Politics

You are currently browsing the archive for the Politics category.

“It’s About The Capability To Design And Build On-Demand”

March 25, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

It would seem Alphabet decided to sell robotics maker and Youtube sensation Boston Dynamics because of that outfit’s dedication to humanoid machines. It’s probably not just a matter of economics. While the company’s grown more circumspect about expenses since its restructuring, it retains plenty of businesses unlikely to pay off immediately–or ever. No, the other reason is probably because AlphaDog and Petman and their progenies will be best suited to military operations and the Google guys have vowed to not become part of that industrial complex.

Even without the search giant, though, the military in America (and other countries) will continue to move forward with drones and robotics and even bioengineering because of the fear that THEY may get these tools before WE do. It’s a new arms race, albeit one with robotic limbs.

From Phil Goldstein’s Fed Tech report on 3D-printed drones possibly coming soon to a military near you:

Eric Spero, an acting team lead in the Army Research Lab’s (ARL) Vehicle Technology Directorate, pushed the AEWE to take a closer look at his team’s tests.

“We saw the trajectories of two beneficial technology areas converging in the future,” Spero said, according to the Army release. “The technologies are 3D printing and small unmanned aircraft systems, sometimes referred to as drones.”

In chaotic battlefield environments, the two technologies could provide soldiers with greater flexibility to accomplish missions that require drones. Spero says that his team’s work is not actually about drones, but rather about using 3D printing to let soldiers create useful technologies on the fly.

“It’s about the capability to design and build on-demand. The concept takes advantage of 3D printing as a future enabler and positions us, as the U.S. military, to take advantage of increasingly better manufacturing technologies,” Spero said.

Spero notes in a white paper that 3D-printed drones could give soldiers in the field an edge — on the fly, as it were.•

Tags: Eric Spero, Phil Goldstein

“The Promise Of The Digital Age Is Being Hijacked By A Rampant Form Of Old-Style Capitalism”

March 25, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There’s an obvious question without an easy answer of whether traditional economic systems will be able to service the needs of the 21st century, at least the needs of those people who aren’t, in Romney-speak, corporations. Early in the Industrial Age, capitalism’s brutish excesses were curbed by labor unions and newspaper muckrakers and tax codes. In the Digital Age, many of those safety nets have come undone, and it’s not clear if they would have on their own been adequate to deal with the gathering storm.

The Uber business model produces some good at high costs, destabilizing businesses and replacing solid jobs with piecework. AI’s continued development will likely bring exceptional benefits to us but also further hollow out the middle. Even if some plans for automation fall by the wayside, enough will probably succeed to upset Labor, causing industries to rise and fall with shocking speed.

If, for example, driverless autos can be perfected in the next 20 years and proliferate, tens of millions of jobs will quickly be gone from every developed country in trucking, taxis, delivery, etc. In fact, a driverless taxi fleet needn’t even have an owner. The cars could “own” themselves, using the fares to automatically pay for repairs and purchase new vehicles. The operation could entirely run itself. Prices for trips from such outfits will be cheap, which is a good thing, since you might not have a job.

From Antony Funnell’s smart Radio National’s Future Tense piece about the question of capitalism in the Digital Age:

University of Maryland legal academic Frank Pasquale, who focuses on the ethical, legal and social implications of information technology, calls them the ‘Silicon Valley oligarchs’.

‘I think the fundamental problem is that people don’t like to face up to the reality of monopolisation,’ says Pasquale, speaking about the global rise of Uber, Airbnb and other so-called sharing economy companies. ‘It’s much more convenient to believe the comforting myth that these markets are always contestable.

‘A firm like Uber is an appeal to venture capitalists—speculative capital—that wants to see massive returns via monopolisation. Let’s not mistake the business model here. The model here is for one of these firms to come in and to take over various aspects of commerce, to take over the rides that are in an area, to take over availability of non-hotel rooms to sleep in, et cetera. I think that this is really a perversion of the original aspirations of the sharing economy.’

The perils of corporate capitalism ‘running on digital steroids’

For Pasquale, the rise of the oligarchs signals lost potential—the opportunity to enhance genuine sharing and competition through the use of new technologies. But leading US media theorist Douglas Rushkoff goes one step further. In his newly released book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, he warns that the promise of the digital age is being hijacked by a rampant form of old-style capitalism, a modus operandi akin to that of the robber-barons of the 19th century.•

Tags: Antony Funnell, Douglas Rushkoff, Frank Pasquale

“As He Lay Dying Alexander Litvinenko Solved His Own Murder And Foresaw The Future”

March 24, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

In the 1950 noir D.O.A., hopelessly poisoned California accountant Frank Bigelow races to name his murderer before the end of his life and the end of the credits. In the B-movie’s chilling contrivance, murder is a lesser horror than the death of truth. It was the potential paucity of resolution that unnerved the most.

In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, murdered bodies and truth rest uneasily in adjoining plots. In 2006, former FSB officer and dissident Alexander Litvinenko became a real-life Bigelow after downing a drink dosed with polonium-210 at the Millennium Hotel in London. His investigation of the Kremlin as a kleptocracy would abruptly come to a close. He did manage, more or less, to solve his own killing before the radioactive chemical ended him, but the truth hardly mattered. The mafia state remained in place and has since only grown worse. His widow’s crusade to achieve a measure of justice led this year to the assassination being linked directly to Putin, but at this point, the machinations of his mafia state are met if not with shrugs then with knowing, silent nods.

In Peter Pomerantsev’s LRB review of Luke Harding’s new book, A Very Expensive Poison, British PM David Cameron is charged with obfuscating the case in order to not upset London’s rise to world’s foremost financial capital. The opening:

As he lay dying Alexander Litvinenko solved his own murder and foresaw the future. A professional detective on his last case, with himself as the victim, he worked out that he had been poisoned in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair, by another former KGB detective, Andrei Lugovoi. He had thought they were partners, investigating the connections between Putin’s Kremlin, organised crime and money laundering in Europe but, he now realised, Lugovoi was still taking orders from the people they were investigating. As Litvinenko’s hair came out in clumps, as he found it increasingly hard to open his mouth to talk, as he became yellow and shrivelled, he cursed himself for letting his guard down: he had assumed he was safe after receiving asylum and citizenship in the UK. But solving the crime, Litvinenko understood, was only the beginning. Would the British government risk undermining its financial interests by investigating his death properly?

‘Of course I understand the West wants to get gas and oil from Russia,’ he told inspectors from Scotland Yard who interviewed him in hospital, ‘but one shouldn’t be involved in political activity if one doesn’t have political beliefs. And beliefs can’t be traded for gas and oil. Because when a businessman is trading he’s trading with his money but when a politician is trading he is trading with the sovereignty of his country and the future of his children.’ The transcripts of Litvinenko’s interviews were released last year; he was clearly trying hard to win the police over to his cause. He was good at speeches. ‘In case there is from the top administrative pressure for political reasons,’ he said, ‘be firm … bring this case to the end.’ The men from Scotland Yard were impressed by his faith in them: ‘Last month I was granted British citizenship and I very much love this country. Possibly I may die, but I will die as a free person, and my son and wife are free people. And Britain is a great country.’

Litvinenko died four days later, on 23 November 2006. Six hours before it happened Scotland Yard got a phone call from the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston. Their tests showed he was ‘terribly contaminated’ with polonium, a metal four hundred times more radioactive than uranium and which can only be manufactured in a nuclear plant. It had very nearly been the perfect assassination: polonium isn’t picked up by Geiger counters and doctors had followed many false leads – ricin? thallium? – in trying to identify the mystery poison. When polonium was first suggested by urine tests it was dismissed as an anomaly caused by the plastic container.

But now that polonium had been confirmed it was a cinch for investigators, dressed in radiation-proof suits, to follow the radioactive trail, with equipment capable of detecting alpha radiation, through Mayfair, Heathrow, and on the plane Lugovoi had flown in on from Moscow.

