Excerpts

You are currently browsing the archive for the Excerpts category.

“A Person Does Not Have To Physically Board A Plane In Order Take Control Of It”

September 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

John McAfee is as paranoid and prescribed as Philip K. Dick, but that doesn’t mean he’s writing fiction when he imagines that planes are prone to cyberterrorists. The anti-virus VIP and former fugitive from Belizean justice thinks America needs a serious course correction or hackers at home, not on-board hijackers, will perpetrate 9/11 2.0. 

From McAfee’s latest International Business Times column:

A person does not have to physically board a plane in order take control of it. Even though Chris boarded a flight to Philadelphia and used the entertainment system to demonstrate the weaknesses inherent in Airline control systems, he has spoken out stating the obvious: anyone with moderate hacking abilities can go online from anywhere in the world, and take control of our commercial airliners. …

This may sound far-fetched, but it is obvious to anyone following the hacking community. In July, two hackers demonstrated to Wired magazine that they could, from anywhere on the internet, hack into a Jeep automobile manufactured within the past 5 years, take control away from the driver, and run the car into a ditch. The demo was done at 5mph. You can imagine what results would manifest at 50mph.

The architecture of automobile control and flight control systems share one commonality: they were designed in an age where the nuances of cybersecurity were unknown or ignored. They were not designed, first and foremost, with preventing a hack in mind. I could write forever about the impossibilities of providing any security whatsoever given the current approach to security that is being pursued by the TSA, but that would be counterproductive.•

Tags:

“We Don’t Give A Damn If Einstein Used Artificial Means Of Cognitive Enhancement To Make His Contributions To Science”

September 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

In sports, as in life, there is no level playing field, never has been.

The idea of purity in athletics is deeply hypocritical. Some competitors have greater natural talents and more advantageous body types and even organs than others. Some possess a special genetic makeup which allows them to naturally beat drug tests, while most others have none. In various leagues, there are drugs genuinely helpful for recovery from injury which are banned under any circumstances, while others, far murkier in legitimacy, are allowed with permission. Even in the Olympics, known for its strictness, fewer than half the athletes are tested at any Games. And when you look at other jobs, from concert musician to action-movie star, everything from beta blockers to HGH is used regularly. While these performances aren’t competitions on the granular level, vying for such opportunities certainly is a contest akin to sport. 

In his Boston Globe essay, “Let Athletes Dope,” philosopher Torbjörn Tännsjö makes a moral argument for allowing competitors to juice, etc., arguing that our obsession with fetishizing natural strength borders on Social Darwinism. He makes a compelling case, but here’s the thing: Sports aren’t only about athletic displays or morality. They’re also, even on the amateur level, a business that has practical concerns and must remain attractive to spectators, often huge numbers of them.

Boxing declined precipitously when consciousness became raised about brain damage, and the same may happen to other sports which carry similar risks. Likewise, drug usage and its attendant health problems (and deaths) could be the end of such competitions. And athletes, being hyper-competitive, would probably push unchecked usage beyond all bounds of sense, going so far as to almost create an Uncanny Valley Effect. We like great athletes because they’re different than us, but also like them because they’re similar to us. (Tännsjö acknowledges there’s a chance that allowing PEDs could end the popularity of elite sports.)

The weakest part of the philosopher’s argument is his belief that we can enforce certain limits within this new permissiveness he urges. Even if there were boundaries on such drug use–you can use this much but no more–some athletes would then cheat on those parameters. There are those who will always look for a new edge and no amount of transparency will halt that.

Testing, though far from perfect, probably limits usage to a degree and somewhat inhibits health problems. But no one should really get too moralistic about it because there’s no great solution. My assumption is gene editing will further complicate the debate sooner than we think.

An excerpt:

The notion that natural strength deserves moral admiration is utterly strange. We do not accept this line of reasoning outside of elite sport.

Consider how students are accepted at a musical conservatory. They play before a jury. It is crucial to perform not only well but better than other applicants. Suppose two applicants, Brian and John, play before the jury. Brian is more talented than John. Both are nervous. John, however, has taken beta blockers, Brian has not. The drugs help, and John performs better. He is accepted. This is clearly the wrong decision by the jury. This seems similar to the sport contest. It is very different, however.

The reason why Brian should be accepted and not John has to do with efficiency. It is a waste of pedagogical resources to spend them on John, who is less talented. However, the fact that John enhanced his skill with artificial means is not a problem as such. The beta blockers could have been offered to both or to none. It doesn’t matter.

Once the person has graduated from the conservatory, it matters even less what means he resorts to in order to play well, artificial or natural. In music, and in the sciences and arts in general, we do show admiration, of course. What we admire, however, are the outputs of the artists and scientists, the artifacts — not the artists and scientists in themselves.

There are, of course, Tchaikovsky competitions and Nobel prizes in arts and sciences. But we do not take this quite seriously. And, in particular, it is not natural skill we favor and praise. We don’t give a damn if Einstein used artificial means of cognitive enhancement to make his contributions to science. Our interest is in the contributions themselves, not in the man, and, in particular, not in his natural talents.•

Tags:

“Need A Nap? Order A Car With A Bed.”

September 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Peter Diamandis is privy to much more cutting-edge technological information than I am, but he’s also more prone to irrational exuberance. I have little doubt driverless cars will be perfected for all climates and conditions at some point in the future, but will there really be more than 50 million autonomous cars on the road by 2035? Well, it is the kind of technology likely to spread rapidly when completed. From a Diamandis Singularity Hub post about the future of transportation, agriculture, and healthcare/elder care:

By 2035 there will be more than 54 million autonomous cars on the road, and this will change everything:

  • Saved Lives: Autonomous cars don’t drive drunk, don’t text and don’t fall asleep at the wheel.
  • Reclaiming Land: You can fit eight times more autonomous cars on our roads, plus you no longer need parking spaces. Today, in the U.S. we devote 10% of the urban land to ~600 million parking spaces, and countless more to our paved highways and roads. In Los Angeles, it’s estimated that more than half of the land in the city belongs to cars in the form of garages, driveways, roads, and parking lots.
  • Saved Energy: Today we give close to 25 percent of all of our energy to personal transportation, and 25 percent of our greenhouse gases are going to the car. If cars don’t crash, you don’t need a 5,000-lb SUV driving around a 100-lb passenger (where 2% of the energy is moving the person, and 98% is to move the metal womb wrapped around them).
  • Saved Money/Higher Productivity: Get rid of needing to own a car, paying for insurance and parking, trade out 4,000-lb. cars for lighter electric cars that don’t crash, and you can expect to save 90% on your local automotive transportation bill. Plus regain 1 to 2 hours of productivity in your life (work as you are driven around), reclaiming hundreds of billions of dollars in the US economy.

Best of all, you can call any kind of car you need. Need a nap? Order a car with a bed. Want to party? Order one with a fully-stocked bar. Need a business meeting? Up drives a conference room on wheels.•

Tags:

“Yay For German Engineering!”

September 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

“Feng shui for geeks, a way of engineering that turns a house into a fine-tuned machine,” is the description Sara Solovitch uses in her Politico Magazine feature to describe “Passive Housing,” a method of building developed in Germany which utilizes very thick insulation and high-quality windows and doors to exploit solar and create amazingly green, inexpensive and comfortable spaces. Disconcertingly if unsurprisingly, America lags behind in such environment-friendly structures, though Portland (also unsurprisingly) has become Ground Zero in the U.S. for what would be a very welcome architectural revolution.

