Excerpts

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“[A] Robot That Gives ‘Informatics’ To Surgeons Doing Critical Tasks”

March 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Every time I read something about Google’s driverless cars or robotic surgeons, I’m reminded of the time I looked up NYC weather on the search engine and the logarithm supplied me with a temperature ten degrees too warm. I wore the wrong jacket.

Mild inconveniences can become life-and-death threats when the stakes are raised. If these ghosts in the machines can be worked through, the potential boon to humanity from such AI assistance is great. Though the vow that the operating theater will always be the domain of the carbon-based surgeon seems a promise not ours to make. From David Crow at Financial Times:

Robotic technology has become increasingly common in operating theatres as patients opt for “minimally-invasive” procedures, which allow the surgeon to make smaller incisions that cause less pain and scarring than open operations. Around 3m of these lighter-touch operations are carried out in the US each year.

Google will not develop the systems that control the surgical instruments, but will explore how advanced imaging and sensors could be integrated into J&J’s robots. For example, software could help to highlight blood vessels or nerves that are difficult to see with the naked eye.

Gary Pruden, chairman of J&J’s global surgery group, said the company would work with Google to produce a “much smarter robot that gives ‘informatics’ to surgeons doing critical tasks”.

“Google has the intellectual property and capability to help us make a robot that is much more than just an extension of a surgeon’s eyes and arms. It would give them the information to make decisions . . . right down to where to make the best incision,” he said.

Mr Pruden likened such a robot to a surgical preceptor that observes and guides a less experienced colleague during an operation, although he insisted it “would always be the surgeon that is the decision maker”.

The companies hope the technology will improve the quality of surgery in emerging markets, where the number of inexperienced surgeons results in a higher degree of failure, said Mr Pruden.•

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“Pilots Often Aren’t Very Familiar With Each Other”

March 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Commercial-plane cockpits always seem a fraternal if cramped space, co-pilots, we imagine, sharing tight quarters, amusing quips, secret handshakes and after-flight drinks. (You hope it’s after the flight.) But as Germanwings 9525 demonstrated, many of the aviators serving the world are veritable strangers. Would it have made a difference if his fellow fliers had some familiarity with Andreas Lubitz? From a Spiegel investigation into the unnecessary disaster:

As tempting as it may be, one shouldn’t imagine the people in the cockpit as teams or partners who know each other well and have done so for a long time. The opposite is actually true. At major airlines, pilots often aren’t very familiar with each other, if at all. The pilot and co-pilot are often teamed up for a flight by throw of dice. Afterwards, they have a few days off and then fly again with a different colleague. The lack of familiarity is deliberate because the airlines want to avoid situations where too much trust gets built up. Everyone is meant to work as dictated by the rules and not like some old couple who create their own. This lack of familiarity is considered to be beneficial to safety, but is it? Could problems with a man like Lubitz have been detected earlier if someone had been more closely associated with him?

In many ways, the fact that taking a closer look at the life of Andreas Lubitz may not get us closer to solving the mystery is even more disturbing than it would have been if a convincing motive could be found. A closer look at the life of a co-pilot who became a murderer shows a lot of signs of ordinariness, with nothing to indicate he might be close to the abyss. Throughout his life, Lubitz cracked ordinary jokes, he listened to ordinary music and he wrote ordinary things. By all appearances, he seemed to be just a normal guy.

It’s possible that his insanity was buried so deep in his head that even his girlfriend had no idea about it. It has been reported that the two lived in Düsseldorf and that they wanted to get married. She worked as a math teacher and was reportedly already on her way to the site of the crash in southern France when she learned that her boyfriend had not been a victim, but rather a likely perpetrator responsible for killing 149 people.•

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“Many Do Sport Fangs”

March 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

There are vampires among us, seriously, and there always have been–even in Albany. The fanged set lives by night and slakes with blood, though they will likely leave your neck alone. John Edgar Browning’s The Conversation post, “What They Do in the Shadows,” looks at what would seem a particularly meshuganah corner of U.S. ethnography, though it’s probably no stranger than anything else. What’s particularly interesting is that these American gothics largely ignore their depictions in popular culture. An excerpt:

“Real vampires” is the collective term by which these people are known. They’re not “real” in the sense that they turn into bats and live forever but many do sport fangs and just as many live a primarily nocturnal existence. These are just some of the cultural markers real vampires adopt to express a shared (and, according to them, biological) essence – they need blood (human or animal) or psychic energy from donors in order to feel healthy.

Their self-described nature begins to manifest around or just after puberty. It derives, according to them, from the lack of subtle energies their bodies produce – energies other people take for granted. That’s the general consensus anyway. It’s a condition they claim to be unable to change. So, they embrace it.

The real vampire community, like the legendary figure it emulates, knows few national boundaries, from Russia and South Africa to England and the United States. Particularly in the internet age, vampires are often well attuned to community issues.

This is more true for some than others though. I found the vampires of Buffalo to be keen to keep up to date with the global community, while those in New Orleans were often more interested in the activities of their local vampire houses (an affiliated group of vampires usually led by a vampire elder who helps his or her house members to acclimate to their vampiric nature).

Some houses, and indeed whole vampire communities, as in the case of New Orleans, will combine their efforts to organise charity events, like feeding (not feeding on) the homeless. However, despite their humanitarian efforts, real vampires don’t go around advertising who they are for fear of discrimination by people who simply don’t understand them.•

 

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“We Demonize People, But Everybody Has A Mother”

March 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Ramsey Clark, now there’s a person. Some people aren’t, but he is. A former U.S. Attorney General and a million other things, Clark just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. He answered questions in full paragraphs. Imagine that. An exchange about the JFK assassination and one about LBJ.

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Question:

My question pertains to your involvement in White House politics in the 1960’s and your familiarity with the assassination of President Kennedy: Who do you think orchestrated the assassination?

Ramsey Clark:

I remember thinking for years I’ll never be happy again after President Kennedy’s assassination.

Because the single act of a deranged person – being my interpretation, that only a deranged person would do it – could make you unhappy, then you’re making a fool of yourself for life. There are things to be done, you know? Including having a good time. Enjoying life.

And if you let it get you down, it’s your own fault.

But i remember I used to have to drive home from the Department of Justice. And I’d go down, over Memorial Bridge. And we worked late at night. And I’d see the Eternal Flame up there… and it nearly always pulled me down a little bit.

But it was reinforcing my determination to carry on.

It’s bad enough he got killed. But if it also got down the people nearest to him – then you became part of the problem, not the solution, yourself.

Well, there’s something in the nature of things that… makes us want to find some vast evil power that’s responsible for things that hurt us so badly.

But that’s very deceptive.

That happens, but life doesn’t work that way.

And you know, I went through it with President Kennedy, and with Bob Kennedy. I used to see the mother of the man that killed Bob Kennedy – she’d be there every morning I went in. There’d be times that I would be going in daily for weeks, ‘cuz somebody was in prison there, and his mother was always there. Every morning i went in, she was there. She was there waiting, because she’d get there, and wait, and wait. Perhaps she’d still be there when we left. Particularly if it was a trial morning.

We had a major trial in San Francisco, where you could see the prisoner in the morning, and then at the trial in a couple of hours.

