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“Climate Change Is Already Costing Us Billions Of Dollars A Year”

October 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Last night’s debate was likely the final ugly stand of the campaign for Donald Trump, the worst American™, the last time he could hector from a national pulpit non-white people and the Constitution itself, with eyes narrowed, fingers pointed, scowl fixed. He was revealed once more in all his damage, bleeding from his wherever, a lucky man who’s been handed everything but feels as if he’s being robbed yet again of what will finally quiet the fury within. But even if Trump, a Berlusconi who dreams of being a Mussolini, is now to be hoisted on Election Day by his feet from a virtual meat hook, he’s already done serious harm to the country.

I don’t mean his coarsening of the dialogue and mood or the undermining of our democracy’s legitimacy, though, of course, those things have weight. As I’ve written before, the real cost of the hideous hotelier is that he’s distracted us at a crucial juncture from vital issues at hand that need addressing to secure America’s future. Vladimir Putin couldn’t have done it better himself, though let’s give him some credit.

In a smart, impassioned Vice “Motherboard” essay, Derek Mead speaks to this same issue. An excerpt:

Climate change is especially important in this regard, as it will exacerbate most of the other ills of our current world, including resource-based conflict, pandemics, extreme weather, and food insecurity. For example, Florida is set to be ravaged by rising seas, including the properties of Donald Trump, who has called climate change a hoax. But rising seas are just one final problem; in the interim, we can expect warming weather to negatively influence everything from hurricanes to the spread of disease, as is potentially the case with Zika (which also didn’t make an appearance in the debates, despite an ongoing funding crisis).

For all the pseudo-talk of the economy in the debates, climate change is already costing us billions of dollars a year, and it is only going to get worse, as even the Pentagon is preparing for.

And despite this endless stream of bad news and heel-dragging from our elected officials, we’re already seeing positive impacts from investment in clean energy and divestment from climate-polluting industries. There’s no better time to push harder on mitigating the worst effects of climate change, which threatens all aspects of our livelihoods. Ignoring the climate for favor of arguing over who’s a stronger leader is simply irresponsible.

Climate may be the largest threat for humanity as a whole, but here in the US, the most immediately pressing one is inequality. Inequality is a problem across all demographic breakdowns—racial, economic, geographic, and so on—and for yet another election, the answer has been summed up with varying shades of the word “jobs.” It’s too late to reverse the tide of globalism, unless we want to turn ourselves into some sort of hermit kingdom, but as the leader of the tech economy, the United States is still in a strong position to shape the world’s economy to our advantage.

This is not a simple truth: As shuffling alliances and developing nations reshape the world order, and as the massive disparity in income and capital in the US mixes with a future economy defined less by ownership and more by timesharing everything, the non-barons among us have a difficult road ahead.•

Tags: Derek Mead

“Computers Can, In Theory, Emulate Human Intelligence — And Exceed It”

October 19, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Stephen Hawking and Ted Kaczynski agree: Machine intelligence may be the death of us. Of course, the Unabomber could himself kill you if only he had your snail-mail address.

Found in the Afflictor inbox an offer from a PR person for a free copy of Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How, Kaczynski’s new book. The release describes the author as a “social theorist and ecological anarchist,” conveniently leaving a few gaps on the old résumé: serial killer, maimer, domestic terrorist, etc.

A few minutes later, I read Hawking’s inaugural speech at the new Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge, an institution created to deal sanely and non-violently with the potential problem of humanity being extincted by its own cleverness.

An excerpt from each follows.

From Kaczynski:

People would bitterly resent any system to which they belonged if they believed that when they grew old, or if they became disabled, they would be thrown on the trash-heap.

But when all people have become useless, self-prop systems will find no advantage in taking care of anyone. The techies themselves insist that machines will soon surpass humans in intelligence.119 When that happens, people will be superfluous and natural selection will favor systems that eliminate them—if not abruptly, then in a series of stages so that the risk of rebellion will be minimized.

Even though the technological world-system still needs large numbers of people for the present, there are now more superfluous humans than there have been in the past because technology has replaced people in many jobs and is making inroads even into occupations formerly thought to require human intelligence.120 Consequently, under the pressure of economic competition, the world’s dominant self-prop systems are already allowing a certain degree of callousness to creep into their treatment of superfluous individuals. In the United States and Europe, pensions and other benefits for retired, disabled, unemployed, and other unproductive persons are being substantially reduced;121 at least in the U.S., poverty is increasing; and these facts may well indicate the general trend of the future, though there will doubtless be ups and downs.

It’s important to understand that in order to make people superfluous, machines will not have to surpass them in general intelligence but only in certain specialized kinds of intelligence. For example, the machines will not have to create or understand art, music, or literature, they will not need the ability to carry on an intelligent, non-technical conversation (the “Turing test”), they will not have to exercise tact or understand human nature, because these skills will have no application if humans are to be eliminated anyway. To make humans superfluous, the machines will only need to outperform them in making the technical decisions that have to be made for the purpose of promoting the short-term survival and propagation of the dominant self-prop systems. So, even without going as far as the techies themselves do in assuming intelligence on the part of future machines, we still have to conclude that humans will become obsolete.•

From Hawking:

It is a great pleasure to be here today to open this new Centre. We spend a great deal of time studying history, which, let’s face it, is mostly the history of stupidity. So it is a welcome change that people are studying instead the future of intelligence.

Intelligence is central to what it means to be human. Everything that our civilisation has achieved, is a product of human intelligence, from learning to master fire, to learning to grow food, to understanding the cosmos.

I believe there is no deep difference between what can be achieved by a biological brain and what can be achieved by a computer. It therefore follows that computers can, in theory, emulate human intelligence — and exceed it.

Artificial intelligence research is now progressing rapidly. Recent landmarks such as self-driving cars, or a computer winning at the game of Go, are signs of what is to come. Enormous levels of investment are pouring into this technology. The achievements we have seen so far will surely pale against what the coming decades will bring.

The potential benefits of creating intelligence are huge. We cannot predict what we might achieve, when our own minds are amplified by AI. Perhaps with the tools of this new technological revolution, we will be able to undo some of the damage done to the natural world by the last one — industrialisation. And surely we will aim to finally eradicate disease and poverty. Every aspect of our lives will be transformed. In short, success in creating AI, could be the biggest event in the history of our civilisation.

But it could also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. Alongside the benefits, AI will also bring dangers, like powerful autonomous weapons, or new ways for the few to oppress the many. It will bring great disruption to our economy. And in the future, AI could develop a will of its own — a will that is in conflict with ours.

In short, the rise of powerful AI will be either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity. We do not yet know which.

That is why in 2014, I and a few others called for more research to be done in this area. I am very glad that someone was listening to me!

The research done by this centre is crucial to the future of our civilisation and of our species. I wish you the best of luck!•

Tags: Stephen Hawking, Ted Kaczynski

“The State’s White Population Is Well-Educated, And Includes Some Workers Who Have Moved From Other Parts Of The Country”

October 18, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

When Time magazine published Tyler Cowen’s 2013 cover story “Why Texas Is Our Future,” which argued that the Lone Star State was America’s new bellwether, I disagreed with the premise, wondering if Texas, as we’ve long known it, was even the future of Texas.

The article notes the large-scale migration to the state by citizens from other parts of the country but assumes these newbies would gladly live within Texas’ regulations (or lack thereof) rather than altering them. In this vision, the bargain of low taxes and real estate prices would have outweighed concerns about environmental damage, the lack of the Medicaid expansion for the Affordable Care Act and the scary high childhood poverty rate. That’s a big assumption. The piece also failed to speak of the growing young Latino population which was going to leave its mark as it aged into voting eligibility. Rather than doubling down on business as usual, the traditionally red state was actually likely to take on a much more purplish hue.

The first signs of a change may be manifesting in the 2016 Presidential election, as Texas is shockingly too close to call. Now granted Trump is nothing like a normal candidate, but he and his border wall would have still risen to an easy victory in the state in years gone by.

From Nate Silver at Five Thirty Eight:

Another day, another traditionally Republican state that Donald Trump could shockingly manage to lose. Yesterday, I wrote about Utah, where Trump’s weakness with Mormon voters could throw the state to Hillary Clinton or to independent candidate Evan McMullin. Today, we turn to Texas, where two new polls show a tight race: A University of Houston poll has Trump up just 3 percentage points there, while SurveyMonkey puts Trump’s lead at 2 points.

Trump will probably win Texas. Earlier polls had shown a close-ish race there, but with a Trump lead in the high single digits. And as a hedge against the polls, our forecast still assigns a little bit of weight to our regression-based analysis, which is based on demographics and voting history. Thus, our model still has Trump ahead by 5 or 6 percentage points in Texas, and puts Clinton’s chances of an upset at 17 percent.