An excerpt:

It’s what you don’t see that makes it so unique. The Orchards is a “Passive House,” currently the largest one in North America. It’s a high performing energy-efficient complex whose 57 apartments stay cool on the hottest days and can be comfortably heated with a hand-held hair dryer on the coldest. Its windows are triple-paned. Its walls and floors are stuffed 11 inches deep with insulation. The ventilation system in the attic acts as the building’s lungs—continually pulling exhaust from every kitchen and bathroom, sucking stale air through a heat exchanger before carrying it to the outside and returning with fresh air.

“Every day I find a new reason to love it,” gushes Georgye Hamlin, whose one-bedroom apartment is as noiseless as a recording studio. “It’s cool, it’s quiet, and I don’t even hear the train. During the heat wave, my girlfriend came over to sleep because it was so cool. Yay for German engineering!”

Passivhaus, a building method developed in Germany in the early 1990s, relies on an airtight envelope—the roof, exterior walls and floors, literally, the physical barrier that separates in from out—to create a building that consumes 80 percent less energy than a standard house.

As translated into English, the term is almost a misnomer. It implies single-family housing, when in fact the approach can be applied to any size building. In Europe, supermarkets, schools, churches, factories and hospitals have been built to passive house standards. The number of certified buildings there exceeds 25,000.•

Tags: ,

“The Robots That Succeed Are Going To Be For Very Limited Use”

September 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In Japan, Pepper is a dear, adorable thing, but the robot is being reprogrammed to be sort of a jerk for use in America. While that cultural reimagining is telling in a small way, the greater takeaway from Will Knight’s smart Technology Review piece about this particular machine is that truly flexible and multifaceted robot assistants still need a lot of work. Of course, Weak AI can do a lot of good (and wreak a lot of havoc on the economy) all by itself. An excerpt:

Brian Scassellati, a professor at Yale University who studies how people and robots can interact, says significant progress has been made in the area in the last 10 years. “Human-robot interaction has really started to home in on the kinds of behaviors that give you that feeling of presence,” he says. “A lot of these are small, subtle things.” For example, Pepper can crudely read your emotions by using software that analyzes facial expressions. I found the robot to be pretty good at telling whether I was smiling or frowning.

However, Scassellati does not believe robots are ready to become constant companions or even effective salespeople. The robots that succeed “are going to be for very limited use,” he suggests. “They’re going to be for targeted use, and probably not with the general population.”

My short time with Pepper makes me think that targeting limited applications is a sensible move.•

 

Tags: ,

“The Government Of The United States Is Not In Any Sense Founded Upon The Christian Religion”

September 20, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

One would certainly think that Dr. Ben Carson knows a great deal about neurosurgery, but he understands precious little about American history and our Constitution, and it’s made him espouse a deeply bigoted view of who we are. From a Yahoo! News report about his just-aired Meet the Press appearance: 

Carson, a devout Christian, says a president’s faith should matter to voters if it runs counter to the values and principles of America.

Responding to a question during an interview broadcast Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, he described the Islamic faith as inconsistent with the Constitution.

“I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation,” Carson said. “I absolutely would not agree with that.”•

Despite what Carson thinks, our forefathers did not base America on Christianity. From The Stammering Century, Gilbert Seldes’ book about our nation during an earlier extreme age:

When the time came to frame a constitution, God was considered an alien influence and, in the deliberation of the Assembly, his name was not invoked. “Inexorably,” says Charles and Mary Beard in their story of The Rise of American Civilization, “the national government was secular from top to bottom. Religious qualifications …found no place whatever in the Federal Constitution. Its preamble did not invoke the blessings of Almighty God…and the First Amendment…declared that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…” In dealing with Tripoli, President Washington allowed it to be squarely stated that “the government of the United States is not in any sense founded upon the Christian religion.”•

Tags:

“Is This Just An Updated Version Of The Old Automats, With iPads Replacing Coin Slots, Or Is It Something More?”

September 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’m just old enough to have been dragged as a small child to the final Automat in Manhattan during its last, sad days, before it was sacrificed at the feet of Ray Kroc, as if it were just one more cow.

In its heyday, despite the lack of servers and cashiers, the Automat was an amazingly social experience and an especially democratic one, with people of all classes and kinds rubbing elbows over cheap turkey sandwiches and cheaper coffee. You could sit there forever. Al Pacino has spoken many times of how he misses the welter of people, the strands of surprising conversations. You don’t get that at McDonalds or Starbucks. It’s just a different vibe (and in the latter case, price point). 

The Automat was the past…and, perhaps, prelude. Well, to some degree. I’ve blogged before about Eatsa (here and here), the so-called “digital Automat” which recently opened in San Francisco. It’s disappeared all workers from the front of the restaurant and probably, in time, from back-room preparation. It certainly doesn’t bode well for fast-casual employees, but what of the social dynamic? 

In his latest insightful Financial Times blog post about how life is changing in the Second Machine Age, Andrew McAfee thinks about the meaning of Eatsa in our “interesting and uncertain” era. He’s not concerned about wait staff being disappeared from his conversations but acknowledges the restaurant, whose model will likely spread, is not a good sign for Labor. An excerpt:

So is this just an updated version of the old automats, with iPads replacing coin slots, or is it something more? There are indications that Eatsa’s founders want it to be the start of something legitimately new: a close to 100 per cent automated restaurant. Food preparation there is already highly optimised and standardised, and it’s probably not a coincidence that the location’s first general manager had a background in robotics.

But the fact that the restaurant’s “front of house” (ie the dining area and customer interactions) are already virtually 100 per cent automated is more interesting to me than the question of whether the “back of house” (the kitchen) ever will be. Interesting because as front of the house automation spreads, it’s going to put to the test one of the most widely held notions about work in the second machine age: that there will always be lots of service jobs because we desire a lot of human interaction.

I agree with the second half of that statement, but I’m not so sure about the first. We are a deeply social species, and even an introvert like me enjoys spending time with friends and loved ones in the physical world. I’ve also learnt to value business lunches and dinners (even though I’d rather be off by myself reading or writing) because they’re an important part of how work advances.

But in the great majority of cases, when I’m out I don’t value the interactions with the waiting staff and other service workers. They’re not unpleasant or terribly burdensome, but they do get in the way of what I want from the restaurant experience: to eat well, and to talk to my tablemates.•

 

Tags:

“Benzyl Mercaptan May Call To Mind Garlic, Horseradish, Mint Or Coffee”

September 18, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The best argument for our insane, incessant foodie culture is that it ultimately pays off in a way that greatly reduces or even eradicates hunger, through some hybrid of avant kitchen experimentation and science-lab processes. Because if we’re just stuffing the faces of people who already have more than enough to eat, how decadent is that?

One cutting-edge culinary expert who aims to not just tempt palates but to combat hunger is Hervé This, who thinks note-by-note cooking may be the answer, though such progress will probably come from an amalgamation of solutions.

In a T Magazine article by Aimee Lee Ball, the chemist acknowledges that for his plan to work at all, he must first overcome “food neophobia.” That won’t be a simple matter as Ball writes that “the results sometimes seem like parcels delivered from Mars.” An excerpt:

This’s big idea is nothing less than the eradication of world hunger, which he plans to accomplish not with any new economic overhaul, but through a culinary innovation that he calls note-by-note cooking, or NbN. Molecular cuisine — the deconstruction of food into a series of highly alchemized individual textures, flavors and compounds, often in the form of foams, gels and other matter not immediately recognizable as food — is associated with intellectual-culinary concept art of the sort practiced by Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck and René Redzepi of Noma. But This’s ambitions for his new cuisine are far from fanciful — indeed, the 60-year-old chemist, an impish and rumpled Dumbledore without the facial hair, often sounds more like a political radical than a food scientist. ‘‘I work for the public,’’ he says. ‘‘I hate rich people. NbN is a new art for chefs, and art is important. But are we going to feed humankind — or just make something for foodies?’’

