No one need blindly trust Monsanto, but not supporting the development of Genetically Modified Organisms is lunacy. The ability to create strains of food impervious to drought and disease is not just a matter of choice but one of national security–of species security, actually. There’s no reason for thinking natural good and GMOs bad, especially since plenty of poisons exist in nature.
Sadly, many European nations are making it difficult for scientists and private enterprise to pursue these needed safeguards on the global food supply, with their policies having ramifications in Africa.
CALL it the “Coalition of the Ignorant.” By the first week of October, 17 European countries — including Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland — had used new European Union rules to announce bans on the cultivation of genetically modified crops.
These prohibitions expose the worrying reality of how far Europe has gone in setting itself against modern science. True, the bans do not apply directly to scientific research, and a few countries — led by England — have declared themselves open to cultivation of genetically modified organisms, or G.M.O.s. But the chilling effect on biotech science in Europe will be dramatic: Why would anyone spend years developing genetically modified crops in the knowledge that they will most likely be outlawed by government fiat?
In effect, the Continent is shutting up shop for an entire field of human scientific and technological endeavor. This is analogous to America’s declaring an automobile boycott in 1910, or Europe’s prohibiting the printing press in the 15th century.
Beginning with Scotland’s prohibition on domestic genetically modified crop cultivation on Aug. 9, Europe’s scientists and farmers watched with mounting dismay as other countries followed suit. Following the Scottish decision, signatories from numerous scientific organizations and academic institutions wrote to the Scottish government to express grave concern “about the potential negative effect on science in Scotland.”
Like almost everyone currently running for the American Presidency, Transhumanist Party candidate Zoltan Istvan isn’t getting anywhere near the White House. The difference is, he knows it. The novice politician is campaigning to force cutting-edge biotech and such into the discussion.
A lot of the issues Istvan is discussing are really interesting to me, though the aggressiveness of Transhumanist predictions often give me pause, and the discourse on genetic engineering can be troubling. At Religion Dispatches, Andrew Aghapour conducted what is probably the best interview yet with Istvan. An excerpt about federal religious subsidies and global warming:
Question:
What do you think of religious subsidies—the approximately $80 billion a year that the American government spends on religious institutions through reduced income, property, and investment taxes?
Zoltan Istvan:
We would remove every single one of those deductions. Of course, I say that knowing that that would be an impossibility. But that would be the goal, to remove those types of incentives [and create] a much more fair playing field for the secular-minded folks out there who also have projects that may not be getting the same types of benefits. I actually don’t want to give benefits to anyone doing these projects. I just think it should be a fair playing field. So the idea is we would try to take away those subsidies and put it back into the system.
Personally, I would put it directly into education. One of our main policies at the Transhumanist Party is we want to provide totally free education. And I’m actually also for mandating that everyone in the country goes to college. In the age of much longer life spans, it’s very likely that anyone under twenty will live to one hundred and fifty years old. So, as a nation, if we’re going to be living longer, we should also probably have longer legal educational periods. So I’m also advocating for making college mandatory, just like high school is mandatory. That way, we have a society that’s much more educated and hopefully better to itself.
Question:
What is your position on global warming, and what solutions would you explore as president?
Zoltan Istvan:
Our party, one hundred percent, believes in global warming. There’s no question about it, that it’s happening, and it’s a sad thing. However, there’s also no way to stop global warming at this point. We lost that battle thirty years ago. That was a mistake our species made and we’re now going to have to pay for it. So the Transhumanist Party doesn’t emphasize reducing the carbon footprint as much as it emphasizes the technologies we can use to overcome [its effects.]
What can we do to make it so that the human being can survive any kind of environmental catastrophe? Over the next ten or twenty years, many people are going to become more machine-like. I have a biochip in my hands, my father already has multiple heart [implants], a grandmother has an artificial hip. We are becoming cyborg-like and, when they start coming out with things like robotic hearts and kidneys, there’s no question that we’re going to start remaking our bodies to be much healthier. What would the human being need to survive?
These are the kinds of ways we want to attack the green problem. It is very unique and a bit radical, but unfortunately we blew it as a species and there’s no turning the ship of global warming around any more. It’s too late.•
In Brian MacIver’s Christian Science Monitor article about autonomous automobiles, former GM executive Larry Burns predicts that Google driverless cars may be road-ready by 2018. That seems very aggressive, but if it’s true, that development would have great benefits, including lives saved and environmental damage mitigated, and pose equally formidable challenges. The piece highlights liability as a major issue, and it’s certainly an obstacle, but it seems a much more surmountable one to me than replacing the tens of millions of jobs that will disappear in the transition.
An excerpt:
For [SAFE CEO] Robbie Diamond, the importance of autonomous electric cars is linked to safeguarding the country’s energy security – and national security.
“We are dependent on one fuel source for the entire transportation sector,” Diamond says. Even as domestic oil production increases, he says, Americans should reduce their reliance on oil across the board.
Diamond also says the driverless car industry “needs to be a faster tortoise or a more focused hare” to make these vehicles widely available as soon as possible.
As for Domino’s Pizza, the country’s largest pizza restaurateur, having a fleet of autonomous vehicles would greatly reduce operating costs for franchises delivering hundreds of pizzas every day.
“Ten million miles per week are covered by Domino’s delivery drivers,” [VP of communications] Lynn Liddle says during the panel at the National Press Club. According to her, most of the company’s delivery drivers use their own cars, gas, and insurance. Franchise owners reimburse them for on-the-job use of their own vehicles. Trimming back could increase profitability for franchises, even if it pushes out drivers.•
Mental illness often expresses itself in terms of the era in which it’s experienced, whether it’s the time of Napoleon’s belated funeral procession or one of a parade of cameras. We live in the latter, and it’s not only the deeply ill who feel paranoid, and for good reason. We are being monitored and measured, corporations wanting what’s in our heads, and with the Internet of Things, the ubiquity of surveillance will reach full saturation, seeming coincidences that are anything but will multiply.
Walter Kirn has written an excellent Atlantic piece about this sense of Digital Age disquiet. His opening:
I knew we’d bought walnuts at the store that week, and I wanted to add some to my oatmeal. I called to my wife and asked her where she’d put them. She was washing her face in the bathroom, running the faucet, and must not have heard me—she didn’t answer. I found the bag of nuts without her help and stirred a handful into my bowl. My phone was charging on the counter. Bored, I picked it up to check the app that wirelessly grabs data from the fitness band I’d started wearing a month earlier. I saw that I’d slept for almost eight hours the night before but had gotten a mere two hours of “deep sleep.” I saw that I’d reached exactly 30 percent of my day’s goal of 13,000 steps. And then I noticed a message in a small window reserved for miscellaneous health tips. “Walnuts,” it read. It told me to eat more walnuts.
It was probably a coincidence, a fluke. Still, it caused me to glance down at my wristband and then at my phone, a brand-new model with many unknown, untested capabilities. Had my phone picked up my words through its mic and somehow relayed them to my wristband, which then signaled the app?
The devices spoke to each other behind my back—I’d known they would when I “paired” them—but suddenly I was wary of their relationship. Who else did they talk to, and about what? And what happened to their conversations? Were they temporarily archived, promptly scrubbed, or forever incorporated into the “cloud,” that ghostly entity with the too-disarming name?
