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“He Said He Hopes His ‘Master Plan’ Is Accepted By NASA And The Country”

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

The square-jawed hero astronauts of 1960s NASA went through marriages at a pretty ferocious clip, as you might expect from careerist monomaniacs, but none has had a more colorful, complicated life than Buzz Aldrin, who successfully walked on the moon but failed at selling used cars after he fell to Earth with a thud. Dr. Aldrin, as he prefers to be called, is now spearheading a plan to build Mars colonies. 

From Marcia Dunn at the AP:

MELBOURNE, Fla. (AP) — Buzz Aldrin is teaming up with Florida Institute of Technology to develop “a master plan” for colonizing Mars within 25 years.

The second man to walk on the moon took part in a signing ceremony Thursday at the university, less than an hour’s drive from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The Buzz Aldrin Space Institute is set to open this fall.

The 85-year-old Aldrin, who followed Neil Armstrong onto the moon’s surface on July 20, 1969, will serve as a research professor of aeronautics as well as a senior faculty adviser for the institute.

He said he hopes his “master plan” is accepted by NASA and the country, with international input. NASA already is working on the spacecraft and rockets to get astronauts to Mars by the mid-2030s.

Aldrin is pushing for a Mars settlement by approximately 2040. More specifically, he’s shooting for 2039, the 70th anniversary of his own Apollo 11 moon landing, although he admits the schedule is “adjustable.”

He envisions using Mars’ moons, Phobos and Deimos, as preliminary stepping stones for astronauts. He said he dislikes the label “one-way” and imagines tours of duty lasting 10 years.•

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“Bush, Like Michael Jackson In His Days At Neverland Ranch, Was Living In A Bubble”

August 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

“Mission Accomplished,” the words that hung like nooses behind our most unwitting President, George W. Bush, in 2003, as he prematurely announced “victory” in Iraq after invading the wrong country for no good reason, may be the phrase most associated with the gross incompetence of his Administration, but “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job” is just as damning and telling.

That’s what Dubya uttered in support of FEMA administrator Michael D. Brown as New Orleans sank not only in the waters of Hurricane Katrina but also in federal fecklessness and neglect. All while the President fiddled–or, more accurately, strummed.

Historian Douglas Brinkley believes it was the latter tragedy that was Bush’s greatest undoing. An excerpt from his writing in Vanity Fair:

What a weird moment in U.S. presidential history.

Hurricane Katrina, a Category 3 storm, had smashed into the Gulf South. People were drowning. And the president of the United States played guitar in San Diego, egged on by country singer Mark Wills.

Even George W. Bush’s most stalwart supporters cringed at his disconnect from reality. Bush, like Michael Jackson in his days at Neverland Ranch, was living in a bubble. By contrast, when Hurricane Betsy had struck the Louisiana coast in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson had immediately flown to New Orleans to see the flood zone firsthand. The difference was glaring. Bush was, quite simply—as Coast Guard first-responder Jimmy Duckworth phrased it—“out of the game.”

On the 10th anniversary of Katrina, with the advantage of hindsight, it’s clear that Bush’s lack of leadership in late summer of 2005 cost his presidency mightily. Unlike Ronald Reagan, after the Challenger explosion, or Bill Clinton, after the Oklahoma City bombing, Bush had failed to feel the profound implications of the moment as his predecessors had. He didn’t scramble into action. He didn’t touch the nation’s heartstrings by using epic oratory to inform the disaster. What we got, instead, were guitar chords and terse speeches void of human pathos. No matter how the Bush library in Dallas tries to spin Bush’s Katrina performance, we all know he deserved an F in crisis management.•

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“Ultimately, Robots Would Drive A Social Revolution…But Not The One People Fear”

August 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

When the sanguine view is that only 7% of American jobs will disappear in the next ten years, we probably need to brace ourselves. Forrester Research reports that figure, saying some employment loss will be offset by the creation of new positions. Probably true enough, but there’s no guarantee low-skilled workers will be able to be retrained for them, and it’s not like 2025 is some important end date. In the longer run, the truth may end up somewhere between the Forrester number and the more troubling Oxford one of 47% jobs being susceptible to automation.

From Elizabeth Dwoskin at WSJ:

Before a robot takes your job, you’re likely to be working with one side-by-side.

That’s the takeaway from a new report by Forrester Research, Inc.

The report wades into a heady and long-running debate over whether, how, and to what extent will robots take over human jobs – a hotly discussed topic amid recent progress in robotics and artificial intelligence. Most experts agree that machines will depress the job market in coming decades, possibly by as much as 47%, according to a widely reported 2013 Oxford paper.

Forrester takes a less dire view. Examining workforces at large companies across industries, including Delta Airlines Inc., Whole Foods Market Inc., and Lowe’s Companies Inc. as well as many startups, analyst J.P. Gownder estimated that automation would erase 22.7 million US jobs by 2025 — 16% of today’s total. However, that decline would be offset somewhat by new jobs created, making for a net loss of 7%, or 9.1 million jobs.

Ultimately, robots would drive a social revolution, Mr. Gownder found, but not the one people fear.•

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“Uber Is Setting Up A New Self-Driving Car Project”

August 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Uber has shamelessly tried to reposition itself as a job creator when it actually destabilizes good jobs and CEO Travis Kalanick has previously been open about wanting to eliminate all its drivers. Perhaps that’s the future, but let’s be honest about it: Uber is good in many ways, but it isn’t good for Labor. So when the rideshare pretends for publicity purposes that the hiring of military veterans or minorities is central to its mission, it’s an outright lie.

From Russell Brandom at the Verge:

Uber is setting up a new self-driving car project at the University of Arizona, according to an email sent out today to university employees. The new project will focus on self-driving car technology, particularly the mapping and optics challenges involved in developing a fully autonomous vehicle. An official statement from Uber confirmed the news, saying, “we’ll work with some of the world’s leading experts in lens design at the University to improve the imagery we capture and use to build out mapping and safety features..” The project comes just months after a major hiring push for Uber’s Pittsburgh center, which many complained had hired so many experts away from the local robotics lab that they had effectively gutted competing projects.