Tags: Alexander Litvinenko, Luke Harding, Peter Pomerantsev

“Humans, On The Other Hand, Can Be Immensely Flexible”

March 24, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In 2011, President Obama made a pilgrimage to Silicon Valley and asked tech titans what it would be required to reshore factories making iPhones and such. The NYT recalled a conversation between Obama and Steve Jobs:

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.•

Jobs may have been correct, if for the wrong reasons. The plants actually are moving back to the U.S. in increasing numbers, though there’s a question as to how many jobs will be returning with them and how many will be swallowed up by automation, which has lowered costs enough so that those plants can come home at all. The further question is how many of the positions that escape the rise of the machines will be prone to further automation.

In a Techcrunch article, Jim Rock reports there’s reason for hope, at least in the immediate future, as near-term robots won’t likely have the flexibility human workers possess. An excerpt:

Although the experts cannot agree on exactly how many robots will enter the economy, it’s safe to say that America’s workforce — from the manufacturer’s factory floor to the open office of a law firm — will look very different once the technology is fully integrated. You must do two things to be a truly valuable worker in this environment: embrace technology and be adaptable.

As millennials age into the workplace, the idea of embracing technology is starting to seem a little more passé. Most office workers know how to use email, run a word processor and maybe even set up a three-way call on their Polycom. As robots enter the workplace, though, knowing the intricacies behind the technology that runs them will become an increasingly coveted skill set.

This is not to say that all white-collar workers should enroll in engineering night classes, but knowing how technology works at a base level will make you better at your job — a job that will more and more likely rely on interacting with robots. Employers need to actively promote training programs that empower employees to work more effectively with new tech.

The second trait that future professionals should focus on is adaptability. Reid Hoffman, co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, shares a story about his visit to the Huawei plant in Shenzhen, China:

I was expecting, as a Silicon Valley technologist, that it would be a complete line of robots…Roughly 60 percent of it was automated and 40 percent of it was still people. You say, ‘Is that just because of low cost?’ No. These are actually high-pay, high-skill jobs. The answer is actually that, in the future, adaptability is key, and people are more adaptable. So when they set up the machine line and it’s all machines, there is a huge amount of retooling to shift from line one to line two, whereas the people are much more easy to shift.”

As robots enter the workforce, most will be extremely proficient at one or two specific tasks. Humans, on the other hand, can be immensely flexible when it comes to how we work.•

“A Majority Of Workers Also Think That Their Own Specific Professions Or Jobs Won’t Be Impacted”

March 23, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

“Nobody knows anything,” William Goldman famously said, in 1983, of the motion-picture industry. I wonder if that analysis remains true.

Hollywood still manufactures bombs, but very few of the tentpoles tank now. There aren’t as many hunches played, which makes the business more stagnant creatively, but most of the big bets come in. More advanced research and marketing and analytics and promotion has made it so, since the artistic merits of comic-book spectaculars are wildly inconsistent.

Can this new reality of film economics be applied to the wider economy? Not exactly, since there are way more variables in play. Black swans will still smack us in the back of the head. A huge meltdown can delay the inevitable–or jump-start it early. But some things are good bets. It seems pretty clear now that there’ll be a major transition in Labor over the rest of this century. Either many jobs–entire industries, actually–disappear and are replaced by ones we’ve yet to imagine, or they vanish and aren’t replaced in the numbers necessary. Although this upheaval is upon us, it would seem politicians in this year’s American Presidential campaign–and the electorate–aren’t aware that manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back and more professions than they might imagine are going away.

From Sam Becker at Cheat Sheet, the world’s worst-designed website:

Social scientists and economists are getting pretty good at reading the tea leaves from available data. When it comes to forecasting future trends in employment and business, we generally have an idea of where things things are headed. Though there are big, unexpected events that occur and throw everything into flux, we can mostly plot out humanity’s course, on a macro level, over the next several decades.

Unfortunately, for a good portion of the world’s poor and working classes, it doesn’t look too good – even though we’re living in a time of unprecedented wealth and technological innovation. That innovation will ultimately replace workers in droves, and some large-scale economic policy shifts are going to be needed to sort things out.

But even as we face the prospect of increasing automation, and fewer employment opportunities, most American workers remain confident – perhaps too confident. A look at some new numbers from Pew Research Center shows that worker sentiment toward the future speaks not just to inflated confidence, but perhaps a sense of denial.

The Pew brief cites a 2013 study from Oxford University, which says that as much as 47% of American jobs are subject to automation in the near future. In other words, as much as half of the American work force may be facing a serious employment crisis, and we’re really doing nothing about it. Using that as a starting point, Pew surveyed Americans to drill further down into this dilemma, and see how Americans feel about the unnerving prospect of mass automation.

As expected, a majority (two-thirds) do expect that within 50 years, robots and computers will take over most of the menial work from human employees. But – and here’s the big hang-up – a majority of workers also think that their own specific professions or jobs won’t be impacted.•

Tags: Sam Becker

“There’s A Darker Side To All This, Too”

March 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Our information is inside the machine now, but soon we’ll be there, too.

We now enter queries and likes and itineraries into a networked machine that continues to learn more about us and people like us. Soon the Internet of Things will be established, and the machine will escape its casing and live among us, so quiet, not even making a hum, that we’ll barely notice it. Driverless car technology will mature and we’ll be sitting inside a computer which will be inside another computer. In our pockets will be more computers. They’ll all be measuring and tracking, tabulating, taking a pulse, all the time, not just following us but guiding us. The data will be worthwhile, will help us achieve a safer and, in some ways, saner world, but it will be almost impossible to opt out, to be left alone. We’ll be a known quantity. It will seem like progress.

The opening of “How Self-Driving Cars Will Threaten Privacy,” a wonderfully lucid Atlantic essay by Adrienne LaFrance, which opines that the “price of convenience [will be] surveillance”:

Allow me to join you, if I may, on your morning commute sometime in the indeterminate future.

Here we are, stepping off the curb and into the backseat of a vehicle. As you close the car door behind you, the address of your office—our destination—automatically appears on a screen embedded in the back of a leather panel in front of you. “Good morning,” says the car’s humanoid voice, greeting you by name before turning on NPR for you like it does each day.

You decide you’d like a cup of coffee, and you tell the vehicle so. “Peet’s coffee, half-a-mile away,” it confirms. Peet’s, as it turns out, is a few doors down from Suds Cleaners. The car suggests you pick up your dry cleaning while you’re in the neighborhood. “After work instead,” you say. The car tweaks your evening travel itinerary accordingly.

As we run into Peet’s to grab coffee, the car circles the block. Then, we’re back in the vehicle, en route to your office once again. There’s a lunch special coming up at the vegetarian place you like, the car tells you as we pass the restaurant. With your approval, it makes a reservation for Friday. We ride by a grocery store and a list of sale items appears on the screen. With a few taps, you’ve added them to your existing grocery list. The car is scheduled to pick up and deliver your order this evening.

We’re less than a mile from your office now. Just like every morning, your schedule for the morning—a conference call at 10 a.m., a meeting at 11 a.m.—appears on the screen, along with a reminder that today is a colleague’s birthday.

This is the age of self-driving cars, an era when much of the minutiae of daily life is relegated to a machine. Your commute was pleasant, relaxing, and efficient. Along with promising unprecedented safety on public roadways, driverless cars could make our lives a lot easier—freeing up people’s time and attention to focus on other matters while they’re moving from one place to the next.

But there’s a darker side to all this, too.•

Tags: Adrienne LaFrance

“Only The Strongest Men Can Spend Full Days Among Lunatics And Not Become One”

March 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Excerpts follow from two stories published under the “Life Inside” rubric at The Marshall Project. The first is from Nate A. Lindell’s short essay about his experiences behind bars with a woebegone Whitey Bulger, a geriatric wheeled around in his waning days by an ex-Aryan Brotherhood member. The second is from “Inside the Shithouse,” Jeremy Busby’s memory of being flushed down the vortex of the American penal system, finding himself awash in the lunacy of an East Texas prison.

____________________________

From Lindell:

When Sid wheeled him to dinner that first night, many inmates commented on the new arrival. “Look, that’s Whitey Bulger!” they exclaimed. But nobody went up to him to ask for his autograph or strike up a conversation. The guy was frail, and his posture shouted Stay away.

Despite Whitey’s clear desire to be left alone, when he wheeled past my table out of the chow hall that night, I told him, “Nice running, Whitey!” He broke out into a broad, wolfish smile.

