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“There Is An Automation Revolution In China”

September 11, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

“Robots will show up in China just in time,” Daniel Kahneman has reportedly said, and that’s probably a true statement, though not an uncomplicated one. In order to sustain itself with a giant population that will go gray without also developing widespread automation, China will need robotics on a mass scale. Of course, the problem is huge swaths of the employed will be disappeared from their jobs. They will be promised a better life, better positions, but these guarantees won’t likely be true. It will be a transitional phase with great pain.

Other nations that will have to keep pace with China in this new “arms race,” even if they don’t have the same complex population issues. These countries, America included, will have to seek political solutions.

From Yue Wang at the South China Morning Post:

There is an automation revolution in China. Factory owners are turning to robots amid rising labour costs, worker-protests and greater demand for quality. In 2013, the country overtook Japan as the world’s largest market for industrial robots, accounting for 20 per cent of global supply, according to the International Federation of Robotics, an industry group based in Germany.

As robots march into Chinese factories, global automation companies are racing to invest. Demand is primarily driven by the car sector, which accounts for 40 to 50 per cent of robot demand in China, according to consultancy Solidiance.

But the big race is now in the electronics sector.  Adapting robots to the needs of fast-changing production lines is a challenge for global players such as Japan’s Fanuc Corp, Yaskawa Electric Corp, German’s Kuka Corp and Swiss robot maker ABB.

“Robotics has the limitation of requiring intensive change-out to adapt to a new product model or production line scenario,” says Pilar Dieter, a partner at Solidiance. “If a robotics manufacturer can solve this dilemma, they will certainly hold a coveted position in the market.”•

 

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Old Print Article: Examing Hitler’s 16,000-Volume Library, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1942)

September 10, 2015 in Books, Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Karl May, left, in 1904.

Karl May, left, in 1904.

Making complete sense of the perfect storm of hatred and insanity that enabled Nazi Germany is impossible, but still we try. Are there any clues in the elaborate personal library that madman Adolf Hitler assembled? Probably not, but for curiosity’s sake, he was particularly enamored with the work of Karl May, a writer of Westerns who never visited America. (In all fairness to May, Albert Einstein was also a fan.) During the heat of WWII, an article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle looked at the titles on Hitler’s shelves, trying to make some sense of it all.

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“I’ve Seen How Quickly New Roles Can Appear And Disappear”

September 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Education now is largely preparation for a world that won’t exist on graduation day, and it’s not entirely the fault of our learning system. No one can really pinpoint where to from here, not with robotics and AI moving forward in a rapid but unpredictable manner. It’s difficult to learn to dance on a moving floor. Professions can rise and fall in a day, relatively speaking.

In a Fast Company piece, Ryan Holmes offers prescriptions which aren’t new but are the best we currently have: a more free-range education based on the Montessori method and guaranteed basic income. An excerpt:

White-collar roles once thought to be the exclusive domain of human beings could also end up on the chopping block. The first to go, according to the experts Pew surveyed, include paralegals, bookkeepers, transcriptionists, and medical secretaries. The widespread use of DIY tax and finance software and automatic transcription tools like Siri only hints at the changes to come in these sectors. The important thing to note is that these jobs aren’t just repetitive mechanical functions. They require an ability to learn and adapt to new information. And this is precisely why the coming AI revolution is so scary.

I’ve seen how quickly new roles can appear and disappear even in my own sector, social media. Just a few years ago, “social media manager” was one of the most in-demand job functions on the career site Indeed.com. Then social media management tools—including those made by my company, Hootsuite—became more widespread and easy to use. Social media use has increased exponentially since then, but demand for dedicated social media managers hasn’t kept pace. This is still a critical role in large organizations, but for many businesses, ever more sophisticated technology has transformed social media from a discrete job into something that people all across an organization can do. …

Promoting creativity and encouraging independent thinking might help us stay ahead of job losses in the short term. But in the long term, advanced robots may well be able to execute even some of these uniquely “human” functions better than we can. Here we’re getting into the realm of “strong” or “full” AI—machines that aren’t just able to learn basic tasks but can master pretty much anything. If you’re a futurist, this is when talk of the “singularity” comes into the picture—the moment when computers can make themselves smarter, leading to capabilities that match, and then quickly exceed, our own.•

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“I Think That American Exceptionalism Will Be The Death Of Us”

September 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Politics | Permalink

More than any other reason, Donald Trump has supporters–a loud minority, no matter what he says–because some Americans feel awful and want to stamp their feet and say they’re great. That’s what people do when they’re at their worst, their most bitter. Easier to do that than seek real solutions.

Michael Moore is releasing a new documentary about American militarism, the brilliantly titled Where to Invade Next, and sat for a Q&A with the Vice staff. (They’ve labeled it an “exclusive” because Moore is famously shy and probably won’t do any more press for the film.) I interviewed Moore years ago and he’s a nice, bright guy, though I don’t agree with his political purity. That’s what led him to support Ralph Nader in 2000, in the ludicrous belief that there was no difference Bush and Gore. It’s what drove Moore to lambaste the Affordable Care Act, a flawed piece of legislation I’ll agree, but a marked improvement and a huge step in the right direction. Whether it’s some demanding exceptionalism or others accepting only perfection, it’s puzzling when adults see the world in only black and white.

An excerpt from Vice:

Question:

But don’t you also think that the country has to be open to introspection? The narrative of American exceptionalism—the idea that this is the best, bravest, most free country ever—to me suggests a culture that is not introspective. Do you think Americans are introspective?

