Clamor for Stan Smiths is such that Adidas is building a new automated factory to meet demand. The company hopes robots will help it respond more nimbly to rapidly changing tastes, but promises this people-less plant and others like it will merely complement existing suppliers. Of course, it’s really a harbinger of a worker-less direction. The jobs that would have been will never be, and then the ones that actually are will be gone. Why would it be any other way?
The new “Speedfactory” in the southern town of Ansbach near its Bavarian headquarters will start production in the first half of 2016 of a robot-made running shoe that combines a machine-knitted upper and springy “Boost” sole made from a bubble-filled polyurethane foam developed by BASF.
“An automated, decentralized and flexible manufacturing process… opens doors for us to be much closer to the market and to where our consumer is,” said Chief Executive Herbert Hainer.
Larger rival Nike is also investing heavily in new manufacturing methods. But it has not yet put a date on when it expects that to result in more U.S.-based production.
Adidas plans high volume production in the near future and will establish a global network of similar factories, although it expects them to complement existing suppliers rather than replace them as it seeks to keep growing fast.
“This is on top. It is a separate business model,” Gerd Manz, head of technology innovation at Adidas, told journalists.
Adidas currently makes about 600 million pairs of shoes and items of clothing and accessories a year. It plans to grow sales by almost half again by 2020.
The new factory will still use humans for parts of the assembly process, around 10 people will be on the ground for testing purposes during the pilot phase, but Adidas is working towards full automation.•
In addressing the Bank of England, the institution’s Chief Economist Andrew G Haldane tries to answer if it’s different this time in regard to technological unemployment. Haldane argues that even successful long-term technological transitions have been visited by “hollowing out” effects which have exacerbated wage gaps. As for the Second Machine Age, a time when AI may become highly competent at cognitive processing, the economist sees job value shifting from IQ to EQ, with emotional intelligence becoming the supreme skill. He further thinks wealth distribution of some sort may become necessary.
An excerpt that provides a thumbnail account of the tech job threat through history:
Certainly, the Ancient Civilisations of Greece and Rome wrestled with the problem of how to deal with the consequences of workers displaced by technological advance. The responses then included large-scale public work programmes and income support policies for the needy. Indeed, they have an eerie echo in many of today’s public policy debates.
The debate about technological unemployment really picked up pace in the 19th century, with the blossoming of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Then, it spilt over into the streets with worker protests and machine breaking, most notably by the Luddite movement. These fears about technological displacement gathered intellectual support from no less a figure than the classical economist, David Ricardo (Ricardo (1821)).
Yet the intellectual tide was by no means in one direction. It was accepted that technological advance could damage some workers in the short run. But its benefits to most workers in the longer-run were felt likely to dominate. In the middle of the 19th century, that view came to prominence through such figures as John Stuart Mill (Mill (1848)) and Karl Marx (Marx (1867)), two unlikely intellectual bedfellows.
The technology debate was re-stirred in the 1930s, at the time of mass unemployment during the Great Depression. In his essay, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”, Keynes predicted on-going technological advance and workers being replaced by machines (Keynes (1930)). Yet far from being a threat, Keynes viewed this as a huge opportunity. He predicted that, by 2030, the average working week would have shrunk to 15 hours. Technology would give birth to a new “leisure class”.
Debates on the relationship between jobs and technology stirred again during the 1960s in the US, during the 1970s in advanced economies, and again in the 1980s and 1990s in the UK and parts of Europe. In each case, the prompt was rising rates of unemployment. And in each case, this debate subsided as unemployment rates fell.
Moving into the 21st century, this debate has once again been re-kindled.•
Ted Koppel hasn’t morphed into late-life Jim Bakker, hasn’t exactly become a preacher for preppers, but he does suggest those who can afford it should build a supply of freeze-dried food and water in case of a cyberattack on our power grid. The former Nightline anchor thinks such a potentially devastating event has a good chance to occur. In addition to penning a book on the topic, Lights Out, which seems to be The Day After for the Digital Age,Koppel conducted a Reddit AMA to raise consciousness. A few exchanges follow.
_________________________________
Question:
What are the likely odds of such an attack happening and in which grid do you foresee the most damage occurring? It seems almost unfathomable that such an event could occur but you must know some things that we don’t, considering you wrote a book about the subject.
Ted Koppel:
I’ll give you the answer that former Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, gave me when I asked. “Very, very likely. 80-90%.” The most damage would undoubtedly be caused by a cyber attack on the Eastern Interconnect. There are three grids in the country and the Eastern Interconnect is by far the largest covering the entire east coast westward past Chicago. Essentially everything I know about the subject I put into my book, Lights Out. You’re right, it does seem unfathomable that such an event could occur, but when you consider just how many companies have already been hacked over the last few years, it would be foolish to assume that only the electric power industry is immune. Former NSA director, Keith Alexander, likes to say there are only two kinds of companies out there: Those that have been hacked and those that don’t yet know it.
_________________________________
Question:
What can I do right now as a U.S. citizen, to prepare my home for such an attack?
Ted Koppel:
If you can afford it (and I recognize that many people cannot) start building up a backup supply of storable food. This, ideally, would be something like freeze-dried products which have an incredibly long shelf life (about 25 year) or items as simple as sacks of dried beans and rice. Also, water is critical. Again, this is much easier for people who live in houses and in rural areas; not so easy for apartment dwellers in our cities.
_________________________________
Question:
Do you think the presidential candidates should be addressing the threat of a cyberattack? This seems to be a topic that is under represented even when terrorism and national security are a huge concern.
Ted Koppel:
Absolutely! I think there are a couple of factors that inhibit our candidates from talking about cyberattacks: One, they know very little about the subject themselves, and two – when you raise an issue/problem, there’s an expectation that a candidate will offer solutions. That’s a high bar in a campaign atmosphere that focuses more of Trump’s railing than substantive issues.•
One who sees the curtain coming down sooner than later is the Christian evangelist and dapper apocalypse salesman Hal Lindsey, co-author with Carole C. Carlson of the meshuganah 1970 bestseller,The Late Great Planet Earth,which estimated 1988 as the Judgement Day. Missed by that much. Lindsey, who’s still alive as are many of us, spends his dotage accusing President Obama of being “the Antichrist.” Whatever.