Thirty-some days later, I was put in the same unit as Whitey with only one cell between his and my own.

Whitey didn’t seek out conversation — I only saw him smile twice. Most of the time, he sat in his wheelchair by the TV with an intense look on his face. Sometimes, he slipped into an old-man nap while he was out at recreation. (Which he could never have done at a normal prison. Your gang required you to be fully dressed and ready to fight at all times.) One day, when Whitey napped on the rec yard, a dope fiend and hustler known for selling used shoes snuck up on him and pretended to try and remove his shoes.

“Hey, stop that!” I yelled. “He ain’t dead yet.”

We all laughed, and Whitey went back to sleep.

Back on our unit, Whitey finally got around to telling some stories about his life, often producing documents and photos he said backed them up. He claimed that way back when he was at Alcatraz, they “experimented on him” with LSD.•

____________________________

From Busby:

The facility is designed to break you. It houses some of the most dangerous people in Texas, as well as some of the most mentally-disturbed. I immediately feared that I would soon find myself turning into them, by virtue of my proximity.

I understood that only the strongest men can spend full days among lunatics and not become one.

My neighbor spent hours at a time kicking his door for no apparent reason. Yells came from down the corridor as I slept. And there was a nagging voice I heard at the same time every day, like some sort of chant or incantation, unnerving in its consistency.

I began to memorize it: “Attention F-Pod, this is Rabbi Shepard,” it always began. “I live in F-Pod, 65 Cell. My TDC number is 599999. This is no time to bring children into the world. Warden Moore works for Satan, and Lieutenant Holder is their servant. The snitches on this unit are Black Major, Easy Black-E, and Whiteboy Snow. Do not drink the water after seven o’clock p.m. If you want to go to PAMEO, a safer place, hang a sign on your door that says, ‘I AM A PEDOPHILE,’ shave your head, and toss shit on the first black nurse you see. They took Morris from 62 Cell and never brought him back.”

I eventually learned that the four cartons of feces that greeted me were the rabbi’s doing. The cartons, apparently, were known as “bullets,” and they were thrown at guards — a practice called “shit-chunking.” Since inmates had no other weapon, they attacked their enemies with what their own bodies could provide.

The serious “chunkers,” like the rabbi, kept an arsenal of three or four missiles at the ready. The less psychotic would load one when needed.•

Tags: James "Whitey" Bulger, Jeremy Busby, Nate A. Lindell

Old Print Article: President Coolidge Visits Cuba, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1928)

March 21, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Calvin Coolidge was President of the United States in a time of railroads and radios, the last good time (at least for many white Americans) before the worst, hard time, one we wouldn’t completely emerge from until after World War II. He also was our final Commander in Chief to visit Cuba, 88 years ago, before President Obama’s current historic trip aimed at reconnecting the cultures. Much of Coolidge’s mission was diplomatic, directed at trying to repair the two nations’ strained relations, which of course would be completely torn asunder after Fidel Castro’s successful coup two decades later. An article from the January 16, 1928 Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported on the visit.

Tags: Calvin Coolidge

“It Feels Dangerous Over Here”

March 21, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

If the polls are correct, most Americans believe in gun ownership but also desire in sensible laws governing that right, that responsibility. Studies even show the bulk of NRA members in agreement with background checks and not selling arms to those on terrorist watch lists and such. It’s always puzzled me that moderate gun owners don’t splinter off from the NRA, the second-most powerful fringe group in America (congratulations, Republican Party!).

In a Financial Times essay, the novelist Richard Ford, a longtime gun owner, thinks what I’ve just described is a fairy tale, that the majority of us do favor insane gun laws. Perhaps, though it seems most of us have been removed from a discussion that goes on in Washington between lobbyists (with money) and lawmakers (with pockets). Ford himself looks at our facacta political landscape and believes it’s time to stop being locked into being loaded. An excerpt:

America is getting nuttier and nuttier. Every election cycle I notice how less governable it seems. Now the thuggish Donald Trump or the gargoyle-ish Ted Cruz may be our next president. What’s that about? Congress basically doesn’t work any more. Hundreds of our citizens were killed or wounded in mass shootings last year. Thanks to President Barack Obama and a lot of other right-thinking people, relations between blacks and white Americans (frictive, violent and unjust for centuries) are now prominently and more accurately in our view, and are improving. But white, undereducated men (the core group of handgun owners in our country), are living less long, are suffering increased alcoholism, drug abuse and stress. Black Americans know this experience very well in their own history. These white men don’t feel they’re keeping up with either their parents’ generation or with the people they normally compare themselves to (often African-Americans). Nine per cent of these men are unemployed. They’re cynical — with some reason — about their government. They feel too many things in the country aren’t going their way, and that they can’t control their lives. They fear change. Yet they sense the change they fear may have already occurred. Crime and gun violence are actually down in the US. But gun ownership is up. The NRA would say the latter statistic occasions the former. Me . . . I just say it feels dangerous over here.

I don’t cite these facts to engender undue sympathy for any particular American demographic slice. I personally do have some empathy for these white men, as well as for black teenagers mercilessly murdered by white police officers. And for lots of other people, too. I’m a novelist. Empathy is kinda my job. My version of liberty in the American republic is consonant with the view held by the cunningly named US appellate judge Learned Hand; which is, that the spirit of liberty is that spirit which is not too sure it’s right. What I feel, though, is what many Americans feel now — people I agree with and people I decidedly don’t — namely, we sense we’re approaching a tipping point in our liberties, a point at which good is being intolerably held hostage by not good, a point we need to back away from while we still can.•

Tags: Richard Ford

“Factories Have Been Coming Back, But The Jobs Haven’t”

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

In this nativist political season, Donald Trump has promised he’d use taxes to force American companies to not relocate factories overseas, but many of them are glad to stay and others are happily returning. The jobs aren’t coming back, mind you, just the factories. The work is being outsourced beyond our species, with machines taking over most of the tasks. That trend will only continue apace, regardless of where the physical plants are located. That’s the real political issue, the increase in automation, and one that’s been almost completely ignored on the trail. That’s probably because there are no easy answers.

From “Manufacturing Is Never Coming Back,” by Ben Casselman at Five Thirty Eight:

A plea to presidential candidates: Stop talking about bringing manufacturing jobs back from China. In fact, talk a lot less about manufacturing, period.

It’s understandable that voters are angry about trade. The U.S. has lost more than 4.5 million manufacturing jobs since NAFTA took effect in 1994. And as Eduardo Porter wrote this week, there’s mounting evidence that U.S. trade policy, particularly with China, has caused lasting harm to many American workers. But rather than play to that anger, candidates ought to be talking about ways to ensure that the service sector can fill manufacturing’s former role as a provider of dependable, decent-paying jobs.

Here’s the problem: Whether or not those manufacturing jobs could have been saved, they aren’t coming back, at least not most of them. How do we know? Because in recent years, factories have been coming back, but the jobs haven’t. Because of rising wages in China, the need for shorter supply chains and other factors, a small but growing group of companies are shifting production back to the U.S. But the factories they build here are heavily automated, employing a small fraction of the workers they would have a generation ago.•

Tags: Ben Casselman

“The Company Is Testing Pizza Delivery By Robot In New Zealand”

March 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Described by Domino’s corporate execs as “cheeky and endearing” and a “road to the future,” the DRU robot has begun delivering the sludge the company calls pizza. Better to pull a tire from the rolling machine and gnaw on it.

Delivering pies is drudgery and sometimes dangerous, but it is an entry point into the economy for workers, and when the task is transitioned to robots it will leave a hole in the job market that won’t be easy to replace. The same goes for drivers (trucks, taxi, limo, etc.) when autonomous cars are perfected. Progress is good, but it comes with a price that must be addressed.

From Rhiannon Williams at The Telegraph:

Robots have changed our lives in many ways, from advancing our healthcare and automating our factory lines, to taking on dangerous tasks and even taking our place in warfare.

Now Domino’s have developed possibly the greatest use for robots yet – safe and secure pizza delivery in what the company claims is a world first.

