Politics

You are currently browsing the archive for the Politics category.

“What About The Ecological Niche The Mosquito Fills?”

March 10, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

321Anopheles-gambiae-photo-2-thumb-425x279

No one likes bees stings, but everyone likes bees. We all want to save the bees.

New technologies may ultimately give us the option to rescue, revive, reconfigure or eradicate species, which sounds like a great power to have–and a chilling one. It may not bring back mammoths anytime soon or maybe ever, but it likely will have significant impact on life on Earth as we learn to take the reigns of evolution for ourselves and other species.

Yohann Koshy of Vice interviewed Ashley Dawson, author of Extinction: A Radical History, which argues, among other things, that the development of such new tools may imbue us with the belief that we can elide any capitalism-created crisis. 

An excerpt about CRISPR:

Question:

Are there any examples of this technology being put to good ends?

Ashley Dawson:

Last week, I was at Princeton, and I spoke to a scientist from MIT. He’s one of a few people who is trying to use CRISPR technology to genetically engineer the extinction of the Anopheles mosquito, which is responsible for carrying malaria, Dengue fever, Zika, and lot of horrible viruses and diseases.

I’m still trying to figure out where I stand on that. More than 700,000 people die every year of malaria, mostly in poor and vulnerable populations. So if you can do something to eradicate the disease, perhaps it’s OK. But then what about the ecological niche the mosquito fills? What about how the use of these technologies could be proliferated?

Some people think this technology, CRISPR, is so dangerous it should be treated like nuclear technology—that it shouldn’t be widely available. The problem with scientists is they often don’t look at the broader political-economic questions. The reason Zika has gotten so much traction in a place like Brazil is because as deforestation happens, you get human populations in closer proximity to wild species of various different kinds, some of which function as disease vectors. So the prevalence of the disease in certain areas is connected to resource extraction, which is, in turn, coming from corporations that the governments like the United States are supporting.•

Tags: ,

Old Print Article: Tsar Nicholas II Assumes Power, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1894)

March 10, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

czarnicholasii

Nicholas_II_by_Boissonnas_&_Eggler_c1909

10-NIKOLAI-2-

It began auspiciously for Nicholas II, though it didn’t end well.

The last of the Russian tsars assumed power at a youthful age in 1894 after his father, Alexander III, was assassinated. Nicholas II, who at most possessed modest political, economic and military skills, was not the optimal choice to lead a nation even under the best of circumstances, but no one likely could have restrained the sweep of history that was to upturn the embattled nation. It ended for Russia with a successful revolution in 1917, of course, and basement executions in Ekaterinburg the following year for the last emperor, his loved ones and minions. 

Even from the start, many thought the new leader wouldn’t last the tumultuous times, as evidenced by an article that ran in the November 3, 1894 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, two days after his father died. 

tnii

Tags: ,

“He’s Not Really In Russia In His Mind”

March 10, 2016 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

321snowdeni9 Snowden-Oliver-Stone (1)

I don’t trust the NSA or Oliver Stone with our information. 

It was clear long before Edward Snowden to any American paying attention that our government had overreached into our privacy in the aftermath of 9/11. It’s not that there aren’t real dangers that need to be investigated, but treating every citizen like a threat is another kind of threat.

Stone is a very gifted filmmaker whose work seems informed by chemicals he (over-)experimented with as a youth. It’s galling that so many took his overheated JFK hokum seriously for so long and that some still do. His films are interesting provided no one uses them as history lessons.

That means the director’s upcoming take on Snowden should be…interesting? Well, let’s not prejudge. 

Stephen Galloway of the Hollywood Reporter has an article about Stone’s paranoid approach to the making of the movie, which might be warranted in this case. He recently said this of the production: “We moved to Germany, because we did not feel comfortable in the U.S….we felt like we were at risk here.” An excerpt:

When Stone (whose films include Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Wall Street) was first approached to make the movie, he hesitated. He had been working on another controversial subject, about the last few years in the life of Martin Luther King Jr., and did not immediately wish to tackle something that incendiary again.

“Glenn Greenwald [the journalist who worked with Poitras to break the Snowden story] asked me some advice and I just wanted to stay away from controversy,” he said. “I didn’t want this. Be that as it may, a couple of months later, the Russian lawyer for Snowden contacts me via my producer. The Russian lawyer told me to come to Russia and wanted me to meet him. One thing led to another, and basically I got hooked.”

In Moscow, Stone met multiple times with Snowden, who has been living in exile in Russia since evading the U.S. government’s attempts to arrest him for espionage. “He’s articulate, smart, very much the same,” he said. “I’ve been seeing him off and on for a year — actually, more than that. I saw him last week or two weeks ago to show him the final film.”

He added: “He is consistent: he believes so thoroughly in reform of the Internet that he has devoted himself to this cause … Because of the Russian hours, he stays up all night. He’s a night owl, and he’s always in touch [with the outside world], and he’s working on some kind of constitution for the Internet with other people. So he’s very busy. And he stays in that 70-percent-computer world. He’s on another planet that way. His sense of humor has gotten bigger, his tolerance. He’s not really in Russia in his mind — he’s in some planetary position up there. And Lindsay Mills, the woman he’s loved for 10 years — really, it’s a serious affair — has moved there to be with him.”•

Tags: , ,

“Trade May Be His Single Biggest Concern – Not White Supremacy”

March 9, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

trumpmexico4

While I agree with Thomas Frank that few things are more out of touch than New York Times editorials–remember Maureen Dowd’s awful, cackling Donald Trump interview?–I can’t support his contention in the Guardian that the average Trump supporter isn’t chiefly and deeply racist. The first thing you hear from his voters isn’t that the fascist condo salesman is strong on trade but rather that “he isn’t politically correct.” Or that “he speaks the truth.” Those lines seem a dog whistle for bigotry considering the statements he’s made. His nativist blame game is the exploitation of not only economic fears but also of racial ones. Mostly the latter, I believe. Maybe the trouble with Kansas is, at long last, Kansans.

From Frank:

Stories marveling at the stupidity of Trump voters are published nearly every day. Articles that accuse Trump’s followers of being bigots have appeared by the hundreds, if not the thousands. Conservatives have written them; liberals have written them; impartial professionals have written them. The headline of a recent Huffington Post column announced, bluntly, that “Trump Won Super Tuesday Because America is Racist.” A New York Times reporter proved that Trump’s followers were bigots by coordinating a map of Trump support with a map of racist Google searches. Everyone knows it: Trump’s followers’ passions are nothing more than the ignorant blurtings of the white American id, driven to madness by the presence of a black man in the White House. The Trump movement is a one-note phenomenon, a vast surge of race-hate. Its partisans are not only incomprehensible, they are not really worth comprehending.

* * *
Or so we’re told. Last week, I decided to watch several hours of Trump speeches for myself. I saw the man ramble and boast and threaten and even seem to gloat when protesters were ejected from the arenas in which he spoke. I was disgusted by these things, as I have been disgusted by Trump for 20 years. But I also noticed something surprising. In each of the speeches I watched, Trump spent a good part of his time talking about an entirely legitimate issue, one that could even be called leftwing.

Yes, Donald Trump talked about trade. In fact, to judge by how much time he spent talking about it, trade may be his single biggest concern – not white supremacy. Not even his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, the issue that first won him political fame. He did it again during the debate on 3 March: asked about his political excommunication by Mitt Romney, he chose to pivot and talk about … trade.•

Tags: ,

“Companies [Could] Go For The Carlos Slim Option”

March 9, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

robert-de-niro-taxi-driver-3-1-e1438031459375

The 2008 financial collapse was a tipping point for most workers in countries transitioning from Industrial to Information economies. Jobs have returned to a good extent, but the wages and conditions have, at best, flatlined. As we move deeper into an age of automation and one in which gigantic companies need software but few FT workers (e.g., Uber), living has become difficult for many and retirement off the table. 