Michael Moore:

Well, I think that American exceptionalism will be the death of us. It’s almost like saying we don’t really need to find a cure for cancer ’cause we’re big enough and brave enough to suck it up and get through it. It’s the sort of belief that we’re on top when we’re not.

Question:

What do you think politicians are trying to say when they talk about American exceptionalism?

Michael Moore:

They’re trying to make people feel good, who deep down inside don’t feel good… In America we keep saying, “We’re number one, we’re number one,” and it’s at the point now where we need to think about who we are really trying to convince.

The facts don’t bear it out. We’re not number one in education, we’re not number one in mass transit, we’re not number one in health care, we’re not number one in… name it, you know?

Question:

So is your film documenting the death of the American dream?

Michael Moore:

I think you could say that about my earlier films, but I think that that so-called dream is already dead. And people know it. But they also really realize that it’s also just what it says it was: a dream. It wasn’t the American reality. It was a dream. And the dream has become a nightmare for millions of people because they’re not going to get the life that their parents had, and they know their kids are not going to get to have the life that they’ve had.•

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“Political Orders Change”

September 9, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Can Homo sapiens survive climate change, the long recovery process that will follow it and become a thriving multi-planet species? Not without huge changes.

In an excellent Nautilus interview astrobiologist David Grinspoon conducted with writer Kim Stanley Robinson, the sci-fi author discusses how humans can endure the Anthropocene. Robinson believes it will require a global economic system with ecology at its heart. Hard to imagine that shift, even with a planetary Easter Island in our eyes. Perhaps when it’s even clearer that there’s no other choice we’ll make the right one?

One exchange:

David Grinspoon: 

So, are we talking evolution or revolution? Do we need to escape from path dependence and start anew?

Kim Stanley Robinson: 

No, we have to alter the system we already have, because like an animal with evolutionary constraints, we can’t change everything and start from scratch. But what we could do is reconstruct regulations on the existing global economic system. For this, we would need to wrench capitalism so that the global rules of the World Bank, etc., required ecological sustainability as their main criterion. That way, prices would shift to match their true costs. Burning carbon would cost more than it does now, and clean energy would become cheaper than burning carbon. This would address the most pressing part of our crisis, but finding a replacement for the market to allocate goods and price them is not easy.

As we enter this new mass extinction event, at some point there is going to be a global civilization response that will try to deal with it: try to cope, survive, and repair landscapes and ecosystems. The scientific method and democratic politics are going to be the crucial tools, I’d say. For them to work, we need universal justice and education because we need active and well-educated citizens who are empowered and live at adequacy.

From where we are now, this looks pretty hard, but I think that’s because capitalism as we know it is represented as natural, entrenched, and immutable. None of that is true. It’s a political order and political orders change. What we want is to remember that our system is constructed for a purpose, and so in need of constant fixing and new tries.•

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“Drones Are Set To Become A Defining Feature Of This Century”

September 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The sluggishness of legislation to keep pace with drone development isn’t a surprise, but it’s still worrisome. Looking back to the Montgolfier brothers’ 18th-century experimentation with hot-air ballooning and forward to a time when the drone is ubiquitous, Gbenga Oduntan of the Conversation wonders about the future of international regulation, a thorny enterprise for sure. An excerpt:

Drones are set to become a defining feature of this century. Thousands are already in operation in most developed countries worldwide – and that is likely to grow to hundreds of thousands as drones of different shapes and sizes are deployed by the media, emergency services, scientists, farmers, sports enthusiasts, hobbyists, photographers, the armed forces and government agencies.

Eventually commercial uses will dwarf all others. Amazon promises to deliver purchases within 30 minutes via delivery drones. Domino’s Pizza has staged hot pizza drone delivery. More than 20 industries are approved to fly commercial drones in the US alone, and developing countries are following suit.

The question is, is this boom in drones moving faster than the law? How to fit such a proliferation of drones into the current regulations? The answers will need to be written into national and international laws quickly in order to govern an increasingly busy airspace. Many existing laws may need to be tweaked, including those governing cyber-security, stalking, privacy and human rights legislation, insurance, contract and commercial law, even the laws of war.•

“I Fear That The IRS Doesn’t Have The Courage To Take On Scientology”

September 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It might seem strange to call a filmmaker a writer of perfect essays, but that’s an apt description of Alex Gibney. The director consistently turns out potent work that brims with intelligence and never loses its precision despite the great passion propelling it. Having just followed up a documentary about one popular storyteller (L. Ron Hubbard) with a film about another one (Steve Jobs), Gibney did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

____________________________

Question:

Have any Scientologists done anything in retribution for Going Clear to you personally? I thought it was a great documentary by the way.

Alex Gibney:

They have tried to make my life uncomfortable through online harassment and occasional in-person confrontations. But it’s what they are doing to the subjects of the film that is really terrible. Those who appeared have reported harassment by PIs, economic and physical threats and lots of on-line vilification.

____________________________

Question:

My question is about Going Clear. At the end of the film, you display a list of high ranking Scientologists who refused to be interviewed or never responded to your interview requests. Among those is Tom Cruise and Captain David Miscavige. What would you like to have asked these men, if you had been given the opportunity?

Alex Gibney:

I would have asked them both about specific aspects of the story. For example, I would have asked Cruise detailed questions about the Nazanin Boniadi episode. I also would have asked him how it is that he can defend the allegations of human rights abuses that have been confirmed by so many. Re: Miscavige, I would have asked him detailed questions about the battle against the IRS and also about the hole and the Cruise wiretap and so much much more. I find it instructive that Miscavige won’t permit anyone to ask him questions.