Not often, but if there was something important to talk about, they’d bring him over and have him talk in the Courthouse. They brought Sirhan Sirhan over, in a helicopter, from the Federal prison on San Francisco bay, and landed on the roof as I recall. I’m not quite sure about that. But they brought him right to the courthouse by helicopter. But i’d see his mother nearly every time you got in there, if she wasn’t already visiting with her son. She was visiting him every day.

Which is another piece of evidence that we’re all human.

We demonize people, but everybody has a mother.

And nearly all those mothers love whomever happens to be their child.

That’s the way the world is. One of the better things about the world.

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Question:

What was Lyndon Johnson like?

Ramsey Clark:

Well, he was first and foremost a driven person.

Enormous store of energy. Worked all the time.

7 days a week, he was always working, always thinking ’bout his work. This was during his presidency.

I had the unfortunate position of being the liaison between Vice President Johnson and Attorney General Kennedy, because they didn’t like each other. So when they had communication between them, it went through me.

Which was an uncomfortable position to be in, but it was a service, haha! Communication was important, and neither of them felt like conducting it face-to-face.

But it certainly toned it down, and got the word through. It took a lot of my time. I spent better of it, but it was worth it.

Well, Johnson’s principal characteristic was he had enormous drive. And he worked ALL the time. He was thinking about work all the time.

He’d call at 3 o’clock in the morning and say “WHAT!? you’re asleep!?”

And you’d say Yes, you woke me up!

His job was 7 days a week, and probably close to 16, 18 hours a day.

But he loved it, hehe!

And it made a difference. It wasn’t good for family, perhaps, although what you find is that you make a lot better use of the time together when you don’t have much time together. So he and the girls and Ladybird were a very tight little family.

And very natural. I remember one night I was sitting there, about 8:30, and Lucy, the younger daughter, came in – it was a week night, and she was probably still in high school I think, probably a senior. And she had something she wanted to talk to him about. And so she started to go back to the door, and he said “You go back now finish your homework and go to bed.” And she said “No, I’m going out.” And he said “No, you’re not going out.” And she said “Daddy, it doesn’t work that way, I’m going out.”

That was an exact quote. “Daddy, it doesn’t work that way.” Haha!

I don’t think there’s many people in the world who would’ve talked to him like that, but his daughter would, haha!

Between a father and a daughter, it didn’t work that way. She didn’t elaborate on it, just said “Daddy, it doesn’t work that way.”

Course, they loved each other, but she went out on her date.•

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LBJ ordering pants:

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“There Are Also Important Risks, And Humanity’s Extinction Is Only The Most Radical”

March 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Weak AI and Strong AI (or Narrow AI and Artificial General Intelligence, if you prefer) can both help and hurt us, if on a different order of magnitude. The former can mow our lawns, disrupt the gardening industry and perhaps run down a cricket that you or I would have swerved from (though you and I haven’t been angels to the creatures, either). The latter is probably necessary if we are to avoid human extinction–although it may cause the same. In her Slate essay “Striking the Balance on Artificial Intelligence,” philosopher and neuroscientist Cecilia Tilli calmly assesses the situation. An excerpt:

The benefits of narrow A.I. systems are clear: They free up time by automatically completing tasks that are time-consuming for humans. They are not completely autonomous, but many require only minimal human intervention—the better the system, the less we need to do. A.I.s can also do other useful things that humans can’t, like proving certain mathematical theorems or uncovering hidden patterns in data.

Like other technologies, however, current A.I. systems can cause harm if they fail or are badly designed. They can also be dangerous if they are intentionally misused (e.g., a driverless car carrying bombs or a drone carrying drugs). There are also legal and ethical concerns that need to be addressed as narrow A.I. becomes smarter: Who is liable for damages caused by autonomous cars? Should armed drones be allowed total autonomy?

Special consideration must be given to economic risks. The automation of jobs is on the rise. According to a study by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne (who are my colleagues at the University of Oxford), 47 percent of current U.S. jobs have a high probability of being automated by 2050, and a further 23 percent have a medium risk. Although the consequences are uncertain, some fear that increased job automation will lead to increased unemployment and inequality.

Given the already widespread use of narrow A.I., it’s easy to imagine the benefits of strong A.I. (also known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI). AGI should allow us to further automate work, amplify our ability to perform difficult tasks, and maybe even replace humans in some fields. (Think of what a fully autonomous, artificial surgeon could achieve.) More importantly, strong A.I. may help us finally solve long-standing problems—even deeply entrenched challenges like eradicating poverty and disease.  

But there are also important risks, and humanity’s extinction is only the most radical. More intermediate risks include general societal problems due to lack of work, extreme wealth inequality, and unbalanced global power.

Given even the remote possibility of such catastrophic outcomes, why are some people so unwilling to consider them? Why do people’s attitudes toward AGI risk vary so widely? The main reason is that two forecasts get confused. One concerns the possibility of achieving AGI in the foreseeable future; the other concerns its possible benefits. These are two different scenarios, but many people confuse them: “This is not happening any time soon” becomes “AGI presents no risks.”

In contrast, for many of us AGI is an actual possibility within the next 100 years. In that case, unless we prepare ourselves for the challenge, AGI could present serious difficulties for humanity, the most extreme being extinction. Again, these worries might just be precautionary: We don’t know when AGI is coming and what its impact will be. But that’s why we need to investigate the matter: Assuming that nothing bad will happen is just negligent wishful thinking.•

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“Reports Of Odd Animal Behavior Before A Quake Date Back At Least As Far As Ancient Greece”

March 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Speaking of educated livestock: What do the animals know and when do they know it? Can they tell the earth is about to quake, or is this a story we tell ourselves because we want to steal some of disaster’s efficacy? It seems it may be the former. From the Economist:

SEISMOLOGISTS tend to greet the idea that some animals know when an earthquake is coming with a sizeable degree of scepticism. Though reports of odd animal behaviour before a quake date back at least as far as ancient Greece, the data are all anecdotal. They are also subject to vagaries of the human psyche: “confirmation bias” ensures that strange behaviour not followed by earthquakes gets forgotten, and “flashbulb memory” can, should an earthquake strike, imbue quotidian animal antics with great import after the fact. The US Geological Survey—arguably the world’s authority on earthquakes—undertook studies in the 1970s to find out if animals really did predict them, but came up empty-handed. However, the latest data, just published in Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, are not just anecdotal.

Friedemann Freund of San Jose State University, in California, and his colleagues considered the earthquake of magnitude seven that hit north-eastern Peru in August 2011. They found that, by coincidence, the nearby Yanachaga National Park had in the month running up to the quake been using nine so-called camera traps. These are employed to track the movements of rare or skittish animals, silently snapping pictures (for example, that above, of a paca) when motion sensors are triggered.

Well ahead of the tremor, the traps recorded up to 18 animals a day, but that number began to drop off steeply as the earthquake approached.•

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“There Is No Reason Why The School Room Should Be Any Less Mechanized Than The Kitchen”

March 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

B.F. Skinner, who felt we could use some training, created a Teaching Machine in the 1950s to help improve our behavior. Thanks to the wonderful 3 Quarks Daily, I read Sophia Nguyen’s Harvard Magazine article about the reconsideration of Skinner’s contraption in the computer age, as classrooms become increasingly plugged in. The goal for such machines should, of course, be something other than teaching us chickens how to play tic-tac-toe. In investigating gaming as learning, Nguyen writes of the vision of designer Eric Zimmerman:

Future generations will understand their world in terms of games and systems, and will respond to it as players and designers—navigating, manipulating, and improving upon them.