In a Financial Time article, Michael Skapinker considers five possible future scenarios in a world where the whistle never blows, the workday never truly ends. An excerpt: 

Companies go for the Carlos Slim option. In 2014, the Mexican telecoms magnate, said that, instead of retiring, older workers should cut back to three days a week.

Everyone gains. The company holds on to older workers’ skills while cutting the cost of employing them. The workers have more leisure.

This scenario appears to have more to recommend it than any other, although it does depend on older workers being able to afford the reduction in working hours.

Older people working shorter weeks could step back from senior positions. They could also do different jobs for the company.

The Financial Times reported this week on a former manager at Nissan in Sunderland, in the north-east of England who, at 67, conducts tours of the plant. He does not work for Nissan. He has retired and works for an outside agency that runs the tours.•

Tags: ,

“Even George Jetson Takes His Briefcase To Work Every Day”

March 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

jetsonsbriefcase5

Serious discussion about Guaranteed Basic Income in America stretches back at least as far as Richard Nixon, whose administration’s advocacy for it and universal health insurance would today make the 37th President a sort of Sanders-esque figure.

When people initially learn Silicon Valley technologists are fully in favor of GBI, they’re often surprised and grateful, but this largesse comes with a caveat. To a good degree, it’s driven by a Libertarian streak that aims to vanish social safety nets (the welfare state, as it’s often referred to) and the bureaucracy that attends it. That would include all forms of government healthcare. That’s a problem since, as we’ve seen, health insurance left to the free market is an unmanageable expense for many, and that would be true even with an income floor.

In a NYT conversation about basic income between columnists Farhad Manjoo and Eduardo Porter, the latter questions whether we’re headed for an Utopian work-free world or one with plenty of poorly paid drudgery in which the BGI math doesn’t add up. An excerpt:

I read your very interesting column about the universal basic income, the quasi-magical tool to ensure some basic standard of living for everybody when there are no more jobs for people to do. What strikes me about this notion is that it relies on a view of the future that seems to have jelled into a certainty, at least among the technorati on the West Coast.

But the economic numbers that we see today don’t support this view. If robots were eating our lunch, it would show up as fast productivity growth. But as Robert Gordon points out in his new book, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” productivity has slowed sharply. He argues pretty convincingly that future productivity growth will remain fairly modest, much slower than during the burst of American prosperity in mid-20th century.

A problem I have with the idea of a universal basic income — as opposed to, say, wage subsidies or wage insurance to top up the earnings of people who lose their job and must settle for a new job at a lower wage — is that it relies on an unlikely future. It’s not a future with a lot of crummy work for low pay, but essentially a future with little or no paid work at all.

The former seems to me a not unreasonable forecast — we’ve been losing good jobs for decades, while low-wage employment in the service sector has grown. But no paid work? That’s more a dream (or a nightmare) than a forecast. Even George Jetson takes his briefcase to work every day.•

Tags:

“It Is An Uprising Borne By The White Lower And Middle Classes”

March 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

trump-rally-twitter_v27vio

I asked this question last September: If Donald Trump grew a small, square mustache above his lip, would his poll numbers increase yet again?

We know the sad answer now. A candidacy that began with a bigoted proclamation accusing Mexicans of being rapists has grown into a full-fledged racist, nativist campaign that ejects African-Americans at stump speeches and vows to ban all 1.6 billion Muslims in the world from entering our immigrant country. It’s the ugliest, saddest face America has to show, and a surprising one since even those who doubted the election of President Obama signaled a post-racial nation never could have guessed that this many white citizens missed using ethnic slurs without consequence. Trump followers explain their adoration for the bully by exclaiming, “He says what I wish I could say,” and considering the words he’s chosen, it’s clear where their minds are at. Since his politics are often at odds with true conservatism, it’s revealed the GOP has long been about prejudice, not policy. “Make America Great Again” can easily be read as “Make America White Again.”

If Trump’s ascension marks the end of the modern Republican Party, it’s a death in the gutter. If he were to actually become President, America itself will have fallen from the curb.

From Holger Stark at Spiegel:

Trump’s unexpected success is part of a political revolt that has taken hold in America in recent months, and is shifting all known parameters. It is an uprising borne by the white lower and middle classes, and it is directed against the liberal establishment, President Barack Obama and the political correctness of the post-modern age — but also against a Republican Party, which the party rebels believe is part of the ailing system. Deeply religious Christians, the so-called Evangelicals, whose ancestors came from Europe and who helped create the United States, are the core of this uprising.

At the beginning of this election campaign, there were several things that were considered inalienable truths in political America. One of those was the recognition that the United States is a land of immigration, that its population is becoming more colorful, multicultural and multiethnic.

Bucking Convention

The lesson seemed clear: Those who hope to win elections must absolutely win the support of these groups of voters. The structure of the American population has changed radically. Blacks make up 12.9 percent of the population today and Hispanics more than 17 percent, with their share steadily increasing. Whites are predicted to become a minority by 2050. This democratic shift contributed significantly to President Barack Obama’s election victory in 2012. His challenger, Mitt Romney, managed to win just a quarter of Latino votes. A mere 6 percent of African-Americans voted for him.

Trump has studied these numbers carefully and drawn his conclusions, albeit against all the conventional rules of Washington political advisers. His campaign targets white, overwhelmingly Christian voters, who have felt marginalized and threatened for some time. Trump calls them “the silent majority.”

Some 70 percent of Americans are still Christians, and one in four US citizens, or about 80 million, are Evangelical Christians. However, only 27 million Evangelicals voted in the last presidential election, while the rest stayed home.

“Trump and Cruz both aim to energize this white, Christian core group, which is why they are not seeking compromise on issues, but have adopted harsh rhetoric instead,” says David Brody, chief Washington correspondent for the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). “If one of them manages to convince only five to 10 million Evangelical non-voters to go to the polls, he’ll be able to take over the Republican Party and defeat the Democrats.”•

Tags: ,

“Has There Been A Problem Or Challenge That’s Made You, As A Billionaire, Feel Completely Powerless?”

March 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

BillGatesmugshot_700

In America, ridiculously rich people are considered oracles, whether they deserve to be or not.

Bill Gates probably earns that status more than most. He was a raging a-hole when engaged full time as a businessperson at Microsoft, but he’s done as much good for humanity as anyone likely can in his 2.0 avuncular philanthropist rebooting. Gates just did one of his wide-ranging Reddit AMAs. A few exchanges follow. 

_____________________________

Question:

What do you see human society accomplishing in the next 20 years? What are you most excited for?

Bill Gates:

I will mention three things.

First is an energy innovation to lower the cost and get rid of green house gases. This isn’t guaranteed so we need a lot of public and private risk taking.

EDIT: I talked about this recently in my annual letter.

Second is progress on disease particularly infectious disease. Polio, Malaria, HIV, TB, etc.. are all diseases we should be able to either eliminate of bring down close to zero. There is amazing science that makes us optimistic this will happen.

Third are tools to help make education better – to help teachers learn how to teach better and to help students learn and understand why they should learn and reinforce their confidence.

_____________________________

Question:

Hey Bill! Has there been a problem or challenge that’s made you, as a billionaire, feel completely powerless? Did you manage to overcome it, and if so, how?

 

Bill Gates:

The problem of how we prevent a small group of terrorists using nuclear or biological means to kill millions is something I worry about. If Government does their best work they have a good chance of detecting it and stopping it but I don’t think it is getting enough attention and I know I can’t solve it.