In 1979, when the batshit book had been made into a film–with Orson Welles picking up late-life wine-and-bullfight money for handling the narration–Lindsey was profiled in a People pieceby Lucretia Marmon. The opening:
In 1938 Orson Welles terrified radio listeners with War of the Worlds, an imaginative report of a Martian invasion. Now Welles, as gloomy-voiced narrator of a film, The Late Great Planet Earth, out this fall, tells another frightening tale. This time it is a movie version of the end of the world, based on a scenario by evangelist-author Hal Lindsey. The script, claims Lindsey, really isn’t his. It’s all in the Scriptures.
Lindsey’s book Earth, published in 1970, has been translated into 31 languages and 10 million copies have been sold. The public also snapped up five subsequent Lindsey books on the same subject, running his sales total to over 14 million.
Thus Lindsey, 47, may now be the foremost modern-day Jeremiah. ‘If I had been writing 15 years ago I wouldn’t have had an audience,’ he concedes. ‘But a tremendous number of people are worried about the future. I’m just part of that phenomenon.’
Lindsey splices Bible prophecies of doom with contemporary signs. For instance, he says the Bible pinpoints Israel’s rebirth as a nation as the catalyst to Judgment Day, which will probably occur by 1988. The intervening years will see the emergence of a 10-nation confederacy (prophet Daniel’s dreadful 10-horned beast) or, as Lindsey sees it, the European Common Market. Eventually Russia (biblical Magog) will attack Israel and precipitate a global nuclear war. Only Jesus’ followers will be spared. Hence, Lindsey advises, “the only thing you need to understand is that God offers you in Jesus Christ a full pardon.”
Meanwhile, is Lindsey cowering in his fallout shelter? Not at all. Sporting a gold Star of David around his neck and another on his pinky (‘After all, Jesus was a Jew’), Lindsey zips around Southern California in a Mercedes 450 SL. He conducts services on the beach and indulges in his hobbies of photography and surfing.•
Perhaps the greatest surprise about heavyweight champion Tyson Fury is that he chose boxing instead of MMA, but then again he’s an old-fashioned guy.
Fury believes the Old Testament is not just a document but documentary. He argues that his pronouncements, equally apocalyptic and bigoted, are supported by the scriptures, and he has a point. Fury is full of rage and hate speech, but then so is the bible. How can such “righteousness,” he asks, be wrong?
A week before beating Vladimir Klitschko, Fury gave a jaw-dropping interview to Oliver Holt of the Daily Mail, one that put every ounce of his lunatic world view on display. Since his victory, he’s been considered by most in his native England (and the few others who still care about his sport) as the Donald Trump of prizefighting, in the lead despite being a crude caricature of evil.
From Holt:
Tyson Fury is sitting on a sofa in his hotel room. His bed is unmade. A pillow lies on the floor. An empty water bottle sits on the table. Apart from that, the room is bare. The conversation has just started and Fury is talking in a stream of consciousness, fast and freely. Things turn dark very, very quickly.
‘We live in an evil world,’ he says. ‘The devil is very strong at the minute, very strong, and I believe the end is near. The bible tells me the end is near. The world tells me the end is near. Just a short few years, I reckon, away from being finished.
‘Abusing the planet, the wars in the Middle East, the famines, the earthquakes, the natural disasters, all these things are talked about 2000 years ago before they even happened. Prophesised. So now it’s all coming true…’
There is a breathlessness about his speech and an intensity, too. He is an articulate man and his words are littered with references to the scriptures. It feels as if he has taken sections of the Old Testament and swallowed them whole. There is no filter. He begins to make sweeping and repugnant statements about what he interprets as the evils that he says are hurrying us towards the apocalypse. It is hard not to feel worried about his mental well-being. He says that always happens when men are ‘filled up with God’.
‘There are only three things that need to be accomplished before the devil comes home: one of them is homosexuality being legal in countries, one of them is abortion and the other one’s paedophilia. Who would have thought in the 50s and 60s that those first two would be legalised?
…
‘This is a funny world we live in and an evil world,’ Fury says. ‘People can say, “Oh, you are against abortions, you are against paedophilia, you are against homosexuality, you’re against whatever”, but my faith and my culture is all based on the bible. The bible was written a long time ago, from the beginning of time until now, and if I follow that and it tells me it’s wrong, then it’s wrong for me. That’s just my opinion.•
Donald Trump, a colostomy bag dipped in bronzer, is a bully with scant self-awareness who needs to be reminded who he is in the most frank terms. It didn’t stun me that the favored son of a privileged family (Hi, Jeb!) didn’t know how to disarm a bully. He hasn’t had the practice. It did shock me, though, when in the wake of disgraceful comments about Mexicans at the outset of his campaign that he was treated by the media as merely a harmless joke. A joke, okay, but someone making fascistic comments isn’t funny. Aspiring despots often initially come across as vulgar clowns. You deal with them early and often.
The interview that peeved me most early on was conducted by Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, who matched the hideous hotelier in buffoonery when she portrayed him as a somewhat naughty great-uncle instead of a deeply bigoted demagogue. The Economist Q&A that followed in its wake was likewise far too friendly, if not as clueless. Not even Trump mocking POWs and the disabled was enough to fully stifle the press guffaws. It’s taken talk of a Muslim ban and internment camps to finally awaken some commentators. This poor journalistic performance isn’t necessarily responsible for Trump’s ascension in the polls, but it’s poor, nonetheless.
Trump on Tuesday abruptlycanceleda pre-planned interview with Yahoo’s Katie Couric. The interview was previously scheduled for Wednesday. He has also generally increased his rhetoric on the media, which he regularly describes as mostly made up of “scum.” At Monday’s rally, he described an NBC reporter in the crowd as “third-rate,” and encouraged the audience to boo her.
These changes come amidmuch hand-wringingwithin the media itself. Journalists have noted repeatedly in recent weeks that Trump appears to be completely resistant to fact-checking. He bandies about the false claim that he saw New Jersey Muslims celebrate the 9/11 attacks on TV, despite being rebuked by former officials and fact-checkers. Coverage of prior shocking incidents has generally corresponded with a bump in his poll numbers. Some wonder whether the media’s treatment of Trump as an entertaining curiosity allowed his haphazard campaign to coalesce into a viable candidacy, but that’s a hard claim to prove or disprove.
The Morning Joe snafu and [Arianna] Huffington’s change of heart might indicate a souring mood, but they’re hardly cutting the air off of Trump’s visibility. CNN carried Trump’s Monday night rally live. Fox News’s Greta van Susteren interviewed him shortly after his proposal was published. In addition to his nearly 30-minute Morning Joe appearance, Trump also called into Good Morning America on Tuesday.
