Military historian Gwynne Dyer deems terrorism “the weapon of the weak,” and he’s right. Compared to the threat from traffic accidents–not to mention climate change!–such small-scale evil is a mere drop in the dead pool. We mostly give these acts outsize importance because horrible deaths bother us more than mundane ones, and because of their sheer nastiness and needlessness excites our sense of fairness.
When it comes to the Islamic State, I think there’s more at play. Ignoring the organization probably won’t work. It’s carved out territories as bases of operation, and a lack of response will probably lead to attempts to acquire more “attention-getting” weapons. That doesn’t mean a ground war is a good idea (wow, it’s not), but attempts to degrade military might and financial holdings probably is needed.
The most hopeful note from Dyer is that he doesn’t believe ISIS has enough in the way of resources to spread much further, the surprise factor they initially exploited now a thing of the past.
Don’t panic. Terrorism is a very small problem. And any western president or prime minister who thinks they’ll severely damage ISIS by dropping bombs on its fighters is terribly mistaken
That was the message author and historian Gwynne Dyer brought to SFU Woodward’s in a March 25 sold-out lecture at the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts.
“Well, we lost two people in the last year to terrorism and we lost about 250 a month on the roads,” Dyer said. “You know, the Americans lost 3,000 people on 9/11, but they also lost 3,000 people on the roads and another 3,000 to gunshot wounds, mostly delivered by their nearest and dearest.
“The scale of the terrorism is tiny compared to its presence in the media,” Dyer continued. “Really, we should, as much as possible, ignore it. We certainly don’t need to overreact by sending troops to the Middle East or aircraft to do God knows what in terms of useful activity. It’s just dumb.”
In fact, according to Dyer, if western countries expand their bombing campaigns against ISIS into Syria, it will only make the Islamic State stronger.•
Donald Trump, a Fraggle Rock puppet inspired by Mussolini, has won favor in polls for his loose usage of dangerous words and both vague and specific threats, not directing them only at American enemies but also at Americans.
He’s spoken recklessly of oil wars and such, despite draft deferments that kept him personally far from any bunker that wasn’t situated on a golf course. An Economist essay looks at the many uses of the word “war,” including its troubling application in regards to the Islamic State. An excerpt:
War in its canonical form has state armies on a battlefield trying to control territory. Most of today’s shooting wars are not even that clean cut—America has not declared one officially since the second world war. But worse, politicians have been unable to resist the temptation to declare war on things like poverty (Lyndon Johnson), drugs (Ronald Reagan) or terrorism (George Bush).
Declaring such “wars” is a problem because such a war on a concept is unwinnable: poverty and drugs will never show up and sign a surrender document on the battleshipMissouri, as Imperial Japan did in 1945 to end the second world war. Did Johnson defeat poverty? Did Reagan defeat drugs? We certainly know that Mr Bush did not defeat terrorism.
What about declaring war on Islamic State (IS), presumed by all to be behind the Paris massacres? “War” is exactly the term IS would most eagerly choose. Wars are fought by armies belonging to states—just what the Islamic State fancies itself. In reality, the territory controlled by ISIS—the “caliphate”—has some elements of a state, with everything from fighting forces to rudimentary social services, but it is unrecognised, claiming territory other states have a legitimate claim to. IS’s claim to state status is dubious. Mr Hollande runs the risk of raising that status when he calls eight men with guns and small bombs capable of “an act of war” against a nuclear power.•
Citizens Unitedv. FEC is still an odious decision, but billionaires have done little more than offer stimulus to the struggling media sector when shoveling elephantine sums of money into national elections, with Jeb Bush being the latest evidence. It’s just very difficult to paper over an undesirable candidate or message. Another reason: Small donors feel a connection to their candidate that will get them to the polls. Well, at least the Tea Party-powering Kochs don’t yet know the winner’s curse on the biggest stage, though state and local elections seem more prone to stupid wealth.
The political world is discovering an unsettling truth: Money isn’t everything. The latest evidence comes from the just-expired presidential campaign of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican who dropped out on Tuesday, saying, “This is not my time.” Jindal had wallowed in the low single digits in polls and was relegated to the undercard debates even though groups allied with his campaign consistently ranked among the top sponsors of TV ads in Iowa.
Or consider the staggering confession made by conservative billionaire Charles Koch last month. The man who along with his brother David has spent or steered hundreds of millions of dollars into reshaping U.S. politics in recent years said, in effect, that he believes he has been wasting his money. “We looked like we won. [But] as you can see by the performance, we didn’t win much of anything,” Charles Koch told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski in October. “So far we’re largely failures.”
Koch was only conceding what has become, more and more, an obvious fact. With the advent of Republican Paul Ryan as speaker of the House and a budget deal that will prevent more government shutdowns, the Koch-funded Freedom Caucus has been, for the moment, declawed.•
Before Bernie Madoff, there was Ivan Boesky, the stock trader who used insider information to amass more money than he could ever hope to spend but still enjoyed counting. In May of 1986, Boesky gave a speech in which he said, “I think greed is healthy,” and perhaps Oliver Stone should have given him a screenwriting credit for Wall Street. Only months after that address, Boesky was ruined, the cover boy of outraged articles about Wall Street’s brazen malfeasance. If there was a lesson learned, it was soon forgotten. FromPeople in 1986:
The unmasking of Ivan Boesky—a man who has come to symbolize unbounded avarice—has unsettled the financial community because no one knows who else may be under investigation. It has also led to some belated soul-searching about the ethics of Wall Street. In a commencement speech last year at the School of Business Administration at Berkeley, this is what Boesky had to say about greed: “I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”
Even at the end, when the Securities and Exchange Commission scuttled Boesky’s operation, he still managed to cut himself a deal. It is widely believed that he agreed to record his phone conversations and thus implicate an unknown number of unscrupulous traders. He was allowed to unload an estimated $1.6 billion worth of stocks before the announcement of the government’s charges against him could drive prices down.
Until November, Ivan F. Boesky was a glittering success. He had an ideal family—a handsome wife and four children—and lived in a $3.3 million mansion in New York’s affluent Westchester County. He gave lavishly to charity; he supported both the Republican and Democratic establishments—in short, he appeared the perfect gentleman from sole to crown.
If there was an unresolved mystery about him, it was the quirky drive of someone who had wealth like water, yet who still lived as though he worked in a sweatshop. He slept a mere two hours a night. “The machine doesn’t like to stop,” he explained to an interviewer two years ago.
The son of a Russian immigrant delicatessen owner in Detroit, Boesky had a restless, floundering youth, dropping in and out of college, unable to land a satisfying job even after he graduated from the Detroit College of Law at 27. But he married well. Seema Silberstein was the daughter of real estate tycoon Ben Silberstein. Muriel Slatkin, Seema’s sister, has said her father had a low opinion of Boesky, who he said had “the hide of a rhinoceros and the nerve of a burglar.”•
“Will Life Be Worth Living in 2000AD?” is the title of a byline-less, futuristic 1961 article from Australia’s Weekend Magazine. Plenty of wrong predictions of what the world would be like but correct in anticipating email, the Internet and primitive study aids. An excerpt:
Mail and newspapers will be reproduced instantly anywhere in the world by facsimile.
There will be machines doing the work of clerks, shorthand writers and translators. Machines will “talk” to each other.