____________________________

Question:

Do you see Scientology continuing to have tax exempt status, or do you think the “religion” is on the way out?

Alex Gibney:

I fear that the IRS doesn’t have the courage to take on Scientology. I think they should lose their exemption because they are really a money-making organization disguised as a religion and because the church has an appalling human rights record. Why should we subsidize that? I wrote a piece about this in the L.A. Times.

Question:

Isn’t that pretty much true of all organized religions?

Alex Gibney:

Depends. I don’t have any problem with subsidizing anti-poverty programs. But I think the exemption should be based on that – which in theory it is supposed to be – rather than on belief in a deity.

____________________________

Question:

What do you make of Pope Francis and his tenure as Pontiff? Shockingly, MEA MAXIMA CULPA gave me more respect for Pope Benedict, and I lost a lot of respect for Pope John Paul II.

Alex Gibney:

I am truly impressed by Pope Francis. I love his principled stands on the growing disparity between rich and poor and the destruction of our environment. He has changed things more than I ever thought possible and acted as a moral force for change for everyone. I find it appalling that prominent wealthy Catholics suggest that he should not involve himself in economic issues. If a Pope can’t talk about morality and economic justice, he shouldn’t be Pope.

____________________________

Question:

What were you most surprised to learn about Steve Jobs?

Alex Gibney:

Three things. 1) I was fascinated to find out about his interest in zen. What CEO has a monk as a spiritual advisor? 2) I was surprised to learn how much the teams at Apple took care of invention of the actual products. Steve was more of a storyteller.

Question:

What’s number 3?

Alex Gibney:

Good question.•

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“I’m Number One With Hispanics”

September 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

The Economist interview with Donald Trump isn’t as woeful as the Maureen Dowd one for the New York Times, but it still isn’t very good. There are precious few follow-up questions to counter the subject’s usual nonsense about race, global politics and his biography and nothing at all about how consistently and drastically wrong this self-styled economic genius has been about money matters in recent years. It seems the publication was happy to have a Q&A with someone so prominently in the news and performed like a matador, stepping aside to let the bull rush on through. When someone’s made the type of odious racist and xenophobic statements Trump has, sounding deeply fascistic in the process, either do a thorough job or don’t do it at all. 

Two exchanges follow.

_______________________

The Economist:

If the terms of trade can be changed, as you say, why haven’t today’s politicians of either party done it?

Donald Trump:

Because they’re grossly incompetent. And they are not negotiators. And they are grossly incompetent. And I have friends from China – by the way I love China. I love Japan. I have people that buy my apartments, I have people that work for me from China. I love Mexico. I mean, Mexico, I have thousands of people from Mexico that work for me. Thousands. Hispanics. In fact a poll just came out, Public Policy Polling, where I am leading with Hispanics, can you believe that, after what you have been hearing? I’m leading, I’m number one with Hispanics.

_______________________

The Economist:

You use the phrase “silent majority” that Nixon used in 1969. Do you hear echoes of that time now?

Donald Trump:

No, it doesn’t echo. I’ll tell you what. I’ve heard the term, but for the last 20 years I really haven’t heard the term. But I went to a rally in Alabama, and there were 31,000 people there, you’ve seen it, you’ve read about it. It was the largest, the most amount of people – a lot of people say in the history of primaries, because you know, I mean, you are talking about…certainly in the history of early primaries. Because 31,000 people. It was going to be in a hotel, 500 people, and then it turned out to be 10,000 people and then it turned… so we went from a hotel to a convention centre to a football stadium. So we had 31,000 people and it was amazing. And I looked and I said, this is the silent majority. Though they weren’t silent, because they want to see proper change, not Obama change. And what happened is, I thought of that term, I just said the words silent majority. Now, it hasn’t been used in a long time because I guess it is associated somewhat with Nixon. But honestly it’s two words, that when you put together describe what is happening very well. There’s a group of people, great people in this country that have been disenfranchised. Their country has been taken away from them. Things have happened, having to do with many things including political correctness, where people are so worried about being politically correct that they are unable to function. And with me, hey, look I’m politically correct, I went to a great school, I was a good student, look, I’m a smart guy. I built a great company. I did The Art of the Deal which is the number one selling business book of all time, I did many other best-sellers. You know, I did 12 best-sellers. I did The Apprentice, which was one of the most successful television shows of the last 25 years. You know, all that stuff. But the words “silent majority”, the words “silent majority” are very descriptive of what is happening with me.•

 

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“New Forms Of Slavery Are The Hallmark Of These Wealthy Countries”

September 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

You can find in President Trump’s support the desire for an illusory America that will never be. The very complex problems which the candidate is ill-prepared to address have been dutifully avoided. There’s no discussion of automation vanishing jobs. There’s no talk about how China is the world leader in cancer rates and air pollution as partial payment for its hellbent shift into capitalism. You’ll hear from Trump that Dubai has such beautiful, modern airports and lavish golf courses because that state’s leaders are much smarter than ours are, but there’s no mention of their willingness to use quasi-slave labor. 

In a London Review of Books piece about the ongoing refugee crisis, Slavoj Žižek examines the need for a nouveau forms of slavery in the contemporary global economy. These people are still cheaper than machines, for now.