According to a statement from Arizona’s governor, the partnership will focus on the optics systems necessary for mapping and safety, and will result in a number of Uber’s test vehicles taking up permanent residence in Arizona. Uber will donate $25,000 to the university’s College of Optical Sciences.…•

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“Plumbing Trump’s Psyche Is As Productive As Asking American Pharoah, The Winner Of The Triple Crown, Why He Runs”

August 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Celebrity Sightings In New York City - August 23, 2015

The early success of the disgracefully bigoted Donald Trump Presidential campaign is the result of two forces: 1) Some white Americans sensing (correctly) that their unfair privilege is fading, and 2) Politics, tax codes, shifting global fortunes and new technologies combining to devastate the middle class in recent decades.

Someone must be held accountable, but it’s not a sure bet that the right people will be. Currently, one who’s most benefited from the rigged system, Trump himself, is leading in the Republican polls, a full-of-shit performer posing as a mad-as-hell reformer. He certainly has no economic expertise, but he does have a surfeit of anger. For now, that’s enough.

As always, it’s far easier to blame them than us. Not too long ago, Trump co-opted the Birther movement, an effort to label our first African-American President as them. In retrospect, it was the transition period from the soft, coded language of Gingrich and Rove to the overt and odious. That’s the new abnormal.

Those Americans cheered by a petulant, foot-stomping adult baby reminds me of a piece of marginalia George Saunders scribbled as he reconsidered CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: “Some issues: Life amid limitations; paucity. Various tonalities of defense. Pain; humiliation inflicted on hapless workers – some of us turn on one another.”

Evan Osnos, who wrote Age of Ambition, one of my favorite books of 2014, takes measure of Trump’s stump speeches and their eager listeners, in a New Yorker piece. The American Pharaoh line is the best sentence I’ve read in 2015. An excerpt:

What accounts for Donald Trump’s political moment? How did a real campaign emerge from a proposition so ludicrous that an episode of The Simpsons once used a Trump Presidency as the conceit for a dystopian future? The candidate himself is an unrewarding source of answers. Plumbing Trump’s psyche is as productive as asking American Pharoah, the winner of the Triple Crown, why he runs. The point is what happens when he does.

In New Hampshire, where voters pride themselves on being unimpressed, Fred Rice, a Republican state representative, arrived at a Trump rally in the beach town of Hampton on an August evening, and found people waiting patiently in a two-hour line that stretched a quarter of a mile down the street. “Never seen that at a political event before,” he said. Other Republicans offer “canned bullshit,” Rice went on. “People have got so terribly annoyed and disenchanted and disenfranchised, really, by candidates who get up there, and all their stump speeches promise everything to everyone.” By the night’s end, Rice was sold. “I heard echoes of Ronald Reagan,” he told me, adding, “If I had to vote today, I would vote for Trump.”

To inhabit Trump’s landscape for a while, to chase his jet or stay behind with his fans in a half-dozen states, is to encounter a confederacy of the frustrated—less a constituency than a loose alliance of Americans who say they are betrayed by politicians, victimized by a changing world, and enticed by Trump’s insurgency. Dave Anderson, a New Hampshire Republican who retired from United Parcel Service, told me, “People say, ‘Well, it’d be nice to have another Bush.’ No, it wouldn’t be nice. We had two. They did their duty. That’s fine, but we don’t want this Bush following what his brother did. And he’s not coming across as very strong at all. He’s not saying what Trump is saying. He’s not saying what the issues are.”•

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“The First Order Of Business Should Be Creating A Fair Tax System”

August 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Months before the first 2011 Occupy protest in Zuccotti Park, economist Joseph Stiglitz was bemoaning the 1%, doggedly working to put a spotlight on wealth inequality and the rigged system that abets it. These days, he feels the discussion has evolved but there haven’t been any real material changes. 

Gawker took a break from being yeesh! long enough to allow Hamilton Nolan to do his typically smart work, interviewing Stiglitz about how disparity can be mitigated. Simply put, he doesn’t believe fairness can be achieved through charitable donations but will require systemic changes. An excerpt:

Question:

Is there a red line level of inequality past which you think there will be some sort of tipping point?

Joseph Stiglitz:

We’re always gonna have some inequality. There is a small enough level of inequality that, while you might worry about it, it doesn’t have a corrosive effect. We’ve reached a level of inequality where it’s unambiguously clear to me and to most observers that it’s interfering with our economic performance. It’s having a corrosive effect on the way our democracy works. It’s having a corrosive effect on the way our society functions. So we’re in the bad regime. We’re facing very large costs.

The other question that you’re asking is, “Is there a tipping point, a dynamic where things get more and more unequal and increasingly hard to pull back?” I would say yes, and what that point is depends on a number of factors, including the political landscape. I believe a lot of inequality is a result of the policies we make. Those policies are a result of political processes. Political processes are affected by the rules that [govern] how money gets translated into politics. So if you have a political system like the US, where money talks more than in Europe, that is going to have a more corrosive effect—a lower tipping point. I try to be optimistic. I wouldn’t be working so hard if I believed we were over that tipping point. There’s some chance we are over it, but there’s some chance that we’re not. The fight right now is to make sure we don’t go further over it.

Question:

Is it possible to rein it in with our current campaign finance system?

Joseph Stiglitz:

It’s possible, and difficult. We’ve seen successes in the minimum wage campaign. We’ve seen successes in when the Republicans try to restrict voting rights in Pennsylvania, it backfired and people got so angry that they came out and voted. So every once in a while you see an outpouring of democratic forces.

Question:

Where would you set the income tax rates, if it was up to you?

Joseph Stiglitz:

The first order of business should be creating a fair tax system, so that we tax dividends and speculators at the same rate that we tax ordinary income.•

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“The Pundits Think Americans Are Stupid. I Don’t.”

August 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig is crowdfunding in the hopes of financing a run for President not as a protest candidate but as a referendum candidate, one who would resign and cede the office to his Veep after a very brief first act of fixing our troubled political system (campaign finance, gerrymandering, etc.). We certainly need these things to occur, but it almost definitely won’t happen, at least not directly, because of Lessig’s quixotic campaign. Elizabeth Warren was really the only potential candidate who had a chance of undoing at least some of this wrong-mindedness, but she isn’t running.

I’m hopeful that Lessig and other campaigns will make these important issues central in the way the Occupy movement pushed wealth inequality into the mainstream. However, Lessig himself doesn’t believe just making reform one of many major issues will work–it needs to be a candidate’s number one and perhaps only concern. Let’s hope that’s not true, because a person running to reform and resign isn’t likely getting elected. What would make for a spellbinding TED Talk doesn’t necessarily translate into a real-life solution.

