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“He Sounded More Like A Marxist Theoretician Than Someone Who Made His Fortune Selling Cartier Diamonds And Montblanc Pens”

July 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

I took a NYC bus recently, an odd circumstance for a dedicated subway rider like myself, and it was a depressing experience in a way I didn’t anticipate. The stop at which I boarded was the culmination of an undercover sting operation, and those who hadn’t paid full fare along the line (just put small change in the box) or hopped on via the back door were loudly pointed out by plainclothes cops and herded off like murderers. There they were lined up and written tickets. A cursory glance at these “hardened criminals” showed them to be just sort of down-on-their luck working class people, who weren’t much different than anyone else on the bus, save a Metrocard or enough coins. I didn’t mind if my fare was subsidizing them, and it was tough seeing these struggling folks treated like perps just because they didn’t have enough money. It felt like they were mostly guilty of daring to be poor in New York City, of being on the losing end of a class war.

When Wall Street banks crashed the economy in 2008, those involved in the schemes weren’t pointed out and lined up. No tickets written. Perhaps that’s because they have enough money to avoid taking buses. Fact is, when you can hire lobbyists and buy politicians, you don’t have to really break the law to get what you want. You can have rules bent to your advantage so things that should be illegal are perfectly okay. That’s also class warfare, especially since such behavior had a direct impact on the fate of bus riders.

In a New York Times piece, Alan Feuer, who never disappoints, writes of a few super-rich people at least paying lip service to the problem of wealth inequality. His opening:

EARLIER this month, when the billionaire merchandising mogul Johann Rupert gave a speech at The Financial Times’ “luxury summit” in Monaco, he sounded more like a Marxist theoretician than someone who made his fortune selling Cartier diamonds and Montblanc pens. Appearing before a crowd of executives from Fendi and Ferrari, Mr. Rupert argued that it wasn’t right — or even good business — for “the 0.1 percent of the 0.1 percent” to raid the world’s spoils. “It’s unfair and it is not sustainable,” he said.

For several years now, populist politicians and liberal intellectuals have been inveighing against income inequality, an issue that is gaining traction among the broader body politic, as shown by a recent New York Times/CBS News poll that found that nearly 60 percent of American voters want their government to do more to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor. But in the last several months, this topic has been taken up by a different and unlikely group of advocates: a small but vocal band of billionaires.

In March, for instance, Paul Tudor Jones II, the private equity investor, gave a TED talk in which he proclaimed that the divide between the top 1 percent in the United States and the remainder of the country “cannot and will not persist.” Mr. Jones, who is thought to be worth nearly $5 billion, added that such divides have historically been resolved in one of three ways: taxes, wars or revolution.•

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“They Have Ways Of Making You Happy”

July 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

My opinion may be influenced by living in NYC and knowing lots of media workers, but I believe most people are fucking miserable. And the majority never change, except to get worse. So while the implications of “mood surveillance” by corporations and governments are troubling, I don’t know that unhappiness is a problem that can be manipulated or weeded out.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be efforts to do so, though. Philip Matthews of Stuff.co.nz speaks to sociologist William Davies, author of The Happiness Industry, about the past, present and future of measuring and modifying our moods. An excerpt:

Davies asks, what does a happiness or well-being industry exist for, and who benefits from it? At times, it can resemble science-fiction or a culture of benign-seeming surveillance.

There is the wearable technology that could let managers see how stressed employees are, or how active, which has sinister potential. Could managers identify the less active or sociable sector of their workforce and find ways to remove them? They could come to similar conclusions by analysing keywords in emails and social media messages, and picking up patterns in metadata.

“While I give it a slightly sinister spin, there are people out there who think this is the future of business,” Davies says.

Measuring and then modifying the public mood could turn out to be relatively easy. There is the example of a literature festival in the UK that filmed the smiles of attendees, which were analysed by software and rated. It was described by as “the future of evaluation”.

There was the infamous Facebook experiment, in which the news feeds of nearly 700,000 users were manipulated for a week to test theories about “emotional contagion”. Some users saw more good news than usual and some saw more bad news, and Facebook found that the input had a small effect on the output. In other words, those whose feeds had been negative posted more negative comments themselves.

They have ways of making you happy. In the UK, “the science of emotion has been put to work as part of an austerity agenda that withdraws benefits from vulnerable populations”, Davies says.

It almost sounds like a perversion of motivational thinking.•

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“It’s Not Unreasonable To Expect People To Vote For Policies That Will Help Them Avoid The Economic Fate Of The Horse”

July 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The new Foreign Affairs issue on automation, which I’ve excerpted several times (here and here and here), would not have been complete without a piece by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, authors of The Second Machine Age, an excellent book that asks all right questions about the rapid growth of robotics, trying to answer them as well.