It was the winter of 2013, and these “walnut moments” had been multiplying…•
I hate you if you describe yourself on Twitter as a “Leading Influencer” or “Visionary Entrepreneur,” but not as much as I hate Donald Trump, a man who wants to become President solely so that he can give Fireside Chats about his erections.
In a Bloomberg Q&A conducted by Sasha Issenberg, Mike Murphy says Trump is unelectable, though considering the political consultant has hitched his wagon to Jeb Bush, who is three times as dense as the planet Saturn, perhaps he’s not one to talk.
Murphy’s chagrin over the direction of the GOP is nothing new. After the Mitt Romney debacle, he coolly assessed the demographics, especially the growing Latino voting bloc, and said “if we don’t modernize conservatism, we can go extinct.”
An excerpt:
Question:
Has the tempo of the race been different than what you had anticipated when you first developed a campaign plan?
Mike Murphy:
Well, I knew it would be kind of hyper because that’s the business now. But one thing in hindsight is we got this paper crown of front-runner early that we didn’t want and I don’t think realistically we should have had. Because what happens is when the punditocracy says, “You’re the front-runner,” then they take a bunch of meaningless polls and a Donald Trump or a Kardashian or whatever jumps in and they say, “Now you’re not the front-runner.” So they put you on trial for them being wrong at the beginning. I think we’re getting a little bit of a bad rap on all that stuff but, you know, who cares? We’re going to power through it. …
Question:
One day after Jeb announced his candidacy, in mid-June, Trump got in. I assume you hadn’t anticipated what that would do to the campaign.
Mike Murphy:
I don’t think he’s been particularly good for the process, he’s trivialized it. I remember working in foreign countries in the past where like the beer brands would each run a candidate for president as a marketing gimmick. I thought “God, I hope this never comes to us,” because it just makes the election kind of a cheap card trick. And here we are.
Question:
How has Trump’s entry changed the race?
Mike Murphy:
It created a false zombie front-runner. He’s dead politically, he’ll never be president of the United States, ever. By definition I don’t think you can be a front-runner if you’re totally un-electable. I think there’s there an a-priori logic problem in that.
It’s not surprising someone in Louisiana shot Senator Huey P. Long, who had no end of enemies, but it was unexpected that his assassin would be a mild-mannered eye doctor.
Firebrand and lightning rod, “Kingfish,” as he was called, was the Bayou State’s de facto dictator, a populist who planned to run for President on the promise of ending the privations of the Great Depression with his Share Our Wealth redistribution plan. A month after he announced his intentions to face off with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, however, Long was felled by an unlikely gunman named Dr. Carl A. Weiss, a son-in-law to one of the Senator’s political enemies but not someone suspected by any relative or friend of having murder on his mind. Weiss was immediately killed by the spray of bullets sent his way as Long’s bodyguards returned fire.
In the annals of American assassinations, a sorrowfully long list, there was probably no killer who had a better attended or more solemn funeral than Weiss. A brief article in the September 10, 1935 Brooklyn Daily Eagle described the scene.
The future usually arrives…later. Some things, however, zoom past the anticipation-and-frustration period.
Tell someone in 1980 about the future of cellphones or in 1990 about the near-term reality of the Internet or in 2000 about the development of drones or driverless. None of these advances seemed possible.
If we are to snake our way through the Anthropocene, it would be really advantageous if solar and other renewables were among these black swan technologies. In a Washington Post editorial, Vivek Wadhwa predicts energy will soon be clean, ubiquitous and free. That doesn’t seem likely, but I suppose it’s not impossible. One important caveat: There are entrenched corporate interests that don’t want to see it happen and could slow down the process.
Wadhwa’s opening:
In the 1980s, leading consultants were skeptical about cellular phones. McKinsey & Companynotedthat the handsets were heavy, batteries didn’t last long, coverage was patchy, and the cost per minute was exorbitant. It predicted that in 20 years the total market size would be about 900,000 units, and advised AT&T to pull out. McKinsey was wrong, of course. There were more than 100 million cellular phones in use in 2000; there are billions now. Costs have fallen so far that even the poor — all over world — can afford a cellular phone.
The experts are saying the same about solar energy now. They note that after decades of development, solar power hardly supplies 1 percent of the world’s energy needs. They say that solar is inefficient, too expensive to install, and unreliable, and will fail without government subsidies. They too are wrong. Solar will be as ubiquitous as cellular phones are.•
Pierre Trudeau, Justin’s dad, was the cool, cosmopolitan Prime Minister of Canada for all but ten months from 1968 to 1984, a relatively hip media sensation, one who would receive visits from John & Yoko as well as heads of state. Part of the fun of his second administration was watching him try to contain his frustration when in close proximity to American President Ronald Reagan. It wasn’t easy. From a 1982UPI reportabout an interview David Frost conducted with Trudeau, who spoke of his children:
Trudeau said his political legacy to Canada would be patriation of the constitution, the National Energy Progam and his stand on the relation of rich to poor nations.
He said his greatest professional achievement was political longevity.
“It is an achievement, I think, in this turbulent society and changing world … to have managed to keep our party, with its values hopefully corresponding to the Canadian general will, a long time in office,” he said.
In the interview, Trudeau also spoke reservedly about his own talents.
“I realized that I wasn’t among the geniuses and I’d have to work harder if I wanted to perform with some degree of excellence,” Trudeau said. “I certainly realized I wasn’t very handsome nor very strong physically or strong in a health sense.”
The prime minister, 62, spoke of his ‘joy’ at becoming a father. “I want to see these young boys grow up into pre-teenagers, and then teenagers, and hopefully beyond, and give them the time they deserve,” he said.
“I realize that the longer I wait, the less they will need me, and less I will be able to give them.”•
Trudeau on responding to personal attacks in a 1972 interview.
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In 1969, computer-processing magnate Ross Perot had a McLuhan-ish dream: an electronic town hall in which interactive television and computer punch cards would allow the masses, rather than elected officials, to decide key American policies. In 1992, he held fast to this goal–one that was perhaps more democratic than any society could survive–when he bankrolled his own populist third-party Presidential campaign. The opening of “Perot’s Vision: Consensus By Computer,” a New York Times article fromthat year by the late Michael Kelly:
WASHINGTON, June 5— Twenty-three years ago, Ross Perot had a simple idea.
The nation was splintered by the great and painful issues of the day. There had been years of disorder and disunity, and lately, terrible riots in Los Angeles and other cities. People talked of an America in crisis. The Government seemed to many to be ineffectual and out of touch.
What this country needed, Mr. Perot thought, was a good, long talk with itself.
The information age was dawning, and Mr. Perot, then building what would become one of the world’s largest computer-processing companies, saw in its glow the answer to everything. One Hour, One Issue
Every week, Mr. Perot proposed, the television networks would broadcast an hourlong program in which one issue would be discussed. Viewers would record their opinions by marking computer cards, which they would mail to regional tabulating centers. Consensus would be reached, and the leaders would know what the people wanted.
Mr. Perot gave his idea a name that draped the old dream of pure democracy with the glossy promise of technology: “the electronic town hall.”
Today, Mr. Perot’s idea, essentially unchanged from 1969, is at the core of his ‘We the People’ drive for the Presidency, and of his theory for governing.
