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It’s tough being Paddy Chayefsky these days. Charlie Brooker, the brilliant satirist behind Black Mirror, comes closest. If he doesn’t make it all the way there, it’s not because he’s less talented than the Network visionary; it’s just that the era he’s working in is so different. I’ve read many articles about Brooker’s impressive program and pretty much all of them miss the point I believe he’s making about our brave new world of technology. That includes Jenna Wortham’s recent New York Times Magazine essay, which referred to Mirror as “functioning as a twisted View-Master of many different future universes where things have strayed horribly off-course.” The Channel 4 show is barely about the future. It’s mostly about the present. And it isn’t about the present in the manner of many sci-fi works, which create outlandish scenarios which can never really be in the service of telling us about what currently is. Brooker’s scenarios aren’t the exaggerations they might seem at first blush. In almost no time, our hyperconnected world delivers something far more disturbing than his narratives.

Chayefsky and Andy Warhol and Marshall McLuhan could name the future and we’d wait 25 or 50 years as their predictions slowly gestated, only becoming fully manifest at long last. None of that trio of seers even lived long enough to experience the full expression of Mad As Hell of 15 Minutes of Fame or the Global Village. Brooker will survive to see all his predictions come to pass, and it won’t require an impressive lifespan.

Consider the initial episode, “The National Anthem.” In this installment, the British Prime Minister is blackmailed by an unknown terrorist into having sex with a pig on live TV in front of a gigantic worldwide audience. It’s supposed to be a shocking media event that unfolds before a rapt world, but the most surprising thing about it is that more people don’t time-shift it. About three years after “Anthem” aired, ISIS released its first beheading video, marrying Hollywood torture porn to real-life extremism, and millions of curious people pressed play. Ah, for the simpler days of pretend PM-on-pork penetration.

Another episode, “Fifteen Million Merits,” offered a similar example of the future arriving fast on the heels of a seemingly outrageous provocation. “Merits” creates a world in which humans are reduced to automatons, forced to ride stationary bicycles to provide power the world desperately needs, the riders soothed by drugs and apps and pornos they can purchase with merit points earned by pumping pedals. One of the disconsolate workers not fully anesthetized by the sensory overload, Bing, offers his points to a beautiful coworker, Abi, so that she can buy a ticket to compete on Hot Shots, an even-more-offensive version of American Idol, hoping to become a pop star and escape a life of drudgery. She walks into a latter-day dance marathon where they don’t only shoot horses but the riders as well. Abi doesn’t realize her version of stardom and is instead shunted into pornography, another body offered up to appease an unwittingly depressed populace. Last year, just three years after this episode aired, the Fappening arrived one weekend on screens in our pockets, a hacked sex show sent to distract and titillate the world. One of the victims of the breach was the British actress Jessica Brown Findlay, who had portrayed Abi in “Merits.” Again, technology enabled the so-called future to arrive before the prophecies had been digested, and it looked even uglier than dystopic fiction.

And that’s how things are now. Before Brooker (or anyone else) can fire a warning shot, before we can decide how to proceed, tomorrow is already moving in for the kill, a drone at our doorsteps that may be delivering takeout or, perhaps, a bomb. If you hurry, there’s still time to smile into the camera. We’re all pioneers now, constantly, without traveling anywhere, without moving a muscle. We live only in the past and present, the future hardly existing. That’s what Black Mirror is really about.•

 

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Google has always been envisioned as an AI company, and if it’s mostly making its money from search in a decade, something has gone haywire. Bill Maris, President of Google Ventures, envisions a day soon when chemotherapy will be as rudimentary as the telegraph, and he intends to invest some of the $425 million fund he manages to make sure Google plays a large role in personalizing such treatments. Katrina Brooker of Bloomberg has written a profile of Maris, who believes five centuries of life per person may be theoretically possible. The opening:

“If you ask me today, is it possible to live to be 500? The answer is yes,” Bill Maris says one January afternoon in Mountain View, California. The president and managing partner of Google Ventures just turned 40, but he looks more like a 19-year-old college kid at midterm. He’s wearing sneakers and a gray denim shirt over a T-shirt; it looks like he hasn’t shaved in a few days.

Behind him, sun is streaming through a large wall of windows. Beyond is the leafy expanse of the main Google campus. Inside his office, there’s not much that gives any indication of the work Maris does here, Bloomberg Markets will report in its April 2015 issue. The room is sparse—clean white walls, a few chairs, a table. On this day, his desk has no papers, no notepads or Post-its, not even a computer.

Here’s where you really figure out who Bill Maris is: on his bookshelf. There’s a fat text called Molecular Biotechnology: Principles and Applications of Recombinant DNA. There’s a well-read copy of Biotechnology: Applying the Genetic Revolution. And a collection of illustrations by Fritz Kahn, a German physician who was among the first to depict the human body as a machine. Wedged among these is a book that particularly stands out to anyone interested in living to 500. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, published in 2005, is the seminal work by futurist Ray Kurzweil. He famously predicted that in 2045, humankind will have its Terminator moment: The rise of computers will outpace our ability to control them. To keep up, we will radically transform our biology via nanobots and other machines that will enhance our anatomy and our DNA, changing everything about how we live and die.

“It will liberate us from our own limitations,” says Maris, who studied neuroscience at Middlebury College and once worked in a biomedical lab at Duke University. Kurzweil is a friend. Google hired him to help Maris and other Googlers understand a world in which machines surpass human biology. This might be a terrifying, dystopian future to some. To Maris, it’s business.

This is where he hopes to find, and fund, the next generation of companies that will change the world, or possibly save it. “We actually have the tools in the life sciences to achieve anything that you have the audacity to envision,” he says. “I just hope to live long enough not to die.”•

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When Timex introduced cheap, seemingly unbreakable watches in the 1950s, the product was given short shrift by both media and jewelers, but they soon were category leaders. The Timex Data Link of the 1990s, however, made in conjunction with Microsoft, was probably lavished with too much praise. Before computers were tiny and powerful, the Data Link was the first watch that could receive downloaded information. It wasn’t good enough, but it was (sort of) the future. As Apple releases more information today about the iWatch that no one seems to be clamoring for, here’s an excerpt from a 1994 New York Times article about the Data Link followed by a commercial for it.

“Talk about information at your fingertips. The Timex Corporation and the Microsoft Corporation said today that they had teamed up to develop a wristwatch that can store information received directly from a personal computer screen.

The Timex Data Link watch, which will cost about $130 when it goes on sale in September, uses a wireless optical scanning system to receive data from Microsoft software.

The Data Link watch was demonstrated today at a presentation by Microsoft’s chairman, Bill Gates, who held it up to a computer as a series of bar-code lines flashed on the screen. After several seconds, Mr. Gates was able to scroll through personal information like appointment locations and telephone numbers at the touch of a button on the watch.

Fast Sales Predicted

C. Michael Jacobi, the president of Timex, predicted that the company would sell 200,000 of the watches in the final three months of this year, making it the fastest-selling watch ever in its price category.

