It was in 2012 that I first put up a post about CITE, an insta-ghost town planned to be built in the New Mexican desert for the express purpose of testing technologies, and I still can’t say I fully get the concept. Is a discrete soundstage city really required when driverless cars are tested on public streets and highways? Wouldn’t it just be better for tech firms to make agreements with small urban areas for pilot programs? That would seem a truer test.
In the arid plains of the southern New Mexico desert, between the site of the first atomic bomb test and the U.S.-Mexico border, a new city is rising from the sand.
Planned for a population of 35,000, the city will showcase a modern business district downtown, and neat rows of terraced housing in the suburbs. It will be supplied with pristine streets, parks, malls and a church.
But no one will ever call it home.
TheCITE(Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation) project is a full-scale model of an ordinary American town. Yet it will be used as a petri dish to develop new technologies that will shape the future of the urban environment.
The $1 billion scheme, led by telecommunications and tech firmPegasus Global Holdings, will see 15-square-miles dedicated to ambitious experiments in fields such as transport, construction, communication and security.•
In her Guardian column, Jemima Kiss describes driverless cars as a “hard sell for Google,” and I agree with part of her reasoning.
Regulators and entrenched market interests will certainly be a chore to appease. The fallout will be huge, policy-wise, and auto-insurance companies, after all, aren’t not-for-profits and stand to be destabilized out of business. But I think Kiss’ contention that motorist fear of the new technology is overstated. Some may enjoy continuing to drive, but it won’t be because of apprehension about robocars. That worry will quickly abate.
Of course, the bigger point is that Google won’t be alone in trying to change the course of the future, in having automobiles be truly automatic, as Apple, Tesla, Uber, Big Auto and companies in China and Japan will be doing likewise. Google’s biggest challenge will in ensuring it’s one of the companies in the winner’s circle.
An excerpt:
The hard sell for Google will be winning over generations of people who feel safer being in control of their vehicle, don’t know or care enough about the technology, or who simply enjoy driving. Yet most people who try a demo say the same thing: how quickly the self-driving car feels normal, and safe. As the head of public policy quipped, “perhaps we just need to do demos for 7 billion people”. Google’s systems engineer Jaime Waydo helped put self-driving cars on Mars while she worked at Nasa; it may well be that regulation and public policy prove easier there than on Earth.
And before it can get to the public, Google has to get through the regulators. In taking on the auto industry, Google has some mighty pitched battles ahead, not least the radical changes it implies for the insurance industry (who will find the number of accident claims dropping sharply), car makers (who will become partners with Google to equip their autonomous cars) and the labour issues of laying off a whole class of drivers, from cabs to haulage.•
As long as people smoke, it’s difficult to argue that free markets are chastened by free wills. It’s an addiction almost always begun in adolescence, yes, but plenty of smokers aren’t even trying to quit despite the horrifying health risks. So we tax cigarettes dearly and run countless scary PSAs, trying to curtail the appetite for destruction and push aside the market’s invisible hand offering us a light.
The cost, of course, goes beyond the rugged individual, transferred onto all of us whether we’re talking about lung cancer or obesity or financial bubbles. Sooner or later, we all pay.
In aNYRB piece about Phishing for Phools,a new book on the topic by economists George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, professional noodge Cass R. Sunstein finds merit in the work, though with some reservations. One topic of note touched on briefly: the micro-marketing of politicians aided by the “manipulation of focus.” An excerpt:
Akerlof and Shiller believe that once we understand human psychology, we will be a lot less enthusiastic about free markets and a lot more worried about the harmful effects of competition. In their view, companies exploit human weaknesses not necessarily because they are malicious or venal, but because the market makes them do it. Those who fail to exploit people will lose out to those who do. In making that argument, Akerlof and Shiller object that the existing work of behavioral economists and psychologists offers a mere list of human errors, when what is required is a broader account of how and why markets produce systemic harm.
Akerlof and Shiller use the word “phish” to mean a form of angling, by which phishermen (such as banks, drug companies, real estate agents, and cigarette companies) get phools (such as investors, sick people, homeowners, and smokers) to do something that is in the phisherman’s interest, but not in the phools’. There are two kinds of phools: informational and psychological. Informational phools are victimized by factual claims that are intentionally designed to deceive them (“it’s an old house, sure, but it just needs a few easy repairs”). More interesting are psychological phools, led astray either by their emotions (“this investment could make me rich within three months!”) or by cognitive biases (“real estate prices have gone up for the last twenty years, so they’re bound to go up for the next twenty as well”).
Akerlof and Shiller are aware that skeptics will find their depiction of human beings as “phools” to be inaccurate and impossibly condescending. Their response is that people are making a lot of bad decisions, producing outcomes that no one could possibly want. In their view, phishing for phools “is the leading cause of the financial crises that lead to the deepest recessions.” A lot of people run serious health risks from overeating, tobacco, and alcohol, leading to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths annually in the United States alone. Akerlof and Shiller think that it is preposterous to believe that these deaths are a product of rational decisions.•
Vivek Wadhwa, who wisely looks at issues from all sides, has written an excellent Singularity Hub article analyzing which technologies he believes will impact global politics in the next two decades.
In the opening, he asserts something I think very true: an ascendant China isn’t really scary but that state in steep decline would be. He further argues in that first paragraph that fossil fuel is in its dying days, something that probably needs to be true if China, with its world-high cancer and air-pollution rates, is to remain stable. A nation of 1.3 billion will only cough and choke for so long. Solar and wind can’t arrive soon enough for that country, and for us all, though oil-dependent nations unable to transition will be destabilized.
An excerpt about 3D printers:
In conventional manufacturing, parts are produced by humans using power-driven machine tools, such as saws, lathes, milling machines, and drill presses, to physically remove material to obtain the shape desired. In digital manufacturing, parts are produced by melting successive layers of materials based on 3D models — adding materials rather than subtracting them. The “3D printers” that produce these use powered metal, droplets of plastic, and other materials — much like the toner cartridges that go into laser printers. 3D printers can already create physical mechanical devices, medical implants, jewelry, and even clothing. But these are slow, messy, and cumbersome — much like the first generations of inkjet printers were. This will change.
In the early 2020s we will have elegant low-priced printers for our homes that can print toys and household goods. Businesses will use 3D printers to do small-scale production of previously labor-intensive crafts and goods. Late in the next decade, we will be 3D-printing buildings and electronics. These will eventually be as fast as today’s laser printers are. And don’t be surprised if by 2030, the industrial robots go on strike, waving placards saying “stop the 3D printers: they are taking our jobs away.”