Lessig and his supporter Jimmy Wales (a “foreigner,” as President Trump would call him) just did an AMA at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

___________________________

Question:

What led you to decide to run yourself instead of remaining an advisor to Sanders’ campaign? Don’t you think that the MOST LIKELY scenario would be that, by some (increasingly likely) miracle, Sanders overtakes Clinton for the nomination? Why can’t Sanders introduce the Citizens Equality Act and do the same things you want to do, but remain president?

Lawrence Lessig: 

I became convinced that Sanders has been seduced by the consultants, whose aim (this is why they’re hired) is to elect him rather than run a campaign that might be harder, but would give him the mandate to lead. I believe Bernie can get elected. But if he runs his campaign as he has, it will be Obama v2.0 (not in the substance but in the inability to pass or even propose reform).

___________________________

Question:

Could Elizabeth Warren be your Vice President?

Lawrence Lessig:

Yes, absolutely. Politically, it would make sense for one of us to move out of MA (and that would be me since she’s the senator). That’s because the constitution wouldn’t permit MA to cast its votes for both of us, and so if the election were close, that would risk one of us not making it. But constitutionally, there is no bar (except the rule that forbids a state to vote for two people from that state).

___________________________

Question:

How can we connect issues of campaign finance and voter equality with the day-to-day practical & emotional realities of regular Americans?

Lawrence Lessig:

The pundits think Americans are stupid. I don’t. I think that if you connect the dots, they’ll get it. Start with the issues they care about — health care, social security, student debt, minimum wage, the environment, network neutrality, copyright (ok, a guy can dream) — and show them how EVERY ISSUE is linked to this one issue. Try an obvious metaphor: An alcoholic could be losing his liver, his job, his wife. Those are the worst problems someone can have. But unless you solve the alcoholism, none of those problems is going to be solved.

___________________________

Question:

Why did you decide to create the Citizens Equality Act instead of trying to get a Constitutional amendment passed like Wolf PAC is trying to do?

Lawrence Lessig:

Because (1) we need reform NOW (not 3 years from now), (2) a majority in Congress is more likely than 2/ds (to propose), or 3/4ths (to ratify), (3) because changing the way campaigns are funded is something Congress could do tomorrow, and should. An amendment may well be necessary — if the Supreme Court doesn’t fix the superPAC problem it is certainly necessary — but we can’t afford to wait. We need to act through Congress now.

___________________________

Question:

Say you’re elected, and the Citizen Equality Act of 2017 isn’t passed by Congress. Now What?

Lawrence Lessig:

Not an option. With 50 referendum representatives, and a president that doesn’t care about what’s next, it gets passed.

I get the anxiety here. I really do. But here’s the reality: We have a government that doesn’t work. We need the best shot to getting a government that does work. Making “reform” one of 8 issues on a platform is not a plan. It’s a wish.

___________________________

Question:

A healthy democracy requires the enforcement of law. But today, law enforcement officials are able to routinely violate citizen’s legal and Constitutional rights with impugnity.

Do you believe Campaign Zero’s policy proposals (link) are adequate to provide communities adequate means to hold their police departments accountable, safeguard individual’s rights, and eliminate racial bias? Do you believe the adequately safeguard the disabled, the non-neurotypical, and the mentally ill?

If not, what additional policies would you support?

Lawrence Lessig:

Agreed. This ties to the culture of inequality that is America today. We don’t have equal citizens, and that spreads to every aspect of social life. The stupid war on drugs turns police into drill sergeants, and they treat citizens as grunts in boot camp. The only way we change this is to reaffirm the basic equality of citizens, and use that power to undo these idiotic laws.•

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“Trump Headed For A Prime Location, The City’s Red-Light District”

August 24, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Grandpa Friedrich Trump was a “whoremaster,” and in retrospect, he was the classy one.

After leaving Germany as a lad and rechristening himself as the more-Americanized “Frederick,” Donald’s pop-pop burnished his bank account by selling liquor, gambling and women to miners in rooming houses he built in boomtowns before they went bust. He always managed to stay just ahead of the law.

In a Politico piece, Gwenda Blair, who authored a book about Trump history, writes that his grandfather was the template for Donald, who has been most influenced by the “family culture of doing whatever it takes to come out on top and never giving up.”

The opening:

One hundred and thirty years ago, in 1885, Friedrich Trump stepped off a boat in lower Manhattan with a single suitcase. Only sixteen years old, he had left a note for his widowed mother on the kitchen table back in Kallstadt, a village in southwestern Germany, and slipped off in the middle of the night. He didn’t want to work in the family vineyard or get a job as a barber, the profession for which he’d been trained. He wanted to become rich, and America was the place to do it.

Friedrich wasted no time, and he did it by pushing the behavioral boundaries of his time, much as his grandson Donald would a century later. By the early 1890s, Friedrich had learned English; morphed from a skinny teenager into an adult man with a handlebar moustache; become a naturalized U.S. citizen, an easy matter at a time when there were no immigration quotas (much less debates about “birthright”); changed the spelling of his name to the more American-sounding Frederick; and made his way to Seattle, a wide-open city filled with single, rootless newcomers who’d arrived expecting to make their fortunes but found themselves facing the same uncertain economic prospects they’d wanted to leave behind.

A quick study, Trump headed for a prime location, the city’s red-light district, known as the Lava Beds. There he leased a tiny storefront restaurant named the Poodle Dog, which had a kitchen and a bar and advertised “private rooms for ladies”–code for prostitutes. It would allow the resourceful Trump, who renamed it the Dairy Restaurant, to offer the restless, frustrated public some right-now satisfaction in the form of food, booze and easily available sex.•

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“When Isis Destroys Ancient Sites It Is Not Just Attacking Buildings”

August 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

What’s most maddening about the Islamic State is that if the rest of the world decided it was not going to allow this atrocious behavior, the group could be put down quite readily. But, of course, that’s not how global politics works, it’s a more fractious and complicated thing, and sometimes that can be galling.

While I’m no longer shocked by the brutal murders committed by these deviants, they still hit me harder than the trashing of antiquities, though that’s another horror. In a Guardian article, Julian Baggini argues that if you inversely feel more outraged about the ISIS assaults on dead cities than living humans, you’re not necessarily being inhumane. An excerpt:

Caring about how people live also means caring about those aspects of human culture that speak to more than our needs for food, shelter and good health. It involves recognising that there are human achievements that transcend our own lives and our own generations. We come and go, but we are survived by the fruits of our peers and those who came before us. There is a humility in seeing, as Rick did in Casablanca, that the problems of a few “little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world”.