An excerpt:

New forms of slavery are the hallmark of these wealthy countries: millions of immigrant workers on the Arabian peninsula are deprived of elementary civil rights and freedoms; in Asia, millions of workers live in sweatshops organised like concentration camps. But there are examples closer to home. On 1 December 2013 a Chinese-owned clothing factory in Prato, near Florence, burned down, killing seven workers trapped in an improvised cardboard dormitory. ‘No one can say they are surprised at this,’ Roberto Pistonina, a local trade unionist, remarked, ‘because everyone has known for years that, in the area between Florence and Prato, hundreds if not thousands of people are living and working in conditions of near slavery.’ There are more than four thousand Chinese-owned businesses in Prato, and thousands of Chinese immigrants are believed to be living in the city illegally, working as many as 16 hours a day for a network of workshops and wholesalers.

The new slavery is not confined to the suburbs of Shanghai, or Dubai, or Qatar. It is in our midst; we just don’t see it, or pretend not to see it. Sweated labour is a structural necessity of today’s global capitalism. Many of the refugees entering Europe will become part of its growing precarious workforce, in many cases at the expense of local workers, who react to the threat by joining the latest wave of anti-immigrant populism.

In escaping their war-torn homelands, the refugees are possessed by a dream. Refugees arriving in southern Italy do not want to stay there: many of them are trying to get to Scandinavia. The thousands of migrants in Calais are not satisfied with France: they are ready to risk their lives to enter the UK. Tens of thousands of refugees in Balkan countries are desperate to get to Germany. They assert their dreams as their unconditional right, and demand from the European authorities not only proper food and medical care but also transportation to the destination of their choice. There is something enigmatically utopian in this demand: as if it were the duty of Europe to realise their dreams – dreams which, incidentally, are out of reach of most Europeans (surely a good number of Southern and Eastern Europeans would prefer to live in Norway too?). It is precisely when people find themselves in poverty, distress and danger – when we’d expect them to settle for a minimum of safety and wellbeing – that their utopianism becomes most intransigent. But the hard truth to be faced by the refugees is that ‘there is no Norway,’ even in Norway.•

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Old Print Article: H.G. Wells Opposes Teaching History, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1937)

September 8, 2015 in Books, Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Perhaps it was his background in biology that made H.G. Wells believe that the differences among us were smaller than politics made them out to be.

The author, who in the 1890s wrote a series of classic novels of science fiction decades before that genre was named, believed schools were using the teaching of history to instill a dangerous strain of nationalism. He called for a shift to a less ideological view of the past. A brief article in the September 5, 1937 Brooklyn Daily Eagle recalls the marks that caused something of a sensation.

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“We Can Generate Millions Of Stories In A Matter Of Minutes”

September 7, 2015 in Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

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A little more of Jerry Kaplan and his new book, Humans Need Not Apply, is on display in Anthony Mason’s CBS News report “The Future of Work and Play.” Most of the piece will be familiar to those already thinking about the perplexing question of how a free-market economy can operate if it becomes a highly automated one, with discussion of driverless cars, algorithms thinning the ranks of blue- and white-collar workers alike, etc.

Most interesting is a visit to the Associated Press, which has begun relying on software to rapidly transform raw data into its inverted-triangle pieces, stories that can pass for human-level composition. Both the software makers and the AP say the innovation has complemented workers, not replaced them.

Still, NYU Professor Gary Marcus offers that a guaranteed minimum income from the state to citizens (likely through the taxation of capital) is ultimately the endgame of automation. View here.

 

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“Many Workers Take Them By Necessity, Not Choice”

September 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Gig Economy has been on the margins of America, but the fear is that it’s going mainstream. If technology, which hasn’t proved to be the worker’s friend, allows contingent employment to become the norm, we really aren’t arranged to handle that new reality. President Obama has been a champion of Labor, particularly in his second term, but he’s chastening elements of a system that may not continue. A piecemeal economy, if pervasive, will need fresh answers.

From Katie Johnston at the Boston Globe:

To be sure, technology has helped make workers more productive. But they are reaping few of the rewards that come from producing more in less time, and at lower costs. From 2000 to 2014, net productivity rose by nearly 22 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. The gain in hourly compensation during that time? Less than 2 percent.

Nearly all the benefits of the surge in productivity have gone to top executives, in the form of bigger pay packages; to owners, as higher profits; and to investors, as better returns, the Economic Policy Institute said.

The rise of what’s being called the gig economy gives people the flexibility to work when and where they want — a great advantage for many workers. But few of these jobs come with benefits, or a guarantee of steady work. Many workers take them by necessity, not choice.

These types of arrangements are growing, and not only with so-called sharing economy firms such as the ride-hailing service Uber or TaskRabbit, which finds labor for daily chores. A recent study by the Government Accountability Office, an independent congressional watchdog agency, found that as many as 40 percent of employed Americans in 2010 were contingent workers — part-timers, temps, day laborers, or independent contractors — up from 35 percent in 2006.•

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3 Classic Videos: Paddy Chayefsky (1969), Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick (1965), Preston Tucker (1948)

September 7, 2015 in Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink


Paddy Chayefsky, that brilliant satirist, holds forth spectacularly on a 1969 episode of the Mike Douglas Show. It starts with polite chatter about the success of his script for Marty but quickly transitions into a much more serious and futuristic discussion. The writer is full of doom and gloom, of course, during the tumult of the Vietnam Era; his best-case scenario for humankind to live more peacefully is a computer-friendly “new society” that yields to globalization and technocracy, one in which citizens are merely producers and consumers, free of nationalism and disparate identity. Well, some of that came true. He joins the show at the 7:45 mark.

Andy Warhol refuses to speak during a 1965 appearance on Merv Griffin’s talk show, allowing a still-healthy-looking Edie Sedgwick to do handle the conversation. Not even the Pop Artist himself could have realized how correct he was in believing that soon just being would be enough to warrant stardom, that it wouldn’t matter what you said or if you said a thing, that traditional content would lose much of its value.