The idea that Trump has suddenly crossed some decency line is also tenuous: the man built his campaign for the White House on half-truths and impossible-to-enact proposals.•
How long will our species or some next-level version of it continue to exist? If we go on long enough, it’s not theoretically impossible that humans could replace our old “parts” with new bio-printed ones. A kidney here, a kidney there, it all adds up. Or maybe they’ll be remarkably good bioengineering that will allow us to repair and upgrade what we have, regardless of its condition. I said “we,” but we actually won’t enjoy these marvels. Perhaps some future iteration of us will.
Organovo was set up by Hungarian-born Dr Forgacs, after he made the decision to quit his career as a theoretical physicist and retrain as a biologist – taking classes with undergraduates.
Those classes left him with a pretty lofty ambition – to grow organs that could mimic or even improve on existing ones.
He set about developing a process to print multi-cellular tissues – dubbed bio-printing – in 2005, and two years later founded Organovo with colleagues Keith Murphy and Dr Eric Michael David.
Its ultimate aim is to mass produce organs that could create a future in which humans, like cars, have regular services that keep them living indefinitely.
“If we could replace organs, we could live forever, and then it is up to us whether we want that,” he told the audience at the recent Wired conference in London.
He admits there is currently a lot of hype around bio-printing, particularly the idea of “growing” full organs.
“Bio-printing does not result in a viable biological structure. We cannot yet make big structures like livers or hearts,” he said.
“If it is possible, it will take a long time, so don’t smoke or drink too much.”•
There’s nothing quite like the IBT columns of antisocial antivirus expert John McAfee, pieces that read like PKD-esque fever dreams propelled by acute paranoia, actual knowledge and perhaps pharmaceuticals. In a recent article, he warned that Electromagnetic Pulse generators (or EMPs) could be used to destroy an American city at any moment. An excerpt:
EMPs can be generated in many ways. Much has been said about nuclear EMPs, but that threat concerns me far less than other, more specific means of generating EMPs. The US recently announced our ownEMP weapon, which can be carried aboard a missile. Using a technology based on hydraulically compressing and decompressing rods made of specific elements, the device is able to create multiple EMPs very quickly.
The weapon can be focused to take out individual buildings within a city and can take out dozens of individual buildings in a single pass of the missile. I will admit that such technology is beyond the reach of the average individual. But what if the individual is not concerned with precision strikes and merely wants to take out an entire city block or the entire city? Well, that technology is readily available, cheap, and simple to construct.
…
I am not going to give a course on constructing EMP weapons. I am only trying to raise the awareness of the world to a real and imminent threat.
I also received many questions about how an EMP could kill people. The answer is easy. A large-scale localized attack that involved all of our power stations would leave us all permanently without power. An attack that included our water processing plants would leave us without potable water, except that which we could purchase at the supermarket.
Localized attacks on food processing plants, attacks on mass transportation and attacks on centralized communication organizations would leave us without food and communications. Attacks on oil processing plants would ultimately leave us without individual transportation. What percentage of the population do you think would survive such a catastrophe? And all of this without a single nuclear explosion.•
In our facacta political season, McAfee is, of course, running for President, decrying the cyber illiteracy of the average Washington representative. Despite being an erstwhile murder suspect, he’s not even close to the most deplorable candidate. Here he is in September announcing his campaign to Greta Van Susteren, a Scientologist with an unsustainable face.
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Racing legend Jackie Stewart was king of a sport in which his competitors–his friends–kept dying, one after another on the dangerous-as-can be-courses of the ’60s and early ’70s. The opening of Robert F. Jones 1973 Sport Illustrated article “There Are Two Kinds of Death“:
Contrasted with the current woes of the real world—the new Arab-Israeli war, the old Watergate maunder-ings—it might have seemed a week of minor tragedy on the Grand Prix circuit. But for John Young Stewart, 34, the finest road racer in the game, it was perhaps the most agonizing week of his life. A month earlier, at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, Stewart had captured his third world driving championship in five years. During the course of this racing season he had become the most successful Formula I driver ever, with 27 Grand Prix victories to his credit (compared with 25 for his late Scottish countryman, Jim Clark, and 24 for his idol, Argentina’s Juan Manuel Fangio). And certainly Stewart had outdone both of them in the main chance of racing: money.
Jackie Stewart is the canniest man ever to don a fireproof balaclava—and certainly the gutsiest ever to con a sponsor. Earning close to $1 million a season in prize money and other emoluments, Stewart seemed to have turned motor racing into some kind of a private treasure trove—and survived to enjoy it. Then why not retire?
That was the first source of his agony last weekend. At Watkins Glen for the 15th running of the U.S. Grand Prix, Stewart played coy with the question. Indeed, even his business agent claimed that the wee Scot was hung on the horns of that old sportsman’s dilemma: quit on a peak of success, or press on to try for even greater rewards? The business agent also was well aware that the timing of a retirement statement by a figure so prominent as Stewart could bring in lots of bucks, and perhaps the coyness was merely a question of timing to suck up more cash. “If Jackie were single,” said his lovely wife Helen, “there would be no question. He would continue to race. I would like to see him retire, but I cannot press him. No, there is nothing that could fill the role of racing for him if he were to quit.”
Stewart himself was brusque on the question. He sidestepped it with every slick word at his command—and they are as many and as evasive as the black grouse of Scotland’s moors. But still it all seemed a game.
Then, on qualifying day before the race, Stewart’s good friend and teammate, Francois Cevert, was killed in a smashup during practice. Stewart had already lost three close friends to the sport: Clark in 1968, Piers Courage and.Jochen Rindt in 1970. In his poignant account of that last tragic season in his recent book, Faster! A Racer’s Diary, Stewart had likened Grand Prix racing to a disease and wondered in painful print if he himself were not a victim. With Cevert’s death last Saturday, it seemed to many that Stewart must at last accept the prognosis. He must—finally—retire and let sad enough alone.•
A 1973 documentary about Formula One racing, known at various times as One by One, Quick and the Dead, and Champions Forever, this interesting period piece with a funked-up score focuses on Stewart, Peter Revson and their peers. Stacy Keach is the cool-as-can-be narrator, but Cévert sums it up simply and best, admitting, “steering is hard.”