But to put that in perspective, Texas is closer than Pennsylvania right now (where Clinton leads by 7 to 8 points). And Clinton is more likely to win Texas than Trump is to win the election, at least according to the polls-only model, which puts Trump’s overall chances at 12 percent.

As in Utah, demographics play a role in Trump’s struggles in Texas. The state’s white population is well-educated, and includes some workers who have moved from other parts of the country to take advantage of the state’s burgeoning economy. (College-educated whites have turned away from Trump.) Texas also used to have its share of Republican-leaning Latinos — George W. Bush won almost half of the Latino vote there in 2004 — another group that Trump has turned off. Meanwhile, only 43 percent of Texas’ population consists of non-Hispanic whites, down from 52 percent in 2000. However, because 11 percent of Texas’ population consists of non-citizens — many of them recent immigrants from Mexico — its electorate is whiter than its population overall.•

Tags: Nate Silver, Tyler Cowen

“If The Technology Looks Low-Tech, It’s Deliberate”

October 18, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Elon Musk’s dream of colonizing Mars in a handful of years is bold but probably misbegotten. He means well in wanting to safeguard the survival of the human species, but things may not end well. There’s no reason for humans to be out there just yet. It might work out best if Musk’s large-scale plans crater and his still-sizable contributions (e.g., reusable rockets) remain. We can explore space for the foreseeable future without the undue burdens of cost and loss of life if we utilize robots for reconnaissance and 3D printers to lay foundation.

In “The Low-Tech Way to Colonize Mars,” an Atlantic piece by Sarah Zhang, the writer examines a saner alternative to Musk’s vision, a slow build in space via bootstrapping with relatively simple tools. An excerpt:

NASA is all aboard the 3D-printing train. Last year, it unveiled winners of its first 3D-printed Mars habitat design challenge, and the architectural renders of the winning entries were all sleek and futuristic, as renders of unbuilt buildings always are (see above). In reality, the current state of the art for Martian 3D-printing looks more like the clay logs [planetary scientist Philip] Metzger has been documenting on Twitter.

If the technology looks low-tech, it’s deliberate. “We’re rethinking how to do space technology by taking cues from less developed parts of world,” says Metzger. The logic goes like this: If a valve breaks in a complex machine on Mars, an astronaut can’t go online to order a replacement with next day delivery. (It’s more like nine months, assuming Mars and Earth are in their most favorable alignment.) So the idea is to start simple and slowly build up technological capabilities: clay to metal to plastic to electronic equipment. Eventually, Mars will have the refineries and factories to make complicated machines itself. This is “bootstrapping,” and it’s Metzger’s vision for space exploration.•

Tags: Elon Musk, Sarah Zhang

“Technological Revolutions Now Vastly Outpace Political Processes”

October 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Since the start of the Tea Party paranoia about the U.S. government’s supposed “hostile takeover” of the citizenry and the free markets, I’ve argued that despite some real assaults on individual rights (e.g., Patriotic Act-enabled surveillance), control by any central body in even a nominal democracy is on the wane. Big Brother isn’t as much a problem as is just keeping the family together at all.

That being said, I think Yuval Noah Harari (whose latest book, Homo Deus, will hopefully arrive in my mailbox this week) overplays his hand a bit on this point in what’s otherwise a fun and provocative New Yorker essay about our technologically advanced society inexplicably enabling Trump’s “nihilistic burlesque.” The historian offers a macro analysis of what ails disgruntled America (and much of the rest of the world), assigning the disquiet to the fecklessness of our elected governments.

In America, we certainly have structural problems in ensuring the people are truly represented. The chief flaw, more than even Citizens United, is probably gerrymandering, which is why President Obama, in his first post-White House act, is joining forces with former Attorney General Eric Holder to legally challenge districting that runs afoul of common sense and, perhaps, the law. It’s a serious bug but not a fatal error.

Policy can be a brutally slow game, not nearly as fleet as a tweet, but it’s also not so fleeting. Today’s ballooning high school graduation rates required a change in priorities six years ago, The substantial gains in income for middle class and impoverished households in 2015 was the cumulative effect of the policies of a President determined to reverse course on Reaganomics, one who aimed to be a transformative instead of transitional leader. Going forward, automation is poised to threaten Labor in a large-scale manner, but for now the pendulum has swung in the direction of working people.

Harari is certainly correct in saying that technological tools have quickly outpaced our capacity to legislate them or to process them in an ethical fashion, and that could make war among nations or within them more likely. Off-the-shelf drones can now deliver explosions as well as pizzas. Tools like those will only get better (and worse).

Nothing speaks to the disruption of traditional governance as we’ve known it like Silicon Valley billionaires engaging in Space Race 2.0 against entire nations. Even if those dreams are still beyond reach for individuals with lots of stock options, they aren’t so far that they can be dismissed.

Individuals and corporations, however, work toward satisfying their own priorities, not always the greater good. Government, run reasonably well, should always be striving to accomplish the latter. As long as it does so to a fair degree, central authority will always have a role in our lives, no matter how fractured they become.

When some say philosophy is dead, seemingly giddy about it, I’m perplexed. We need it now more than ever. The same goes for government. It’s possible our great expectations may cause us to ignore real progress, but that will be a failing of “us,” not “them.”

From Harari:

Disruptive technologies pose a particularly acute threat to the power of national governments and ordinary citizens. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, progress in the form of the Industrial Revolution produced concomitant horrors, from the Dickensian coal pits to Congo’s rubber plantations and China’s disastrous Great Leap Forward. It took tremendous effort for politicians and citizens to put the train of progress on more benign tracks. Yet while the rhythm of politics has not changed much since the days of steam, technology has switched from first gear to fourth. Technological revolutions now vastly outpace political processes.

The Internet suggests how this happens. The Web is now crucial to our lives, economy, and security, yet the early, critical choices about its design and basic features weren’t made through a democratic political process—did you ever vote about the shape of cyberspace? Decisions made by Web designers years ago mean that today the Internet is a free and lawless zone that erodes state sovereignty, ignores borders, revolutionizes the job market, smashes privacy, and poses a formidable global-security risk. Governments and civic organizations conduct intense debates about restructuring the Internet, but the governmental tortoise cannot keep up with the technological hare.

In the coming decades, we will likely see more Internet-like revolutions, in which technology steals up silently on politics. Artificial intelligence and biotechnology could overhaul not just societies and economies but our very bodies and minds. Yet these topics are hardly a blip in the current Presidential race. (In the first Clinton-Trump debate, the main reference to disruptive technology concerned Clinton’s e-mail debacle, and despite all the talk about job losses, neither candidate addressed the potential impact of automation.)

Ordinary voters may not understand artificial intelligence but they can sense that the democratic mechanism no longer empowers them.•

Tags: Yuval Noah Harari

“Then There’s A Long-Term Implication For The Civic Life Of The Country”

October 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Donald Trump, the Worst American™, is the GOP nominee, so we all probably owe an apology to Sarah Palin for disqualifying her from sitting a heartbeat from the Oval Office because she was ill-prepared, ignorant, fact-challenged, mean-spirited and generally unfit. Why did we focus on such mundane matters?

Steve Schmidt, who chose Sarah Palin for the GOP VP slot in 2008 and then chose to not vote for her, is interviewed by Andrew Prokop of Vox about the sewer-water campaign of the hideous hotelier and what is likely to occur in the aftermath of a Trump flameout on Election Day. The political adviser sees the finger-pointing, paranoia and bigotry perhaps birthing an alt-right cable channel and a UKIP-ish factional movement. Whatever happens, it will likely involve further fracturing America.

The opening exchange:

Andrew Prokop:

Stepping back a bit from the swirl of allegations about Trump’s personal behavior in the news, what’s your big-picture view of the state of the Republican Party right now, and our politics in general?

Steve Schmidt:

One of John McCain’s famous quotes was quoting Chairman Mao: “It’s always darkest before it’s completely black.”

The Trump campaign is over — Hillary Clinton is going to be elected president. The question that remains here, the open question, is the degree of the collateral damage, right? The Republicans are going to lose the US Senate. The question is how many seats can they lose in the House. It is possible but not probable yet that they lose the House majority. So the question is, how far below 40 percent is Trump in the popular vote?

Then there’s a long-term implication for the civic life of the country, the vandalism being done, which will culminate for the first time in American history with his refusal to make an ordinary concession where he grants to the winner legitimacy by recognizing the legitimacy of the election. I think it’s very clear he’s going to go out saying it’s a rigged system.

I think what you’re gonna see is Steve Bannon monetizing 30 percent of the electorate into a UKIP-style movement and a billion-dollar media business.