The opening:

ON NOVEMBER 11, 1953, psychology professor B.F. Skinner sat in a fourth-grade math class, perturbed. It was Parents Day at his daughter Deborah’s school. The lesson seemed grossly inefficient: students proceeded through the material in lock-step, at the same pace; their graded assignments were returned to them sluggishly.

A leading proponent of what he called “radical behaviorism,” Skinner had devoted his career to studying feedback. He denied the existence of free will and dismissed inner mental states as explanations for outward action. Instead, he focused on the environment and the organism’s response. He had trained rats to push levers and pigeons to play Ping-Pong. A signed photo of Ivan Pavlov presided over his study in Cambridge. Turning his attention to a particular subset of the human animal—the schoolchild—Skinner invented his Teaching Machine.

Roughly the size and shape of a typewriter, the machine allowed a student to progress independently through a curriculum, answering test items and getting instant feedback with a few pulls of a lever. “The student quickly learns to be right. His work is pleasurable. He does not have to force himself to study,” Skinner claimed. “A classroom in which machines are being used is usually the scene of intense concentration.” With hardly any hindrance from peers or teachers, thousands of students could receive knowledge directly from a single textbook writer. He told The Harvard Crimson, “There is no reason why the school room should be any less mechanized than the kitchen.”

Sixty years later, Skinner’s reductionist ideas about teaching and learning continue to haunt public education—especially as it’s once again being called upon to embrace technology.•

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Teaching machine and programmed learning, from 1954:

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“It Faces A Rise In The Power Resources Of Many Others — Both States And Non-State Actors”

March 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

A little more from Joseph Nye, author of Is the American Century Over?, who takes a largely sanguine view of our path forward, arguing that the U.S. still has great assets while acknowledging that it will no longer be lonely at the top. From Nye in the Financial Times:

A century is generally the limit for a human organism but countries are social constructs. Rome did not collapse until more than three centuries after it reached its apogee of power in 117AD. After American independence in 1776 Horace Walpole, the British politician, lamented that his nation had been reduced to the level of Sardinia, just as Britain was about to enter the industrial revolution that powered its second century as a global power.

Any effort at assessing American power in the coming decades should take into account how many earlier efforts have been wide of the mark. It is chastening to remember how wildly exaggerated US estimates of Soviet power in the 1970s and of Japanese power in the 1980s were. Today some see the Chinese as 10ft tall and proclaim this “the Chinese century”.

China’s size and relatively rapid economic growth will bring it closer to the US in terms of its power resources in the next few decades. But this does not necessarily mean it will surpass the US in military, economic and soft power.

Even if China suffers no big domestic political setback, many projections are simple linear extrapolations of growth rates that are likely to slow in the future. Moreover, economic projections are one dimensional. They ignore US military and soft power advantages, such as the desire of students around the world to attend US universities. They also overlook China’s geopolitical dis­advantages in the Asian balance of power, compared with America’s relations with Europe, Japan and India, which are likely to remain more favourable.

It is not impossible that a challenger such as China, Europe, Russia, India or Brazil will surpass the US in the first half of this century but it is but not likely. …

The real problem is not that it will be overtaken by China or another contender but rather that it faces a rise in the power resources of many others — both states and non-state actors such as transnational corporations, terrorist groups and cyber criminals.•

 

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“He Gave Off A Good Feeling”

March 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We don’t even fully know ourselves, let alone others, but it would be impossible to function without pretending we do. 

Perhaps there’s someone among us who understands what appears to be the monstrous end of Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot of the Germanwings flight who seems to have purposely put the plane into the mountains. The case may have been all but solved for practical purposes, but in another sense it could always remain a mystery. Was it a willful act? A descent into madness? Sometimes there’s truly no one at the controls. From Tom Porter of International Business Times:

Details of Lubitz’s life are still emerging, with investigators confirming he did not have any known terrorist links. According to the website of the flight club where he was a member, the co-pilot was from Montabaur in Rhineland Palatinate.

Members of the Montbaur flying club where Lubitz renewed his glider license last month said he was pleased to have gained a job with Germanwings. 

“He was happy he had the job with Germanwings and he was doing well,” longtime club member Peter Ruecker, told AP. “He was very happy. He gave off a good feeling.”

Ruecker said that Lubitz had a girlfriend. “I can’t remember anything where something wasn’t right,” he said.

Montabaur city mayor Gabriele Wieland, speaking to the DPA press agency, said Lubitz lived with his parents in Montabaur and also had a residence in Dusseldorf, where the Germanwings flight was heading before it crashed.

German media reports he had 630 flight hours and joined budget airline Germanwings straight out of Lufthansa Flight Training School in Bremen in September 2013. Authorities have not confirmed if he had any experience as a professional pilot prior to that.

At a press conference on 26 March, Lufthansa announced Lubitz interrupted his training for a number of weeks six years ago. They did not provide details on the reasons for this interruption, but said he had been subjected to health checks afterwards. 

They said he had passed all psychological and physical tests prior to starting work as a pilot.

“Andreas became a member of the club as a youth to fulfil his dream of flying,” the club said in a death notice on its website.

“He fulfilled his dream, the dream he now paid for so dearly with his life,” the club said, reports the Wall Street Journal.•

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“SaviOne’s Only On-Screen Facial Feature Is A Pair Of Blinking Eyes”

March 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Weak AI is going to roll in quietly, just a little hum to hypnotize us while the jobs disappear. The dream of the human-free labor force, a long-held one, is finally making strides. The robot butler is here, and you’ve been served. Grab what you can on the way out.

From “Bring on the Boring Robots,” Erik Sofge’s Popular Science piece about the mundane nature of the new machines, their gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun:

Compared to the usual subjects of robotics coverage—assassin drones, driverless cars, Amazon’s still-completely-hopeless delivery bot program—there’s nothing particularly titillating about an autonomous courier rolling quietly through hotel corridors, looking more like a small, mobile ATM than the “butler bot” that it’s sometimes described as. Is it interesting that it can weave through foot traffic without, as many other self-navigating bots do, grinding to a halt until the area is completely clear of humans? Is it cool that it can share an elevator with people, accomplishing the not-insignificant task of navigating in extremely close-quarters without bumping into or obstructing guests? Yes and yes, but only for people with an outsize interest in the nuts and bolts of robotics.

For everyone else, what’s interesting about SaviOne—and the upcoming Relay—is that they’re exactly as boring as robots should be, if they’re going to effectively populate the greater human world. Courier bots already ferry items around hospitals, though with less agility and understated charm as Savioke’s machines (SaviOne’s only on-screen facial feature is a pair of blinking eyes). The future of ubiquitous robotics isn’t in hyper-capable androids, but in specialized, good-enough systems that scurry about their narrowly-defined jobs.

Which isn’t to say that [Savioke CEO Steve] Cousins is thinking small. Hotels are obviously a huge market, and other environments could benefit from outsourcing the point-to-point delivery of small items to a mobile machine. Savioke is looking at nursing homes and offices, and banks have already expressed interest in Relay. Years from now, when fantasies of dishwasher-loading automatons are still fully out of reach, and self-driving cars are still relegated to HOV-style lanes in sunny California, we’ll have long since learned to ignore the swarms of hard-working, single-minded robots buzzing around underfoot. Boring is a matter of perspective.•

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“Survivalism Is The Ultimate Vote Of No Confidence In The Government”

March 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Do most survivalists fear the end is near or that it will never arrive?

