All superpowers have their challenges, and China more than most. Rapid industrialization, mass urbanization and the building of insta-cities have left the environment in utter disrepair just as the economy seems poised for a serious slowdown. China plans to innovate its way out of the jam, like a rather large Silicon Valley of 1.357 billion.
More than four years ago, I wondered (dubiously) if China could ever transition from its knockoff Apple stores to creating a company like Apple. It would appear the state is moving in the right direction.
China has ambitious plans to source as much as 15% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, at the same time its economy is projected to slow. It also aspires to be the next space superpower while facing major health and environment challenges, such as an ageing population and water shortages.
The Chinese government knows that surmounting these challenges while achieving its goals can only be accomplished through science. Indeed, China is pegging its future prosperity on a knowledge-based economy, underpinned by research and innovation. For a country that invented paper, gunpowder and the compass, such lofty ambitions could be realized. This year pharmacologist Tu Youyou became the first Chinese researcher to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine for helping discover a new drug for malaria that has saved millions of lives.
“With a solid base built upon the large quantity of research, China is [about] to take off in world-leading innovations and scientific breakthroughs,” says He Fuchu, the founding president of PHOENIX, the Chinese National Center for Protein Sciences. “High-quality research is built upon the accumulation of incremental advances,” He says.
The Nature Index shows China is already a high-quality scientific powerhouse. Since the first Nature Index database started in 2012, China’s total contribution has risen to become the second largest in the world, surpassed only by the United States.
But, what sets China apart is the rapid growth of its WFC. While China’s contribution grew 37%from 2012 to 2014, the United States saw a 4% drop over the same period.•
While it won’t much help those who’ve invested their lives in the value of a taxi medallion, it would be beneficial to a growing population of workers if we could figure out a way to protect employees participating, willingly or otherwise, in the Gig Economy. In his latest Financial Times column, Tim Harford has a suggestion: “Libertarianism with a safety net.” If that sounds oxymoronic, it’s intentional. The writer believes we need to consciously uncouple the welfare and corporate states, providing assurances to all citizens so that they can be unmoored without being at risk.
Uber maintains that they are not. That seems defensible: a driver can switch the app on or off at any time, or work for a competitor such as Lyft on a whim. Few employees who acted in this way would be employed for very long.
Then again, does a driver who puts in 60 or 70 hours a week providing Uber-assigned rides according to Uber-determined rules and rates not deserve some sort of security? Some authorities think so: the company has lost a number of rulings in California as judges and arbitrators have found that, in certain cases, Uber drivers are employees.
Such judgments are likely to vary from case to case and place to place, and the uncertainty helps nobody bar the lawyers. Alan Krueger, former chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, draws a parallel with the emergence of the workers’ compensation system a century ago. Sensible rules were agreed, he says, once lawsuits over industrial accidents became expensive and unpredictable.
Americans misunderstand December 25 even as they celebrate it. One example is the song “I’ll Be Home For Christmas,” which is commonly perceived as a nostalgic and heartwarming ode when it’s one of the saddest pieces of music imaginable, a tearful tune about someone not being able to make it back to their loved ones. The crushing line (“If only in my dreams”) seems to have been psychologically elided the way the suicide threat tucked in neatly at the end of Sinatra’s plucky Horatio Alger classic “That’s Life” was. It’s not so much about embracing hope as willful ignorance.
Of course, the Fox News “War on Christmas” is a much larger philosophical disconnect, where non-Christians are somehow a threat to a Christian country. It’s just another scattershot reaction to the crumbling of the American middle class stoked by Roger Ailes’ hot-air machine. The formerly privileged know something they used to have has been stolen from them and assume, for some reason, that it involves Christ-ified consumerism.
As the tug of tinsel goes, so does U.S. politics, an unholy rabble bent on crucifying the truth. Objective information is beside the point. It all depends on what you wish for.
Once upon a time, Americans settled around the television to enjoy a white Christmas together. Nowadays, it seems, they are too entrenched on opposite sides of the “war on Christmas”, or commoditising it to oblivion, to remember Bing Crosby’s crooning. To say the US is a civilisation divided may strike some as an overstatement
For the most part, the country still speaks one language. Black and white, straight and gay, Jewish and Muslim all flock to the latest Star Wars movie. Interest in the Oscars and the Super Bowl obliterates sociological distinction. So too does fear of economic insecurity. These things unite most Americans.
Yet the things that divide the country are growing. If you listen to the Republican presidential debate, one message overrides all. Conservatives do not just disagree with President Barack Obama — they hate him profoundly. When asked if they would back a Donald Trump nomination, even the most moderate Republican says anyone would be better than this “feckless, weakling” president, to quote Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor.
Likewise, if you ask a liberal about today’s Republicans, it does not take long before the word “stupid” is used. People who support Mr Trump are idiots. People who oppose him must be snobs. The two sides neither speak to each other, nor obtain their “information” from the same outlets. Facts are what you feel comfortable believing. No one in your social group is likely to challenge you.
Is the idea of America as a republic of shared values under threat?•
If the recent Anne Case-Angus Deaton research is correct, America’s former middle class is dying, and not just metaphorically.
While other ethnic and racial groups are holding steady or making gains, caucasians in the U.S. are perishing in middle age at an increasingly alarming rate. Suicides have spiked as have overdoses. Why this ugly turn? Perhaps something to do with the financial collapse of 2008 and the very lopsided recovery? Maybe the decline of the white working class in a globalized, technologized world minus the safety net of unions and progressive taxes? Could it just be the cheaper “weapons” (e.g., opioids) at hand?
The findings show that two distinct but intertwined trends are driving America’s overdose epidemic: a 15-year increase in deaths from prescription opioid pain reliever overdoses as a result of misuse and abuse, and a recent surge in illicit drug overdoses driven mainly by heroin. Both of these trends worsened in 2014.
More than six out of 10 drug overdose deaths in 2014 involved opioids, including opioid pain relievers and heroin. The largest increase in opioid overdose deaths involved synthetic opioids (not including methadone), which were involved in 5,500 deaths in 2014, nearly twice as many as the year before. Many of these overdoses are believed to involve illicitly-made fentanyl, a short-acting opioid.
In addition, heroin-related death rates increased 26 percent from 2013–2014, totaling 10,574 deaths in 2014. Past misuse of prescription opioids is the strongest risk factor for heroin initiation and use—especially among people who became dependent upon or abused prescription opioids in the past year. The increased availability of heroin, its relatively low price (compared to prescription opioids), and high purity appear to be major drivers of the upward trend in heroin use, overdoses, and deaths.•
Donald Trump, the pre-diabetic potentate of Apartheid America, is impressed with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who’s rule has made his country stink worse than Lenin’s corpse. “At least he’s a leader,” says America’s aspiring flabby strongman, which is like saying that at least the captain of the Titanic was a “steerer.”
Scarborough pointed to Putin’s status as a notorious strongman.
“Well, I mean, it’s also a person who kills journalists, political opponents, and invades countries. Obviously that would be a concern, would it not?” Scarborough asked.