And I think the Republican Party has an outstanding chance of fracturing. There will be the alt-right party; then there will be a center-right conservative party that has an opportunity to reach out, repair damage, and rebuild the brand over time. America, ideologically right now, is a centrist country — it used to be a center-right country — but it’s by no means a Bernie Sanders country. Not even close. The market will demand a center-right party.

The last implication for it behaviorally is it exposes at such a massive scale and at such magnitude the hypocrisy of the Tony Perkinses and the Jerry Falwell Jrs. and the Pat Robertsons. These people are literally the modern-day Pharisees, they are the money changers in the temple, and they will forever be destroyed from a credibility perspective.

There are millions of decent, faithful, committed evangelicals in this country who have every right to participate in the political process. But this country doesn’t ever need to hear a lecture from any one of these people [Perkins, Falwell, etc.] again on a values issue, or their denigration of good and decent gay people in this country.•

Tags: Andrew Prokop, Donald Trump, Steve Schmidt

“The Quarter-Century From 1948 To 1973 Was The Most Striking Stretch Of Economic Advance In Human History”

October 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Rebuilding the world has to rank at the top of economic low-hanging fruit of the last century. The U.S. played a large role in piecing together the shattered globe in the wake of WWII. Yes, four decades of unfortunate tax rates, globalization and the demise of unions have all abetted the decline of the American middle class, but just as true is that the good times simply ended, the job completed (more or less), the outlier running out of energy. That was essentially the key lesson of Thomas Piketty’s Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century.

It’s not that high growth and high productivity are completely impossible today, but those circumstances may not now move the masses even if they were to occur. Postwar technologies replaced some workers but complemented many others, and the reverse may be true of our new tools.

In his Wall Street Journal “Saturday Essay,”: former Economist editor Marc Levinson speaks to this topic, arguing that neither liberals nor conservatives are capable of markedly boosting productivity and that “secular stagnation” may just be business as usual. An excerpt:

The quarter-century from 1948 to 1973 was the most striking stretch of economic advance in human history. In the span of a single generation, hundreds of millions of people were lifted from penury to unimagined riches.

At the start of this extraordinary time, 2 million mules still plowed furrows on U.S. farms, Spanish homemakers needed ration books to buy olive oil, and in Tokyo, an average of three people had to cook, eat, relax and sleep in an area the size of a parking space. Within a few years, tens of millions of families had bought their own homes, high-school education had become universal, and a raft of government social programs had created an unprecedented sense of financial security.

People who had thought themselves condemned to be sharecroppers in the Alabama Cotton Belt or day laborers in the boot heel of Italy found opportunities they could never have imagined. The French called this period les trente glorieuses, the 30 glorious years. Germans spoke of the Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle, while the Japanese, more modestly, referred to “the era of high economic growth.” In the English-speaking countries, it has more commonly been called the Golden Age.

The Golden Age was the first sustained period of economic growth in most countries since the 1920s. But it was built on far more than just pent-up demand and the stimulus of the postwar baby boom. Unprecedented productivity growth around the world made the Golden Age possible. In the 25 years that ended in 1973, the amount produced in an hour of work roughly doubled in the U.S. and Canada, tripled in Europe and quintupled in Japan.

Many factors played a role in this achievement. The workforce everywhere became vastly more educated. As millions of laborers shifted from tending sheep and hoeing potatoes to working in factories and construction sites, they could create far more economic value. New motorways boosted productivity in the transportation sector by letting truck drivers cover longer distances with larger vehicles. Faster ground transportation made it practical, in turn, for farms and factories to expand to sell not just locally but regionally or nationally, abandoning craft methods in favor of machinery that could produce more goods at lower cost. Six rounds of tariff reductions brought a massive increase in cross-border trade, putting even stronger competitive pressure on manufacturers to become more efficient.

Above all, technological innovation helped to create new products and offered better ways for workers to do their jobs.•

Tags: Marc Levinson

“He Has A Long History Of Falling For Cranks And Grifters, And Trump Is Just The Largest”

October 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Whenever a racist (Donald Trump, Hulk Hogan) needs assistance, Peter Thiel is quick to cut a large check.

According to a New York Times report, the bloodthirsty Silicon Valley big deal just infused the odious Trump campaign with $1.25 million. In David Streitfeld’s article, a confidante reveals the reason for the gay immigrant’s support of a bigot: “The investor feels the country needs fixing, and Mr. Trump can do it.” Yes, an irrational ignoramus with the depth of an off-color bumper sticker is the one to cure what ails us, even though his stated economic and immigration policies would clearly be ruinous.

At the convention, Thiel revealed he was troubled that the nation was fixated on cultural issues like the homophobic “bathroom laws” in places like North Carolina. He failed to mention it was members of his own party who manufactured the controversy by proposing, and sometimes passing, prejudiced legislation aimed at rebuking the national legalization of gay marriage.

As I’ve mentioned before, being a billionaire in America doesn’t mean you’re especially decent or particularly intelligent.

Another deep-pocketed Trump donor is wealthy hedge-fund manager Robert Mercer, who’s no stranger to handing over large sums of money for crackpot ideas, though none so far have had so much potential for devastation as helping the hideous hotelier into the White House.

From Jon Schwarz at the Intercept:

So why does Mercer feel such allegiance to Trump? Is it Trump’s policies, élan, and extraordinary judgement and poise?

Maybe. But based on Mercer’s past, it’s more likely that it’s that Mercer is an incredibly easy mark. He has a long history of falling for cranks and grifters, and Trump is just the largest.

Mercer is a relative newcomer to big-time Republican politics, but not to writing big checks to people with exciting proposals to change the world.

For instance, in 2005 Mercer’s family foundation sent $60,000 to Art Robinson, an Oregon chemist, so Robinson could expand his huge collection of human urine. Robinson, who believes that a close analysis of urine can “improve our health, our happiness and prosperity, and even the academic performance of our children in school,” has now received a total of $1.4 million from the Mercer foundation. He’s used this to buy urine freezers and mail postcards to puzzled Oregonians asking them to send him their urine, among other things.

Robinson, who also feels public education is America’s “most widespread and devastating form of child abuse and racism,” ran for Congress in 2010 against Democrat Peter DeFazio. Mercer, smitten with Robinson’s vision of low taxes and large-scale urine collection, co-funded a Super PAC that spent $600,000 on ads supporting him.

Mercer also funds the peculiar organization Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, to which Robinson belongs. The group’s other members hold varied beliefs, such as that low doses of radiation are good for you, that HIV does not cause AIDS, and that the U.S. government did not stop the San Bernardino terrorist attacks because it’s “on the other side.”•

Tags: Donald Trump, Jon Schwarz, Peter Thiel, Robert Mercer

“In Other Countries, Including America, It Is Difficult For People To Try Out VR Technology”

October 14, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Forgive the people of China for their lack of fealty to reality after a dizzying 25 years of transformation. The breakneck pace of urbanization and industrialization must have often seemed shockingly otherworldly, and the same could be said of problems attendant to the big switch: the world’s highest cancer rates and worst air pollution. Maybe some citizens need a break from their vertiginous world.

Or perhaps China is leading the world in early adoption of VR technologies more practical reasons. The real estate boom on the mainland and the new money that allows Chinese people to buy overseas has popularized the use of Virtual Reality goggles that allow potential buyers to “take a tour” of a property from afar–or one yet to be built–normalizing the professional use of the tool. This utilization of the technology may provide the country with a foundational advantage in future uses of VR. That’s a possibility, though an early lead can disappear in a hurry as gadgets become cheaper and better.

From the Economist:

In the West the interest in VR has mainly focused on consumer applications like gaming. By contrast, in China business applications are an immediate and profitable avenue for growth. Property developers like Vanke are using VR to peddle expensive properties that are overseas or not yet built, and architects are using it in design. Education is another promising field. NetDragon, a Chinese software firm that attracted attention when it acquired Britain’s Promethean World, an online education outfit, for some $100m last year, is testing how VR software and hardware can be used in mainland schools (one idea is that headsets could tell when children are tilting their heads, indicating boredom, meaning a change of subject or teaching method is required).

Companies specialising in VR are spending a great deal of time examining the growth in China’s market. In addition to the quick adoption by Chinese businesses, this is for two other reasons to do with the consumer side, reckons Huang Zhuang, founder of China’s Nao Chuan Yue, a startup VR outfit. First, mainlanders are enthusiastic early adopters of whizzy technologies, even if the early versions are somewhat imperfect. Second, China leads the world in the use of the mobile internet. Mr Huang is convinced that the majority of users in future will access VR via their web-connected smartphones, not via goggles attached to personal computers or self-contained devices.

In other countries, including America, it is difficult for people to try out VR technology, notes Ryan Wang of Outpost Capital, a Californian venture-capital firm with investments in the sector. They have to fork out $1,000 or more to experience high-end VR. That means there is as yet no clear, affordable path for American consumers to adopt the technology, says Mr Wang.