It forms the basis of Mr. Perot’s pitch, in which he presents himself, not as a politician running for President, but as a patriot willing to be drafted ‘as a servant of the people’ to take on the ‘dirty, thankless’ job of rescuing America from “the Establishment,” and running it.
In set speeches and interviews, the Texas billionaire describes the electronic town hall as the principal tool of governance in a Perot Presidency, and he makes grand claims: “If we ever put the people back in charge of this country and make sure they understand the issues, you’ll see the White House and Congress, like a ballet, pirouetting around the stage getting it done in unison.”
Although Mr. Perot has repeatedly said he would not try to use the electronic town hall as a direct decision-making body, he has on other occasions suggested placing a startling degree of power in the hands of the television audience.
He has proposed at least twice — in an interview with David Frost broadcast on April 24 and in a March 18 speech at the National Press Club — passing a constitutional amendment that would strip Congress of its authority to levy taxes, and place that power directly in the hands of the people, in a debate and referendum orchestrated through an electronic town hall.•
A 1992 NBC News report on the unlikely popularity of Perot’s third-party candidacy for the White House.
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In Lauren Weiner’s 2012 New Atlantis article about Ray Bradbury, she provided a tidy description of the Space Age sage’s youthful education:
Bradbury spent his childhood goosing his imagination with the outlandish. Whenever mundane Waukegan was visited by the strange or the offbeat, young Ray was on hand. The vaudevillian magician Harry Blackstone came through the industrial port on Lake Michigan’s shore in the late 1920s. Seeing Blackstone’s show over and over again marked Bradbury deeply, as did going to carnivals and circuses, and watching Hollywood’s earliest horror offerings like Dracula and The Phantom of the Opera. He read heavily in Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, L. Frank Baum, and Edgar Rice Burroughs; the latter’s inspirational and romantic children’s adventure tales earned him Bradbury’s hyperbolic designation as “probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world.”
Then there was the contagious enthusiasm of Bradbury’s bohemian, artistic aunt and his grandfather, Samuel, who ran a boardinghouse in Waukegan and instilled in Bradbury a kind of wonder at modern life. He recounted: “When I was two years old I sat on his knee and he had me tickle a crystal with a feathery needle and I heard music from thousands of miles away. I was right then and there introduced to the birth of radio.”
His family’s temporary stay in Arizona in the mid-1920s and permanent relocation to Los Angeles in the 1930s brought Bradbury to the desert places that he would later reimagine as Mars. As a high-schooler he buzzed around movie and radio stars asking for autographs, briefly considered becoming an actor, and wrote and edited science fiction “fanzines” just as tales of robots and rocket ships were gaining in popularity in wartime America. He befriended the staffs of bicoastal pulp magazines like Weird Tales,Thrilling Wonder Stories, Dime Mystery, and Captain Future by bombarding them with submissions, and, when those were rejected, with letters to the editor. This precocity was typical. Science fiction and “fantasy” — a catchall term for tales of the supernatural that have few or no fancy machines in them — drew adolescent talent like no other sector of American publishing. Isaac Asimov was in his late teens when he began writing for genre publications; Ursula K. Le Guin claimed to have sent in stories from the age of eleven.•
Groucho Marx sasses Bradbury on You Bet Your Life in 1955.
Today there are dual Space Races, the one out there and the one in our heads, and they both have militaristic ramifications.
On the latter subject: DARPA is using neurotechnologies to try to develop robot soldiers or robot-like human ones, a topic on which Tim Requarth has written a very smart Foreign Policy piece. While these tools hold amazing promise for treating many diseases, they also could be utilized to supercharge the war machine. The U.S. Defense department isn’t investing hundreds of millions of dollars into neuroweaponry research on the off chance it might meet with success, but because it feels the work is doable. Those areas include brain-to-brain communication, exoskeletons and memory augmentation, all areas Requarth addresses.
An excerpt:
There is a potentially dark side to these innovations. Neurotechnologies are “dual-use” tools, which means that in addition to being employed in medical problem-solving, they could also be applied (or misapplied) for military purposes.
The same brain-scanning machines meant to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease or autism could potentially read someone’s private thoughts. Computer systems attached to brain tissue that allow paralyzed patients to control robotic appendages with thought alone could also be used by a state to direct bionic soldiers or pilot aircraft. And devices designed to aid a deteriorating mind could alternatively be used to implant new memories, or to extinguish existing ones, in allies and enemies alike.
Consider [Neuroscientist Miguel] Nicolelis’s brainet idea. Taken to its logical extreme, says bioethicist Jonathan Moreno, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, merging brain signals from two or more people could create the ultimate superwarrior. “What if you could get the intellectual expertise of, say, Henry Kissinger, who knows all about the history of diplomacy and politics, and then you get all the knowledge of somebody that knows about military strategy, and then you get all the knowledge of a DARPA engineer, and so on,” he says, referring to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “You could put them all together.” Such a brainet would create near-military omniscience in high-stakes decisions, with political and human ramifications.
To be clear, such ideas are still firmly in the realm of science fiction. But it’s only a matter of time, some experts say, before they could become realities. Neurotechnologies are swiftly progressing, meaning that eventual breakout capabilities and commercialization are inevitable, and governments are already getting in on the action. DARPA, which executes groundbreaking scientific research and development for the U.S. Defense Department, has invested heavily in brain technologies. In 2014, for example, the agency started developing implants that detect and suppress urges. The stated aim is to treat veterans suffering from conditions such as addiction and depression. It’s conceivable, however, that this kind of technology could also be used as a weapon—or that proliferation could allow it to land in the wrong hands. “It’s not a question of if nonstate actors will use some form of neuroscientific techniques or technologies,” says James Giordano, a neuroethicist at Georgetown University Medical Center, “but when, and which ones they’ll use.”
People have long been fascinated, and terrified, by the idea of mind control. It may be too early to fear the worst—that brains will soon be vulnerable to government hacking, for instance—but the dual-use potential of neurotechnologies looms.•
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Miguel Nicolelis’ TED Talk on brain-to-brain communication.
Menachem Begin knew quiet, at long last, but not peace.
When the Israeli Prime Minister’s wife died suddenly in the midst of political tumult with Lebanon, Begin resigned from office, suffering from depression, and spent the last nine years of his life in seclusion. As a soldier and politician, he’d had much of his life occupied by the fury of war, famously enjoying a great moment of peace with Egypt. Once resigned, he was only seen again in public when he would occasionally say Kaddish at his wife’s gravesite.
The opening of Peter Carlson’s 1983 People profile, written at the beginning of Begin’s retreat:
In the frigid predawn darkness, dozens of photographers perched on rooftops overlooking Jerusalem’s cemetery on the Mount of Olives. With their cameras pointed toward the grave of Aliza Begin, they shivered, waiting for a rare chance to catch former Prime Minister Menachem Begin in their viewfinders. Begin had not appeared in public since his sudden resignation last Aug. 28. Rumors had spread that he would skip the traditional Jewish ceremony on the first anniversary of his beloved wife’s death and instead visit the cemetery under cover of darkness to pray privately. The photographers blew on their frozen fingers, stamped their icy feet and scanned the cemetery, but the old warrior did not appear. Nor did he join his son, Beni, 40, and his daughters, Chassia, 37, and Leah, 34, at the memorial services at noon the following day. Instead, he sat with a flannel bathrobe draped over his pale, emaciated frame and watched the tribute to his wife of 43 years on an old television set.