When Isis destroys ancient sites it is not just attacking buildings, it is attacking the values their preservation represents, such as a recognition of the plurality of cultures that precede and surround us, as well as a respect for the achievements of past generations and a sense that we are custodians for the generations to follow. The destruction of the Temple of Baal Shamin is a brutally shocking sign that this is an organisation that has no respect for the diverse history and culture of civilisation but seeks instead to erase everything except what it holds dear. It shows that even when Isis does not kill, it doesn’t let people live as they legitimately desire to do, which is a particular kind of terror of its own.

The destruction of people and places might appear to be quite different, but the distinction is not as neat as it first seems.•

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“Current Laws Never Envisioned A Vehicle That Can Drive Itself”

August 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In what’s an otherwise very good Fast Company article about autonomous cars, Charlie Sorrel conveniently elides one really important fact: not all the kinks have yet been worked out of the driverless experience. While Google has done extensive testing on the vehicles, inclement weather is still poses a challenge for them and visual-recognition systems need further enhancement. So, yes, legislation and entrenched human behaviors are significant barriers to be overcome, but the machines themselves continue to need fine-tuning.

Still, it’s an interesting article, especially the section about the nature of future cities that await us should we perfect and accept this new normal. An excerpt:

Famously, Google’s self-driving cars have clocked up 1.7 million miles over six years, all without major incident.

“In more than a million miles of real-world testing, autonomous vehicles have been involved in around a dozen crashes (with no major injuries),” says John Nielsen, AAA’s Managing Director of Automotive Engineering and Repair, “all of which occurred when a human driver was in control, or the vehicle was struck by another car.”

Self-driving cars are already way better than people-piloted cars, so what’s the trouble?

“Current laws never envisioned a vehicle that can drive itself, and there are numerous liability issues that need to be ironed out,” Nielsen says. “If an autonomous vehicle gets in a collision, who is responsible? The “driver,” their insurance company, the automaker that built the vehicle, or the third-party supplier that provided the autonomous control systems?”

How will the laws adapt? And how will we adapt? People are hesitant to embrace change, but the change that driverless cars will bring to our cities and lifestyles is enormous. What will it take to get there?•

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“Imagine Such A Weapon Enhanced By An A.I. Technology”

August 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Jerry Kaplan, author of Humans Need Not Apply, thinks technology may make warfare safer (well, relatively). Perhaps, but that’s not the goal of all combatants. He uses the landmine as an example, arguing that a “smarter” explosive could be made to only detonate if enemy military happened across it. But any nation or rogue state using landmines does so precisely because of the terror that transcends the usual rules of engagement. They would want to use new tools to escalate that threat. The internationally sanctioned standards Kaplan hopes we attain will likely never be truly universal. As the implements of war grow cheaper, smaller and more out of control, that issue becomes more ominous.

In theory, robotized weapons could make war less lethal or far more so, but that will depend on the intentions of the users, and both scenarios will probably play out. 

From Kaplan in the New York Times:

Consider the lowly land mine. Those horrific and indiscriminate weapons detonate when stepped on, causing injury, death or damage to anyone or anything that happens upon them. They make a simple-minded “decision” whether to detonate by sensing their environment — and often continue to do so, long after the fighting has stopped.

Now imagine such a weapon enhanced by an A.I. technology less sophisticated than what is found in most smartphones. An inexpensive camera, in conjunction with other sensors, could discriminate among adults, children and animals; observe whether a person in its vicinity is wearing a uniform or carrying a weapon; or target only military vehicles, instead of civilian cars.

This would be a substantial improvement over the current state of the art, yet such a device would qualify as an offensive autonomous weapon of the sort the open letter proposes to ban.

Then there’s the question of whether a machine — say, an A.I.-enabled helicopter drone — might be more effective than a human at making targeting decisions. In the heat of battle, a soldier may be tempted to return fire indiscriminately, in part to save his or her own life. By contrast, a machine won’t grow impatient or scared, be swayed by prejudice or hate, willfully ignore orders or be motivated by an instinct for self-preservation.•

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“He Must Be Taken Seriously”

August 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

If there’s one person Jesus Christ would not approve of, it would be a racist, adulterous, thrice-married braggart who builds gaudy buildings and casinos and vomits gold paint onto them. Christian conservatives who support Donald Trump have shown their so-called faith never had anything to do with religion. It’s always been about race and privilege. 

More worrisome is how the U.S. press has handled his odious campaign, treating it like a summer blockbuster full of fun special effects. Riveting! A joyride! Fun for the whole family!

It behooves journalists to cover any candidate making xenophobic comments seriously. When CNN announced Trump drew 30,000 spectators in Alabama to hear him speak when the 45,000-seat stadium was more than half-empty, they aren’t doing their job but instead feeding a monster. When Maureen Dowd of the New York Times yukked it up with the vulgar hatemonger, it’s clear Trump wasn’t the only wealthy, out-of-touch person involved in the interview. (Thankfully, others at the Times are treating the matter more soberly.)

Even if the miserable magnate is deflated and floats away like a Thanksgiving Day balloon that backed into a pin, the paraders following him will still be there, full of rage and bigotry.

From Edward Luce at the Financial Times:

It is February 2016 and the sky is falling on our heads. Donald Trump has just won the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary. Those who predicted he would have long since imploded are scrambling to fallback positions. He will flame out on Super Tuesday, they insist. He will be ejected by primary voters in Jeb Bush’s Florida in March, they add.

If worst comes to worst, he will meet his Waterloo at the Republican convention in July — the first such brokered event in decades. Fear not, wise heads will reassure us, that man could never be president of the United States.

Like a stopped clock, conventional wisdom must eventually be right on Mr Trump. It goes without saying that sane people should hope so. Last week two of the billionaire’s more inflamed supporters beat up a homeless Hispanic man. All Mr Trump could initially say was that his followers were “passionate”. Make no mistake, the property tycoon who would be president is an unpleasant piece of work.

Conservatives should be especially worried. His plans to round up and deport the estimated 11.5m undocumented immigrants would require the federal power of a police state. His plan to scrap the 14th amendment’s birthright to US citizenship would corrode America’s soul.