ACCORDING TO THIS, one of the reasons there isn’t enough food to go around is because when we transport it, what we’re really transporting is water, which makes food spoil. A carrot is mostly water. Same for a tomato, an apple, an eggplant and many other fruits and vegetables. Unless they’re refrigerated, which is expensive and has a nasty impact on the environment, their moist nutrients provide an optimal environment for microorganisms.

This proposes that we stop shipping ‘‘wet’’ foods across countries or continents and instead break them down into their parts: separating their nutrients and flavors into a wide variety of powders and liquids that are theoretically shelf-stable in perpetuity, and can be used as ingredients. Many of the basic components of food have unwieldy names but familiar tastes or smells. Allyl isothiocyanate, a compound obtained from mustard seeds, suggests wasabi; 1-octen-3-ol evokes wild mushrooms. Depending on its concentration, benzyl mercaptan may call to mind garlic, horseradish, mint or coffee; decanal hints at something between an orange and an apricot. ‘‘Nobody knows why the same compound in different strengths may taste like curry or maple syrup,’’ This says. ‘‘The physiology of taste is an exciting field — my colleagues are discovering new things every month.’’•

Tags: ,

“It’s Actually Adjusting Work Orders On The Fly”

September 18, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Hitachi wants to help us make decisions, whether we’re workers or management. They’re being helpful. But it’s difficult to see how what’s now merely a tool in our hands won’t soon enough be in charge, at least to a significant degree. There have recently been experiments in algorithmic bosses, but Hitachi has gone beyond mere research, appointing what’s probably the world’s first AI manager. 

From Glenn McDonald at Yahoo! Tech:

Of course, we’ve seen all kinds of automation introduced into the workplace over the years, from the Industrial Revolution to modern IT infrastructures. But this project is different. The AI system isn’t just automating routine tasks. It’s actually adjusting work orders on the fly, basing its decisions on enormous, cumulonimbus swirls of Big Data stored up the Cloud.

In this case, those weather metaphors are no joke. The Hitachi AI is programmed to adjust work flows depending on what the weather’s like (among other factors). So forget about blaming that snowstorm for being late or delaying a deadline: The boss already knows about the snow and has already Made Appropriate Corrections.

The really fascinating stuff involves the integration of artificial intelligence with the concept of kaizen — the business philosophy common in Japan that encourages workers and managers to constantly improve their personal efficiency.

According to kaizen, workers should implement new approaches based on their personal experience. But Hitachi’s AI system adds a new twist to that system: “The AI automatically analyzes the outcome of these new approaches, and selects processes which produce better results and applies it to the next work order.”•

Tags:

“Pay The People From Whom The Data Is Gathered”

September 18, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’ve stated many times already that I think Facebook would easily qualify as the largest sweatshop in the history of the world, except that even those grimy outfits actually pay a wage, if not close to a living one. Sure, we get some degree of utility from Mark Zuckerberg’s company in exchange for the free content we create daily from our previously private data and ideas, but that doesn’t seem like such a bargain. We’re really just worker bees who get none of the honey.

In a Pacific-Standard piece, Jason Lanier holds forth on this same topic, suggesting such information-rich companies pay us for our data, which they handsomely profit from. It’d be awfully hard to arrange and institute but would embody much more of a free-market spirit than the model we currently have. The opening:

Big Data is actually made of people, like “Soylent Green.’’ Big Data does not come from angels or some supernatural realm or a single mathematician’s mind. We need to accept the fact that the cloud programs that are starting to run the world are actually made of the activities of large numbers of people whose behavior—whether online searches, or customer reviews, or Facebook postings or tweets, or even crossing the street—is being observed by computers and used to increase the power of networks. To deny that means stealing from very large numbers of people.

My solution: Pay the people from whom the data is gathered. That gets tricky and there has to be some real innovation. But the principle is simple. And it’s a fair, ethical solution to technologically degraded employment.

How to set a value on this data? In essence, we would ask: If we didn’t include data from this person, how much worse would the translation be, how much worse would the robot function, how much worse would the city be designed if we hadn’t been able to observe that person’s behavior? Based on an approximation of that value, people could price their data—high if they want privacy. Or somebody could be a “data slut’’ and offer all their data for very low cost. That would create individual freedom.•

Tags:

“[It] Answers Every Question. Correctly.”

September 18, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The dream of the digital assistant, that perfect robotic helper, has long been with us. The dumb-ish systems that currently guide us in paying bills and getting directions can understand speech but not the nuances of language. The next-level tool must be able to “listen.”

That day is almost here, the perfect convergence of technology progressing to meet need at just the right moment, asserts David Pierce in a new Wired piece. He believes that “your assistant will know every corner of every app on your phone and will glide between them at your spoken command,” reducing or eliminating the reliance on pointing and clicking (a blessing for many users, especially the visually impaired).

The downside to this innovation (which goes unmentioned in the article) is that a “servant” that improves as it gets to know more about you will know more about you. Your privacy won’t be just yours, and a warm, friendly voice may get you to reveal more than the cool hum of a search engine ever could.

In surveying what he believes to be the near-future landscape, Pierce relates his awe of a new SoundHound app prototype that dazzled him with its sophistication. An excerpt:

The prototype is called Hound, and it’s pretty incredible. Holding a black Nexus 5 smartphone, [SoundHound CEO Keyvan] Mohajer taps a blue and white microphone icon and begins asking questions. He starts simply, asking for the time in Berlin and the population of Japan. Basic search-result stuff—followed by a twist: “What is the distance between them?” The app understands the context and fires back, “About 5,536 miles.”

Then Mohajer gets rolling, smiling as he rattles off a barrage of questions that keep escalating in complexity. He asks Hound to calculate the monthly mortgage payments on a million-dollar home, and the app immediately asks him for the interest rate and the term of the loan before dishing out its answer: $4,270.84.

“What is the population of the capital of the country in which the Space Needle is located?” he asks. Hound figures out that Mohajer is fishing for the population of Washington, DC, faster than I do and spits out the correct answer in its rapid-fire robotic voice. “What is the population and capital for Japan and China, and their areas in square miles and square kilometers? And also tell me how many people live in India, and what is the area code for Germany, France, and Italy?” Mohajer would keep on adding questions, but he runs out of breath. I’ll spare you the minute-long response, but Hound answers every question. Correctly.

Hound, which is now in beta, is probably the fastest and most versatile voice recognition system unveiled thus far. It has an edge for now because it can do speech recognition and natural language processing simultaneously. But really, it’s only a matter of time before other systems catch up.

After all, the underlying ingredients—what Kaplan calls the “gating technologies” necessary for a strong conversational interface—are all pretty much available now to whoever’s buying. It’s a classic story of technological convergence: Advances in processing power, speech recognition, mobile connectivity, cloud computing, and neural networks have all surged to a critical mass at roughly the same time. These tools are finally good enough, cheap enough, and accessible enough to make the conversational interface real—and ubiquitous.•

Tags: ,

“People Will Accept Them Faster Probably Than Governments Will”

September 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Uber should, of course, not be prevented from becoming a company of driverless taxis when innovation makes that possible. But CEO Travis Kalanick’s part-time pose as a champion of Labor is an infuriatingly dishonest stance. Autonomous vehicles and Uber’s business model may both be great in many ways, but they’re not good for workers. Not in the short and medium term, at least, and likely never.