Begin’s behavior did not surprise his closest associates. “His heart is broken,” says Yona Klimovitsky, 36, who has served as the Israeli leader’s secretary for more than a decade and was as close as a daughter to both Begin and his wife. “He misses Aliza more than one can imagine. He is thoroughly alone now.”
Only a year ago, Menachem Begin was among the world’s most powerful men. Today, at 70, he is a recluse. He has not only resigned from office, he has retreated from life. Since his resignation, he has not ventured outside the official Prime Minister’s residence, which he has still not vacated. His children are furnishing a new apartment for him, but the place is not yet ready. (His successor as Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, continues to live in a three-room walk-up apartment.) Unable to shave due to a skin disorder that covers his face with brown blotches, Begin has grown a long, totally white beard. Exhibiting the classic symptoms of clinical depression, he eats little—vegetables, rice, cottage cheese and eggs prepared by his daughter Leah—and sits day and night in robe and slippers, watching television and rereading books. He sees no one but his children and calls no one on the telephone. When old friends and political allies phone, he parries their inquiries with polite but curt replies. “I telephone him on various developments,” says Prime Minister Shamir. “He sounds as if he is interested in things, but I haven’t seen him in quite a few weeks.”
Begin’s nearly catatonic retirement comes after a lifetime of almost constant action. Born in an area of Poland that is now part of Russia, he lost both parents in the Nazi Holocaust and was himself imprisoned in a Soviet labor camp in Siberia. After emigrating to Palestine in 1942, he led the Irgun, the infamous anti-British terrorist group that bombed Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in 1946, killing 76 people. For nearly 30 years after Israel achieved independence in 1948, Begin led the right-wing opposition forces in the Knesset while raising his three children in an austere, two-room Tel Aviv apartment. Then, in an upset victory that shocked Israel, he was elected Prime Minister in 1977. The high point of his six-year term was the Nobel prizewinning 1978 peace treaty negotiated by President Jimmy Carter and signed by Begin with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. The low point was last year’s bitter invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent shocking massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut.
It was the war in Lebanon that triggered Begin’s emotional decline, says Klimovitsky. “He thought the army would go in, make a quick blitzkrieg and victoriously get out,” she says. “Instead, it went on and on, and more and more casualties fell. He feels betrayed by those who led him up the garden path about Lebanon. What disturbs him are the casualties—ours and the Lebanese. That was what made him turn more and more into himself.”
Shortly after the Palestinian refugee-camp massacres left Begin reeling, the death of his wife in November 1982 from chronic asthma and a heart attack devastated him.•
You have to be drinking a lot of gravy to buy any of the nonsense dished out by former Reagan scriptwriter Peggy Noonan. Two doozies from her latest grab-bag of bullshit in the Wall Street Journal followed by my comments.
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The only thing I feel certain of is how we got here. There are many reasons we’re at this moment, but the essential political one is this: Mr. Obama lowered the bar. He was a literal unknown, an obscure former state legislator who hadn’t completed his single term as U.S. senator, but he was charismatic, canny, compelling. He came from nowhere and won it all twice. All previously prevailing standards, all usual expectations, were thrown out the window.
Anyone can run for president now, and in the future anyone will. In 2020 and 2024 we’ll look back on 2016 as the sober good ol’ days. “At least Trump had business experience. He wasn’t just a rock star! He wasn’t just a cable talk-show host!”
As Peg would have it, the reason why the GOP national election process has hit the skids isn’t because the party’s decades-long appeal to the baser instincts in voters with coded, divisive terms (“welfare queens”) has grown into full-on hate speech, but because Barack Obama, someone she deems an unqualified celebrity, ran for President. Denying Obama, a Harvard Law President and Senator before winning the White House, is a serious-minded person with a sense of history, something you couldn’t assign to the Trumps and Carsons, is as dishonest as telling Americans that postwar prosperity was caused by the free market alone and not because it was matched to a severe, bordering on socialist, tax code. The so-called Reagan Revolution was always based on nostalgia for an America that never existed.
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[Joe Biden] would have been as entertaining in his way as Donald Trump…
Like Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Noonan thinks Trump’s a gas, with the way he refers to Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and African-Americans as “lazy” and sees women as bloody servants. She thinks that Biden’s penchant for awkward foot-in-mouth moments (sometimes in support of equality) is similar to the bigoted rantings of a fascist combover who’s politically inferior to a Kardashian. Now there’s some false equivalency.•
If you have good luck, accept it graciously. If you have incredibly good luck at a very young age, perhaps it’s best to run in the opposite direction?
As I’ve written in the past, sports announcer Al Michaels, blessed from early on with never having to worry about food and shelter or even more luxurious things–if anyone believes in miracles, it should be him.–has a serious breach where a sense of morality should be, whether we’re talking racist team names or athletes enduring brain injuries. In addition to feigning ignorance about such issues, he’s not above working in a political lie that serves his conservative mindset.
At this point, it’s difficult to know if Michaels is consciously lying or if he’s just fully digested bullshit talking points. From Timothy Burke at Deadspin:
Al Michaels is one of sports broadcasting’s best-known conservatives, and the NBC announcer cracked wise with one of the right’s most classic myths: that income taxes these days are extraordinarily high.
“That’d be $8 today,” Michaels muttered about Bill Belichick’s first job, making $25 a week for the Colts—“$22 after taxes he told us,” partner Cris Collinsworth replied. The truth: Say you take Bill Belichick at his word (this may be difficult for you). If he really did only make $1,300 in income in 1975 (if, indeed, he made $25 a week for an entire year) then he wouldn’t have owed any taxes at all; the standard deduction was $1,600 in 1975. For someone to owe $3 a week in income tax in 1975, they’d have to have earned $3,400 a year.
In 2014, that’s about $15,037. A single person earning that and filing in 2014 would pay about $488 in taxes for the year—or $9.38 a week. That’s $2.13 in 1975 dollars—for a person earning nearly three times what Bill Belichick claimed to earn.•
It is more than a little maddening that Americans freaked out over Ebola, which had very little chance of becoming plague here, yet aren’t a fraction as flustered over a potential catastrophe caused by carbon emissions, a far more likely outcome. Even astoundingly successful capitalist Bill Gates–the sweater-clad, avuncular 2.0 version–has called for serious government curbs on free markets to combat climate change.
In advance of COP 21, Venkatesh Rao has penned an Atlantic piece about the need for a wartime-level approach to reworking the whole of global infrastructure, explaining why it’s possible but not probable to succeed. If death is in the distance but not yet in our faces, are we likely to surrender our luxuries to austerity? Rao acknowledges that a “single cheap and effective solution [could] emerge,” but that’s also not a plausible scenario. An excerpt:
We are contemplating the sorts of austerities associated with wartime economies. For ordinary Americans, austerities might include an end to expansive suburban lifestyles and budget air travel, and an accelerated return to high-density urban living and train travel. For businesses, this might mean rethinking entire supply chains, as high-emissions sectors become unviable under new emissions regimes.
What [Bill] Gates and others are advocating for is not so much a technological revolution as a technocratic one. One for which there is no successful peacetime precedent. Which is not to say, of course, that it cannot work. There is always a first time for every new level of complexity and scale in human cooperation. But it’s sobering to look back at the (partial) precedents we do have.