“He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader,” Trump replied. “Unlike what we have in this country.”
“But again: He kills journalists that don’t agree with him,” Scarborough said.
The Republican presidential front-runner said there was “a lot of killing going on” around the world and then suggested that Scarborough had asked him a different question.
“I think our country does plenty of killing, also, Joe, so, you know,” Trump replied. “There’s a lot of stupidity going on in the world right now, Joe. A lot of killing going on. A lot of stupidity. And that’s the way it is. But you didn’t ask me [that] question, you asked me a different question. So that’s fine.”
Genetic tests to screen individuals for a predisposition to obesity or cancer or some other health-threatening condition are a great thing, but they need to be uncoupled from workplaces. Companies can claim to remain unbiased toward workers who shows tendencies of poor future health, but insurance costs incentivize misuse of such information. Right now the costs of the tests make them a prime perk for employers to offer to those who voluntarily want subsidized lab work, but those prices shouldn’t remain prohibitive in the long run. Going forward, it’s more a question of what corporations will be legally allowed to require. I have a feeling, though, they’ll find out regardless.
The opening of Rachel Emma Silverman’s WSJ report:
Employers want workers to know what’s in their genes.
A handful of firms are offering employees free or subsidized tests for genetic markers associated with metabolism, weight gain and overeating, while companies such as Visa Inc., Slack Technologies Inc., Instacart Inc. recently began offering workers subsidized tests for genetic mutations linked to breast and ovarian cancer.
The programs provide employees with potentially life-saving information and offer counseling and coaching to prevent health problems down the road, benefits managers say.
Screening for genetic markers linked to obesity is the latest front in companies’ war on workers’ weight woes.
Obesity-related conditions such as Type 2 diabetes comprise a large share of overall health-care costs, estimated to run more than $12,000 a worker this year, according to a recent survey from Towers Watsonand the National Business Group on Health.
Haven’t yet read Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, which I blogged about last month, though it’s on my list, my fucking list. Bookforum has published an excerpt. The authors are hopeful that a technological future–“Marxism basically dressed up with robotics,” as they’ve termed it–will free us from drudgery if we can ever unloose ourselves from the Puritan work ethic. I think regardless of work hours or mindset, the menial, physical or otherwise, will always be part of the human experience. There’s just something small about us.
A passage:
THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY
One of the most difficult problems in implementing a universal basic income (UBI) and building a post-work society will be overcoming the pervasive pressure to submit to the work ethic. Indeed, the failure of the United States’ earlier attempt to implement a basic income was primarily because it challenged accepted notions about the work ethic of the poor and unemployed. Rather than seeing unemployment as the result of a deficient individual work ethic, the UBI proposal recognized it as a structural problem. Yet the language that framed the proposal maintained strict divisions between those who were working and those who were on welfare, despite the plan effacing such a distinction. The working poor ended up rejecting the plan out of a fear of being stigmatized as a welfare recipient. Racial biases reinforced this resistance, since welfare was seen as a black issue, and whites were loath to be associated with it. And the lack of a class identification between the working poor and unemployed—the surplus population—meant there was no social basis for a meaningful movement in favor of a basic income. Overcoming the work ethic will be equally central to any future attempts at building a post-work world. Neoliberalism has established a set of incentives that compel us to act and identify ourselves as competitive subjects. Orbiting around this subject is a constellation of images related to self-reliance and independence that necessarily conflict with the program of a post-work society. Our lives have become increasingly structured around competitive self-realization, and work has become the primary avenue for achieving this. Work, no matter how degrading or low-paid or inconvenient, is deemed an ultimate good. This is the mantra of both mainstream political parties and most trade unions, associated with rhetoric about getting people back into work, the importance of working families, and cutting welfare so that “it always pays to work.” This is matched by a parallel cultural effort demonizing those without jobs. Newspapers blare headlines about the worthlessness of welfare recipients, TV shows sensationalize and mock the poor, and the ever looming figure of the welfare cheat is continually evoked. Work has become central to our very self-conception—so much so that when presented with the idea of doing less work, many people ask, “But what would I do?” The fact that so many people find it impossible to imagine a meaningful life outside of work demonstrates the extent to which the work ethic has infected our minds.
While typically associated with the protestant work ethic, the submission to work is in fact implicit in many religions. These ethics demand dedication to one’s work regardless of the nature of the job, instilling a moral imperative that drudgery should be valued. While originating in religious ideas about ensuring a better afterlife, the goal of the work ethic was eventually replaced with a secular devotion to improvement in this life. More contemporary forms of this imperative have taken on a liberal-humanist character, portraying work as the central means of self-expression. Work has come to be driven into our identity, portrayed as the only means for true self-fulfilment. In a job interview, for instance, everyone knows the worst answer to “Why do you want this job?” is to say “Money,” even as it remains the repressed truth. Contemporary service work heightens this phenomenon. In the absence of clear metrics for productivity, workers instead put on performances of productivity—pretending to enjoy their job or smiling while being yelled at by a customer. Working long hours has become a sign of devotion to the job, even as it perpetuates the gender pay gap. With work tied so tightly into our identities, overcoming the work ethic will require us overcoming ourselves.
The central ideological support for the work ethic is that remuneration be tied to suffering. Everywhere one looks, there is a drive to make people suffer before they can receive a reward.•
In a must-read FT Alphaville post, Mackenzie Weinger writes about the U.S. Department of Defense’s plans for warfare of the future, which puts a heavy accent on human-machine tandems. Perhaps such a focus will ease the minds of soldiers who fear they’re on the verge of being technologically unemployed. The U.S. military has long desired to robotize the military as much as possible, and the freestyle-chess approach to combat will only be employed as long as its the most effective (and cost-effective) means. I don’t think we’ll get to choose the future as much as it will be decided by the progress of AI. That, of course, is a troubling prospect.
An excerpt from Weinger:
So what’s the DoD looking at in terms of technology for the future of the US military? As one would expect, there’s a handy set of “five building blocks” they’ve identified regarding AI and autonomy, along with plenty of acronyms. Take a look at the US military’s take on AI and weapon tech, as laid out in Work’s speech (bolding, links and brackets our own):
The first are autonomous deep learning machines systems. Now deep learning systems are already changing the way we analyse data in the financial community, in the intelligence community, but we are going to use them to improve indications in warning. The AI guys say that what is happening in the grey zone with ‘little green men’ is nothing more than a big data analytics problem. And they are absolutely convinced that we can create learning machines that will give us indication and warning that something is happening in the gray zone [conflicts that aren’t formal wars and don’t resemble conventional warfare. Think Russia and Crimea/Ukraine] … we believe strongly that humans should be the only ones to decide when to use lethal force, but when you’re under attack, especially at machine speeds, we want to have a machine that can protect us. So an example is air defense systems, where the engagement windows are steadily shrinking… and on cyberdefense, you cannot have a human operator operating on human speed fighting back a determined attack. You’re going to have to have a learning machine that does that.