In “Will Humans Go the Way of Horses?” the duo wisely points out that regardless of machine progress, we aren’t likely going to become our equine brothers. There’s some chance superintelligence might obliterate humans one day in the very long run, but interpersonal skills, common sense, political will and revolution are some of the tools the authors believe may slow or even mitigate the lower-case calamities on the horizon, keeping us from the stable or glue factory, even if we’re no longer the heart of production. An excerpt:

It’s possible, however, to imagine a “robot dividend” that created more widespread ownership of robots and similar technologies, or at least a portion of the financial benefits they generated. The state of Alaska provides a possible template: courtesy of the Alaska Permanent Fund, which was established in 1976, the great majority of the state’s residents receive a nontrivial amount of capital income every year. A portion of the state’s oil revenues is deposited into the fund, and each October, a dividend from it is given to each eligible resident. In 2014, this dividend was $1,884.

Even if human labor becomes far less necessary overall, people, unlike horses, can choose to prevent themselves from becoming economically irrelevant.


It’s important to note that the amendment to the Alaska state constitution establishing the Permanent Fund passed democratically, by a margin of two to one. That Alaskans chose to give themselves a bonus highlights another critical difference between humans and horses: in many countries today, humans can vote. In other words, people can influence economic outcomes, such as wages and incomes, through the democratic process. This can happen directly, through votes on amendments and referendums, or indirectly, through legislation passed by elected representatives. It is voters, not markets, who are picking the minimum wage, determining the legality of sharing-economy companies such as Uber and Airbnb, and settling many other economic issues.

In the future, it’s not unreasonable to expect people to vote for policies that will help them avoid the economic fate of the horse.•

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“The Only Civilized Cure Is To Prevent These Changes From Causing Destitution”

July 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The MIT Technology Review has republished a piece of  “Machinery and Unemployment,” Dugald C. Jackson’s 1933 article for that publication about workers displaced by technical progress. What was true then–new opportunities would replace those that vanished–may not be so now. And certainly Jackson’s remedy (businesses purposely not use machines to preserve some jobs) is completely at odds with this age. An excerpt:

In the United States, a highly mechanized nation, the proportion of the population ten years of age and older in gainful occupations has varied only six or seven per cent from its average figure during the 50 years from 1880 to 1930. Nevertheless, during the same time a large change occurred in the percentages employed in different occupations. The numbers of individuals gainfully occupied in trade, transportation, and clerical work expanded tremendously. Similar shifts have occurred in western Europe.

Employees of the more advanced ages and least mental skill are likely to be permanently displaced by such shifts. The uneducated and meager-minded man who is destitute is a continuing cost-burden to society; and it is a poor order of intellect which can look upon the poorhouse as a desirable haven for old age.

The only civilized cure is to prevent these changes from causing destitution. This may be done by placing responsibility on those commercial, industrial, or other profit-making activities favorably affected by the changes. Replacement of man-hours by machine-hours should be restrained unless the replacement enlarges net earnings sufficiently to provide a reasonable contribution for reestablishing the displaced employees’ status of living. Applying these principles would introduce a restraint upon the improper or socially unprofitable introduction of machinery.”•

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“We Are Already In A Cold War”

July 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Former Carter Administration National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose daughter, Mika, is a liberal Margaret Dumont employed to prevent Joe “Gummo” Scarborough from being absolutely the dumbest person in the room, spoke to Sebastian Fischer and Holger Stark of Spiegel about the contretemps with Russia. Brzezinski’s technically correct in labeling the West’s stalemate with Russia a new Cold War, but let’s not use that term as if had the same meaning as it did during the Soviet days. Russia is still nuked-up, sure, and Ukraine is of great concern, but the pre-Glasnost standoff was a completely different order of magnitude. The opening:

Spiegel:

Mr. Brzezinski, are we seeing the beginning of a new Cold War between Russia and the US?

Zbigniew Brzezinski:

We are already in a Cold War. Whether it will become hot is fortunately still less than likely.

Spiegel:

The last Cold War lasted more than 40 years. Will it last that long this time around?

Zbigniew Brzezinski:

I don’t think so. Things move much more rapidly. Pressures from the outside are more felt internally. If this continues, and if Ukraine doesn’t collapse, domestic pressures in Russia will force whoever is in charge to explore alternatives. Hopefully, Putin is smart enough to know that it’s better to explore alternatives ahead of time and not too late.

Spiegel:

Is he smart enough?

Zbigniew Brzezinski:

That’s very hard to say. He has what’s called “smarts” in American, which is a kind of instinctive smartness. He has a real sophistication. I wonder why he’s almost deliberately antagonizing more than 40 million people in a country next door which, until very recently, were not driven by any hostility towards Russia.

Spiegel:

Do you think it is right for the US to send heavy weaponry to Eastern Europe and the Baltic states?