Of the previous six energy revolutions of comparable magnitude—wind, water, coal, oil, electricity, and nuclear—only nuclear power had anywhere near the same level of early-stage technocratic shaping that we are contemplating. Among technological revolutions outside the energy sector, only space exploration, nuclear-weapons technology, and computing technology have had similar levels of bureaucratic direction.
None of these are true comparables, however, for one critical reason. In each historical case, the revolution was highly focused on a single core technology rather than a broad portfolio of technologies, and a managed transition of infrastructure at civilization scale. In the case of aerospace and computing technologies, the comparison is even weaker: Those sectors enjoyed several decades of organic evolution driven primarily by inventors, private investors, and market forces before technocrats got involved.•
Despite being witness to the murderous Orwellian circus that is contemporary North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee, who escaped that insane state as a teenager and has authored the book The Girl With Seven Names, believes the two Koreas will eventually reunite, free of tyranny. She told Michael Rundle of Wired UK of her experiences. An excerpt:
“North Koreans are tragically oppressed,” she said. “Despite the risks to my personal safety I feel a strong obligation to tell the world about the Orwellian nightmare that North Koreans face.”
That nightmare leaves North Koreans unable to rely on anyone, she said — including each other. “We have to learn that we can’t trust anyone […] classmates are forced to report on each other and spy on each other […] Someone will hear you. The walls have ears and the fields have eyes [my mother] said,” Lee told WIRED 2015.
“We are forced to watch public executions. I watched my first one at the age of seven as I watched a man hanging by his neck from a bridge […] Due to hate, fear and oppression the North Koreans cannot help themselves.”
In a harrowing description of her former home, Lee described a process by which young girls were routinely forced to perform and be judged by the state, to compile a “pleasure group” for the leader and regime — effectively to serve as sexual slaves.•
In technology and science, you see it especially in the area of life extension. The fountain of youth has been with us ever since people had time to stop and ponder, but the irrational rhetoric has grown louder since gerontologist Aubrey de Grey said in 2004 that “the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already.” What nonsense. I’m all in favor of working toward longer and healthier lives, but there’s no need to overheat the subject.
When it comes to a Singularitarian paradise of conscious machines, Ray Kurzweil’s pronouncements have ranged further and further into science fiction, promising superintelligence in a couple of decades. That’s not happening. Again, working toward such goals is worthwhile, but thinking that tomorrow is today is a sure way to disappoint.
Weak AI (non-conscious machines capable of programmed tasks) is the immediate challenge, with robots primed to devour jobs long handled by humans. That doesn’t mean we endure mass technological unemployment, but it could mean that. In a Nature review of three recent books on the topic (titles by John Markoff + Martin Ford + David A. Mindell), Ken Goldberg takes a skeptical look at our machine overlords. An excerpt:
Rise of the Robots by software entrepreneur Martin Ford proclaims that AI and robots are about to eliminate most jobs, blue- and white-collar. A close reading reveals the evidence as extremely sketchy. Ford has swallowed the rhetoric of futurist Ray Kurzweil, and repeatedly asserts that we are on the brink of vastly accelerating advances based on Moore’s law, which posits that computing power increases exponentially with time. Yet some computer scientists rue this exponential fallacy, arguing that the success of integrated circuits has raised expectations of progress far beyond what historians of technology recognize as an inevitable flattening of the growth curve.
Nor do historical trends support the Luddite fallacy, which assumes that there is a fixed lump of work and that technology inexorably creates unemployment. Such reasoning fails to consider compensation effects that create new jobs, or myriad relevant factors such as globalization and the democratization of the workforce. Ford describes software systems that attempt to do the work of attorneys, project managers, journalists, computer programmers, inventors and musicians. But his evidence that these will soon be perfected and force massive lay-offs consists mostly of popular magazine articles and, in one case, a conversation with the marketing director of a start-up.•
“I have made myself very rich,” Trump says (over and over again). “I would make this country very rich.” That’s why he should be president. He insists that he’s the ‘most successful man ever to run’, never mind the drafters of the constitution or the supreme commander of the allied forces. Bloomberg puts Trump’s current net worth at $2.9 billion, Forbes at $4.1 billion. The National Journal has worked out that if Trump had just put his father’s money in a mutual fund that tracked the S&P 500 and spent his career finger-painting, he’d have $8 billion. Wisely, D’Antonio refrains from offering an estimate of Trump’s net worth. When Timothy O’Brien, a New York Times journalist, suggested in Trump Nation (2005) that Trump probably wasn’t a billionaire at all, he was sued for libel. The case was eventually thrown out, as Trump must have known it would be, but O’Brien’s publisher is thought to have spent much more money defending the book than it could have made.
It’s not just vanity that requires Trump to claim that all his deals make gazillions: his current business requires it. Even when his projects fail – his golf course in Aberdeenshire, to take one example, has lost £3.5 million over the last two years – he makes money through letting other people put his name on their projects: no risk, little work, just a licensing fee upfront or a share of the profits. He doesn’t actually own the Trump Taj Mahal or Trump Palace or Trump Place or Trump Plaza or Trump Park Avenue or Trump Soho, or the many Trump buildings throughout South America, Turkey, South Korea and the Caucasus. Developers buy the use of his name because enough customers believe in it: “It’s not even a question of ego. It’s just that my name makes everything more successful,” he says. And so there have been Trump board games and phone contracts, credit cards, mattresses, deodorants, chocolate bars that look like gold bars, cologne sold only by Macy’s (“Success by Trump“). He made $200 million over 14 seasons by being the star of The Apprentice, playing “Donald Trump.” the richest, tycooniest man in the world. Between 2005 and 2010, Trump made more than $40 million from thousands of students who enrolled in entrepreneurship classes at “Trump University.” Some say it was a scam, and many of them have joined class action lawsuits to get their money back (one says that “for my $35,000+ all I got was books that I could have gotten from the library”). The attorney general of New York has filed a lawsuit against Trump for fraud.•
American drug laws are dumb beyond belief, and apart from selling these substances to children, no one should go to prison for their sale or use. There are more effective (and less-expensive) ways of managing the situation.
While our perplexing “war on drugs” might be silly, it may not be the reason for mass incarceration, a belief echoed resoundingly this political season, even by politicians who were calling for mandatory minimums not too long ago. In a Washington Post editorial, Charles Lane writes of a new study that seems to dispel the myth that our cells are bulging because of nonviolent drug offenders. An excerpt:
At the last Republican debate, on Sept. 16, former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina charged that “two-thirds of the people in our prisons are there for nonviolent offenses, mostly drug-related.” …
Too bad this bipartisan agreement is contradicted by the evidence. Fiorina’s numbers, for example, are exaggerated: In 2014, 46 percent of all state and federal inmates were in for violent offenses (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault), according to the latest Justice Department data. And this is a conservative estimate, since the definition of violent offense excludes roughly 30,000 federal prisoners, about 16 percent of the total, who are doing time for weapons violations.
Drug offenders account for only 19.5 percent of the total state-federal prison population, most of whom, especially in the federal system, were convicted of dealing drugs such as cocaine, heroin and meth, not “smoking marijuana.”