The geopolitical implications of these changes are exciting and worrisome.•
Nicholas Carr’s The Glass Cage, a must-read if you want to understand all sides of this new machine age, is now out in paper. I like Carr’s thinking when I agree with him, and I like it when I don’t. He always makes me see things in a fresh way, and he’s a miraculously graceful writer. Carr put an excerpt from the book, one about the history of automation, on his blog. Here’s a smaller section from that:
Automated machines existed before World War II. James Watt’s steam engine, the original prime mover of the Industrial Revolution, incorporated an ingenious feedback device — the fly-ball governor — that enabled it to regulate its own operation. The Jacquard loom, invented in France around 1800, used steel punch cards to control the movements of spools of different-colored threads, allowing intricate patterns to be woven automatically. In 1866, a British engineer named J. Macfarlane Gray patented a steamship steering mechanism that was able to register the movement of a boat’s helm and, through a gear-operated feedback system, adjust the angle of the rudder to maintain a set course.
But the development of fast computers, along with other sensitive electronic controls, opened a new chapter in the history of machines. It vastly expanded the possibilities of automation. As the mathematician Norbert Wiener, who helped write the prediction algorithms for the Allies’ automated antiaircraft gun, explained in his 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings, the advances of the 1940s enabled inventors and engineers to go beyond “the sporadic design of individual automatic mechanisms.” The new technologies, while designed with weaponry in mind, gave rise to “a general policy for the construction of automatic mechanisms of the most varied type.” They opened the way for “the new automatic age.”
Beyond the pursuit of progress and productivity lay another impetus for the automatic age: politics.•
If I was making a list of the factors behind the rash of American mass shootings, many of them happening in schools, I would lead with ease of access to guns, mental illness and drugs. Additionally, I think our fear of being labeled “losers” in this all-or-nothing age is also a factor.
In Paula Young Lee’s Salon article about the U.S. epidemic of large-scale shootings, she tries to get at the confluence of non-access issues leading to the rampages. An excerpt:
Overall, gun violence is down, but rampage shootings are up. When asked, “Why does America lead the world in school shootings?” the former Associate Director the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Frank Ochberg,listed the following five factors: 1) bullying, 2) major mental illness, 3) violent role models, 4) drugs, and 5) access to guns. Read that list again. Think about it. Consider the order in which it is presented, because factors 1-4 presage the final decision, which is obtaining a gun. But sociologists frequently note two additional factors driving this phenomenon: 6) copycatting, which requires the media circus precisely because the model being copied, Columbine, is the one where the media changed the script, and 7) a distinctly American version of individualism.•
Tom Junod, one of the great longform journalists of the Magazine Age, is probably best known for his 2003 Esquire piece, “The Falling Man.” If I could only tell people to look at two things related to the WTC, I would recommend Man on Wire, the documentary about Philippe Petit, who didn’t tumble from the buildings’ heights, and Junod’s article, about a man, on 9/11, who did.
Junod just did a predictably smart Ask Me Anything at Reddit. Here’s an exchange about a contemporary figure he once profiled, the serial groom and bible salesman Donald Trump:
Question:
From a journalist’s point of view, What do you think of Donald Trump running for President in 2016?
Tom Junod:
Well, he’s been a treasure trove for journalists, hasn’t he? But there’s lesson here, because his campaign has been driven by the fact that he doesn’t sound like anybody else. He doesn’t sound like a politician, so he can get away with stuff people think that politicians shouldn’t say. But a lot of journalists want to sound like journalists. A lot of journalists want to sound like everybody else. Trump speaks to the advantage of having your own voice.
Question:
Thank you for your answer, I agree and that is why I think a lot of people really like him. But do you think it seems like he is making most of us feel dumb by the way he is talking to the press? Or do you think he is trying to appeal to more of the uneducated voters in America by making this run for President a Circus?
Tom Junod:
I’ve met Trump — I wrote a story about him, oh, a long time ago. I don’t think he’s trying to make anybody feel dumb, or even that he’s trying to turn the whole campaign into a circus. That’s just the way he is. The interesting thing is that it makes people think he’s authentic, think he’s telling the truth, when he’s flat out the most insincere person I’ve ever met. That he’s ridiculously needy, and responds to everything situationally and by instinct, doesn’t make him a truth teller.•
Although it has far greater implications, I don’t know if gene manipulation will eventually be viewed very differently than plastic surgery. The timeline is undefined, but it will start with animals, then be used to treat diseases in humans, finally becoming a performance-enhancement tool for our friends and neighbors (and us). It’s easy to say now that we’d opt out, but that won’t be so simple since such changes won’t be merely cosmetic.
In China, gene-editing is being used to design micropigs that permanently remain lap-size and make great pets. From David Cyranoski at Nature:
Cutting-edge gene-editing techniques have produced an unexpected byproduct — tiny pigs that a leading Chinese genomics institute will soon sell as pets.
At the summit, the institute quoted a price tag of 10,000 yuan (US$1,600) for the micropigs, but that was just to “help us better evaluate the market”, says Yong Li, technical director of BGI’s animal-science platform. In future, customers will be offered pigs with different coat colours and patterns, which BGI says it can also set through gene editing.
Withgene editing taking biology by storm, the field’s pioneers say that the application to pets was no big surprise. Some also caution against it. “It’s questionable whether we should impact the life, health and well-being of other animal species on this planet light-heartedly,” says geneticist Jens Boch at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in Germany.•
Donald Trump is deeply loyal to country and family, if you discount the military deferments and adultery. Ben Carson is a neurosurgeon who’s worked on lots of brains, though not, it would seem, his own. Bernie Sanders is a 74-year-old small-state socialist who knows what ails America and has been wholly unable to remedy any of these problems during 25 years in Washington.
Yet they are among the polling leaders in the race for the U.S. Presidency. Even relatively early in the election season, it’s an odd, populist place for us to be–but then it’s a strange time in America.
The tax codes that spread the wealth in the aftermath of WWII have long been erased, a process that gained furious urgency in the Reagan years and was completed by Dubya. Nothing ever trickled down and the 2008 economic collapse was a storm that hit us sideways. The recovery has been a top-heavy affair that’s barely glanced the majority. If technological unemployment becomes even a fraction of what some fear it will be, the haves and have-nots will move even further apart.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. but is that what we’ll get?