Yet he must be taken seriously.•

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Old Print Article: “Eyes Dry As Two Sons Visit Rosenbergs For ‘Last Time'” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1953)

August 21, 2015 in Books, Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ethel_Rosenberg_mugshot

In a time of hysteria, justice is only the first casualty. Human lives often follow.

It’s hard to make sense in retrospect of the 1950s trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, accused Soviet spies, because there was very little sensible about the Communist witch hunt of that era. Charged with a crime that “jeopardizes the lives of every man, woman and child in America,” the couple certainly didn’t get a fair hearing.

I thought of this agonizing piece of our history when E.L. Doctorow, author of The Book of Daniel, a fictionalized take on the topic, died recently. As the novel reminds, it was an especially painful period for many Americans because the two Rosenberg children, Michael and Robert (later adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol), were collateral damage. Embedded is a January 4 1953 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article which covers the boys visiting their parents six months before their execution.

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“Nonstate Actors And Rogue States Will Create Killer Robots”

August 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a Wall Street Journal article, Christopher Mims writes that killer robots aren’t inevitable, spoiling it for everyone. I mean, we need to be obliterated by really smart robots, the sooner, the better. Please.

Mims is right, of course, that banning research on Strong Ai is the wrong tack to take to ensure our future. This work is going to go ahead one way or another, so why not proceed, but with caution? He also points out that many of the scientists and technologists signing the Open Letter on Artificial Intelligence are engaged in creating AI of all sorts.

An excerpt about the bad news:

Imagine the following scenario: It’s 2025, and self-driving cars are widely available. Turning such a vehicle into a bomb isn’t much harder than it is to accomplish the same thing with a conventional vehicle today. And the same goes for drones of every scale and description.

It’s inevitable, say the experts I talked to, that nonstate actors and rogue states will create killer robots once the underpinnings of this technology become cheap and accessible, thanks to its commercial use.

“I look back 10 years, and who would have thought people would be using cellphone technology to detonate IEDs?” says retired Rear Admiral Matthew Klunder, who as chief of research spent four years heading up the Navy’s work on autonomous systems.

And what about killing machines driven by artificial intelligence, which could learn to make decisions themselves, a fear that recently bubbled to the surface in an open letter signed by the likes of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking. The letter warned that an arms race was “virtually inevitable” between major powers if they continue to develop these kinds of weapons.•

 

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“Sometimes I Do Go A Little Bit Far”

August 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Was anybody else put off by Maureen Dowd’s New York Times op-ed about Donald Trump, in which she allowed the hideous hotelier to run roughshod over her column space, while labeling him as a “braggart” or “cartoonish,” when a more accurate description would have been “vicious racist”? Does it seem that an attempt at a fun piece about a gutter-level racist is wrong?

Not only is he king of the Birthers, but the hideous hotelier has also said that “laziness is a trait in blacks” and described Mexicans as “rapists.” That’s not someone who should be treated as an amusingly undiplomatic blowhard who sticks his foot into it by boasting about his golf courses or denying Heidi Klum perfect-ten status. 

Dowd treated the whole sordid affair as if it was just harmless entertainment, an amusing sideshow (even featuring an extra-fun lightning round!), when Trump’s bigotry and those attracted to it are anything but a laugh. It’s unadulterated ugliness that should be called out by anyone who interviews him. Believing that the campaign is foolishness that will eventually blow away isn’t an excuse for a reporter to abdicate responsibility. In this instance, Dowd failed to be the equal of Megyn Kelly.

From her NYT piece:

The billionaire braggart known for saying unfiltered things is trying to be diplomatic. Sort of.

It has suddenly hit Trump that he’s leading the Republican field in a race where many candidates, including the two joyless presumptive nominees, are sputtering. He’s got the party by the tail — still a punch line but not a joke.

The Wall Street Journal huffed that Trump’s appeal was “attitude, not substance,” and the nascent candidate is still figuring out the pesky little details, like staff and issues, dreaming up his own astringent campaign ads for Instagram on ISIS and China.

The other candidates, he says, “have pollsters; they pay these guys $200,000 a month to tell them, ‘Don’t say this, don’t say that, you use the wrong word, you shouldn’t put a comma here.’ I don’t want any of that. I have a nice staff, but no one tells me what to say. I go by my heart. The combination of heart and brain. When Hillary gets up there she reads and then goes away for three days.”

As he headed off this weekend to see the butter cow in Iowa — “Iowa is very clean. It’s not like a lot of places where you and I would go, like New York City” — Trump is puzzling over a conundrum: How does he curb the merciless heckler side of himself, the side that has won over voters who think he’s a refreshing truth teller, so that he can seem refined enough to win over voters who think he’s crude and cartoonish?

How does he tone it down when he’s proud of his outrageous persona, his fiery wee-hours Twitter arrows and campaign “gusto,” and gratified by the way he can survive dissing John McCain and rating Heidi Klum when that would be a death knell for someone like Scott Walker?

“Sometimes I do go a little bit far,” he allowed, adding, after a moment: “Heidi Klum. Sadly, she’s no longer a 10.”•

 

 

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“Sentient Beings Shouldn’t Harm Each Other”

August 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If gene-editing was utilized to keep animals from wanting to harm one another–no more predators, no more prey–you think there might be a few unintended consequences? Some, right? David Pearce, a philosopher and Transhumanist, wants to engineer all suffering out of existence, from the ecosystem to the human brain. Given enough time, I suppose anything is possible. Excerpts follow from two interviews with Pearce.

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The opening of a 2014 i09 Q&A by George Dvorsky:

Question:

The idea of re-engineering the ecosystem such that it’s free from suffering is a radically ambitious project — one that’s been referred to as the “well intentioned lunacy” of a futurist. That said, it’s an idea rooted in history. From where do you draw your ideas and moral philosophy?

David Pearce:

Sentient beings shouldn’t harm each other. This utopian-sounding vision is ancient. Gautama Buddha said “May all that have life be delivered from suffering”. The Bible prophesies that the wolf and the lion shall lie down with the lamb. Today, Jains sweep the ground in front of their feet rather than unwittingly tread on an insect.

My own conceptual framework and ethics are secular — more Bentham than Buddha. I think we should use biotechnology to rewrite our genetic source code; recalibrate the hedonic treadmill; shut down factory farms and slaughterhouses; and systematically help sentient beings rather than harm them.