The company is testing pizza delivery by robot in New Zealand, known as the Domino’s Robotic Unit (DRU). The three-foot tall battery-powered unit contains a heated compartment for storing up to 10 pizzas, and is capable of self-driving up to 12.5 miles, or 20 km from a shop.

The robot sports sensors for detecting obstacles on its route, and customers are given a unique code to key into the pizza compartment once it arrives at their house to prevent thieves from trying to steal its goods en route.•

Tags: Rhiannon Williams

“The Chinese Government Wants To Know About Everything”

March 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Was reading an article, “Botox and Driverless Cars to Spearhead China Growth,” and thinking the obvious, that despite a disdain for democracy, China has become Western in so many ways, especially technological ones. Of course, our new tools also threaten to make the West resemble China’s autocracy, even if it’s more corporatocracy than governmental. Smartphones are the first step, but driverless cars and the Internet of Things will move us so far into the machine, make it so easy for every step–even thought–to be tracked, that it will be impossible to withdraw. These advances will do great things, but there will be costs.

The opening of G. Clay Whittaker’s Daily Beast piece about China’s Minority Report mission:

China has a new strategy in fighting crime, ripped from science fiction and hastily pasted at the top of the list of paranoia-inducing concepts.

It’s called pre-crime. It goes further than sting operations, counterterrorism, or any other government action to preempt criminal activity ever before.

Like the 2002 film Minority Report, China wants to fight crimes before they happen. They want to know they’ll happen before they’re planned—before the criminal even knows he’s going to be part of them. Bloomberg Business reported that the Communist Party “has directed one of the country’s largest state-run defense contractors, China Electronics Technology Group, to develop software to collate data on jobs, hobbies, consumption habits, and other behavior of ordinary citizens to predict terrorist acts before they occur.”

The Chinese government wants to know about everything: every text a person sends, every extra stop they make on the way home. It’s designed for dissidents, but it means that they’ll know every time a smoker buys a pack of cigarettes, how much gas a car owner uses, what time the new mom goes to bed, and what’s in the bachelor’s refrigerator.

It’s a scary thought, especially when you consider that the main target of Chinese pre-crime efforts wouldn’t be “terrorists,” murderers, rapists, or child molesters, but rather dissidents of every shape and size.•

Tags: G. Clay Whittaker

“Technology May Be Even More Precise Than Human Employees”

March 18, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Collars white and blue will be impacted by automation in the coming decades, the question being whether enough new jobs will be created to make up for the losses of lawyers and livery drivers.

Two passages follow, one from a Business Insider piece by Kate Taylor on Carl’s Jr. CEO Andy Puzder who boldly stepped into the future (and put his foot in the mouth) in announcing he wants to open an Eatsa-esque automated location, while simultaneously bashing humans laborers, those pests, and their requests for living wages and basic rights. The second excerpt comes from a Financial Times article by Jane Croft about the projected technological transition in the legal profession that will favor some while displacing others.

______________________

From Business Insider:

First and foremost, the technology has to work every time. For the time being, Puzder doesn’t think that it’s likely that any machine could take over the more nuanced kitchen work of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s.

But for more rote tasks like grilling a burger or taking an order, technology may be even more precise than human employees.

“They’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case,” says Puzder of swapping employees for machines.

…

Puzder says that a restaurant that’s 100% automated would have one big plus for millennials: no social interaction.

“Millennials like not seeing people,” he says. “I’ve been inside restaurants where we’ve installed ordering kiosks … and I’ve actually seen young people waiting in line to use the kiosk where there’s a person standing behind the counter, waiting on nobody.”•

______________________

From Financial Times:

Around 114,000 jobs in the legal sector are likely to become automated in the next 20 years as technology transforms the profession, a new study has found.

Automation, changes in the demands from clients and the rise of millennials in the workplace will alter the types of skills sought after by law firms, according to the new study by Deloitte which predicts a tipping point for law firms by 2020.

Technology has already contributed to a reduction of around 31,000 jobs in the sector including roles such as legal secretaries, the report said, as it predicted that another 39 per cent of jobs are at “high risk” of being made redundant by machines in the next two decades.

The sector is currently growing; there has been an overall increase of approximately 80,000 jobs — most of which are higher skilled and better paid, such as barristers and solicitors.

The study also predicts a healthier future for highly skilled lawyers. It points to projections by the Warwick Institute for Employment Research which estimates that 25,000 extra workers will be needed in legal activities sector between 2015 and 2020.•

Tags: Andy Puzder, Jane Croft, Kate Taylor

“I Have Wanted That To Be The Future For…Forever”

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

Steve Wozniak just completed one of his wide-ranging AMAs at Reddit, providing thoughtful commentary on myriad subjects. On the state of the company he cofounded, he admires Tim Cook’s management though he has misgivings about the Apple Watch (and who doesn’t!). The Woz longs for the day when we can talk to machines that know us as well as–even better than–our human friends, which will be wonderful and creepy. In the Apple/FBI scrum, he comes down on the side civil liberties, which is unsurprising if you know his history. A few exchanges follow.

__________________________

Question:

What is Tim Cook doing right/wrong, in your opinion?

Steve Wozniak:

Tim Cook is acknowledging the employees of Apple and the customers of Apple as real people. He is continuing a strong tradition that Steve Jobs was known for of making good products that help people do things they want to do in their life, and not taking the company into roads of, “Oh, we’ll make all our money like by knowing you and advertising to you.” We’ll make good products. And you know, I started out as a hardware product guy, so I’m glad to see that.

I worry a little bit about – I mean I love my Apple Watch, but – it’s taken us into a jewelry market where you’re going to buy a watch between $500 or $1100 based on how important you think you are as a person. The only difference is the band in all those watches. Twenty watches from $500 to $1100. The band’s the only difference? Well this isn’t the company that Apple was originally, or the company that really changed the world a lot. So it might be moving, but you’ve got to follow, you know. You’ve got to follow the paths of where the markets are.

Everything else, I’m very approving of Tim Cook, because every time we have a new iOS update, I’m very happy that it’s doing things that really affect people. Like transferring calls from my phone to my computer, etc. I really love even the Airplay, and all that. So, I love the software, and I love the hardware, and nothing’s letting me down. So I approve very strongly of Tim Cook and the new Apple. I dearly miss Steve Jobs too, but, that’s all.

__________________________

Question:

What are your thoughts on the FBI/DOJ vs Apple ordeal at the moment?

Steve Wozniak:

All through my time with personal computers from the start, I developed an attitude that things like movement towards newer, better technologies – like the Macintosh computer, like the touchscreen of the iPhone – that these were making the human more important than the technology. We did not have to modify our ways of living. So the human became very important to me. And how do you represent what humanity is?

You know what, I have things in my head, some very special people in my life that I don’t talk about, that mean so much to me from the past. Those little things that I keep in my head are my little secrets. It’s a part of my important world, my whole essence of my being. I also believe in honesty. If you tell somebody, “I am not snooping on you,” or, “I am giving you some level of privacy; I will not look in your drawers,” then you should keep your word and be honest. And I always try to avoid being a snoop myself, and it’s rare in time that we can look back and say, “How should humans be treated?” Not, “How can the police run everything?”

I was brought up in a time when communist Russia under Stalin was thought to be, everybody is spied on, everybody is looked into, every little thing can get you secretly thrown into prison. And, no. We had our Bill of Rights. And it’s just dear to me. The Bill of Rights says some bad people won’t do certain bad things because we’re protecting humans to live as humans.

So, I come from the side of personal liberties. But there are also other problems. Twice in my life I wrote things that could have been viruses. I threw away every bit of source code. I just got a chill inside. These are dangerous, dangerous things, and if some code gets written in an Apple product that lets people in, bad people are going to find their way to it, very likely.

__________________________

Question:

What is your opinion on how immersive our technology is becoming? We use computers in some form, almost constantly. Do you ever feel in your own life you that it becomes overwhelming?

Steve Wozniak:

I have that feeling all the time because I like a nice, quiet, simple life. I grew up shy. I’m more into products than I’m into socializing. And I do not carry around my phone answering every text message instantly. I am not one of those people.

I wait until I’m alone in my places and get on my computer and do things where I think I’m more efficient. I really see a lot of people that are dragged into it, but you know, I don’t criticize them. When you have change, it’s not that the change in how people are behaving different to you is bad or good, it’s just different.