It will be the age of press-button transportation. Rocket belts will increase a man’s stride to 30 feet, and bus-type helicopters will travel along crowded air skyways. There will be moving plastic-covered pavements, individual hoppicopters, and 200 m.p.h. monorail trains operating in all large cities.
The family car will be soundless, vibrationless and self-propelled thermostatically. The engine will be smaller than a typewriter. Cars will travel overland on an 18 inch air cushion.
Railways will have one central dispatcher, who will control a whole nation’s traffic. Jet trains will be guided by electronic brains.
In commercial transportation, there will be travel at 1000 m.p.h. at a penny a mile. Hypersonic passenger planes, using solid fuels, will reach any part of the world in an hour.
By the year 2020, five per cent of the world’s population will have emigrated into space. Many will have visited the moon and beyond.
Our children will learn from TV, recorders and teaching machines. They will get pills to make them learn faster. We shall be healthier, too. There will be no common colds, cancer, tooth decay or mental illness.
Medically induced growth of amputated limbs will be possible. Rejuvenation will be in the middle stages of research, and people will live, healthily, to 85 or 100.•
It’s probably not going to be so neat, the future resistant to being any one thing, but it seems likely the foundations of education and Labor will be radically remade. How do we reimagine economies that have been largely free-market ones if a full-employment society is no longer a reality?
Important to Srnicek and Williams isn’t just basic income but also the end of the fetishization of the work ethic. The opening:
Vice:
Can you explain what you mean by a “high-tech future free from work”?’
Alex Williams:
The idea of the book is to argue for a different kind of left-wing politics to the kind we may be used to in America and in the UK, where traditionally, the role of the Democratic Party or, in the UK, the Labour Party, is one where we’re going to help poorer people by giving them jobs. For a variety of reasons, which we go into in the book, we view that as no longer possible, and possibly no longer desirable in the same way. This is all related, in part, to the increasing role of automation—this new wave of automation that a quiet wide variety of economists, technologists, and sociologists have begun thinking about.
Vice:
Right—the idea that “robots are stealing our jobs.”
Alex Williams:
Right. Our kind of perspective on this is, well, is it possible that robots stealing jobs might be a good thing? What would it require to make it a good thing?
Nick Srnicek:
We have all this amazing technology around us. It seems like we’re in a rapidly changing world and we’ve got new potential sprouting out everywhere. But at the same time, our everyday lives are crushed by debt and work and all of these obsolete social relations. It seems that we could be doing much better with the technologies that we have. Our argument has to do with capitalism. This isn’t fundamentally different from what Marx was saying 150 years ago, but it is a matter of capitalism constraining the potentials available within technology and within humanity.•
Fascist Twinkie hoarder Donald Trump, who boasts with the desperation of a man in possession of the world’s smallest micropenis, often says that he’s going to “have to look at a lot of things” when asked for specifics about his policies should he become President. That’s his way of trying to make it sound like he’s not an impetuous, adult baby who has no idea what he’s talking about and is too lazy to conduct basic research.
When it comes to doing “regretfully” unpleasant things to people who are not very white, he is definitely going to have to look at a lot of things. Nipple clamps? Cattle prods? Internment camps? Well, they are the linchpins of democracy.
In Hunter Walker’s Yahoo! Politics piece, Trump not only serves up Torquemada-esque talking points, but the skank even has the lack of self-awareness to mention Monica Lewinsky. An excerpt:
Yahoo News asked Trump whether his push for increased surveillance of American Muslims could include warrantless searches. He suggested he would consider a series of drastic measures.
“We’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule,” Trump said. “And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.”
Yahoo News asked Trump whether this level of tracking might require registering Muslims in a database or giving them a form of special identification that noted their religion. He wouldn’t rule it out.
“We’re going to have to — we’re going to have to look at a lot of things very closely,” Trump said when presented with the idea. “We’re going to have to look at the mosques. We’re going to have to look very, very carefully.”•
Almost all of wealth inequality’s consequences, intended or not, are bad, but I doubt so much money would be pouring into the Immortality Industrial Complex were it not for haves having quite so much. No one wants to die when they have stock options. In London as in Silicon Valley, those with ridiculous disposable wealth pursue radical life extension. From Rebecca Newman at the Evening Standard:
Across the road from Harrods sits Omniya clinic, a calm, contemporary white space amid the hustle of Knightsbridge. At street level it is a luxuriously reimagined pharmacy, whose curated selection includes recent launches from Hollywood’s favourite ‘cosmeceutical’ brands Zo Skin Health and Dr Levy. ‘I wanted to create a place that brings the newest advancements in medical and regenerative health to London,’ says co-founder Danyal Kader, a former lawyer, radiant with bien-être. He was so depressed by the difficulty of finding the best medical treatment for his father, who suffers from a heart condition, that he decided to create his own one-stop conduit to wellness. ‘We optimise the lives our clients can lead, body, mind and soul.’ To this end, he has brought together a team of leading specialists who analyse the health of their clients in the most minute and sophisticated detail — a kind of space-age human MOT.
One of these is cellular ageing specialist Dr Mark Bonar. As his title suggests, Bonar is passionate about the very specific degradations that happen in the cells of the body as we age — and still more excited about the new ways he can use to slow such deterioration. Consider, for example, telomeres. ‘Telomeres are the caps on the ends of our DNA,’ Bonar explains. ‘A bit like the plastic on the end of a shoe lace, they prevent the ends from fraying. By measuring their length in the lab we can determine how well the body is ageing’ — for instance, if at 30, you show the wear and tear you’d expect in a 40-year-old. ‘The length can also inform you about your risk of various kinds of disease such as breast or bowel cancer.’
More dramatically, Bonar continues, a product has been patented — it has been around in the States since 2011 — called TA-65, which can rebuild your telomeres, pausing this process central to ageing. In fact, by making the telomere length longer, you can actually make cells ‘younger’, he argues. In one study, fruit flies given TA-65 doubled their life expectancy, while another study on rats discovered that the risk of them developing certain cancers fell by some 30 per cent. And yes, Bonar can prescribe it for you, in a capsule or a cream.•
Writer Carl Zimmer did a predictably smart Ask Me Anything at Reddit, fielding all manner of queries on his forte, science. One exchange is about ancient humans, who were a decidedly more heterogeneous mix than we are, something that could again be true of our species in the future. An excerpt:
Question:
What ancient human fact do you find to be the most fascinating?
Carl Zimmer:
Can I give two answers? A tie?
First off, all the species of ancient humans! One scientist I interviewed recently said he likes to say that the Middle Pleistocene was like Middle Earth, with orc and elves and such. I guess that might be a bit strained if you consider that the different hominin species probably couldn’t talk to each other. (Imagine the Lord of the Rings movies with no dialogue…) Still, tiny Homo floresiensis, Denisovans and Neanderthals having sex (and babies too) with modern humans, plus Homo erectus and probably a bunch of other species/lineages we have yet to find. Our current loneliness is a fluke of human evolution.