Kalanick, who recently discussed his company’s robotic tomorrow with Marc Benioff, sees the transition to AI coming in 10 or 15 years or so. In commentary on Bloomberg, Forrester analyst James McQuivey thinks the future is just around the bend and Kalanick too conservative in his estimation of the driverless ETA. He also believes Kalanick’s job itself will likely be a casualty of the autonomous revolution (and other factors).

Tags: , ,

“How Would The Millions Of Telemarketers And Taxi Drivers…Survive In This New Landscape?”

September 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Should millions of jobs, entire industries, be taken over by AI in the near future, without other ones emerging to replace them, political and economic systems would need to quickly adapt and adjust to manage the new reality. One way to prepare would be to experiment with universal basic income, which may or may not prove a panacea.

From Federico Pistono in New Scientist:

How would the millions of telemarketers and taxi drivers, for example – whose jobs are at high risk of being automated – survive in this new landscape? One of the most interesting proposals, and one that does not live in the fanciful world of “the market will figure it out,” is the creation of an unconditional basic income (UBI).

It’s a simple idea with far-reaching consequences. The state would give a monthly stipend to every citizen, regardless of income or employment status. This would simplify bureaucracy, get rid of outdated and inefficient means-based benefits, and provide support for people to live with dignity and find new meaning.

No incentive-killer

The biggest UBI experiments, involving a whole town in Canada and 20 villages in India, have confounded a key criticism – that it would kill the incentive to work. Not only did people not stop working, but they were more likely to start new businesses or perform socially beneficial activities compared with controls. In addition, there was an increase in general well-being, and no increase in public bads such as alcohol and drug use, and gambling.

These early results are promising but not conclusive. We don’t know what would happen in other countries, and whether the same results would apply if millions of people were involved. Forthcoming experiments may give us a clearer picture.•

Tags:

“So What’s Really Going On?”

September 17, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The spirit of any age must be addressed, even when inconvenient. I doubt Bill Clinton entered politics to be the tough-on-crime President whose policies helped turn the nation into a penal colony within a colony, but there he was in the 1990s, not realizing that crime was about to mysteriously and precipitously decline, waving a badge and a billy club. Clinton likely never dreamed of a scenario in which he would be chastening “welfare queens,” yet there he was doing a better job of it than Ronald Reagan, who coined that odious term. It was no different than when Richard Nixon, having at long last having won the White House, argued in favor of universal healthcare and a basic-guaranteed-income tax plan, something he certainly wasn’t considering before the Sixties happened.

Chief among the prevailing winds of our time is wealth inequality, the enduring gift of an Occupy movement that framed a single election and otherwise sputtered out, at least for now. So GOP candidates must, at minimum, pay lip service to the concern. Donald Trump is suddenly a reformer taking aim at hedge-fund managers. Jeb Bush has spoken about how income disparity has threatened the American Dream (without mentioning, of course, that his proposed tax cuts would only exacerbate the situation). Rick Santorum and the sweater-vest wing of the party want to raise the minimum wage. 

What’s true of politicians is also so of economists, and academics have descended on the problem, which makes this moment ideal for Joseph Stiglitz, who’s spent much of his career, from thesis forward, on the topic. In a NYRB piece, James Surowiecki analyzes the economist’s most recent slate of books, finding fault with Stiglitz’s identification of the twin devils of the contemporary financial arrangement: rent-seeking and a lack of corporate oversight. Surowiecki doesn’t believe these issues explain our 99-and-1 predicament. He doesn’t dismiss Stiglitz’s suggestions and likewise sees no reason why CEOs should be earning so much, but he believes a remedy is more complicated.

An excerpt: 

It’s possible, of course, that further reform of corporate governance (like giving shareholders the ability to cast a binding vote on CEO pay packages) will change this dynamic, but it seems unlikely. After all, companies with private owners—who have total control over how much to pay their executives—pay their CEOs absurd salaries, too. And CEOs who come into a company from outside—meaning that they have no sway at all over the board—actually get paid more than inside candidates, not less. Since 2010, shareholders have been able to show their approval or disapproval of CEO pay packages by casting nonbinding “say on pay” votes. Almost all of those packages have been approved by large margins. (This year, for instance, these packages were supported, on average, by 95 percent of the votes cast.)

Similarly, while money managers do reap the benefits of opaque and overpriced fees for their advice and management of portfolios, particularly when dealing with ordinary investors (who sometimes don’t understand what they’re paying for), it’s hard to make the case that this is why they’re so much richer than they used to be. In the first place, opaque as they are, fees are actually easier to understand than they once were, and money managers face considerably more competition than before, particularly from low-cost index funds. And when it comes to hedge fund managers, their fee structure hasn’t changed much over the years, and their clients are typically reasonably sophisticated investors. It seems improbable that hedge fund managers have somehow gotten better at fooling their clients with “uncompetitive and often undisclosed fees.”

So what’s really going on? Something much simpler: asset managers are just managing much more money than they used to, because there’s much more capital in the markets than there once was.•

 

Tags: ,

“Manufacturing Will Be Hit By An Identical Crisis To The Music Industry”

September 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Think how strange it seems now: Until recently, one or several musicians would disappear for many months into an expensive recording studio and try to conjure something that would fill our ears, and, perhaps, blow our minds. They threw away the vast majority of the results and delivered a few dozen minutes of entertainment. There was a distribution system which not only supported this process but was even marvelously lucrative.

It was all a dream. The decentralization of the media not only usurped the record store but also the records, squeezing the financial value from these commodities, rendering them a mere promotional tool for the few touring acts that can fill arenas. Good luck with that.

During the halcyon music-business decade of the 1970s, one economist and theorist knew the precariousness of the arrangement, how this fraught ecosystem, still spectacularly profitable, was actually endangered. He was Jacques Attali, a Mitterand adviser who 39 years ago coined the term “crisis of proliferation” in his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, which foretold the coming perfect storm that would soak the industry. 

In “The Pop Star and the Prophet,” a new BBC Magazine article, singer-songwriter Sam York sought out Attali, wanting to know where the philosopher thought the future was heading. The quick answer is that while he maintains some hope for musicians, Attali thinks what happened to the recording biz is merely prelude. An excerpt:

Attali also had another big idea. He said that music – and the music industry – forged a path which the rest of the economy would follow. What’s happening in music can actually predict the future.

When musicians in the 18th Century – like the composer Handel – started selling tickets for concerts, rather than seeking royal patronage, they were breaking new economic ground, Attali wrote. They were signalling the end of feudalism and the beginning of a new order of capitalism.

In every period of history, Attali said, musicians have been at the cutting edge of economic developments. Because music is very important to us but also highly adaptable it’s one of the first places we can see new trends appearing.

He was right about the “crisis of proliferation”… but if music really does predict the future for the rest of the economy, what does he think it is telling us will happen next?

Attali says manufacturing will be hit by an identical crisis to the music industry, and this time it will be caused by 3D printing.

“With 3D printing, people will print their own cups, furniture,” he says. “Everyone will make their own objects, in the same way they are making their own music.”•

 

Tags: ,

“‘Transformative’ Means You Get Amazing New Capabilities, But Also Amazing New Questions And Dilemmas And Problems”

September 16, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Peter W. Singer, who wrote Wired for War and coauthored (with August Cole) Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War, just did a really interesting Ask Me Anything at Reddit about the fire next time. In addition to the exchanges below, Singer’s long answer to a question about the U.S. response to Chinese cyberattacks is definitely worth reading.