_____________________________

Question:

What’s your take on the recent FBI/Apple situation?

Bill Gates:

I think there needs to be a discussion about when the government should be able to gather information. What if we had never had wiretapping? Also the government needs to talk openly about safeguards. Right now a lot of people don’t think the government has the right checks to make sure information is only used in criminal situations. So this case will be viewed as the start of a discussion. I think very few people take the extreme view that the government should be blind to financial and communication data but very few people think giving the government carte blanche without safeguards makes sense. A lot of countries like the UK and France are also going through this debate. For tech companies there needs to be some consistency including how governments work with each other. The sooner we modernize the laws the better.

_____________________________

Question:

Some people (Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, etc) have come out in favor of regulating Artificial Intelligence before it is too late. What is your stance on the issue, and do you think humanity will ever reach a point where we won’t be able to control our own artificially intelligent designs?

Bill Gates:

I haven’t seen any concrete proposal on how you would do the regulation. I think it is worth discussing because I share the view of Musk and Hawking that when a few people control a platform with extreme intelligence it creates dangers in terms of power and eventually control.

_____________________________

Question:

How soon do you think quantum computing will catch on, and what do you think about the future of cryptography if it does? Thanks!

Bill Gates:

Microsoft and others are working on quantum computing. It isn’t clear when it will work or become mainstream. There is a chance that within 6-10 years that cloud computing will offer super-computation by using quantum. It could help use solve some very important science problems including materials and catalyst design.

_____________________________

Question:

You have previously said that, through organizations like Khan Academy and Wikipedia and the Internet in general, getting access to knowledge is now easier than ever. While that is certainly true, K-12 education seems to have stayed frozen in time. How do you think the school system will or should change in the decades to come?

Bill Gates:

I agree that our schools have not improved as much as we want them to. There are a lot of great teachers but we don’t do enough to figure out what they do so well and make sure others benefit from that. Most teachers get very little feedback about what they do well and what they need to improve including tools that let them see what the exemplars are doing.

Technology is starting to improve education. Unfortunately so far it is mostly the motivated students who have benefited from it. I think we will get tools like personalized learning to all students in the next decade.

A lot of the issue is helping kids stay engaged. If they don’t feel the material is relevant or they don’t have a sense of their own ability they can check out too easily. The technology has not done enough to help with this yet.

_____________________________

Question:

What’s a fantasy technological advancement you wish existed? 

Bill Gates:

I recently saw a company working on “robotic” surgery where the ability to work at small scales was stunning. The idea that this will make surgeries higher quality, faster and less expensive is pretty exciting. It will probably take a decade before this gets mainstream – to date it has mostly been used for prostate surgery.

In the Foundation work there are a lot of tools we are working on we don’t have yet. For example an implant to protect a woman from getting HIV because it releases a protective drug.

Question:

What’s a technological advancement that’s come about in the past few years that you think we were actually better off without?

Bill Gates:

I am concerned about biological tools that could be used by a bioterrorist. However the same tools can be used for good things as well.

Some people think Hoverboards were bad because they caught on fire. I never got to try one.•

321hover8-e1450829287238

Tags:

“He Also Quickly Found Himself In The Midst Of A Scientific Battle That To His Mind Was Of The Greatest Political And National Interest”

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

jeffersonani

Thomas Jefferson was never a soldier, but he fought for Americans in numerous ways. After the new nation won its independence, the Founding Father squared off in France against those who believed the United States’ plants and animals inferior to Europe’s, which of course was wholly ignorant, but unenlightenment shapes the world if it has enough believers.

Jefferson’s efforts involved, among other things, a giant moose skeleton. From Andrea Wulf in the Atlantic:

In Paris, in between negotiations of commercial treaties, arranging loans and composing diplomatic dispatches, Jefferson purchased the latest scientific books, visited famous gardens and met the greatest thinkers and scientists of the age. He also quickly found himself in the midst of a scientific battle that to his mind was of the greatest political and national interest. His weapons were native North American trees, weights of mammals, a panther pelt, and the bones and skin of a moose.

For years, Jefferson had been furious about a theory that the French called the “degeneracy of America.” Since the mid-eighteenth century several French thinkers had insisted that flora and fauna degenerated when “transplanted” from the Old to the New World. They noted how European fruits, vegetables and grains often failed to mature in America and how imported animals refused to thrive. They also insisted that American native species were inferior to European plants and animals. One of the offending scientists was Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, the most famous naturalist in the world and the author of the 36–volume magisterial Histoire Naturelle. In the 1760s and 1770s Buffon had written that in America all things “shrink and diminish under a niggardly sky and unprolific land.”

As Buffon’s theories spread, the natural world of America became a symbol for its political and cultural significance—or insignificance, depending on the point of view. Hoping to restore America’s honor, and elevate his country above those in Europe, Jefferson set out to prove that everything was in fact larger and superior in the New World.•

Tags: ,

“Advances That Would Take Decades Now Happen In Years, Sometimes Months”

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

cellph-1

It’s no secret that regulation, not traditionally the nimblest of things, has trouble keeping pace with technology, but Vivek Wadhwa states the case well in a new Washington Post column. He points out that decisions made on these thorny questions are often done emotionally–would Tim Cook be willingly working with the government if there had been a terrorist attack on Apple headquarters?–but the bigger issue is the briskness with which our tools are progressing. Think about how quickly drones and driverless have morphed in just the past few years. Wadhwa uses another example: the iPhone. An excerpt:

It takes decades, sometimes centuries, to reach the type of consensus that is needed to enact the far-reaching legislation that Congress will have to consider. Laws are essentially codified ethics, a consensus that is reached by society on what is right and wrong. This happens only after people understand the issues and have seen the pros and cons.

Consider our laws on privacy. These date back to the late 1800s, when newspapers first started publishing gossip. They wrote a series of intrusive stories about Boston lawyer Samuel Warren and his family. This led his law partner, future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, writing a Harvard Law Review article “The Right of Privacy”  which argued for the right to be left alone. This essay laid the foundation of American privacy law, which evolved over 200 years. It also took centuries to create today’s copyright laws, intangible property rights, and contract law. All of these followed the development of technologies such as the printing press and steam engine.

Today, technology is progressing on an exponential curve; advances that would take decades now happen in years, sometimes months. Consider that the first iPhone was released in June 2007. It was little more than an iPod with an embedded cell phone. This has evolved into a device which captures our deepest personal secrets, keeps track of our lifestyles and habits, and is becoming our health coach and mentor. It was inconceivable just five years ago that there could be such debates about unlocking this device.•

Tags:

“Without An O.K. From The Astrologer, Air Force One Did Not Take Off”

March 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Ronald And Nancy Reagan Return To Los Angeles After Rea

President Reagan and First Lady Nancy relied heavily on astrology, a fairly benign if boneheaded practice in Hollywood but a troubling one in the White House. The stars were luckily aligned properly for beneficial international relations during the Administration, particularly with the Soviets, though it was still something of a shock to the country when news of the voodoo surfaced during the end of the President’s second term. Two excerpts follow, one from a 1988 People piece about the revelation and an excerpt from Douglas Martin’s 2014 New York Times obituary of Joan Quigley, stargazer to the Reagans.

______________________

From People:

The year was 1980, the mood in the nation restless. American hostages languished in Iran; American athletes were sitting out the Olympics. In the White House, a dithering peanut farmer President looked to be wreaking havoc on the economy. At least, that’s how it appeared to one conservative society lioness out West—whose husband had spent some time in politics but was now between jobs. She felt she had a better man for the office.

