Bolt is the most concrete evidence yet that the largest car companies in the world are contemplating a very different kind of future too. GM knows the move from gasoline to electricity will be a minor one compared to where customers are headed next: away from driving and away from owning cars. In 2017, GM will give Cadillac sedans the ability to control themselves on the highway. Instead of dismissing Google as a smart-aleck kid grabbing a seat at the adults’ table, GM is talking about partnering with the tech firm on a variety of efforts. Last year GM launched car-sharing programs in Manhattan and Germany and has promised more to come. In January the company announced that it’s investing $500 million in Lyft, and that it plans to work with the ride-sharing company to develop a national network of self-driving cars. GM is thinking about how to use those new business models as it enters emerging markets like India, where lower incomes and already packed metro areas make its standard move—put two cars in every garage—unworkable.

This all feels strange coming from GM because, for all the changes of the past decade and despite the use of words like disruption and mobility, it’s no Silicon Valley outfit.•

Tags: Alex Davies, Mary Barra

“She’s Staked Out Her Own Odd Territory As A Collector Of Earthquake Predictions”

January 20, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

New York City has earthquakes, but they’re so minor we never feel them. In most instances, the earth prefers to swallow us up one by one. But it’s different in Los Angeles.

L.A.’s temperamental turf is the subject of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, a fine 2005 volume on the topic of secular shaking by David L. Ulin. Among other topics, Ulin’s volume looks at the thorny issue of earthquake prediction, by scientists and psychics, the concerned and the kooky. An excerpt about Linda Curtis, who works for the Southern California field office of the United States Geological Survey in Pasadena:

Curtis is, in many ways, the USGS gatekeeper, the public affairs officer who serves as a frontline liaison with the community and the press. Her office sits directly across the hall from the conference room, and if you call the Survey, chances are it will be her low-key drawl you’ll hear on the line. In her late forties, dark-haired and good-humored, Curtis has been at the USGS since 1979, and in that time, she’s staked out her own odd territory as a collector of earthquake predictions, which come across the transom at sporadic but steady intervals, like small seismic jolts themselves.

“I’ve been collecting almost since day one,’ she tells me on a warm July afternoon in her office, adding that it’s useful for USGS to keep records, if only to mollify the predictors, many of whom view the scientific establishment with frustration, paranoia even, at least as far as their theories are concerned.

“Basically,” she says, ‘we are just trying to protect our reputation. We don’t want to throw these predictions in the wastebasket, and then a week later…” She chuckles softly, a rolling R sound as thick and throaty as a purr. “Say somebody predicted a seven in downtown L.A., and we ignored it. Can you imagine the reaction if it actually happened? So this is sort of a little bit of insurance. If you send us a prediction, we put it in the file.”•

________________________

Marjoe Gortner–in Sensurround!

“Her Embrace Of Mr. Trump Also Has A Biblical Subtext”

January 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Sarah Palin’s halting, incoherent endorsement speech for Donald Trump is the sort of thing that usually comes from the mouth of a nativist stroke victim, a fan of medicines or an imbecile. Sometimes all three at the same time.

It’s amusing that Palin, who’s always pretended to be a great supporter of American troops and has repeatedly excoriated President Obama, even today, for not showing them enough respect (though he always does), is now an ardent advocate of the only national American politician in recent memory (ever?) to mock our service people. What makes it worse is Trump, who requested multiple military deferments and has never seen a bunker that wasn’t on a golf course, ridiculed the extreme sacrifice of the very person, John McCain, who made Palin’s ascendency possible.

From Edward Luce at the Financial Times:

To chants of “USA, USA”, America’s best known hockey Mom briefly stole the limelight during the 2008 election before embarking on a career as a conservative entertainer. Her 2016 comeback, which she kicked off with an endorsement of Donald Trump on Tuesday, may turn out the same. Should Mr Trump becomes the next US president, Ms Palin could be his secretary of energy (as he has promised). Failing that, she will return to her life in Alaska as a fading social media star.