China, on the other hand, already has a full infrastructure in place for consumers to try it out.•

“There Are Certain Advantages To Being A Machine”

October 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Tad Friend’s “Letter from California” articles in the New Yorker are probably the long-form journalism I most anticipate, in part because I’m fascinated from a distance with the opposite coast, but chiefly because he’s so good at understanding the micro and macro of any situation or subject and sorting through psychological motivations that drive the behavior of individuals or groups. To put it concisely: He gets ecosystems.

The writer’s latest effort, a profile of Y Combinator President Sam Altman, a stripling yet a strongman, reveals someone who has almost no patience for or interest in most people yet wants to save the world–or something.

It’s not a hit job, as Altman really has no intent to offend or injure, but it vivisects Silicon Valley’s Venture Capital culture and the outrageous hubris of those insulated inside its wealth and privilege, the ones who nod approvingly while watching Steve Jobs use Mahatma Gandhi’s image to sell wildly marked-up electronics made by sweatshop labor, and believe they also can think different.

When envisioning the future, Altman sees perhaps a post-scarcity, automated future where a few grand a year of Universal Basic Income can buy the jobless a bare existence (certainly not the big patch of Big Sur he owns), or maybe there’ll be complete societal collapse and the VC wunderkind can flee the carnage by jetting with that misery Peter Thiel to the safety of his New Zealand spread (though grisly death seems preferable). Either or. More or less.

Three quick excerpts from the piece follow.

The immediate challenge is that computers could put most of us out of work. Altman’s fix is YC Research’s Basic Income project, a five-year study, scheduled to begin in 2017, of an old idea that’s suddenly in vogue: giving everyone enough money to live on. Expanding on earlier trials in places such as Manitoba and Uganda, YC will give as many as a thousand people in Oakland an annual sum, probably between twelve thousand and twenty-four thousand dollars.

The problems with the idea seem as basic as the promise: Why should people who don’t need a stipend get one, too? Won’t free money encourage indolence? And the math is staggering: if you gave each American twenty-four thousand dollars, the annual tab would run to nearly eight trillion dollars—more than double the federal tax revenue. However, Altman told me, “The thing most people get wrong is that if labor costs go to zero”—because smart robots have eaten all the jobs—“the cost of a great life comes way down. If we get fusion to work and electricity is free, then transportation is substantially cheaper, and the cost of electricity flows through to water and food. People pay a lot for a great education now, but you can become expert level on most things by looking at your phone. So, if an American family of four now requires seventy thousand dollars to be happy, which is the number you most often hear, then in ten to twenty years it could be an order of magnitude cheaper, with an error factor of 2x. Excluding the cost of housing, thirty-five hundred to fourteen thousand dollars could be all a family needs to enjoy a really good life.”

On the far side of a fire pit, two founders of Shypmate, an app that links you to airline passengers who will cheaply carry your package to Ghana or Nigeria, were commiserating. Kwadwo Nyarko said, “We’re at the mercy of travellers who never have as much space in their luggage as they said.” Perry Ogwuche murmured, “YC tells us, ‘Talk to your customers,’ but it’s hard to find our customers.” Altman walked over to engage them, dutiful as a birthday-party magician. “So what are your hobbies?” he asked. Nonplussed, Ogwuche said, “We work and we go to the gym. And what are yours?”

“Well, I like racing cars,” Altman said. “I have five, including two McLarens and an old Tesla. I like flying rented planes all over California. Oh, and one odd one—I prep for survival.” Seeing their bewilderment, he explained, “My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end. After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird-flu virus, five years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next twenty years became, well, nonzero. The other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks us and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources.” The Shypmates looked grave. “I try not to think about it too much,” Altman said. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”

Altman’s mother, a dermatologist named Connie Gibstine, told me, “Sam does keep an awful lot tied up inside. He’ll call and say he has a headache—and he’ll have Googled it, so there’s some cyber-chondria in there, too. I have to reassure him that he doesn’t have meningitis or lymphoma, that it’s just stress.” If the pandemic does come, Altman’s backup plan is to fly with his friend Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, to Thiel’s house in New Zealand. Thiel told me, “Sam is not particularly religious, but he is culturally very Jewish—an optimist yet a survivalist, with a sense that things can always go deeply wrong, and that there’s no single place in the world where you’re deeply at home.”

Four years ago, on a daylong hike with friends north of San Francisco, Altman relinquished the notion that human beings are singular. As the group discussed advances in artificial intelligence, Altman recognized, he told me, that “there’s absolutely no reason to believe that in about thirteen years we won’t have hardware capable of replicating my brain. Yes, certain things still feel particularly human—creativity, flashes of inspiration from nowhere, the ability to feel happy and sad at the same time—but computers will have their own desires and goal systems. When I realized that intelligence can be simulated, I let the idea of our uniqueness go, and it wasn’t as traumatic as I thought.” He stared off. “There are certain advantages to being a machine. We humans are limited by our input-output rate—we learn only two bits a second, so a ton is lost. To a machine, we must seem like slowed-down whale songs.”•

Tags: Sam Altman, Tad Friend

“Why Should A Pizza Be Delivered By A Drone, But Not A Bomb?”

October 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

We live in interesting times, as the sly old Chinese blessing/curse says.

Paul Mason, a passionate humanist who can be a bit all over the place because that’s where the trouble is, brings laser-sharp focus to a Guardian piece on the Aleppo atrocities, particularly the besieged hospitals, which he believes could signal the end of the Geneva Conventions, a chilling possibility that may be played out in the macro should another world war occur.

He’s right, but even if most nations could agree to double down on Geneva, two potential stumbling blocks remain: states ruled by a central authoritarian figure and those barely ruled at all. The former are run by dictators who can purchase increasingly powerful tools for little more than the cost of a tin pot. In the latter category, improvements to store-bought drones will only allow for more mayhem by terrorists, which was the first thought that came to my pessimistic head when I became aware of them five or so years ago.

Two excerpts follow: one from Mason and the other from Brian Dowling of the Boston Herald.

From Mason:

Since Iraq, state-sanctioned barbarity has of course been ruthlessly mirrored and bettered by the war criminals of Isis, for whom the Geneva conventions’ prohibitions read like a to-do list.

But there’s something deeper at work, eroding in our attitudes to mercy. The men and women Dunant inspired had a horror of war born of their experience of it: the more total it became, the more interest the population had in moderating military behaviour.

Modern media coverage sanitises war. Broadcasting rules in the UK, for example, place strict limits on showing death, mutilated bodies and the agony of wounded people – all the things that inspired Dunant to change the world.

Our grandfathers’ generation were surprised and shocked by the ways in which the Nazis broke the Geneva conventions. We have come to expect they will be broken in all wars.

Though the US has apologised for the Kunduz attack, and disciplined 12 people in the military for the errors that caused it, initial coverage in the US media actually justified the attack on the hospital because it was said to be treating al-Qaida fighters.

Now, as the Russian airstrikes against hospitals in rebel-held areas of Syria reach a crescendo, there is a campaign of justification centred around the accusation that the Syrian White Helmets –a medical relief group funded by both the US and EU – is “not neutral”. Regardless of the White Helmets’ funding by western powers, the issue of its neutrality is secondary to the fact that it is a medical organisation. It runs ambulances rescue services – and both are entitled to protection under the Geneva conventions, just as a British military hospital would be.

The danger should be obvious. If we do not stop and punish the targeting of hospitals in the asymmetric wars, then the next big war – should it occur – will see the Geneva conventions go out of the window. Guernica showed a generation what the second world war would be like; Aleppo shows you what any future conventional conflict will descend to, if we don’t act.•

From Dowling:

A store-bought ISIS drone packed with explosives that killed two Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq this month is raising fears the terror group could attack U.S. troops there and American civilians here at home, with lone wolves launching airborne IEDs to bypass security checkpoints and deliver deadly blasts to crowded events.

“The truth is it’s just a matter of time before someone figures this out,” former Boston police Commissioner Edward F. Davis told the Herald. “The bottom line with these things are as the drones get more sophisticated and more powerful, it’s all about payload.

“The danger is real, and there are companies that are working on anti-drone strategies, but they aren’t fully baked yet,” said Davis, who noted Boston police were involved in the 2011 case of an Ashland jihadi-wannabe who planned to bomb the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol with remote-controlled planes.

RAND Corp. terror analyst Colin Clarke said weaponized drones, which have also been used by the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, are the “tip of the iceberg” for where terror groups can go with the latest technology.

“Why should a pizza be delivered by a drone, but not a bomb?” Clarke said.•

Tags: Brian Dowling, Colin Clarke, Paul Mason

“[It] Has Emerged As The Biggest Polling Outlier Of The Presidential Campaign”

October 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Excellent analysis by Nate Cohn of the New York Times “Upshot” in interpreting the methods and merits of the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak poll, which has baffled both sides of the aisle in 2016, zigging while everyone else zagged. The survey has consistently shown Donald Trump outperforming all other available numbers. Is the poll purposely biased, somehow better than all the rest or just flawed?