Just to be certain, however, she called up a friend, a wellborn San Francisco Republican, from whom she had been taking counsel for several years. The woman, one Joan Quigley, quickly did an astrological chart on Jimmy Carter. Then she got back to Nancy Reagan with good news about her husband’s presidential bid: “I was certain Ronald Reagan wouldn’t have any trouble with him,” says Quigley, who volunteered her services to the campaign and later provided them, on a regular basis, to the Reagan White House.

Throughout this association, the Vassar-educated astrologer with country club manners was—as befits a lady—terribly discreet. By the end of the first term, her fellow astrologers had begun to notice the impeccable celestial timing of many Reagan moves, like the bombing of Libya and his announcement for a second term. “I had astrologer friends calling me saying, ‘Reagan must have had his chart done,’ “Quigley recently confided during an interview in a suite at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel. “I just said, ‘Yes. He must have been consulting someone.’ ”

Last week the soignée soothsayer’s cover was blown by former White House aide Donald Regan. In his just-published book, For the Record, Regan spilled what he insisted was “the most closely guarded domestic secret of the Reagan White House.” To wit: “Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House Chief of Staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise.” Within hours, an avid press had zeroed in on Quigley as the mystery adviser.

If astrology was the Reagans’ little secret, however, it was not very well kept. “I have known since before Reagan was elected that they went to astrologers,” says former Washington Post style reporter Sally Quinn, “and that’s why I’m surprised at all of the surprise and shock.” In fact the Reagans’ interest in astrology goes back to the early ’50s—and amounts to far more than the scanning of newspaper horoscopes that the President once jovially confessed to a reporter. Quigley was only the most recent of several stargazers to enter the Reagans’ domestic orbit and exert the pull of the heavens on decisions great and small.•

______________________

From the Times:

In his 1988 memoir, Donald T. Regan, a former chief of staff for President Ronald Reagan, revealed what he called the administration’s “most closely guarded secret.”

He said an astrologer had set the time for summit meetings, presidential debates, Reagan’s 1985 cancer surgery, State of the Union addresses and much more. Without an O.K. from the astrologer, he said, Air Force One did not take off.

The astrologer, whose name Mr. Regan did not know when he wrote the book, was Joan Quigley. She died on Tuesday at 87 at her home in San Francisco, her sister and only immediate survivor, Ruth Quigley, said.

Mr. Regan said that Miss Quigley — a Vassar-educated socialite who preferred the honorific Miss to Ms. (she never married) — had made her celestial recommendations through phone calls to the first lady, Nancy Reagan, often two or three a day. Mrs. Reagan, he said, set up private lines for her at the White House and at the presidential retreat at Camp David.

Further, Mrs. Reagan paid the astrologer a retainer of $3,000 a month, wrote Mr. Regan, who had also been a Treasury secretary under Reagan and the chief executive of Merrill Lynch.

“Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House chief of staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise,” he wrote in the memoir, For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington.

In an interview with CBS Evening News in 1989, after Reagan left office, Miss Quigley said that after reading the horoscope of the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, she concluded that he was intelligent and open to new ideas and persuaded Mrs. Reagan to press her husband to abandon his view of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” Arms control treaties followed.•

“Right Now, Almost Everyone Is Trying To Game The System”

March 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

gighadidselfie5

I don’t have to tell you that we’re living in a new and strange economy. The star of a film franchise that makes more than a billion dollars globally is paid six figures and has no real leverage to demand more, whereas Kendall Jenner or Gigi Hadid reportedly earn in that ballpark just for putting a single post on Instagram. Of course, all of the above are lottery winners in this post-collapse world of flat wages and vulnerable workers.

In his recent Reddit AMA, Douglas Rushkoff, author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, engaged in an esoteric give-and-take about where the economy may be heading. He believes restoring the middle class through micropayments unlikely (and it is!), thinking tomorrow will need a better system. Despite the noble thought projects Rushkoff mentions, I can guarantee you the future isn’t TV-less Tandy computers. An excerpt:

Question:

Within a decade we could see mainstream VR/AR with eye-tracking that would lead to complete compartmentalization, observation, and memorization of pretty much all Hierarchical interactions between individuals in all levels of a growing society.

With innovative social networking tools like Synereo, which is pretty much a decentralized Facebook that turns ‘Likes’ into attention-derived cryptocurrency, do you think we’re headed into a digital economy that’s vastly different than today, or are things going to be relatively the same?

Douglas Rushkoff:

We could go in some bizarre new direction like you’re describing. And it would be interesting. It’s a bit like Lanier envisions, where we start getting all sorts of data-mining activities back on the books, and pay people in micro currencies. But I’m thinking it’s likely easier to go in the other direction. I’m interested in getting things off the books. Building connections between people. I don’t like building a society based on the premise that everyone is trying to game the system.

True – right now, almost everyone is trying to game the system. Finance itself is gamified commerce. Derivatives and algorithms gasify that, and so on and so on. Startups are gamified Wall St.

So these new micro-transactional social networks mean to reprogram the value extraction to our own benefit. I just don’t know where the marketers are who are going to support all this in the end. Marketing has never made up more than 5% of GDP. And that’s being generous. I don’t think it can support the entire economy.

I’d rather see communities develop currencies for people to take care of one another, and for us to use those locally, and then use long distance money to buy our iPhones or whatever.

Question:

“I don’t like building a society based on the premise that everyone is trying to game the system.”

This exactly. I don’t mean to sound anti-capitalist, but that’s one of its major flaws – that exploiting people’s weaknesses for financial gain is a good thing.

Douglas Rushkoff:

One horrific factoid I’ve been working on is what would be the cost of an iPhone if it didn’t use the equivalent of slave labor and blood rare-earth minerals. We get these things so relatively cheaply, and it feels as if making these technologies cheaper somehow breaks down the digital divide. But it really just externalizes it to somewhere we don’t see.

It’s a strange project – but I’m wondering if it’s really appropriate to make our tech cheaper at their expense? And wonder if the older stuff we used to use – like my Tandy computer – can do things like this AMA, how is getting TV over my computer really important?•

Tags:

“Trump Launched A Political Campaign That Tore Into Reagan’s Record”

March 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Donald Trump, who hopes to have a long and thick political career, is less chameleon than outright liar.

It’s no surprise the GOP frontrunner dropped to his knees before the memory of our 40th President as soon as it was announced Nancy Reagan died. After all, Beefsteak Charlie is a person without a shred of honesty or shame. While the hideous hotelier today trolls President Obama and claims China is destroying America, he behaved similarly in the 1980s toward Reagan and Japan. Trump could claim he’s changed his opinion as he’s matured, but clearly this is a man who hasn’t grown an inch (not a penis joke).

From Michael D’Antonio at Politico Magazine:

In 2016, there are 14 Republican presidential candidates for whom Ronald Reagan is both the benchmark for conservative values and the lodestar of conservative ideas. There’s also one who wrote, in the second to last year of Reagan’s presidency, that he had been “so smooth, so effective a performer” that “only now, seven years later, are people beginning to question whether there’s anything beneath that smile.”

The gadfly was Donald Trump, writing in his book The Art of the Deal. But it wasn’t just a glancing blow; to promote the book, Trump launched a political campaign that tore into Reagan’s record, including his willingness to stand up to the Soviet Union. Advised by the notorious Roger Stone, a Nixon-era GOP trickster, in 1987 Trump took out full-page ads in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post blasting Reagan and his team.

In the text, which was addressed “To the American people,” Trump declared, “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.” The problem was America’s leading role in defending democracy, which had been fulfilled by Republicans and Democrats all the way back to FDR. Foreshadowing his 2015 argument that would have Mexico pay for an American-built border wall, Trump then said that the United States should present its allies with a bill for defense services rendered.