Trump, who entered the race impetuously in a bid for attention to fill one of the many holes in his heart, never actually wanted to be President. He already seems bored with it all. Carson is clearly unelectable unless the majority of Americans secretly believe in the devil. Sanders probably would need the whole of the country to morph into Minnesota, desiring a national version of none-of-the-above candidate Jesse Ventura, though one of a decidedly less steroidal physique. Elizabeth Warren was likely the only true populist who had a path to the Oval Office, if a bumpy one, and she passed. Does this mean we ultimately get the same old thing and emotions further boil? Considering the alternatives, is that still the best possible outcome?
As Edward Luce writes in his latest astute Financial Times column about U.S. politics, “since the mid-19th century, no populist has ever made it to the White House.” He suspects this may be true again in 2016 but urges wariness of the media-class consensus that says the demons will definitely dissipate. The opening:
Anyone puzzled by the sustained popularity of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders should look no further than the latest US jobs report. The share of prime age males in work is now markedly lower than it is in France. Yes, France. The share of US adults in jobs as a whole is lower than at any time since Jimmy Carter was president. Yet America’s overall outlook is better than that of France. Silicon Valley is in the middle of another golden age and the US mints new billionaires every month. It is a tale of two different Americas. It should be no surprise that the fate of the rest — and particularly America’s idle male population — is fuelling its angriest bout of populism in decades.
We should not expect it to peter out. Conventional wisdom on politics is as misleading as it has been on the economy. The first tells us to disregard opinion polls in an odd-numbered year. Voters are being frivolous. By 2016 the freak show will fade and establishment candidates, such as Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, will win the nominations of their respective parties. Perhaps so. But this is from the mindset that has been wrongfooted by the surge of outsider candidates all year.•
As has been said before, the problem with technology is one of distribution, not scarcity. Not a small challenge, of course.
We’ll need to work our way through what will likely be a wealthier if lopsided aggregate, but we all stand to gain in a more vital way: environmentally. The new tools, through choice and some fortuitousness, are almost all designed to make the world greener, something we desperately need to snake our way through the Anthropocene.
In Andrew McAfee’s latest post at his excellent Financial Times blog, he pivots off of Jesse Ausubel’s “The Return of Nature,” an essay which says that technological progress and information becoming the coin of the realm have led to a “dematerialization process” in America that is far kinder ecologically. Remember during the 1990s when everyone was freaking out about how runaway crime would doom society even as the problem had quietly (and mysteriously) begun a marked decline? Ausubel argues that a parallel situation is currently occurring with precious resources.
Two excerpts follow: 1) Ausubel asserts that a growing U.S. population hasn’t led to a spike in resource use, and 2) McAfee writes that the dematerialization process may explain some of the peculiarities of the economy.
______________________________
From Ausubel:
In addition to peak farmland and peak timber, America may also be experiencing peak use of many other resources. Back in the 1970s, it was thought that America’s growing appetite might exhaust Earth’s crust of just about every metal and mineral. But a surprising thing happened: even as our population kept growing, the intensity of use of the resources began to fall. For each new dollar in the economy, we used less copper and steel than we had used before — not just the relative but also the absolute use of nine basic commodities, flat or falling for about 20 years. By about 1990, Americans even began to use less plastic. America has started to dematerialize.
The reversal in use of some of the materials so surprised me that Iddo Wernick, Paul Waggoner, and I undertook a detailed study of the use of 100 commodities in the United States from 1900 to 2010. One hundred commodities span just about everything from arsenic and asbestos to water and zinc. The soaring use of many resources up to about 1970 makes it easy to understand why Americans started Earth Day that year. Of the 100 commodities, we found that 36 have peaked in absolute use, including the villainous arsenic and asbestos. Another 53 commodities have peaked relative to the size of the economy, though not yet absolutely. Most of them now seem poised to fall. They include not only cropland and nitrogen, but even electricity and water. Only 11 of the 100 commodities are still growing in both relative and absolute use in America. These include chickens, the winning form of meat. Several others are elemental vitamins, like the gallium and indium used to dope or alloy other bulk materials and make them smarter. …
Much dematerialization does not surprise us, when a single pocket-size smartphone replaces an alarm clock, flashlight, and various media players, along with all the CDs and DVDs.
But even Californians economizing on water in the midst of a drought may be surprised at what has happened to water withdrawals in America since 1970. Expert projections made in the 1970s showed rising water use to the year 2000, but what actually happened was a leveling off. While America added 80 million people –– the population of Turkey –– American water use stayed flat.•
______________________________
From McAfee:
Software, sensors, data, autonomous machines and all the other digital tools of the second machine age allow us to use a lot fewer atoms throughout the economy. Precision agriculture enables great crop yields with much less water and fertiliser. Cutting-edge design softwareenvisions buildingsthat are lighter and more energy efficient than any before. Robot-heavy warehouses can pack goods very tightly, and so be smaller. Autonomous cars, when (not if) they come, will mean fewer vehicles in total and fewer parking garages in cities. Drones will replace delivery trucks. And so on.
The pervasiveness of this process, which Mr Ausubel labels “dematerialisation,” might well be part of the reason thatbusiness investment has been so sluggisheven in the US, where profits and overall growth have been relatively robust. Why build a new factory, after all, if a few new computer-controlled machine tools and some scheduling software will allow you to boost output enough from existing ones? And why build a new data centre to run that software when you can just put it all in the cloud?•
No contemporary authoritarian ruler would think the Internet an ideal tool for propaganda. For all its deficits, it’s still too anarchic to be controlled. Kim Jong-un, for one, just blocks it. Cinema in another era, however, offered fascists larger-than-life spin-machine opportunities.
From early on, Benito Mussolini, Italy’s vulgar, murderous clown, knew film could be manipulated and controlled in a world of limited home technology. He planned to open a sprawling movie studio in 1937 which was to surpass Hollywood, and like his trains were purported to do, it arrived on time, turning Italy into an insane asylum with a studio system. After Il Duce met the business end of a meat hook atop an Esso gas station and the nation was defeated in WWII, the lots served briefly as a refugee camp. Later, Cinecittà, as it was known, became the backbone of a rebuilt Italy’s film industry, acting as the backdrop to American-produced epics like Ben-Hur as well as numerous Federico Fellini projects.
An article in the April 16, 1936 Brooklyn Daily Eagle covered the massive studio’s construction, among other things. An excerpt from it is embedded below.