The new watch looks like a regular round sports watch and includes such standard digital watch functions as a calendar, light, dual time-zone settings and alarms.

Using a microchip developed by Timex with Motorola Inc., the watch can store about 70 messages in its memory, downloading them in about 20 seconds, officials said.

Each watch will include software compatible with Microsoft Windows 3.1 and the company’s scheduling applications, such as Schedule Plus. The software also will be compatible with future versions of Windows, including a ‘Chicago’ upgrade expected out by the end of the year.

Users simply need to hold the watch about a foot away from their computer screens to download data, which can be done as often as needed.

Laptops Won’t Work

However, road warriors will be disappointed to learn that the watch will not work with laptop computers, which do not have a strong enough lighting source in their screens, Timex officials said.”•

As much as living in an endlessly public, hyperconnected world may be, perhaps, an evolutionary necessity, that doesn’t mean it isn’t the root cause of a global mismatch disease, that it isn’t bad for us on the granular level. You and I, remember, we don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. There’s something medieval in the new order, the way privacy has vanished and judgement is ubiquitous. But unlike during the Middle Ages, we’re now not exposed to just the village but to the entire Global Village. What effect does that have? From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens:

The imagined order is embedded in the material world. Though the imagined order exists only in our minds, it can be woven into the material reality around us, and even set in stone. Most Westerners today believe in individualism. They believe that every human is an individual, whose worth does not depend on what other people think of him or her. Each of us has within ourselves a brilliant ray of light that gives value and meaning to our lives. In modern Western schools teachers and parents tell children that if their classmates make fun of them, they should ignore it. Only they themselves, not others, know their true worth.

In modern architecture, this myth leaps out of the imagination to take shape in stone and mortar. The ideal modern house is divided into many small rooms so that each child can have a private space, hidden from view, providing for maximum autonomy. This private room almost invariably has a door, and in many households it is accepted practice for the child to close, and perhaps lock, the door. Even parents are forbidden to enter without knocking and asking permission. The room is decorated as the child sees fit, with rock-star posters on the wall and dirty socks on the floor. Somebody growing up in such a space cannot help but imagine himself ‘an individual’, his true worth emanating from within rather than from without.

Medieval noblemen did not believe in individualism. Someone’s worth was determined by their place in the social hierarchy, and by what other people said about them. Being laughed at was a horrible indignity. Noblemen taught their children to protect their good name whatever the cost. Like modern individualism, the medieval value system left the imagination and was manifested in the stone of medieval castles. The castle rarely contained private rooms for children (or anyone else, for that matter). The teenage son of a medieval baron did not have a private room on the castle’s second floor, with posters of Richard the Lionheart and King Arthur on the walls and a locked door that his parents were not allowed to open. He slept alongside many other youths in a large hall. He was always on display and always had to take into account what others saw and said. Someone growing up in such conditions naturally concluded that a man’s true worth was determined by his place in the social hierarchy and by what other people said of him.•

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The German postal system grew from the nation’s military courier apparatus to become a multifaceted marvel, contributing subsequently to networks all over the world, leaving its mark on Soviet socialism and American capitalism. It has a latter-day parallel, of course, in the Internet, which was incubated and nurtured by the U.S. Defense Department wing DARPA. The Financial Times has a passage from David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules about the mixed blessing of bureaucracy, which allows for large-scale progress, making the unthinkable manageable, before beginning to succumb to its own weight, a sideshow giant who wows until his heart gives out. An excerpt:

All these fantasies of postal utopia now seem rather quaint. Today we usually associate national postal systems with the arrival of things we never wanted in the first place: utility bills, overdraft alerts, tax audits, one-time-only credit-card offers, charity appeals, and so on. Insofar as Americans have a popular image of postal workers, it has become increasingly squalid.

Yet at the same time that symbolic war was being waged on the postal service, something remarkably similar to the turn-of-the-century infatuation with the postal service was happening again. Let us summarise the story so far:

1. A new communications technology develops out of the military.

2. It spreads rapidly, radically reshaping everyday life.

3. It develops a reputation for dazzling efficiency.

4. Since it operates on non-market principles, it is quickly seized on by radicals as the first stirrings of a future, non-capitalist economic system already developing within the shell of the old.

5. Despite this, it quickly becomes the medium, too, for government surveillance and the dissemination of endless new forms of advertising and unwanted paperwork.

This mirrors the story of the internet. What is email but a giant, electronic, super-efficient post office? Has it not, too, created a sense of a new, remarkably effective form of cooperative economy emerging from within the shell of capitalism itself, even as it has deluged us with scams, spam and commercial offers, and enabled the government to spy on us in new and creative ways?

It seems significant that while both postal services and the internet emerge from the military, they could be seen as adopting military technologies to quintessential anti-military purposes. Here we have a way of taking stripped-down, minimalistic forms of action and communication typical of military systems and turning them into the invisible base on which everything they are not can be constructed: dreams, projects, declarations of love and passion, artistic effusions, subversive manifestos, or pretty much anything else.

But all this also implies that bureaucracy appeals to us — that it seems at its most liberating — precisely when it disappears: when it becomes so rational and reliable that we are able to just take it for granted that we can go to sleep on a bed of numbers and wake up with all those numbers still snugly in place.

In this sense, bureaucracy enchants when it can be seen as a species of what I like to call “poetic technology” — when mechanical forms of organisation, usually military in their ultimate inspiration, can be marshalled to the realisation of impossible visions: to create cities out of nothing, scale the heavens, make the desert bloom. For most of human history this kind of power was only available to the rulers of empires or commanders of conquering armies, so we might even speak here of a democratisation of despotism. Once, the privilege of waving one’s hand and having a vast invisible army of cogs and wheels organise themselves in such a way as to bring your whims into being was available only to the very most privileged few; in the modern world, it can be subdivided into millions of tiny portions and made available to everyone able to write a letter, or to flick a switch.•

 

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The dream, if that’s what it is, of machines writing in the manner of humans is not a new one. It’s difficult to imagine a time when computers can give us anything beyond basic, templated prose, but perhaps that’s not the point. Maybe each of us will have a robot collecting and writing simple and personalized information for us, the long tail taken to its extreme conclusion. That could be helpful or it might encourage us all to be nations of one. From Klint Finley at Wired:

Is anyone actually reading any of this machine generated content? Automated Insights CEO Robbie Allen says that’s the wrong question to ask. Although the company generated over one billion pieces of content in 2014 alone, most of this verbiage isn’t meant for a mass audience. Rather, Wordsmith is acting as a sort of personal data scientist, sifting through reams of data that might otherwise go un-analyzed and creating custom reports that often have an audience of one.

For example, the company generates Fantasy Football game summaries for millions of Yahoo users each day during the Fantasy Football season, and it helps companies turn confusing spreadsheets into short, human readable reports. One day you might even have your own personal robot journalist, filing daily stories just for you on your fitness tracking data and your personal finances.