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My favorite book published in the U.S. in 2015 isSapiens, a brilliant work about our past (and future) by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. In a New Statesman essay, the author argues that if we’re on the precipice of a grand human revolution–in which we commandeer evolutionary forces and create a post-scarcity world–it’s being driven by private-sector technocracy, not politics, that attenuated, polarized thing. The next Lenins, the new visionaries focused on large-scale societal reorganization, Harari argues, live in Silicon Valley, and even if they don’t succeed, their efforts may significantly impact our lives. An excerpt:
Whatever their disagreements about long-term visions, communists, fascists and liberals all combined forces to create a new state-run leviathan. Within a surprisingly short time, they engineered all-encompassing systems of mass education, mass health and mass welfare, which were supposed to realise the utopian aspirations of the ruling party. These mass systems became the main employers in the job market and the main regulators of human life. In this sense, at least, the grand political visions of the past century have succeeded in creating an entirely new world. The society of 1800 was completely destroyed and we are living in a new reality altogether.
In 1900 or 1950 politicians of all hues thought big, talked big and acted even bigger. Today it seems that politicians have a chance to pursue even grander visions than those of Lenin, Hitler or Mao. While the latter tried to create a new society and a new human being with the help of steam engines and typewriters, today’s prophets could rely on biotechnology and supercomputers. In the coming decades, technological breakthroughs are likely to change human society, human bodies and human minds in far more drastic ways than ever before.
Whereas the Nazis sought to create superhumans through selective breeding, we now have an increasing arsenal of bioengineering tools at our disposal. These could be used to redesign the shapes, abilities and even desires of human beings, so as to fulfil this or that political ideal. Bioengineering starts with the understanding that we are far from realising the full potential of organic bodies. For four billion years natural selection has been tinkering and tweaking with these bodies, so that we have gone from amoebae to reptiles to mammals to Homo sapiens. Yet there is no reason to think that sapiens is the last station. Relatively small changes in the genome, the neural system and the skeleton were enough to upgrade Homo erectus – who could produce nothing more impressive than flint knives – to Homo sapiens, who produces spaceships and computers. Who knows what the outcome of a few more changes to our genome, neural system and skeleton might be? Bioengineering is not going to wait patiently for natural selection to work its magic. Instead, bioengineers will take the old sapiens body and intentionally rewrite its genetic code, rewire its brain circuits, alter its biochemical balance and grow entirely new body parts.
On top of that, we are also developing the ability to create cyborgs.•
In a London TED Talk from earlier this year, Harari details why Homo sapiens came to rule the world, and why that development wasn’t always such a sure bet.
Being great at one thing doesn’t necessarily mean you possess any general genius (e.g., Ben Carson, neurosurgeon). Michael Bloomberg believed the financial sector needed a certain type of information terminal and he created it with a ridiculous $10 million golden parachute he was handed after getting shitcanned by Salomon Brothers. About the terminals, he was right. It made him one of the richest people in the world, but his wealth should never have been taken as a sign of competence or rectitude.
As Mayor of New York, he did some great things and bungled major projects like Build It Back. He was tone deaf enough to want to proceed with the marathon in the wake of Hurricane Sandy turning New York City into a necropolis. Crime was kept low but policing got out of hand on his watch. The poorer people he claimed to champion often did worse. His paternalism knew no bounds, often seeming petty. He even scammed a third term, writing his own law in a back-office deal with another billionaire, voters be damned.
As a businessperson, Bloomberg is likewise a mixed bag. Unencumbered with the mayoralty, he’s returned to his namesake business, slicing and dicing his way through the journalistic side, an area for which he holds no great regard. All the while, those terminals keep updating, making general rightness or wrongness seem almost irrelevant on a large scale but often troubling on the micro one.
Visitors to the building could be forgiven for thinking that the heyday of journalism was still ongoing. Staff exit the elevator into a light-filled foyer that feels like the lobby of a designer hotel. The eye is drawn to orange sofas and white lacquered counters, upon which rest bowls stuffed with apples, oranges and diced melon. There are carrot sticks and broccoli, as well as fresh roasted coffees that would put any Starbucks to shame. The employees scurrying by can help themselves free of charge. Bloomberg wants his people to be comfortable.
But his paternalism can at times seem condescending. The potato chip bags are free, but they’re only available in the smallest size possible. Bloomberg would like his people to eat healthily. And the elevators don’t stop on each of the building’s 25 floors — only on those marked with a white circle — forcing employees to take the stairs.
In nearly every Bloomberg bureau around the world there is at least one saltwater aquarium with purple and yellow fish and corals — to foster relaxation, Bloomberg says. Those who work for him should be proud of their job. One of his favorite sentences is: “The best for us.”
‘Scientology on Speed’
Those who jump ship, though, get a taste of his colder side. Bloomberg once confessed that he doesn’t attend going-away parties out of principle, saying that he couldn’t wish departing employees all the best. “That just wouldn’t be honest of me,” he said. Whoever turns his or her back on the company is no longer one of us, but one of “them.” Bloomberg’s employees must enter a binding contractual agreement to not divulge company secrets, including a clause that permits the company to scan an employee’s e-mails even after that person has left. The microcosm of Mike Bloomberg is a whimsical world of good and evil, one with its own unique — some might say sect-like — view of things. An insider jokingly refers to it as “Scientology on speed.”•
The future often happens sooner than seems possible but not as soon as we might hope, and I think nano-engineering fits into that category. I wouldn’t expect to see “living” architecture that morphs and modifies in my lifetime, not in any profound way, but there’s nothing theoretically impossible to prevent it happening at some indeterminate point. In 1956, Arthur C. Clarke, working from the theories of Richard Feynman, imagined a future full of buildings built and endlessly rebuilt by molecular engineering. From Darran Anderson’s excellent essay on the topic at Aeon:
Let’s elaborate Arthur C Clarke’s prophecy a little. Nanobots would create a programmable architecture that would change shape, function and style at command, in anticipation or even independently. Imagine an apartment where furniture fluidly morphs from the walls and floor, adapting to the inhabitants, an apartment that physically mutates into a Sukiya-zukuri tea-room or an Ottoman pleasure palace or something as yet unseen, while outside the entire skyline is continually rearranging itself. Architecture might become an art available to all.
The advantages of nanomaterials are already becoming apparent; consider the strength of graphene, the insulation of aerogel. The idea of a self-repairing, pollutant-neutralising, climate-adapting ‘living’ architecture no longer seems the preserve of fiction. Resistance to the idea of buildings that could grow (as in John Johansen’sforms) or liquefy (like William Katavolos’sdesigns) is almost as much a question of our conservatism as of technical limitations. But as the materials scientist Rachel Armstrong hasobserved, this vision of the city as a biological or ecological manifestation is not so much a leap into the unknown as a maturation of ancient Vitruvian ideals.