The second component is what we call human machine collaboration. Decision making. 1997, computer beats Kasparov, world champion in chess. Everyone goes ‘wow’. But in 2005, two amateurs working with three PCs defeated a field of chess champions and machines themselves. … [it’s about] the strategic analysis of a human combined with the tactical acuity of a computer.•
“Average is over,” Tyler Cowen told us, and in his new Foreign Affairs piece, Klaus Schwab argues that this will be increasingly true in what he terms the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” a time when the fabric of society may be especially prone to tearing. We have already witnessed the ugly rise of nativist politics in developed nations that are growing in the aggregate but leaving behind what used to be the middle class. We’re richer, yet poorer. “A winner-takes-all economy that offers only limited access to the middle class is a recipe for democratic malaise and dereliction,” writes Schwab, asserting that only the highly skilled will thrive in this new arrangement. But I bet a lot of them will also struggle as the talents that are valued will shift frequently and violently.
An excerpt:
Like the revolutions that preceded it, the Fourth Industrial Revolution has the potential to raise global income levels and improve the quality of life for populations around the world. To date, those who have gained the most from it have been consumers able to afford and access the digital world; technology has made possible new products and services that increase the efficiency and pleasure of our personal lives. Ordering a cab, booking a flight, buying a product, making a payment, listening to music, watching a film, or playing a game—any of these can now be done remotely.
In the future, technological innovation will also lead to a supply-side miracle, with long-term gains in efficiency and productivity. Transportation and communication costs will drop, logistics and global supply chains will become more effective, and the cost of trade will diminish, all of which will open new markets and drive economic growth.
At the same time, as the economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have pointed out, the revolution could yield greater inequality, particularly in its potential to disrupt labor markets. As automation substitutes for labor across the entire economy, the net displacement of workers by machines might exacerbate the gap between returns to capital and returns to labor. On the other hand, it is also possible that the displacement of workers by technology will, in aggregate, result in a net increase in safe and rewarding jobs.
We cannot foresee at this point which scenario is likely to emerge, and history suggests that the outcome is likely to be some combination of the two. However, I am convinced of one thing—that in the future, talent, more than capital, will represent the critical factor of production. This will give rise to a job market increasingly segregated into “low-skill/low-pay” and “high-skill/high-pay” segments, which in turn will lead to an increase in social tensions.
In addition to being a key economic concern, inequality represents the greatest societal concern associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution.•
Writer Lucian Truscott IV is one of the figures featured in the latest 3 Videos, and here’s a little more about him from a 1979 People piece penned by Cheryl McCall at the outset of his very abbreviated marriage to writer-photographer Carol Troy. In an age when people cared at least somewhat about print journalists, the couple was apparently, fleetingly, an F. Scott and Zelda, which is a mixed blessing, of course. An excerpt:
Lucian Truscott IV and Carol Troy both write. His current book is the best-selling novel Dress Gray; hers is Cheap Chic Update. But literary achievement isn’t the only reason the New York Times compared them, a little waspishly, to Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Take Truscott and Troy’s enthusiasm for disagreement.
When they met in 1975 at a party in his New York loft, she found him “awfully gruff.” The following year they were fixed up by a mutual friend. It started off disastrously. “Vassar girls and West Point guys hated each other,” ex-cadet Truscott recalls. “We wouldn’t dance with them at mixers,” Troy (Vassar ’66) explains. They went to dinner at a Japanese restaurant—”Dutch,” Troy says dryly, “and got into a huge fight.” Truscott agrees: “Sparks were flying,” and then adds, “We didn’t know they were sparks of love.”
As befits New York’s literary darlings, they were married in a Roman Catholic church in the artsy SoHo district this past St. Patrick’s Day. Then 250 guests, including Norman Mailer, were bused uptown with champagne aboard to the swank Lotos Club for the reception. (“Our only salvation is in extravagance,” Fitzgerald once wrote.)
Bride and bridegroom are not only handsome and well-thought-of; they’re rich. Dress Gray, a thriller about homosexuality and murder at the military academy, earned $1.4 million before a copy was sold—thanks to subsidiary rights negotiated by the author without an agent. Paramount bought the movie option and Gore Vidal is writing the screenplay.
…
“I wanted to go to West Point my whole life,” says Truscott, 32. His grandfather, Gen. Lucian K. Truscott Jr., was a World War II hero who commanded the Allied landing at Anzio Beach in Italy. Lucian III was West Point ’45, retiring as a colonel to become a watchmaker in 1971. Lucian’s mother, Anne, is a medical secretary; he’s the eldest of five children. The family lived in eight states, Germany and Japan, and Lucian recalls: “I grew up liking Army officers. I bagged their groceries, I washed their cars, I mowed their lawns.”
At West Point he was, however, less than a model cadet. In his sophomore year he began a letter-writing campaign to New York’s Village Voice. One epistle, he remembers, contained the line: “Jerry Rubin is palpably full of sh**.” On campus he challenged compulsory chapel attendance (it was found unconstitutional three years after he graduated).
But Truscott’s most serious transgression was getting caught—with three other cadets—using a telephone credit card number that reportedly belonged to the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society. “Hell, I wasn’t calling a subversive,” Truscott claims. “I was calling my grandmother.” Nevertheless, West Point slapped him with 30 demerits for “gross lack of judgment.” Truscott barely graduated—658th in a class of 800.
He began serving his five-year Army commitment in 1969 as an infantry lieutenant at Fort Carson, Colo. There he wrote an article on heroin addiction among enlisted men for the Voice, in which he admitted he had smoked marijuana. That, plus a refusal to serve on courts-martial because “they were patently unfair and ridiculous,” led to his resignation and a general discharge under “other than honorable conditions” in 1970. Conservative military columnist Col. Robert Heinl wrote that Truscott had “disparaged and derogated” West Point’s creed: “Duty, honor, country.”
Truscott settled on a barge in New Jersey and joined the Voice staff, freelancing on the side. Five years later he met Troy. The daughter of Francis Troy, a Borden executive, and his wife, Bernice, she grew up living American Graffiti in the suburbs of San Francisco. Dolled up in tight skirts, sweater sets and Weejuns, she liked to cruise in her parents’ hot-pink Mercury with black interior (she still owns it). After Vassar and studying film at Stanford, she turned journalist, working for Newsday, Oui and a pre-publication issue of People, among others.
During this time she made a virtue of scrimping, developing the skills she later wrote about in Cheap Chic. (It was a hit even though Troy recalls Barbara Walters describing the book on the Today show as “written only for skinny young girls who didn’t have jobs.”) Now she and Truscott visit flea markets and garage sales to furnish their New York loft and a $100,000 Victorian carriage house in Sag Harbor.
Lucian, purposely avoiding military subjects, has begun a novel about a businesswoman. “Writing doesn’t have to be a painful, gut-wrenching experience, the 3 a.m. of the soul that Fitzgerald talked about,” he says cheerfully. “I like the experience of writing.” Troy, 34, is doing a screenplay about the fashion industry and pondering a magazine editing job.