Yet her embrace of Mr Trump also has a biblical subtext. Ms Palin was John the Baptist to Mr Trump’s Jesus. Years before Mr Trump trashed conventional wisdom by boosting his poll numbers with gaffes, Ms Palin had patented that style of campaigning. The more tongue-tied Ms Palin seemed, the more intensely her supporters backed her. The more the media mocked her, the more her fanbase exulted. Mr Trump has elevated that approach into an art form. In an age when knowledge is a mark of elitism, ignorance is power. It is also great marketing.

During the 2008 campaign, Ms Palin famously could not think of a single newspaper title she read. She also failed to recall the name of a founding father. Likewise, she was pilloried for citing Alaska’s proximity to Russia as evidence of her foreign policy credentials. The more derision Ms Palin suffered, the greater her heartland appeal. This is how Ms Palin’s “teachers, and teamsters, and cops and cooks, and stay-at-home Moms,” also felt. Mr Trump has collected Ms Palin’s hockey puck and skated on with it. When he betrayed ignorance of the “nuclear triad” in a recent debate, experts were floored. How could someone auditioning to be commander-in-chief be unaware of America’s three nuclear delivery platforms? Mr Trump’s admission did him no harm. His supporters knew how it felt to be the butt of liberal sneering.

Ms Palin’s endorsement also highlights a lesser known breach — that between “movement” conservatives who tend to be more ideological and generally back Ted Cruz in Iowa, and Mr Trump’s more populist fan base.•

Tags: Donald Trump, Edward Luce, Sarah Palin

“There Are Deep Worries, As Well As Awe, At What Technology Can Do”

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

In Ben Hirschler’s Reuters Davos report, he identifies several game-changing technologies that World Economic Forum attendees believe will be possible by 2025: implantable mobile phones, 3D-printed organs for transplant, clothes and reading-glasses connected to the Internet. Apart from the bioprinting of organs, the rest seem to be not very risky bets. If human kidneys can be printed by that year (or any near it), we’ll have moved into a very remarkable new age. Of course, all new eras have their challenges as well.

An excerpt:

One of the most in-demand participants in Davos this year is not a central banker, CEO or politician but a prize-winning South Korean robot called HUBO, which is strutting its stuff amid a crowd of smartphone-clicking delegates.

But there are deep worries, as well as awe, at what technology can do.

A new report from UBS released in Davos predicts that extreme levels of automation and connectivity will worsen already deepening inequalities by widening the wealth gap between developed and developing economies.

“The fourth industrial revolution has potentially inverted the competitive advantage that emerging markets have had in the form of low-cost labor,” said Lutfey Siddiqi, global head of emerging markets for FX, rates and credit at UBS.

“It is likely, I would think, that it will exacerbate inequality if policy measures are not taken.”

An analysis of major economies by the Swiss bank concludes that Switzerland is the country best-placed to adapt to the new robot world, while Argentina ranks bottom.•

Tags: Ben Hirschler, Lutfey Siddiqi

“In Other Words You Could Simply Upload To A New, Perhaps Synthetic, Body”

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

In the same way that you either bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water, Singularitarians want to bring the computer inside of humans or put humans inside computers. They’d ideally prefer both options.

The idea of digitizing brain function seems impossibly far off in the future to me, but one idea if it does someday become reality is that we could capture the wetware in our heads, make copies of it, and upload it into a video-game-ish scenario or a synthetic bodysuit of sorts.

Yes, far-flung stuff, and none of us will live to see it, though Nell Watson of Singularity U believes it could be possible this century. From Marie Boran at the Irish Times:

Nell Watson’s job is to think about the future and she says: “I often wonder if, since we could be digitized from the inside out – not in the next 10 years but sometime in this century – we could create a kind of digital heaven or playground where our minds will be uploaded and we could live with our friends and family away from the perils of the physical world.

“It wouldn’t really matter if our bodies suddenly stopped functioning, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. What really matters is that we could still live on.”

In other words you could simply upload to a new, perhaps synthetic, body.

As a futurist with Singularity University (SU), a Silicon Valley-based corporation that is part university, part business incubator, Watson, in her own words, is “someone who looks at the world today and projects into the future; who tries to figure out what current trends mean in terms of the future of technology, society and how these two things intermingle”.