The other fact is that in one respect Darwin got human evolution very wrong. He saw bipedalism and human behavior as intimately tied together. But the earliest hominins, 6-7 million years ago, were fairly upright (even if they could scale trees to get away from the occasional leopard). Despite being upright, their brains were puny till less than 2 million years ago. So for most of hominin evolution, they were essentially bipedal apes, rather than what we’d call human. Which, of course, leaves us with the question of why human brains got big so fast when smaller ones did just fine, thank you very much.•
Roughly five years after DARPA’s 2004 not-ready-for-prime-time driverless-car contest mercilessly dubbed the “Debacle in the Desert,” Google was testing autonomous vehicles on American streets and highways. The latest DARPA Robotics Challenge earlier this year, the one aimed at pushing humanoid rescue machines to new limits, was likewise far less than a complete success, though I doubt we’ll be bossing around tin butlers by 2020. However, progress will be made.
Even though opposable thumbs were a lovely development in the course of life on Earth, there’s some question as to whether we should be so concerned about humanoid-type robots. We didn’t create a “robot person” to handle the wheel of a driverless car and drones don’t flap wings like birds (nor do airplanes). There is something satisfyingly narcissistic about inanimate metal and plastic replicating familiar life forms–especially our own–but many of the needed maneuvers in Fukushima and flood zones could probably be accomplished by unfamiliar figures.
In a GQ article, Bucky McMahon looks back at DARPA’s June contest and looks ahead. An excerpt:
Southern California, June 2015
Here, now, on day one of the DARPA Robotics Challenge, the little humans in the crowd are the opposite of patient. Overstimulated, brainy children—future roboticists, perhaps—they half-pack the stands at the Los Angeles County fairgrounds, chanting “Go, robots, go!” as the first four competitors enter the open-air arena. In just a few short minutes, against a backdrop of rusty corrugated iron and dusty windows reminiscent of a 1950s sci-fi-movie set, the robots will navigate the course like giant praying mantises cast in community theater. Five Jumbotrons will offer fans close-ups and instant replays as the robots wrestle with various Mr. Fix-It tasks, clear debris, or walk on a jumble of concrete blocks. It’s a little like the Roman Colosseum, but with bizarre humanoid machines instead of gladiators, masterpieces of engineering that are still battling their own limitations as much as one another.
Twenty-three robotics teams from seven nations are here in Pomona, California, competing for $3.5 million in federally funded prize money dangled by DARPA. (Full name: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.) Despite its buzz-cut reputation, the agency is putting on a pretty good show here at the DRC Finals. There’s a festival atmosphere, with a tech expo outside the stadium, under dozens of white tents. And though the purpose of the event is grim enough—to test robotic technology for emergency disaster relief at the Three Mile Islands, Chernobyls, and Fukushimas of the future—the competition format is kind of hilarious.
For each heat of the two-day comp, up to four robots at a time walk or drive vehicles from the racetrack oval toward the grandstand—a Futurama Shriners parade—arriving at four identical obstacle courses. You are invited to imagine that this is the scene of an industrial accident—a chemical spill, say, or toxic-gas leak—some terrible thing man has wrought that man ought not, something so bad we just can’t be there, not in person. But our metal friends? If they’re up to snuff, yes indeed. The final task is to climb a stairway, at the top of which is catastrophic doom’s off button, figuratively speaking.
For the robotics world, this is the greatest show on earth, and everybody’s here—all the best U.S. university robotics programs, industry reps, toy companies, even a would-be pirate with a robotic parrot named Polymer. You couldn’t swing a robotic cat—there are a few of those, too—without hitting a genius.•
The future usually arrives gradually and only occasionally with an asteroid strike. For the taxi industry in New York, Chicago and many other major cities, it’s been the latter. Ridesharing (a misnomer) via companies like Uber and Lyft is an improvement in numerous ways over business as usual, but, wow, lots of people are being hurt in the transition. Many more will be in a similarly tight spot in time, since Uber has vowed to replace all its piecework drivers with autonomous cars as soon as technologically possible.
Taxi owners and lenders on Tuesday sued New York City and its Taxi and Limousine Commission, saying the proliferation of the popular ride-sharing business Uber was destroying their businesses and threatening their livelihoods.
The lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court accused the defendants of violating yellow cab drivers’ exclusive right to pick up passengers on the street by letting Uber drivers who face fewer regulatory burdens pick up millions of passengers who use smartphones to hail rides.
According to the complaint, the number of Uber rides in the “core” of Manhattan increased by 3.82 million from April to June 2015 compared with a year earlier, while medallion cab pickups fell by 3.83 million.
They said this had driven down the value of medallions, which yellow cab drivers need to operate, by 40 percent from a peak exceeding $1 million and caused more defaults.
Uber’s rise also contributed to the July 22 bankruptcy of 22 companies run by taxi magnate Evgeny Freidman, and the state’s Sept. 18 seizure of Montauk Credit Union, which specialized in medallion loans, the complaint said.•
A couple months before its historic eruption on May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens began to slowly awaken. Tourists toting binoculars went to the mountain to get a better look, but some experts warned them to not expect too much, predicting it very unlikely to be a major geological event. The experts were wrong. From the April 21, 1980 People magazine:
It was hardly Vesuvius or Krakatoa, but when Mount St. Helens—near Washington’s border with Oregon—began to gurgle seriously last month, geologists and thrill-seekers gathered from all over the world. They hoped to see one of the rarest and most spectacular of nature’s performances: a volcanic eruption. Not since Mount Lassen in California began seven years of activity in 1914 has a volcano in the lower 48 states put on such a show. Still, some watchers may be disappointed by Mount St. Helens. “People have this idea about lava from old South Sea movies,” says Donal Mullineaux, a volcanologist in the U.S. Geological Survey, “with everybody in sarongs hotfooting it away from this smoky, glowing stuff that comes oozing out of the crater and down the mountain like cake batter. Lava can be dangerous, sure, but that’s only a part of it.”
The rest of it—clouds of poisonous gas, searing hot winds and cascades of mud and rock—now seems unlikely at Mount St. Helens. Mullineaux, who had predicted an eruption in a scholarly 1975 article, is maintaining a vigilant calm. “The probability of a big, big eruption is very low,” he says. Asked if the gases already escaped pose a pollution threat, he smiles and says, “Any comment I could make would be facetious. I grew up in a paper-mill town.”•
The CBS News report three days after the volcano blew, with Dan Rather and his folksy whatthefuck subbing for Walter Cronkite.
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Most men (and women) lead lives of quite desperation, but from Brooklyn to Big Sur Henry Miller hollered. That resulted in some genius writing and some considerably lesser material. In 1961, the author explained in a Paris Review interview how he believed his tools shaped his writing:
Paris Review:
Do you edit or change much?
Henry Miller:
That too varies a great deal. I never do any correcting or revising while in the process of writing. Let’s say I write a thing out any old way, and then, after it’s cooled off—I let it rest for a while, a month or two maybe—I see it with a fresh eye. Then I have a wonderful time of it. I just go to work on it with the ax. But not always. Sometimes it comes out almost like I wanted it.
Paris Review:
How do you go about revising?
Henry Miller:
When I’m revising, I use a pen and ink to make changes, cross out, insert. The manuscript looks wonderful afterwards, like a Balzac. Then I retype, and in the process of retyping I make more changes. I prefer to retype everything myself, because even when I think I’ve made all the changes I want, the mere mechanical business of touching the keys sharpens my thoughts, and I find myself revising while doing the finished thing.
Paris Review:
You mean there is something going on between you and the machine?