The first two are improbable, while the latter seems likely. As Cohn notes, USC/LAT is “admirably transparent,” which allowed him to discern the two key problems with the system: 1) It weights for very tiny groups, which results in big weights, and 2) It weights by past vote. Number two is a particularly unorthodox practice.

The opening:

There is a 19-year-old black man in Illinois who has no idea of the role he is playing in this election.

He is sure he is going to vote for Donald J. Trump.

And he has been held up as proof by conservatives — including outlets like Breitbart News and The New York Post — that Mr. Trump is excelling among black voters. He has even played a modest role in shifting entire polling aggregates, like the Real Clear Politics average, toward Mr. Trump.

How? He’s a panelist on the U.S.C. Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak poll, which has emerged as the biggest polling outlier of the presidential campaign. Despite falling behind by double digits in some national surveys, Mr. Trump has generally led in the U.S.C./LAT poll. He held the lead for a full month until Wednesday, when Hillary Clinton took a nominal lead.

Our Trump-supporting friend in Illinois is a surprisingly big part of the reason. In some polls, he’s weighted as much as 30 times more than the average respondent, and as much as 300 times more than the least-weighted respondent.•

Tags: Nate Cohn

“It Has Been Seeping Into Our Lives In All Sorts Of Ways”

October 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

In yesterday’s post about Charlie Rose interviewing a fellow robot, I argued that the humanoid form we envision when we consider AI is a distraction from the actual creeping effects of the technology, which has remarkably powerful potential for boon and bane. Like electricity, it can covertly make everything run–or run amok.

In the Wired issue guest edited by President Obama, future ruler of Mars, EIC Scott Dadich mediates a conversation about AI between the leader of the free world and MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito. Casualty of an election cycle dominated by the violent jerks of a masturbating, orange-faced clown has been substantive talk about Artificial Intelligence, automation, the Internet of Things, biotech, etc. Those are discussions we dearly need to have, so I’m glad the publication engaged on some of these issues with the sitting President, who seems to have a good understanding of the challenges ahead (ethical, economic, etc.).

An excerpt:

Scott Dadich:

I want to center our conversation on artificial intelligence, which has gone from science fiction to a reality that’s changing our lives. When was the moment you knew that the age of real AI was upon us?

Barack Obama:

My general observation is that it has been seeping into our lives in all sorts of ways, and we just don’t notice; and part of the reason is because the way we think about AI is colored by popular culture. There’s a distinction, which is probably familiar to a lot of your readers, between generalized AI and specialized AI. In science fiction, what you hear about is generalized AI, right? Computers start getting smarter than we are and eventually conclude that we’re not all that useful, and then either they’re drugging us to keep us fat and happy or we’re in the Matrix. My impression, based on talking to my top science advisers, is that we’re still a reasonably long way away from that. It’s worth thinking about because it stretches our imaginations and gets us thinking about the issues of choice and free will that actually do have some significant applications for specialized AI, which is about using algorithms and computers to figure out increasingly complex tasks. We’ve been seeing specialized AI in every aspect of our lives, from medicine and transportation to how electricity is distributed, and it promises to create a vastly more productive and efficient economy. If properly harnessed, it can generate enormous prosperity and opportunity. But it also has some downsides that we’re gonna have to figure out in terms of not eliminating jobs. It could increase inequality. It could suppress wages.

Joi Ito:

This may upset some of my students at MIT, but one of my concerns is that it’s been a predominately male gang of kids, mostly white, who are building the core computer science around AI, and they’re more comfortable talking to computers than to human beings. A lot of them feel that if they could just make that science-fiction, generalized AI, we wouldn’t have to worry about all the messy stuff like politics and society. They think machines will just figure it all out for us.

Barack Obama:

Right.•

Tags: Barack Obama, Joi Ito, Scott Dadich

“Today’s GOP Is, In His View, A Vehicle For Racial Resentment”

October 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

As it lies prostrate and dying in the gutter, the modern GOP is suffering the final indignity of being on the business end of a golden shower from a creepy, orange clown who needs to drain the overflow of too many Diet Cokes.

Had it not been protected emotionally by the echo chamber of Fox News and practically by gerrymandering, perhaps the Republican Party would have experienced a corrective comeuppance years ago and not continued to career toward annihilation. The government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996 were just such a Waterloo for Newt and other nuts, forcing some sanity into the party.

Eight months after that second power play failed, Fox News was born. Perhaps not coincidentally, compromise hasn’t been on the table ever since nor has there been a true path to the Republican nomination for those unable to pass a conservative purity test that’s poison in the general election. Now it’s too late for this iteration of the former Party of Lincoln. It must start at the bottom and conduct a real rebuild, and not just in a small, surface way. It needs to go big or it may as well go home.

The ascent of Trump has come as a shock to some among the faithful who somehow didn’t get the memo, even after the Tea Party and Birtherism, that the GOP has spent half a century pandering to racists, stoking Angry White Man disease, a profitable business but also a costly one.

From Molly Ball’s Atlantic piece on health-care wonk Avik Roy and other disenfranchised Republicans:

In the real world, Donald Trump was running on a platform directly opposed to the pro-trade, pro-immigration, pro-small-government ideology of conservatives like Roy. Many of those at the Hoover gathering, Roy included, feared they would not have a party to come back to post-Trump. They are among a class of conservative operatives, thinkers, and staffers who have spent the campaign season adrift, pondering the causes of their party’s disruption and looking nervously to the future. Fifty Republican national-security experts signed an open letter declaring Trump a danger to the republic; several staffers quit the Republican National Committee rather than work to elect Trump. Allegiances have been sundered, and professional trajectories thrown into confusion. One former top RNC staffer told me he no longer speaks to his once-close colleagues; a conservative policy expert who runs a think tank in Washington, D.C., says he’s become adept at steering conversations away from politics and toward college football. Several Republicans I know, finding the campaign intolerable, have rediscovered old hobbies.

Of the various explanations that have been advanced in such quarters to explain Trump’s hostile takeover of the GOP, Roy’s may be the most explosive. Although he was originally drawn to the party for its emphasis on economic freedom and self-reliance, he now believes that a substantial portion of Republicans were never motivated by those ideas. Rather than a conservative party that happens to incorporate cultural grievances, today’s GOP is, in his view, a vehicle for the racial resentment, nationalism, and nostalgia of older white voters. The element of the party that he once dismissed as a fringe, in other words, now seems to form its core.•

Tags: Avik Roy, Donald Trump, Molly Ball

“This Process Of Blending Our Minds With Our Devices Has Forced Us To Take Stock Of Who We Are”

October 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Larry Page and other Silicon Valley technologists would like it very much if you would eventually have the implant. You know, the implant in your brain. The one that will automatically feed you information when you think about something you don’t now much about.

Brain implants that boost intelligence while making us, quite literally, inseparable from our computers seems a significant threshold, but that crossing isn’t as vital as we might believe. What we need to fear–or at least be cognizant of–doesn’t spring at us from the dark but remain there growing without notice. Once we’re fully integrated into the information machine we’re gradually building, a process that’s already begun, a chip will be just one more intrusion. We might think the machine is in our pocket, but in reality we’re inside of its.

In an excellent Aeon essay “Embedded Beings: How We Blended Our Minds with Our Devices,” Saskia K. Nagel and Peter B. Reiner speak to this point, writing that “we don’t actually need to plug ourselves in: proximity is a red herring.” An excerpt:

This process of blending our minds with our devices has forced us to take stock of who we are and who we want to be. Consider the issue of autonomy, perhaps the most cherished of the rights we have inherited from the Enlightenment. The word means self-rule, and refers to our ability to make decisions for ourselves, by ourselves. It is a hard-earned form of personal freedom and, at least in Western societies over the past 300 years, the overall trajectory has been towards more power to the individual and less to institutions.

The first inkling that modern technology might threaten autonomy came in 1957 when an American marketing executive called James Vicary claimed to have increased sales of food and drinks at a movie theatre by flashing the subliminal messages ‘Drink Coca-Cola’ and ‘Hungry? Eat Popcorn’. The story turned out to be a hoax, but after attending a demonstration of sorts, The New Yorker reported that minds had been ‘softly broken and entered’. These days, we regularly hear news stories about neuromarketing, an insidious strategy by which marketers tap findings in neuropsychology to read our thoughts as they search for the ‘buy button’ in our brains. To date, none of these plots to manipulate us have been successful.