She talks about existing technologies that are already changing our bodies and our minds: “There are experiments using DNA origami. It’s a new technique that came out a few years ago and uses the natural folding abilities of DNA to create little Lego blocks out of DNA on a tiny, tiny scale. You can create logic gates – the basic components of computers – out of these things.

“These are being used experimentally today to create nanobots that can go inside the bloodstream and destroy leukaemia cells, and in trials they have already cured two people of leukaemia. It is not science fiction: it is fact.”•

Tags: Marie Boran, Nell Watson

“Biometric Data Is Perhaps The Last ‘Missing Link’”

January 19, 2016 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Five years ago when I looked back at the 1978 Michael Crichton film, Coma, through the lens of the new millennium, I wrote this:

The nouveau tech corporations are aimed at locating and marking our personal preferences, tracking our interests and even our footsteps, knowing enough about what’s going on inside our heads to predict our next move. In a time of want and desperation and disparity of wealth, how much information will we surrender?•

It seems truer now than in 2011, as wearables multiply and the Internet of Things comes closer to fruition. Whenever data is collected, it will be sold, whether that was the original intent or not. And the collection process will grow so seamless and unobtrusive we’ll hardly notice it.

From “What Happens to the Data Collected On Us While We Sleep,” by Meghan Neal at Wired Motherboard:

We already know that the major data brokers like Acxiom and Experian collect thousands of pieces of information on nearly every US consumer to paint a detailed personality picture, by tracking the websites we visit and the things we search for and buy. These companies often know sensitive things like our sexual preference or what illnesses we have.

Now with wearables proliferating (it’s estimated there will be 240 million devices sold by 2019) that profile’s just going to get more detailed: Get ready to add how much body fat you have, when you have sex, how much sleep you get, and all sorts of physiological data into the mix.

“Whenever there’s information that you’re collecting about yourself and you’re quantifying, there’s a very good chance that it will end up in a profile of you,” Michelle De Mooy, a health privacy expert at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told me.

This has many privacy and security experts, politicians, and the government wringing their hands, worried that if and when all that granular personal information gathered gets in the hands of advertisers and data brokers, it could be used in ways we never intended or even suspected.

“Biometric data is perhaps the last ‘missing link’ of personal information collected today,” said Jeffrey Chester, Executive Director of the Center for Digital Democracy.

“The next great financial windfall for the digital data industry will be our health information, gathered thru wearables, swallowable pills and an ever-present Internet of Things,” Chester told me. “Pharma companies, hospitals and advertisers see huge profits in our health information.”•

Tags: Jeffrey Chester, Meghan Neal, Michelle De Mooy

“As AI Accelerates, He Predicts That So, Too, Will The Ability To Augment Our Genetic Code”

January 19, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Echoing what physicist Stephen Hsu wrote in Nautilus in 2015 (a piece that made the “50 Great 2015 Articles Online for Free” list), Reed Hastings of Netflix believes the future will see a race between engineered humans and Intelligent AI. To me, that seems the most likely outcome. In the very long run, we will probably increasingly drive our own evolution. We’ll be the “existential risk” to what Homo sapiens currently is.

From Chris O’Brien at Venturebeat:

During a conversation on stage today at the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany, Hastings said he was far less worried about looming threats of an AI-triggered apocalypse than are many other observers, such as Tesla’s Elon Musk.

“Some people worry about what happens when machine intelligence is too strong,” Hastings said. “That’s like worrying about our Mars colony and people being overweight on our Mars colony. We can deal with that later.”

He emphasized, rather, that machine intelligence is just beginning to be felt, through applications like Netflix’s recommendation engine. But he expects that impact to accelerate and predicted that the world is only five to 15 years away from a time when we can hold a three-person conversation and not be sure which of the three is a machine.

Even then, Hastings believes all will not be lost for the puny human race. As AI accelerates, he predicts that so, too, will the ability to augment our genetic code.•

Tags: Chris O'Brien, Reed Hastings

“To Me, Sleeping Is A Disease”

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

Here’s something I feel very good about guaranteeing: Sleep will not be “cured” in 25 years.