You know you had to have experienced the highest highs and lowest lows to see Preston Tucker in yourself, which is why he made such a perfect subject for Francis Ford Coppola. Below is a fun 1948 PR film that Tucker produced about his then-newest machine, a sedan nicknamed the “Tucker Torpedo,” which revolutionized the American automobile, before the SEC and rumors of wrongdoing forced it off the road.

3 Classic Videos: D. B. Cooper (1971), William F. Buckley (1966), Sir Clement Freud (1973)

September 4, 2015 in Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Sometimes a truth is hidden for so long that the reveal becomes anticlimax. For many years, Americans would have given anything to know the identity of Watergate’s Deep Throat, but how many could today readily name him as W. Mark Felt, who seemed to mysteriously disappear back into the shadows immediately after acknowledging in 2005 his key role in the Woodward-Bernstein reportage?

Similarly more interesting in his nebulous state was “D.B. Cooper,” who in 1971 hijacked a plane, collected ransom and parachuted into parts unknown. Excited 2011 headlines named Lynn Doyle Cooper as most likely being the daring criminal, but by then it was almost beside the point, the man had become myth.

This original 1971 Walter Cronkite report about the D.B. Cooper hijacking, heist and escape, contains interviews with many members of the shaken flight crew.

Before Mailer and Breslin tried to relocate to New York City’s Gracie Mansion, William F. Buckley made his own quixotic run for the mayor’s office for the Conservative Party. In these 1965 clips on NBC’s Meet the Press, Buckley discusses his candidacy, which, as the New York Times wrote in 2008, “drew much of its support from aggrieved white ethnic voters who were angry over crime, urban unrest and liberal policies on poverty and welfare.”

Gossip really bothers me on a visceral level, but I have to acknowledge its utility. Before news organs with something to lose will touch a story, whispers carry the day. While most of it’s petty and unnecessary, but occasionally it can be an insurgency. Sometimes gossip, the original viral information, is the fastest route to justice. 

In 1973, gossipmonger Rona Barrett and Sigmund Freud’s polymath grandson, Sir Clement Freud, got into a dust-up on a program Jack Paar hosted years after he abandoned the Tonight Show.

“It Turns Out That There Are Tens Of Millions Of Such People In America”

September 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

When Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove and their ilk appealed to white Americans based on “family values” and other such clean-sounding exclusionary terms, they cultivated a voting bloc on issues they didn’t sincerely care about but found useful. The GOP power brokers were merely playing with the dreams of the blindly faithful to help themselves consolidate power. 

But the dreams were not dashed, just deferred. The Trump candidacy and its copious anger and name-calling, which dispenses with the coded language of bigotry for the real deal, is aimed as much at Republicans who let these folks down as the Democrats whom they believe have upended their prosperity. The GOP’s bedrock, from the Bush family to Fox News, is at long last meeting the piledriver of its own design. The Tea Party was the first wave of the ungodly energy unloosed. Trump is the next phase, the anarchic spirit visited upon the most important national political campaign. The controls have been commandeered, the mutiny complete.

From the Economist:

On one domestic issue, to be fair, he has staked out a clear, bold position. Alas, it is an odious one. He wants to build a wall on the Mexican border and somehow make Mexico pay for it. He would deport all 11m immigrants currently thought to be in America illegally. Apart from the misery this would cause, it would also cost $285 billion, by one estimate—roughly $900 in new taxes for every man, woman and child left in Mr Trump’s America. This is necessary, he argues, because Mexican illegal immigrants are “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Not only would he round them all up; he would also round up and expel their children who were born on American soil and are therefore American citizens. That this would be illegal does not bother him.

His approach to foreign affairs is equally crude. He would crush Islamic State and send American troops to “take the oil”. He would “Make America great again”, both militarily and economically, by being a better negotiator than all the “dummies” who represent the country today. Leave aside, for a moment, the vanity of a man who thinks that geopolitics is no harder than selling property. Ignore his constant reminders that he wrote The Art of the Deal, which he falsely claims is “the number-one-selling business book of all time.” Instead, pay attention to the paranoia of his worldview. “[E]very single country that does business with us” is ripping America off, he says. “The money [China] took out of the United States is the greatest theft in the history of our country.” He is referring to the fact that Americans sometimes buy Chinese products. He blames currency manipulation by Beijing, and would slap tariffs on many imported goods. He would also, in some unspecified way, rethink how America protects allies such as South Korea and Japan, because “if we step back they will protect themselves very well. Remember when Japan used to beat China routinely in wars?”

Towering populism

Mr Trump’s secret sauce has two spices. First, he has a genius for self-promotion, unmoored from reality (“I play to people’s fantasies. I call it truthful hyperbole,” he once said). Second, he says things that no politician would, so people think he is not a politician. Sticklers for politeness might object when he calls someone a “fat pig” or suggests that a challenging female interviewer has “blood coming out of her wherever”. His supporters, however, think his boorishness is a sign of authenticity—of a leader who can channel the rage of those who feel betrayed by the elite or left behind by social change. It turns out that there are tens of millions of such people in America.•

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“Do I Have The Thing About Your Daughter Marrying A Robot In There?”

September 4, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There is a fascinating premise underpinning Steven Levy’s Backchannel interview with Jerry Kaplan, the provocatively titled, “Can You Rape a Robot?”: AI won’t need become conscious for us to treat it as such, for the new machines to require a very evolved sense of morality. Kaplan, the author of Humans Need Not Apply, believes that autonomous machines will be granted agency if they can only mirror our behaviors. Simulacrum on an advanced level will be enough. The author thinks AI can vastly improve the world, but only if we’re careful to make morality part of the programming.