“We sort of flip the traditional content creation model on its head,” he says. “Instead of one story with a million page view, we’ll have a million stories with one page view each.”•

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The decentralization of media has allowed some silent insecurities to grow loud. There’s nothing sadder than some middle-aged mook doing a podcast from his basement, complaining, obliviously, about the privileged existence of women and minorities. There are so many available for download that I can hardly count. For such wounded warriors, things are likely to only get worse, as women eventually come to prominence on the American political landscape. 

Would a female U.S. President drastically alter the country’s mindset away from sabre-rattling and toward greater enlightenment? Not instantly, probably. African-American police officers often engage in racial profiling of other African-Americans, so it’s not only about the electing of an individual but the reimagining of a system. Hopefully such a rethinking of priorities will be a byproduct of women gradually gaining greater parity in politics. In a WSJ opinion piece, Melvin Konner explains why male dominance is on the decline:

The Bible, the Iliad, the great Indian epics—all of them are full of sex and violence. I don’t know whether Helen’s face was what launched a thousand Greek ships against Troy. I don’t know whether David really fell in love with Bathsheba and had her soldier-husband sent to die at the front, or if Solomon had seven hundred wives. But all the evidence suggests the plausibility of such stories, and this culture of male domination didn’t come to an end with the ancients. It prevailed throughout the middle ages and the Renaissance as well.

But then what happened? Why did some men begin at last to let go of their privileges?

The great transformation of the past two centuries—the slow but relentless decline of male supremacy—can be attributed in part to the rise of Enlightenment ideas generally. The liberation of women has advanced alongside the gradual emancipation of serfs, slaves, working people and minorities of every sort.

But the most important factor has been technology, which has made men’s physical strength and martial prowess increasingly obsolete. Male muscle has been replaced to a large extent by machines and robots. Today, women operate fighter jets and attack helicopters, deploying more lethal force than any Roman gladiator or Shogun warrior could dream of.•

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Why is it that I don’t believe I’ll ever experience Earthlings colonizing Mars, even if I’m lucky enough to have an average or better lifespan? Is it because it’s a hopelessly complicated and costly mission? Or am I just not able to visualize it because we’ve never accomplished anything nearly that ambitious in our history? I don’t think I’d be so dour about the prospects if the reusable rockets were headed to the moon, if we were going to build domed cities in craters. But I really doubt getting to see the Mars thing.

Elon Musk certainly can imagine it and believes we’ll have accomplished the ginormous leap in the next 25 years. From Tom Yet at the Berkeley Technology Review:

The alternative to a life on Mars lived entirely underground or indoors is terraforming, the transformation of the Martian surface to resemble Earth’s. Essentially, we’ve learned that greenhouse gases ruin the atmosphere and keep temperatures on an ascent, and so a deliberate injection of greenhouse gases into the Martian atmosphere could, in theory, alter its current state of equilibrium and render it hospitable to our species. This process may require decades, even centuries. Given the conditions in the interim, initial settlements would likely need to be constructed by robots. Human pioneers would face a life of extreme austerity.

Musk has said that a million people must settle on Mars before a sustainable civilization can be built. “Even at a million, you’re really assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars,” he explained in the Aeon interview. “You would need to mine and refine all of these different materials, in a much more difficult environment than Earth. There would be no oxygen or nitrogen that are just there. No oil.” For now, at least, SpaceX has remained laser-focused on its competitive advantage – space transport – leaving other necessary technological endeavors (as they relate to the erection and maintenance of a Martian civilization) out of their purview.

Who will build the robots that will build up Mars? What will a Martian economy look like? How will politics take form? These, among many other questions, seem unanswered amid the excitement. Continued, long-term inter-organizational cooperation and integration are clearly necessary for substantial gains to be made. Technological advancements aside, setting up a colony aimed at self-sustainability will require not only gargantuan economic investment, but also formidable political will. It’s a leap of faith, and each step along the way will need to break new ground. It’s a journey of precision. Mistake and malfunction could spell not just failure, but also death.•

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Rose Jacobs of Newsweek has a story about the emergence of robotic factories in Europe (Industrie 4.0, as its called), not the first time that magazine has covered the rise of industrial machines. The article notes these plants aren’t yet devoid of human workers, but it’s tough to see how that isn’t just the result of a transition not yet completed. Manufacturers argue industrial automation is propelled by consumer demand for cheaper prices and greater convenience. In that sense, it’s not much different than the mechanics of Uber marginalizing drivers to appeal to riders. An excerpt:

You might expect a world built on sensors, software and machines to be devoid of humans. But in Amberg, the 10,000-square-metre shop floor is populated by 1,020 workers over three shifts. And their labour looks relatively physical: a young man lying on his back inches his way under an elegant blue-and-grey machine, as you would under a car needing repair; a woman nearby bends over a circuit board wielding tweezers. Yet other members of staff peer at screens, never touching the products rolling down glassed-in assembly lines.

“A digital future can frighten people,” says Günter Ziebell, production unit leader in Amberg. “But we complement automated tests with eye checks.” More to the point, this project has created demand for people with experience and creativity, who can improve the processes. So the management structure in Amberg has become very flat, allowing, for example, line workers to speak with the IT department directly rather than go through their bosses. Any employee can initiate a project that requires an investment of less than €10,000, and managers simply check every quarter that their teams are neither spending too much nor too little. Employees also earn bonuses when they suggest changes that are later implemented. The average employee earns an additional €1,000 per year this way, says Ziebell. He stresses the importance of schemes like this: “If a digital factory is being managed top-down, you wouldn’t get many advantages from it.”

But even if increasing automation hasn’t sapped jobs in Amberg, fast-growing efficiency means new plants might have been built to meet rising customer demand – and new positions to fill them – are now unnecessary. It is an issue that the Germans, at least, are attempting to address head-on, with plans under way to form a national-level working group for Industrie 4.0 that includes employee representatives as well as private businesses and industry bodies.

Dieter Wegener, Siemens’s coordinator for Industrie 4.0, argues that companies aren’t pushing these developments forward – consumers are. We want customised products, we want them now, and we want them made efficiently, whether to bring down prices or preserve natural resources. This isn’t possible without networked production processes. As Mr Wegener says, “This is coming from you and me.” He also argues that Germany is at least two years ahead of the industrial internet community in the US “but we appear as if we’re following the Americans. The Americans are better at marketing.”•

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Zoltan Istvan, Transhumanist candidate for next year’s Presidential election, knows he’s not going to be taking his calls at the Oval Office come January 2017, which makes him far more politically self-aware than, say, Ted Cruz. So what is he after with his thus-far self-financed campaign? From a Q&A conducted by Ajai Raj at Medium:

Question:

What’s the goal of your campaign?