Every advance will have repercussions. The idea of walking through walls that simultaneously scan us for illnesses might sound promising – but what else will they monitor? Who will they answer to? What will it mean for human creativity, let alone employment, when there are buildings that can build themselves?•
Donald Trump, an airborne pathogen lodged in America’s small intestine continually forcing the country to violently go No. 2 in its pants, is apparently popular in the bellwether Vigo County of Indiana, at least based on research conducted by Adam Wren of Politico. The Terre Haute community is a place with eerily prescient abilities for selecting American Presidents Republican or Democrat, Dubya or Obama. According to the article, the county’s unbridled passion for the fascist fathead is based almost entirely on false assumptions about the GOP candidate. Trump as a good business person? Trump the self-made man? Holy fuck.
If the people in Vigo really think the country is a disaster, which they seem to, it might behoove them to realize that since they’ve almost always picked the winning candidate, they’re as much to blame as anyone.
An excerpt:
The people gathered at Grand Traverse weren’t the political neophytes and gadflies often chalked up as Trump voters. They were the kind of people who scuttled their Thursday night plans to come to a two-hour event organized by a low-key Republican county chairman. And if the Republican primary were held on this evening, and limited to Politics and Pies attendees, Trump would win, and handily.
Take Dick and Jane Ames, both 72, for example. The retired air traffic controller and insurance agent who met when they were in high school here are sold on Trump. “He said what I want to hear, and I believe him,” Jane said. “He’s such a good business person, and we need that.” (She did admit, though, that Rubio has a “a cute smile.”)
Dick said he’s not afraid to vote for a Democrat. He voted for Kennedy, after all.
“He voted for Jackie,” Jane said.
“I did,” Dick said.
But for Dick, 2016 is different. “Democrats don’t have anybody. One’s a communist, and Clinton should be in jail.”
And then there was 17-year-old Jared Potts, who wore gray contacts that turned his pupils into pinholes, who will turn 18 next September, and plans to vote for Trump in his first election in November. “He speaks his mind, and I think that might be what the country needs,” he said. “A lot of the presidents don’t really enforce what needs to happen, they just do whatever the country feels like. Other countries just say, ‘do this, do that.’ Trump is just like, ‘no, I want this.’ He doesn’t owe anybody anything. Marco Rubio is paid for. Donald Trump is a self-made person.”•
The problem of widespread technological unemployment is, economically speaking, one of distribution, not scarcity, but a Universal Basic Income is far from a sure thing in America (to be implemented or to work), and not every last person canteach Zumba. What way forward then if the jobs run out? In aPacific•Standard piece, a slate of technologists, academics and journalists assess the challenge of income by the year 2035. The opening:
DEAN BAKER “The corruption of United States politics may be so great that corporations will be able to use new technologies to undermine labor laws on an ever-larger scale as the government pursues macroeconomic policies that are intended to leave much of the labor force unemployed and most of the employed with little bargaining power. This is indeed a very bleak scenario for the future, but it is silly to blame the robots.” —Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research
ANDREW SCHRANK “When I think about the ‘jobless future’ predicted by so many observers, I’m reminded of the late Cambridge economist Joan Robinson, who famously quipped that ‘the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.’ … One can thus envision a more auspicious future in which an increasingly educated and empowered global workforce confronts a somewhat chastened corporate elite on democratic terrain that is more favorable to the former.” —Andrew Schrank is a professor of sociology at Brown University•
Midway through COP21 in Paris, it might be instructive to look back 41 years to Scottish landscape architect and planner Ian McHarg sounding all sorts of alarms about the environment to Joan Oliver in a 1974 People magazine piece. McHarg, who died in 2001, didn’t at all appreciate the greening effects of cities, but he certainly understood the fragility of our species and the desperate straits we were putting ourselves in.
An excerpt:
Question:
What’s happening to the environment these days?
Ian McHarg:
We are still screwing it up at a helluva rate. But we’re also diminishing our own lives, which is much the most important thing. I don’t think we have to worry about nature. The worst we could do—have an atomic cataclysm and wipe out mankind—would not wipe out all bacteria, viruses, plants. They would start again. But man is a different story. Man is ephemeral, unlikely and precarious.
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Question:
Suppose we used intelligence in dealing with this business of energy. Far too much to hope for, but let’s operate on this assumption. What we ought to do is maximize energy sources which neither stress the environment nor stress human beings.
Ian McHarg:
Say we’ll get as much energy as we can by using solar power alone. It involves no new technology. The simplest scheme would be a bloody great water tank and glass on the roof. You could get all the heat you want in almost any part of the United States from direct sunlight, shining through glass panels into water which is circulated through the house. But besides heat we also would like to have television and other amenities which use electric power. So we simply cheapen NASA’s photovoltaic cells which transform sunlight into direct current. They’ve developed them for space, where you can’t send up an electrician to change a fitting. Why can’t we have a version that everybody can put on their roof?
Question:
Could this technique be put into production right away?
Ian McHarg:
Absolutely. If we could only get a lobby. You see our problem is that we have lobbies for oil, for coal, for gas and for the Atomic Energy Commission. We don’t have a lobby for solar energy. We need one. Also, where is our lobby for methane? For chicken dung?
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Question:
What is your “grand plan”—your “National Ecological Inventory”?
Ian McHarg:
We’d like to find for every person, every institution, every industry the best environment. There should be a national environmental center with a group of scientists who represent all the sciences necessary to understand the total environment of the United States. They’d be required to make a model of that system so they could predict: if you put an atomic reactor here, if you do offshore drilling there, then these are the consequences. I would like to be part of such a dream.
Question:
Do you think America is ready for such visionary proposals?
Ian McHarg:
This sense of man apart from nature—this sense that he’s got to exercise dominion, subjugate—is a deep, deep sickness that’s got to be eradicated somehow. I am horrified by the assumption that the greatness of America is measured by commodity—by automobiles, or the amount of electricity consumed, or whether people jet all over the world. As far as I’m concerned, greatness is measured by compassion, by courage, by gentleness.•
In an interesting Guardian article, Nicola Davis and Rachel David survey a large number of the smart-home technologies currently gestating in the hopes that they may one day quantify you within an inch of your life. The home of the future, even if a few of these tools should come to fruition, is a very helpful and very invasive thing. An excerpt about the bathroom of tomorrow:
Morning ablutions might seem a private affair, but that could all change as technology finds its way into the smallest room in the house.