Henry Miller:
Yes, in a way the machine acts as a stimulus; it’s a cooperative thing.•
Robert Snyder’s deeply enjoyable 1969 documentary of Miller in his middle years, when he had befriended, among many others, astrologer Sydney Omarr, a relationship which helped the author indulge his curiosity in the occult.
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Wilt Chamberlain was a hybrid of topdog and underdog, fully aware that all his greatness could never make the public quite love a Goliath. To merely be himself was to be unfair. In Allen Barra’s 2012 Atlantic appreciation of the late NBA, volleyball and track & field star, the writer compares the legendary basketball player favorably with Babe Ruth, and recalls the humble environs in which he recorded the NBA’s only triple-digit scoring performance. An excerpt:
The celebration of Wilt Chamberlain’s career that accompanied the 50th anniversary of his 100-point game last weekend was too short and passed too quickly.
Wilt Chamberlain was the Babe Ruth of pro basketball. Like Ruth, he was by far the most dominant force in his time, and quite possibly of all time. Like the Babe, Wilt was the lightning rod for interest in the sport in a time when it was badly needed. In Chamberlain’s case, he was more important to basketball than Ruth was to baseball.
Contrary to popular opinion, baseball was doing quite well at the turnstiles when Ruth came along and would have survived the stink of the Black Sox gambling scandal with or without him (though the recovery certainly would have taken longer). But without Wilt, who knows if the NBA would have made it from the 1960s—when it was scarcely one of the big three pro sports behind baseball and football—to the Magic Johnson-Larry Bird boom of the late 1970s and the Michael Jordan tidal wave a few years later?
If you doubt this, consider one extraordinary fact: Wilt played his 100-point game not in New York or even in the Warriors’ home city of Philadelphia but in an odd-looking, plain concrete barn-like structure with an arched roof in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where the Warriors played several games a year in order to increase a fan base that wasn’t showing them overwhelming support in Philly.
Try and imagine the equivalent in baseball: Babe Ruth hitting his 60th home run in, say, Newark, New Jersey, at a Yankees “secondary” park in front of a handful of fans. If not for an unknown student listening to a late night rebroadcast of the game who thought to tape the fourth quarter on a reel-to-reel, we’d have no live coverage of the game at all.
Chamberlain’s triumph came at the Hershey Sports Arena. Today the HersheyPark Arena looks virtually the same, a practice facility for the AHL’s Hershey Bears and home ice for a local college that is also open for public skating. It’s easy to miss the notices that here Chamberlain played his landmark game: a small sign on a pole outside the main gates and a copy of the photo of Wilt holding up the handmade “100” in the back side of the lobby.
There is one primary difference between the careers of Babe Ruth and Wilt Chamberlain: Ruth was—and is—regarded by most baseball analysts as the greatest player in his game. But basketball people have never quite been able to make up their minds about Wilt.•
Ed Sullivan interviews Chamberlain soon after his heroics in Hershey.
I think I went from devoted moviegoer (250-300 films every year) to completely uninterested in the medium for reasons deeper than the seismic shifts of the business wrought by globalization (i.e., the march of comic-book blockbusters not dependent on nuance or language), but these changes helped usher me out of the theater.
The new Star Wars is coming out and I don’t care, but at least Adam Rogers’ Wired article “The Force Will Be With Us. Always.” makes me interested in the dynamics behind the endless stream of familiar films that are more than mere sequels. The various productions are designed as an ever-expanding supply of “connective tissue” that can stretch and cover us with comforting entertainment until we’re mummies. Unless, of course, some unforeseen disruption takes the industry in another direction. I mean, nothing is truly forever. For now, though, the template is fixed.
An excerpt:
The company intends to put out a new Star Wars movie every year for as long as people will buy tickets. Let me put it another way: If everything works out for Disney, and if you are (like me) old enough to have been conscious for the first Star Wars film, you will probably not live to see the last one. It’s the forever franchise.
These new movies won’t just be sequels. That’s not the way the transnational entertainment business works anymore. Forget finite sequences; now it’s about infinite series. Disney also owns Marvel Comics, and over the next decade you can expect 17 more interrelated movies about Iron Man and his amazing friends, including Captain America: Civil War, two more Avengers movies, another Ant-Man, and a Black Panther (not to mention five new TV shows). Thanks to licensing agreements, Disney doesn’t own the rights to every Marvel property—Fox makes movies about the X-Men and related mutants like Gambit and Deadpool. So you’ll get interrelated comic-book movies there too. Warner Bros. Entertainment, which owns DC Comics, is prepping a dozen or so movies based on DC characters, with Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad in 2016, Wonder Woman, and eventually the two-part team-up Justice League. Warner is also trying to introduce Godzilla to King Kong (again). Paramount is working on a shared universe for its alien robot Transformers. Universal continues, with limited success, to try to knit together its famous bestiary (Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, etc.).
Everywhere, studio suits are recruiting creatives who can weave characters and story lines into decades-spanning tapestries of prequels, side-quels, TV shows, games, toys, and so on. Brand awareness goes through the roof; audiences get a steady, soothing mainline drip of familiar characters. Forget the business implications for a moment, though. The shared universe represents something rare in Hollywood: a new idea.•
Maybe we should tell the GOP Presidential candidates that climate change is Muslim?
Like most people, I don’t give a crap what the Islamic State wants, except insofar as comprehending that mindset will aid in the destruction of the terrorist organization. Empathy is a useful tool, even in war. In addition to understanding the ideology of the monstrous group, I’m also curious how much drug use is employed to “program” the modern suicidal soldiers. We know that a mélange of medieval brutality, Hollywood technique and social media are the heart of its methods, but what is driving the execution?
When it comes to the murderous principles, Graeme Wood raises many intelligent points about the terrorists’ apocalyptic nature in his new Atlantic essay. The opening:
What is the Islamic State?
Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.
The group seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area larger than the United Kingdom. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been its leader since May 2010, but until last summer, his most recent known appearance on film was a grainy mug shot from a stay in U.S. captivity at Camp Bucca during the occupation of Iraq. Then, on July 5 of last year, he stepped into the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, to deliver a Ramadan sermon as the first caliph in generations—upgrading his resolution from grainy to high-definition, and his position from hunted guerrilla to commander of all Muslims. The inflow of jihadists that followed, from around the world, was unprecedented in its pace and volume, and is continuing.
Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State’s countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the caliphate’s supporters have toiled mightily to make their project knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.•
Rodney Brooks still thinks the future will be fast and cheap, but perhaps not out of control.
In Errol Morris’ 1997 documentary, the roboticist famously says that in tomorrow’s world of intelligent machines, humans might not be necessary. In a BBC piece written by Regan Morris, Brooks backs off that statement (“You can’t expect me to stand by something I said during a long day of filming 20 years ago!”), and also explains why he doesn’t fear technological unemployment or appreciate “cute” robots.
Brooks is certainly right that AI handling rote, backbreaking tasks is a good thing in the big picture, though distribution of wealth is a sticky point. And the work that disappears won’t only be of the blue-collar variety.
An excerpt:
Some people remain nervous about the growing role of robots.
Martin Ford, the author of Rise of the Robots, says robots will change the global economy in drastic ways beyond manufacturing. White collar jobs, are equally susceptible and likely more at risk, he says.
“I think it’s inevitable that robots will displace a lot of jobs, if you have a PhD in science and engineering, you’re probably safe. But that’s not many people,” Ford says.