The ads, which cost more than $90,000, came after Trump had visited the Soviet Union and met with Mikhail Gorbachev. (A few years earlier, Trump had offered himself as a replacement for Reagan’s nuclear arms control negotiators, whom he considered too soft.) Trump followed his letter to America with a trip to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where voters were eyeing the candidates in the 1988 primary. There he spoke to the Rotary Club, which met at Yoken’s restaurant, where the sign out front featured a spouting whale and the slogan, “Thar she blows!” In his talk, Trump sounded some of the same themes he offers today, except for the fact that the bad guys who were laughing at the United States were the Japanese and not the Mexicans or Chinese.•

Tags: , ,

“Who Knows Anything Anymore?”

March 4, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

trumpdebate5937264

Donald Trump, who impetuously got into politics hoping to get a tugjob in the toilet adjacent to the Lincoln Bedroom, is Barry Goldwater at a Gathering of the Juggalos. 

One of the happiest turns in the media world in 2015 was a wonderful talent like James Poniewozik becoming the TV critic at the New York Times. It may not be his favorite assignment, but the writer stifled his gag reflex long enough to review the awfulness of last night’s Pants-Off Dance-Off known as the GOP debate. What follows is an excerpt from his work and one from Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo.

_____________________________

From Poniewozik:

Mr. Trump turns subtext into text, whether it’s about immigration or torture. Republican candidates had sent certain messages to voters for years, and now the party hears them coming back from Mr. Trump translated, or perhaps decoded.

On Thursday, his opponents made plenty of substantive, detailed attacks on him, and maybe they worked, but tying them to questions of character risks underscoring his reality-TV-style directness.

But what’s the alternative? Mr. Rubio tried speaking Mr. Trump’s language at the previous debate, and afterward. He mocked, he taunted, he said that Mr. Trump may have wet himself. It worked, or it didn’t — Mr. Rubio didn’t have a great Super Tuesday. And at this debate, he seemed a little sheepish about having tried it. He was still on the attack, but in his own language.

It seems the best way to beat Mr. Trump is to make him small, and the best way to make him small is to beat him. Maybe Thursday’s media whirlwind was the start of that — who knows anything anymore? — but it made the debate, the news cycle, the world, all about him, Trump Trump Trumpity-Trump. It was done, to borrow the hashtag of the social-media movement against him, in the spirit of #NeverTrump, but the practical effect was #AllTrump, #AllTheTime.

The Republican Party hung a giant target on Mr. Trump’s back. But that meant he ended the day reassured, for the umpteenth time, that his was in fact bigger.•

_____________________________

From Marshall:

There was one point maybe in the 3rd quarter hour of the debate where Rubio and Trump were basically just yelling at each other. It was very messy. Trump was clearly unable to dominate the stage. And yet, as I watched, I thought: this is not doing Marco Rubio any good. It may be bloodying Trump but not to Rubio’s benefit. They knocked him off his perch a bit but they looked like ridiculous animals wrestling with him on the ground.

The other thing I wonder about tonight is the effect of Fox News’ attacks on Trump. Trump’s the frontrunner. His dirty laundry is only now really getting a close look from the press. It makes sense that the moderators would press him more than the others. But it went well beyond that. They were out to get him. No one could watch this debate and not get that. Given how much Trump’s base constituency is driven by resentment against ‘establishments’ and perceived unfairness to themselves and those they support, will this redound to Trump’s benefit? Will it at least not hurt him? I think it’s definitely possible.

I have little doubt that the cross-country exchange with Romney today actually did help Trump. If you’re for Trump, you’re against the establishment and all it stands for. Romney is the establishment wing of the establishment and even the attack itself was fairly feckless. It only confirms Trump’s message. On a stage he owned, a short while later in Maine, Trump mutilated Romney in his response. I’m much less sure this debate helped Trump in the same way.

My cautious, initial take is that all the attacks combined didn’t do much if anything to shake Trump’s support. But they may have started to put an actual ceiling on that support. It may have stopped him from building on his current numbers. I’m truly not sure.•

Tags: ,

“I Would Be Going To The Moon Too. Not Soon, But Before I Died. “

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

Ray_Bradbury (1)

Can you imagine if more than 50 years after the global sensation of Charles Lindbergh’s Transatlantic flight if there were still no commercial airlines? Seems unthinkable, right? 

It’s beyond perplexing that we haven’t established permanent colonies on the moon, that this “trade route” wasn’t opened in the wake of the successful Apollo missions of 1969-72. It must have seemed fait accompli during those bold days. On the night of the giant leap for mankind, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke could barely contain their wildest visions when interviewed live by Walter Cronkite and his cohorts. Sure, the cost involved in space flight dwarfs that of Earth-bound airport hopping, but it seemed to make too much sense to not happen, didn’t it?

Alas, it did not come to fruition. Sharing my disappointment is the excellent writer Brian Clegg, who’s penned an Aeon essay which explores why science fiction became so uncoupled from reality when it comes to “setting up house” on the moon. The opening:

One of the biggest thrills of my teenage life was being allowed to stay up all night to watch the Apollo 11 moon landing (the first time I’d ever spent a whole night without going to bed). And something was very clear to me, back then on that long 1969 night: I would be going to the moon too. Not soon, but before I died. I was realistic. I didn’t expect it to be soon, because I never saw myself as an astronaut. But I firmly expected that by the time this book was written and I was a very elderly person in my fifties, trips to the moon would be pretty much like flights across the Atlantic were in the 1960s. Still a very special experience, not for everyone by any means, but something that would be available to the general public as a safe, scheduled pleasure trip.

This seems very naïve now, but it really didn’t back in the heady days of 1969. I had read the science fiction. I knew that moon bases and lunar cities would inevitably follow that first, groundbreaking step of making a manned landing. Why not? It seemed an entirely logical progress. Think how much had been achieved in just the previous eight years. Imagine what would be possible in another 40 or 50 years. And yet the reality was so different. There were just six brief manned moon landings in the Apollo series, and then nothing. Not a single person has reached the moon for decades. There have been plenty of unmanned probes, but nothing has been done toward laying the ground for those lunar cities and for the regular, commercial moon flights I so eagerly anticipated. That glorious future has evaporated.

There’s something very strange and fascinating in the way that reality has deviated so far from science fiction – especially considering how deeply rooted the moon is in the human imagination.•

Tags:

“More People Are Choosing To Live Alone Than Ever Before”

March 3, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

helmet56

Singles got a bad name in the 1970s and have been blamed for many of society’s ills ever since, but they were revolutionaries in their own way. This century, we’ve witnessed significant growth in the unmarried population in America (and Europe and Asia), a shift that impacting the world. It’s taken hold in part because phones and apps and other tools of liberation have uncoupled living alone and loneliness.

Many social scientists believe this new normal is a poison pill for us culturally and economically, but Bella DePaulo, author of How We Live Now, argues the contrary in a Nautilus essay. She believes the modern living arrangements have made for stronger and better communities, with an untethered class of people who’ve improvised families and have the time and freedom to contribute to the world outside their homes. I tend to agree with her, but it would be great to know for sure since the answer could help us in creating smart policy. The opening:

When Dan Scheffey turned 50, he threw himself a party. About 100 people packed into his Manhattan apartment, which occupies the third floor of a brick townhouse in the island’s vibrant East Village. His parents, siblings, and an in-law were there, and friends from all times and walks of his life. He told them how much they meant to him and how happy he was to see them all in one place. “My most important family,” says Dan, who has been single his entire life, “is the family that I’ve selected and brought together.”