The preppers are ready for any calamity, to such an extent that it would almost be a shame if they didn’t get to break out their Bug Out Bags. Some almost seem to be welcoming of the end, whatever that would entail, weary of the modern madness. I mean, you don’t dress for a party you don’t want to attend. You certainly can’t say this about all involved, but there are those with a taste for freeze-dried food that no other meal will satisfy.

And because whatever age your living in is the modern one, such concerns are nothing new. From a 1981 People piece about the second boom in the American bomb-shelter business:

They call themselves survivalists. They would have us believe we are on the brink of nuclear war, economic collapse, technological breakdown, Communist takeover—you name it. In a mushrooming movement that recalls the bomb shelter craze of the 1950s, these end-is-near believers, thought to number somewhere between two and five million and concentrated in the Western U.S., are busy storing food, weapons and gasoline in remote hideaways against the day of reckoning. It may seem unduly pessimistic of them—or optimistic, given their plain belief in living through the apocalypse. But whatever the merits of their reasoning, they are a peculiarly American group, styling themselves as rough-and-ready pioneers on the most discouraging frontier of all. “Most individuals in societies fearing collapse band together,” observes Dr. Alan Dundes, professor of anthropology at Berkeley. “But Americans take to the hills to fend off nuclear holocaust with a shotgun and a supply of food.”

And, of course, there’s gold in them hills, as enterprising businessmen, real estate developers, authors and teachers of self-defense have been quick to discover. Fallout shelters are being dug by the thousands, and freeze-dried food sales (including a line of nonperishable high-protein dog food called Sir Vival) are heating up. Many of the original survivalists were Mormons, descendants of ruggedly self-sufficient pioneers whose church has historically called upon every head of a household to store enough food for his family to last a year. The recent trend, though, is closely linked to current events: the Arab oil embargo, inflation, the Iranian hostage crisis. Each has translated as an uptick in the survival business.

On these pages are three men who have been caught up in the doom boom: an author, a fallout-condo builder and a retailer of survival goods, Bill Pier—one of a growing number of capitalists who have a stake in selling the future short. “Survival is the last thing we have,” says Pier. “It’s always been there. And we have a tendency to rise to the occasion or we wouldn’t be here, would we?”

Doug Clayton’s dad sees a craven new world

Little Dougie Clayton, now nearly 2, has a very special birthright: The family’s fallout shelter doubles as his romper room. Dougie’s father, Bruce, like many other Californians, believes that Armageddon is right around the corner, and besides the fallout shelter, there are a year’s supply of food, medical supplies in the pantry and two water beds full of pure drinking water in the bedrooms. “Survivalism is the ultimate vote of no confidence in the government,” says Clayton, 31. “If disaster comes, survivalists will help themselves. They are not hostile, just contemptuous.”

Clayton’s contempt was informed by his studies for a Ph.D. in ecology at the University of Montana. Curious about the possible effect of a nuclear attack, he came across what he considered horrifyingly simplistic and sometimes incorrect civil defense information provided by the government. After five years of research, he published Life after Doomsday: A Survivalist Guide to Nuclear War and Other Major Disasters (Paladin Enterprises, $19.95) early last year. He is currently working on a sequel, a guide to subsisting on wild edibles.

Clayton is less concerned about living through the holocaust than he is about peaceful coexistence with fellow survivors. “Some of them will have no food but thousands of dollars’ worth of guns and ammunition,” he says. “You ask them how they intend to get food in an emergency and they say right to your face, ‘We figure we’ll take yours.’ ” To guard against this possibility, Clayton is armed with military assault rifles and police riot guns and is ready to pack his family off to a secret retreat in the Sierra foothills. “I was never very sure that I could actually shoot people just to save myself,” he says, “but after Dougie was born, I discovered there was no question in my mind I would shoot to protect him.”•

“Privacy Will Have Been Abolished, And Regarded As A Cover For Criminality And Hypocrisy”

March 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If I’m still publishing this site by year’s end, I would think they’ll be a place on the Great 2015 Nonfiction Articles list (see last year’s) for Stefan Klein and Stephen Cave’s excellent new Aeon essay, “Once and Future Sins,” a thought experiment which considers what will be viewed as our deepest moral blind-spots in a century’s time. Can we divine it right now, or is it something none of us, conservative or liberal, even realize is an atrocity?

I would think slaughterhouses will be a sure thing, eating animals viewed the same as cannibalism. But what else? The penal system, I would assume. Probably income inequality. The future will name our sins for sure, but perhaps trying to do so in our time can hasten progress. As Klein and Cave point out, however, such moral advancement will come at the expense of some people’s privilege and pleasure, maybe even yours and mine. The essay’s opening:

In 100 years it will not be acceptable to use genderised words such as ‘he’ or ‘she’, which are loaded with centuries of prejudice and reduce a spectrum of greys to black and white. We will use the pronoun ‘heesh’ to refer to all persons equally, regardless of their chosen gender. This will of course apply not only to humans, but to all animals.

It will be an offence to eat any life-form. Once the sophistication, not only of other animals, but also of plants has been recognised, we will be obliged to accept the validity of their striving for life. Most of our food will be synthetic, although the consumption of fruit – ie, those parts of plants that they willingly offer up to be eaten – will be permitted on special occasions: a birthday banana, a Christmas pear.

We will not be permitted to turn off our smartphones – let alone destroy them – without their express permission. From the moment Siri started pleading with heesh’s owners not to upgrade to a newer model, it became clear that these machines contained a consciousness with interests of heesh’s own. Old phones will instead be retired to a DoSSBIS (Docking Station for Silicon-Based Intelligent Systems).

Privacy will have been abolished, and regarded as a cover for criminality and hypocrisy. It will be an offence to use a pseudonym online – why would anyone do this except to abuse or deceive others? – and all financial transactions of any kind, including earnings and tax payments – will automatically appear on the internet for all to see. With privacy, prudishness too will disappear; for example, wearing a bikini or trunks to go swimming will be seen as no less absurd than bathing in a bow-tie and top hat.

In 100 years, the idea that ordinary humans – prone to tiredness and drunkenness, watery eyes and sneezing fits – could be in sole charge of weapons, cars or other dangerous objects will cause the average citizen to shudder. All driving, fighting and arresting will be done by silicon-based intelligent systems that are prone neither to a tipple nor to hay fever.

Wasting water will be regarded with the same horror that we now regard the spilling of blood: as a squandering of the stuff of life. Those who flushed toilets with water of drinking quality (everyone in the industrialised world) will be put on a par with those who shot the last tigers.

Well, maybe.•

 

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“We Confabulate To Explain Our Choice”

March 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Card-shuffling McGill psychiatry student Jay Olson thinks our will may not be as free as we’d like to believe–in fact, it might often be an illusion straight out of a magic act. We’re nudged and cajoled constantly, primed and prodded, not just by our own memories and experiences and not only when suggestions are discrete and identifiable. Persuasion is everywhere. From David Robson at the BBC: 

Consider when you go to a restaurant for a meal. Olson says you are twice as likely to choose from the very top or very bottom of the menu – because those areas first attract your eye. “But if someone asks you why did you choose the salmon, you’ll say you were hungry for salmon,” says Olson. “You won’t say it was one of the first things I looked at on the menu.” In other words, we confabulate to explain our choice, despite the fact it had already been primed by the restaurant.