Carly Fiorina’s disastrous stretch as Hewlett-Packard’s CEO can be summed up thusly: a huge debacle, a golden parachute, a long period of inactivity. Now she’s trying to ride failure and inertia to the White House, and in this strange era of anti-politics, she’s actually one of the Republican frontrunners, seemingly rewarded for her lack of government experience.
Fiorina namechecked Steve Jobs at the most recent GOP debate, trying to get a posthumous rub from our era’s most-celebrated businessperson. Steven Levy, having written the book on the iPod (quite literally), recalls in a Backchannel article how the Apple chief defeated Fiorina in a landslide in the two companies’ dealings. Let’s put it this way: Steve Jobs would have been a terrible President, and the person he clearly outmaneuvered maybe shouldn’t get the gig, either.
From Levy:
Ms. Fiorina’s trainwreck stint at HP has beenwell documented. But I want to address one tiny but telling aspect of her misbegotten reign: an episode that involved her good friend Steve Jobs. It is the story of the HP iPod.
The iPod, of course, was Apple’s creation, a groundbreaking digital music player that let you have “a music library in your pocket.” Introduced in 2001, it gained steam over the next few years and by the end of 2003, the device wasa genuine phenomenon. So it was news that in January 2004, Steve Jobs and Carly Fiorina made a deal where HP could slap its name on Apple’s wildly successful product. Nonetheless, HP still managed to botch things. It could not have been otherwise, really, because Steve Jobs totally outsmarted the woman who now claims she can run the United States of America.
I can talk about this with some authority. Not only have I writtena book about the iPod, but I interviewed Fiorina face to face when she introduced the HP iPod at the 2004 Consumer Electronics Show, and then got Steve Jobs’s side of the story.•
One major concern voiced about the wave of migrants fleeing war-torn Middle Eastern and African countries for Europe is that ISIS or some other terrorist group will embed their own among the refugees in order to wreak havoc abroad. Certainly not impossible, but it seems a needlessly complicated, roundabout method. Kim Hjelmgaard, a USA Today world reporter, who just spent ten days with the exiles, speaks to this issue in a Reddit AMA. The exchange:
Question:
Lots of media around the world are reporting that people are afraid that some of the migrants are in fact, infiltrate terrorists… What do you think about this and do you think there is enough security to filtrate these fears?
Kim Hjelmgaard:
I have read these stories as well and it would be wrong to just dismiss these concerns. What I would say is that I did not, myself, witness any people or behavior that gave me cause for alarm. That is not the same thing as saying there aren’t bad eggs around and about. There are bad eggs everywhere. If someone from the Islamic State wanted to infiltrate Europe from Syria they would probably just fly from Turkey to a major European city. I may be wrong but I can’t see why they would go this route when there are so many others that would probably be open to them. This is also not the same thing as refuting the idea that people can become radicalized after they arrive somewhere. Bu they can also be radicalized by not going anywhere as so-called homegrown attacks have shown.•
Outside of governments largely deregulating drones, the easiest way to bring about their proliferation would be for private companies to purchase fleets of them to rent out. That would remove the risk for individuals and small businesses who have a need for them but are reluctant to purchase. Such large-scale outfits making bulk purchases would spur further development and diminish costs, which in turn would lead to more private ownership. It’s worth remembering, however, that privacy will suffer further if the sector thrives.
The business of drones has ascended into the stratosphere, as investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the tiny unmanned aircraft in hopes of turning them into big business.
Now Robert Wolf, the financier who is a confidant of President Obama, is raising his bet on an industry that has already drawn names like Amazon and GoPro and top venture capital firms like Accel Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Mr. Wolf’s advisory firm plans to announce on Wednesday that it is spinning off its drone-services arm into a separate company. The business, Measure, is betting that its ability to fly the devices to take pictures of farmland and oil rigs will draw interest, and dollars, from a potentially huge number of customers.
Nearly two years ago, Mr. Wolf’s 32 Advisors set up Measure to capture that opportunity. Rather than focus on making the drones or the accessories and software that power them, he has banked on creating a fleet of aircraft that can be flown on behalf of customers. For Measure, it is “drones as a service.”
“We think that over the next 24 to 36 months, we’ll be able to fulfill something that doesn’t exist around the world,” Mr. Wolf, Measure’s chairman, said in a telephone interview.•
In any reasonably sober season, the Donald Trump Presidential campaign, that odious thing, would be a pig so dead by now that even David Cameron wouldn’t dare penetrate it.
But it’s 2015, a time of the anti-politician. Gerrymandering has left us without a true representational government as well as the inability to get much accomplished across aisles, and Citizens United has made people feel someone else owns the process, even if billionaires have yet to see a return on their investments on the national stage. If the situation is to normalize, those systemic failures need be amended, and it’s going to have to happen without Lessig-ish gimmicks. How to get to there from here?
Meanwhile, a nation that considers absolutely everything entertainment has a Reality TV racist to “shake things up,” whatever that means. In “Donald Trump Is Not Going Anywhere,” the great Mark Leibovich of the New York Times wonders about the new abnormal as he profiles the fascist combover in mid-stream. The opening:
“I don’t worry about anything,’’ Donald J. Trump told me aboard his 757 as we were flying to the recent Republican debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. He was dividing his attention between the brick-size slice of red-velvet cake he was annihilating and the CNN commentator on the 57-inch television who at that moment was talking about Trump, as most commentators have been at pretty much every moment for the last three months. The commentator, Dylan Byers, was saying that Trump now ran the risk of ‘‘jumping the shark’’ because voters were becoming so familiar with his act. ‘‘Nah,’’ Trump said, smirking at the screen. As the real estate and reality-show tycoon sees things, this is all win-win for him. Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal wrote something to this effect recently, Trump told me, explaining that even if he loses, ‘‘he goes back to being Donald Trump, but even bigger.’’
The Trump campaign may be a win-win for Trump, but it is a monstrous dilemma for a lot of other people. It is a dilemma for the Republican Party and a dilemma for the people Trump is running against. They would love to dismiss him as a sideshow and declare his shark jumped, except he keeps dominating the campaign and the conversation, and they have no clue whether to engage, attack, ignore or suck up in response. It is a dilemma for the elected leaders, campaign strategists, credentialed pundits and assorted parasites of the ‘‘establishment.’’ They have a certain set of expectations, unwritten rules and ways of doing things that Trump keeps flouting in the most indelicate of ways. And, of course, it is a dilemma for the media, who fear abetting a circus. This is why The Huffington Post announced in July that it would publish stories about Trump only in its ‘‘entertainment’’ section, so that when it all ended, as it surely would soon, the website could remain pristine and on the side of the high-minded. A similar sort of worry prevented me from writing about Trump throughout his rise this summer. Initially, I dismissed him as a nativist clown, a chief perpetrator of the false notion that President Obama was not born in the United States — the ‘‘birther’’ movement. And I was, of course, way too incredibly serious and high-minded to ever sully myself by getting so close to Donald Trump.