Dan has never been married. He doesn’t have kids. Not long ago, his choice of lifestyle would have been highly unusual, even pitied. In 1950, 78 percent of households in the United States had a married couple at its helm; more than half of those included children. “The accepted wisdom was that the post-World War II nuclear family style was the culmination of a long journey—the end point of changes in families that had been occurring for several hundred years,” sociologist John Scanzoni wrote in 2001.

But that wisdom was wrong: The meaning of family is morphing once again. Fueled by a convergence of historical currents—including birth control and the rising status of women, increased wealth and social security, LGBTQ activism, and the spread of personal communication technologies and social media—more people are choosing to live alone than ever before.

Pick a random American household today, and it’s more likely to look like Dan’s than like Ozzie and Harriet’s. Nearly half of adults ages 18 and older are single. About 1 in 7 live alone. Americans are marrying later, divorcing in larger numbers, and becoming less interested in remarrying. According to the Pew Research Center, by the time today’s young adults reach age 50, a quarter of them will have never married at all.

The surge of singlehood is not just an American phenomenon. Between 1980 and 2011, the number of one-person households worldwide more than doubled, from about 118 million to 277 million, and will rise to 334 million by 2020, according to Euromonitor International. More than a dozen countries, including Japan and several European nations, now have even larger proportions of solo-dwellers than the U.S. (Sweden ranks highest at almost 50 percent.) Individuals, not couples or clans or other social groups, are fast becoming the fundamental units of society.•

Tags: ,

“So Who Should Be Worried?”

March 3, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

OldFashionedGirlsMean

In “Global Cities, Global Talent” a new Deloitte report that’s bullish on London and bearish on NYC because of the greater number of high-skilled jobs the former has recently added, perhaps the most worrying conclusion is that the hollowing out of low-skilled positions via automation may further exacerbate our increasingly middle-less economy. According to Deloitte, women may be particularly prone in this new normal.

The paper does note that “the difficulty of implementing the technology, social or political resistance or the relative human cost of labor versus investment in technology” may be the “real brakes on the pace of job automation.” It seems doubtful those things will be any type of long-term obstacle to automation, and it really shouldn’t be artificially restrained. But policy is going to have to answer many difficult questions in the next few decades to keep societies from irreparably fraying.

From Matthew Nitch Smith at Forbes:

One of the biggest accountancy firms in the world Deloitte released a report today entitled “Global cities, global talent” and it warned that “automation risks ‘hollowing out’ London’s lower paid jobs.”

However, at the same time it said 235,000 high-skill jobs have been created in London since 2013.

Basically, those working in lower paid jobs, mainly service and manufacturing sector jobs like cleaning, waitressing, and some factory work, are at the greatest risk of losing their jobs because robots are able to do it instead of them. 

The warning comes close after the World Economic Forum (WEF) warned that as many as five million jobs could be lost between 15 major and emerging economies by 2020 due to robots, automation, and artificial intelligence.

The British Retail Consortium also said that 900,000 jobs would be lost in retail across the country thanks, in part, to “robots.” It added that almost a third of stores would close by 2025. 

Automation on a mass scale has always been concern to economists and employees alike, but we’re now starting to get the sense that what was once in the realm of sci-fi is going to have a real, imminent impact on global cities like London.

So who should be worried?•

Tags:

“There Will Be Awkward Decades Where The Modes Of Transport Co-Exist”

March 3, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

tireturningani (2)

For driverless cars, it’s really more a matter of when than if. They may not arrive en masse in the next ten minutes the way Elon Musk believes they will, but we’re at the beginning of what may be a relatively quick transition into a world of hands-free vehicles, which, if we’re smart and fortunate, will be EVs powered by electricity from solar sources. This new reality will be full of ethical, legal and philosophical questions, some of them extremely thorny. But that’s the future, and it isn’t far from now. In our age, we’ll get to experience for years–decades, probably–a variation of what it was like when horses and cars (uneasily) shared the roads and streets. In the new equation, we’re the horses.

From Martin Belam in the Guardian:

Our cities must have been dreadfully foul and smelly before the motor car. At the London Transport Museum they have a display of two horse-drawn vehicles. Pre-recorded voices make it sound like the model horses are chatting to each other, and there’s fake horse dung on the floor for extra giggles. Whole sub-industries flourished in clearing up the straw and excrement clogging up our 19th-century streets. It must have been particularly grim when it rained or snowed.

I thought about this exhibit while trying to cross the road the other day, waiting for a break in the relentless London traffic. I watched cars whizz by, spewing out fumes that we know are toxic, and burning fossil fuels that costs us millions to extract from the ground.

It struck me how awful and primitive that is going to look in a museum display in a hundred years’ time. People stuck in movable boxes polluting the air, taking up all the space in our cities. The display will calmly inform people that by the early 21st century, thanks to huge efforts expended on safety measures, only around four people every day died on the UK’s roads due to cars.

That is the way things are.

But technology is going to transform it over the next couple of decades, and we can see the endgame. We know we are going to get to a point where nearly every car is driverless, and uses some kind of rechargeable electric power rather than petrol engines.

There will be awkward decades where the modes of transport co-exist, as evidenced by the fact that one of Google’s self-driving cars just pranged a bus in the US. But what is the exception now will become the norm.•

Tags:

Old Print Article: American Sculptor To Build Perfect City, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1927)

March 3, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

hendrik1 eityomage6

IW_MuseoAndersen_02-665x498

Like most who entertain top-heavy fantasies for reimagining the world, the sculptor and urban planner Hendrik Christian Andersen was a bit of a buffoon.

The Norwegian-American artist truly believed that if he could build a flawless city of beauty and learning that knew no nationalist bounds, the entire world would be inspired to perfection. Not only was it an asinine political fantasy, but it somehow led Andersen into the arms of the vulgar, murderous clown Benito Mussolini, a former drifter and agitator who had horrified the world in the 1920s by coming to absolute power in Italy. Il Duce, no doubt enamored with the pomposity of the project, promised the visionary the land and resources to realize his dream. The Shangri-La was ultimately never built, but the “soft-voiced idealist,” as the artist was described, was still speaking fondly of Mussolini into the middle of the 1930s. Andersen died in Rome in 1940, not living long enough to see his patron deservedly face the business end of a meat hook. An article in the June 19, 1927 Brooklyn Daily Eagle recalls the proposed series of stately pleasure-domes.

andersentitle6789

and1

and2

and3

and4

and5

and6

Tags: ,

“What Will A Demagogue With A Platform Like Trump’s Who Ascends To The Presidency Do With Control Over The NSA, FBI And IRS?”

March 2, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

donald-trump-shaves-720

At Gizmodo, Matt Novak poses an interesting question: “Has Donald Trump Ever Used a Computer?” 

My best guess would be “yes,” that he Googles himself in the wee hours of the morning when too bloated on bacon cheeseburgers too sleep, growing furious at blogs that mock him. And is it really possible this man is unfamiliar with Internet porn?

I think the better query might be this one: “Has Donald Trump Ever Read a Book?” I’m more worried about his ignorance in regard to this much earlier tool. He certainly doesn’t have any in his home, and he’s paid other people to write ones published under his name. I feel fairly certain that this man has no paper cuts on his freakishly stubby fingers. 

Two excerpts follow, the first from Novak’s post and the second from Lawrence Summers’ essay about the specter of a Trump Presidency.

___________________________

From Novak:

There is no technological test for the presidency in the United States. A hypothetical President Trump would not be required to use a computer nor a smartphone. But it’s 2016. The future president of the United States will confront myriad issues involving the average American’s use of technology. And if you’ve never touched a computer in your life, it seems hard to imagine how Trump might relate to things as trivial as “information overload” or as important as mass government surveillance.