An exchange:

Steven Levy:

Well by the end of your book, you’re pretty much saying we will have robot overlords — call them “mechanical minders.”

Jerry Kaplan:

It is plausible that certain things can [happen]… the consequences are very real. Allowing robots to own assets has severe consequences and I stand by that and I will back it up. Do I have the thing about your daughter marrying a robot in there?

Steven Levy:

No.

Jerry Kaplan:

That’s a different book. [Kaplan has a sequel ready.] I’m out in the far future here, but it’s plausible that people will have a different attitude about these things because it’s very difficult to not have an emotional reaction to these things. As they become more a part of our lives people may very well start to inappropriately imbue them with certain points of view.•

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“So What’s To Be Done?”

September 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s not for sure that this time will be different, that automation will lead to technological unemployment on a large scale, but all the ingredients are in place. Such a shift would make us richer in the aggregate, but how do we extend the new wealth beyond the owners of capital? 3-D printers may become ubiquitous and make manufacturing much less expensive, leading to cheaper prices and abundance. But the basic needs of food, shelter, etc. will still be required by those no longer employable in the new arrangement. 

Sure, it’s possible thus-unimagined fields will bloom in which humans won’t be “redundancies,” but if they don’t or if there aren’t enough of them? What then?

In a FT Alphaville post, Izabella Kaminska writes of Citi’s latest “Disruptive Innovations” report, which suggests, among other remedies, universal basic income. An excerpt:

Could this time be different, in that where previous manifestations of “robot angst” created new and usually better jobs and sectors to replace those lost, this time there is no automatism for better job creation once existing jobs become redundant?

If that’s the case, Citi says there may indeed be some feedback between weak aggregate demand and growing polarisation of productivity across workers and firms. And this inevitably leads to larger inequalities in income and wealth.

So what’s to be done?

According to Citi a list of potentially desirable policy measures includes:

a) improve and adapt education and training to better align workers’ skills with the demands of firms and technologies,
b) reduce barriers to reallocating resources, including by reducing barriers to labour mobility and simplifying bankruptcy procedures,
c) increase openness to trade and FDI to facilitate knowledge transfers,
d) increase support for entrepreneurship,
e) improve access to credit for restructuring and retraining, and
f) use the tax-transfer mechanism (e.g. through a guaranteed minimum income for all, or an ambitious negative income tax, public funding of health care and long-term care etc.) to support those left behind by technological advances.

Note with particular attention that last policy recommendation: a basic income for one and all to help society adjust to the new hyper technological environment, in a way that encourages competition and productivity in laggard firms, and dilutes the power of the winner-takes-all corporates.•

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Old Print Article: A Postcard From Palestine, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1928)

September 3, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

File this February 19, 1928 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article about Palestine under “Bad Predictions.” In addition to bemoaning that Palestinian profiteers were turning the land into a dusty tourist trap and a squalid one at that, it also openly scoffed at the notion that Jewish settlers, still a target of casual anti-Semitism, could ever be a power in the region. The new settlement of Hapharalm, or Israel, was singled out as particularly “laughable.”

“Our Political Discourse Is Shrinking To Fit Our Smartphone Screens”

September 2, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

dt2

If Donald Trump grew a small, square mustache above his lip, would his poll numbers increase yet again? For a candidate running almost purely on attention, can any shock really be deleterious?

Howard Dean was the first Internet candidate and Barack Obama the initial one to ride those new rules to success. But things have already markedly changed: That was a time of bulky machines on your lap, and the new political reality rests lightly in your pocket. A smartphone’s messages are brief and light on details, and its buzzing is more important than anything it delivers.

The diffusion of media was supposed to make it impossible for a likable incompetent like George W. Bush to rise. How could such a person survive the scrutiny of millions of “citizen journalists” like us? If anything, it’s made it easier, even for someone who’s unlikable and incompetent. For a celeb with a Reality TV willingness to be ALL CAPS all the time, facts get lost in the noise, at least for awhile.

That doesn’t mean Donald Trump, an adult baby with an attention span that falls somewhere far south of 15 months, will be our next President, but it does indicate that someone ridiculously unqualified and hugely bigoted gets to be on the national stage and inform our political discourse. The same way Jenny McCarthy used her platform to play doctor and spearhead the anti-vaccination movement, Trump gets to be a make-believe Commander-in-Chief for a time.

Unsurprisingly, Nicholas Carr has written the best piece on the dubious democracy the new tools have delivered, a Politico Magazine article that analyzes election season in a time that favors a provocative troll, a “snapchat personality,” as he terms it. The opening:

Our political discourse is shrinking to fit our smartphone screens. The latest evidence came on Monday night, when Barack Obama turned himself into the country’s Instagrammer-in-Chief. While en route to Alaska to promote his climate agenda, the president took a photograph of a mountain range from a window on Air Force One and posted the shot on the popular picture-sharing network. “Hey everyone, it’s Barack,” the caption read. “I’ll be spending the next few days touring this beautiful state and meeting with Alaskans about what’s going on in their lives. Looking forward to sharing it with you.” The photo quickly racked up thousands of likes.

Ever since the so-called Facebook election of 2008, Obama has been a pacesetter in using social media to connect with the public. But he has nothing on this year’s field of candidates. Ted Cruz live-streams his appearances on Periscope. Marco Rubio broadcasts “Snapchat Stories” at stops along the trail. Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush spar over student debt on Twitter. Rand Paul and Lindsey Graham produce goofy YouTube videos. Even grumpy old Bernie Sanders has attracted nearly two million likers on Facebook, leading the New York Times to dub him “a king of social media.”