“We can’t stop it. We can’t educate ourselves out of it. Top level, highly creative, highly skilled jobs will survive. But most people do average stuff. Even if we tried we couldn’t educate every person to be a rocket scientist or brain surgeon.”
Baby boomers need bots
Mr Brooks is less concerned. He thinks fears of robots taking over jobs are overblown and that robots will improve people’s lives.
“I think there’s a misconception amongst the wealthy people in the bubble that there are endless rows of people wanting dull, boring jobs in factories. It’s not true,” Mr Brooks says, adding that robots will become more pervasive in society as baby boomers age and require more self-driving cars and home healthcare.•
Despite his intelligence–or perhaps because of it–philosopher Nick Bostrom could have just as readily fallen through the cracks as rose to prominence, making an unlikely space for himself with the headiest of endeavors, calculating the likelihood of humans to escape extinction. He’s a risk manager on the grandest scale.
Far from a crank screaming of catastrophes, the Oxford academic is a rigorous researcher and intellectual screaming of catastrophes, especially the one he sees as most likely to eradicate us: superintelligent machines. In fact, he thinks self-teaching AI of a soaring IQ is even scarier than climate change. In aNew Yorker pieceon Bostrom, the best profile yet of the philosopher, Raffi Khatchadourian writes that the Superintelligence author sees himself as a “cartographer rather than a polemicist,” though he’s clearly both.
In addition to attempting to name the threats that may be hurtling our way, Bostrom takes on the biggest of the other big questions. For example: What will life be like a million years from now? He argues that long-term forecasting is easier than the short- and mid-term types, because the assumption of continued existence means most visions will be realized. He refers to this idea as the “Technological Completion Conjecture,” saying that “if scientific-and technological-development efforts do not effectively cease, then all important basic capabilities that could be obtained through some possible technology will be obtained.”
My own thoughts on these matters remain the same: In the long run, we either become what those of us alive right now would consider a Posthuman species, the next evolution, or we’ll cease to be altogether. A museum city can linger for a long spell, beautiful in its languor, but humans doubling as statues from the past will eventually be toppled.
An excerpt:
Bostrom has a reinvented man’s sense of lost time. An only child, he grew up—as Niklas Boström—in Helsingborg, on the southern coast of Sweden. Like many exceptionally bright children, he hated school, and as a teen-ager he developed a listless, romantic persona. In 1989, he wandered into a library and stumbled onto an anthology of nineteenth-century German philosophy, containing works by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. He read it in a nearby forest, in a clearing that he often visited to think and to write poetry, and experienced a euphoric insight into the possibilities of learning and achievement. “It’s hard to convey in words what that was like,” Bostrom told me; instead he sent me a photograph of an oil painting that he had made shortly afterward. It was a semi-representational landscape, with strange figures crammed into dense undergrowth; beyond, a hawk soared below a radiant sun. He titled it “The First Day.”
Deciding that he had squandered his early life, he threw himself into a campaign of self-education. He ran down the citations in the anthology, branching out into art, literature, science. He says that he was motivated not only by curiosity but also by a desire for actionable knowledge about how to live. To his parents’ dismay, Bostrom insisted on finishing his final year of high school from home by taking special exams, which he completed in ten weeks. He grew distant from old friends: “I became quite fanatical and felt quite isolated for a period of time.”
When Bostrom was a graduate student in Stockholm, he studied the work of the analytic philosopher W. V. Quine, who had explored the difficult relationship between language and reality. His adviser drilled precision into him by scribbling “not clear” throughout the margins of his papers. “It was basically his only feedback,” Bostrom told me. “The effect was still, I think, beneficial.” His previous academic interests had ranged from psychology to mathematics; now he took up theoretical physics. He was fascinated by technology. The World Wide Web was just emerging, and he began to sense that the heroic philosophy which had inspired him might be outmoded. In 1995, Bostrom wrote a poem, “Requiem,” which he told me was “a signing-off letter to an earlier self.” It was in Swedish, so he offered me a synopsis: “I describe a brave general who has overslept and finds his troops have left the encampment. He rides off to catch up with them, pushing his horse to the limit. Then he hears the thunder of a modern jet plane streaking past him across the sky, and he realizes that he is obsolete, and that courage and spiritual nobility are no match for machines.”•
Whenever seemingly intelligent people get taken in by what’s so obviously a con, there’s an urge to dismiss them, to laugh at their utter foolishness. But it would be far better to understand what went awry, because in some ways we all get taken, by ideologies or belief systems or lies we want to be true.
Niall Rice, an Internet consultant troubled by anxiety and addiction, got “sucked in” and cleaned out by psychics who promised him something they couldn’t possibly deliver. How could a smart, successful person so completely lack a filter to prevent grifters from exploiting him? Is there something he failed to learn despite learning so many other things? Why did his emotional problems supersede intellect at key moments? Are some people just wired to be more prone to such scams?
The opening of Michael Wilson’s fascinating New York Times article about a man who wanted, too much, to believe:
He sat in a Denny’s restaurant, drinking coffee between cigarette breaks after a long and sleepless night, answering question after question.
He knew none of it made sense: He was a successful and well-traveled professional, with close to seven figures in the bank, and plans for much more. And then he gave it all away, more than $718,000, in chunks at a time, to two Manhattan psychics.
They vowed to reunite him with the woman he loved. Even after it was discovered that she was dead. There was the 80-mile bridge made of gold, the reincarnation portal.
“I just got sucked in,” the man, Niall Rice, said in a telephone interview last week from Los Angeles. “That’s what people don’t understand. ‘How can you fall for it?’”
There was even, between payments to one of the psychics for a time machine to cleanse the past, a brief romance.
The sidewalks in Paris weren’t yet dry when America’s leading ghoul Bill Kristol was being wheeled in front of cameras to call for 50,000 U.S. ground troops to be deployed to the Middle East, for a war that would no doubt last decades and get many thousands of people killed. All that money and death for something so impractical as a ground effort against a moving target, when a flexible, selective offensive is much safer and more intelligent. But what can you expect from this embalmed-looking buffoon, who seems at this point to only be able to get hard from inhaling the scent of soldier blood.
Of course, this routinely discredited dunderhead won’t be alone in calling for a large-scale war effort. With GOP rivals trying to out-extreme one another, the war drums are now to be pounded with many fists.
Think, for a moment, about what France is and what it represents. It has its problems — what nation doesn’t? — but it’s a robust democracy with a deep well of popular legitimacy. Its defense budget is small compared with ours, but it nonetheless retains a powerful military, and has the resources to make that military much stronger if it chooses. (France’s economy is around 20 times the size of Syria’s.) France is not going to be conquered by ISIS, now or ever. Destroy Western civilization? Not a chance.
So what was Friday’s attack about? Killing random people in restaurants and at concerts is a strategy that reflects its perpetrators’ fundamental weakness. It isn’t going to establish a caliphate in Paris. What it can do, however, is inspire fear — which is why we call it terrorism, and shouldn’t dignify it with the name of war.