So that’s sort of the modern way, and you know the millennials, every generation wants to criticize the next generation for missing out on things like personal human contact, but I’ll tell you a little story. When we started Apple, Steve Jobs and I talked about how we wanted to make blind people as equal and capable as sighted people, and you’d have to say we succeeded when you look at all the people walking down the sidewalk looking down at something in their hands and totally oblivious to everything around them!

__________________________

Question:

What is your favorite up and coming gadget? Anything people don’t know about yet?

Steve Wozniak:

Well, I would think probably one of them is certainly the Oculus Rift, or any of the VR headsets. I love putting mine on and watching a basketball game live; it was just an experience that you can’t believe. Sometimes I come out of a VR world, take off the helmet, and I can’t believe I’m actually sitting in my office, at a desk at home. So, that’s one of the big ones.

Right now, Amazon Echo; it’s getting so popular among the people that use it and they speak so highly of it, and it’s so inexpensive. I see a lot of developers that went into smartphones jumping onto that. It’s a platform, and when you have a platform that everybody else is writing apps for and connecting to, basically they’re advertising your company as much as you are.

Obviously, I’m very interested in the evolution of self-driving cars. Right now, the assist that they give you for keeping in your lane and cruise control…the cruise control started back in 2004 actually, adjusting your distance. I love driving my Tesla so much, I just smile! I sit there in the driver’s seat, and I kinda look over at my wife, and I just smile. I’m so happy, not using my hands or feet. So, I think the progression towards self-driving cars is going to be a good one. But it falls into that category of AI.

Now, the AI that impresses me, I fell in love 10 years ago – well not 10 years ago, but whenever it started; Siri was an app you could buy for the iPhone, and I bought it. And for one year, Apple didn’t have it. I just spoke of it as the app that changed my life, because I get to live as a human, saying things out of my head the way I would to another human, and a machine understands me. And I have wanted that to be the future for…forever.

Actually, ever since our Newton message pad, where I could type in, “Sara, dentist, Tuesday, 2 PM,” and click the assist button, and it would open up the calendar; Tuesday at 2 PM, it would put the word dentist, and it would grab Sara out of my contact list. I hand wrote with my own muscles a message for myself, for a human, and a machine understood me. So, I want that to get better and better; machines understanding what we mean, so that we can eventually communicate with them as our best, most trusted friends that know our own hearts and souls better than other humans.•

Tags: Steve Wozniak

“Look Closer, However, And Russia’s Victory Rings Hollow”

March 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Historically, Mussolini may be the template for the odious Donald Trump, but on the contemporary world stage, he most resembles Vladimir Putin. Russia’s swaggering, macho coward makes loud noises to drown out the death rattle of outdated foreign and domestic policies lifted from the twentieth century. The American idiot may be a make-believe mafioso as opposed to Putin’s very real murderous thug, but the similarities are still disconcerting. Of course, in addition to not realizing Putin a poisoner and pistolman by proxy, Trump seems to not have noticed the Russian president is on increasingly shaky ground.

From the Economist:

JUBILANT crowds waved Russian flags; homecoming pilots were given fresh-baked bread by women in traditional dress. Judging by the pictures on television, Vladimir Putin won a famous victory in Syria this week. After his unexpected declaration that the campaign is over, Mr Putin is claiming credit for a ceasefire and the start of peace talks. He has shown off his forces and, heedless of civilian lives, saved the regime of his ally, Bashar al-Assad (though Mr Assad himself may yet prove dispensable). He has “weaponised” refugees by scattering Syrians among his foes in the European Union. And he has outmanoeuvred Barack Obama, who has consistently failed to grasp the enormity of the Syrian civil war and the threat it poses to America’s allies in the Middle East and Europe.

Look closer, however, and Russia’s victory rings hollow. Islamic State (IS) remains. The peace is brittle. Even optimists doubt that diplomacy in Geneva will prosper (see article). Most important, Mr Putin has exhausted an important tool of propaganda. As our briefing explains, Russia’s president has generated stirring images of war to persuade his anxious citizens that their ailing country is once again a great power, first in Ukraine and recently over the skies of Aleppo. The big question for the West is where he will stage his next drama.

Make Russia great again

Mr Putin’s Russia is more fragile than he pretends. •

Tags: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin

“That’s A Lot Of Competition, All In A Short Span, For American Factory Workers”

March 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Outsourcing has traditionally meant jobs moving outside of a country, but more and more it will mean they move outside the species. Increasing automation will likely put more stress on workers, though no one can surely say how much, as nobody knows precisely when driverless cars or delivery drones or robot bellhops will reach critical mass. President Obama addressed the issue, if briefly, in his last State of the Union:

Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction. What is true — and the reason that a lot of Americans feel anxious — is that the economy has been changing in profound ways, changes that started long before the Great Recession hit and haven’t let up. Today, technology doesn’t just replace jobs on the assembly line, but any job where work can be automated. Companies in a global economy can locate anywhere, and face tougher competition. As a result, workers have less leverage for a raise. Companies have less loyalty to their communities. And more and more wealth and income is concentrated at the very top.

All these trends have squeezed workers, even when they have jobs; even when the economy is growing. It’s made it harder for a hardworking family to pull itself out of poverty, harder for young people to start on their careers, and tougher for workers to retire when they want to. And although none of these trends are unique to America, they do offend our uniquely American belief that everybody who works hard should get a fair shot.•

Most of the focus in this sadly nativist American political season hasn’t been on looming technological unemployment but on blaming and bashing other countries, chiefly China. It’s not that trade deals don’t matter–of course they do–but part of our declining manufacturing base has to do with emerging economies simply becoming more competitive by developing sophisticated systems and taking dicey shortcuts (terrible air pollution, sky-high cancer rates, dangerous work conditions, etc.) that we wouldn’t accept.

From a post by Neil Irwin at the New York Times “Upshot”:

One study found that Chinese imports from 1999 to 2011 cost up to 2.4 million American jobs.

That said, it’s easy to assign too much of the blame for the collapse of manufacturing employment to China or trade more broadly. Hundreds of millions of workers across the globe — many of whom were in dire poverty a generation ago — have become integrated into the world economy. That’s a lot of competition, all in a short span, for American factory workers.

At the same time, factory technology has advanced so that a company can make more stuff with fewer workers. The number of manufacturing workers in the United States has been declining as a share of all jobs nearly continuously since 1943, and the total number of manufacturing jobs peaked in 1979; China’s trade with the United States didn’t really take off until the 1990s.

In other words, trade has been an important economic force over the last few decades, and the deepening of the United States’ ties with China is one of the most important developments in global economics of the last generation. But to look at China as the sole force affecting the ups and downs of American workers misses the mark.•

Tags: Neil Irwin

Old Print Article: Gen. Cassius M. Clay–Liberator And Captor, New York Times (1903)

March 16, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Cassius Marcellus Clay of Kentucky was a liberator, mostly.

A general who served the Union during the Civil War, he was an abolitionist from a family of slave owners who went mental in his dotage, essentially imprisoning a very reluctant 15-year-old wife when he was in his eighties. He was also a politician, an expert duelist, a Yale graduate and the U.S. Minister to Russia under President Lincoln. He was a wonderful and, eventually, terrible man.

It’s his post in St. Petersburg that reminded me of him, as he’s mentioned in a book I just read, Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia, which I consider to be part of an unofficial trilogy by the great reporter, along with Great Plains and On the Rez, of volumes by a tourist of sorts who lingers as long as you can without becoming a local.

From an article of the death of the nonagenarian in the July 23, 1903 New York Times:

Gen. Cassius Marcellus was famous for such a multitude of daring deeds, political feats, and personal eccentricities that it is hard to choose any one act or characteristic more distinguished than the rest. As a duelist, always victorious, he was said to have been implicated in more encounters and to have killed more men than any fighter living. As a politician he was especially famous for his anti-slavery crusades in Kentucky, having become imbued with abolition principles while he was a student at Yale, despite the fact that his father was a wealthy slave owner. As a diplomat while Minister to Russia during and after the civil war, he took a prominent part in the negotiations that resulted in the annexation of Alaska.