However, there is an obvious problem. On the face of it, the idea of a pain-free biosphere is ecologically illiterate. Secular and religious utopians tend to ignore the biology of obligate carnivores and the thermodynamics of a food chain. Feed a population of starving herbivores in winter and we’d trigger a population explosion and ecological collapse. Help carnivorous predators and we’d just cause more death and suffering to the herbivores they prey on. Richard Dawkins puts the bioconservative case quite bluntly: “It must be so.” Fortunately, this isn’t the case.•

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From a 2007 interview by Ingo Niermann of the German edition of Vanity Fair:

Vanity Fair:

You claim that it is possible to eradicate all suffering on earth, whether physical or mental. When?

David Pearce: 

It will technically be possible to get rid of all suffering within a century or two. Its abolition would be practical only if it were agreed in the sense of something like the moon program or the human genome project – if there was a degree of social consensus. There are certainly technological obstacles, but they are dwarfed by the ethical-ideological ones. Many people’s negative reaction to the idea of a world without suffering comes from a fear that someone is going to be manipulating and controlling them. Partly, too, the abolition of suffering seems to make a mockery of one’s life projects. Most of us spend the greater part of our lives seeking happiness for ourself and others we care about. But we do so in extremely inefficient and in many cases self-defeating ways. This is a problem with existing human society. Even though we have made extraordinary progress technologically and medically, we aren’t any happier than our ancestors. Even if we could arrange society in the most utopian way imaginable, there would be some people who would still be depressed and anxious. There would be some people who would be consumed by jealousy or unhappy love affairs. No amount of environmental reform or manipulation is going to get rid of suffering. Only biotechnology can eradicate its neural substrates.

Vanity Fair: 

Statistics say that on the average people in Bangladesh are happier than in the Western World.

David Pearce: 

In Bangladesh, if you lose a child through malnourishment or disease it’s absolutely dreadful, just as it is if you lose a child here. But yes, statistically the hedonic set-point around which our lives fluctuate is pretty similar whether you live in London, Berlin or Bangladesh. If someone offers you a million dollars, for instance, you get a quick boost in the same way that (to use a more extreme example) crack-addicts do. Even though crack-addicts know that the drug is going to make them awfully miserable in the long-term, they still strive for their next hit. Here in the rich West, we know money won’t make us happy, but we strive for it compulsively.

If you take suffering seriously, the only way to eradicate it is by biological reprogramming. In the short run, this may involve superior designer drugs. In the long run, the only realistic way to abolish suffering is through genetic engineering.

Vanity Fair: 

There would be a very simple method to make all people happy straight away: by putting electrodes in their pleasure centres.

David Pearce: 

Wireheading is offensive to human dignity, to our conception of who we are. The real value of wireheading is that it serves as an existence-proof for people who are sceptical that it is possible to be extremely happy indefinitely. Wireheading shows there is no tolerance to pure pleasure. The normal process of inhibitory feedback doesn’t seem to kick in. We don’t understand why this is the case. When we do, it will be a very important discovery.

Vanity Fair: 

The anaesthetist Stuart Meloy discovered accidentally that by putting an electrode in a certain area of the spinal cord a woman could experience endless orgasms. But he had a hard time finding enough people volunteering for a trial.

David Pearce: 

I can’t see wireheading as an evolutionary stable solution. Wireheads will not want to have children, or want to look after their children.

Vanity Fair: 

But what is your idea of paradise engineering? What should an ever-happy life be like?

David Pearce: 

It is not a uniform happiness but a world with a motivational system based entirely on gradients of well-being. Think of your ideal fantasy. With the right biological substrates, the reality could be millions of times better.•

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“The Remaining Employees Would Just Need To Learn How To Operate The Machines”

August 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Like many in postwar America, Ray Kroc found it rather easy to make money. It’s different today for the franchise, struggling in a much more competitive global economy. The typical McDonalds restaurant has half the staff it did 50 years ago, and there’s a chance that number could go much lower, owing to automation.

How much of the human element can be sacrificed from the Hospitality Industry (restaurants, hotels, etc.)? Probably a good deal, enough to hollow out staffs peopled by low-skill workers as well as novices and retirees. The push for a national $15 minimum wage (which workers dearly need) has some wondering if the process will be hastened.

From Lydia DePillis at the Washington Post:

Of course, it’s possible to imagine all kinds of dramatic productivity enhancements. Persona ­Pizzeria’s [Harold] Miller predicts that drone delivery systems will eventually get rid of the need to come into a restaurant at all, for example. [Middleby Corp COO Dave] Brewer has a bold prediction: He thinks that all the automation working its way into restaurants could eventually cut staffing levels in half. The remaining employees would just need to learn how to operate the machines and fix things when they break.

“You don’t want a $15-an-hour person doing something that the person who makes $7 an hour can do,” Brewer said. “It’s not downgrading the employees. It’s that the employees become managers of a bunch of different systems. They’ll become smarter and smarter.”

The value of a human touch

Not everybody, however, agrees that machines could make that much of a dent in labor costs. Implementing new systems is expensive, and mistakes can be devastating. And for some concepts, it’s possible that the presence of employees is actually a restaurant’s competitive advantage. Compared with grocery stores and gas stations, many people come to restaurants exactly because they want some human interaction.•

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An industrial video from 50 years ago about AMF, which brought automation and computers to bowling, trying to make fast food even more inhuman.

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“It Is Raising Questions Of Privacy And Concerns About Potential Misuse”

August 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

As we witnessed with horror in Ferguson, the tools we create to fight wars overseas find their way back to the home front, free markets taking over where DARPA and other Defense departments trail off. Beyond guns and drones, surveillance equipment is the latest boomerang returning, and there are few rules in place to moderate their use, the technology, as usual, outstripping legislation. 

From Timothy Williams at the New York Times:

SAN DIEGO — Facial recognition software, which American military and intelligence agencies used for years in Iraq and Afghanistan to identify potential terrorists, is being eagerly adopted by dozens of police departments around the country to pursue drug dealers, prostitutes and other conventional criminal suspects. But because it is being used with few guidelines and with little oversight or public disclosure, it is raising questions of privacy and concerns about potential misuse.

Law enforcement officers say the technology is much faster than fingerprinting at identifying suspects, although it is unclear how much it is helping the police make arrests.

When Aaron Harvey was stopped by the police here in 2013 while driving near his grandmother’s house, an officer not only searched his car, he said, but also took his photograph and ran it through the software to try to confirm his identity and determine whether he had a criminal record.•

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“What Is The Greatest Social And Economic Risk Of The Coming Decade?”