Though Fiat heiress Delfina Rattazzi has thrown a party for them and they rate a table at Manhattan’s celebrity feeding trough, Elaine’s, Truscott and Troy have an unpretentious side. Evenings they may show slides or reminisce about souvenir matchbooks and place mats. They hang out in unsung places like the Spring Street Bar in SoHo. Carol takes modern dance classes and when in Sag Harbor Lucian body-surfs. He gave up tennis, which he learned at West Point from Lt. Arthur Ashe, and skiing because “that stuff has become so chichi.”
They expect to have children within the decade, though Troy isn’t quivering with anticipation. “I don’t know anything about kids,” she says, “because I was an only child. But I’m sure Lucian will be a good father. I don’t know how many we’ll have. They make so much noise. One sounds like a lot.”•
As far as I can tell, Edward Luce of the Financial Times was the first to argue that even should Donald Trump’s candidacy dissolve, the hatred he unloosed would remain. It was waiting for agency, and the GOP opportunist–or worse yet, hatemonger–supplied it. Now it’s here for the long haul, regardless of who’s the eventual nominee.
In Luce’s latest column, he pens a letter to America in the guise of Joe Biden, appealing to the fading American middle class to say no to their worst impulses. He wonders if U.S. politics is merely a reality show now, accepting of a bachelor who hands out only thorns. An excerpt:
Fellow Americans, we are in danger of electing someone who could do great damage to our country. When fear takes over, humans forget reason. Since 9/11 almost a quarter of a million Americans have died ingun violence. Thousands were children. Some of them were gunned down in their classrooms. We did not call these acts of terrorism. Don’t misunderstand me. I am not suggesting we take away everyone’s guns. I am realistic. But you should know that your chances of being killed in everyday gun violence are several thousand times greater than dying from terrorism on US soil. Forty Americans have been killed by terrorists since 9/11. We need to keep our sense of perspective.
Who are we? Is America turning into a game-show democracy that can be manipulated to laugh and cry and boo on a whim by the host with trophy wives? Are we the kind of people who would close our shutters to a fifth of the world and two per cent of our law-abiding citizens? Would we set up a police state so that we could round up 11m Mexicans? Is that who we are?•
Donald Trump, who’s cheating on his third wife with a veal parm, doesn’t really want to win the Republican nomination, but he also doesn’t want to not win it. That would be a loss.
The most important matter at hand isn’t whether Beefsteak Charlie is really in it for good, but rather that he’s appealed to the worst of us, stoked vile hatred that will survive him. When Trump supporters tell you that they’re tired of being forced to be politically correct, what they really mean is they feel like they can’t say racist things without retribution anymore, something that once was possible.
Adding to the fury is the seismic financial and demographic shifts that the former white working class is enduring. That economic decline is the result of many factors, among them the tax codes instituted by those GOP pols who claimed to champion them. They’ve been let down, and now with Trump’s assistance they’ll let loose, and many who are not to blame will be blamed.
About half of Trump supporters in North Carolina and in New Hampshire want to “see the mosques in the country shut down.” In the North Carolina poll, only one-quarter of Trump supporters said they thought Islam should even be legal in the United States; 44 percent thought not.
This suggests that there is an enormous constituency favoring this set of (probably unconstitutional) ideas, despite the fact that they have been rejected by most of the American political class. Trump didn’t generate this constituency with a few brash statements. He harnessed feelings that long predated his candidacy — feelings of besiegement and alienation, of being silenced — and gave them an unprecedented respectability. Even if Trump leaves the stage by springtime, he has galvanized, gathered and given voice to all these Americans.
America is living through an era of dramatic changes: its demographics shifting, its middle class contracting, its institutions grappling with the pressures of the networked age. Trump isn’t winning those Americans who tend to experience this change as a tailwind. But he has enthralled millions who experience it as a headwind, and his relentless campaign against “political correctness” has given voice to their fears: about terrorism; about a country passing into new hands, with the attendant loss of privileges and certainties; about a democracy that will never solve problems if we cannot call radical Islam radical Islam. This anti-P.C. sentiment, so vital to Trump’s brand, is often minimized on the left as simple intolerance. But the longing for less-muzzled debates is to many on the right what campaign finance is to many on the left: the issue we must solve to be able to solve any other issue.
This is how Trumpism might outlast Trump — by gelling this anxiety and longing into a movement, by giving a new permission to question who is American, by redrawing the borders of respectable debate.•
It was supposed to be the Year of Rand, the day when Libertarianism was to have its moment, or that was the story the media was selling last year. But the GOP had plenty of other none-of-the-above candidates, and Rand Paul couldn’t out-wack the Trumps and Carsons and Cruzs.
Just as unlikely to come to fruition was Paul’s brand of socially conservative, anti-immigrant Libertarianism being a hit in Silicon Valley. The opening of Tony Romm’s well-written Politico piece:
SAN FRANCISCO — When Rand Paul announced plans to set up shop in Silicon Valley, he portrayed it as a bid to reverse Republicans’ fortunes in deep Democratic territory: “If we want to win the presidency,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in September 2014, “we have to figure out how to compete in California.”
Other Republicans had similarly high hopes that Paul’s message against big government — and Big Brother — might strike a chord among this city’s tech elite and engineers alike. “He’s hopeful it’s a libertarian incubator of future Ayn Rands,” Shawn Steel, a past chairman of the California Republican Party, told POLITICO last year.
But seven months after the Kentucky senator’s team finally found an outpost here, not even a campaign sign hangs above the gated door outside StartupHouse, the shared, rented work space where his aides toil alongside app makers and Web designers. At times, nobody from Paul’s presidential campaign can be found among the doodle-covered walls, concrete floors and rows of computer-lined tables.
“They come in every now and then,” said StartupHouse founder Elias Bizannes, whose work space boasts about being blocks away from tech companies like Slack and Yahoo, during an interview. The Paul campaign hasn’t held a public event here since it hosted a “hackathon” in June, a quiet streak matched these days by the senator’s lackluster fundraising in the Bay Area.
This isn’t the way it was supposed to be for Paul.•
The anarchy of the Internet will be unloosed into the physical world more and more as we move forward, with 3D printers and gene-editing kits and the like. That will be mostly good, but what if just a little bit of it is catastrophically bad? Assault rifles won’t be the only untraceable weapons to fall into the wrong hands.
In a thought-provoking IEEE Spectrum essay, Phil Torres wonders if positivists like Steven Pinker aren’t missing a small explosive truth while admiring the hopeful big-picture data. An excerpt:
If one actually looks at the statistics, the world is steadily becoming more peaceful. This is the conclusion of Steven Pinker’s monumental 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, as well as Michael Shermer’s excellent 2015 follow-up The Moral Arc (essentially a “sequel” of Pinker’s tome). The surprising, counterintuitive fact is that the global prevalence of genocides, homicides, infanticide, domestic violence, and violence against children is declining, while democratization, women’s rights, gay rights, and even animals rights are on the rise. The probability that any one of us dies at the hands of another human being rather than from natural causes is perhaps the lowest it’s ever been in human history, even before the Neolithic Revolution. If that’s not Progress with a capital ‘p’, then I don’t know what is.