The act of Gen. Clay’s life that has commanded most attention in recent years was his marriage to a fifteen-year-old peasant girl after he had reached his eighty-fourth birthday. In 1887, he had married his first wife, Miss Warfield, a member of an aristocratic family of slave holders, and years afterward when he had become an ardent disciple of Tolstoi, he came to the conclusion that he ought to wed a “daughter of the people.” In November, 1894, he chose Dora Richardson, the daughter of a woman who had been a domestic for some time in his mansion at White Hall, near Lexington.

When the little girl became his wife, the General proceeded to employ a governess for her. She rebelled. Then he sent her to the same district school she had attended previously. The fact that he supplied her with the most beautiful French gowns and lavished money upon her, she did not consider compensations for the teasing she got at the hands of her fellow-pupils. In two months he had to take her back home, still uneducated.

The old warrior’s eccentricities increased during his declining years, and after his latest marriage he thought little of anything except his dream that some ancient enemy was trying to murder him and his “peasant wife,” as he called her. She, in spite of his kindnesses, kept running away from White Hall, and finally he decided he must get a divorce. This he did, charging her with abandonment. She soon married a worthless young mountaineer named Brock, who was once arrested for counterfeiting. Then the General began to plot to get her back, having already given a farm and house to her and her new husband, only to hear that Brock sold the property. At last Brock died, and a few months ago dispatches from Kentucky stated that the General was trying in vain to prevail upon his “child wife” to return to him. She refused persistently, never having outgrown the dislike for the luxurious life with which he surrounded her and still preferring the simple country existence to which she was born.•

“Part Half-Decayed Empire On Ice And Part Gas Station”

March 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

“Thuggish kleptocracy upheld by state-sponsored murder” is probably the way I’d describe Russia under Vladimir Putin, a capo with nuclear capabilities whose odious criminal record will only grow in retrospect, when the much-needed autopsy is finally performed. If Nixon had a “credibility gap,” Putin has an incredible, gaping one. No one knows precisely where all the bodies are buried, only that there’s death in the air, mixed with the scent of oil pulled from yesterday’s wells.

In a New York Review of Books piece, Masha Gessen tries to make sense of it all, wondering if the term “mafia state” is the most apt description. The opening:

Is Russia a fascist state? A totalitarian one? A dictatorship? A cult of personality? A system? An autocracy? An ideocracy? A kleptocracy? For two days last week, some of the best Russian minds (and a few non-Russians) met in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, to debate the nature of the Putin regime and what it may turn into when Putin is no longer in power, whenever and however that may come to pass. The gathering was convened by chess champion and politician Garry Kasparov, who, like the overwhelming majority of the roughly four hundred participants, is living in exile. People came from the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Malta, and the Baltic states, but Vilnius was chosen for its geographic and symbolic proximity to Russia.

“Part half-decayed empire on ice and part gas station,” a description offered by political scientist Lilia Shevtsova, was probably the most colorful, but the current fashion among the Russian intellectual class is to call Russia a “hybrid regime,” one that combines elements of dictatorship and democracy. Unlike just about all other available definitions of Putinism, this one contains a kernel of hope: it suggests that the regime’s tiny democratic elements can be strengthened and used to weaken the dictatorship part.•

Tags: Lilia Shevtsova, Masha Gessen, Vladimir Putin

“His Hoaxes Attempted To Make Some Kind Of Political Commentary”

March 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

There’s something wrong with people who play pranks. It seems like fractured sexual energy fashioned into a whoopee cushion. But as any longtime reader of this site knows, I’m fascinated by the legendary hoaxster Alan Abel, a blend of Lenny Bruce and Allen Funt whose deadpan presentation bedeviled broadcasters when TV was the primary American media. Abel’s gift is being able to divine our desires and fears before we can name them, and then reflect them through ridiculous stunts that are obviously fake yet fool the masses because of the collective holes in our souls. More than anyone else, he’s the cultural antecedent to Sacha Baron Cohen.

In a smart Priceonomics post, Zachary Crockett profiles man who is–and isn’t–serious. The opening (followed by video of a few Abel hoaxes):

On May 27, 1959, a mysterious, bespectacled man in a suit appeared on The Today Show. After briskly introducing himself, he turned to the camera and told America of his mission: to “clothe naked animals for the sake of decency.”

The man went by the name of G. Clifford Prout, and he claimed to be the president of an organization called The Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (S.I.N.A.). Naked animals, he harped, were “destroying the moral integrity of our great nation” — and the only solution was to cover them up with pants and dresses.

Prout’s impassioned speech did not fall on deaf ears: within days, S.I.N.A. attracted more than 50,000 members. For the next four years, the organization and its leader topped news headlines, made the rounds on talk shows, and spurred heated debates among pundits.

But S.I.N.A. was not real: it was the invention of Alan Abel, history’s greatest media hoaxster.

Over his 60-year “career” as a professional hoaxster, Abel orchestrated more than 30 high-profile stunts — from faking his own death to convincing the press he had the world’s smallest penis. He tricked top New York Times reporters, trolled Walter Cronkite, and weaseled his way into tens of thousands of print publications and talk shows.

His hoaxes attempted to make some kind of political commentary — on censorship, backwards moral standards, or the vapidity of daytime television. But often, they would be taken literally, riling up supporters and revealing ugly truths about America. He preyed on the media’s hunger for juicy stories, and ultimately revealed its gullibility.•

________________________

A funny and prescient piece of performance art in which Abel responded to an ad placed by a 1999 HBO show seeking men willing to discuss their genitalia. Abel presented himself as a 57-year-old musician with a micro-penis. The hoaxer was ridiculing the early days of Reality TV, in which soft-headed pseudo-documentaries were offered to the public by cynical producers who didn’t exactly worry about veracity. Things have gotten only dicier since, as much of our culture, including news, makes no attempt at objective truth, instead encouraging individuals to create the reality that comforts or flatters them. Language is NSFW, unless you work in a gloryhole.

________________________

In this ridiculous interview from basic cable decades ago, Abel satirized our wish for fame, youth and immortality, marrying the emerging celebrity culture to new scientific possibilities. He pretended that he’d created a sperm bank in which only stars like John Wayne and Johnny Carson were allowed to make deposits. And he was going to cryogenically freeze a young woman and tour her body across America. Everyone would be a star and live forever.

________________________

In a 1970s scam, the wiseacre posed as a tennis-loving sheik, playing off America’s fear and loathing of newly minted OPEC millionaires, at a time when our post-WWII lustre had faded. Abel created the character of Prince Emir Assad, who competed in a Pro-Am tourney.

________________________

Abel pulled a prank during the economic downturn of the early 1990s in which he pretended to be a financially desperate man willing to sell his kidneys and lungs. The ruse was eagerly devoured by news media because it toyed furiously with the fear of falling being experienced by a shrinking American middle class, which was under extreme pressure from a dwindling manufacturing base, anti-unionists and technology-driven downsizing. Things have clearly grown even worse.

Tags: Alan Abel, Zachary Crockett

“Suddenly The Plane Hit A Patch Of Nasty Turbulence”

March 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Years ahead of a Presidential election season, major news organizations run articles about the futures of the parties, those candidates who may someday be king because of a demographic trend or quirk of history. It’s almost always a fool’s errand because predicting politics so many news cycles away usually makes a mockery of the messenger. And you never know how someone, no matter how good they look in a mirror or on paper, will respond to the trail, a bruising, unforgiving thing–a microscope, a cudgel. For every Barack Obama, there are many Fred Thompsons, Chris Christies and Bobby Jindals.

The New York Times Magazine, which has played this handicapping game–Mark Warner, anyone?–assigned the great writer Mark Leibovich the task of penning the postmortem of the latest can’t-miss prospect who did just that, Marco Rubio, the “choirboy rebel” whose progress (and regress) he’s followed for six years. A Republican Party looking to make inroads with Hispanic voters was supposed to embrace the Great Not-Exactly-White Hope with the conservative bona fides, but while Mom and Dad just adored him, the other kids clearly did not. The piece was published a couple of days before the Florida primary, but by then the sun had gone down.