And then there’s Donald Trump. If Sanders is a king, Trump is a god. A natural-born troll, adept at issuing inflammatory bulletins at opportune moments, he’s the first candidate optimized for the Google News algorithm.•

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Old Print Article: Vladimir Bekhterev’s Brain Is Collected, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1927)

September 1, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Vladimir Bekhterev had a great brain, but he lacked diplomacy.

Joseph Stalin probably was a “paranoiac with a short, dry hand,” but when the Russian neurologist reportedly spoke that diagnosis after examining the Soviet leader, he died mysteriously within days. Many thought he’d been poisoned to avenge the slight. Or maybe it was just a coincidence. A cloud of paranoia envelops all under an autocratic regime, whether we’re talking about Stalin in the 20th century or Vladimir Putin today: Some deaths are very suspect, so all of them become that way. At any rate, the scientist’s gray matter became an exhibit in his own collection of genius brains. An article in the December 27, 1927 Brooklyn Daily Eagle recorded the unusual series of events.

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“The Americans Had Developed Concrete Plans For The Use Of Nuclear Weapons In Afghanistan?”

August 31, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Ah, to be a fly on the wall in the White House in the aftermath of 9/11, once President Bush finally rested his copy of The Pet Goat and returned to the business at hand. If Al-Qaeda’s destruction of the World Trade Center was merely Step 1 of its plan to damage America, it was a scheme ultimately realized on a grand level. Our decisions in response to the large-scale terrorism, for the better part of the decade, did more harm to us than even the initial attack. Of course, in retrospect, there were potential reactions with even more far-reaching implications that went unrealized.

In a Spiegel Q&A, René Pfister and Gordon Repinski ask longtime German diplomat Michael Steiner about an alternative history that might have unfolded in the wake of September 11. An excerpt:

Spiegel:

The attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001 came during your stint as Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s foreign policy advisor. Do you remember that day?

Michael Steiner:

Of course, just like everybody, probably. Schröder was actually supposed to hold a speech that day at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. My people had prepared a nice text for him, but when he was supposed to head out, he — like all of us — couldn’t wrest himself away from the TV images of the burning Twin Towers. Schröder said: “Michael, you go there and explain to the people that I can’t come today.”

Spiegel:

What was it like in the days following the attacks?

Michael Steiner:

Condoleezza Rice was George W. Bush’s security advisor at the time. I actually had quite a good relationship with her. But after Sept. 11, the entire administration positively dug in. We no longer had access to Rice, much less to the president. It wasn’t just our experience, but also that of the French and British as well. Of course that made us enormously worried.

Spiegel:

Why?

Michael Steiner:

Because we thought that the Americans would overreact in response to the initial shock. For the US, it was a shocking experience to be attacked on their own soil.

Spiegel:

What do you mean, overreact? Were you afraid that Bush would attack Afghanistan with nuclear weapons?

Michael Steiner:

The Americans said at the time that all options were on the table. When I visited Condoleezza Rice in the White House a few days later, I realized that it was more than just a figure of speech.

Spiegel:

The Americans had developed concrete plans for the use of nuclear weapons in Afghanistan?

Michael Steiner:

They really had thought through all scenarios. The papers had been written.•

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“This Is A Missed Opportunity”

August 31, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Some people don’t know how to accept a gift. America has many such people among its government, as apparently do numerous other developed nations. 

One of the few upsides to the colossal downside of the 2008 economic collapse is the rock-bottom interest rates that offer countries the opportunity to rebuild their infrastructure at virtually no added cost. It’s a tremendous immediate stimulus that also pays long-term dividends. But deficit hawks have made it impossible for President Obama to take advantage of this rare and relatively short-term opportunity. While some of it is certainly partisanship, it does seem like a large number of elected officials have pretty much no idea of basic economics.

From the Economist:

IT IS hard to exaggerate the decrepitude of infrastructure in much of the rich world. One in three railway bridges in Germany is over 100 years old, as are half of London’s water mains. In America the average bridge is 42 years old and the average dam 52. The American Society of Civil Engineers rates around 14,000 of the country’s dams as “high hazard” and 151,238 of its bridges as “deficient”. This crumbling infrastructure is both dangerous and expensive: traffic jams on urban highways cost America over $100 billion in wasted time and fuel each year; congestion at airports costs $22 billion and another $150 billion is lost to power outages.

The B20, the business arm of the G20, a club of big economies, estimates that the global backlog of spending needed to bring infrastructure up to scratch will reach $15 trillion-20 trillion by 2030. McKinsey, a consultancy, reckons that in 2007-12 investment in infrastructure in rich countries was about 2.5% of GDP a year when it should have been 3.5%. If anything, the problem is becoming more acute as some governments whose finances have been racked by the crisis cut back. In 2013 in the euro zone, general government investment—of which infrastructure constitutes a large part—was around 15% below its pre-crisis peak of €3 trillion ($4 trillion), according to the European Commission, with drops as high as 25% in Italy, 39% in Ireland and 64% in Greece. In the same year government spending on infrastructure in America, at 1.7% of GDP, was at a 20-year low.