Undeniably, the population of state prisons (which house the vast majority of offenders) grew from 294,000 in 1980 to 1,362,000 in 2009 — a stunning 363 percent increase — though it has been on a downward trajectory since the latter date.
But only 21 percent of that growth was due to the imprisonment of drug offenders, most of which occurred between 1980 and 1989, not more recently, according to a review of government data reported by Fordham law professor John Pfaff in the Harvard Journal of Legislation. More than half of the overall increase was due to punishment of violent offenses, not drugs, Pfaff reports.•
Malcolm Gladwell has written a powerful New Yorker piece about the new abnormal in America of mass violence perpetrated by teenage boys and young men, often at schools. While these acts are a small fraction of U.S. gun violence, they leave deep scars. Gladwell looks for answers at the intersection of developmental disorders, the easy access to weapons and a fatal type of “fan fiction” that has gone viral in the past two decades, with Columbine in 1999 being the shot heard ’round the world.
The article’s most important point, I think, is that there’s no pattern of history among the killers, who come from backgrounds good or bad. What they seem to share is a seemingly inexplicable attraction to spectacles of public violence that have preceded them and provided a modus operandi.
As a dedicated reader of newspapers from the 19th and early-20th century, I can assure you there were always very deeply troubled people in America, probably way more than there are now (per capita, anyhow). They just didn’t have such easy access to guns or at least the type of automatic weapons that exist today, nor were they easily connected to the violent delusions of others.
I don’t see much of a realistic answer for arms control in the long term. The laws should certainly be rewritten to address gun proliferation, but the country is already awash in weapons and with 3D printers coming our way, it will be a tricky battle to win, even without discussing the thorny politics. Similar frustrations are likely in trying to prevent copycat violence among teenage boys, perhaps ones on the autism spectrum, in the Internet Age. For all the good the democratization of media has encouraged, we’re also prone to its dark mirror.
Gladwell conducted a really good Reddit AMA about the subject. A few exchanges follow.
_____________________________
Question:
That was the toughest article I had to get through in a while but that is a testament to your writing style. What do you think are the ways we can fix this culture of violence? Do you think pop culture is to blame?
As a member of the media, what are the steps you can take to stop this kind of problem?
Malcolm Gladwell:
Pop culture is to blame, absolutely. But the issue is that pop culture today is not what it was thirty years ago. The internet has created a rabbit warren for the all sorts of twisted fantasies: the paradox of the internet is that the group who seem to use it the most (teenagers) are those least well-equipped to deal with its pathologies.
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Question:
Mass shootings (and even more so school shootings seem to be the very definition of outliers (1% or less). Why are we focusing on those instead of the 60% of gun deaths that are suicides or 30% that are non-mass homicides? It seems we have it all backwards.
Malcolm Gladwell:
Another very good question. Yes, you are quite right. The magnitude of gun violence in the U.S. is such that school shootings represent a very minor part of the problem. In a logical world, we would be talking way more about the other 99 percent. That said, I think the issue with this particular genre of violence is that it has the potential to spread: that was the point of my article. What began as a problem specific to teens were serious troubles and disorders has now engulfed teenagers who are, for all intents and purposes, normal. That’s scary, because we don’t know where the epidemic will lead.
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Question:
Are you concerned that your article’s focus on autism spectrum disorders as a correlate for schooling shooting behavior plays into the typical distraction of “mental health” we hear about after most mass shootings? America doesn’t have a monopoly on mental illness, but we seem to have one on school shootings.
Relatedly, do you worry that a story like this stigmatizes the mentally ill even further?
Malcolm Gladwell:
Very important question. First of all I was writing about a case in which the subject’s ASD was at the center of his entire legal experience. It was his diagnosis with mild ASD that led to him being put on probation–instead of behind bars. So I had to deal with it. The second half of the piece, which I gather you’ve read, is explicitly about trying to explain how we should NOT confuse John LaDue’s attitudes and condition for those of the classic school shooters, like Eric Harris. That’s why I have the long discussion of “counterfeit deviance”–the notion that we need to be very careful in assessing the criminality of people with ASD when it comes to certain kinds of behaviors: someone like John LaDue might be very innocently drawn into a troubling pattern of behavior. I was trying to fight the tendency to stigmatize those with ASD. I hope that came across.
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Question:
Do you believe that curbing this school attack trend is more a matter of understanding/addressing the psychological condition you describe in the article, or equally or more to do with gun control?
Malcolm Gladwell:
I think that gun control is crucial for lowering the overall homicide rate: there’s no question in my mind that the easy availability of guns in the U.S. is a huge contributor to the fact that we have a homicide rate several times higher than other industrialized nations. But school schooters are a far more complicated issue: they are a subgenre of homicide that is about a specific fantasy that has taken hold of some teenaged boys. We could crack down on guns and still have a Columbine.
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Question:
A lot of people will put these shootings down to sheer ‘craziness’ and they consider them isolated incidents, but here in Ireland we too have ‘crazy’ people and people who aren’t stable, but they don’t have guns so they don’t end up killing people. So surely guns are the problem? Because if you don’t have a gun then you aren’t mobilised to shoot, so this idea of ‘copycats’ you have is really interesting to think about, I couldn’t agree with you more. Excellent article and I look forward to a response!
Malcolm Gladwell:
I couldn’t agree more. Except that I have no idea how to get American “back” to the “pre-gun” condition like Ireland or England or any other Western nation is in. Remember its not just guns that are the issue here. It is the existence of an accompanying powerful fantasy about how they ought to be used.•
During the 2012 Presidential election, Mitt Romney took the Obama Administration to task for wasting taxpayer money with stimulus funds loaned to Solyndra and Tesla, two failed companies. The former had indeed gone belly up, while Elon Musk’s auto company paid back the money ahead of scheduled and has since become a substantial firm, one whose batteries may be repurposed to help cultivate a wider green revolution.
Anyone who’s spent time around venture capital folks knows they have more misses than hits, but they can end up far ahead in the aggregate if they continually take wise risks. In trying to combat climate change with research-and-development monies, governments should be held to this same standard and not an impossible one. The free market isn’t incentivized to change to alternative energies, and change is dearly needed.
In an Atlantic interview by James Bennet, Bill Gates names gov’t R&D and carbon taxes as desperately needed tools, stressing that “by 2050, wealthy nations like China and the United States…must be adding no more carbon to the skies.” An excerpt:
On why the free market won’t develop new forms of energy fast enough:
Well, there’s no fortune to be made. Even if you have a new energy source that costs the same as today’s and emits no CO2, it will be uncertain compared with what’s tried-and-true and already operating at unbelievable scale and has gotten through all the regulatory problems, like “Okay, what do you do with coal ash?” and “How do you guarantee something is safe?” Without a substantial carbon tax, there’s no incentive for innovators or plant buyers to switch.
And for energy as a whole, the incentive to invest is quite limited, because unlike digital products—where you get very rapid adoption and so, within the period that your trade secret stays secret or your patent gives you a 20-year exclusive, you can reap incredible returns—almost everything that’s been invented in energy was invented more than 20 years before it got scaled usage. So if you go back to various energy innovators, actually, they didn’t do that well financially. The rewards to society of these energy advances—not much of that is captured by the individual innovator, because it’s a very conservative market. So the R&D amount in energy is surprisingly low compared with medicine or digital stuff, where both the government spending and the private-sector spending is huge.