Zoltan Istvan:

Of course, as you know from reading my articles, there’s no chance of me winning. I’m not even trying to pretend that I’m necessarily going to take votes from anyone — it’s pretty complex to get on all the state ballots and do all these other things. But it’s very likely that I’m going to be involved in some discussions at the higher ranks of politics as to, well, what is this guy really talking about? Should we be considering genetic engineering and talking about it in our political campaigns, for example? I’m hopefully going to have some contact with Hillary Clinton. Al Gore has been a closet transhumanist for literally a decade.

So there’s been some involvement, especially in the liberal parties, and interest in what technology is doing, and interest in how it can help politics. What does Hillary Clinton think about artificial wombs, for example, or designer babies? What about the military controlling artificial intelligence, this technology with the potential to create something with a hundred times the intelligence of a human?

These are not things she wants to talk about, and neither does Mitt Romney [NOTE: This conversation took place before Romney announced that he will not run] or whoever else is going to run, but there’s a good chance if there’s enough press around it, they’ll be forced to deal with it.

The idea is that maybe in 2020, 2024, the Transhumanist Party can become something more significant than what it is now — a brand new startup, in a way.

Question:

So it’s about shifting the conversation, and getting some of these transhumanist ideas and concerns out of the fringe and into the mainstream, on people’s TVs.

Zoltan Istvan:

Absolutely. And I don’t mean to take anything away from my own campaign — everyone keeps saying, “Don’t say you’re going to lose” — but I’m just trying to be realistic. Our time might be in four or eight years. But what we can really do this time around is bring the conversation into the public’s view. I believe that I can be included in some debates, especially with other third parties, where we actually get a voice to make a dent, and get people saying, “Well, we really don’t want to talk about these topics, because they’re so controversial. However, it’s probably time we do, because after all, the country is kind of running headlong into the Transhumanist Age.”

You know, we have robotic hearts, bionic eyes, artificial hearing, all this stuff — it’s already here, it’s just a matter of, when we start implementing these things, how the FDA handles it, how the culture of America decides to say, “Wow, is a robotic arm something I’m going to want in ten years if it’s actually better than a human arm?”•

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Unless the People magazine archives are lying to me, the first mention of the word “computer” in the publication occurred in the April 4, 1977 edition. It was used in reference to Richard Dawkins’ publication of The Selfish Gene. An excerpt:

It looks like a scene in a mad-scientist movie, but Oxford’s Dr. Richard Dawkins is studying the response of female crickets to the computer-simulated mating calls of the male. Dawkins is a sociobiologist, one of a new breed of scientists who specialize in the biological causes of animal behavior. “I love to solve the intellectual problems of my specialty,” he says. “It’s the kind of game people like me play.”

Based on his studies, Dawkins, 36, has developed a theory about the survival of species. It is described in his book The Selfish Gene, which recently was published in the U.S. He says the seemingly “altruistic” acts of many species are the result of genes trying to perpetuate themselves. “Even man,” says Dawkins, “is a gene machine, a robot vehicle blindly programmed to preserve its selfish genes. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism. Let us understand what our selfish genes are up to because we may then have the chance to upset their designs—something no other species has ever aspired to.”•

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Tuan C. Nguyen of the Washington Post earnestly investigates the pretty ridiculous claims of neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero who believes he’ll perform a successful head-transplant surgery in the next two years. The writer comes away believing the procedure won’t permanently be impossible, but there’s one little catch: Even a “successful” operation will leave the patient permanently a quadriplegic. An excerpt:

In recent years, there’s been renewed talk of perfecting such a procedure. This time it’s spearheaded by Sergio Canavero, an Italian neurosurgeon at the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group who has claimed that advances in medical science now make it possible to carry out head transplants that would allow patients to not only survive, but function normally. And with sufficient financial and legal support, he envisions successfully performing a transplant on a human as early as 2017.

“I think we are now at a point when the technical aspects are all feasible,” Canavero told New Scientist.

While expert opinions on Canavero’s claims vary, the possibility isn’t as far fetched as it sounds. James Harrop, director of Adult Reconstructive Spine at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and co-editor of Congress of Neurological Surgeons, says that the kind of complications the surgeons faced back in 1970 could easily be fixed using today’s methods.

“Technically it’s not any harder than a liver and heart transplant,” he says. “We now have immunosuppressant drugs that might prevent the body from rejecting it. Arteries and the ends of the esophagus can be sewn together. Bones can be fused. As long as the cuts are in place and if you do it high enough, there isn’t that much to hook back up.”

Several challenges remain, however. For Harrop, the biggest hurdle would be to reconstruct the millions of disconnected central nerve fibers that, under normal circumstances, do not regenerate.•

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Figuring out the future of paid journalism isn’t just about making the economics work but by doing so while actually turning out original and intelligent reporting that has integrity. That’s something often lost on media analysts eager to bury the legacy of twentieth-century journalism, a mixed bag, sure, but an era that saw the best of reportage reach never-before-seen heights. We live in a fuller and deeper time because everyone is potentially a citizen journalist (a good thing), but we shouldn’t reflexively accept Buzzfeed and the like as the way forward simply because of page views or ad sales. From James King’s Gawker post, “My Year Ripping Off the Web With the Daily Mail Online“:

The eager paradigm-proclaimer Michael Wolff used his USA Today media column last August to praise the Mail’s business model as having succeeded where other, better-funded and more prestigious publications have failed. Under the headline “Daily Mail Solves Internet Paradox,” Wolff lauded the publication’s “180 million unique visitors a month” and suggested that if other publications want to survive the “digital migration” they should adopt a model similar to that of the Mail’s.

What Wolff failed to acknowledge: the Mail’s editorial model depends on little more than dishonesty, theft of copyrighted material, and sensationalism so absurd that it crosses into fabrication.

Yes, most outlets regularly aggregate other publications’ work in the quest for readership and material, and yes, papers throughout history have strived for the grabbiest headlines facts will allow. But what DailyMail.com does goes beyond anything practiced by anything else calling itself a newspaper. In a little more than a year of working in the Mail’s New York newsroom, I saw basic journalism standards and ethics casually and routinely ignored. I saw other publications’ work lifted wholesale. I watched editors at the most highly trafficked English-language online newspaper in the world publish information they knew to be inaccurate.

“We do things a little differently than you might be used to,” U.S. editor Katherine Thomson told me, early in my time there.

She was right. …

The production process was simple. During a day shift—8 a.m. to about 6 p.m—four news editors stationed together near Clarke’s desk assigned stories to reporters from a continually updated list of other publications’ articles, to which I did not have access. Throughout the day, they would monitor the website’s traffic to determine what was getting clicked on and what to remove from the homepage.

When a writer was free to write a story, he or she simply would shout “I’m free” and an editor would assign a link to an article on the list. In many cases, it would be accompanied by a sensationalized headline—one that may or may not have been accurate—for the writer to use.