August 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It amazes me that California’s water shortage seems to be viewed in this country as a regional problem for them, when it’s clearly a grave concern for us. As farmers in that state search deeper and deeper for the scarce liquid hoping to stave off personal disaster, we all near a collective one. If California dying of thirst isn’t a national emergency, I don’t know what is. Globally, the water crises may be the most serious threat to world peace. From the Spiegel report “World Without Water“:

“Water is the primary principle of all things,” the philosopher Thales of Miletus wrote in the 6th century BC. More than two-and-a-half thousand years later, on July 28, 2010, the United Nations felt it was necessary to define access to water as a human right. It was an act of desperation. The UN has not fallen so clearly short of any of its other millennium goals than the goal of cutting the number of people without this access in half by 2015.

The question is whether water is public property and a human right. Or is it ultimately a commodity, a consumer good and a financial investment?

The world’s business leaders and decision makers gathered at the annual meeting in snow-covered Davos, Switzerland in January to discuss the most pressing issues of the day. One of the questions was: What is the greatest social and economic risk of the coming decade? The selection of answers consisted of 28 risks, including wars, weapons of mass destruction and epidemics. The answer chosen by the world’s economic elite was: water crises.

Consumers have recognized for years that we need to reduce our consumption of petroleum. But very few people think about water as being scarce, even though it’s the resource of the future, more valuable than oil because it is irreplaceable. It also happens to be the source of all life.•

 

“I Fear For The Future Of Capitalism In Our Country And Around The World”

August 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

A few days ago, I posted an excerpt from a New York Times op-ed written by Peter Georgescu, the Young & Rubicam chairman emeritus, who believes wealth inequality must be remedied by corporations (not particularly likely) or we’ll have social uprisings and ginormous tax increases. Well, something’s got to give.

The essay touched a nerve, leading to a raft of Facebook questions directed at the writer. He answered some of them for the Times. Unfortunately, none address automation potentially adding to the short- and medium-term woes with technological unemployment. 

One exchange about what the questioner and Georgescu see as the precarious position of contemporary capitalism:

Question:

A quick prelude is that I fear that our capitalist model is in danger. In the early days of capitalism (here in the US and elsewhere) companies were mostly family owned and run even for generations. Now we have the board, stockholders and CEO model, which appears very flawed. The stockholders often are just looking for short term gain, the board has no real ties to or ‘skin’ in the company, and the CEO is often colluding with the stockholders for short term gain.

After that long-winded lead in, do you share those fears? Any thoughts on improving the current public corporate model? How about the German system of requiring public corporations to have a union representative on the board?

Peter Georgescu:

I fear for the future of capitalism in our country and around the world. Capitalism really means free enterprise. The name came from the resource that once drove the free-market engine. Capital no longer plays that prominent role. Creativity and innovation drive global business today. Capital is just one resource, important, but no longer the major differentiator. Historically, this so-called capitalist free-enterprise engine achieved extraordinary results. It propelled America into the superpower that is it today. It lifted hundreds of millions of people from deep poverty to a more humane standard of living. (Think China, India, Brazil, countries in Africa and more.)

But that extraordinary engine has been hijacked by a rogue philosophy that says that shareholders’ interests come first and which threatens to destroy both this magnificent engine and our very way of life. The misguided philosophy says that one of a corporation’s stakeholders, the shareholders, deserves to have their value maximized in the short term. The three other vital stakeholders are not adequately represented at the decision-making table and inadequately compensated. First, the employees — who are the real value creators. They have been turned into a cost to be squeezed. Then, the corporation itself, where investment in R&D and innovation is grossly inadequate. Finally, a business’s customers, who should be a corporation’s prime stakeholder — not the shareholders.

Even the moral justification that the shareholder is the owner and an owner gets what they want when they want it is a myth. In fact the shareholder is a mentor at best. They come into stock when they want and leave at their will. And they are of course immune from any corporation liabilities. That’s not ownership. The preponderance of legal opinion is clear. The corporation owns its own assets, not the shareholder.

So yes, we must rebalance a business’s incremental value returns among the key stakeholders — the employees, the shareholders and the corporation itself. And we must always put the customer’s interests first.

If we do that, we can liberate free enterprise from its present-day shackles.•

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“How Could We Maneuver Akin Into The GOP Driver’s Seat?”

August 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

American politics aren’t merely an endless horserace as many pundits seem to think it is, but you don’t get to effect real change unless you wind up in the winner’s circle. Claire McCaskill, Democratic Senator in the red state of Missouri, realized this when running for reelection in 2012. In a Politico piece she penned, McCaskill confirms something suspected at the time: She consciously and audaciously helped the most extreme and defeatable GOP opponent, Todd Akin, win the Republican nomination, giving herself the best chance of general-election victory. She even advised Akin about which of his TV ads were working and should be continued. “This was the most fun I’d had in a long time,” she writes.

It was a risky gambit since the state could have been left with a wingnut nonpareil in the Senate, but it worked. Not even McCaskill could have anticipated Akin’s “legitimate rape” comments, a despicable bit of reasoning and a monumental political gift. An excerpt:

Akin’s track record made him my ideal opponent. Many of his votes in Congress contradicted his claim of being a fiscal conservative. While he opposed President Barack Obama’s authority to raise the debt limit, during the Bush administration, in 2004, he had voted to raise the limit by $800 billion. A vocal opponent of the Obama administration’s stimulus efforts, in 2001 Akin had voted in favor of a $25 billion stimulus package that mostly benefited large corporations and the wealthy. And he was a big earmarker: in one fiscal year he sponsored or cosponsored $14 million worth of pork and once sought $3.3 million in a special appropriation for a highway near nine acres he owned and was planning to develop. While opposing spending money for child nutrition programs, veterans’ health benefits, and disaster relief, he repeatedly voted to raise his own salary.

His extreme positions on social issues and ridiculous public statements made him anathema to many independent voters. He sponsored an amendment that would define life as beginning at conception, thereby outlawing common forms of birth control. He voted against repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” legislation. When the Affordable Care Act was being debated, he stood on the House floor and asked for God’s help in keeping the nation from “socialized medicine.” In 2008, he claimed in a House floor speech that it was “common practice” for doctors to conduct abortions on women “who were not actually pregnant.” He had made speeches calling for America to pull out of the United Nations and claiming the government had “a bunch of socialists in the Senate” and a “commie” in the White House.