The human brain is the most amazingly complex machine, until the day it becomes a simple one. If we last long enough, that moment will arrive, and consciousness will no longer be the hard problem or any problem at all.
I don’t think intelligent machines are happening anytime soon, but they’re likely if the Anthropocene or some other age doesn’t claim us first. In fact, we may ultimately become them, more or less.But I’m not talking about today or tomorrow. In the meanwhile, Weak AI will be enough of a boon and bane to occupy us.
The problem I have with concerned technologists attempting to curb tomorrow’s superintelligence today is that any prescripts we create now will become moot soon enough as realities shift. New answers will alter old questions. It’s better to take an incremental approach to these challenges, and try to think through them wisely in our era and trust future humans to do the same in theirs.
Already operating on the South Korean border is a sentry robot, dubbed SGR-1. Its heat-and-motion sensors can identify potential targets more than two miles away. Currently it requires a human before it shoots the machine gun that it carries but it raises the question – who will be responsible if the robots begin to kill without human intervention?
The use of autonomous weapons is something that the UN is currently discussing and has concluded that humans must always have meaningful control over machines.
Noel Sharkey co-founded the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and believes there are several reasons why we must set rules for future battlefield bots now.
“One of the first rules of many countries is about preserving the dignity of human life and it is the ultimate human indignity to have a machine kill you,” he said.
But beyond that moral argument is a more strategic one which he hopes military leaders will take on board.
“The military leaders might say that you save soldiers’ lives by sending in machines instead but that is an extremely blinkered view. Every country, including China, Russia and South Korea is developing this technology and in the long run, it is going to disrupt global security,” he said.
“What kind of war will be initiated when we have robots fighting other robots? No-one will know how the other ones are programmed and we simply can’t predict the outcome.”•
Speaking of Minority Report, Hitachi says it’s created a system that crunches disparate data (tweets, weather patterns, etc.) and predicts where and when future crimes will occur. Of course, right now it will do so on a macro level as traditional crime-prediction models do, not trying to pinpoint particular people, but as these kinds of tools grow more sophisticated and proliferate, it seems likely they’ll try to operate more and more on a micro one. That could be all kinds of trouble. On the surface, it would be less invasive than stop-and-frisk, but systems, like people, contain all sorts of biases and assumptions.
No one has found a trio of psychic mutant “precogs” who can unanimously foresee future crimes, but Hitachi today introduced a system that promises to predict where and when crime is likely to occur by ingesting a panoply of data, from historical crime statistics to public transit maps, from weather reports to social media chatter. Hitachi says that “about half a dozen” U.S. cities will join a proof of concept test of the technology beginning in October, and though Hitachi hasn’t yet named them, Washington, D.C. could well be on the list. It’s one of several dozen cities in the U.S. and Caribbean countries where the company already provides video surveillance and sensor systems to police departments with its Hitachi Visualization Suite. Hitachi execs provided several examples—even screenshots of the software—featuring D.C. in my conversations with them.
“We don’t have any precogs as part of our system,” says Darrin Lipscomb, cofounder of companies Avrio and Pantascene, which developed crime-monitoring tech that Hitachi later acquired. “If we determined that the precogs were actually somewhat accurate, we could certainly use their predictions to feed into our model,” he says with perfect deadpan. What the new technology, called Hitachi Visualization Predictive Crime Analytics (PCA), does have is the ability to ingest streams of sensor and Internet data from a wide variety of sources.•
The biggest problems for the GOP in the current Presidential race are too numerous to list. The most pressing one for the Democrats, apart from their primary candidate carrying worrisome scars, is that there’s no suitable second challenger by normal standards. When Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama battled in 2008, the party had a fallback should one of them take ill or be knocked out for some unforeseen reason. Elizabeth Warren could have been that other option this time but chose not to run. At present, small-state Socialist Bernie Sanders is the safety net.
In the wake of the tragic death of his son, Beau, Vice President Joe Biden has been urged by many Democrats to run and provide a working-class counterpart to the big-money politics of the Clintons. It seems like something he really, really shouldn’t do. Biden certainly offers the authenticity that our Reality TV era demands (despite being a career politician), but someone who’ll be 74 at the time of the 2017 inauguration and has a habit of misspeaking and a belly full of grief probably shouldn’t be your other slam-dunk candidate. That’s a weak bench.
Gawker pointed me to a 1974 Washingtonian profile of Biden written by future sensationalist Kitty Kelley at an inflection point in the Senator’s life–the aftermath of the auto-wreck death of his first wife and baby daughter. The article, notable for Biden’s discomfort at the time with Roe v. Wade, is a very good piece throughout.
An excerpt:
His 29-year-old sister Valerie and her husband Bruce have moved into the Senator’s house to take care of the children. He commutes from Wilmington every day to be with them when they wake up in the morning and go to bed at night. They like visiting him here, and it is not unusual to see two little blondes streaking through Biden’s reception room. Both seem adjusted to the loss. Beau, now five years old, explains the situation with simplicity: “My father works in his office with the Senators and my mother is in heaven.”
***
Named one of the ten best-dressed men in the Senate, Joe Biden looks like Robert Redford’s Great Gatsby in natty pin-striped suits, elegant silk ties, and black tassled loafers. He dresses rich. “I’m a suit-and-tie kind of guy,” he says. “I’ve been this way all my life. I even wore a tie in college. My wife thought I dressed too conservatively and so she would buy a lot of my clothes which is probably the only reason I look so good.” He looks like a Senator—complete with receding hairline and gravelly voice. He has immense self-confidence. He doesn’t smoke and doesn’t drink. Although he makes deprecating noises about some senators and calls Congress an antiquated nineteenth-century institution, he still is proud of his position. He thoroughly enjoys being a politician. “I am proud to be a politician. There is no other walk of life which can do more good for mankind than politics. It influences every thing that happens to the American people. You might think I’m off the wall when I say this, but I believe what Plato said 2,000 years ago: ‘The penalty good men pay for not becoming involved in politics is being governed by men worse than themselves.”