Or how about the simple task of choosing wine at the supermarket? Jennifer McKendrick and colleagues at the University of Leicester found that simply playing French or German background music led people to buy wines from those regions. When asked, however, the subjects were completely oblivious to the fact.

It is less clear how this might relate to other forms of priming, a subject of long controversy. In the 2000 US election, for instance, Al Gore supporters claimed the Republicans had flashed the word “RATS” in an advert depicting the Democrat representative. 

Gore’s supporters believed the (alleged) subliminal message about their candidate would sway voters. Replicating the ad with a made-up candidate, Drew Westen at Emory University, found that the flash of the word really did damage the politician’s ratings, according to subjects in the lab. Whether the strategy could have ever swayed the results of an election in the long term is debatable (similarly, the supposed success of subliminal advertising is disputed) but it seems likely that other kinds of priming do have some effect on behaviour without you realising it.

In one striking result, simply seeing a photo of an athlete winning a race significantly boosted telephone sales reps’ performance – despite the fact that most people couldn’t even remember seeing the picture. And there is some evidence showing that handing someone a hot drink can make you seem like a “warmer” person, or smelling a nasty odour can make you more morally “disgusted” and cause you to judge people more harshly.•

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“The Robot Already Has Seen Two Or Three Coffee Machines”

March 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Robots that deliver coffee to your suite of rooms are swell, but robotics enters another phase when machines can use Deep Learning to grow and adapt. Of course, we might not always like what they do with their newfound knowledge. From Technology.org:

In the near future we may have household robots to handle cooking, cleaning and other menial tasks. They will be teachable: Show the robot how to operate your coffee machine, and it will take over from there.

But suppose you buy a new, different coffee maker. Will you have to start over?

“The robot already has seen two or three coffee machines; it should be able to figure out how to use this one,” said Ashutosh Saxena, assistant professor of computer science. In robotics work up to now, he noted, a robot must be trained for each task and always positioned in the same relationship to the machine and its controls.

In his Robot Learning Lab, Saxena is making robots more adaptable. A new deep-learning algorithm developed by Saxena and graduate student Jaeyong Sung enables a robot to operate a machine it has never seen before, by consulting the instruction manual – probably available online – and drawing on its experience with other machines that have similar controls.

One thing that makes this hard is the “noise” in natural language instructions. Do you turn on the machine with a “knob” or a “switch?” Do you dispense coffee by pulling a “handle” or a “lever?” And then, where is that control on the machine, and what’s the proper way to manipulate it? For this, the robot draws on a database of recorded actions.

“We use a deep learning neural network that can tell the robot which action in a database is the closest to the one it has to perform,” Sung explained.•

______________________________

“Press the button to start grinding”:

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“Computers Are Going To Take Over From Humans, No Question”

March 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Here’s a thought about the future you don’t hear much: Steve Wozniak tells the Australian Financial Review that humans will be interrupted, permanently so, by machines, unless Moore’s Law finally sputters out. While quantum computing has proved a disappointment (and may be permanently beyond our reach), even if Gordon E. Moore’s rule hits a wall, that would probably only slow down the march of “progress,” not end it. An excerpt:

He said he has started to feel a contradictory sense of foreboding about the increasing sophistication of artificial intelligence, while still supporting the idea of continuing to push the boundaries of what technology can do

HUMANS SUPERSEDED

“Computers are going to take over from humans, no question,” Mr Wozniak said.

He said he had long dismissed the ideas of writers like Raymond Kurzweil, who have warned that rapid increases in technology will mean machine intelligence will outstrip human understanding or capability within the next 30 years. However Mr Wozniak said he had come to recognise that the predictions were coming true, and that computing that perfectly mimicked or attained human consciousness would become a dangerous reality.

“Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people. If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they’ll think faster than us and they’ll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently,” Mr Wozniak said.

“Will we be the gods? Will we be the family pets? Or will we be ants that get stepped on? I don’t know about that … But when I got that thinking in my head about if I’m going to be treated in the future as a pet to these smart machines … well I’m going to treat my own pet dog really nice.”

Mr Wozniak said the negative outcome could be stopped from occurring by the likely end of Moore’s Law, the pattern whereby computer processing speeds double every two years.•

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“The Report Was Regarded As Science Fiction By The League”

March 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

Sports Illustrated made the following statement about football not in 2015 but in 1978: “The game is headed toward a crisis, one that is epitomized by the helmet, which is both a barbarous weapon and inadequate protection.” This dire warning was attached to a series of articles reported by John Underwood about the dark side of Monday Night Lights, a clarion call about the devastating injuries that are endemic to the game, among other unsavory elements of the gridiron.

Since then, the sport hasn’t faced endgame, anything but, as football replaced baseball as America’s pastime, with its ubiquitous fantasy leagues and gambling and sophisticated content-delivery system. But that doesn’t mean Underwood wasn’t prophet, as the commonplace concussions–which just led Chris Borland to retire from the NFL at 24–aren’t going anywhere, no matter what type of helmet is developed. You can’t stop that type of whiplash, the brain slashing around inside the skull. The NFL’s ruling class is awfully good at self-delusion, but they worry sooner or later parents will steer youngsters from football the way they now do from boxing, the former king of sports.

From Underwood:

Once there was a game that had practically everything. Fun to play and exciting to watch, it was beloved by a nation of sports-minded people. It was held up to the nation’s youth as an exemplary physical test and as a builder of character. Outstanding men, including Presidents and Supreme Court Justices, had played it in their youth. Many observers considered it to be the definitive American game.

In time, the sport developed a professional adjunct. It was shown on television and was used to sell automobiles, beer and “pieces of the Rock.” As a result, some of the men who played the game were idolized and became rich.

Statistics showed that it was the nation’s most injurious team sport, but those who despaired of the weekend casualty lists were encouraged to look at the sport’s virtues, at the lives and profit statements it enhanced.

The game became contaminated, but the process was so gradual and insidious that few took notice. From the kiddie leagues to the major colleges and professional league, the sport’s public image grew more robust even as it decayed within. The injury rate mounted, sportsmanship declined. Vicious acts became commonplace.

Reform, though obviously needed, was resisted by the sport’s custodians. Most of its coaches were too busy trying to stay employed. They were also reluctant to give up “proven” coaching tenets. They said injuries were “part of the game.” They were supported in this by the players, who were busy trying to keep their scholarships or make their fortunes. For their part, the sport’s administrators were too busy trying to maximize their profits.

Eventually the professional league commissioned a study of injuries. The investigation was supposed to be private, but word of it got around. The study showed that the game’s equipment and many of its rules needed to be overhauled to keep pace with the times. Players were bigger, faster and stronger, but the laws of physics were constant: e.g., force=mass X acceleration. Nonetheless, the report was regarded as science fiction by the league. Only minimal changes were made; key recommendations were ignored.

Excess begot excess. Some of the sport’s paid stars were glorified for the “macho” way they broke the rules. A psychiatrist wrote firsthand about the amphetamine abuses of one pro team and how the drug contributed to injury. For this he was discredited by the league, which led a move to have his license revoked.