_______________________

Question:

Do you think that having high-tech weapons and capabilities lowers the threshold for taking military actions? Thinking of drones as an immediate example and cyberwarfare as a coming one.

Peter W. Singer:

Yes, I think that is a risk. The new generation of tech lowers the bar to entry in 2 ways: 1) Unlike Atomic bombs or aircraft carriers, they are much easier for nations and even non state actors to individuals to gain and use. Indeed, over 100 nations already have cyber military units and 80 have drones, while less than 10 have nukes and only one has supercarriers, but 2) The new generation of technology also moves the human role sometimes geographically off the battlefield and sometimes chronologically from the point in time of its use. So it creates distance and among many a percerption of less risk. Leaders and their public don’t look at the decision to use force in the same way. So that also lowers the barrier of entry to conflict. Think how we’ve carried out more than 400 drone strikes into Pakistan, but no one thinks of it as a “war.” To be clear, this perception of less risk doesn’t mean the actual costs are removed. The costs hit in everything from casualties in that target area to blowback over the longterm. I did a piece a few years back on this.

______________________

Question:

As I understand it, a large part of U.S. defense and security policy has been built around having a technological superiority over any potential adversary and so I would like to ask you if you believe that this strategy will continue to be viable in the foreseeable future and what potential trends or developments are/might impact it?

Peter W. Singer:

That is exactly one of the key questions the book plays with.

In every fight since 1945 (when Germany had jets and we had prop planes), US forces have been a generation-ahead in technology. It has not always translated to decisive victories, but it has been an edge every other nation wants and its baked into our assumptions. Yet US forces can’t count on that “overmatch” in the future. Some of our trusted major platforms are now vulnerable to new classes of weapons, but also we face a new tech race. China, for example, just overtook the EU in R& D spending and is on pace to match the US in five years, with new projects ranging from the world’s fastest supercomputers to three different long range drone strike programs. And now off-the-shelf technologies can be bought to rival even the most advanced tools in the US arsenal. The winner of a recent robotics test, for instance, was not a US defense contractor but a group of South Korea student engineers.

There is another interesting aspect of this that comes from cyber attacks. We’re planning to spend over a Trillion (no typo, a T) dollars on a new stealth fighter jet, the F35, that was planned to be a generation ahead of any potential foe. And yet that program has been hacked on at least 3 occasions. The result is that F35 has a near twin, the J31, before its even operational for us. It is hard to win an arms race, when you are paying the R&D for the other side.

______________________

Question:

I’m not sure if this is outside your field, but a few weeks ago I asked Defense Secretary Carter what technological developments interested him the most, and although he didn’t say that it directly interested him the most, he indicated that biotechnology has the potential to be very transformative for modern warfare. Do you have any thoughts about this? Any important systems, companies, personalities etc to keep an eye out in regards to this?

 

Peter W. Singer:

Yes, the pace of breakthrough in that field is actually moving much faster than even Moore’s Law for IT. Some amazing things happening in genomics etc. We played a bit with human performance modification tech in Ghost Fleet and another scene on Brain-Machine interface, but genomics is one we didn’t tap, which could be transformative. And to be clear, “transformative” means you get amazing new capabilities, but also amazing new questions and dilemmas and problems.

______________________

Question:

Do you think U.S. political leaders have a good handle on emerging high technology (and the benefits/risks thereof) or should the general population be concerned?

For example: drones, cybersecurity/cyber warfare, internet policy in general, etc.

Peter Singer:

No, sadly not. Just way behind in their understanding of not merely where we are headed, but where we already are. The result is that they often make simple errors with major consequences and are taken advantage of by “hucksters” who are invested in some particular tech or role, and spin a little amount of knowledge to their own advantage. We see it in everything from defense issues to the “cyber walls” discussion in presidential debates, where all the candidates nodded in seeming agreement, as someone used a term that is literally made up and makes no sense.•

 

Tags:

“It Was Inevitable That Artificial Intelligence For Children Would Arrive, Too”

September 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The future often arrives wearing the clothes of the past, even if they’re Purrfectly Pink! fashions. 

Mattel wants to introduce AI to children via Barbie who will be their “perfect friend.” I’m not speaking of a Freeman Dyson-ish future of genetically-modified playthings that are actually alive, of course, but a convincingly conscious toy that utilizes Siri-esque speech-recognition software to not only talk but to also listen.

The dream of animating dolls is nothing new, as pull-strings, sleight of hand and psychological needs have long helped us “awaken” them. But what will it mean when a profound simulacrum becomes part of children’s lives? My guess is kids, those ingenious creatures, will adapt and adjust to the elaborate ruse in most ways, but the information potentially pushed upon them and extracted from them will be troubling.

From James Vlahos’s fascinating New York Times Magazine article “Barbie Wants to Get to Know Your Child“:

In the past five years, breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and speech recognition have given the devices around us — smartphones, computers, cars — the ability to engage in something approaching conversation, by listening to users and generating intelligent responses to their queries. Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana are still far from the science-fiction promise of Samantha from the movie Her. But as conversational technology improves, it may one day rival keyboards and touch screens as our primary means of communicating with computers — according to Apple, Siri already handles more than a billion spoken requests per week. With such technology widely available, it was inevitable that artificial intelligence for children would arrive, too, and it is doing so most prominently in the pink, perky form of Mattel’s Hello Barbie. Produced in collaboration with ToyTalk, a San Francisco-based company specializing in artificial intelligence, the doll is scheduled to be released in November with the intention of hitting the lucrative $6 billion holiday toy market.

For adults, this new wave of everyday A.I. is nowhere near sophisticated enough to fool us into seeing machines as fully alive. That is, they do not come close to passing the ‘‘Turing test,’’ the threshold proposed in 1950 by the British computer scientist Alan Turing, who pointed out that imitating human intelligence well enough to fool a human interlocutor was as good a definition of ‘‘intelligence’’ as any. But things are different with children, because children are different. Especially with the very young, ‘‘it is very hard for them to distinguish what is real from what is not real,’’ says Doris Bergen, a professor of educational psychology at Miami University in Ohio who studies play. The penchant to anthropomorphize — to believe that inanimate objects are to some degree humanlike and alive — is in no way restricted to the young, but children, who often favor magical thinking over the mundane rules of reality, have an especially rich capacity to believe in the unreal.

Hello Barbie is by far the most advanced to date in a new generation of A.I. toys whose makers share the aspiration of Geppetto: to persuade children that their toys are alive — or, at any rate, are something more than inanimate.•

Tags: , ,

“Why Did They Do It?”

September 16, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

I thought recently of this 2014 Gary Indiana quote about contemporary NYC and the U.S.: “This city, America, loves the successful sociopath and thinks it’s normal to dream of becoming like him.”

In the London Review of Books, Indiana writes of Masha Gessen’s The Brothers, her examination of the motivations of the Tsarnaev siblings, who perpetrated the horrific Boston Marathon bombing. The title was largely taken to task in the New York Times by former DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, not a disinterested party. Indiana, conversely, lavishes praise upon it. In doing so, he argues that destabilized economies, America’s included, are helping to breed violent radicals. Perhaps, though even in times of relative financial stability, such acts of political terrorism occur. The extremist child can be born of many different types of parents, not just poor ones.