He defines politics as power. “And, whether you like it or not, young lady,” he says, leaning over his desk to shake a finger at me, “us cruddy politicians can take away that First Amendrnent of yours if we want to.” There’s no time to pursue the point—Biden is summoned o the floor for a vote. On the way over to the Capitol he channels the conversation away from politics, talking about his family: “This is really a big deal for them. I’m the only Senator any of us have ever known. We never even knew anyone who knew a Senator before. At first my dad tried to talk me into running for governor but I told him I didn’t want to be a damn old administrator. I wanted to come to Washington and get something accomplished. He calls me champ now. He and Mike Mansfield are probably the most decent men I’ve ever known. My dad never went to college [he’s an automobile sales manager in Wilmington] and he had never been involved in politics until I started campaigning. But he loves it.”•
In this 1960 clip, Arthur C. Clarke acknowledges the “only thing that is sure about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic,” before promising by the year 2000 we would genetically engineer servant monkeys, abolish cities and utilize instant-communication devices.
He was right, of course, in believing the transistor would allow us to immediately reach one another at all times as well as telecommute, though he felt these changes might mean the end of city living, which, of course, was far off the mark. He was too bold in his predictions about bioengineering, though he’ll likely be right should Homo sapiens survive potential climate-change disaster. (I don’t, however, think that “servant monkeys” will be the direction we go.) Clarke further thought we would tinker with the human brain so that we could learn Chinese overnight and erase bad memories. Unsurprisingly, the co-creator of HAL-9000 envisioned conscious machines zooming past our intelligence, biological evolution reaching its endgame and organic life having served its purpose as a stepping stone to greater knowledge.
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In this clip, philosopher, LSD guru and countercultural icon Dr. Timothy Leary and his wife Rosemary deplane in Algeria and, after a few words with reporters, walk into the waiting of arms of fugitive Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver.
The backstory: During his1970 gubernatorial raceagainst Ronald Reagan in California, Leary was railroaded into a 20-year prison sentence for the dubious charge of possession of two joints. He escaped from the penitentiary, spent time in Algeria with Cleaver before the two had a falling out and was finally recaptured at an airport in Afghanistan. Leary was returned to the states to continue his sentence atFolsom Prison.
California Governor Jerry Brown released Leary in 1976 and the controversial figure spent the last two decades of his life encouraging the construction of space colonies and being an early Internet enthusiast.
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Below is a trailer for Lord of the Universe, a 1974 documentary about adolescent guru Maharaj Ji, who came to some fame in those days for promising to levitate the Houston Astrodome, a plot that never got off the ground. More than any other holy-ish person of the time, the Indian teenager would have fit in quite nicely in Silicon Valley of 2015. He was a technocrat who believed he could disrupt and improve the world. Sound familiar?
Theformer child preacher Marjoe Gortner was hired by OUI, a middling vagina periodical of the Magazine Age, to write a deservedly mocking article about the American visit of the self-appointed messiah. Two excerpts from theresulting report.
The guru’s people do the same thing the Pentecostal Church does. They say you can believe in guru Maharaj Ji and that’s fantastic and good, but if you receive light and get it all within, if you become a real devotee-that is the ultimate. In the Pentecostal Church you can be saved from your sins and have Jesus Christ as your Saviour, but the ultimate is the baptism of the Holy Ghost. This is where you get four or five people around and they begin to talk and more or less chant in tongues until sooner or later the person wanting the baptismal experience so much-well, it’s like joining a country club: once you’re in, you’ll be like everyone – else in the club.
The people who’ve been chanting say, “Speak it out, speak it out,” and everything becomes so frenzied that the baptismalee will finally speak a few words in tongues himself, and the people around him say, “Oh, you’ve got it.” And the joy that comes over everybody’s faces! It’s incredible. It’s beautiful. They feel they have got the Holy Spirit like all their friends, and once they’ve got it, it’s forever. It’s quite an experience.
So essentially they’re the same thing pressing on your eyes while your ears are corked, and standing around the altar speaking in tongues. They’re both illuminating experiences. The guru’s path is interesting, though. Once you’ve seen the light and decided you want to join his movement, you give over everything you have–all material possessions. Sometimes you even give your job. Now, depending on what your job is, you may be told to leave it or to stay. If you stay, generally you turn your pay checks over to the Divine Light Mission, and they see that you are housed and clothed and fed. They have their U. S. headquarters in Denver. You don’t have to worry about anything. That’s their hook. They take care of it all. They have houses all over the country for which they supposedly paid cash on the line. First class. Some of them are quite plush. At least Maharaj Ji’s quarters are. Some of the followers live in those houses, too, but in the dormitory-type atmosphere with straw mats for beds. It’s a large operation. It seems to be a lot like the organization Father Divine had back in the Thirties. He did it with the black people at the Peace Mission in Philadelphia. He took care of his people-mostly domestics and other low-wage earners–and put them up in his own hotel with three meals a day.
The guru is much more technologically oriented, though. He spreads a lot of word and keeps tabs on who needs what through a very sophisticated Telex system that reaches out to all the communes or ashrams around the country. He can keep count of who needs how many T-shirts, pairs of socks–stuff like that. And his own people run this system; it’s free labor for the corporation.
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The morning of the third day I was feeling blessed and refreshed, and I was looking forward to the guru’s plans for the Divine City, which was soon going to be built somewhere in the U. S. I wanted to hear what that was all about.
It was unbelievable. The city was to consist of ‘modular units adaptable to any desired shape.’ The structures would have waste-recycling devices so that water could be drunk over and over. They even planned to have toothbrushes with handles you could squeeze to have the proper amount of paste pop up (the crowd was agog at this). There would be a computer in each communal house so that with just a touch of the hand you could check to see if a book you wanted was available, and if it was, it would be hand-messengered to you. A complete modern city of robots. I was thinking: whatever happened to mountains and waterfalls and streams and fresh air? This was going to be a technological, computerized nightmare! It repulsed me. Computer cards to buy essentials at a central storeroom! And no cheating, of course. If you flashed your card for an item you already had, the computer would reject it. The perfect turn-off. The spokesman for this city announced that the blueprints had already been drawn up and actual construction would be the next step. Controlled rain, light, and space. Bubble power! It was all beginning to be very frightening.•
The retreat of the middle class began before the rise of Reagan and Thatcher, but their supply-side policies, which promised to rectify this backslide, to create one big class of haves, was always farce played as drama, voodoo offered as science. Instead, these schemes, which were credited with defeating communism, may have ultimately done the same to capitalism as we know it. The reality has become even starker since the rally which followed the post-2008 collapse has been a recovery of the few. A reconfiguring is desperately needed.