Transhumanist Presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan sees things very differently, believing the REM state a “disease,” a dress rehearsal for death, that robs us of waking life. He thinks within a quarter century we might not even need to sleep. I, on the other hand, think much of my self-awareness comes from analyzing my dreams. Beyond that, what Istvan proposes seems not even a remote biological possibility by 2040.

From his article on the topic at Vice Motherboard:

To me, sleeping is a disease. Luckily, in the next 25 years, scientists may cure it. For millions, that cure can’t come soon enough. I hate sleeping and always have. I see sleeping as an early form of dipping in and out of death. Sleeping is probably the most wasteful thing all humans do—we spend a third of our lives in basically a lobotomized state. I wish I could I will myself from doing it, but like everyone else, I’m a slave to my body and mind, and I require sleep to function normally.

…

While much has been made about how beneficial a good night of sleep is, few discuss that sleeping is stealing away conscious time with loved ones, hampering economies around the world, and even indirectly hurting our bodies. We should never forget we age whether we’re awake or sleeping. And while the studies say the better we sleep the longer we live, this information may be misleading. I believe we age much more in our sleep than our lifespans gain from sleeping well. Sleeping—like being awake—is slowly killing us.

Scientifically speaking, sleep is a process where internal restoration and recuperation of the body and mind takes place. Sleep is comprised of various cycles, which are often separated by two classifications: non-REM and REM sleep.

There are numerous researchers in the world working on ways to try to remain alert despite sleep deprivation.•

Tags: Zoltan Istvan

“Google Also Believes That Cars Should Be Able To Move Around Even With No Humans In Them”

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

In a Backchannel piece, Steven Levy shares ~~everything~~ most things he learned during an inside look at Google’s autonomous-car mission command at the decommissioned Castle Air Force Base in Atwater, California. Most of the (non-)drivers hired to put miles on the vehicles are recent Liberal Arts grads who test the prototypes on streets in Mountain View and Austin. Some are even employed as human props, known as “professional pedestrians.” “We just have to learn to trust,” one tells Levy. It seems the tight-lipped company’s testing of the cars may have gone beyond what people realize.

An excerpt:

Google’s ultimate goal, of course, is to make a transition from testing to systems where no safety drivers are needed — just passengers. For some time, Google has been convinced that the semiautonomous systems that others champion (which include various features like collision prevention, self-parking, and lane control on highways) are actually more dangerous than to the so-called Level Four degree of control, where the car needs no human intervention. (Each of the other levels reflects a degree of driver involvement.) The company is convinced that with cars that almost but don’t drive themselves, humans will be lulled into devoting attention elsewhere and unable to take quick control in an emergency. (Google came to that conclusion when it allowed some employees to commute with the cars, using autodrive only on premapped freeways. One Googler, perhaps forgetting that the company was capturing the whole ride on video, pretty much crawled into the backseat for a phone charger while the car sped along at 65 miles per hour.)

Google also believes that cars should be able to move around even with no humans in them, and it has been hoping for an official go-ahead to begin a shuttle service between the dozens of buildings it occupies in Mountain View, where slow-moving, no-steering-wheel prototypes would putter along by themselves to pick up Googlers. It was bitterly disappointed when the California DMV ruled it was not yet time for driverless cars to travel the streets, even in those limited conditions. The DMV didn’t even propose a set of requirements that Google could satisfy to make this happen. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, is barreling ahead, introducing a driverless feature in his Tesla cars called Summon. He predicts that by 2018, Tesla owners will be able to summon their cars from the opposite coast, though it’s a mystery how the cars would recharge themselves every 200 or so miles.

But maybe Musk is not the first. When I discussed this with [program director Chris] Urmson, he postulated that in most states — California not among them — it was not illegal to operate driverless cars on public streets. I asked him whether Google had sent out cars with no one in them to pick up people in Austin. He would not answer.•

Tags: Chris Urmson, Steven Levy

“We Can Put Unlimited Numbers Of People In Such Engineered Environments”

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

In a Phys.org piece, astronomer Seth Shostak identifies the twenty-first century as the last one that may be ruled by Homo sapiens, with speciation being driven by three huge changes. Perhaps it’s surprising the writer believes humans living on other planets won’t be altered as radically as those on Earth engineered by General Artificial Intelligence. My bearish mind thinks 85 years is a very aggressive timeframe for what he proposes, but nothing about it seems theoretically impossible in the long run.