On why the free market won’t develop new forms of energy fast enough:
Well, there’s no fortune to be made. Even if you have a new energy source that costs the same as today’s and emits no CO2, it will be uncertain compared with what’s tried-and-true and already operating at unbelievable scale and has gotten through all the regulatory problems, like “Okay, what do you do with coal ash?” and “How do you guarantee something is safe?” Without a substantial carbon tax, there’s no incentive for innovators or plant buyers to switch.•
When you continually appeal to the margins, that’s where you end up. The GOP found the radicals and paranoiacs in their midst useful for a good while. The Reagan, Gingrich and Limbaugh surges were built on pandering to those with rigid feelings about race, religion and rights. In the early days of coded language and manipulation, the Republicans were still about winning governance and trying to do something with it. But the ante was gradually upped, the most fervent of the loyalists they’d cultivated demanded it, the discourse grew vicious, and disdain for government born in the public consciousness during the Reagan years became a full-grown monster. Now the party is a Frankenstein supported by a torch-carrying mob.
David Brooks’ opinions in the NYT often appall me, but in his latest column he sums up the party’s slow passage into insanity, how the sideshow moved to the center ring, better and more succinctly than anyone on the Left or Right has. An excerpt:
By traditional definitions, conservatism stands for intellectual humility, a belief in steady, incremental change, a preference for reform rather than revolution, a respect for hierarchy, precedence, balance and order, and a tone of voice that is prudent, measured and responsible. Conservatives of this disposition can be dull, but they know how to nurture and run institutions. They also see the nation as one organic whole. Citizens may fall into different classes and political factions, but they are still joined by chains of affection that command ultimate loyalty and love.
All of this has been overturned in dangerous parts of the Republican Party. Over the past 30 years, or at least since Rush Limbaugh came on the scene, the Republican rhetorical tone has grown ever more bombastic, hyperbolic and imbalanced. Public figures are prisoners of their own prose styles, and Republicans from Newt Gingrich through Ben Carson have become addicted to a crisis mentality. Civilization was always on the brink of collapse. Every setback, like the passage of Obamacare, became the ruination of the republic. Comparisons to Nazi Germany became a staple.•
Nine decades before the election of President Barack Obama, a mixed-race person who identifies as African American, Charles Curtis, a mixed-race man who identified as Native American, was elected as Herbert Hoover’s Vice President.
A child of a French, Kaw, Osage and Potawatomi mom and an English, Scotch and Welsh father, Curtis was born in the Kansas Territory and raised on a Kaw reservation. He was known as “Indian Charlie” as a boy and was a spectacular rider of horses and an accomplished prairie jockey. His mother died when he was three, and Curtis was cared for at various times by both sets of grandparents, taking an education in Topeka. A career in law led to one in politics, the biggest horse race of them all, which he also mastered. The Brooklyn Daily Eagleprofiled Curtis in early 1929, soon after he he was sworn into executive office.
Marilynne Robinson (the writer) and Barack Obama (the President) are the type of people I’m happy if surprised America still turns out. They seem of this time but of another as well, with a sense of history that feels as if it’s being rapidly churned out of the collective memory.
In a conversation that took place recently in Iowa, and is now being published in two parts in the New York Review of Books (read part one), the pair have a wide-ranging talk, touching on many topics, including how fear–and the exploitation of it–is a large part of the contemporary political discourse. Obama, despite having his Administration and supporters mentioned in the same breath as slavery and Nazism by Ben Carson alone, is confident the madness will pass. An excerpt:
President Obama:
Why did you decide to write this book of essays? And why was fear an important topic, and how does it connect to some of the other work that you’ve been doing?
Marilynne Robinson:
Well, the essays are actually lectures. I give lectures at a fair rate, and then when I’ve given enough of them to make a book, I make a book.
President Obama:
So you just kind of mash them all together?
Marilynne Robinson:
I do. That’s what I do. But it rationalizes my lecturing, too. But fear was very much—is on my mind, because I think that the basis of democracy is the willingness to assume well about other people.
You have to assume that basically people want to do the right thing. I think that you can look around society and see that basically people do the right thing. But when people begin to make these conspiracy theories and so on, that make it seem as if what is apparently good is in fact sinister, they never accept the argument that is made for a position that they don’t agree with—you know?
President Obama:
Yes.
Marilynne Robinson:
Because [of] the idea of the “sinister other.” And I mean, that’s bad under all circumstances. But when it’s brought home, when it becomes part of our own political conversation about ourselves, I think that that really is about as dangerous a development as there could be in terms of whether we continue to be a democracy.
President Obama:
Well, now there’s been that strain in our democracy and in American politics for a long time. And it pops up every so often. I think the argument right now would be that because people are feeling the stresses of globalization and rapid change, and we went through one of the worst financial crises since the Great Depression, and the political system seems gridlocked, that people may be particularly receptive to that brand of politics.•
A footnote now to the last quarter century of polarized American politics is the fact that Maya Angelou supported Clarence Thomas during his bruising, controversial Supreme Court nomination process. She believed he could be “saved” or “won over” or something, would become a generous soul. How’d that turn out? Did this sense of unity, as she termed it, really help African-American children? Did Citizens United or the near-dismantling of the Affordable Care Act help them? As always, there’s a real danger in having a big-picture view when interpreting individual people.
In these bloody days and frightful nights when an urban warrior can find no face more despicable than his own, no ammunition more deadly than self-hate and no target more deserving of his true aim than his brother, we must wonder how we came so late and lonely to this place.
In this terrifying and murderous season, when young women achieve adulthood before puberty, and become mothers before learning how to be daughters, we must stop the rhetoric and high-sounding phrases, stop the posing and preening and look to our own welfare.
We need to haunt the halls of history and listen anew to the ancestors’ wisdom. We must ask questions and find answers that will help us to avoid falling into the merciless maw of history. How were our forefathers able to support their weakest when they themselves were at their weakest? How were they able to surround the errant leader and prevent him from being co-opted by forces that would destroy him and them? How were they, lonely, bought separately, sold apart, able to conceive of the deep, ponderous wisdom found in “Walk together, children . . . don’t you get weary.”
The black youngsters of today must ask black leaders: If you can’t make an effort to reach, reconstruct and save a black man who has been to and graduated from Yale, how can you reach down here in this drug-filled, hate-filled cesspool where I live and save me?
I am supporting Clarence Thomas’s nomination, and I am neither naive enough nor hopeful enough to imagine that in publicly supporting him I will give the younger generation a pretty picture of unity, but rather I can show them that I and they come from a people who had the courage to be when being was dangerous, who had the courage to dare when daring was dangerous — and most important, had the courage to hope.
Because Clarence Thomas has been poor, has been nearly suffocated by the acrid odor of racial discrimination, is intelligent, well trained, black and young enough to be won over again, I support him.
The prophet in “Lamentations” cried, “Although he put his mouth in the dust . . . there is still hope.”•
As I wrote recently, Donald Trump is an adult baby with no interest in actually being President.