The point is not to minimize the horror. It is, instead, to emphasize that the biggest danger terrorism poses to our society comes not from the direct harm inflicted, but from the wrong-headed responses it can inspire. And it’s crucial to realize that there are multiple ways the response can go wrong. …
Finally, terrorism is just one of many dangers in the world, and shouldn’t be allowed to divert our attention from other issues. Sorry, conservatives: when President Obama describes climate change as the greatest threat we face, he’s exactly right. Terrorism can’t and won’t destroy our civilization, but global warming could and might.•
One of the better understandings I’ve read of the current American mindset is Ben Casselman’s Five Thirty Eight piece “The Economy Is Better — Why Don’t Voters Believe It?” The reporter travels to Davenport, Iowa, to get a sense of why voters in a city with a mercifully low unemployment rate still have a profound fear of falling.
The passage below is poignant and a little heartbreaking. Local citizens (and others, no doubt, across America) yearn for a return to the time when you were educated when you were young and then coasted to success for the rest of your life on that foundation. Not only is that not coming back, but it’s going further and further away. We’re just at the beginning of a very bumpy technological and cultural transition.
An excerpt:
I was in Davenport just days before a closely contested local election in which the city’s mayor wasunseated after eight years in office. The campaign was focused on local issues — a riverfront development project, a new on-shore casino, the controversial firing of the city manager — but Jason Gordon, a city alderman running for re-election, said he had heard voters talk about how the economy had changed.
Gordon, who wasre-elected, got his start in politics working for U.S. Rep. Jim Leach, a moderate Republican, and is drawn to mainstream presidential candidates, not the insurgents. (Local government races in Davenport are nonpartisan.) But he said he understood voters’ concern about the long-term direction of the economy.
“This is a county that 40 years ago, you could go to college and you’d be set for life, or you could come out of high school and get a job at Deere orCaseor wherever and also be set for life with a solid, middle-class lifestyle,” he said. “That doesn’t exist here anymore, and I don’t think it exists anywhere anymore.”
The recession may not have hit Davenport hard, Gordon added, but it nonetheless revealed how fragile the economy can be, shattering what was left of the illusion of stability.
“If you look at a lot of the numbers, unemployment and other data, they look good, but I still sense some angst that you’re one development away from a dire set of circumstances,” Gordon said. “It’s not your house that burned down, but your neighbor’s did.”•
Henry Miller wrote this in the early pages of Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch: “The enchanting, and sometimes terrifying, thing is that the world can be so many things to so many different souls.”
While the rise of the Islamic State, a nightmarish quasi-nation of no precise borders, was certainly made possible by the senseless invasion of Iraq by the United States, I don’t think the destructive impulse that drives it was. Unfortunate geopolitical decisions liberated the madness but did not create it. Terror is usually thought to be a response, but it can also be a call, driven by deeply embedded ideologies and psychologies, whether we’re speaking of a large-scale operation like Nazism or a relatively small-scale one like ISIS. Sometimes evil is just evil.
Disappear every last Westerner from the Middle East and attacks such as the horror in Paris will continue, because the very fact of liberalism and secularism is incompatible with this small but destructive band of zealots. The world just means something different to them, and they can’t abide by such differences.
The overwhelming majority of the globe’s nearly 1.6 billion Muslims are clearly living peaceful, productive lives, but the members of ISIS and Al Qaeda aren’t among them. There’s no easy strategy to defeat them for good, with trillions of dollars of boots on the ground unlikely to bring about a lasting peace and likely to be attended by many casualties. A broader coalition of free nations acting in an opportunistic military fashion is really the best guess right now.
In his latest FT column, Edward Luce looks at the impact of the Paris attacks on the U.S. 2016 election season. An excerpt:
Even before the carnage in Paris, the sands of American public opinion were shifting. Last week a majority said they were prepared to put more US troops into Iraq and Syria to defeat Isis. After November 13, that number is likely to rise. The pressure on Mr Obama to take more drastic action, such as agreeing to “no-fly zones” within Syria, is rising. At nearly every point, Mr Obama has been caught behind the curve on Syria. In early 2014, he described Isis as “junior varsity”, which meant they were unlikely to trouble the grown-ups. Within weeks the group had taken control of up to a third of Iraq and was spreading rapidly in Syria. Whatever the reality on the ground today, Americans are prone to distrust Mr Obama’s reassuring words on Isis.
He is losing his grip on the language. When he came into office, Mr Obama quietly dropped George W Bush’s “war on terror”. That downgrade looks unlikely to outlast his period of office. It was motivated by the view that the US had brought much of the terror on itself by the mistaken 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Mr Obama vowed to undo. By 2011, all US troops were out of Iraq.
But the success of Isis, which filled much of the vacuum left by a departing US, has challenged Mr Obama’s worldview. Instead of seeing Isis as a product of the botched aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq — notably the decision to disband Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated army and leave Baghdad in the grip of the Shia — many Americans see it as a result of Mr Obama’s decision to pull out of Iraq in 2011. He has already put 3,500 troops back into Iraq. US public opinion would like to see more. The Paris attacks will increase that drumbeat.
Mr Obama’s fellow Democrats have yet to catch up with that reality.•
In the two decades after one of the most sensational murders in American history, the 1906 rooftop shooting of architect Stanford White, the batshit crazy gunman Harry K. Thaw sunk deeper and deeper into his sadistic mania, and the woman at the center of the love triangle, Evelyn Nesbit, downed disinfectant, trying to wipe herself clean from the face of the Earth.
She failed. Eventually, when Nesbit was done with red velvet swings and speakeasies, the former chorus girl found her footing and dedicated much of her later life to sculpting and teaching the art. She spoke of passion for her work and her disdain for brassieres in a 1952 issue of People Today, which I found courtesy of the Old Magazine Articles site.
Even at his most outlandish, George Saunders never seems to me to be writing about the future but about life right now. What is a quiet nightmare The Semplica Girls Diaries about if not growing divide between the haves and have-nots as we shift from the Industrial Revolution to the Digital one, the way technocracy removes the friction from our lives and disappears the “downsized” from our minds?
One topic I’d like to someday take on in a work of “futuristic” fiction is our increasing materialism — we are coming to believe that our minds are entirely sufficient to understand the universe in its entirety. This means a shrinking respect for mystery — religion vanishing as a meaningful part of our lives (or being used, in its fundamentalist forms, to beat back mystery, rather than engage it); an increasing acceptance that if something is “effective” (profitable, stockholder-enhancing), then that answers all questions of its morality. This insistence on the literal and provable and data-based and pragmatic leaves us, I think, only partly human. What will the future look like, given that premise? Bleak, I’d say. But interesting.
I’m actually working on a novel based in the past now, and to me, there are some parallels between writing about the future and writing about the past. Neither interests me at all, if the intention is just to “get it right.” It’s nearly impossible to recreate a past mind-set, and also, why bother? That mind-set already existed, if you see what I mean. The goal of a work of fiction is, in my view, to say something, about how life is for us, not at any particular historical moment (past or present or future) but at every single moment. By necessity, we have to choose some precise time to depict, but we wouldn’t want to confuse ourselves by thinking that the “correct depiction” of that time was the goal.
Jennifer Egan:
I’m curious what period are you writing about, and what led you to do that?