Among those vying to keep an eye on your vital statistics is Withings, whose “Smart Body Analyzer” makes your old nemesis – the bathroom scales – look positively friendly. Claiming to measure your weight, body fat, heart rate and BMI, it will not only terrorise your tiled floor, but take to your phone: an accompanying app tracks your activity and adjusts your calorie budget for the day to meet your health goals. Think that teatime biscuit looks good? Think again.
Even that most benign of bathroom essentials, the humble loo, is in for an upgrade. Smart toilets have already hit the stores, withAmerican firm DXVanticipating what it somewhat alarmingly terms a “contemporary movement” through its heated seats, night lights and remote controls. But alternatives are already in the offing that can monitor your bodily extrusions better than an over-competitive parent. Japanese company Toto has unveiled itsFlowskytoilet that keeps tabs on your rate of gush, whileMIT SENSEeable City Labis working on a loo that can not only recognise the be-throned, but analyse their excrement to shed light on the state of their health and microbiome.
The bathroom might well become the domain of Big Mother. Water-wasters will be chivvied by warning lights thanks to devices like Drop from Qonserve Technologiesthat displays a red light when the taps have been left running, while bathroom hoggers will be ousted by“water pebbles” that can be programmed to flash red when bathtime’s up. Baths and showers too will be cleaning up their act, withOrbital Systems developing filtersto recycle water as it is used andNebiaoffering a water-saving shower based on an intense mist of water rather than a traditional deluge. And our towels might even be cleaned without H2O: designerLeobardo Armentaenvisages a nifty device that eschews the washing machine for a doughnut-like contraption with a fan to dry the towel and UV light to kill bacteria.•
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In 1967, Walter Cronkite looks at the living room, kitchen and home office of the future.
What interests me most about human consciousness is how we’re prone to extreme apostasies, completely abandoning one belief system (or narrative) for another that’s even dicier: cults, terrorist organizations, etc. While a single person can completely lose the thread of reality, two people can seemingly drive each other even further, and a tribe or state or nation further still.
But even on the granular level, even if we don’t go too far to recover and are only casually and temporarily abandoning minute pieces of our world view, we can be conned. Why? Because we want to believe, we want things to improve, we want to be better ourselves and we’d like the same out of others. In that sense, we’d all like to join a cult, different the one we’re already a part of, and those good intentions can end disastrously.
Before humans learned how to make tools, how to farm or how to write, they were telling stories with a deeper purpose. The man who caught the beast wasn’t just strong. The spirit of the hunt was smiling. The rivers were plentiful because the river king was benevolent. In society after society, religious belief, in one form or another, has arisen spontaneously. Anything that cannot immediately be explained must be explained all the same, and the explanation often lies in something bigger than oneself.
The often-expressed view of modern science is that God resides in the cracks between knowledge. That is, as more of the world is explained — and ends up being not so divine after all — the gaps in what we know are where faith resides. Its home may have shrunk, but it will always exist so there will always be room for things that have to be taken on faith — and for faith itself.
Nobody thinks they are joining a cult, David Sullivan explains. “They join a group that’s going to promote peace and freedom throughout the world or that’s going to save animals, or they’re going to help orphans or something. But nobody joins a cult.” We don’t knowingly embraces false beliefs. We embrace something we think is as true as it gets. We don’t set out to be conned. We set out to become, in some way, better than we were before.
That is the true power of belief. It gives us hope.•
What’s the difference between wearing quantifying bracelets on wrists or ankles and temporary biotech tattoos directly on the skin? They both can track us and our vitals and can likewise be removed, yet…it feels like a new line is being crossed. Is it? Maybe not, but not for the reason you might expect. It’s not that we overreact to tattoo on skin but that we underreact to surveillance that seems at a remove. Each is equally boon and bane.
These new devices, whether hardware or software, will eventually bring a bounty of positive things (e.g., easy access to blood-sugar levels), but real-time medical data will be floating around the ether like so much of our lives right now. And health applications will just be the start of it: Soon enough, you’ll be a walking, talking credit card.
Chaotic Moon‘s tattoos are currently in beta — nobody has one yet. But the company has high hopes for the Tech Tat. It could be used to track children in crowded places, they say, or for soldiers who need to have their condition monitored in detail. They could also be used for purchasing — just like Apple Pay. But will tech tattoos be replacing real tattoos any time soon? Unfortunately for tattooed tech-enthusiasts, Lamm thinks not.
“In theory they could work as real tattoos,” [CEO Ben] Lamm told Wired. “But when we embed into the dermal layer of our skin, a lot has to be considered. Conductivity is lost through the natural resistance of our skin, for example, and the materials we use to produce the circuit would probably have to be adapted.”
“I can see them working alongside real tattoos — I just don’t think they’ll augment or replace real tattoos”.
What Lamm does hope for is widespread adoption. And although many of the suggested uses of the tech are fairly extreme — military tracking being one example — he’s hopeful that they’ll become as omnipresent as the FitBit.
“We see these being used by everyone,” said Lamm. “The tech tattoo is a device that will just make everyone’s lives easier.”
“This kind of technology can work in complex situations as well as for home use. You could monitor your child’s temperature while they’re sick, or just monitor your own sleep patterns.”
“This kind of device has the potential to become another part of life, and to streamline your day-to-day interactions. They could potentially help you build a more quantified self.”•
A lot of things that could happen don’t, not if the economics don’t makes sense. Since the 1960s, we’ve known how to automate fast-casual meals, but the cost has been prohibitive (though that seems to be changing now). So when I read that Japan could have half its jobs performed by robots in 20 years, that means it’s theoretically possible, not much more. Of course, with a graying and homogenous population desperately in need of labor replacement, Japan is a culture strongly incentivized to make the transition.
Data analystsNomura Research Institute(NRI), led by researcher Yumi Wakao, figure that within the next 20 years, nearly half of all jobs in Japan could be accomplished by robots. Working with Professor Michael Osborne from Oxford University, who hadpreviously investigated the same matterin both the US and UK, the NRI team examined more than 600 jobs and found that “up to 49 percent of jobs could be replaced by computer systems,” according to Wakao.
The team looked at how likely each position could be automated, based on the degree of creativity required.•
It was nearly three years ago that then-Barnes & Noble CEO Mitchell Klipper (now retired) announced the chain would only have 450-500 stores in a decade, and coffee come flying out of my mouth and nose. Now there was an optimistic fellow.