During a typical 10-hour shift, I would catch four to seven articles this way. Unlike at other publications for which I’ve worked, writers weren’t tasked with finding their own stories or calling sources. We were simply given stories written by other publications and essentially told to rewrite them. And unlike at other publications where aggregation writers are encouraged to find a unique angle or to add some information missing from an original report, the way to make a story your own at the Mail is to pass off someone else’s work as your own.•

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As the above photos attest, Homo sapiens is not a perfect species. Gene therapy could change that.

Altering the code of those with a specific illness embedded in the “alphabet” of who they are is an area of great promise. But what if those changes to DNA could be made hereditary? What if we “optimize” humans across generations to not only be rid of disease but to increase intelligence and strength and to weed out characteristics that are considered unfavorable at this moment in history? Will we make things worse while trying to make them better? It’s a pretty sure bet that if we don’t destroy ourselves in the short run with greenhouse gases or by some other means, we’ll have to work through these questions. The opening of “Engineering the Perfect Baby,” Antonio Regalado’s Technology Review inquiry into the future of parenting:

If anyone had devised a way to create a genetically engineered baby, I figured George Church would know about it.

At his labyrinthine laboratory on the Harvard Medical School campus, you can find researchers giving E. Coli a novel genetic code never seen in nature. Around another bend, others are carrying out a plan to use DNA engineering to resurrect the woolly mammoth. His lab, Church likes to say, is the center of a new technological genesis—one in which man rebuilds creation to suit himself.

When I visited the lab last June, Church proposed that I speak to a young postdoctoral scientist named Luhan Yang, a Harvard recruit from Beijing who’d been a key player in developing a new, powerful technology for editing DNA called CRISPR-Cas9. With Church, Yang had founded a small company to engineer the genomes of pigs and cattle, sliding in beneficial genes and editing away bad ones.

As I listened to Yang, I waited for a chance to ask my real questions: Can any of this be done to human beings? Can we improve the human gene pool? The position of much of mainstream science has been that such meddling would be unsafe, irresponsible, and even impossible. But Yang didn’t hesitate. Yes, of course, she said. In fact, the Harvard laboratory had a project to determine how it could be achieved. She flipped open her laptop to a PowerPoint slide titled “Germline Editing Meeting.”

Here it was: a technical proposal to alter human heredity.

“Germ line” is biologists’ jargon for the egg and sperm, which combine to form an embryo. By editing the DNA of these cells or the embryo itself, it could be possible to eliminate disease genes and to pass those genetic fixes on to future generations. Such a technology could be used to rid families of scourges like cystic fibrosis. It might also be possible to install genes that offer lifelong protection against infection, Alzheimer’s, and, Yang told me, maybe the effects of aging. These would be history-making medical advances that could be as important to this century as vaccines were to the last.

That’s the promise. The fear is that germ line engineering is a path toward a dystopia of super people and designer babies for those who can afford it.•

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America’s obituary has been written prematurely many times, and, no, fucking ISIS won’t be the death of us. There’s always hope for a bright future for the U.S. as long as our immigration policies aren’t guided by politicians pandering to xenophobic impulses. From an Economist review of Joseph Nye’s Is the American Century Over?:

Europe is hardly a plausible challenger. Though its economy and population are larger than America’s, the old continent is stagnating. In 1900 a quarter of the world’s people were European; by 2060 that figure could be just 6%, and a third of them will be over 65.

By 2025 India will be the most populous nation on Earth. It has copious “soft power”—a term Mr Nye coined—in its diaspora and popular culture. But only 63% of Indians are literate, and none of its universities is in the global top 100. India could only eclipse America if it were to form an anti-American alliance with China, reckons Mr Nye, but that is unlikely: Indians are well-disposed towards Washington and highly suspicious of Beijing.

China is the likeliest contender to be the next hyperpower: its army is the world’s largest and its economy will soon be. (In purchasing-power-parity terms, it already is.) But it will be decades before China is as rich or technologically sophisticated as America; indeed, it may never be. By 2030 China will have more elderly dependants than children, which will sap its vitality. It has yet to figure out how to change governments peacefully. And its soft power is feeble for a country of its size. It has few real friends or allies, unless you count North Korea and Zimbabwe.

Hu Jintao, the previous president, tried to increase China’s soft power by setting up “Confucius Institutes” to teach its language and culture. Yet such a strategy is unlikely to win hearts in, say, Manila, when China is bullying the Philippines over islands in the South China Sea. The staging of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing was a soft-power success, but was undercut by the jailing of Liu Xiaobo, a pro-democracy activist, and the resulting empty chair at the ceremony to award him the Nobel peace prize. “Marketing experts call this ‘stepping on your own message’,” says Mr Nye.•

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Zoltan Istvan, your 2016 Transhumanist Party Presidential candidate, is concerned about the geopolitical implications of self-aware AI and is making it a plank of his campaign. I think his timeframe for such superintelligence (in the next 10-20 years) is not even remotely possible and Weak AI will be much more of a political challenge in the next few decades, but I would love to see him debate Jeb and Hillary. From Istvan at Vice:

​Forget about superintelligent AIs being created by a company, university, or a rogue programmer with Einstein-like IQ. Hollywood and its AI-themed movies like Transcendence and Her have misled the public. The launch of the first truly autonomous, self-aware artificial intelligence—one that has the potential to become far smarter than human beings—is a matter of the highest national and global security. Its creation could change the landscape of international politics in a matter of weeks—maybe even days, depending on how fast the intelligence learns to upgrade itself, hack and rewrite the world’s best codes, and utilize weaponry.

In the last year, a chorus of leading technology exp​erts, like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates, have chimed in on the dangers regarding the creation of AI. The idea of a superintelligence on Planet Earth dwarfing the capacity of our own brains is daunting. Will this creation like its creators? Will it embrace human morals? Will it become religious? Will it be peaceful or warlike? The questions are innumerable and the answers are all debatable, but one thing is for sure from a national security perspective: If it’s smarter than us, we want it to be on our side—the human race’s side.

Now take that one step further, and I’m certain another theme regarding AI is just about to emerge—one bound with nationalistic fervor and patriotism. Politicians and military commanders around the world will want this superintelligent machine-mind for their countries and defensive forces. And they’ll want it exclusively. Using AI’s potential power and might for national security strategy is more than obvious—it’s essential to retain leadership in the future world. Inevitably, a worldwide AI arms race is set to begin.

As the 2016 US Presidential candidate for the Transhumanist Party, I don’t mind going out on a limb and saying the obvious: I also want AI to belong exclusively to America.•

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David Graeber, who’s just published The Utopia of Rules, explaining to Elias Isquith of Salon why free markets don’t actually supplant bureaucracy but actually beget more of it:

Salon:

The idea that free-market policies create bureaucracies is pretty counterintuitive, at least for most Americans. So why is it the case that laissez-faire policy creates bureaucracy?

David Graeber:

Part of the reason is because in fact what we call the market is not really the market.

First of all, we have this idea that the market is a thing that just happens. This is the debate in the 19th century: market relations creeped up within feudalism and then it overthrew [feudalism]. So gradually the market is just the natural expression of human freedom; and since it regulates itself, it will gradually displace everything else and bring about a free society. Libertarians still think this.