But the threat to autonomy remains. Persuasive technologies, designed to change people’s attitudes and behaviours, are being deployed in every corner of society. Their practitioners are not so much software engineers as they are social engineers.•

Tags: Peter B. Reiner, Saskia K. Nagel

“I Would Have Gone Right After Him”

October 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

The wonderful New York Times culture reporter Dave Itzkoff has a brief interview with David Letterman, in which the retired talk-show host shares how he would have handled a Donald Trump interview during this Baba Booey of an election season. The thing is, Letterman had ample opportunity to address Trump’s descent into utter bigotry and failed miserably.

Like many of us, Letterman watched in horror as Trump used his Birther bullshit to try to disqualify the first African-American President as being “not one of us.” Justifiably, the talking head labeled his frequent guest a “racist.” So far, so good. For some reason, the host later backtracked and apologized on-air to the hideous hotelier for the accurate assessment, pretty much groveling in the process. It was a shocking and disappointing reversal for someone who built his career on cutting through the bullshit. Now that it’s far too late, Letterman has a plan.

From Itzkoff:

Question:

Jimmy Fallon seemed to try a different approach, by not even addressing Trump’s controversies, and it got a negative reaction. How would you handle Trump as a guest now?

Donald Trump:

If I had a show, I would have gone right after him. I would have said something like, “Hey, nice to see you. Now, let me ask you: what gives you the right to make fun of a human who is less fortunate, physically, than you are?” And maybe that’s where it would have ended. Because I don’t know anything about politics. I don’t know anything about trade agreements. I don’t know anything about China devaluing the yuan. But if you see somebody who’s not behaving like any other human you’ve known, that means something. They need an appointment with a psychiatrist. They need a diagnosis and they need a prescription.•

Tags: Dave Itzkoff, David Letterman, Donald Trump

“Trump Became Dependent On The Shock Jock”

October 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Whether it’s Howard Stern or that other shock jock Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump’s deep-seated need for praise has made him a mark for those who know how to push his buttons. In the 1990s, when the hideous hotelier was at a career nadir, he was a veritable Wack Packer, dropping by the Stern show to cruelly evaluate women and engage in all sorts of locker-room banter. Trump tries to dismiss these un-Presidential comments as “entertainment,” but his vulgarity off-air is likewise well-documented. He wasn’t out of his element when with the King of All Media but squarely in it. And it wasn’t just two decades ago. Up until 2014, Trump was still playing right along, allowing himself to be flattered into conversation he must have realized on some level was best avoided.

For Stern, who’s become somewhat less of an asshole as Trump has become far more of one, the joke was always that ugly men were sitting in judgement of attractive women. The future GOP nominee, however, was seemingly not aware he was a punchline. He’s a self-described teetotaler who somehow has beer goggles for himself.

In “How Howard Stern Owned Donald Trump,” a sharp Politico Magazine piece, Virginia Heffernan writes knowingly of the dynamic between the two men. The article’s one glaring error–it initially stated Stern hasn’t revealed if he would vote for Trump or Hillary Clinton when he’s repeatedly stated he’s supporting the latter–has been corrected. An excerpt:

Today, as the Republican nominee, he may fashion himself as a boss and a master of the universe. But what comes across in old tapes of the show, resurfaced recently by BuzzFeed and other outlets, is that Trump, like many of Stern’s guests, was often the one being played. By nailing him as a buffoon and then—unkindest cut—forcing him to kiss the Howard Stern ring, Stern and his co-anchor, Robin Quivers, created a series of broadcasts that today showcase not just Trump’s misogyny but his ready submission to sharper minds.

Why would people subject themselves to Stern’s hazing? Generally, his guests in those days—if not strippers and professional opera buffa types—had to have been brought pretty low, so that a combination of psychological fragility and hunger for celebrity made them vulnerable to his mock camaraderie. That’s why it’s important to remember that Trump in the period of his appearances on the show was deeply in the red. By the time he was a regular, he had blown it all in Atlantic City, run out on his vendors, left his imperious first wife, Ivana, for the commoner Marla Maples, earned the yearlong silent treatment of his namesake son and reported a loss of nearly a billion dollars. (Even a businessman of cognitive impairment would have to sweat that one.)

His 1987 business advice memoir, The Art of the Deal, which briefly conferred valor on Trump’s scattershot career, was now a distant memory. Trump’s gilded glory belonged to the suddenly despised ’80s.

But Stern took Trump’s calls, and even had him into the studio. He gave Trump free airtime, as would cable news much later. And so Trump became dependent on the shock jock. He even admitted at times to being addicted to Stern’s show, telling Stern during one episode that he was late to at least one “really important” meeting, because he couldn’t tear himself away from the broadcast. Trump’s attention was evidently sliding off the dreary business of becoming solvent again. He was finding his calling as a carny.•

Tags: Donald Trump, Howard Stern, Virginia Heffernan

“My Relationship With Trump, If You Could Call It A Relationship, Goes Back More Than Three Decades”

October 5, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Somewhere prominent in the annals of great insults is “short-fingered vulgarian,” an enduring epithet repeatedly spit in the face of the hideous hotelier Donald Trump from the wonderfully poisonous pages of Spy. The aggrieved party wiped the saliva from his cheek with his wee baby hands, but he couldn’t forgive or forget this taunt for all times.

The description may not possess the extreme brevity of the Beckett curse “critic” or the Reagan Era diminution of “liberal,” but it’s a gift that keeps on giving, long after the end of the Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen publication or the heyday of the Magazine Age itself. The lacerating line reemerged in major way earlier this year when a variant of it was employed by Presidential aspirant Marco Rubio, a rare moment of momentum for the Little Marco that couldn’t.

The slight had its genesis in a 1983 GQ feature about the orange supremacist penned by Carter. It was then a simple observation which surprisingly began a war of words between the men, and though the editor was pretty much forced occasionally to accept the status of bemused frenemy, most of the time Trump wanted to wrap his hands around the journalist’s neck, if only it were anatomically possible.

In an excellent Vanity Fair “Hive” piece, Carter analyzes this Baba Booey of a campaign season, while revealing that an unintended consequence of the profile he penned 33 years ago may have been that it abetted the political ascent of Bull Connor as a condo salesman. The opening:

In 1987, Michael Kelly, later a celebrated editor but at the time a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, took Fawn Hall, a secretary to Oliver North, as his guest to the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Hall had been caught up in the whole Iran-contra scandal, and her arrival shocked the swells of Washington, who were used to seeing business, political, sports, and movie grandees on the arms of major news organizations. Thus began a tradition of media companies prowling the nether regions of their coverage to come up with the tabloid oddity of the moment for their novelty guest.

Novelty guests don’t know they’re novelty guests. They just think they’re guests. That evening in May 1993, Vanity Fair had two tables and we filled them with the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Bob Shrum, Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg, Peggy Noonan, Tipper Gore, and Vendela Kirsebom, a Swedish model who professionally went by her first name and who was then at or near the top of the catwalk heap. I sat Trump beside Vendela, thinking that she would get a kick out of him. This was not the case. After 45 minutes she came over to my table, almost in tears, and pleaded with me to move her. It seems that Trump had spent his entire time with her assaying the “tits” and legs of the other female guests and asking how they measured up to those of other women, including his wife. “He is,” she told me, in words that seemed familiar, “the most vulgar man I have ever met.”

The next time I saw Trump in that giant ballroom of the Washington Hilton was in 2011. This time he had come as the guest of Washington Post heiress Lally Weymouth. It was at the beginning of Trump’s lunatic “birther” rampage, and he was probably quite pleased with himself at being in the midst of all this sequined ersatz Washington glamour. Much as Trump loves to be the center of attention, the attention he got that night didn’t go according to plan. First, President Obama ridiculed him mercilessly from the dais. The fact that the president’s birther tormentor was in the room appeared to give him a lift—he was seriously funny and his timing was flawless. Then the evening’s headliner, Seth Meyers, stood up and really went to town on Trump. Weymouth’s table was right beside us, so I got a ringside view of the poor fellow as he just sat there, stony-faced and steaming—and of course unaware, like everyone else, that while Obama was launching his jokes he was also launching the attack that would kill Osama bin Laden. To think that next spring Trump could be attending the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner as the commander in chief renders one almost speechless.

My relationship with Trump, if you could call it a relationship, goes back more than three decades. I first met him in 1983, when I was reporting a story I was doing on him for GQ magazine. Trump was eager for the national attention that a big article in a national magazine could bring, and so we spent a good deal of time together. There were a number of aspects of the resulting story that he hated, including, but not limited to, an observation that he had remarkably small (if neatly groomed) hands.