An excerpt:

To begin with, we’re finally going to understand biology at a molecular level. DNA’s double helix was discovered a mere six decades ago, and now – for hardly more than a kilobuck – you can sequence the genome of your yorkie or yourself.

The relentless interplay of science and technology ensures that genomic knowledge will spawn a growing number of applications. Curing disease is one of these, and it’s obviously desirable. But our efforts won’t be limited to merely fixing ourselves; we’ll also opt for improvement. You may hesitate to endorse designer babies, but hot-rodding our children is as much on the horizon as the morning sun.

Number two on my list of major 21st century developments is expanding into nearby space. We need more resources – both acreage and raw materials – unless we’re happy to condemn our descendants to a limited lifestyle and unlimited war. You may worry about running out of oil, but that’s not the resource that should really make you antsy. We’re going to eat through the easily recoverable reserves of stuff like copper, zinc, and the platinum group metals in a matter of decades.

We can find more of these elements in asteroids, and already several companies are planning to do so. But nearby space could also provide unlimited real estate for siting the condos of the future. Everyone expects our progeny to establish colonies on the moon or Mars, but the better deal is to build huge, orbiting habitats in which you can live without a spacesuit. Think of scaling up the International Space Station a few thousand times. We can put unlimited numbers of people in such engineered environments, and sometime in this century we’ll start doing that. The days of being confined to the bassinette of our birth are coming to an end.

The third thing you can expect before the year 2100 is the development of generalized artificial intelligence (GAI). In other words, machines that don’t just play games like chess or Jeopardy, but can do the thinking required for any white-collar job, including all the ones at the top. And such machines won’t necessarily be large. A synapse in your brain is a few thousand nanometers in size. A transistor on a chip is hundreds of times smaller. The hardware necessary for human-level smarts – even today – could fit in an iPad.•

Tags: Seth Shostak

Excerpts

“It Is A Little Bit Surreal To Know That You Are In Your Own Little Spaceship And A Few Inches From You Is Instant Death”

“The ‘Total’ Office Heralds The Rise Of A New Technocracy”

“Essentially He Saw Himself As An Artist Of The Void”

“Teaching Machines Flooded The Market, And Backlash Soon Followed”

“We Too Want More Freedom”

“Mr. Rumsfeld Can’t Code”

“It’s A Salacious Tale Of Revenge And Espionage”

“How Did You Get Involved In This Strange, Curious Future Business?”

“A Startup Is Using Brain-Scan Technology To Map The Relationship Between Cognition And Athletic Performance”

“Mr. Page Is Hardly The First Silicon Valley Chief With A Case Of Intellectual Wanderlust”

“Call It Unreality TV”

“Its Gently Beeping Radio Signal Heralded A New And Very Uncertain World”

“You Don’t Want A Cop Arresting Anyone When They Haven’t Done Anything Wrong”

“Old Man Trump Knows Just How Much Racial Hate He Stirred Up”

“The Societal Challenges That Come With Suzu’s Graying Population Are Common Throughout Japan”

“It’s A Refrain Among GM Executives That In The Next Five To 10 Years, The Auto Industry Will Change As Much As It Has In The Past 50”

“She’s Staked Out Her Own Odd Territory As A Collector Of Earthquake Predictions”

“Her Embrace Of Mr. Trump Also Has A Biblical Subtext”

“There Are Deep Worries, As Well As Awe, At What Technology Can Do”

“In Other Words You Could Simply Upload To A New, Perhaps Synthetic, Body”

“Biometric Data Is Perhaps The Last ‘Missing Link’”

“As AI Accelerates, He Predicts That So, Too, Will The Ability To Augment Our Genetic Code”

“To Me, Sleeping Is A Disease”

“Google Also Believes That Cars Should Be Able To Move Around Even With No Humans In Them”

“We Can Put Unlimited Numbers Of People In Such Engineered Environments”

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