We have documentary evidence of Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, and Marco Rubio all using tablets, smartphones, and PCs. Somehow Trump has mastered the high-tech demands of running a 21st century presidential campaign without ever using those technologies first-hand. He’s on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter—all set up for him and controlled by his lackeys. Frankly, I’m not sure whether to be impressed or horrified.

I guess, of all the things to be horrified over regarding our future president, his technological prowess might be the least of our worries.•

___________________________

From Summers:

The possible election of Donald Trump as President is the greatest present threat to the prosperity and security of the United States.  I have had a strong point of view on each of the last ten presidential elections, but never before had I feared that what I regarded as the wrong outcome would in the long sweep of history risk grave damage to the American project.

The problem is not with Trump’s policies, though they are wacky in the few areas where they are not indecipherable. It is that he is running as modern day man on a horseback—demagogically offering the power of his personality as a magic solution to all problems—and making clear that he is prepared to run roughshod over anything or anyone who stands in his way.

Trump has already flirted with the Ku Klux Klan and disparaged and demeaned the female half of our population. He vowed to kill the families of terrorists, use extreme forms of torture, and forbid Muslims from coming into our country. Time and again, he has claimed he will crush those who stand in his way; his promised rewrite of libel laws, permitting the punishment of The New York Times and Washington Post for articles he does not like, will allow him to make good on this threat.

Lyndon Johnson’s celebrated biographer, Robert Caro, has written that while “power doesn’t always corrupt…[it] always reveals.” What will a demagogue with a platform like Trump’s who ascends to the presidency do with control over the NSA, FBI and IRS?  What commitment will he manifest to the rule of law? Already Trump has proposed that protesters at his rallies “should have been roughed up.”

Nothing in the way he campaigned gave Richard Nixon a mandate for keeping an enemies list or engaging in dirty tricks.  If he is elected, Donald Trump may think he has such a mandate.  What is the basis for doubting that it will be used?•

Tags: , ,

“I See Technology As Taking Human Goals And Making Them Able To Be Automatically Executed By Machines”

March 2, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

lpfactoryrobot (3)

If our species is fortunate (and wise) enough to survive deep into the future, we’ll continually redefine why we’re here. I doubt anyone would want people in 2325 to subsist on currency paid to them for piecing together fast-food sandwiches. Those types of processes will be automated and everyone will hopefully be working on more substantial issues. 

The problem is, we really don’t need humans doing that job right now. And pretty soon, we won’t need delivery drivers, truck drivers, taxi drivers, bellhops, front-desk agents, wait staff, cooks, maintenance people and many other fields, a number of them white-collar positions that were traditionally deemed “safe.” In addition to figuring out what our new goals need to be, that type of technological unemployment could bring about a serious distribution problem. If the transition occurs too quickly, smart policy will need to be promptly deployed.

In the Edge piece “AI and the Future of Civilization,” Stephen Wolfram tries to answer the bigger question of what role humans will play as automation becomes ubiquitous. The scientist believes our part will be to invest the new machines with goals. He says “that’s what humans contribute, that’s what our civilization contributes—execution of those goals.”

The opening:

Some tough questions. One of them is about the future of the human condition. That’s a big question. I’ve spent some part of my life figuring out how to make machines automate stuff. It’s pretty obvious that we can automate many of the things that we humans have been proud of for a long time. What’s the future of the human condition in that situation?

More particularly, I see technology as taking human goals and making them able to be automatically executed by machines. The human goals that we’ve had in the past have been things like moving objects from here to there and using a forklift rather than our own hands. Now, the things that we can do automatically are more intellectual kinds of things that have traditionally been the professions’ work, so to speak. These are things that we are going to be able to do by machine. The machine is able to execute things, but something or someone has to define what its goals should be and what it’s trying to execute.

People talk about the future of the intelligent machines, and [whether] intelligent machines are going to take over and decide what to do for themselves. What one has to figure out, while given a goal, how to execute it into something that can meaningfully be automated; the actual inventing of the goal is not something that in some sense has a path to automation.

How do we figure out goals for ourselves? How are goals defined? They tend to be defined for a given human by a small history of their cultural environment, the history of our civilization. Goals are something that are uniquely human. It’s something that almost doesn’t make any sense. We ask, what’s the goal of our machine? We might have given it a goal when we built the machine.•

Tags:

“Who Is To Write The Evolutionary Code Of Tomorrow?”

March 2, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

old-school-flying-airplane-work-typewriter-people-pic-1335218357-e1419282636723 (4)

Has there ever been a biography written about Alvin Toffler, the sociological salesman whose pants are forever being scared off? I don’t see one on Amazon. I’d love to know what it was about his life that positioned him, beginning in the 1960s, to look ahead at our future and be shocked. There’s always been a strong sci-fi strain to his work, though it’s undeniably important to think about how science and technology could go horribly wrong. By imagining the worst, perhaps we can avoid it. Likewise it’s vital to realize that exploring these uncharted frontiers may be key to saving us from extinction.

A passage about genetic engineering, a fraught field but one with tremendous promise, from a 1978 Omni interview with Toffler conducted by leathery beaver merchant Bob Guccione:

Omni:

What’s good about genetic engineering?

Alvin Toffler:

Genetic manipulation can yield cheap insulin. It can probably help us solve the cancer riddle. But, more important, over the very long run it could help us crack the world food problem.

You could radically reduce reliance on artificial fertilizers–which means saving energy and helping the poor nations substantially. You could produce new, fast-growing species. You could create species adapted to lands that are now marginal, infertile, arid, or saline. And if you really let your long-range imagination roam, you can foresee a possible convergence of genetic manipulation, weather modification, and computerized agriculture–all coming together with a wholly new energy system. Such developments would simply remake agriculture as we’ve known it for 10,000 years.

Omni:

What is the downside?

Alvin Toffler:

Horrendous. Almost beyond our imagination, When you cut up genes and splice them together in new ways, you risk the accidental escape from the laboratory of new life forms and the swift spread of new diseases for which the human race no defenses.

As is the case with nuclear energy we have safety guidelines. But no system, in my view, can ever be totally fail-safe. All our safety calculations are based on certain assumptions. The assumptions are reasonable, even conservative. But none of the calculations tell what happens if one of the assumptions turns out to be wrong. Or what to do if a terrorist manages to get a hold of the crucial test tube.

A lot of good people are working to tighten controls in this field. NATO recently issued a report summarizing the steps taken by dozens of countries from the U.S.S.R. to Britain and the U.S. But what do we do about irresponsible corporations or nations who just want to crash ahead? And completely honest, socially responsible geneticists are found on both sides of an emotional debate as to how–or even whether–to proceed.

Farther down the road, you also get into very deep political, philosophical, and ecological issues. Who is to write the evolutionary code of tomorrow? Which species shall live and which shall die out? Environmentalists today worry about vanishing species and the effect of eliminating the leopard or the snail darter from the planet. These are real worries, because every species has a role to play in the overall ecology. But we have not yet begun to think about the possible emergence of new, predesigned species to take their place.•

“Mr. Trump Is A Promoter Of Paranoid Fantasies, A Xenophobe And An Ignoramus”

March 1, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

trumpmex

Donald Trump, the political offspring of Mayor McCheese and Benito Mussolini, isn’t so singular among Republican politicians for the things he thinks but for saying them in such a brazen manner. The Gingrich-Atwater-Rove soft, coded language of bigotry helped GOP politicians to victory in a whiter America, but it never returned the nation to a mythical past as it had promised. The party leaders never intended to. Family values and the other hokum they were selling wasn’t important to the power brokers. It was just a useful means to fire up the base and gain control for the financial good of a sliver of the country.