The oceanic evidence that Pinker and Shermer present is robust and cogent. Yet I think there’s another story to tell — one that hints at a possible future marked by unprecedented human suffering, global catastrophes, and even our extinction. The fact is that while the enterprise of human civilization has been making significant ethical strides forward in multiple domains, a range of emerging technologies are, by nearly all accounts, poised to introduce brand new existential risks never before encountered by our species
…
the most worrisome threats are not merely anthropogenic, they’re technogenic. They arise from the fact that advanced technologies are (a) dual-use in nature, meaning that they can be employed for both benevolent and nefarious purposes; (b) becoming more powerful, thereby enabling humans to manipulate and rearrange the physical world in new ways; and (c) in some cases, becoming more accessible to small groups, including, at the limit, single individuals. This is notable because just as there are many more terrorist groups than rogue nations in the world, there are far more deranged psychopaths than terrorist groups. Thus, the number of possible offenders armed with catastrophic weaponry is likely to increase significantly in the future.
It’s not clear how the trends that Pinker and Shermer identify could save us from this situation. Even if 99% of human beings in the year 02100 were peaceable, the remaining 1% could find themselves with enough technological power at their fingertips to initiate a disaster of global proportions. Or, forget 1% — what about a single individual with a death wish for humanity, or a single apocalyptic group hoping to engage in the ultimate mass suicide event? In a world cluttered with doomsday machines, exactly how long could we expect to survive?•
DARPA is on one hand a sort of moonshot laboratory, but it doesn’t engage in the frivolous end of futurism. Like Bell Labs, it chooses outlandish visions it believes can be realized (the Internet, driverless cars, humanoid robots). A Tech Insider report by Paul Szoldra surveys the defense wing’s thoughts about life three decades on. An excerpt:
So what’s going to happen in 2045?
It’s pretty likely that robots and artificial technology are going to transform a bunch of industries, drone aircraft will continue their leapfrom the military to the civilian market, and self-driving cars will make your commute a lot more bearable.
But DARPA scientists have even bigger ideas. In a video series from October called “Forward to the Future,” three researchers predict what they imagine will be a reality 30 years from now.
Dr. Justin Sanchez, a neuroscientist and program manager in DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, believes we’ll be at a point where we can control things simply by using our mind.
“Imagine a world where you could just use your thoughts to control your environment,” Sanchez said. “Think about controlling different aspects of your home just using your brain signals, or maybe communicating with your friends and your family just using neural activity from your brain.”
According to Sanchez, DARPA is currently working on neurotechnologies that can enable this to happen. There are already some examples of these kinds of futuristic breakthroughs in action, like brain implants controlling prosthetic arms.•
MIT’s David Autor has bet the under on the Second Digital Age destroying jobs, though you might not agree these days if you invested your life savings in the value of a taxi medallion. He believes the short- and mid-term fears of the rise of the machines are unfounded and have crossed into hysteria. Time will tell, but he does acknowledge that the shifting of McJobs from high school juniors to those approaching senior citizen age is a downward spiral.
Inconversationwith Social Europe Editor-in-Chief Henning Meyer, Autor explains how two very different nations, Norway and Saudi Arabia, have taken vastly different approaches to abundance, a wonderful thing not always evenly distributed. What’s left unspoken is that the latter state has hidden beneath its vast wealth aquiet epidemic of poverty.
An excerpt:
Take, for example, two countries: Norway and Saudi Arabia. Both of them have huge amounts of sovereign wealth. You could say it’s like they have a machine that creates wealth for them. It’s not a computer, it’s just oil, but that’s okay; it creates surplus. You could say, “In those countries, maybe no-one needs to do anything, because they just have so much money,” but Norway and Saudi Arabia have handled this completely differently.
In Saudi Arabia only a little bit more than 10% of the private-sector workforce is Saudi, and the rest is guest workers. That is a recipe for long-term economic and social problems. In Norway just about everybody works, men and women, much more than most other European countries, but they don’t work that many hours. They have kept themselves relevant, and engaged, and prosperous, and actually pretty happy if you believe the data.
So, there are ways to deal with the challenge of abundance, but it’s not a bad problem to have on the scale of social problems that one could face. That’s what we’re talking about here, it’s the problem of abundance – in other words, abundant productivity, abundance of capability to do things with machines that we used to require human labour and toil for.
There are challenges that come with that. One is the leisure challenge; the other is, of course, some skills become less relevant faster than others. The people who have clearly been affected by the thrust of technological change, over the last 30 years especially, have been low-educated adults whose skills are more closely replaceable by automation, not actually necessary in the lowest-skilled jobs, but many have been displaced from middle-skilled jobs.
If I’m a clerical worker or a production worker and that type of work no longer exists, I can still do table waiting, I can still do security, I can still do cleaning, and actually I’ll probably displace an even less-educated worker who wanted that job. For example, in the US we see very few teenagers anymore working at so-called ‘teen’ jobs; they’re held by adults.
It does create challenges and they are distributional challenges.•
Donald Trump, a gout-ish dummkopf who makes Juggalos wince, has no interest in being President, a position that requires commitment, foresight and maturity, qualities he sorely lacks. He jumped into the race impetuously during one of his many glucose spikes, demanding attention for his man-baby ego, and has been unable to disqualify himself from the odious GOP race no matter how disgraceful his behavior. The fledgling fascist will just have to keep upping the ante as he tries to dream up some exit from the trail.
Early in the campaign, Edward Luce of the Financial Timesmade a prediction already realized: The miserable mogul may accomplish an egress after sullying the season, but the hatred he stirs up isn’t going anywhere.
The Ku Klux Klan is using Donald Trump as a talking point in its outreach efforts. Stormfront, the most prominent American white supremacist website, is upgrading its servers in part to cope with a Trump traffic spike. And former Louisiana Rep. David Duke reports that the businessman has given more Americans cover to speak out loud about white nationalism than at any time since his own political campaigns in the 1990s.
As hate group monitors at the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League warn that Trump’s rhetoric is conducive to anti-Muslim violence, white nationalist leaders are capitalizing on his candidacy to invigorate and expand their movement.
“Demoralization has been the biggest enemy and Trump is changing all that,” said Stormfront founder Don Black, who reports additional listeners and call volume to his phone-in radio show, in addition to the site’s traffic bump. Black predicts that the white nationalist forces set in motion by Trump will be a legacy that outlives the businessman’s political career.•
In a New York Times editorial, neurobiologist Ji Xiaohua (who writes under the pen name Ji Shisan) sees the Google Glass as half full, believing jobs disappeared by new technologies and systems will be replaced by heretofore unimagined ones. Well, it’s always worked that way in the past.