In fact, if you look at what actually happens historically, this is just not true. Self-regulating markets were basically created with government intervention. It was a political project. Certain assumptions of how these things work just aren’t true. People don’t do wage labor if they have any choice, historically, for example. So in order to get a docile labor force, you have to create police and [a] large apparatus to ensure that the people you kick off the land actually will get the kinds of jobs you want them to … this is the very beginning of creating a market.

Basically, we assume that market relations are natural, but you need a huge institutional structure to make people behave the way that economists say they are “supposed” to behave. So, for example, think about the way the consumer market works. The market is supposed to work on grounds of pure competition. Nobody has moral ties to each other other than to obey the rules. But, on the other hand, people are supposed to do anything they can to get as much as possible off the other guy — but won’t simply steal the stuff or shoot the person.

Historically, that’s just silly; if you don’t care at all about a guy, you might as well steal his stuff. In fact, they’re encouraging people to act essentially how most human societies, historically, treated their enemies — but to still never resort to violence, trickery or theft. Obviously that’s not going to happen. You can only do that if you set up a very strictly enforced police force. That’s just one example.•

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James Salter turned out some beautiful pieces for People magazine during that publication’s infancy, usually profiling other great writers of earlier generations who were living in some state of exile. (Earlier I posted a passage from his Graham Greene article.) In 1975, he coerced Vladimir Nabokov, living in Switzerland two years before his death, into grudgingly sitting for an interview, and recorded the writer’s dislike for many things: fame, hippies, Dostoevsky, etc. It’s not a portrait of only one novelist but also of a different time for writers in general, when one could still find pockets of a less-disposable age. An excerpt:

Novelists, like dictators, have long reigns. It is remarkable to think of Nabokov’s first book, a collection of love poems, appearing in his native Russia in 1914. Soon after, he and his family were forced to flee as a result of the Bolshevik uprising and the civil war. He took a degree at Cambridge and then settled in the émigré colony in Berlin. He wrote nine novels in Russian, beginning with Mary, in 1926, and including Glory, The Defense, and Laughter in the Dark. He had a certain reputation and a fully developed gift when he left for America in 1940 to lecture at Stanford. The war burst behind him.

Though his first novel written in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, in 1941, went almost unnoticed, and his next, Bend Sinister, made minor ripples, the stunning Speak, Memory, an autobiography of his lost youth, attracted respectful attention. It was during the last part of 10 years at Cornell that he cruised the American West during the summers in a 1952 Buick, looking for butterflies, his wife driving and Nabokov beside her making notes as they journeyed through Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, the motels, the drugstores, the small towns. The result was Lolita, which at first was rejected everywhere, like many classics, and had to be published by the Olympia Press in Paris (Nabokov later quarreled with and abandoned his publisher, Maurice Girodias). A tremendous success and later a film directed by Stanley Kubrick, the book made the writer famous. Nabokov coquettishly demurs. “I am not a famous writer,” he says, “Lolita was a famous little girl. You know what it is to be a famous writer in Montreux? An American woman comes up on the street and cries out, ‘Mr. Malamud! I’d know you anywhere.’ ”

He is a man of celebrated prejudices. He abhors student activists, hippies, confessions, heart-to-heart talks. He never gives autographs. On his list of detested writers are some of the most brilliant who have ever lived: Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Faulkner and Henry James. His opinions are probably the most conservative, among important writers, of any since Evelyn Waugh’s. “You will die in dreadful pain and complete isolation,” his fellow exile, the Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin, told him. Far from pain these days and beyond isolation, Nabokov is frequently mentioned for that same award. “After all, you’re the secret pride of Russia,” he has written of someone unmistakably like himself. He is far from being cold or uncaring. Outraged at the arrest last year of the writer Maramzin, he sent this as yet unpublished cable to the Soviet writers’ union: “Am appalled to learn that yet another writer martyred just for being a writer. Maramzin’s immediate release indispensable to prevent an atrocious new crime.” The answer was silence.

Last year Nabokov published Look at the Harlequins!, his 37th book. It is the chronicle of a Russian émigré writer named Vadim Vadimych whose life, though he had four devastating wives, has many aspects that fascinate by their clear similarity to the life of Vladimir Vladimirovich. The typical Nabokovian fare is here in abundance, clever games of words, sly jokes, lofty knowledge, all as written by a “scornful and austere author, whose homework in Paris had never received its due.” It is probably one of the final steps toward a goal that so many lesser writers have striven to achieve: Nabokov has joined the current of history not by rushing to take part in political actions or appearing in the news but by quietly working for decades, a lifetime, until his voice seems as loud as the detested Stalin’s, almost as loud as the lies. Deprived of his own land, of his language, he has conquered something greater. As his aunt in Harlequins! told young Vadim, “Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!” Nabokov has done that. He has won.

“I get up at 6 o’clock,” he says. He dabs at his eyes. “I work until 9. Then we have breakfast together. Then I take a bath. Perhaps an hour’s work afterward. A walk, and then a delicious siesta for about two-and-a-half hours. And then three hours of work in the afternoon. In the summer we hunt butterflies.” They have a cook who comes to their apartment, or Véra does the cooking. “We do not attach too much importance to food or wine.” His favorite dish is bacon and eggs. They see no movies. They own no TV.

They have very few friends in Montreux, he admits. They prefer it that way. They never entertain. He doesn’t need friends who read books; rather, he likes bright people, “people who understand jokes.” Véra doesn’t laugh, he says resignedly. “She is married to one of the great clowns of all time, but she never laughs.”

The light is fading, there is no one else in the room or the room beyond. The hotel has many mirrors, some of them on doors, so it is like a house of illusion, part vision, part reflection, and rich with dreams.•

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About a year ago, a Pittsburgh hospital announced it would begin using suspended-animation techniques to stave off imminent death for gunshot and stabbing victims, keeping them barely alive until they could be saved. Heart-attack sufferers would also be naturals for such a treatment, though it’s a tricky procedure, and we’re still in a pioneering phase despite efforts in this area over the course of centuries. From Rene Ebersole at Nautilus:

The bags are packed, the car is loaded, and the neighbor will pick up the mail. Now there’s just one last thing to do before heading out the door for vacation: It’s time to turn off the dog.

You lead Sparky to his fluffy bed inside a small chamber filled with a continuous stream of hydrogen sulfide gas. While you’re away, he’ll stay—completely still. No breath. No pulse. But Sparky’s neither sleeping, nor dead. He is in a state of suspended animation, as if you simply put his body on pause. And when you return home, he’ll reboot back to normal in the fresh air.

This slightly unnerving scenario belongs to Mark Roth, a biomedical scientist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. The good-natured Roth offers it not as a business plan for futuristic pet care, but as an example of how suspended animation, a process in which he specializes, may work.