B&N’s current meshuganeh idea for survival in the face of megapower Amazon is to deemphasize books as its main mission and become a “lifestyle brand,” focusing on personal growth or something. Unfortunately, I believe Bezos’ operation also stocks some of those games, toys and electronics new CEO Ron Boire is banking on, except Amazon has cheaper prices and far greater stock.
Mr. Boire, 54, the former chief executive of Sears Canada and a retail veteran who has worked at Brookstone, Best Buy and Toys “R” Us, is under pressure to reverse the fortunes of the beleaguered bookstore chain, which has been stung in recent years by the rise of Amazon, steep losses from its Nook e-reader division and a string of store closings.
To that end, Mr. Boire is leading a push to rebrand Barnes & Noble as more than just a bookstore by expanding its offerings of toys, games, gadgets and other gifts and reshaping the nation’s largest bookstore chain into a “lifestyle brand.”
“Everything we do around learning, personal growth and development fits our brand,” Mr. Boire said. “There’s a lot of opportunity.”
Facing spiraling losses from store closings, Barnes & Noble is searching for ways to increase foot traffic and drive sales. Last month, the chain held a coloring event at stores around the country, where it doled out sample sheets from coloring books and art supplies. It also recently held a national Mini Maker Faire promoting technology literacy at its stores, with coding and 3-D printing workshops.•
Fossil fuels work great, except for that one thing, the one where they might cause the extinction of our species. Peter Thiel and others agitate for nukes as a replacement, but clearly renewables would be a far safer alternative if they could be produced on a massive scale. Even if renewables are just a significant piece of the solution for the foreseeable future, they need to reach their tipping point soon. Will the Paris summit be that moment? One attendee, Prof. John Schellnhuber, tells Damian Carrington of the Guardian that an “induced implosion” of the fossil fuel industry must happen now, explaining how it can be provoked. An excerpt:
If a critical mass of big countries implement their pledges, he said in an interview with the Guardian, the move towards a global low-carbon economy would gain unstoppable momentum.
“If some countries really honour their pledges, including China, Brazil, South Africa, US and Europe, I think we will get a dynamic that will transform the development of the century. This is not sheer optimism – it is based on analysis of how incumbent systems implode.”
In July, Schellnhuber told a science conference in Paris that the world needed “an induced implosion of the carbon economy over the next 20-30 years. Otherwise we have no chance of avoiding dangerous, perhaps disastrous, climate change.”
“The avalanche will start because ultimately nothing can compete with renewables,” he told the Guardian. “If you invest at [large] scale, inevitably we will end up with much cheaper, much more reliable, much safer technologies in the energy system: wind, solar, biomass, tidal, hydropower. It is really a no-brainer, if you take away all the ideological debris and lobbying.”
India, for example, aims to deliver 350GW of renewable energy in the next 10 years, the equivalent to 300 nuclear power stations, he said. “That is mind boggling and would be the final nail in the coffin of coal-fired power stations,” Schellnhuber said. “If India delivers on that pledge, it will be a tipping point for that country.”•
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, members of the 1% club no matter how you work out the door policy, have pledged to give away 99% of their Facebook stock. It’s a wonderfully generous thing, but not an easy one to pull off well, and of course the process will be heavily influenced by the worldview of the Facebook founder.
In the announcement of his intentions, Zuckerberg asked this question: “Can you learn and experience 100 times more than we do today?” Listen, I want the world to be 100 times smarter (or even 2 times smarter), but that sounds like he’s investing money in brain chips and VR gear, which is fascinating, sure, but not quite the Gates-ian antimalarial efforts some might have anticipated. In all fairness, the technologist also mentions disease prevention and eradication, but there’s an awful lot of sci-fi-esque wording about radical life extension and the like. A lot of progress may ultimately come from future-forward neuro- and bioengineering, or maybe it will be money spent poorly. Good intentions and good execution are not the same thing.
In a similar vein, a Daily Beast piece by Charlotte Lytton notes that 2015 was the year that Silicon Valley became something of an Immortality Industrial Complex, with the well-compensated wanting to live forever, or at least until their stock options run out. An excerpt:
Might it be more charitable, then, to use the billions being funneled through avoidance schemes into abiding by the law and helping to reverse the problems created by a deficit-laden economy you’ve willfully avoided paying money to for an extended period of time?
“It’s incredibly exciting and wonderful to be part of a species that dreams in a big way,” explained bioethicist Laurie Zoloth. “But I also want to be part of a species that takes care of the poor and the dying, and I’m worried that our attention is being drawn away to a glittery future world that is fantasy and not the world we live in.”
Her sentiments were echoed by Bill Gates, the world’s second greatest philanthropist (after Warren Buffet), who expressed that “it seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer” in a Reddit AMA earlier this year.
In any case, whether significant progress of the ilk [Peter] Thiel and co. are searching for will ever be made remains a big “if.” But should one of these projects yield a major discovery, who will benefit? As we’ve gleaned from the plethora of “free” services made flesh (or screen) by these businessmen, there’s no such thing as something for nothing—and that something has largely been handing over our personal data.•
Understandable as it is that scientists worry that lay people like Transhumanists will use new gene-editing tools as home science kits, it’s going to happen, and the games will sometimes be messy and dangerous. I guess the bigger question is when will nations utilize them in a large-scale way, perhaps Russia “inventing” the perfect athlete or China trying to birth the greatest scientists ever? When will some babies come with designer labels?
Geneticists developing powerful genome editing tools are worried that transhumanists will try to use them on themselves before they’re deemed safe and effective for use in humans, which could undermine the future of technologies, such as CRISPR/Cas9, that allow for specific, targeted DNA editing.
Many of the biggest names in the field are at the International Summit on Human Gene Editing, where theyare trying to reach a consensuson when, how, and for what purposes humans should edit their own DNA (or the DNA of an embryo).
CRISPR holds promise in the potential eradication of diseases likeHIV, Huntington’s, and Alzheimer’s, and could be used to prevent children from being born mentally impaired. The scientific community seems to generally agree that using CRISPR to potentially prevent disease is ethically OK as long as the technology overall is deemed safe for use in humans. Things get sticky, however, when you consider that gene editing could theoretically be used down the line to create designer babies, to prevent premature aging, or to stimulate muscle growth, among myriad other applications.•
Thinking deeply about the ethical and practical questions that attend AI development is very important, but not because we’ll dream up some guidelines to permanently steer our descendants. The long-term challenges and opportunities will be far different than the ones we now know, and the people of tomorrow can’t be fenced in by our reality, even if we’re making good decisions in the present. We can only hope that our example of trying to apply ethics to machine intelligence will inspire future citizens do the same in their time. The tradition, more than the particulars, is what’s most important.