An excerpt that quotes another treatment of terrorist tragedy, Yasmina Khadra’s novel The Attack:

What passed between the brothers in the ten months after Zubeidat’s departure to Dagestan is terra incognita. The chances are no specific event or Svengali-like radicalisation inspired the Tsarnaev brothers to blow up the Boston Marathon. As a policeman in Yasmina Khadra’s 2006 novel The Attack puts it: ‘I think even the most seasoned terrorists really have no idea what has happened to them. And it can happen to anyone. Something clicks somewhere in their subconscious, and they’re off … Either it falls on your head like a roof tile or it attaches itself to your insides like a tapeworm. Afterwards, you no longer see the world in the same way.’ The media fantasy that Tamerlan was schizophrenic and ‘heard voices’ is highly improbable. The consensus among terrorism experts is that terrorists are normal people. ‘He was a perfectly nice guy.’ ‘The last person I’d imagine doing something like this.’ After the fact, neighbours, friends and co-workers invariably say the same things about terrorists as they say about serial killers. It’s worth noting that there isn’t a single provable instance of the legendary FBI profiling unit in Quantico, Virginia actually instigating the capture of a serial killer: it tends to be when someone is stopped for driving with a broken tail light that the dead body in the trunk is discovered. It’s only afterwards that we’re told they ‘fit the FBI profile’.

*

Why did they do it? How could they? In the world we live in now, the better questions are: why not? Why wouldn’t they? To quote Khadra’s novel again, on suicide bombers: ‘The only way to get back what you’ve lost or to fix what you’ve screwed up – in other words, the only way to make something of your life – is to end it with a flourish: turn yourself into a giant firecracker in the middle of a school bus or launch yourself like a torpedo against an enemy tank.’ Everything the US has done to prevent terrorism has been the best advertising terrorism could possibly have. The ‘war on terror’ has degenerated since its ugly inception in Afghanistan and Iraq into a two-pronged war against the US domestic population’s civil rights and the infrastructures of Muslim nations; every cynical episode of this endless war has inched America closer to a police state, and turned people minding their own business in other countries into jihadists and suicide bombers. If the United States were at all interested in preventing terrorism, it would first have to acknowledge that the country belongs to the citizens its economic policies have impoverished, and get rid of emergency laws that violate their rights on the pretext of ensuring their safety. This would involve dismantling the surveillance state apparatus that inflates its criminally gigantic budgets with phony terrorism warnings and a veritable industry of theatrical FBI sting operations. And then the country would have to address the systemic social problems that have been allowed to metastasise ever since the presidency of Ronald Reagan. As everyday existence becomes more punitive for all but the monied few, more and more frustrated, volatile individuals will seek each other out online, aggravate whatever lethal fairy tale suits their pathology, and, ultimately, transfer their rage from the screen world to the real one.•

Tags: , , , ,

“I Really Wanted To Reach Out And Maybe Find Some Evidence That There Was Something More”

September 15, 2015 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Because ultimately there’s nothing, and everything we and our loved ones once were cruelly goes away, many of us spend time desperately trying to prove that there’s something beyond. This can’t be it. While it’s not a self-fulfilling prophecy, it sure does pass the time.

At Vice’s “Broadly” section, Zing Tsjeng interviews British paranormal investigator Jayne Harris, who specializes in haunted dolls, which look almost like people, almost alive. The opening:

Question:

Can you tell me a little about what brought you to this industry?

Jayne Harris:

My parents were very interested in the paranormal so I heard lots of stories from them. When I was about 16, I started going to various spiritualist churches and seeing psychic mediums. Then my cousin died in a car accident when I was 17. That was the catalyst for me. It sparked more than a curiosity— I really wanted to reach out and maybe find some evidence that there was something more.

Question:

How often do you genuinely find a haunted object or doll in someone’s house?

Jayne Harris:

In our experience, when we get called to people’s homes, we can explain the activity through normal explanations in about seven out of 10 cases. If someone feels that they’re hearing knocking noises, we’ll examine everything from pipework to spaces in the attic where you might get mice. If the lights are flickering, it often needs rewiring. You’re trying to rule out all of the possibilities so that what you’re left with is the true case of what is going on.•

 

Tags: ,

“What Major Crisis Can We Expect In Next Few Years? What The World Is Going To Be Like By 2025?”

September 15, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Dr. Anders Sandberg of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford just did one of the best Reddit AMAs I’ve ever read, a brilliant back-and-forth with readers on existential risks, Transhumanism, economics, space travel, future technologies, etc. He speaks wisely of trying to predict the next global crisis: “It will likely not be anything we can point to before, since there are contingency plans. It will be something obvious in retrospect.”

The whole piece is recommended, and some exchanges are embedded below.

_________________________

Question:

Will we start creating new species of animals (and plants, fungi, and microbes) any time soon?

What about fertilizing the oceans? Will we turn vast areas of ocean into monoculture like a corn field or a wood-pulp plantation?

When will substantial numbers of people live anywhere other than Earth? Where will it be?

What will we do about climate change?

Dr. Anders Sandberg:

I think we are already making new species, although releasing them into nature is frowned upon.

Ocean fertilization might be a way of binding carbon and getting good “ocean agriculture”, but the ecological prize might be pretty big. Just consider how land monocultures squeeze out biodiversity. But if we needed to (say to feed a trillion population), we could.

I think we need to really lower the cost to orbit (beanstalks, anyone?) for mass emigration. Otherwise I expect the first real space colonists to be more uploads and robots than biological humans.

I think we will muddle through climate: technological innovations make us more green, but not before a lot of change will happen – which people will also get used to.

_________________________

Question:

What augmentations, if any, do you plan on getting?

Dr. Anders Sandberg:

I have long wanted to get a magnetic implant to sense magnetic fields, but since I want to be able to get close to MRI machines I have held off.

I think the first augmentations will be health related or sensory enhancement gene therapy – I would love to see ultraviolet and infrared. But life extension is likely the key area, which might involve gene therapy and implanting modified stem cells.

Further down the line I want to have implants in my hypothalamus so I can access my body’s “preferences menu” and change things like weight setpoint or manage pain. I am a bit scared of implants in the motivation system to help me manage my behavior, but it might be useful. And of course, a good neural link to my exoself of computers and gadgets would be useful – especially if it could allow me to run software supported simulations in my mental workspace.

In the long run I hope to just make my body as flexible and modifiable as possible, although no doubt it would tend to normally be set to something like “idealized standard self”.

It is hard to tell which augmentations will arrive when. But I think going for general purpose goods – health, intelligence, the ability to control oneself – is a good heuristic for what to aim for.

_________________________

Question:

What major crisis can we expect in next few years? What the world is going to be like by 2025?

Dr. Anders Sandberg:

I am more of a long term guy, so it might be better to ask the people at the World Economic Forum risk report (where I am on the advisory board).http://www.weforum.org/reports/global-risks-report-2015

One group of things are economic troubles – they are safe bets before 2025 since they happen every few years, but most are not major crises. Expect some asset bubbles or deflation in a major economy, energy price shocks, failure of a major financial mechanism or institution, fiscal crises, and/or some critical infrastructure failures.

Similarly there will be at least some extreme weather or natural disaster events that cause a nasty surprise (think Katrina or the Tohoku earthquake) – such things happen all the time, but the amount of valuable or critical stuff in the world is going up, and we are affected more and more systemically (think hard drive prices after the Thai floods – all the companies were located on the same flood plain). I would be more surprised by any major biodiversity loss or ecosystem collapse, but the oceans are certainly not looking good. Even with the scariest climate scenarios things in 2025 are not that different from now.

What to look out for is interstate conflicts that get global consequences. We have never seen a “real” cyber war: maybe it is overhyped, maybe we underestimate the consequences (think something like the DARPA cyber challenge as persistent, adapting malware everywhere). Big conflicts are unfortunately not impossible, and we still have lots of nukes in the world. WMD proliferation looks worryingly doable.