George Saunders:
Yeah, I’m going to be a little secretive about it, as sort of a mojo-protection move. … but it’s the 19th century. And the motivation for doing it was just this really cool, sad story I heard around 1998. For years, I was playing with that idea in different modes and screwing it up, and then one day I had a little insight into how I might do it. It’s also got a supernatural element. So, weirdly, although it’s ostensibly “historical,” it actually feels more like a sci-fi story than anything I’ve ever done before. There’s a heavy element of world-building — figuring out the internal rules of the place and so on.•
I can’t say whether Tesla Motors and Faraday Future will both be successful electric-vehicle companies, but I can say there’s room for two EV makers. In fact, there’s room enough if all car makers go electric, the way it was when all manufacturers were working with fossil fuels. Faraday seems to have an Amazonian approach to profits: Get the “gadget” into consumer hands and make money from apps and subscriptions.
Is there room enough for both Tesla Motors and Faraday Future in our electric-car, uh, future? A Chinese billionaire is backing what hopes to be a rival to Elon Musk’s enterprise. The 18-month-old company, based out of Southern California, aims to roll out itsfirstlong-range, premium model, comparable to Tesla’s Model S, by 2017. The engineer who oversaw the chassis design of the Model S, Nick Sampson, is now Faraday’s research-and-development chief.
The billionaire backer is Jia Yueting, founder of LeTV(“China’s Netflix”). A partner of Yueting is listedon the incorporating documents as chief executive. There have beensome rumorsof the company being an Apple-affiliated venture; Apple is said to want to get into the car business. In any case, Sampson has said the car will be more like a smartphone.
“Our business model is not based around moving a car out of the dealer,” Sampson said. “We envision this like a smart phone. The revenue starts once you get the device in the owners’ hands. We’re looking at subscriptions and apps and other opportunities.” This could include car-sharing services, which already operate off your phone.•
In a 1968 Playboy Interview, Eric Nordern tried to extract a definitive statement about the meaning of 2001: A Space Odyssey directly from the mouth of the horse, but Stanley Kubrick wasn’t having it. The director was happy, however, to expound on the potential existence of extraterrestrials of advanced intelligence and what it would mean for us relatively lowly earthlings. An excerpt:
Playboy:
Speaking of what it’s all about—if you’ll allow us to return to the philosophical interpretation of 2001—would you agree with those critics who call it a profoundly religious film?
Stanley Kubrick:
I will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001—but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God. I don’t believe in any of Earth’s monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguingscientific definition of God, once you accept the fact that there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, that its star is a life-giving sun and that there are approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visibleuniverse. Given a planet in stable orbit, not too hot and not too cold, and given a few billion years of chance chemical reactions created by the interaction of sun’s energy on the planet’s chemicals, it’s fairly certain that life in one form or another will eventually emerge. It’s reasonable to assume that there must be, in fact, countless billions of such planets where biological life has arisen, and the odds of some proportion of such life developing intelligence are high. Now, the sun is by no means an old star, and its planets are mere children in cosmic age, so it seems likely that there are billions of planets in the universe not only where intelligent life is on a lower scale than man but other billions where it is approximately equal and others still where it is hundreds of thousands of years in advance of us. When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia—less than a microsecond in the cosmology of the universe—can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities—and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans.
Playboy:
Even assuming the cosmic evolutionary path you suggest, what has this to do with the nature of God?
Stanley Kubrick:
Everything—because these beings would be gods to the billions of less advanced races in the universe, just as man would appear a god to an ant that somehow comprehended man’s existence. They would possess the twin attributes of all deities—omniscience and omnipotence. These entities might be in telepathic communication throughout the cosmos and thus be aware of everything that occurs, tapping every intelligent mind as effortlessly as we switch on the radio; they might not be limited by the speed of light and their presence could penetrate to the farthest corners of the universe; they might possess complete mastery over matter and energy; and in their final evolutionary stage, they might develop into an integrated collective immortal consciousness. They would be incomprehensible to us except as gods; and if the tendrils of their consciousness ever brushed men’s minds, it is only the hand of God we could grasp as an explanation.
Playboy:
If such creatures do exist, why should they be interested in man?
Stanley Kubrick:
They may not be. But why should man be interested in microbes? The motives of such beings would be as alien to us as their intelligence.
Playboy:
In 2001, such incorporeal creatures seem to manipulate our destinies and control our evolution, though whether for good or evil—or both, or neither—remains unclear. Do you really believe it’s possible that man is a cosmic plaything of such entities?
Stanley Kubrick:
I don’t really believe anything about them; how can I? Mere speculation on the possibility of their existence is sufficiently overwhelming, without attempting to decipher the motives. The important point is that all the standard attributes assigned to God in our history could equally well be the characteristics of biological entities who billions of years ago were at a stage of development similar to man’s own and evolved into something as remote from man as man is remote from the primordial ooze from which he first emerged.
Playboy:
In this cosmic phylogeny you’ve described, isn’t it possible that there might be forms of intelligent life on an even higher scale than these entities of pure energy—perhaps as far removed from them as they are from us?
Stanley Kubrick:
Of course there could be; in an infinite, eternal universe, the point is that anything is possible, and it’s unlikely that we can even begin to scratch the surface of the full range of possibilities. But at a time when man is preparing to set foot on the Moon, I think it’s necessary to open up our Earth bound minds to such speculation. No one knows what’s waiting for us in our universe. I think it was a prominent astronomer who wrote recently, “Sometimes I think we are alone, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering.”
Playboy:
You said that there must be billions of planets sustaining life that is considerably more advanced than man but has not yet evolved into non- or suprabiological forms. What do you believe would be the effect on humanity if the Earth were contacted by a race of such ungodlike but technologically superior beings?
Stanley Kubrick:
There’s a considerable difference of opinion on this subject among scientists and philosophers. Some contend that encountering a highly advanced civilization—even one whose technology is essentially comprehensible to us—would produce a traumatic cultural shock effect on man by divesting him of his smug ethnocentrism and shattering the delusion that he is the center of the universe. Carl Jung summed up this position when he wrote of contact with advanced extraterrestrial life that “reins would be torn from our hands and we would, as a tearful old medicine man once said to me, find ourselves ‘without dreams’ … we would find our intellectual and spiritual aspirations so outmoded as to leave us completely paralyzed.” I personally don’t accept this position, but it’s one that’s widely held and can’t be summarily dismissed.
In 1960, for example, the Committee for Long Range Studies of the Brookings Institution prepared a report for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration warning that even indirect contact—i.e., alien artifacts that might possibly be discovered through our space activities on the Moon, Mars, or Venus or via radio contact with an interstellar civilization—could cause severe psychological dislocations. The study cautioned that “Anthropological files contain many examples of societies, sure of their place in the universe, which have disintegrated when they have had to associate with previously unfamiliar societies espousing different ideas and different life ways; others that survived such an experience usually did so by paying the price of changes in values and attitudes and behaviour.” It concluded that since the consequences of any such discovery are “presently unpredictable,” it was advisable that the government initiate continuing studies on the psychological and intellectual impact of confrontation with extra-terrestrial life. What action was taken on this report I don’t know, but I assume that such studies are now under way. However, while not discounting the possible adverse emotional impact on some people, I would personally tend to view such contact with a tremendous amount of excitement and enthusiasm. Rather than shattering our society, I think it could immeasurably enrich it.