The opening:

The last time I saw Marco Rubio in person, he seemed to be on the verge of inheriting the charred Republican earth. It was Feb. 22, the day before theNevada caucuses. We were aboard Rubio’s campaign plane, flying from Reno, Nev., to Las Vegas. Rubio is 44, but he can sometimes come off like an overgrown and hyperactive boy, jiggling his leg when he is otherwise still. He seemed to be in a sunny mood.

“This was a great day for us,” said Rubio, who had not yet resorted to making pee-pee jokes about the Donald. At the time, consensus was building among the pundit geniuses (whose consensuses are, of course, always correct) that Rubio was now the preferred alternative to Donald J. Trump.

As Rubio crisscrossed Nevada with his retinue of local dignitaries — Nevada’s lieutenant governor and a former governor, a congressman and a senator — it seemed as if every hour brought another endorsement from another vintage piece of the Republican furniture: Orrin Hatch, Bob Dole, a senator from Indiana, the governor of Arkansas. The night before at a rally in North Las Vegas, Rubio strode, chest out, onto a stage crowded with validators — 17 of them in all. They included a casino’s buffet of Nevada pols, someone from a reality TV show called “Pawn Stars” and Donnie Wahlberg: once a New Kid on the Block, now a lapsed golden boy who was going all in for Marky Marco.

Suddenly the plane hit a patch of nasty turbulence. It started bouncing and shaking, as if we were flying through a blender.•

Tags: Marco Rubio, Mark Leibovich

“A Robot Never Tells A Lie”

March 15, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

There’s no doubt that AI can have an amazing positive impact on the world, but it comes with costs. I’m not so concerned with most of the skill-loss we’ll experience since that’s always been a part of the human experience, the shedding of previously primary talents in favor new ones. There’s short-term risk, but I think in the longer run we’re talking about a natural progression. My greater concerns are the ethical ones that might result from software handling formerly human tasks. As sure as there’s prejudice embedded in most of us, there will be some (probably unwittingly) built into smart machines. Will it be more unimpeachable coming from our silicon sisters because they give off the air of indifference?

We also don’t know if we’re headed for a world sans work or one without enough jobs to support our economic systems. The latter, which seems more likely for the foreseeable future, could provoke serious turbulence or even societal collapse if public policy wasn’t nimble enough to deal with the transition. How quickly that changeover should occur will weigh heavily on how significant our response must be.

Two excerpts follow: 1) A paragraph from Ethan Wolff-Mann’s Time article in which a roboticist supports the false idea of robots necessarily being ethical, and 2) Madhumita Murgia of The Telegraph quoting Eric Schmidt, in his AlphaGo afterglow, about the evolutionary nature of job-killing machines.

_______________________

From Time:

It may not be long, for example, until androids replace sales associates. According to Osaka University professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, Japanese men don’t like talking with staff at stores because they might get pressured after they indicate they’re interested in making a purchase. “But they don’t hesitate to talk to the android,”he said at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, adding that a “robot never tells a lie, and that is why the android can sell lots of clothes.”

_______________________

From The Telegraph:

Few company chairmen could justify taking a 10- hour flight to travel 5,638 miles to watch a board game being played. But Eric Schmidt could.

The Alphabet chairman last week took the trip from Google’s holding company’s headquarters in California to Seoul, South Korea, to watch world Go champion Lee Se-dol go head to head with AlphaGo, an algorithm created by Google-owned British artificial intelligence company DeepMind, over five rounds of the ancient east Asian board game.

“When I was a young computer scientist in the Seventies, there were many claims that we would beat human intelligence. None of it happened,” Schmidt said over a gourmet Chinese meal a few hours before the first Go game. “Now there is a sense that AI [artificial intelligence] has finally arrived.”

…

Now that a machine has beaten a Go grand master at a game he’s been playing professionally for 20 years, surely there is a concern that AI-fuelled robots will be able to replace humans in other areas, hurting jobs?

“There’s no question that as [AI] becomes more pervasive, people doing routine, repetitive tasks will be at risk,” Schmidt says.

“I understand the economic arguments, but this technology benefits everyone on the planet, from the rich to the poor, the educated to uneducated, high IQ to low IQ, every conceivable human being. It genuinely makes us all smarter, so this is a natural next step.”

A natural next step for Alphabet, perhaps, but for those whose jobs may be displaced by robots and the like, Schmidt may yet have to do some convincing.•

Tags: Ethan Wolff-Mann, Hiroshi Ishiguro, Madhumita Murgia

“It Was An Information Transformation”

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

Most consider the technological changes of the 19th century more foundational than ours but also slower to proliferate, but the latter wasn’t always so. Consider that the Pony Express was established in 1860 and had been made completely obsolete by telegraphy by 1861, a rush from cradle to grave without the benefit of a dotage. That same year the Civil War began and President Lincoln, an early adopter, was soon sleeping in the telegraph office in the War Department next to the White House. Every era had been an Information Age in one way or another, but some fundamental things had changed and they were speed and connectivity.

In an excellent Newsweek article, journalist Kevin Maney looks back at the mid-19th century technological boom and sees a reflection of our own tumultuous political times. He believes wealth inequality has been stoked by the jolting transition from industrialization to digitalization in much the same as it was in the 1850s when we moved from an agrarian economy to one of factories. The North reached for the future with innovative inventions while the South doubled down on a farm-based economy powered by slavery. Soon enough, the center could not hold.

There’s truth to Maney’s theory, though I think there’s more at play and don’t believe the shocking displays of bigotry and xenophobia we’ve recently witnessed can be wholly explained by our puzzling new economic reality. Such sad things predated AI and apps. As he argues, though, great leadership and policy will be necessary to help us traverse unsure terrain before we can arrive at what may be a post-scarcity society.

The opening:

A technological revolution killed the Whig Party in 1850. A new one is blasting the GOP into splinters in 2016.

Amazingly, none of the presidential candidates talk much about technology, yet our software-eats-the-world whirlwind drives everything that’s cleaving the country and throwing its politics into chaos. The parallels to the dynamics of the 1850s are a little scary. After all, the Whigs’ self-destruction was a prelude to the Civil War.

Like today, the technological revolution in the mid-1800s ushered in a disruptive new era of connectivity, and transportation technology was key. Before the 1800s, getting anywhere—or exchanging any information over distance—involved horses, mud roads or boats. Movement was so hard that almost all business in America stayed local and small, and much of it was centered on agriculture.

Then, starting around 1810, the country paved roads and built canals. Robert Fulton invented the steamboat in 1807, and within a couple of decades mountains of goods were flowing upstream. The monster agent of change was the railroads. The country built rail lines with the same alacrity that would go into building the Web during the dot-com boom. By 1860, the U.S. boasted more miles of rail than the rest of the world combined.

Oh, and in the 1830s Samuel Morse invented the telegraph. By 1860, telegraph lines spanned the continent. You couldn’t quite sit in Boston and Skype your dad at the California Gold Rush, but prices and business data could cross states in a flash. It was an information transformation.

All of this changed life and economics in ways we can relate to today.•

Tags: Kevin Maney

“Today We Appear To Be Going Further And Further Into Uncharted Territory”

March 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Donald Trump, Bull Connor with a spray tan, has turned the American electoral process into a bumfight.

His violence-stoking rhetoric is being condemned even by fellow GOP hopefuls, including the rudderless Marco Rubio. Of course, the Florida Senator simultaneously tried to lay blame for the Trump campaign fracases on the divisiveness of Barack Obama, when the President’s chief sin seems to be that he’s black. It was never Obama’s tan suit that outraged those on the right but his tan skin.