This summer, The New Yorker published a story by Jane Mayer about Tony Schwartz, the co-author of Trump’s book Trump: The Art of the Deal. Mayer wrote that that issue of GQ, with Trump on the cover, was a huge best-seller. She reported that this sale encouraged S. I. Newhouse Jr., the proprietor of this magazine (as well as of The New Yorker), to urge the editors of Random House (which he also owned) to sign Trump up for a book. Which they did. The trouble with this narrative is that the Trump issue of GQ sold hardly at all. At least in the traditional way. Word was, the copies had been bought by him—Trump had sent a contingent out to buy up as many as they could get their hands on. The apparent intention, in those pre-Internet days, was to keep the story away from prying eyes.•

Tags: Donald Trump, Graydon Carter, Kurt Andersen

“There Is A Lot Of Naiveté”

October 5, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Not trusting your own government isn’t a good reason to trust Julian Assange. He’s full of shit, this Bill Cosby of whistle blowers, this unprincipled hack. Citizens disrupting government agencies surveilling us has great value, but they must have at least a modicum of scruples and the maturity to realize that in addition to black and white, gray areas actually exist.

Like a lot of assholes, Assange had the potential at one point to do some good despite himself, but this guy is no Daniel Ellsberg. Instead, he’s a self-aggrandizing bag of nuts. His apparent support of a Trump Presidency and his promised-but-not-delivered leak of a supposed trove of important documents are the latest signs of his utter unraveling.

Those still twisting and turning to support his nonsense in the name of some ideological argument are doing harm to themselves and their beliefs.

Two excerpts follow, one from a Spiegel Q&A conducted by Michael Sontheimer, and the other from a Mic piece by Emily Cahn about Assange’s bait-and-switch in regard to a Hillary Clinton bombshell he was allegedly sitting on.

From Spiegel:

Spiegel:

Mr. Assange, 10 years after the founding of WikiLeaks, the whistleblower platform is again being criticized. WikiLeaks is said to have put millions of Turkish voters in danger. What is your response?

Julian Assange:

A few days after the publication of internal emails from the Democratic National Committee, an entirely false story was put out that we had published the names, addresses and phone numbers of all female voters in Turkey. It is completely false. And it was and is simple to check. Power factions fight back with lies. That’s not surprising.

Spiegel:

Quite a few German journalists have long sympathized with WikiLeaks and also with Edward Snowden. But they aren’t impressed with the publishing of the DNC emails. Are you campaigning on behalf of Donald Trump?

Julian Assange:

Our publication of the DNC leaks has showed that the Democratic National Committee had effectively rigged the primaries in the United States on behalf of Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders. That led to the resignation of leading members of the DNC, including its president Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Spiegel:

People within the Clinton campaign have suggested that the DNC emails were given to you by the Russian secret service.

Julian Assange:

There have been many attempts to distract from the power of our publications. Hillary Clinton is the favorite to win. As always, most media aligns with the presumptive winner even though their claimed societal virtue is to investigate those in power.

Spiegel:

The fact is, WikiLeaks is damaging Clinton and bolstering Trump.

Julian Assange:

We’re not going to start censoring our publications because there is a US election. Our role is to publish. Clinton has been in government so we have much more to publish on Clinton. There is a lot of naivety. The US presidency will continue to represent the major power groups of the United States — big business and the military — regardless of who the talking head is.•

From Mic:

Julian Assange trolled the internet — and much of the world — Tuesday, getting thousands to tune into a glorified informercial for WikiLeaks and his new book by teasing he would be dropping a surprise in October on Hillary Clinton.

But Assange didn’t release any documents. Instead, he again moved the goal post for when new documents related to the election would leak — saying they’d come before the end of the year.

“We are going to need an army to defend us from the pressure that is already starting to arise,” Assange said via live video feed into a press conference to celebrate WikiLeaks’ 10-year anniversary, NBC News reported.

Top supporters of Donald Trump — including noted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and political operative Roger Stone — had hyped Assange’s press conference, saying he would release documents that would end Clinton’s presidential bid.•

Tags: Emily Cahn, Julian Assange, Michael Sontheimer

“Are We Ready For This?”

October 5, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

When it comes to biotech or AI or military robotization, many think we can make sober decisions which will limit these amazingly powerful tools from becoming the most destructive weapons imaginable. But progress does not often proceed in an orderly fashion. Priorities can differ wildly from state to state and corporation to corporation, and decisions made by one actor can impact what others do. You can say you never want to tinker with genetics to radically improve human intelligence, but you may feel differently if another nation decides to. And this technology is likely moving too fast to for its negative potential to be unnaturally constrained by legislation.

In a Washington Post column, Vivek Wadhwa and Aaron Johnson write wisely on the the topic of military automation. They encourage a complete ban on such systems, but even smaller states will eventually be able to disrupt such an accord. An excerpt:

The technology is still imperfect, but it is becoming increasingly accurate — and lethal. Deep learning has revolutionized image classification and recognition and will soon allow these systems to exceed the capabilities of an average human soldier.

But are we ready for this? Do we want Robocops policing our cities? The consequences, after all, could be very much like we’ve seen in dystopian science fiction. The answer surely is no.

For now, the U.S. military says that it wants to keep a human in the loop on all life-or-death decisions. All of the drones currently deployed overseas fall into this category: They are remotely piloted by a human (or usually multiple humans). But what happens when China, Russia and rogue nations develop their autonomous robots and acquire with them an advantage over our troops? There will surely be a strong incentive for the military to adopt autonomous killing technologies.

The rationale then will be that if we can send a robot instead of a human into war, we are morally obliged to do so, because it will save lives — at least, our soldiers’ lives, and in the short term.•

Tags: Aaron Johnson, Vivek Wadhwa

“I Think We Must Have Democratization Of AI Technology To Make It Widely Available”

October 4, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Elon Musk says he’ll put humans on Mars within a decade, but perhaps it’s the Botox talking.

The Space X founder has had his fears about Artificial Intelligence shift somewhat since the Nick Bostrom bender he went on at around the time of the publication of Superintelligence. He’s not so worried about conscious AI obviating us now but instead thinks the concentration of such knowledge among a handful of countries and/or companies is highly dangerous. He wants to democratize AI, so that it instead can be accessed by all. Otherwise, he fears, dictators or rogue states can steal the science and use it to try to dominate the world.

But it’s possible Musk’s plan will end up making things more dangerous. Sixty years ago, President Eisenhower launched “Atoms for Peace,” sharing with the world nuclear knowledge and supplies, a move aimed at providing participating nations with relatively cheap energy and making the world less likely to end in Armageddon. This policy led to the building of the first nuclear reactors in some nations, Iran and Pakistan included, and a proliferation of WMDs. Everyone having similar weapons and knowledge only precludes brinkmanship if all actors involved are rational, and in that sense, the world is not flat.

From Y Combinator:

Question:

Speaking of really important problems, AI. You have been outspoken about AI. Could you talk about what you think the positive future for AI looks like and how we get there?

Elon Musk:

Okay, I mean I do want to emphasize that this is not really something that I advocate or this is not prescriptive. This is simply, hopefully, predictive. Because you will hear some say, well, like this is something that I want to occur instead of this is something I think that probably is the best of the available alternatives. The best of the available alternatives that I can come up with, and maybe someone else can come up with a better approach or better outcome, is that we achieve democratization of AI technology. Meaning that no one company or small set of individuals has control over advanced AI technology. I think that’s very dangerous. It could also get stolen by somebody bad, like some evil dictator or country could send their intelligence agency to go steal it and gain control. It just becomes a very unstable situation, I think, if you’ve got any incredibly powerful AI. You just don’t know who’s going to control that.

So it’s not that I think that the risk is that the AI would develop a will of its own right off the bat. I think the concern is that someone may use it in a way that is bad. Or even if they weren’t going to use it in a way that’s bad but somebody could take it from them and use it in a way that’s bad, that, I think, is quite a big danger. So I think we must have democratization of AI technology to make it widely available. And that’s the reason that obviously you, me, and the rest of the team created OpenAI was to help spread out AI technology so it doesn’t get concentrated in the hands of a few. But then, of course, that needs to be combined with solving the high-bandwidth interface to the cortex.•

Tags: Elon Musk

“It Was Kind Of An Earthquake Inside The Democratic Party”

October 3, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

There’s a fairly convincing counterfactual in which the Reagan Revolution was reversed in 1988 by President Gary Hart, a Democrat prescient about the effects technology and globalization was beginning to have on working-class America. His ascent would have prevented Middle American whites from becoming GOP stalwarts, making impossible three terms of Bushes. His monkey business with Donna Rice, it is said, dashed his dreams and ours.

But who knows?

In a smart Vanity Fair “Hive” interview conducted by Abigail Tracy, Hart bemoans that “the media has become more intrusive in people’s private lives and the loss of privacy on the part of candidates has caused an awful lot of people of quality to choose not to seek public office.” In this comment, I think Hart has had history pass him by. It was certainly true for awhile, certainly when Bill Clinton became caught in his zipper before the entire nation, but infidelities don’t seem a deal-breaker anymore, in much the same way that divorce or avoidance of military service are no longer disqualifying. It still not fair or pretty, but eyes prying into bedrooms seem beside the point.