This is a missed opportunity. Over the past six years, the cost of repairing old infrastructure or building new projects has been much cheaper than normal, thanks both to rock-bottom interest rates and ample spare capacity in the construction industry.•

“These Humans Would Be Physically And Mentally Augmented”

August 29, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

It’s logical if not desirable that war becomes more automated, since it only takes one nation pursuing the dream of a robot army to detonate a new arms race. I’ve thought more about weapons systems discrete from human beings than I have about enhanced soldiers, but the U.S. Army Research Laboratory has already given great consideration to the latter. The recent report “Visualizing the Tactical Ground Battlefield in  the Year 2050” imagines fewer of us going into battle but those that do being “super humans” augmented by exoskeletons, implants and internal sensors. It certainly ranges into what currently would be considered sci-fi territory.

From Patrick Tucker at Defense One:

People, too, will be getting a technological upgrade. “The battlefield of the future will be populated by fewer humans, but these humans would be physically and mentally augmented with enhanced capabilities that improve their ability to sense their environment, make sense of their environment, and interact with one another, as well as with ‘unenhanced humans,’ automated processes, and machines of various kinds,” says the report.

What exactly constitutes an enhanced human is a matter of technical dispute. After all, night-vision goggles represent a type of enhancement, as does armor. The military has no problem discussing future plans in those areas, but what the workshop participants anticipate goes well beyond flak jackets and gear. …

The report envisions enhancement taking several robotic steps forward. “To enable humans to partner effectively with robots, human team members will be enhanced in a variety of ways. These super humans will feature exoskeletons, possess a variety of implants, and have seamless access to sensing and cognitive enhancements. They may also be the result of genetic engineering. The net result is that they will have enhanced physical capabilities, senses, and cognitive powers. The presence of super humans on the battlefield in the 2050 timeframe is highly likely because the various components needed to enable this development already exist and are undergoing rapid evolution,” says the report.•

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“It’s Extraordinarily Frustrating”

August 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Attempting to reverse aging–even defeat death–seems like science-fiction to most, but it’s just science to big-picture gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, who considers himself a practical person. Given enough time it certainly makes sense that radical life-extension will be realized, but the researcher is betting the march toward a-mortality will begin much sooner than expected. It frustrates him to no end that governments and individuals alike usually don’t accept death as a sickness to be treated. Some of those feelings boiled over when he was interviewed by The Insight. An excerpt:

The Insight:

I’m interested in the psychology of people, I guess you can put them into two camps: one doesn’t have an inherent understanding of what you’re doing or saying, and the other camp willingly resign themselves to living a relatively short life.

You’ve talked to a whole wealth of people and come across many counter-opinions, have any of them had any merit to you, have any of them made you take a step back and question your approach?

Aubrey de Grey:

Really, no. It’s quite depressing. At first, really, I was my own only affective critic for the feasibility – certainly never a case or example of an opinion that amounted to a good argument against the desirability of any of this work; that was always 100% clear to me, that it would be crazy to consider this to be a bad idea. It was just a question of how to go about it. All of the stupid things that people say, like, “Where would we put all the people?” or, “How would we pay the pensions?” or, “Is it only for the rich?” or, “Wont dictators live forever?” and so on, all of these things… it’s just painful. Especially since most of these things have been perfectly well answered by other people well before I even came along. So, it’s extraordinarily frustrating that people are so wedded to the process of putting this out of their minds, by however embarrassing their means; coming up with the most pathetic arguments, immediately switching their brains off before realising their arguments might indeed be pathetic.

The Insight:

It might be a very obvious question, but it just sprung to mind – maybe you’ve been asked this before, it’s extremely philosophical and speculative – what do you think happens when you die?

Aubrey de Grey:

Oh, fuck off. I don’t give a damn. I’m a practical kind of guy – I’m not intending to be that experiment.•

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“It Is Predicated On A Radical And Deeply Un-American Notion That Housing Is A Right”

August 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The main difference between rich people and poor people is that rich people have more money. 

That’s it, really. Those with wealth are just as likely to form addictions, get divorces and engage in behaviors we deem responsible for poverty. They simply have more resources to fall back on. People without that cushion often land violently, land on the streets. Perhaps they should be extra careful since they’re in a more precarious position, but human beings are human beings: flawed. 

In the same ridiculously simple sense, homeless people are in that condition because they don’t have homes. A lot of actions and circumstances may have contributed to that situation, but the home part is the piece of the equation we can actually change. The Housing First initiative has proven thus far that it’s good policy to simply provide homes to people who have none. It makes sense in both human and economic terms. But it’s unpopular in the U.S. because it falls under the “free lunch” rubric, despite having its roots in the second Bush Administration. Further complicating matters is the shortage of urban housing in general.

In a smart Aeon essay, Susie Cagle looks at the movement, which has notably taken root in the conservative bastion of Utah, a state which has reduced homelessness by more than 90% in just ten years. An excerpt:

A new optimistic ideology has taken hold in a few US cities – a philosophy that seeks not just to directly address homelessness, but to solve it. During the past quarter-century, the so-called Housing First doctrine has trickled up from social workers to academics and finally to government. And it is working. On the whole, homelessness is finally trending down.

The Housing First philosophy was first piloted in Los Angeles in 1988 by the social worker Tanya Tull, and later tested and codified by the psychiatrist Sam Tsemberis of New York University. It is predicated on a radical and deeply un-American notion that housing is a right. Instead of first demanding that they get jobs and enroll in treatment programmes, or that they live in a shelter before they can apply for their own apartments, government and aid groups simply give the homeless homes.

Homelessness has always been more a crisis of empathy and imagination than one of sheer economics. Governments spend millions each year on shelters, health care and other forms of triage for the homeless, but simply giving people homes turns out to be far cheaper, according to research from the University of Washington in 2009. Preventing a fire always requires less water than extinguishing it once it’s burning.

By all accounts, Housing First is an unusually good policy. It is economical and achievable.•

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