In the “The Middle-Class Squeeze,” Charles Moore’s article at the WSJ, the essayist looks at howthis contemporary discomfort has been good for hard-right and -left politicians and not much else. Moore says that “pretty much the whole of the developed world is still in the convalescent ward” and offers some prescriptions, including more employee-owned companies. It’s probably going to require much more than that in the U.S., including a serious reworking of our tax codes. An excerpt:
In Britain and the U.S., we are learning all over again that it is not the natural condition of the human race for children to be better off than their parents. Such a regression, in societies that assume constant progress, is striking. Imagine the panic if the same thing happened to life expectancy.
When things go backward in nations accustomed to middle-class stability, people start to ask questions. What is the use of capitalism if its rewards go to the few and its risks are dumped on the many? The rights of property do not seem so enticing if the value of what you own collapses or if that property is trapped by debt. What is so great about globalization if it means that the products and services you offer are undercut by foreign competition and that millions of new people can come to your country, take your jobs and enjoy your welfare benefits?
Great international banks and other corporations—and their top executives—can devise a life that escapes normal tax jurisdictions. Their successes are globalized and accrue chiefly to them; their failures crawl back home to die, at the expense of the rest of us.
So instead of feeling that it is a privilege to be an ordinary citizen of a free country, many of us start to feel a bit like suckers. Hope—the inseparable companion of progress—fades and is replaced by disappointment, even bitterness. It has always been understood that opportunity carries some price of insecurity, but what happens if insecurity rises and opportunity contracts?•
I admire Jack Kerouac for not accepting the pretty version of things but could have withstood his self-seriousness, smoking and drinking for about five minutes without screaming. That being said, the embedded 1959 clip of him on Steve Allen’s show is fun. Before reading from On the Road, he defines the word “Beat” as meaning “sympathetic.”
In a 1952 New York Times Magazine piece, “This Is the Beat Generation,” which explained the movement to the masses, John Clellon Holmes also attempted to demystify the term:
Any attempt to label an entire generation is unrewarding, and yet the generation which went through the last war, or at least could get a drink easily once it was over, seems to possess a uniform, general quality which demands an adjective … The origins of the word “beat” are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most Americans. More than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness. In short, it means being undramatically pushed up against the wall of oneself. A man is beat whenever he goes for broke and wagers the sum of his resources on a single number; and the young generation has done that continually from early youth.•
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The Olivier of oral and progenitor of the pornstache, Harry Reems saw his work on the landmark 1972 skin-flick Deep Throat lead to years of prosecution on obscenity charges. Reems ultimately was victorious, and converted to Christianity in later life. An excerpt from Margalit Fox’s 2013 obituary of him in the New York Times:
Mr. Reems, who began his career in the 1960s as a struggling stage actor, had already made dozens of pornographic films when he starred opposite Ms. Lovelace in Deep Throat.
But where his previous movies were mostly the obscure, short, grainy, plotless stag films known as loops, Deep Throat, which had set design, occasional costumes, dialogue punctuated by borscht-belt humor and an actual plot of sorts, was Cinema.
Mr. Reems played Dr. Young, a physician whose diagnostic brilliance — he locates the rare anatomical quirk that makes Ms. Lovelace’s character vastly prefer oral sex to intercourse — is matched by his capacity for tireless ministration.
“I was always the doctor,” he told New York magazine in 2005, “because I was the one that had an acting background. I would say: ‘You’re having trouble with oral sex? Well, here’s how to do it.’ Cut to a 20-minute oral-sex scene.”•
In 1976, William F. Buckley “welcomes” Reems and his attorney, a wild-haired Alan Dershowitz.
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Barbra Streisand chats up Golda Meir in 1978 as part of The Stars Salute Israel at 30, which is amusing, despite the atrocious canned laughter. Probably the best Meir inquisition wasconducted by Oriana Fallaci, who had an affinity for the Israeli leader, who reminded her of her mother, despite not agreeing with all of the Prime Minister’s politics. An excerpt:
Oriana Fallaci:
Shall we talk about the woman Ben-Gurion called ‘the ablest man in my cabinet?’
Golda Meir:
That’s one of the legends that have grown up around me. It’s also a legend I’ve always found irritating, though men use it as a great compliment. Is it? I wouldn’t say so. Because what does it really mean? That it’s better to be a man than a woman, a principle on which I don’t agree at all. So here’s what I’d like to say to those who make me such a compliment. And what if Ben-Gurion had said, ‘The men in my cabinet are as able as a woman’? Men always feel so superior. I’ll never forget what happened at a congress of my party in New York in the 1930s. I made a speech and in the audience there was a writer friend of mine. An honest person, a man of great culture and refinement. When it was over he came up to me and exclaimed, ‘Congratulations! You’ve made a wonderful speech! And to think you’re only a woman!’ That’s just what he said in such a spontaneous, instinctive way. It’s a good thing I have a sense of humor….
Oriana Fallaci:
The Women’s Liberation Movement will like that, Mrs. Meir.
Golda Meir:
Do you mean those crazy women who burn their bras and go around all disheveled and hate men? They’re crazy. Crazy. But how can one accept such crazy women who think that it’s a misfortune to get pregnant and a disaster to bring children into the world? And when it’s the greatest privilege we women have over men.•
The Economist has a report on the booming drone industry, which has grown many times faster than even most enthusiasts supposed it could, with 15,000 units now sold each month. Legislation clearly hasn’t kept pace with the innovation, so the article suggests the easiest way to arrive at proper rules of the “road” might be to allow the new tools to launch relatively undeterred, enabling us to “lead from behind” with experience as our guide. It certainly worked that way with the fledgling aviation industry of the early twentieth century, when thousands of startups attempted to build on and commodify the Wright brothers’ soaring success.
A hammer, however, is a tool or a weapon depending on how you swing it, and terrorists as well as Taco Bell would like to employ delivery drones. But while criminals might benefit from crowded skies in avoiding early detection, they’re also the least likely to remain within the boundaries of the law, so they can’t be the only priority when drawing up such guidelines. Such concerns probably need to be addressed with myriad approaches.
From a practical standpoint, the Economist identifies the industry’s two key needs: drones able to stay in the air for at least an hour and the development of sense-and-avoid technology.