Donald Trump (adulterer) didn’t ascend to the Republican Party nomination to oppose Hillary Clinton (married to one) because really gifted politicians were cowed by fears over past indiscretions. Fellow candidate Governor John Kasich is a gifted politician and true conservative who was rejected by GOP voters because he failed to pass a self-destructive purity test, refusing to spurn Obamacare in Ohio or engage in name-calling with the first African-American President. That’s a question of priorities, not prudishness. So is ignoring the amazing gains in household income made by non-rich citizens during the last eight years to support a party dead set on reversing policies that led to such an improvement. In our time, someone’s peccadillo may be an excuse to not vote for someone, but it’s certainly not a driving force.

One exchange from the Q&A:

Question:

How has the Democratic Party changed, in particular, since you were seeking the presidential nomination?

Gary Hart:

I was first elected to the Senate in 1974 and re-elected in 1980, and I began to realize that there were shifts, like tectonic plates under the surface, going on and it had to do with the beginning of globalization and the shift of the base of the economy from manufacturing to information. And with that shift, we began to see the Rust Belt, manufacturing states in the Midwest and the Northeast—Ohio, Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and other places—beginning to lose jobs, and communities beginning to decline. Whereas at the same time, you go to the West Coast and it was booming because of Silicon Valley.

This was all beginning in the 1970s. Foreign competition was beginning. Nations, which we had defeated in World War II, just 30 years before, were now exporting to us—cars and tech, and all kinds of consumer goods, which we had previously, in recent years, dominated world markets. So I began to talk about it and think about what the implications of this were. In 1984, I placed a great deal of emphasis on the long-term impacts of these shifts.

My principal competition in the Democratic primary, Vice President [Walter] Mondale, and I ended up dividing the country. I won 25 states and he won 25 states. No journalist to my knowledge ever tried to figure out if there was a pattern there, but there definitely was. I carried almost every state that was benefitting from world trade—the West Coast and other parts of the country—and he got the support of those areas in decline. So it was kind of an earthquake inside the Democratic Party as to who was winning and who was losing.•

Tags: Abigail Tracy, Gary Hart

“Every Presidential Election Holds Up A Mirror To U.S. Society”

September 30, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Just after Y2K fears subsided, America was struck by another disaster that shook it to its core, the Fox TV show Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? The program was a gross two-hour spectacle in which a woman was chosen by a supposedly rich man to become his insta-wife even though they barely knew one another. The broadcast provoked outrage for making a mockery of marriage, a traditional value (and financial arrangement) that had long been credited for holding together the fabric of our society. Despite a gigantic audience, the rerun was cancelled, apologies offered and an annulment hastily arranged.

In 2016, U.S. television is littered with thirsty aspiring brides and bachelors with no body hair nor brain cells. Nobody worries about such things anymore, the flood of programs washing away any resistance to a sideshow of emotionally destroyed people providing cheap content for endless channels.

In some ways, the loosening of traditional mores is good. Back in 2000, when the Fox pseudo-nuptials took place, no state in the country was close to allowing gay people to marry, and now those unions are legal across the land. How amazing.

The flip side is that the constant shocks of our bread-and-Kardashians culture have numbed us to any sense of civility, even in a Presidential race. It seems acceptable to a surprising number of citizens that the country be in the hands of a Reality TV star who’s a vicious racist and xenophobe, an insomniac tweeter and a vulgar bumper sticker of a man who knows nothing more than simple catchphrases and how to reflexively point fingers.

That’s our strange, new dichotomy. It’s unreal.

From Edward Luce in the Financial Times:

Every presidential election holds up a mirror to US society. In 2008 it was the hope promised by Barack Obama. This year it is unshockability. Donald Trump’s gaffes are too legion to list. From his reiteration this week that one of his former Miss Universes was too fat, to his criticism a year ago of John McCain’s record as a war prisoner, or his imitation of a disabled reporter, any one would have sunk an earlier candidate. Mr Trump’s immunity to his multitude of offences marks a shift in America’s sensibility. In an age of reality TV we have the reality politician.

Such shock fatigue is not limited to political incorrectness — though the rise of reality TV has inured people to humiliation as entertainment. It also extends to revelations about Mr Trump’s life. In the last month, the Washington Post has run investigative probes on the Trump Foundation, which have shocked political America, but caused barely a ripple beyond the Washington beltway. They allege Mr Trump’s charity, the Trump Foundation, paid off a plaintiff in a lawsuit against one of his businesses, bought portraits of Mr Trump and settled a public suit unrelated to his charity.

He also used it to make a $25,000 donation to Pam Bondi, Florida’s attorney-general, who was investigating whether to prosecute Trump University for fraud. The “university” — another of Mr Trump’s misleadingly titled ventures — faces class action lawsuits. Ms Bondi dropped the probe around the time she received the donation. Mr Trump was fined $2,500 for misusing charitable money. The Post has also detailed millions of dollars Mr Trump claims to have given to charities that were never made.

Again, such revelations would have destroyed a candidate in years past. There is no evidence Mr Trump has been scathed.•

Tags: Edward Luce

“We’re A Co-Bot Situation”

September 30, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

The problem with the idea that humans and machines will work in tandem is that the latter will require the aid of too few of the former. The lucky ones who have those jobs may do quite well, but those who don’t adjust–or are just unlucky–will be left on the outside looking in. Average may be over in terms of demand but not supply. What becomes of those of us left behind?

Zume Pizza, which employs robots rather than chefs, may or not be a success but its methods will certainly succeed in the near future. Hot pies are even easier to make with machines than they are to deliver with drones. From CNBC:

The future has arrived in Mountain View, California.

Zume Pizza is replacing human chefs with robots, slashing labor costs in half, and reinvesting those savings into higher-quality ingredients to carve out a portion of the $40 billion annual U.S. pizza business.

“What we are doing is leveraging the power of this evolution of automation, these intelligent robots, to put better food on people’s tables,” said Julia Collins, the company’s co-founder and co-CEO.

Zume, which is delivery-only, employs far fewer workers than the average pizza chain, but the employees it does hire — which include sous chefs and software engineers — get full benefits, education subsidies and shares in the business. The company — which made its first hire on Sept. 8, 2015 — has never had an employee quit, which is unusual in the restaurant business, said Collins.

“We’re a co-bot situation,” said Collins. “There are humans and robots collaborating to make better food, to make more fulfilling jobs and to make a more stable working environment for the folks that are working with us.”•

Tags: Julia Collins

“People Don’t Necessarily Want To Live In A World Without Work”

September 29, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

How do we reconcile a highly automated economy with a free-market one? If jobs of all skill levels emerge that can’t be outsourced beyond our species, we’ll be fine. But if average truly ls over, as Tyler Cowen and others have predicted, we could be in for some turbulence. Everyone and his brother can’t be quickly upskilled, and even if they could, there will be a limit to the number of driverless-car engineers needed. Abundance is great if we can figure out a good distribution system, something America has never perfected. If the macro financial picture is good but the micro is harsh, political solutions may become necessary.

From an PC World interview with The Wealth of Humans author Ryan Avent:

If this abundance of labor is indeed what is sparking global unrest, things will probably get a lot more chaotic before stability returns, unless the world embraces an Amish-style rejection of technology. So how should civilization proceed moving forward? Proposals include universal basic income (UBI), which is quite fashionable in Silicon Valley circles, or shortening the work week to four days.

“Eventually, we’re going to have to change the ways we do things so that people are working less and are also still able to buy the things they need—that would be where redistribution or basic income comes into the picture,” according to Avent. “There’s a couple of things to consider though. People don’t necessarily want to live in a world without work. Even though work is a drag, it creates structure for our day. It creates purpose and meaning. You can imagine that society would be kind of a messy place if nobody ever had to do anything. The other tricky thing is you need to find a way to pay for everything, which means that you have to tax somebody or create common ownership. Something that’s going to require a big political change.”

The big changes may be far in the future. Many of us may be able to wait out the big transformation, but where does that leave the next generation? Are they just completely screwed? As a parent of a young child, I am keenly interested in what skills—if any—will have any value in the decades to come.

“Those with a PhD in computer engineering will probably be okay. I don’t think that’s going to be something that goes away over the next few decades. The skills that will be applicable in a lot of parts of the economy will actually be the softer skills,” Avent says. “The ability to learn from others, to teach yourself new things, to get along in different cultural settings. Basically to be adaptive and be able to pick up new skills. That’s useful now, but in an environment where new sectors and new jobs are constantly be introduced will be critical to being successful.”•

Tags: Ryan Avent

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