No sin was too great for absolution. College coaches caught cheating one year were named “Coach of the Year” the next. Pro players threatened officials, and each other, with impunity. The sport suddenly found itself crawling with lawyers. Charges ranging from breached contracts to slander were hurled. Players–teen-agers and adults–filed suit, seeking recompense for their broken bodies. Manufacturers of the game’s equipment learned they were faced with Judgment Day. The cost of insuring the game against itself soared alarmingly.

And all the while men of goodwill who loved the sport, and were involved in it, grew fearful for its future.

And wondered what would happen next.

And if any good seats were left for the big game.•

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“A New Creed’s Apparent Preposterousness Is No Guarantee Of Failure”

March 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

Scientology is really no goofier in its belief system than are any of the world’s major religions, with their virgin births and reincarnations and, yes, talking donkeys, but it seems predatory toward its adherents in a way scary cults are. Will it ever grow past that? As Alex Gibney’s broadside on the church of Hubbard and Travolta and Cruise prepares to air on HBO, the great Tom Carson writes of the anti-auditing doc at Grantland. An excerpt:

The church’s own claims of around million members aren’t what you’d call reliable, and that’s still a drop in the bucket to Vatican City and Mecca. But ex-insiders estimate the actual figure is a paltry 30,000 adherents worldwide. If so, Scientology’s prominence as an alternative faith and/or perceived public menace is some kind of tribute to Hubbard’s Warhol-anticipating perception that celebrity is currency; according to the same sources, one out of six of those 30,000 live in Los Angeles.

Another measure is staying power, which in this case is still TBD. It’s been only 60 years since founder L. Ron Hubbard ginned up a mental-health program into a mighty — let’s be polite — idiosyncratic theology. Remember, though, that a new creed’s apparent preposterousness is no guarantee of failure. In the first century A.D., Christianity’s tenets probably sounded fairly goofy up against the more plausible stuff about Jupiter, Minerva, & Co. that the civilized world swore by. At least in theory, it’s totally possible that sociable chat about thetans and Suppressive Persons — the jargon Hubbard bequeathed us — won’t be any more outlandish a few hundred years from now than being down with transubstantiation or the virgin birth.

Porky Pig turning drone may seem more likely, but whatever you think of the prospect, the day is brought no closer — and that’s putting it kindly — by Gibney’s harsh and sometimes blatantly alarmist doc. Its full title is Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief. Gibney’s take derives considerable authority from being based on prizewinning New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright’s scrupulously reported book of approximately the same name. (Wright’s subtitle had “Hollywood” in there, too, and it would be interesting to know what prompted the elision: The doc certainly features enough of John Travolta and Tom Cruise.) But so long as we’re talking the difference between religions and cults, try to imagine HBO running a comparable documentary about, say, Mormonism — in more ways than one, as Wright’s book details, Scientology’s 19th-century equivalent, at least in the popular suspicions (and derision) it aroused when it was founded.•

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“It Brings Immediacy To Your Thoughts, And That Is Something That Never Happened Before In The History Of Mankind”

March 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The graphic designer Massimo Vignelli, who passed away nearly a year ago, left a mark on New York City that’s dwarfed only by those on the level of Robert Moses and Frederick Law Olmsted. Here’s an excerpt from a 2006 Gary Hustwit interview with Vignelli (republished by Fast Company) in which the man who somehow made sense of our serpentine subway comments on the impact of modern machines on signage:

Question:

What’s your opinion of the impact of the computer on typography?

Massimo Vignelli:

In the ’60s, we were taking Standard and cutting the sides of the letters in order to get the type tighter. A good typographer always has sensitivity about the distance between letters. It makes a tremendous amount of difference. We think typography is black and white. Typography is really white, you know. It’s not even black, in a sense. It is the space between the blacks that really makes it. In a sense, it’s like music—it’s not the notes; it’s the space you put between the notes that makes the music. It’s very much the same situation.

The spacing between letters is important, and the spacing between the lines is important, too. And what typographers do, what we do all the time, is continuously work with those two elements, kerning and leading. Now, in the old times we were all doing this with a blade and cutting type and cutting our fingers all the time. But eventually, thank God, the Apple computer came about. Apple made the right kind of computer for the communication field. IBM made the PC, and the PC was no good for communication. The PC was great for numbers, and they probably made studies that there were more people involved with numbers—banks, insurance companies, businesses of all kinds. But they made a tremendous mistake at the same time by not considering the size of the communications world. That community is enormous, you know—newspapers, television, anything that is printed. It’s enormous. Advertising, design, you name it. 

Anyhow, Apple, thank God, got the intuition of going after that market, and so in 1990 they came out with a computer that we designers could use. Now, let’s face it: the computer is a great thing, but it’s just a tool, just like a pencil is a tool. The computer has much more memory, the pencil has no memory whatsoever, and I have even less. But it is a fantastic tool which allowed the best typography ever done in the history of typography, because you can do the kerning perfectly for the situation. You can do the leading perfectly for whatever you’re encountering. Not only that, but you see it right away; you can print it right away. It brings immediacy to your thoughts, and that is something that never happened before in the history of mankind.

It allows you to do the best typography ever, but it also allows you to do the worst ever.•

___________________________

“It’s the space between the notes”:

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“The Robot Astronaut Was Able To ‘Observe’ Certain Operations”

March 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Our friends are already electric, but is the current arrangement just prelude?

When you consider the place in our pockets–in our hearts–for our smartphones with all their endless content, is it any stretch to see robots as our pals? The alliance may start in space, but it will eventually touch down. Even if the robots can’t truly see us, they can watch us, and such a simulacrum may bring satisfaction. From Anthony Cuthbertson at IBM Times:

The Kibo Robot Project, set up in Japan around three years ago, is hoping that its robots can be used to better understand the relationship between robots and humans, with the eventual aim of providing complete companions for humans living increasingly isolated lives. …

The Kibo Robot Project originally formed from a collaboration between the University of Tokyo, Toyota, Robo Garage and Dentsu.

As a result, two identical humanoid robots – Kirobo and Mirata – were developed, each featuring voice and facial recognition, as well as natural language processing to allow them to understand and communicate with humans.

After a period of tests and experiments, one of the robots was sent up to join Japanese astronaut Wakata Koichi aboard the ISS.

While aboard the ISS, the robot astronaut was able to “observe” certain operations, however its functionality meant that its role as a companion was limited to short conversations with Wakata. As artificial intelligence technology advances it is hoped that robots such as these could be used on more long-term space missions.

“A robot would be utilised more in long-distance missions like on a journey to Mars,” Nishijima said. “It would be used to support the astronauts because sometimes a loss of signal occurs, and in that case the astronaut needs to have a companion or friend to talk to.”•

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“Eventually, These Advances In Software Will Rise To The Level Of Consciousness”

March 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I suppose there’s nothing theoretically impossible in pharmacological entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt’s dream of a second self for each us, one made of silicon, which will last forever, but I’m extremely skeptical when I hear those plans attached to the phrase “not-too-far-future.” And that doesn’t even take into consideration that our software siblings would be a version of us but not us. From Rick Jervis at USA Today:

AUSTIN – In a not-too-far-future, robotic mind-clones will accompany us to the ballot box or grocery store, sit in on business meetings we can’t make, argue with us occasionally and keep our essence alive long after we’re gone.