Watching Trump yesterday, sweaty and frightened, ducking from a protestor who charged the stage, reminds that he trolled the President relentlessly with his Birther garbage, charging him with the phantom crime of occupying the White House illegally, which could have easily incited some unstable person into a reckless act. Trump clearly didn’t care nor has he been worried about encouraging his supporters to inflict violence on peaceful protesters during his disgusting campaign. Shaun King of the NYDN was the first to point out that someone is going to get killed at one of the rallies, and now John Marshall of the Talking Points Memo has published similar sentiments. An excerpt:

Today we appear to be going further and further into uncharted territory. After the cancellation of Trump’s event yesterday in Chicago, we had the incident at the rally in Dayton, Ohio in which a protestor, Thomas Dimassimo, jumped the security perimeter surrounding Trump and tried to rush the speaking platform. Dimassimo was charged with disorderly conduct and inducing panic and later released on bail. At a subsequent event and on Twitter, Trump claimed that Dimassimo was tied to ISIS, apparently on the basis of a hoax video his staff found on Youtube. At yet another event this evening Trump called for the mass arrest of protestors, noting that arrest records would leave an “arrest mark” and “ruin the rest of their lives.” Trump also repeatedly blamed “communist” Bernie Sanders for what now appear to be the almost constant protests and disruptions at his rallies.

This evening at an event in Kansas City there were numerous protest interruptions inside the rally and a chaotic scene outside in which, according to a report on MSNBC, police used pepper spray on at least one group of protestors.

For all the talk about Mussolini, let alone Hitler, George Wallace is the best analog in the last century of American politics – the mix of class politics and racist incitement, the same sort of orchestrated ratcheting up of conflict between supporters and protestors. As all of this has unfolded over the course of the day there have been numerous instances of Trump supporters calling for protestors to “go back to Africa” and another on video calling on them to “go to fucking Auschwitz.”

Is the man invoking Nazi concentration camps in that video an anti-Semite or just a ramped hater in a frenzy of provocation? I’m not sure we know. And as I’ll argue in a moment, in a climate of incitement and crowd action, it doesn’t necessarily matter.

It may sound like hyperbole. But this is the kind of climate of agitation and violence where someone will end up getting severely injured or killed. I do not say that lightly.•

Tags: Donald Trump, John Marshall, Shaun King

“This Is A New Surveillance Capitalism”

March 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Attempting to narrow the wealth gap by having corporations make micropayments to citizens for their information seems to me a morally bankrupt system even if it achieves the unlikely and saves some from actual bankruptcy. There has to be a better way, though whether we’re unwittingly working for Facebook and Google for free or accepting bits of coins for our efforts, it’s hard to see how we avoid this privacy-obliterating system we’ve built. We live in a very anti-government time, but corporations are far more pervasive and invasive and will only grow more so as the Internet of Things becomes the thing. We may eventually miss Big Brother.

I’m looking forward to reading Nicholas Carr’s forthcoming book, Utopia Is Creepy, which has the best title ever, and I credit him with pointing me toward Shoshana Zuboff’s Frankfurter Allgemeine essay “The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism.” As she writes, “the very idea of a functional, effective, affordable product as a sufficient basis for economic exchange is dying,” and what is replacing it is spooky as hell. The Harvard professor’s article is devastating not for imagining a dark future that might be if things go horribly wrong but for laying out where we’re headed if we just incrementally build on the status quo.

The opening:

Google surpassed Apple as the world’s most highly valued company in January for the first time since 2010. (Back then each company was worth less than 200 billion. Now each is valued at well over 500 billion.) While Google’s new lead lasted only a few days, the company’s success has implications for everyone who lives within the reach of the Internet. Why? Because Google is ground zero for a wholly new subspecies of capitalism in which profits derive from the unilateral surveillance and modification of human behavior. This is a new surveillance capitalism that is unimaginable outside the inscrutable high velocity circuits of Google’s digital universe, whose signature feature is the Internet and its successors. While the world is riveted by the showdown between Apple and the FBI, the real truth is that the surveillance capabilities being developed by surveillance capitalists are the envy of every state security agency. What are the secrets of this new capitalism, how do they produce such staggering wealth, and how can we protect ourselves from its invasive power?

“Most Americans realize that there are two groups of people who are monitored regularly as they move about the country. The first group is monitored involuntarily by a court order requiring that a tracking device be attached to their ankle. The second group includes everyone else…”

Some will think that this statement is certainly true. Others will worry that it could become true. Perhaps some think it’s ridiculous. It’s not a quote from a dystopian novel, a Silicon Valley executive, or even an NSA official. These are the words of an auto insurance industry consultant intended as a defense of “automotive telematics” and the astonishingly intrusive surveillance capabilities of the allegedly benign systems that are already in use or under development. It’s an industry that has been notoriously exploitative toward customers and has had obvious cause to be anxious about the implications of self-driving cars for its business model. Now, data about where we are, where we’re going, how we’re feeling, what we’re saying, the details of our driving, and the conditions of our vehicle are turning into beacons of revenue that illuminate a new commercial prospect.•

Tags: Nicholas Carr, Shoshana Zuboff

“Trump Might Be Reading From A Script Prepared In 1854”

March 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Donald Trump, equal parts Chairman Mao and Vince McMahon, knows nothing, but is he a Know Nothing?

The Stalin of steaks has flourished thanks to virulent anti-immigrant speech in a country that’s grown rich on the backs of immigrants (and forced immigrants known as slaves). That might sound strange, but as disconcerting as it is, it’s not a new thing. The strain against the Other always lurks in the underbelly of the country, sometimes rearing to the surface.

In a New Statesman article, Ben Wilson recalls an unhappy time much like our own: the 1850s. An excerpt:

Trump would certainly have found the 1850s a congenial time. This was one of the most explosive periods in modern history, with proliferating technologies, shifting patterns of trade and migration on a colossal scale. At a time when the US was entering the global economy, many saw themselves as victims of the new world order. As cities were rapidly reshaped by new industries and tens of thousands of newcomers, many native-born Americans believed their wages, their way of life and even their country were being taken from them. And there were plenty of politicians ready to egg on their discontent, provoking racial prejudices to garner votes.

Today, Trump might be reading from a script prepared in 1854. The American political establishment was shocked in that year when a new political movement known as the Know Nothings sensationally won a series of local and Congressional elections. Started in secret as the Order of the Star Spangled Banner (it got its memorable moniker from the instruction given members to deny any involvement), the movement had prepared the ground well. Look at your cities, the Know Nothings told voters, with its squalor and drunkenness; look at your falling wages. Who was to blame? The answer was simple. The Know Nothings alleged that immigrants, many of them Irish Catholics, were responsible for an upsurge in crime, particularly sexual and violent crime. And as Catholics who supposedly owed their allegiance to the Pope, the migrants would fundamentally alter the character of the Protestant United States. Sound familiar?

The parallels between the Know Nothings and Trump are a reminder that populist nationalism lies close to the surface of American politics, remaining dormant most of the time.•

Tags: Ben Wilson, Donald Trump

« Older entries § Newer entries »

Afflictor.com

Politics

“It’s About The Capability To Design And Build On-Demand”

“The Promise Of The Digital Age Is Being Hijacked By A Rampant Form Of Old-Style Capitalism”

“As He Lay Dying Alexander Litvinenko Solved His Own Murder And Foresaw The Future”

“Humans, On The Other Hand, Can Be Immensely Flexible”

“A Majority Of Workers Also Think That Their Own Specific Professions Or Jobs Won’t Be Impacted”

“There’s A Darker Side To All This, Too”

“Only The Strongest Men Can Spend Full Days Among Lunatics And Not Become One”

Old Print Article: President Coolidge Visits Cuba, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1928)

“It Feels Dangerous Over Here”

“Factories Have Been Coming Back, But The Jobs Haven’t”

“The Company Is Testing Pizza Delivery By Robot In New Zealand”

“The Chinese Government Wants To Know About Everything”

“Technology May Be Even More Precise Than Human Employees”

“I Have Wanted That To Be The Future For…Forever”

“Look Closer, However, And Russia’s Victory Rings Hollow”

“That’s A Lot Of Competition, All In A Short Span, For American Factory Workers”

Old Print Article: Gen. Cassius M. Clay–Liberator And Captor, New York Times (1903)

“Part Half-Decayed Empire On Ice And Part Gas Station”

“His Hoaxes Attempted To Make Some Kind Of Political Commentary”

“Suddenly The Plane Hit A Patch Of Nasty Turbulence”

“A Robot Never Tells A Lie”

“It Was An Information Transformation”

“Today We Appear To Be Going Further And Further Into Uncharted Territory”

“This Is A New Surveillance Capitalism”

“Trump Might Be Reading From A Script Prepared In 1854”

Categories

About

Do a search, Sherlock.