He entered the race impetuously, seeking attention to satisfy his deep and unexamined psychological scars, enjoyed an abundance of cameras over the summer when cable stations needed inexpensive content and focusing on the fascist combover was even cheaper than renting a Kardashian. Now with the new fall TV shows debuting, he’s growing restless, hoping his political program will get cancelled, reliably mentioning an exit strategy in every interview. Even the one-man brand himself is probably in disbelief that his prejudiced bullshit and faux populism have catapulted him for this long over his fellow candidates, weak though they are, a one-eyed racist in the land of the blind.
His continuing campaign is comeuppance richly earned by the GOP, with its bottomless supply of shamelessness, the party’s statistical leader going rogue not so much in policy but in language, stripping away the Gingrich-ish coding from the mean-spirited message meant to appeal to the worst among us and within us. He’s muddied the waters and now wants to swim ashore.
In interviews this week, Mr. Trump insisted he was in the race to win, and took aim at “troublemakers” in the news media who, he said, were misrepresenting his remarks. “I’m never getting out,” he insisted Friday on MSNBC.
Mr. Trump keeps noting that he still leads in every major Republican poll and is in a political position that others would envy, and he says he will spend the money to keep his candidacy alive. But he conceded in another interview: “To me, it’s all about winning. I want to win — whereas a politician doesn’t have to win because they’ll just keep running for office all their life.”
He said he had not contemplated a threshold for what would cause him to get out of the race. And he noted that his crowds were even larger than those of Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who is drawing thousands to rallies in seeking the Democratic nomination.
While Mr. Trump still leads major national polls and surveys in early voting states, that lead has recently shrunk nationally, and the most recentNBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed his support eroding in New Hampshire, the first primary state. His recent comments have lent credence to the views of political observers who had long believed the perennially self-promoting real estate mogul would ultimately not allow himself to face the risk of losing.
“Even back in the summer, when he was somewhat defying gravity, somewhat defying conventional wisdom, it seemed to me there would be a moment when reality sets in,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican political strategist who is based in California. “He would not leave himself to have his destiny settled by actual voters going to the polls or the caucuses.”
Mr. Stutzman was skeptical that Mr. Trump would be willing to endure the grind of a campaign needed to amass enough delegates to make him a factor at the Republican convention in July.•
Stephen Hawking’s answered some of the Reddit Ask Me Anything questions that were submitted a few weeks back. Some highlights: The physicist hopes for a world in which wealth redistribution becomes the norm when and if machines do the bulk of the labor, though he realizes that thus far that hasn’t been the inclination. He believes machines might subjugate us not because of mayhem or malevolence but because of their sheer proficiency. Hawking also thinks that superintelligence might be wonderful or terrible depending on how carefully we “direct” its development. I doubt that human psychology and individual and geopolitical competition will allow for an orderly policy of AI progress. It seems antithetical to our nature. And we actually have no place setting standards governing people of the distant future. They’ll have to make their own wise decisions based on the challenges they know and information they have. Below are a few exchanges from the AMA.
________________________
Question:
Whenever I teach AI, Machine Learning, or Intelligent Robotics, my class and I end up having what I call “The Terminator Conversation.” My point in this conversation is that the dangers from AI are overblown by media and non-understanding news, and the real danger is the same danger in any complex, less-than-fully-understood code: edge case unpredictability. In my opinion, this is different from “dangerous AI” as most people perceive it, in that the software has no motives, no sentience, and no evil morality, and is merely (ruthlessly) trying to optimize a function that we ourselves wrote and designed. Your viewpoints (and Elon Musk’s) are often presented by the media as a belief in “evil AI,” though of course that’s not what your signed letter says. Students that are aware of these reports challenge my view, and we always end up having a pretty enjoyable conversation. How would you represent your own beliefs to my class? Are our viewpoints reconcilable? Do you think my habit of discounting the layperson Terminator-style “evil AI” is naive? And finally, what morals do you think I should be reinforcing to my students interested in AI?
Stephen Hawking:
You’re right: media often misrepresent what is actually said. The real risk with AI isn’t malice but competence. A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble. You’re probably not an evil ant-hater who steps on ants out of malice, but if you’re in charge of a hydroelectric green energy project and there’s an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants. Let’s not place humanity in the position of those ants. Please encourage your students to think not only about how to create AI, but also about how to ensure its beneficial use.
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Question:
Have you thought about the possibility of technological unemployment, where we develop automated processes that ultimately cause large unemployment by performing jobs faster and/or cheaper than people can perform them? Some compare this thought to the thoughts of the Luddites, whose revolt was caused in part by perceived technological unemployment over 100 years ago. In particular, do you foresee a world where people work less because so much work is automated? Do you think people will always either find work or manufacture more work to be done?
Stephen Hawking:
If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
________________________
Question:
I am a student who has recently graduated with a degree in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. Having studied A.I., I have seen first hand the ethical issues we are having to deal with today concerning how quickly machines can learn the personal features and behaviours of people, as well as being able to identify them at frightening speeds. However, the idea of a “conscious” or actual intelligent system which could pose an existential threat to humans still seems very foreign to me, and does not seem to be something we are even close to cracking from a neurological and computational standpoint. What I wanted to ask was, in your message aimed at warning us about the threat of intelligent machines, are you talking about current developments and breakthroughs (in areas such as machine learning), or are you trying to say we should be preparing early for what will inevitably come in the distant future?
Stephen Hawking:
The latter. There’s no consensus among AI researchers about how long it will take to build human-level AI and beyond, so please don’t trust anyone who claims to know for sure that it will happen in your lifetime or that it won’t happen in your lifetime. When it eventually does occur, it’s likely to be either the best or worst thing ever to happen to humanity, so there’s huge value in getting it right. We should shift the goal of AI from creating pure undirected artificial intelligence to creating beneficial intelligence. It might take decades to figure out how to do this, so let’s start researching this today rather than the night before the first strong AI is switched on.
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Question:
I am a biologist. Your fear of AI appears to stem from the assumption that AI will act like a new biological species competing for the same resources or otherwise transforming the planet in ways incompatible with human (or other) life. But the reason that biological species compete like this is because they have undergone billions of years of selection for high reproduction. Essentially, biological organisms are optimized to ‘take over’ as much as they can. It’s basically their ‘purpose’. But I don’t think this is necessarily true of an AI. There is no reason to surmise that AI creatures would be ‘interested’ in reproducing at all. I don’t know what they’d be ‘interested’ in doing. I am interested in what you think an AI would be ‘interested’ in doing, and why that is necessarily a threat to humankind that outweighs the benefits of creating a sort of benevolent God.
Stephen Hawking:
You’re right that we need to avoid the temptation to anthropomorphize and assume that AI’s will have the sort of goals that evolved creatures to. An AI that has been designed rather than evolved can in principle have any drives or goals. However, as emphasized by Steve Omohundro, an extremely intelligent future AI will probably develop a drive to survive and acquire more resources as a step toward accomplishing whatever goal it has, because surviving and having more resources will increase its chances of accomplishing that other goal. This can cause problems for humans whose resources get taken away.•
In 1969, computer-processing magnate Ross Perot had a McLuhan-ish dream: an electronic town hall in which interactive television and computer punch cards would allow the masses, rather than elected officials, to decide key American policies. In 1992, he held fast to this goal–one that was perhaps more democratic than any society could survive–when he bankrolled his own populist third-party Presidential campaign. The opening of
In Lauren Weiner’s