Another positive point is that it’s a virtual certainty that all intelligent life at one stage in its technological development must have discovered nuclear energy. This is obviously the watershed of any civilization; does it find a way to use nuclear power without destruction and harness it for peaceful purposes, or does it annihilate itself? I would guess that any civilization that has existed for a few thousand years after its discovery of atomic energy has devised a means of accommodating itself to the bomb, and this could prove tremendously reassuring to us—as well as give us specific guidelines for our own survival. In any case, as far as cultural shock is concerned, my impression is that the attention span of most people is quite brief; after a week or two of great excitement and over-saturation in the newspapers and on television, the public’s interest would drop off and the United Nations, or whatever world body we had then, would settle down to discussions with the aliens.
Playboy:
You’re assuming that extraterrestrials would be benevolent. Why?
Stanley Kubrick:
Why should a vastly superior race bother to harm or destroy us? If an intelligent ant suddenly traced a message in the sand at my feet reading, “I am sentient; let’s talk things over,” I doubt very much that I would rush to grind him under my heel. Even if they weren’t superintelligent, though, but merely more advanced than mankind, I would tend to lean more toward the benevolence, or at least indifference, theory. Since it’s most unlikely that we would be visited from within our own solar system, any society capable of traversing light-years of space would have to have an extremely high degree of control over matter and energy. Therefore, what possible motivation for hostility would they have? To steal our gold or oil or coal? It’s hard to think of any nasty intention that would justify the long and arduous journey from another star.•
Introduced byVernon Myers, the publisher of Look, the 1966 short film, “A Look Behind the Future,” focuses on the magazine’s former photographer Kubrick, who was then in the process of making 2001: A Space Odyssey at London’s MGM studios. It’s a nice companion piece to Jeremy Bernstein’s two great New Yorker articles about the movie during its long gestation (hereandhere).
Mentioned or seen in this video: Mobile phones, laptop computers,Wernher Von Braun, memory helmets, a 38-ton centrifuge, Arthur C. Clarke at the Long Island warehouse where the NASA L.E.M. (Lunar Excursion Module) was being constructed, Keir Dullea meeting the press, etc.
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I would think I’m in the small minority of Don DeLillo readers who feel that his best novel is White Noise, a book about an airborne toxic event and other looming threats. From Nathaniel Rich’s just-published Daily Beast piece:
How did the novel that Don DeLillo originally titled Panasonic become the phenomenon that was, and still is, White Noise? Canonized at birth by rhapsodic critics and instantly ubiquitous on college syllabi, the novel won the National Book Award and journalists hailed its publicity-shy author as a prophet.
But White Noise was not different in kind from Don DeLillo’s previous seven novels. He had been writing about the same paranoiac themes for 15 years: nuclear age anomie, the tyranny and mind control of American commercial excess, the dread of mass terror and the perverse longing for it, the aphasic cacophony of mass information, and even Hitler obsession. In those earlier novels DeLillo had written in the same clipped, oracular prose, borrowing sardonically from bureaucratic officialese, scientific jargon, and tabloid headlines. Some of White Noise’s main insights—“All plots tend to move deathward,” declares the narrator, Jack Gladney—were recycled from the earlier novels, too. White Noise was more conventionally plotted than End Zone, Great Jones Street, or Players, and the characters more conflicted, more human. But something else had changed.
“The greater the scientific advance,” says Jack Gladney, “the more primitive the fear.” White Noise is bathed in the glare and hum of personal computers and refrigerators and color televisions. Like bulletins from the subconscious, the text is intermittently interrupted by litanies of brand names designed to be pronounceable in a hundred languages: Tegrin, Denorex, Selsun Blue. At one point Jack observes his daughter talking in her sleep, uttering the words Toyota Celica. “It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform. It made me feel that something hovered.”
Something is hovering all right.•
The 1991 BBC program, Don DeLillo: The Word, The Image, and The Gun, was originally aired the same year the author published that strange thing Mao II, a novel with wooden characters and plotting, but one so eerily correct about the coming escalation of terrorism, how guns would become bombs and airplanes would not just be redirected but repurposed. It’s like DeLillo tried to alert us to targets drawn in chalk on all sides of the Twin Towers, but we never really fully noticed. This program is a great portrait of DeLillo and his “dangerous secrets” about technology, surveillance, film, news, the novel, art and the apocalypse.
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The 1980 killing of Scarsdale Diet creator, Dr. Henry Tarnower, by his longtime companion,Jean Harris, was a slaying that awakened all sorts of emotions about the dynamics between men and women. From “Murder with Intent to Love,” a 1981 Time article by Walter Isaacson and James Wilde about the sensational trial:
Prosecutor George Bolen, 34, was cold and indignant in his summation, insisting that jealousy over Tarnower‘s affair with his lab assistant, Lynne Tryforos, 38, was the motivating factor for murder. Argued Bolen: ‘There was dual intent, to take her own life, but also an intent to do something else . . . to punish Herman Tarnower . . . to kill him and keep him from Lynne Tryforos.’ Bolen ridiculed the notion that Harris fired her .32-cal. revolver by accident. He urged the jury to examine the gun while deliberating. Said he: ‘Try pulling the trigger. It has 14 pounds of pull. Just see how difficult it would be to pull, double action, four times by accident.’ Bolen, who was thought by his superiors to be too gentle when he cross-examined Harris earlier in the trial, showed little mercy as he painted a vivid picture of what he claims happened that night. He dramatically raised his hand in the defensive stance he says Tarnower used when Harris pointed the gun at him. When the judge sustained an objection by Aurnou that Bolen‘s version went beyond the evidence presented, the taut Harris applauded until her body shook.•
In 1991, the year before her sentence was commuted, Harris sat for a jailhouse interview with Jane Pauley, who has somehow managed to not murder Garry Trudeau.
One thing I know for sure about the future is that it won’t be a utopia–we’ll see to that. Tomorrow will be only as good as humans are, and we tend to stink up the joint.
However, major changes will come to life, especially city life, in the short run, because we’re on the precipice of game-changing technological innovations. If driverless, for instance, is really perfected in the next 25 years or so, the nature of urban life is remade, and car ownership will become ever-more optional. Our world will be a greener and more convenient thing, but I’m willing to bet it won’t all be electric bicycles and vertical gardens.
So what could a successfully networked city of the transportation near-future look like? Picture this.
You wake up and open an app that tells you how to leverage the city’s various transit options to get to your appointment. Maybe it’s a walk to a bicycle, which you pedal to a bus. Or an autonomous taxi to the downtown perimeter to hail a ride-hailing service, driven by a human. Or borrowing a car that belongs to your apartment building’s small fleet.
Once outside, you’ll notice community gardens and playgrounds where parking lots once stood. The air will be cleaner and you might hear birds chirp, both due to the preponderance of electric vehicles. Emergency vehicle sirens are less common as automotive accidents decline thanks to on-board car sensors that track moving objects and humans. Trucks don’t crowd the streets because deliveries are made at night by self-driving vehicles.
“In many ways, we’ll be moving back toward the city of the past, and much like in the 18th century we’ll be designing around people who are walking, biking and even growing their own food,” says Gabe Klein, author of Start-Up City: Inspiring Public and Private Entrepreneurship, Getting Projects Done, and Having Fun.
In less than two decades, researchers say cities could become safer for pedestrians and cyclists and what cars do exist will be small, electric and largely driverless. Under this optimistic forecast, public transit will be efficient, and smart traffic signals will keep the system moving along.
Not that this vision is either guaranteed or without potentially damaging potholes.•