The pivotal element is the timeframe of such advances. If we ease into a new normal over the rest of the century, we probably would be able to adjust, if in an often lurching manner. But what if, for example, driverless is perfected and widely implemented in the next two decades? That would mean an abrupt end of tens of millions of jobs in the U.S. alone. Degree of difficulty and mountains of bureaucracy may prevent us from finding out how we’d cope, but the scenario is possible.
An excerpt:
It seems likely that developed countries will undergo the most disruptive changes — in some economies, the service sector accounts for over 70% of gross domestic product. In developing countries, the impact on white-collar workers is unlikely to be immediate, due to slower adoption of AI technology, though such regions may experience a decline in outsourced manufacturing jobs with further advances in robotics. This sounds worrisome only because we can’t anticipate the new jobs that these technologies will bring and the new businesses that people will devise, as they always have. The future’s still bright, thanks to our creativity — our unique trait.
In July, an open letter from more than 1,000 AI and robotics researchers and other prominent figures — Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Steve Wozniak among them — warned against using AI in warfare and called for a ban on autonomous weapons. Even that technology is not as advanced as the sentient robots envisioned in the 2015 movies Ex Machina or Chappie. These movies imagine “strong” AI, or AI that is generalized, and able to carry out most human activities, as opposed to “weak” or narrow AI, which is task-specific. No one can say whether strong AI will be created, and if so, when. I asked some Chinese AI scientists about it, and given their responses, I may as well have been asking about the possibility of alien life.
That would be a world in which perhaps even child care jobs are threatened, but thank goodness we have many years before the dawn of strong AI-directed robots. In that future, we may not need to work very hard to support ourselves. The robots will be doing most of the labor, while we will have the time and leisure to explore what it is to be human.•
Clamor for Stan Smiths is such that Adidas is building a new automated factory to meet demand. The company hopes robots will help it respond more nimbly to rapidly changing tastes, but promises this people-less plant and others like it will merely complement existing suppliers. Of course, it’s really a harbinger of a worker-less direction. The jobs that would have been will never be, and then the ones that actually are will be gone. Why would it be any other way?
The new “Speedfactory” in the southern town of Ansbach near its Bavarian headquarters will start production in the first half of 2016 of a robot-made running shoe that combines a machine-knitted upper and springy “Boost” sole made from a bubble-filled polyurethane foam developed by BASF.
“An automated, decentralized and flexible manufacturing process… opens doors for us to be much closer to the market and to where our consumer is,” said Chief Executive Herbert Hainer.
Larger rival Nike is also investing heavily in new manufacturing methods. But it has not yet put a date on when it expects that to result in more U.S.-based production.
Adidas plans high volume production in the near future and will establish a global network of similar factories, although it expects them to complement existing suppliers rather than replace them as it seeks to keep growing fast.
“This is on top. It is a separate business model,” Gerd Manz, head of technology innovation at Adidas, told journalists.
Adidas currently makes about 600 million pairs of shoes and items of clothing and accessories a year. It plans to grow sales by almost half again by 2020.
The new factory will still use humans for parts of the assembly process, around 10 people will be on the ground for testing purposes during the pilot phase, but Adidas is working towards full automation.•
In addressing the Bank of England, the institution’s Chief Economist Andrew G Haldane tries to answer if it’s different this time in regard to technological unemployment. Haldane argues that even successful long-term technological transitions have been visited by “hollowing out” effects which have exacerbated wage gaps. As for the Second Machine Age, a time when AI may become highly competent at cognitive processing, the economist sees job value shifting from IQ to EQ, with emotional intelligence becoming the supreme skill. He further thinks wealth distribution of some sort may become necessary.
An excerpt that provides a thumbnail account of the tech job threat through history:
Certainly, the Ancient Civilisations of Greece and Rome wrestled with the problem of how to deal with the consequences of workers displaced by technological advance. The responses then included large-scale public work programmes and income support policies for the needy. Indeed, they have an eerie echo in many of today’s public policy debates.
The debate about technological unemployment really picked up pace in the 19th century, with the blossoming of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Then, it spilt over into the streets with worker protests and machine breaking, most notably by the Luddite movement. These fears about technological displacement gathered intellectual support from no less a figure than the classical economist, David Ricardo (Ricardo (1821)).
Yet the intellectual tide was by no means in one direction. It was accepted that technological advance could damage some workers in the short run. But its benefits to most workers in the longer-run were felt likely to dominate. In the middle of the 19th century, that view came to prominence through such figures as John Stuart Mill (Mill (1848)) and Karl Marx (Marx (1867)), two unlikely intellectual bedfellows.
The technology debate was re-stirred in the 1930s, at the time of mass unemployment during the Great Depression. In his essay, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”, Keynes predicted on-going technological advance and workers being replaced by machines (Keynes (1930)). Yet far from being a threat, Keynes viewed this as a huge opportunity. He predicted that, by 2030, the average working week would have shrunk to 15 hours. Technology would give birth to a new “leisure class”.
Debates on the relationship between jobs and technology stirred again during the 1960s in the US, during the 1970s in advanced economies, and again in the 1980s and 1990s in the UK and parts of Europe. In each case, the prompt was rising rates of unemployment. And in each case, this debate subsided as unemployment rates fell.
Moving into the 21st century, this debate has once again been re-kindled.•
Ted Koppel hasn’t morphed into late-life Jim Bakker, hasn’t exactly become a preacher for preppers, but he does suggest those who can afford it should build a supply of freeze-dried food and water in case of a cyberattack on our power grid. The former Nightline anchor thinks such a potentially devastating event has a good chance to occur. In addition to penning a book on the topic, Lights Out, which seems to be The Day After for the Digital Age,Koppel conducted a Reddit AMA to raise consciousness. A few exchanges follow.
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Question:
What are the likely odds of such an attack happening and in which grid do you foresee the most damage occurring? It seems almost unfathomable that such an event could occur but you must know some things that we don’t, considering you wrote a book about the subject.
Ted Koppel:
I’ll give you the answer that former Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, gave me when I asked. “Very, very likely. 80-90%.” The most damage would undoubtedly be caused by a cyber attack on the Eastern Interconnect. There are three grids in the country and the Eastern Interconnect is by far the largest covering the entire east coast westward past Chicago. Essentially everything I know about the subject I put into my book, Lights Out. You’re right, it does seem unfathomable that such an event could occur, but when you consider just how many companies have already been hacked over the last few years, it would be foolish to assume that only the electric power industry is immune. Former NSA director, Keith Alexander, likes to say there are only two kinds of companies out there: Those that have been hacked and those that don’t yet know it.
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Question:
What can I do right now as a U.S. citizen, to prepare my home for such an attack?
Ted Koppel:
If you can afford it (and I recognize that many people cannot) start building up a backup supply of storable food. This, ideally, would be something like freeze-dried products which have an incredibly long shelf life (about 25 year) or items as simple as sacks of dried beans and rice. Also, water is critical. Again, this is much easier for people who live in houses and in rural areas; not so easy for apartment dwellers in our cities.