In a Wall Street Journal article, Amir Mizroch writes of Cambridge establishing the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence to be led by Professor Huw Price. An excerpt:
In an interview, Price said part of the job would be to create an AI community with a common purpose of responsible innovation, and to update the current thinking about the opportunities and challenges posed by AI.
“Using memes from science fiction movies made decades ago –the case of 2001: A Space Odyssey — that was 50 years ago. Stanley Kubrick was a brilliant film director but we can do better than that now,” he said. The classic film features a sentient computer program called HAL-9000 on board a space ship. The computer kills the ship’s crew.
The new center will also collaborate with the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, Imperial College London, and the University of California, Berkeley. A major focus of the collaboration would be around what Price called “the value alignment program,” where software programmers would team up with ethicists and philosophers on trying to write code that would govern the behavior of artificial intelligence programs.
“As a species, we need a successful transition to an era in which we share the planet with high-level, non-biological intelligence,” Price said. “We don’t know how far away that is, but we can be pretty confident that it’s in our future. Our challenge is to make sure that goes well.”
The new center in Cambridge joins others around the world set up recently to study the consequences of intelligent machines.•
Big Auto certainly still maintains a gigantic present advantage over Silicon Valley car companies in the marketplace, as do fossil fuels over electric and human-operated over driverless. But things change. Over the next few decades, these competitions are going to alter the industry in a grand way, and it’ll be interesting to see where the edge ultimately rests. One point to keep in mind: 3D printers could play a big role in the race, possibly making it so that software startups in garages could become automobile startups there, which would be very fitting.
Perhaps the most significant shifting of the automotive tectonic plates is the move to software. The future of the automobile will largely be built by software developers. Yes, existing combustion engine cars have embedded systems with lots of code in them to handle everything from HVAC to automatic transmissions. In fact, the complexity in integrating these many layers of software together is causinglots of consternationat the traditional car companies, given this is not their main areas of expertise. In addition to this, future cars will utilize software in profoundly different ways.
Of course we know that Tesla (currently) and Apple (future) are trying to re-imagine the interface between the driver and car, and their dashboards are (likely to be) gorgeous and vastly improved over the mostly superfluous dials and gauges car manufacturers think we need to see (when was the last time you had to check your RPMs or engine temperature?). Good hardware, software and UX designers will be behind all of that. But future vehicles equipped with ADAS systems and eventually autonomous capabilities will need to make trillions of driving decisions based on lots of sensory data. Vision, LiDAR, sonor and other sensors will combine with real-time streams from the internet, from other vehicles and even from municipal environmental data sources (our portfolio companyINRIXis one such data supplier). These inputs are analyzed in real-time, likely with a combination of local on-board and cloud-based compute resources to make driving decisions. Such complex AI systems will be adaptable machine learning systems which continuously refine their decision-making models.
Understanding this makes it less of a surprise that Google leads the way in autonomous vehicle development today. Google’s search engine is an at-scale example of just such a system and much of Google’s core development expertise is in cloud-based predictive systems.•
The New York Times taken as a whole is an awesome thing, but it’s also special on a granular scale when you find certain writers there who you recognize are doing especially superlative work. I think about the first time I read the late, great David Carr and the brilliant obituarist Margalit Fox, how cool it was to “find” reporters turning out such copy.
The crime writer Michael Wilson is another Times journalist operating on that special level. His last column was a fascinating piece about an otherwise bright man taken to the cleaners by psychics, when, of course, he should have known better, but we all should know better about so many things. Wilson follows that up with an amazing posthumous profile of jaw-dropping con man Michael Forman, a Zelig on the make, who crossed paths with Abbie Hoffman, Otto Preminger and Annie Leibovitz, among others, while committing crimes, lots of crimes. It’s a beauty.
The opening:
The woman on the telephone had news. Michael Forman was dead. She asked a reporter if there was any known next of kin.
Mr. Forman was a career criminal and con artist who had been in and out of prisons and jails as recently as last year at age 73. The woman, calling this month from the Brooklyn Center care facility, had come acrosscolumns about himin this space in her search for relatives, and asked if the reporter had known Mr. Forman very well.
No. But peeling back the layers of his life last week raised another question: Did anyone? Not his ex-wife and two children. Not his fellow admen of the 1960s. Not the promoters of Woodstock, working with him behind the scenes before the concert. Not scores of jailers. Not the woman whose picture he carried in recent years, telling friends and relatives she was his Russian ballerina girlfriend, less than half his age. Not his neighbors, near the end, in the Manhattan flophouse he called home.
To take a pass at something like a life story of Michael Stephen Forman is to sift through a mix of strange-but-true fact and preposterous fiction, each constantly seeking to upstage the other. His journey from suburban executive to swindler is told by those close to him at one time or another, men and women alternately charmed and repulsed by the born salesman and, in their words, sociopath.•
Last week, Jeb Bush, the willing strangler of Baby Hitler, said this: “Perhaps the most ludicrous comment I’ve ever heard is that climate change is a bigger threat to our country than radical Islamic terrorism.” You would think such utter wrong-mindedness would catapult him to the top of the GOP polls in this clown car of an election season, but apparently even ludicrousness can’t save Jeb from himself.
In a smart Conversation piece, Christopher Grainger calls for a Space Race initiative to combat climate change. He’s not the first to do so, but it clearly needs repeating. While a carbon tax is a very necessary measure, the writer doesn’t think it will necessarily birth solutions as much as contain badness. I think it might do some of both, the tax perhaps leading corporations and inventors to innovate to preclude paying the tax. Either way, it would be great to find out.
From Grainger:
Many influential economists such as Yale’sWilliam Nordhausor Harvard’sGregory Mankiw, want to fight climate change with a carbon tax. The problem is taxes do a better job of preventing bad things than encouraging better replacements.
Standard economics simply considers greenhouse gas emissions as an “externality” – an economic consequence experienced by a party who did not choose to incur it. Negative side effects such as pollution can be addressed by putting a price on them and forcing those responsible to pay – if your factory produces emissions, it’ll cost you. This is the idea behind carbon taxes. It is assumed that, by making polluting technologies relatively more expensive, the market will adjust, generating low-carbon innovations.
But innovation isn’t as simple as this. In particular, the development and spread of new technologies depends on what has gone before and you can’t simply expect a jump into renewable energy, for instance, when everything is geared towards fossil fuels. This idea of “path dependence” is fundamental to understanding technological change.•