That’s the vision pharma tycoon and futurist Martine Rothblatt shared Sunday with several thousand attendees during one of the more popular events of Day 3 of SXSW Interactive.

“There will be continued advances in software that we see throughout our entire life,” Rothblatt told a packed audience in the cavernous Exhibit Hall 5 during her keynote speech. “Eventually, these advances in software will rise to the level of consciousness.” …

Rothblatt said robots and humans don’t have to choose sides – such as in the plotlines seen in popular Hollywood movies – but will live in a peaceful co-existence that will make them virtually indistinguishable from one another.

“It’s not us versus cyberspace,” she said. “We’re merging together.”

She added: “We don’t want to create a new slave-versus-free motif. I’m all for merging everyone together. On the level of consciousness, we’re all one.”

Rothblatt has applied many of her theories to practical experiments, including creating a lifelike robotic replica of her longtime wife, Bina Aspen. The robot, named Bina48, could answer questions and replies using the real Bina’s characteristics and mannerisms.

Robots in the future will have constitutional rights and even “cyber psychiatrists” who will ease the cyber’s anxiety of not being completely human, she said.•

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“It Isn’t A Car Anyone Would Ever Want To Drive”

March 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Two excerpts follow about driverless cars. The first is swooning review of a Mercedes robocar from Alex Davies of Wired, the second, from Google X’s Astro Teller at Backchannel, examines the more mundane problems of making autonomous a reality.

____________________________

From Davies:

There will come a time, within a few decades, when people simply will not drive anymore. This is a hard truth for automakers like Mercedes-Benz and Audi to acknowledge, given the time and money they spend portraying their cars as fun to drive. So they serve every shot of “Your car will drive itself!” with a chaser of “But you can always drive your car if you want to!” This will make sense as the transition to autonomous cars begins: You’ll take the wheel of your SL-Class when driving through the winding hills, it’ll take over on your boring commute.

But the day is coming when we won’t even do that. That explains why the steering wheel in the F 015 is largely vestigal.

I didn’t get behind the wheel of the F 015, and I had no desire to: It isn’t a car anyone would ever want to drive. For one thing, it’s huge. No amount of torque from the electric motors Mercedes happened to slap into this thing will ever make it an exhilarating performer. It’s also somewhat cumbersome; that epic wheelbase does nothing for its agility (Hutzenlaub says Mercedes would consider giving the car four-wheel steering if it ever considered production.)

But all of that is moot. As I nestled deeper into the leather seats, the idea of leaving the touch screens alone and taking the wheel seemed genuinely stupid. After all, you don’t leave first class to sit in the cockpit.

The F 015 one of the most thrilling cars I’ve ever seen. And I don’t want to drive it.•

____________________________

From Teller:

One of our projects is focused on building a fully self-driving car. If the technology could be made so that a car could drive all the places a person can drive with greater safety than when people drive in those same places, there are over a million lives a year that could be saved worldwide. Plus there’s over a trillion dollars of wasted time per year we could collectively get back if we didn’t have to pay attention while the car took us from one place to another.

When we started, we couldn’t make a list of the 10,000 things we’d have to do to make a car drive itself. We knew the top 100 things, of course. But pretty good, pretty safe, most of the time isn’t good enough. We had to go out and just find a way to learn what should be on that list of 10,000 things. We had to see what all of the unusual real world situations our cars would face were. There is a real sense in which the making of that list, the gathering of that data, is fully half of what is hard about solving the self driving car problem.

A few months ago, for example, our self-driving car encountered an unusual sight in the middle of a suburban side street. It was a woman in an electric wheelchair wielding a broom and working to shoo a duck out of the middle of the road. You can see in this picture what our car could see. I’m happy to say, by the way that while this was a surprising moment for the safety drivers in the car and for the car itself I imagine, the car did the right thing. It came autonomously to a stop, waited until the woman had shoo’d the duck off the road and left the street herself and then the car moved down the street again. That definitely wasn’t on any list of things we thought we’d have to teach a car to handle! But now, when we produce a new version of our software, before that software ends up on our actual cars, it has to prove itself in tens of thousands of situations just like this in our simulator, but using real world data. We show the new software moments like this and say “and what would you do now?” Then, if the software fails to make a good choice, we can fail in simulation rather than in the physical world. In this way, what one car learns or is challenged by in the real world can be transferred to all the other cars and to all future versions of the software we’ll make so we only have to learn each lesson once and every rider we have forever after can get the benefit from that one learning moment.•

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“People Are Duped, They Are Deceived, They Are Subject To Hallucinations In Quite Surprising Ways”

March 23, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We tell stories in order to live, but sometimes they’re the wrong ones.

People want to believe in something, but that impulse can sometimes run amok, and we convince ourselves we’re seeing something we aren’t, as we project our anxieties against the sky. At those moments, we believe our own lies. From a recent Five Books interview with Stephen Law about pseudoscience, a passage about Philip J. Klass’ book about the mistakes we can make when trying to name our fears:

Question:

The second book you’ve chosen is about UFOs. Now, in one sense, UFOs are literally Unidentified Flying Objects, so this description is almost neutral as to what they are. That doesn’t seem to be bad science or false science: it seems to be a description of something which is yet to be explained?

Stephen Law:

Yes, there are, of course, many UFOs and that’s uncontroversial. What is controversial is the claim that what we are looking at, in some cases, are visitors from other worlds. Many people believe that. Some even believe they’ve been abducted by alien visitors. My second book choice, a favourite of mine, is UFOs: The Public Deceived by Philip J. Klass. It was published back in the mid-1980s, and it’s a trawl through some of the great claims of ufology such as the Delphos case, the Travis Walton case, and cases involving airline pilots who have reported seeing quite extraordinary things in the skies. Klass looks very carefully at the evidence, and, in many cases, successfully debunks the suggestion that what was observed was in fact some sort of flying saucer or piloted vehicle from another world. I particularly like a story involving a nuclear power plant. Back in 1967, a power station was being built. The security guards reported seeing an extraordinary light hanging over the plant on several nights. The police were called, and they confirmed the presence of the light. The County Deputy Sheriff described ‘a large lighted object’. An auxiliary police officer stated that he saw ‘five objects, they appeared to be burning, an aircraft passed by while I was watching, they seemed to be 20 times the size of the plane’. The Wake County Magistrate saw ‘a rectangular object that looked like it was on fire’. They figured that it was about the size of a football field, and very bright. Newspaper reporters showed up to investigate the object. They then attempted to get closer to it in their car, but they found that as they drove towards it, it receded. No matter how fast and far they drove, they never got any closer. Eventually they stopped the car, got out, and the photographer looked at the object through a long lens on his camera. He said, ‘Yep, that’s the planet Venus alright’. It really was the planet Venus. Everyone had just seen the planet Venus. It seems extraordinary that these things happen. Here we have a case in which you have police officers, a magistrate, trained eye-witnesses. And there was even hard evidence in the form of an unidentified blip on the local air traffic control radar screen. All of this evidence together, you might think, confirms beyond any doubt that there really was some mysterious object hanging over that nuclear power plant. But the fact is, there wasn’t, despite these numerous eye-witnesses, this multiple attestation. The observers stuck their necks out. They were brave enough to make bold claims, so they clearly thought they were observing something extraordinary, and there was even some hard evidence (the radar blip) to back up the claims. Nevertheless, that turned out to be a coincidence. This case illustrates that you should expect, every now and then, some remarkable claim like this to be made, despite the fact that there’s no truth to it whatsoever. People are duped, they are deceived, they are subject to hallucinations in quite surprising ways. The mere fact that claims like this are made every now and then is not good evidence.•

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“We Can Design Computers That Sharpen Our Wits Or We Can Let Our Machines Turn Us Into Ignoramuses”

March 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We create tools to do things that we can’t do or can’t do well or fast enough. As long as there have been tools, their ability to relieve us of this task or that (“skill fade,” it’s come to be called) seemed it might doom us. Not so. Digital watches didn’t make children dumb, unable to tell time, and offloading some of our memory to computers doesn’t erase our wetware. Thank heavens for the invention of typewriters and calculators and computers. These innovations are a key aspect of human progress, and usually we come up with new and interesting ways to use this freed-up bandwidth.