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Question:
Do you think the presidential candidates should be addressing the threat of a cyberattack? This seems to be a topic that is under represented even when terrorism and national security are a huge concern.
Ted Koppel:
Absolutely! I think there are a couple of factors that inhibit our candidates from talking about cyberattacks: One, they know very little about the subject themselves, and two – when you raise an issue/problem, there’s an expectation that a candidate will offer solutions. That’s a high bar in a campaign atmosphere that focuses more of Trump’s railing than substantive issues.•
Donald Trump, a colostomy bag dipped in bronzer, is a bully with scant self-awareness who needs to be reminded who he is in the most frank terms. It didn’t stun me that the favored son of a privileged family (Hi, Jeb!) didn’t know how to disarm a bully. He hasn’t had the practice. It did shock me, though, when in the wake of disgraceful comments about Mexicans at the outset of his campaign that he was treated by the media as merely a harmless joke. A joke, okay, but someone making fascistic comments isn’t funny. Aspiring despots often initially come across as vulgar clowns. You deal with them early and often.
The interview that peeved me most early on was conducted by Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, who matched the hideous hotelier in buffoonery when she portrayed him as a somewhat naughty great-uncle instead of a deeply bigoted demagogue. The Economist Q&A that followed in its wake was likewise far too friendly, if not as clueless. Not even Trump mocking POWs and the disabled was enough to fully stifle the press guffaws. It’s taken talk of a Muslim ban and internment camps to finally awaken some commentators. This poor journalistic performance isn’t necessarily responsible for Trump’s ascension in the polls, but it’s poor, nonetheless.
Trump on Tuesday abruptlycanceleda pre-planned interview with Yahoo’s Katie Couric. The interview was previously scheduled for Wednesday. He has also generally increased his rhetoric on the media, which he regularly describes as mostly made up of “scum.” At Monday’s rally, he described an NBC reporter in the crowd as “third-rate,” and encouraged the audience to boo her.
These changes come amidmuch hand-wringingwithin the media itself. Journalists have noted repeatedly in recent weeks that Trump appears to be completely resistant to fact-checking. He bandies about the false claim that he saw New Jersey Muslims celebrate the 9/11 attacks on TV, despite being rebuked by former officials and fact-checkers. Coverage of prior shocking incidents has generally corresponded with a bump in his poll numbers. Some wonder whether the media’s treatment of Trump as an entertaining curiosity allowed his haphazard campaign to coalesce into a viable candidacy, but that’s a hard claim to prove or disprove.
The Morning Joe snafu and [Arianna] Huffington’s change of heart might indicate a souring mood, but they’re hardly cutting the air off of Trump’s visibility. CNN carried Trump’s Monday night rally live. Fox News’s Greta van Susteren interviewed him shortly after his proposal was published. In addition to his nearly 30-minute Morning Joe appearance, Trump also called into Good Morning America on Tuesday.
The idea that Trump has suddenly crossed some decency line is also tenuous: the man built his campaign for the White House on half-truths and impossible-to-enact proposals.•
The “Fox” in Fox News, a 24-hour House Un-American Activities Committee sponsored by Bush’s Baked Beans, is taken from the surname of pioneering film producer William Fox, whether he would be happy with the contemporary association or not.
One of Fox’s great innovations was the launching, in 1929, of the Embassy Newsreel Theatre in Manhattan, as a showcase of continuous non-fiction fare, presaging around-the-clock cable by many decades. Newsreels–or “film newspapers“–had been popular since the beginning of cinema, but until Fox they were secondary to the main attraction in the United States. He redefined them as the attraction.
By 1930, the proprietor had lost control of his film company and theaters, having been knocked out by a near-fatal automobile crash and the stock-market collapse. This reversal was followed by legal problems, a commission of perjury and a prison stint. Fox died in 1952, largely forgotten by the media he helped define. Text follows of a brief, understated article from the November 4, 1929 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, unwittingly announcing the moment when news in America–or something resembling it–became an infinite loop.
There’s nothing quite like the IBT columns of antisocial antivirus expert John McAfee, pieces that read like PKD-esque fever dreams propelled by acute paranoia, actual knowledge and perhaps pharmaceuticals. In a recent article, he warned that Electromagnetic Pulse generators (or EMPs) could be used to destroy an American city at any moment. An excerpt:
EMPs can be generated in many ways. Much has been said about nuclear EMPs, but that threat concerns me far less than other, more specific means of generating EMPs. The US recently announced our ownEMP weapon, which can be carried aboard a missile. Using a technology based on hydraulically compressing and decompressing rods made of specific elements, the device is able to create multiple EMPs very quickly.
The weapon can be focused to take out individual buildings within a city and can take out dozens of individual buildings in a single pass of the missile. I will admit that such technology is beyond the reach of the average individual. But what if the individual is not concerned with precision strikes and merely wants to take out an entire city block or the entire city? Well, that technology is readily available, cheap, and simple to construct.
…
I am not going to give a course on constructing EMP weapons. I am only trying to raise the awareness of the world to a real and imminent threat.
I also received many questions about how an EMP could kill people. The answer is easy. A large-scale localized attack that involved all of our power stations would leave us all permanently without power. An attack that included our water processing plants would leave us without potable water, except that which we could purchase at the supermarket.
Localized attacks on food processing plants, attacks on mass transportation and attacks on centralized communication organizations would leave us without food and communications. Attacks on oil processing plants would ultimately leave us without individual transportation. What percentage of the population do you think would survive such a catastrophe? And all of this without a single nuclear explosion.•
In our facacta political season, McAfee is, of course, running for President, decrying the cyber illiteracy of the average Washington representative. Despite being an erstwhile murder suspect, he’s not even close to the most deplorable candidate. Here he is in September announcing his campaign to Greta Van Susteren, a Scientologist with an unsustainable face.
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Racing legend Jackie Stewart was king of a sport in which his competitors–his friends–kept dying, one after another on the dangerous-as-can be-courses of the ’60s and early ’70s. The opening of Robert F. Jones 1973 Sport Illustrated article “There Are Two Kinds of Death“:
Contrasted with the current woes of the real world—the new Arab-Israeli war, the old Watergate maunder-ings—it might have seemed a week of minor tragedy on the Grand Prix circuit. But for John Young Stewart, 34, the finest road racer in the game, it was perhaps the most agonizing week of his life. A month earlier, at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, Stewart had captured his third world driving championship in five years. During the course of this racing season he had become the most successful Formula I driver ever, with 27 Grand Prix victories to his credit (compared with 25 for his late Scottish countryman, Jim Clark, and 24 for his idol, Argentina’s Juan Manuel Fangio). And certainly Stewart had outdone both of them in the main chance of racing: money.
Jackie Stewart is the canniest man ever to don a fireproof balaclava—and certainly the gutsiest ever to con a sponsor. Earning close to $1 million a season in prize money and other emoluments, Stewart seemed to have turned motor racing into some kind of a private treasure trove—and survived to enjoy it. Then why not retire?