Roth’s real aim is to create life-saving medical procedures that would improve recoveries from heart attacks or decrease the collateral tissue damage caused by tumor irradiation. “I think the beginning is not pets on the weekend; it’s the heart attack you’re having right now,” he says. Right now his primary goal is to prove that suspended animation offers “irrefutable benefits for people who would otherwise be dead.” …

Current research into suspended animation builds upon hundreds of years of science that began in the 1660s with chemist Robert Boyle using carbon dioxide to alter the state of animation in honeybees. In the 1820s, physician Henry Hill Hickman found that carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide could make it possible to painlessly amputate animals’ limbs. At the time, his contemporaries deemed his theories “surgical humbug,” but after his death, Hickman was declared one of the fathers of modern anesthesiology, now used for everything from root canals to cancer care.

“As a scientist, I’m no different from Boyle or Hickman, or whoever, attempting to understand the full range of animation,” Roth says. But he aims to go beyond reducing pain and consciousness. He wants to perfect the means by which it’s possible to let a person nearly die, treat them for a serious injury, then bring them back to life—Frankenstein style.

There are dangers involved with his research.•

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Google has withdrawn one of its recently purchased companies from the upcoming DARPA Robotics Challenge in Pomona, but the competition will continue apace, albeit with some accelerated marching orders (i.e., the cables have been cut). From Erico Guizzo at IEEE Spectrum:

In a call with reporters this afternoon, Gill Pratt, program manager for the DRC, said the tasks for the final challenge will be similar to the ones we saw at the trials. But this time the tasks will be “put together in a single mission” that teams have one hour to complete.

The robots will start in a vehicle, drive to a simulated disaster building, and then they’ll have to open doors, walk on rubble, and use tools. Finally they’ll have to climb a flight of stairs. But one more thing, Pratt said: there will be a surprise task waiting for the robots at the end.

Just when we thought the DRC couldn’t get any cooler—it just did. Naturally, Pratt declined to elaborate on what this mystery task might entail.

He also emphasized that now the robots will operate completely untethered. There won’t be cables to provide power and data—and to keep them from falling down. “They’ll have to get up on their own,” he said. “That’s raising the bar on how good the robots have to be.”•

___________________________

“Basically we have to cut the cord”:

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Silicon Valley isn’t merely about money in the way of Wall Street, and it isn’t about power in the traditional sense. The true measure of success in the tech capital is impact, how many lives can be changed–allegedly for the better. It’s about the building of a huge and overarching mechanism that can’t be avoided. From “Tomorrowland: How Silicon Valley Shapes Our Future,“ Thomas Schulz’s Spiegel piece about the shift of influence from bankers to technologists and what that means:

The iPhone only made its appearance seven years ago, but most of us no longer remember what the world was like before. Driverless cars were considered to be a crazy fantasy not long ago, but today nobody is particularly amazed by them. All the world’s knowledge condensed into a digital map and easily accessible? Normal. The fact that algorithms in the US control some 70 percent of all trading on the stock market? Crazy, to be sure. But normal craziness.

Dozens of companies are trying to figure out how to use drones for commercial use, be it for deliveries, data collection or other purposes. Huge armies of engineers are chasing after the holy grail of artificial intelligence. And the advances keep coming. Machines that can learn, intelligent robots: We have begun overtaking science fiction.

The phenomenon is still misunderstood, first and foremost by policymakers. It appears they have not yet decided whether to dive in and create a usable policy framework for the future or to stand aside as others create a global revolution. After all, what we are witnessing is not just the triumph of a particular technology. And it is not just an economic phenomenon. It isn’t about “the Internet” or “the social networks,” nor is it about intelligence services and Edward Snowden or the question as to what Google is doing with our data. It isn’t about the huge numbers of newspapers that are going broke nor is it about jobs being replaced by software. It’s not about a messaging service being worth €19 billion ($21.1 billion) or the fact that 20-year-olds are launching entire new industries.

We are witnessing nothing less than a societal transformation that ultimately nobody will be able to avoid. It is the kind of sea change that can only be compared with 19th century industrialization, but it is happening much faster this time. Just as the change from hand work to mass production dramatically changed our society over 100 years ago, the digital revolution isn’t just altering specific sectors of the economy, it is changing the way we think and live.

This time, though, the transformation is different. This time, it is being driven by just a few hundred people.•

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If I had to guess when we’d be able to bio-print fully functioning human organs, like kidneys, I would think it would be sometime in the twenty-first century but probably many decades down the line. Of course, who knows? In a Backchannel article, Andrew Leonard investigates the bold claims of controversial doctor Vladimir Mironov, “a one-time PETA-funded synthetic meat researcher who believes that eventually we will be bioprinting complete humans with bio-chipped brains.” The sci-fi reaching of some in the sector may be obscuring real advances. An excerpt:

Last November, a news report in Russia Today sent a shudder of excitement through the cluster of blogs and tech sites that cover bioprinting. Scientists at a Moscow laboratory called 3D Bioprinting Solutions announced that they would be able to print a functioning mouse thyroid gland by March 2015. Even better, declared the director of the lab, Vladimir Mironov, by 2018 the lab would start printing fully transplantable kidneys.

“The one who will be the first to print and then successfully transplant the kidney to the patient—who will stay alive—will for sure get a Nobel prize,” said Mironov.

Mironov was probably not wrong in his prediction that whoever first successfully bioprints a working human kidney will be showered with worldwide acclaim. Never mind the psychological benefits of improved techniques for breast reconstruction; the need for more kidneys is a pressing issue of life and death. In the U.S. alone more than 100,000 people are on the waiting list for a kidney transplant right now—but only 17,000 transplants took place in all of 2013. Successful bioprinting of human kidneys will save thousands of lives.

I don’t normally put huge stock in Russia Today as a reliable news source, but I was very curious. I wanted to know, for example, how Mironov intended to solve the vasculature problem? My efforts to reach him, however, failed.

My efforts to Google him, on the other hand, were highly entertaining.

For starters, in 2011 Mironov wrote an article for The Futurist predicting that we would soon be printing out entire human beings.

It is not difficult to predict that changing the human body will eventually be as routine as changing clothes. Cosmetic surgery will fuse with fashion.

Human-printing technology would eliminate the need to wait 18 years in order to get a fully developed adult: Humans could theoretically be printed on demand and be functionally ready in days or weeks. The brain could be replaced with biochips, though brain research would need to advance to such a level that brains could be reverse engineered and manufactured.

The line “cosmetic surgery will fuse with fashion” contains some nuances that could apply to bioprinted breast nipples. But the notion of bioprinting complete humans on demand in days or weeks? To paraphrase Thomas Boland, such a task seems likely to prove very difficult.•

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It’s possible I could read a better book during the rest of 2015 than Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Edge.org made my day as it often does with “Death Is Optional,” a dialogue between the Israeli historian and the psychologist Daniel Kahnemananother great thinker. Harari argues (as I have here many times) that computer consciousness is nowhere near a reality, but that Weak AI can displace and disrupt us regardless. The two consider the road ahead, a highly automated tomorrow in which medicine, even death, may not be an egalitarian affair (though it never was completely). An excerpt:

Daniel Kahneman:

Do you get to a broader view by becoming more differentiated, that is, by having more detailed views? Or is it just that you get people to consider a possibility that wouldn’t occur to them?