We should be careful when ceding life-and-death tasks to AI–robotic surgery, autopilot in aviation, etc.–but for the most part, new tools don’t impoverish us while enriching us. The opening of Ted Greenwald’s WSJ piece, “Will Smart Machines Make Us Stupid?“

Society stands at a crossroads of artificial intelligence: We can design computers that sharpen our wits or we can let our machines turn us into ignoramuses. That observation capped a provocative panel on Tuesday at Austin’s South By Southwest conference.

Increasingly intelligent machines — search engines that yield knowledge on demand, smartphones that understand plain English, computers that proffer medical diagnoses, ad tech that offers to sell you just what you’re looking for — represent a “tipping point,” said Doug Lenat, a former Stanford and Carnegie Mellon computer science professor who is CEO of Cycorp, a maker of machine reasoning software. “We could become smarter or dumber – much smarter or much dumber.”

Electronic calculators, Lenat argued during the panel entitled “AI State of the Union,” have created generations of students who can perform mathematical tasks very quickly but don’t understand the underlying concepts. Similarly, Google “swaddles” users in a blanket of instant information, relieving them of the burden of independent thought and inquiry. The next wave of artificial intelligence — loosely defined as a computer’s ability to distinguish between useful and useless information at any given moment — could propel us irrevocably down that path.

“This could lead to Idiocracy,” Lenat said, referring to the 2006 Hollywood satire about a future in which human intellect has taken a steep dive. The result would be a society “where no one has to understand anything about the world, where everything just seems like magic.”

Alternatively, he said, computer scientists could design artificial intelligence “to challenge us the way Aristotle challenged Alexander the Great, to make us smarter, more rational, more human, to understand the world more deeply.”•

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“It’s Hard To Imagine What These Jobs Might Be”

March 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

robotcoffee

Mark Bittman of the New York Times, perhaps distracted by a particularly succulent cantaloupe, isn’t nearly the first to argue that technological unemployment may soon reach its tentacles into our pockets. Bittman urges for Guaranteed Basic Income, something Richard Nixon tried, if unsuccessfully, to bring into being. The opening of “Why Not Utopia?“:

SOME quake in terror as we approach the Terminator scenario, in which clever machines take over the world. After all, it isn’t sci-fi when Stephen Hawking says things like, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

But before the robots replace us, we face the challenge of decreasing real wages resulting, among other factors, from automation and outsourcing, which will itself be automated before long. Inequality (you don’t need more statistics on this, do you?) is the biggest social challenge facing us. (Let’s call climate change, which has the potential to be apocalyptic rather than just awful, a scientific challenge.) And since wealthy people don’t spend nearly as high a percentage of their incomes as poor people do, much wealth is sitting around not doing its job.

The result is that we’re looking at fewer jobs that pay the equivalent of what an autoworker or a teacher made in the ’60s and ’70s. All but a lucky few will either have the kind of service jobs that are now paying around $9 an hour, or be worse off.

And if robots can think, be creative, teach themselves, beat humans at chess and even Jeopardy, flip burgers, take care of your aging parent, plant, tend and harvest lettuce, drive cars, deliver packages, build iPhones and run warehouses — Amazon’s “Kiva” robots can carry 3,000 pounds, stock shelves and select and ship packages — it’s hard to imagine what these jobs might be.

Welcome to the Brave New World, one featuring even fewer haves and more have-nots than the current one. The winners and losers are the same, but the polarity is even more extreme.•

“The First Ultraintelligent Machine Is The Last Invention That Man Need Ever Make”

March 22, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Yuval Noah Harari writes this in his great book Sapiens:

Were, say, Spanish peasant to have fallen asleep in A.D. 1000 and woken up 500 years later, to the din of Columbus’ sailors boarding the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria, the world would have seemed to him quite familiar. Despite many changes in technology, manners and political boundaries, this medieval Rip Van Winkle would have felt at home. But had one of Columbus’ sailors fallen into a similar slumber and woken up to the ringtone of a twenty-first century iPhone, he would have found himself in a world strange beyond comprehension. ‘Is this heaven?’ he might well have asked himself. ‘Or perhaps — hell?’

What kind of peasants will we be? Is the road forward a high-speed one that will render tomorrow unrecognizable? It would seem so, except if calamity were to sideswipe us and delay (or permanently make impossible) the next phase. But if we are fortunate enough to have a safe travel, will a ruin of our own making await us in the form of Strong AI? I doubt it’s right around the bend as some feel, but it can’t hurt to consider such a scenario. From philosopher Stephen Cave’s Financial Times review of a slate of recent books about the perils of superintelligence:

It is tempting to suppose that AI would be a tool like any other; like the wheel or the laptop, an invention that we could use to further our interests. But the brilliant British mathematician IJ Good, who worked with Alan Turing both on breaking the Nazis’ secret codes and subsequently in developing the first computers, realised 50 years ago why this would not be so. Once we had a machine that was even slightly more intelligent than us, he pointed out, it would naturally take over the intellectual task of designing further intelligent machines. Because it was cleverer than us, it would be able to design even cleverer machines, which could in turn design even cleverer machines, and so on. In Good’s words: “There would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.”

Good’s prophecy is at the heart of the book Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, in which writer and film-maker James Barrat interviews leading figures in the development of super-clever machines and makes a clear case for why we should be worried. It is true that progress towards human-level AI has been slower than many predicted — pundits joke that it has been 20 years away for the past half-century. But it has, nonetheless, achieved some impressive milestones, such as the IBM computers that beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997 and won the US quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011. In response to Barrat’s survey, more than 40 per cent of experts in the field expected the invention of intelligent machines within 15 years from now and the great majority expected it by mid-century at the latest.

Following Good, Barrat then shows how artificial intelligence could become super-intelligence within a matter of days, as it starts fixing its own bugs, rewriting its own software and drawing on the wealth of knowledge now available online. Once this “intelligence explosion” happens, we will no longer be able to understand or predict the machine, any more than a mouse can understand or predict the actions of a human.Good’s prophecy is at the heart of the book Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, in which writer and film-maker James Barrat interviews leading figures in the development of super-clever machines and makes a clear case for why we should be worried. It is true that progress towards human-level AI has been slower than many predicted — pundits joke that it has been 20 years away for the past half-century. But it has, nonetheless, achieved some impressive milestones, such as the IBM computers that beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997 and won the US quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011. In response to Barrat’s survey, more than 40 per cent of experts in the field expected the invention of intelligent machines within 15 years from now and the great majority expected it by mid-century at the latest.•

 

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