So how could we maneuver Akin into the GOP driver’s seat?•

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“The Extent Of The Plunge In Childbearing Is Startling”

August 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The only thing trickier than predicting future population is interpreting what those people will mean for the world and its resources. From Malthus to Ehrlich, population bombs have defused themselves, even proved beneficial. Down deep, most likely think there’s a tipping point, a tragic number, but, of course, development of technologies can rework that math, stretch resources to new lengths. And a larger pool of talent makes it easier to create those new tools.

It would seem to make sense that immigrant nations can ride the wave of fluctuations best, not being dependent on internal fertility numbers. Robotics may reduce that advantage, however. Japan is certainly banking on that transformation.

In a Financial Times piece, Robin Harding writes that fertility seems to be on a steep decline globally, leveling off. If so, the ramifications will be many, including for Labor. The opening:

The extent of the plunge in childbearing is startling. Eighty-three countries containing 46 per cent of the world’s population — including every single country in Europe — now have fertility below replacement rate of about 2.1 births per woman. Another 46 per cent live in countries where the birth rate has fallen sharply. In 48 countries the population will decline between now and 2050.

That leaves just 9 per cent of the world’s population, almost all in Africa, living in nations with pre-industrial fertility rates of five or six children per woman. But even in Africa fertility is starting to dip. In a decade, the UN reckons, there will be just three countries with a fertility rate higher than five: Mali, Niger and Somalia. In three decades, it projects only Niger will be higher than four.

These projections include a fertility bounce in countries such as Germany and Japan. If more fecund nations follow this path of declining birth rates, therefore, a stable future population could quickly be locked in.

That would have enormous consequences for the world economy, geo­politics and the sum of human happiness, illustrated by some of the middle-income countries that have gone through a dramatic, and often ignored, fall in fertility.•

 

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Old Print Article: Robots Enter The U.S. Military, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1928)

August 11, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Televox was the 1920s robot that reportedly fetched your car from the garage or a bottle of wine the cellar. While these feats, along with many others, were said to have been ably performed, the cost of such a machine made it unmarketable.

Televox was also the star attraction of a very early insinuation of robotics into the American military when, in 1928, he barked out orders to the grunts. It was a bit of a publicity stunt but also the beginnings of robotizing war, which some then thought implausible, though nobody does now. An article follows from the June 11, 1928 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

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“Buckley And Mailer Did Not Make History”

August 11, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

At least outwardly, William F. Buckley was approving in the 1990s of Rush Limbaugh replacing him as the voice of Conservatism, believing he was to be succeeded by a more populist talker. Neither pundit, however, was really a driving force in American society. They were just well-positioned observers as responsible for political movements as alarm clocks are for the sun’s rise. Both were simply the noise accompanying the moment, as commentators almost always are.

Buckley and Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer were figures we used to call “public intellectuals,” although quite often they behaved like adult babies hurling balls of ego at one another. I don’t know we’re worse for their absence (though I grant that when Mailer wrote of technology, he was quite insightful).

As Garry Wills states in a NYRB piece, a single episode of The Daily Show or The Colbert Report did more to elucidate than every last insult and threat of fisticuffs from these supposed heavyweights.

From Wills:

A more ambitious project is Kevin M. Schultz’s Buckley and Mailer. He argues that the 1950s was a placid time narcotized by Eisenhower. But two radical voices, Buckley from the right and Mailer from the left, called out across the dreary middle ground, shaking things up—deep calling to deep, in Schultz’s telling. When chaos broke out in the 1960s, the two men pulled back from the violence they had created.

But had they created it? The upsetting of the old order was accomplished mainly by the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and the anti-war movement. Those three things, and the vehement opposition to them, did the real churning of the waters; and Buckley and Mailer were only briefly and peripherally involved in them. The real troublemakers were people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin, opposed by the likes of Strom Thurmond and George Wallace. Feminists like Gloria Steinem and Kate Millett were opposed to the pious legions of Phyllis Schlafly and Beverly LaHaye. On Vietnam, Benjamin Spock and Tom Hayden faced down Nixon’s hardhats and Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO. These deeply committed people with real followings had little time for the filigreed warblings of Buckley or Mailer. Deep to deep? Rather, flamboyant shallow to flamboyant shallow. Buckley and Mailer did not make history. They made good copy.•

 

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“Information Technology Has Reduced The Need For Work”

August 11, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

According to Paul Mason, author of PostCapitalism, technology has reduced the economic system to obsolescence or soon will. While I don’t agree that capitalism is going away, I do believe the modern version of it is headed for a serious revision.

The extent to which technology disrupts capitalism–the biggest disruption of them all–depends to some degree on how quickly the new normal arrives. If driverless cars are perfected in the next few years, tens of millions of positions will vanish in America alone. Even if the future makes itself known more slowly, employment will probably grow more scarce as automation and robotics insinuate themselves. 

The very idea of work is currently undergoing a reinvention. In exchange for the utility of communicating with others, Facebook users don’t pay a small monthly fee but instead do “volunteer” labor for the company, producing mountains of content each day. That would make Mark Zuckerberg’s company something like the biggest sweatshop in history, except even those dodgy outfits pay some minimal fee. It’s a quiet transition.

Gillian Tett of the Financial Times reviews Mason’s new book, which argues that work will become largely voluntary in the manner of Wikipedia and Facebook, and that governments will provide basic income and services. That’s his Utopian vision at least. Tett finds it an imperfect but important volume. An excerpt:

His starting point is an assertion that the current technological revolution has at least three big implications for modern economies. First, “information technology has reduced the need for work” — or, more accurately, for all humans to be workers. For automation is now replacing jobs at a startling speed; indeed, a 2013 report by the Oxford Martin school estimated that half the jobs in the US are at high risk of vanishing within a decade or two.

The second key point about the IT revolution, Mason argues, is that “information goods are corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly.” For the key point about cyber-information is that it can be replicated endlessly, for free; there is no constraint on how many times we can copy and paste a Wikipedia page. “Until we had shareable information goods, the basic law of economics was that everything is scarce. Supply and demand assumes scarcity. Now certain goods are not scarce, they are abundant.”

But third, “goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy.” More specifically, people are collaborating in a manner that does not always make sense to traditional economists, who are used to assuming that humans act in self-interest and price things according to supply and demand.•

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