That was the first source of his agony last weekend. At Watkins Glen for the 15th running of the U.S. Grand Prix, Stewart played coy with the question. Indeed, even his business agent claimed that the wee Scot was hung on the horns of that old sportsman’s dilemma: quit on a peak of success, or press on to try for even greater rewards? The business agent also was well aware that the timing of a retirement statement by a figure so prominent as Stewart could bring in lots of bucks, and perhaps the coyness was merely a question of timing to suck up more cash. “If Jackie were single,” said his lovely wife Helen, “there would be no question. He would continue to race. I would like to see him retire, but I cannot press him. No, there is nothing that could fill the role of racing for him if he were to quit.”
Stewart himself was brusque on the question. He sidestepped it with every slick word at his command—and they are as many and as evasive as the black grouse of Scotland’s moors. But still it all seemed a game.
Then, on qualifying day before the race, Stewart’s good friend and teammate, Francois Cevert, was killed in a smashup during practice. Stewart had already lost three close friends to the sport: Clark in 1968, Piers Courage and.Jochen Rindt in 1970. In his poignant account of that last tragic season in his recent book, Faster! A Racer’s Diary, Stewart had likened Grand Prix racing to a disease and wondered in painful print if he himself were not a victim. With Cevert’s death last Saturday, it seemed to many that Stewart must at last accept the prognosis. He must—finally—retire and let sad enough alone.•
A 1973 documentary about Formula One racing, known at various times as One by One, Quick and the Dead, and Champions Forever, this interesting period piece with a funked-up score focuses on Stewart, Peter Revson and their peers. Stacy Keach is the cool-as-can-be narrator, but Cévert sums it up simply and best, admitting, “steering is hard.”
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My favorite book published in the U.S. in 2015 isSapiens, a brilliant work about our past (and future) by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. In a New Statesman essay, the author argues that if we’re on the precipice of a grand human revolution–in which we commandeer evolutionary forces and create a post-scarcity world–it’s being driven by private-sector technocracy, not politics, that attenuated, polarized thing. The next Lenins, the new visionaries focused on large-scale societal reorganization, Harari argues, live in Silicon Valley, and even if they don’t succeed, their efforts may significantly impact our lives. An excerpt:
Whatever their disagreements about long-term visions, communists, fascists and liberals all combined forces to create a new state-run leviathan. Within a surprisingly short time, they engineered all-encompassing systems of mass education, mass health and mass welfare, which were supposed to realise the utopian aspirations of the ruling party. These mass systems became the main employers in the job market and the main regulators of human life. In this sense, at least, the grand political visions of the past century have succeeded in creating an entirely new world. The society of 1800 was completely destroyed and we are living in a new reality altogether.
In 1900 or 1950 politicians of all hues thought big, talked big and acted even bigger. Today it seems that politicians have a chance to pursue even grander visions than those of Lenin, Hitler or Mao. While the latter tried to create a new society and a new human being with the help of steam engines and typewriters, today’s prophets could rely on biotechnology and supercomputers. In the coming decades, technological breakthroughs are likely to change human society, human bodies and human minds in far more drastic ways than ever before.
Whereas the Nazis sought to create superhumans through selective breeding, we now have an increasing arsenal of bioengineering tools at our disposal. These could be used to redesign the shapes, abilities and even desires of human beings, so as to fulfil this or that political ideal. Bioengineering starts with the understanding that we are far from realising the full potential of organic bodies. For four billion years natural selection has been tinkering and tweaking with these bodies, so that we have gone from amoebae to reptiles to mammals to Homo sapiens. Yet there is no reason to think that sapiens is the last station. Relatively small changes in the genome, the neural system and the skeleton were enough to upgrade Homo erectus – who could produce nothing more impressive than flint knives – to Homo sapiens, who produces spaceships and computers. Who knows what the outcome of a few more changes to our genome, neural system and skeleton might be? Bioengineering is not going to wait patiently for natural selection to work its magic. Instead, bioengineers will take the old sapiens body and intentionally rewrite its genetic code, rewire its brain circuits, alter its biochemical balance and grow entirely new body parts.
On top of that, we are also developing the ability to create cyborgs.•
In a London TED Talk from earlier this year, Harari details why Homo sapiens came to rule the world, and why that development wasn’t always such a sure bet.
Being great at one thing doesn’t necessarily mean you possess any general genius (e.g., Ben Carson, neurosurgeon). Michael Bloomberg believed the financial sector needed a certain type of information terminal and he created it with a ridiculous $10 million golden parachute he was handed after getting shitcanned by Salomon Brothers. About the terminals, he was right. It made him one of the richest people in the world, but his wealth should never have been taken as a sign of competence or rectitude.
As Mayor of New York, he did some great things and bungled major projects like Build It Back. He was tone deaf enough to want to proceed with the marathon in the wake of Hurricane Sandy turning New York City into a necropolis. Crime was kept low but policing got out of hand on his watch. The poorer people he claimed to champion often did worse. His paternalism knew no bounds, often seeming petty. He even scammed a third term, writing his own law in a back-office deal with another billionaire, voters be damned.
As a businessperson, Bloomberg is likewise a mixed bag. Unencumbered with the mayoralty, he’s returned to his namesake business, slicing and dicing his way through the journalistic side, an area for which he holds no great regard. All the while, those terminals keep updating, making general rightness or wrongness seem almost irrelevant on a large scale but often troubling on the micro one.
Visitors to the building could be forgiven for thinking that the heyday of journalism was still ongoing. Staff exit the elevator into a light-filled foyer that feels like the lobby of a designer hotel. The eye is drawn to orange sofas and white lacquered counters, upon which rest bowls stuffed with apples, oranges and diced melon. There are carrot sticks and broccoli, as well as fresh roasted coffees that would put any Starbucks to shame. The employees scurrying by can help themselves free of charge. Bloomberg wants his people to be comfortable.
But his paternalism can at times seem condescending. The potato chip bags are free, but they’re only available in the smallest size possible. Bloomberg would like his people to eat healthily. And the elevators don’t stop on each of the building’s 25 floors — only on those marked with a white circle — forcing employees to take the stairs.
In nearly every Bloomberg bureau around the world there is at least one saltwater aquarium with purple and yellow fish and corals — to foster relaxation, Bloomberg says. Those who work for him should be proud of their job. One of his favorite sentences is: “The best for us.”
‘Scientology on Speed’
Those who jump ship, though, get a taste of his colder side. Bloomberg once confessed that he doesn’t attend going-away parties out of principle, saying that he couldn’t wish departing employees all the best. “That just wouldn’t be honest of me,” he said. Whoever turns his or her back on the company is no longer one of us, but one of “them.” Bloomberg’s employees must enter a binding contractual agreement to not divulge company secrets, including a clause that permits the company to scan an employee’s e-mails even after that person has left. The microcosm of Mike Bloomberg is a whimsical world of good and evil, one with its own unique — some might say sect-like — view of things. An insider jokingly refers to it as “Scientology on speed.”•