Yuval Noah Harari:

Mainly, the second way. The main thing, and my main task as a historian is to get people to consider the possibilities which usually are outside their field of vision, because our present field of vision has been shaped by history and has been narrowed down by history, and if you understand how history has narrowed down our field of vision, this is what enables you to start broadening it.

Let me give you an example that I’m thinking about a lot today, concerning the future of humankind in the field of medicine. At least to the best of my understanding, we’re in the middle of a revolution in medicine. After medicine in the 20th century focused on healing the sick, now it is more and more focused on upgrading the healthy, which is a completely different project. And it’s a fundamentally different project in social and political terms, because whereas healing the sick is an egalitarian project … you assume there is a norm of health, anybody that falls below the norm, you try to give them a push to come back to the norm, upgrading is by definition an elitist project. There is no norm that can be applicable to everybody.

And this opens the possibility of creating huge gaps between the rich and the poor, bigger than ever existed before in history. And many people say no, it will not happen, because we have the experience of the 20th century, that we had many medical advances, beginning with the rich or with the most advanced countries, and gradually they trickled down to everybody, and now everybody enjoys antibiotics or vaccinations or whatever, so this will happen again.

And as a historian, my main task is to say no, there were peculiar reasons why medicine in the 20th century was egalitarian, why the discoveries trickled down to everybody. These unique conditions may not repeat themselves in the 21st century, so you should broaden your thinking, and you should take into consideration the possibility that medicine in the 21st century will be elitist, and that you will see growing gaps because of that, biological gaps between rich and poor and between different countries. And you cannot just trust a process of trickling down to solve this problem.

There are fundamental reasons why we should take this very seriously, because generally speaking, when you look at the 20th century, it’s the era of the masses, mass politics, mass economics. Every human being has value, has political, economic, and military value, simply because he or she is a human being, and this goes back to the structures of the military and of the economy, where every human being is valuable as a soldier in the trenches and as a worker in the factory.

But in the 21st century, there is a good chance that most humans will lose, they are losing, their military and economic value. This is true for the military, it’s done, it’s over. The age of the masses is over. We are no longer in the First World War, where you take millions of soldiers, give each one a rifle and have them run forward. And the same thing perhaps is happening in the economy. Maybe the biggest question of 21st century economics is what will be the need in the economy for most people in the year 2050.

And once most people are no longer really necessary, for the military and for the economy, the idea that you will continue to have mass medicine is not so certain. Could be. It’s not a prophecy, but you should take very seriously the option that people will lose their military and economic value, and medicine will follow.•

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IQ continues to increase globally (if unevenly), and it’s not only in developing nations playing catch-up (China, for a huge example) but also in long-developed ones (the U.S., that other ginormous example). Why is that? Better tools and an improved understanding of tests? Perhaps, but the man who gave the Flynn effect its name believes abstract thinking is at the heart of the steady incline. Does that mean, as I’ve always suspected, that video games are good for us? From William Kremer at the BBC:

James Flynn believes test wiseness may have been a factor in IQ gains in the US in the first half of the 20th Century. However, since then the amount of IQ testing taking place has waned – and IQ increases have remained steady.

Flynn puts this continued progress down to profound shifts in society as well as education over the last century, which have led people to think in a more abstract, scientific way – the kind of intelligence measured by IQ tests.

He cites the work of Russian neuroscientist Alexander Luria, who studied indigenous people in the Soviet Union. “He found that they were very pragmatic and concrete in their thinking,” says Flynn, “and they weren’t capable of using logical abstractions or taking hypotheticals seriously.” Luria put the following problem to the head man of one tribe in Siberia: Where there’s always snow, the bears are white; there’s always snow at the North Pole – what colour are the bears there?

The head man replied that he had never seen bears that were any colour other than brown, but if a wise or truthful man came from the North Pole and told him that bears there were white, he might believe him. The scientific methods of hypothesising, classifying and making logical deductions were alien to him.

“Now virtually all formal schooling, when you get past the sixth grade into high school and college, means that you take hypotheses seriously,” says Flynn. “This is what science is all about. And you’re using logic on abstract categories.”

And this kind of thinking doesn’t only occur in school.•

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Your city will likely be a smart one eventually, and you won’t have much of a say in the matter. It will all flow beneath the surface and you may consider it as infrequently as you do electricity. That will mean constant quantification which will lead to some good things and, quietly, some that are not. An excerpt from a heady talk at Salon (via Alternet) about the nature of smart cities, between journalist Allegra Kirkland and urban theorist Catherine Tumber:

Allegra Kirkland:

It seems like there’s a fundamental split between people who think there is something organic and inexplicable about the ways human beings come together in cities, and those who believe that all human behavior is quantifiable—that we can rely on data to understand how humans interact. Which side of the line do you fall on?

Catherine Tumber:

Digital technology and its use compresses experience. It tends to lead to niche cultures; it tends to lead to a sense of being untethered, as if that’s the golden pathway to real freedom. There are several traditions of political philosophy that hold that its important to be tethered so that you have a sense of the limits of yourself and of what it is that humans can do in the time that they have on this earth. This sense of endless freedom can lead to a very false sense of utopian promise that is simply unrealistic and unwanted. It’s yet another way that we’ve decided to take a pause from history and what history has long told us.

There are some things that you really don’t play with. People have acquired great wisdom over the ages—across the globe, this isn’t just a Eurocentric thing—about what it means to travel and to leave home and to come back. These are all the great stories and myths and fables. Technology kind of flattens all of that.

Allegra Kirkland:

This is sort of a related question, but what do you think are the primary things smart cities take away from the people who live there? What do we lose in these sorts of manufactured urban environments?

It makes me think of the complaints about the gentrification of places like New York City. Michael Bloomberg created new green spaces in Times Square and along the waterfront, made city services more efficient, rezoned districts, and now we have this sanitized, business-friendly, soulless city. The neighborhoods look the same; there’s no mixing of social classes, no weird dive bars. So you’d think smart cities, with their emphasis on homogeneity and efficiency, would be equally off-putting to people.

Catherine Tumber:

I think it’s a matter of the convenience of it and the novelty of it. But smart technology is relatively new and there are so many unexamined consequences, as I think there are with any major technological change like this.

I think that we’re only beginning as a culture to wince a little and take a second look at this. … There really hasn’t been any sort of consensus about what the right manners are in using these technologies. Across the world for time immemorial, every culture had some understanding of manners, and I don’t mean that in the prim Victorian sense. But just some ways in which you convey unspoken, coded assumptions about respect and caring and common courtesy and stuff like that. We haven’t had that conversation here. …The main point is that there are real unintended consequences of this.•

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