Tired of being disappointed, the bedrock of the party has turned to a vulgar clown reluctant to disavow the KKK. But Trump stands on the shoulders of many of those very conservatives who express shock and disbelief at his rise. They were the ones who’ve spent decades cultivating anti-government attitudes and racial divisiveness and obstructionism and conspiracy theories. The question now is whether the hideous hotelier’s rise will be the party’s comeuppance or all of America’s.

From Martin Wolf at the Financial Times:

What is one to make of the rise of Donald Trump? It is natural to think of comparisons with populist demagogues past and present. It is natural, too, to ask why the Republican party might choose a narcissistic bully as its candidate for president. But this is not just about a party, but about a great country. The US is the greatest republic since Rome, the bastion of democracy, the guarantor of the liberal global order. It would be a global disaster if Mr Trump were to become president. Even if he fails, he has rendered the unthinkable sayable.

Mr Trump is a promoter of paranoid fantasies, a xenophobe and an ignoramus. His business consists of the erection of ugly monuments to his own vanity. He has no experience of political office. Some compare him to Latin American populists. He might also be considered an American Silvio Berlusconi, albeit without the charm or business acumen. But Mr Berlusconi, unlike Mr Trump, never threatened to round up and expel millions of people. Mr Trump is grossly unqualified for the world’s most important political office.

Yet, as Robert Kagan, a neoconservative intellectual, argues in a powerful column in The Washington Post, Mr Trump is also “the GOP’s Frankenstein monster.” He is, says Mr Kagan, the monstrous result of the party’s “wild obstructionism,” its demonisation of political institutions, its flirtation with bigotry and its “racially tinged derangement syndrome” over President Barack Obama. He continues: “We are supposed to believe that Trump’s legion of ‘angry’ people are angry about wage stagnation. No, they are angry about all the things Republicans have told them to be angry about these past seven-and-a-half years”.

Mr Kagan is right, but does not go far enough.•

Tags: ,

“I Do Think We Are Operating In A Particularly Post-Truth Moment”

March 1, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

trumpwater678

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m in awe of the work the New York Times has done this election season. Yes, I was angry about an early NYT interview with Donald Trump that painted him as a slightly irreverent great-uncle rather than holding him to his racist, fascistic noises, but the daily reports from the trail have been balanced, thoughtful and provocative (in the best sense of the word).

One of the key figures in the coverage has been Maggie Haberman, an excellent journalist who identifies important issues and writes about them from interesting angles. Just yesterday, she published a smart piece about Trump’s reliance on conspiracy theories he unearths by noodling around online. There’s some question as to whether the Times’ stellar work–and facts, in general–are permeating our Reality TV culture, but the news organization has held up its end of the bargain.

Haberman took time from her Super Tuesday for a Reddit Ask Me Anything. A few exchanges follow.

__________________________

Question:

Of the reporters I read, it seems you and the staff at the NYT were the most measured/cautious to not treat Trump as a “joke” candidate. Did you have any inkling early on that Trump was unlike other burnout candidates a la Herman Cain? To that point, I’m amazed that there are still skeptics within the media and particularly within the GOP that Trump can somehow be stopped — save a brokered convention — as he’s now polling nationally at 49%.

Maggie Haberman:

Hi there – nice to meet you again! Since the first debate I have not thought treating Trump like a “joke” was advisable, given where he was in the polls and given his ability to command media and survive controversies that would have killed other candidates. I also never thought he was a boom-and-bust candidate like Cain because he was a known commodity well ahead of the 2016 campaign cycle. He’s spent years being broadcast into homes of millions of people on The Apprentice, where he sat in a leather chair and looked, well, leaderly. That said, I did not think he would be as dominant as he is now and was skeptical that he could hold this plurality win. I did not think even in November that he was likely to be the nominee. And I misread early on, when he first got in, how strong he would be.

__________________________

Question:

Besides Trump, is there anything that surprised you about 2016 election?

Maggie Haberman:

Great question. One surprise has been how little super PACs have mattered. Part of that is because they basically are only useful to air ads, and negative ads still have the most currency. But given the hype about how this was going to be the super PAC election, it hasn’t worked out that way.

__________________________

Question:

How has reporting changed given the near fact-free environment we are currently in? Facts matter less than ever.

Maggie Haberman:

I don’t think it’s quite right to say facts have little to no impact. But I do think we are operating in a particularly post-truth moment, as my colleague Michael Barbaro wrote a few months ago. In this primary race, direct contradictions to what candidates have said have mattered little to their supporters in many cases.

__________________________

Question:

What is the Republican path to victory at this point? If Trump wins, some have already started to mull a third party and many say they won’t support him. Will they just focus on down ballots? Is there any chance of a big name third party run?

Maggie Haberman:

There’s a chance – Mike Bloomberg is still considering it, and there might be others. But a third party run is logistically really, really hard and expensive, in terms of petitions to get on ballots. Trump could have a path to victory but the refusal to disavow Duke on CNN on Sunday — and while I know he said he had an earpiece problem, he answered Jake Tapper repeatedly and showed no evidence of not hearing the questions — will linger in a general, and makes it easier for other Republicans to criticize him.•

Tags:

“The Only Hope For The Species Still Living Is A Human Effort Commensurate With The Magnitude Of The Problem”

February 29, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

321CUT-RATE_GAS_STATION_OPERATES_OUT_OF_BUS_-_NARA_-_546153.tif-2-e1438205374203 (1)

This weekend, I tweeted a link to a 2014 Tony Hiss Smithsonian article about E.O. Wilson’s “Half-Earth” proposal for combating biodiversity loss. This plan suggests we set aside 50% of the planet’s surface for non-human species, which would not only help safeguard them but us as well. There are some, like Stewart Brand, who think we’ll soon be able to de-extinct at will, but the ability to repopulate is far from certain and full of unintended consequences. Better to preserve what we have while learning to create (or re-create) even more.

Coincidentally, Aeon has published a piece by Wilson on the topic today, the first essay the great biologist has penned for the great online magazine. Among other things, he explains why 50% isn’t just a nice round number but a key one and how rising consumption won’t doom the project. An excerpt:

Today, every sovereign nation in the world has a protected-area system of some kind. All together the reserves number about 161,000 on land and 6,500 over marine waters. According to the World Database on Protected Areas, a joint project of the United Nations Environmental Program and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, they occupied by 2015 a little less than 15 per cent of Earth’s land area and 2.8 per cent of Earth’s ocean area. The coverage is increasing gradually. This trend is encouraging. To have reached the existing level is a tribute to those who have led and participated in the global conservation effort.

But is the level enough to halt the acceleration of species extinction? Unfortunately, it is in fact nowhere close to enough. The declining world of biodiversity cannot be saved by the piecemeal operations in current use alone. The extinction rate our behaviour is now imposing on the rest of life, and seems destined to continue, is more correctly viewed as the equivalent of a Chicxulub-sized asteroid strike played out over several human generations.

The only hope for the species still living is a human effort commensurate with the magnitude of the problem. The ongoing mass extinction of species, and with it the extinction of genes and ecosystems, ranks with pandemics, world war, and climate change as among the deadliest threats that humanity has imposed on itself. To those who feel content to let the Anthropocene evolve toward whatever destiny it mindlessly drifts, I say please take time to reconsider. To those who are steering the growth of reserves worldwide, let me make an earnest request: don’t stop, just aim a lot higher.•

Tags:

« Older entries § Newer entries »