If I were to make a scenario for a major crisis it would be something like a systemic global issue like the oil price causing widespread trouble in some unstable regions (think of past oil-food interactions triggering unrest leading to the Arab Spring, or Russia being under pressure now due to cheap oil), which spills over into some actual conflict that has long-range effects getting out of hand (say the release of nasty bio- or cyberweapons). But it will likely not be anything we can point to before, since there are contingency plans. It will be something obvious in retrospect.

And then we will dust ourselves off, swear to never let that happen again, and half forget it.

_________________________

Question:

As I understand it, regarding existential risk and our survival as a species, most if not all discussion has to happen under the umbrella of ‘if we don’t kill ourselves off first.’ Surely, as a man who thinks so far ahead, you must have some hope that catastrophic self-inflicted won’t spell the end of our race, or at least that it won’t put us back irrevocably far technologically. In your estimation, what are the immediate self-inflicted harms we face and will we have the capacity to face them when their destructive effects manifest. Will the climate change to the point of poisoning our planet, will uncontrolled pollution destroy our global ecology in some other way, will nuclear blasts destroy all but the cockroaches and bacteria on the planet? It seems to me that we needn’t think too far to see one of these scenarios come to pass if we don’t present a globally concerted effort to intervene.

Dr. Anders Sandberg:

I think climate change, like ecological depletion or poisons, are unlikely to spell radical disaster (still, there is enough of a tail to the climate change distribution to care about the extreme cases). But they can make the world much worse to live in, and cause strains in the global social fabric that make other risks more likely.

Nuclear war is still a risk with us. And nuclear winters are potential giga-killers; we just don’t know whether they are very likely or not, because of model uncertainty. I think the probability is way higher than most people think (because of both Bayesian estimation and observer selection effects).

I think bioengineered pandemics are also a potential stumbling block. There may not be many omnicidal maniacs, but the gain-of-function experiments show that well-meaning researchers can make potentially lethal pathogens and the recent distribution of anthrax by the US military show that amazingly stupid mistakes do happen with alarming regularity.

See also: https://theconversation.com/the-five-biggest-threats-to-human-existence-27053

_________________________

Question:

I have trouble imagining how our current economic structure could cope with all the 10’s of millions of driver/taxi/delivery jobs going.

The economic domino effect of inability to pay debts/mortgages, loss of secondary jobs they were supporting, fall in demand for goods, etc, etc

It seems like the world has never really got back to “normal” (whatever that is anymore in the 21st century) after the 2008 financial crisis & never will.

I’m an optimist by nature, I’m sure we will segue & transition into something we probably haven’t even imagined yet.

But it’s very hard to imagine our current hands off laissez fair style of economy functioning in the 2020’s in the face of so much unemployment.

Dr. Anders Sandberg:

Back in the 19th century it would have seemed absurd that the economy could absorb all those farmers. But historical examples may be misleading: the structure of the economy changes.

In many ways laissez faire economics work perfectly fine in the super-unemployed scenario: we just form an internal economy, less effective than the official one sailing off into the stratosphere, and repeat the process (the problem might be if property rights make it impossible to freely set up a side economy). But clearly there is a lot of human capital wasted in this scenario.

Some people almost reflexively suggest a basic income guarantee as the remedy to an increasingly automated economy. I think we need to think much more creatively about other solutions, the BIG is just one possibility (and might not even be feasible in many nations).

_________________________

Question:

What is the most defining characteristic of transhumanism as an idea in the 10s compared with the 00s?

Dr. Anders Sandberg:

Back when I started in the 90s we were all early-Wired style tech enthusiasts. The future was coming, and it was all full of cyber! Very optimistic, very much based on the idea that if we could just organise better and convince society that transhumanism was a good idea, then we would win.

By the 00s we had learned that just having organisations does not mean your ideas get taken seriously. Although they were actually taken seriously to a far greater extent: the criticism from Fukuyama and others actually forced a very healthy debate about the ethics and feasibility of transhumanism. Also, the optimism had become tempered post-dotcom, post-911: progress is happening, but much more uneven and slow than we may have hoped for. It was by this point the existential risk and AI safety strands came into their own.

Transhumanism in the 10s? Right now I think the cool thing is the posttranshumanist movements like the rationalists and the effective altruists: in many ways full of transhumanist ideas, yet not beholden to always proclaiming their transhumanism. We have also become part of institutions, and there are people that grew up with transhumanism who are now senior enough to fund things, make startups or become philanthropists.

_________________________

Question:

Which do you think is more important for the future of humanity, the exploration of outer space (planets, stars, galaxies, etc.)? Or the exploration of inner space (consciousness, intelligence, self, etc.)?

Dr. Anders Sandberg:

Both, but in different ways. Exploration of outer space is necessary for long term survival. Exploration of inner space is what may improve us.

Question:

What step would you take first? Would you first discover “everything” or as much as possible about inner space, or outer space?

Dr. Anders Sandberg:

I suspect safety first: getting off-planet is a good start. But one approach does not preclude working on the other at the same time.•

Tags:

“The Tasks That Have Proved Most Vexing To Automate Are Those Demanding Flexibility, Judgment, And Common Sense”

September 15, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The MIT economist David Autor doesn’t believe it’s different this time, he doesn’t think automation will lead to widespread technological unemployment any more than it did during the Industrial Revolution or the last AI scares of the 1960s and 1970s. Autor feels that robots may come for some of our jobs, but there will still be enough old and new ones to busy human hands because our machine brethren will probably never be our equal in common sense, adaptability and creativity. Technology’s new tools may be fueling wealth inequality, he acknowledges, but the fear of AI soon eliminating Labor is unfounded. 

Well, perhaps. But if you’re a truck or bus or taxi or limo or delivery driver, a hotel clerk or bellhop, a lawyer or paralegal, a waiter or fast-casual food preparer, or one of the many other workers whose gigs will probably disappear, you may be in for some serious economic pain before abundance emerges at the other side of the new arrangement.

Autor certainly is right in arguing that the main economic problem caused by mass automation would be “one of distribution, not of scarcity.” But that’s an issue requiring some political consensus to solve, and reaching a majority isn’t easy these days in our polarized society.

From Autor’s smart article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs?“:

Polanyi’s Paradox: Will It Be Overcome?

Automation, complemented in recent decades by the exponentially increasing power of information technology, has driven changes in productivity that have disrupted labor markets. This essay has emphasized that jobs are made up of many tasks and that while automation and computerization can substitute for some of them, understanding the interaction between technology and employment requires thinking about more than just substitution. It requires thinking about the range of tasks involved in jobs, and how human labor can often complement new technology. It also requires thinking about price and income elasticities for different kinds of output, and about labor supply responses.

The tasks that have proved most vexing to automate are those demanding flexibility, judgment, and common sense—skills that we understand only tacitly. I referred to this constraint above as Polanyi’s paradox. In the past decade, computerization and robotics have progressed into spheres of human activity that were considered off limits only a few years earlier—driving vehicles, parsing legal documents, even performing agricultural field labor. Is Polanyi’s paradox soon to be at least mostly overcome, in the sense that the vast majority of tasks will soon be automated?