The opening:
THE scale and scope of the revolution in the use of small, civilian drones has caught many by surprise. In 2010 America’s Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) estimated that there would, by 2020, be perhaps 15,000 such drones in the country. More than that number are now sold there every month. And it is not just an American craze. Some analysts think the number of drones made and sold around the world this year will exceed 1m. In their view, what is now happening to drones is similar to what happened to personal computers in the 1980s, when Apple launched the Macintosh and IBM the PS/2, and such machines went from being hobbyists’ toys to business essentials.
That is probably an exaggeration. It is hard to think of a business which could not benefit from a PC, whereas many may not benefit (at least directly) from drones. But the practical use of these small, remote-controlled aircraft is expanding rapidly. After dragging its feet for several years the FAA had, by August, approved more than 1,000 commercial drone operations. These involved areas as diverse as agriculture (farmers use drones to monitor crop growth, insect infestations and areas in need of watering at a fraction of the cost of manned aerial surveys); land-surveying; film-making (some of the spectacular footage in “Avengers: Age of Ultron” was shot from a drone, which could fly lower and thus collect more dramatic pictures than a helicopter); security; and delivering things (Swiss Post has a trial drone-borne parcel service for packages weighing up to 1kg, and many others, including Amazon, UPS and Google, are looking at similar ideas).•
Donald Trump, a shrimp-boat barnacle who’s managed to stain adultery’s good name, believes China has “created” the concept of climate change to prevent America from competing in manufacturing. China, with the world’s highest cancer and air-pollution rates, clearly disagrees, finally bowing to political pressure and agreeing to institute cap-and-trade.
It’s breathtaking news with a caveat: The process won’t be easily enforceable in a country rife with corruption and political opaqueness. But it’s a critical first step, and one that will hopefully make the type of impact that America’s Clean Air Act has. From Michael Greenstone’s NYT Upshot post about that U.S. legislation and how it relates to China’s bold move:
The history and impact of the Clean Air Act can serve as a valuable case study for countries that are struggling today with the extraordinary pollution that we once faced. In Northern China, where pollution is curtailing lives by an average offive years, the government has at last declared a “war on pollution.” While enforcement is not perfect, the government has improved transparency andamendedenvironmental protection laws to impose stricter punishments against polluters.
The hundreds of millions of life-years saved from improved air quality in our country didn’t happen by accident or overnight. This happened because a collective voice for change brought about one of the most influential laws of the land.
As the United States and other nations continue to debate the costs of environmental regulation, they can do so with the knowledge that the benefits can be substantial. As proof, we need look no further than the five extra years residents of Weirton-Steubenville are living and the hundreds of millions of years gained by Americans throughout the nation.•
Effective Altruism is certainly better than doing no good at all, and belittling its true believers while doing less than them doesn’t make anyone morally superior, but there’s something of Pangloss’ misplaced confidence in believing back-of-the-napkin “moral calculations” and “philanthropic formulas” can cure the ills of a spinning, jagged world resistant to such neat solutions. While EA adherents clearly don’t think the rising tide of consumerism will, on its own, lift all boats, they do feel enough people using rigorous logic to co-opt capitalism to benefit those less fortunate is the most effective life preserver.
In “Stop the Robot Apocalypse,” her excellent if misleadingly titled London Review of Books piece about William MacAskill’s Doing Good Better, Amia Srinivasan wonders about this system of charity that’s certainly more nebulous than Utilitarianism. She asks, among other things, if the participation of Effective Altruists in capitalism actually perpetuates and exacerbates the wrongs they purport to heal. She also questions if it’s wise to icily wring all emotion from decisions about the “worthiness” or “arbitrariness” of a cause.
An excerpt:
Doing Good Better is a feel-good guide to getting good done. It doesn’t dwell much on the horrors of global inequality, and sidesteps any diagnosis of its causes. The word ‘oppression’ appears just once. This is surely by design, at least in part. According to MacAskill’s moral worldview, it is the consequences of one’s actions that really matter, and that’s as true of writing a book as it is of donating to charity. His patter is calculated for maximal effect: if the book weren’t so cheery, MacAskill couldn’t expect to inspire as much do-gooding, and by his own lights that would be a moral failure. (I’m not saying it doesn’t work. Halfway through reading the book I set up a regular donation to GiveDirectly, one of the charities MacAskill endorses for its proven efficacy. It gives unconditional direct cash transfers to poor households in Uganda and Kenya.)
But the book’s snappy style isn’t just a strategic choice. MacAskill is evidently comfortable with ways of talking that are familiar from the exponents of global capitalism: the will to quantify, the essential comparability of all goods and all evils, the obsession with productivity and efficiency, the conviction that there is a happy convergence between self-interest and morality, the seeming confidence that there is no crisis whose solution is beyond the ingenuity of man. He repeatedly talks about philanthropy as a deal too good to pass up: ‘It’s like a 99 per cent off sale, or buy one, get 99 free. It might be the most amazing deal you’ll see in your life.’ There is a seemingly unanswerable logic, at once natural and magical, simple and totalising, to both global capitalism and effective altruism. That he speaks in the proprietary language of the illness – global inequality – whose symptoms he proposes to mop up is an irony on which he doesn’t comment. Perhaps he senses that his potential followers – privileged, ambitious millennials – don’t want to hear about the iniquities of the system that has shaped their worldview. Or perhaps he thinks there’s no irony here at all: capitalism, as always, produces the means of its own correction, and effective altruism is just the latest instance.
Yet there is no principled reason why effective altruists should endorse the worldview of the benevolent capitalist. Since effective altruism is committed to whatever would maximise the social good, it might for example turn out to support anti-capitalist revolution. And although MacAskill focuses on health as a proxy for goodness, there is no principled reason, as he points out, why effective altruism couldn’t also plug values like justice, dignity or self-determination into its algorithms. (There’s also no reason why one couldn’t ‘earn to give’ to help radical causes; Engels worked at a mill in Manchester to support Marx’s writing of Capital.) Effective altruism has so far been a rather homogeneous movement of middle-class white men fighting poverty through largely conventional means, but it is at least in theory a broad church.•
Part 2 of Alexander R. George’s 1938 Brooklyn Daily Eaglefeature about life 25 years in the future isn’t quite as daring as Part 1, focusing instead on sensible if very hopeful predictions for a society still dealing with the fallout of the Great Depression and yet to lead the Allies to victory in WWII: longer lifespans, healthier citizens, etc. Perhaps most interesting are the fashion prognostications. Americans did wearer fewer and less-formal clothes by 1963, and women discarded corsets, but those expected glass raincoats that protected against lightning never did come to pass.