My reading of the evidence suggests otherwise. Indeed, Polanyi’s paradox helps to explain what has not yet been accomplished, and further illuminates the paths by which more will ultimately be accomplished. Specifically, I see two distinct paths that engineering and computer science can seek to traverse to automate tasks for which we “do not know the rules”: environmental control and machine learning. The first path circumvents Polanyi’s paradox by regularizing the environment, so that comparatively inflexible machines can function semi-autonomously. The second approach inverts Polanyi’s paradox: rather than teach machines rules that we do not understand, engineers develop machines that attempt to infer tacit rules from context, abundant data, and applied statistics.•

Tags:

“His Rise Is Baffling To Electoral Veterans”

September 15, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Why do I feel that the chance of seemingly kindly Ben Carson being President is even slimmer than that of Donald Trump, a dump truck of a human being who’s always ready to pour dirt all over anything he deems in his way?

Perhaps that’s because Carson’s politics are truly much more retrograde than Trump’s, considering the neurosurgeon holds devout beliefs and the cartoonish real-estate mogul doesn’t really possess any, just hasty positions informed by a surfeit of ego and other personality defects. They’re as meaningful as when he asserts that he’s the “biggest builder in New York City,” even though he long ago stopped building here.

Trump’s a xenophobe and racist, the Birther-in-Chief, and his plan to drive millions of undocumented immigrants and their families from America is scary. But perhaps like most of his contentions, this scheme is more bullshit he’s made up as he’s gone along. And any of his few attempts at policy beyond blaming “foreigners” seem stabs in the dark. He might change his feelings about them tomorrow, or even about running for President at all. His only intention, at long last, is attention.

Carson, conversely, genuinely wants to wage a war on women–or, at least, in his own Atwoodian terms, “what’s inside of women“–whereas Trump wants have a look inside for other reasons. Carson really believes “being gay is a choice.” He’s said with conviction that Obamacare is the “worst thing since slavery.” He means it.

Beware the quiet ones.

From Edward Luce’s FT column about the contrasting styles of the two early GOP leaders:

The personality difference between the two is acute. Mr Carson’s demeanour is as gentle — and apparently devoid of anger — as Mr Trump’s is harsh. As the only African-American in the race, Mr Carson, 63, sparks comparisons with Herman Cain, the pizza parlour king, who briefly held sway in the 2012 race with his tirelessly recited “999” tax plan. Mr Carson’s moment in the sun may end just as quickly. Yet his numbers have been building steadily for the past three months. At the second Republican debate on Wednesday night he will stand on the centre of stage next to Mr Trump. It will be a study in contrasts.

What unites them is their outsider status — at this point, experience is the biggest handicap in the Republican battle. Any hint of a past in politics is toxic. Almost everything else differs. Mr Trump comes from a wealthy background as the son of a New York developer. Mr Carson is genuinely self-made. Raised by an illiterate single mother in Detroit, he worked his way to become head of the prestigious Johns Hopkins Hospital and became the first surgeon, in 1987, to separate Siamese twins at birth. His autobiography, Gifted Hands, remains a best-seller. Among some Christian conservatives, Mr Carson is viewed as a handmaiden of the Lord.

Yet his rise is baffling to electoral veterans. If anything, Mr Carson’s string of gaffes are more shocking than Mr Trump’s.•

 

Tags: , ,

“Anything You Should Be Allowed To Do For Free, You Should Also Be Allowed To Do For Money”

September 14, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ilya Somin of the Volokh Conspiracy blog at the Washington Post has capsules of two new books with a Libertarian bent, one of which is Markets Without Limits: Moral Virtues and Commercial Interests by Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski. The main premise seems to be that activities deemed legal if done for no financial gain should also be permitted if there is a charge. Selling kidneys and sex are two chief examples. On the face of it, that makes a lot of sense, except…

What if placing a financial value on a kidney reduces the number of organs donated for free, making them unaffordable except to people who could bid the highest? Would we want the market regulating such a thing?

Prostitution would seem like an easier problem: It’s always existed, so let’s stop being silly and just legalize it. One argument against: If it was okay to have group-sex clubs (like the infamous Plato’s Retreat), wouldn’t that create a ground zero for STDs that could go beyond the participants? Couldn’t it be a public-health threat? Sure, people can arrange for such risky group behaviors for free now, but legalization would commodify and encourage them.

It always seems exciting to strip away regulations, but there are hardly ever simple solutions. At any rate, I look forward to reading the book. 

From Somin:

In Markets Without Limits, [Jason] Brennan and [Peter] Jaworski argue that anything you should be allowed to do for free, you should also be allowed to do for money. They do not claim that markets should be completely unconstrained, merely that we should not ban any otherwise permissible transaction solely because money has been exchanged. Thus, for example, they agree that murder for hire should be illegal. But only because it should also be illegal to commit murder for free. Their thesis is also potentially compatible with a wide range of regulations of various markets to prevent fraud, deception, and the like. Nonetheless, their thesis is both radical and important. The world is filled with policies that ban selling of goods and services that can nonetheless be given away for free. Consider such cases as bans on organ markets, prostitution, and ticket-scalping.•

Tags: , ,

“Many Mysteries Remain”

September 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The excellent Ross Anderson, formerly Deputy Editor at Aeon, is now a Senior Editor at the Atlantic, in charge of the new stand-alone Science section. Definitely worth bookmarking. From his introductory letter:

We live in an age that may come to be regarded as a second enlightenment, a time when science supplies us with discovery after discovery, each more wondrous than the last. Scientists have measured the temperature of the Big Bang’s afterglow out to ten decimal places. They have mapped a decent chunk of the observable universe, in detail so granular, it astonishes. They are predicting events that will take place one trillion years from now.

Scientists are slinging drones out to Pluto, to image its icy peaks. They are bringing distant earths into focus. They are beginning to understand how this Earth’s physical, biological, ecological, technological, and cultural systems interact, across vast time scales, and with important consequences for our future. They are sequencing and reshuffling genomes. They are starting to get a grip on the brain, the most complicated phenomenon in the known universe.

And yet, many mysteries remain. What does it mean that human beings emerged only a geological moment ago, lone survivors among a larger family of hominins? Charles Darwin may have explained the origin of species, but what about the origin of life? Or the nature of quantum reality, which appears to be indeterminate, in some deep sense? What does that mean? And how has this tiny, teeming world given rise to consciousness, a phenomenon that seems to belong to its own metaphysical category? Will we ever be able to reverse engineer consciousness? Or in this, as with so many other questions, are we now reaching the limits of science? How are we making sense of all these questions, each one of us, in our distinctive human cultures?•

Tags:

“Japan Is Already A Robotics Powerhouse”

September 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If you’re a homogenous culture with a lack of fervor for immigration and a graying population as Japan is, robots are a necessity, an elegant solution even, as Yoshiaki Nohara writes in an Financial Review article. For a country like America that embraces immigration (well, some of us still do) and has thrived on youthful demographics, it’s more complicated.

From Nohara:

The rise of the machines in the workplace has US and European experts predicting massive unemployment and tumbling wages.

Not in Japan, where robots are welcomed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government as an elegant way to handle the country’s aging populace, shrinking workforce and public aversion to immigration.

Japan is already a robotics powerhouse. Abe wants more and has called for a “robotics revolution.” His government launched a five-year push to deepen the use of intelligent machines in manufacturing, supply chains, construction and health care, while expanding the robotics markets from 660 billion yen ($US5.5 billion) to 2.4 trillion yen by 2020.

“The labour shortage is such an acute issue that companies have no choice but to boost efficiency,” says Hajime Shoji, the head of the Asia-Pacific technology practice at Boston Consulting Group. “Growth potential is huge.” By 2025, robots could shave 25 percent off of factory labour costs in Japan, according to the consulting firm.•

Tags: ,

« Older entries § Newer entries »