Zbigniew Brzezinski:

Do you think it is right to send troops and weapons into a sovereign country and start up a limited war after having seized a larger portion of it?

Spiegel: 

You are talking about Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

Zbigniew Brzezinski:

You have to see both sides.•

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“Some Of Us Work A Lot More Than Before Whereas Others Are Struggling To Even Break Into The Job Market”

July 1, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

How do we reconcile largely free-market economies with highly automated ones? That depends.

If a scary number of jobs disappear into the algorithms and are readily replaced by new positions in industries we’ve yet to imagine, then it’s a bumpy changeover but not a massive upheaval. But why wouldn’t those jobs also be roboticized? Really, only trucking, delivery and construction have to lose their human workers for serious remedies to be required. Universal basic income is often cited as one potential solution.

From Josefin Smeds at Smarter Together:

For a long time, an argument in favor of automatization has been that it frees up time for people to work less and spend more time on family, leisure, and hobbies. Unfortunately, reality has shown that this has not been the result. Rather, some of us work a lot more than before whereas others are struggling to even break into the job market.

What are the alternatives then? Here is a little optimism along with some thought-provoking ideas. Jobs disappearing and tasks being carried out by machines do not have to be an entirely bad thing. Basic income is an intriguing (and somewhat controversial) concept where each citizen gets a regular “citizen salary” from the government, enough to cover expenses for basic needs. Supposedly, this would enable people to do what they really want to do in life, rather than working just to get bread on the table. The money for this basic income could, at least partly, be taken from the savings made from reduced government expenses on unemployment allowances and social security.•

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“They Will Work Long Hours And Live In Cramped Spaces”

July 1, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

You hear an awful lot about how America is falling behind in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) education, that there’s a shortfall of graduates in those areas for now and the future. But labor statistics don’t back this claim.

Silicon Valley has been particularly loud about wanting foreign applicants fast-tracked for visas and citizenship. The situation is dire, they insist. Perhaps whether we’re talking about apple pickers or Apple engineers, this protest is more about want than need.

From Andrew Hacker’s NYRB piece “The Frenzy About High-Tech Talent“:

A variety of American industries have long held that their survival depends on being permitted to bring in foreign workers. Most familiar has been much of agriculture, which claims that resident citizens will not take the pay that employers can afford. Today the technology sector is making a similar plea, with the obvious difference that it needs more cerebral skills. Under H-1B, candidates must be sponsored by specified employers, with elaborate paperwork on both sides, including avowals that the domestic workforce has been thoroughly combed for qualified candidates. Apparently, the time spent on such applications is worth it.

As of the end of 2012, fully 262,569 H-1B visa-holders were working in the United States. By far the most were from India (168,367), with China a distant second (19,850). Indians are most wanted because they come knowing English and can start on assignments the day after they arrive. Topping the list are “computer-related occupations,” such as coding, followed by engineering. Microsoft leads the employers’ list, with Intel, IBM, and Oracle close behind. But a host of enterprises now have software systems in need of servicing. The H-1B roster also includes Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and the Rite-Aid pharmacy chain.

A central question, of course, is why Americans weren’t available or applying for these 262,569 jobs. During the 2001–2011 decade, the most recent for which we have figures, our colleges turned out some 2.5 million graduates in computer science and engineering, which seems a fair-sized pool. On its face, it should contain enough people with the qualifications that Microsoft and Oracle and Rite-Aid expect. One explanation is that these and other firms in fact prefer people from abroad. Indeed, many are already in universities here, where they receive half the graduate degrees in computer science and engineering. Of students from India awarded Ph.D.s, 85 percent were still in the US five years after receiving their degrees.

James Bach and Robert Werner’s How to Secure Your H-1B Visa is written for both employers and the workers they hire. They are told that firms must “promise to pay any H-1B employee a competitive salary,” which in theory means what’s being offered “to others with similar experience and qualifications.” At least, this is what the law says. But then there are figures compiled by Zoe Lofgren, who represents much of Silicon Valley in Congress, showing that H-1B workers average 57 percent of the salaries paid to Americans with comparable credentials.

Norman Matloff, a computer scientist at the University of California’s Davis campus, provides some answers. The foreigners granted visas, he found, are typically single or unattached men, usually in their late twenties, who contract for six-year stints, knowing they will work long hours and live in cramped spaces. Being tied to their sponsoring firm, Matloff adds, they “dare not switch to another employer” and are thus “essentially immobile.” For their part, Bach and Warner warn, “it may be risky for you to give notice to your current employer.” Indeed, the perils include deportation if you can’t quickly find another guarantor.

Matloff also found that employers “tailor job requirements so that only the desired foreign applicants qualify” and they “have an arsenal of legal means to reject all US workers who apply.”•

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“The Late North Korean Dictator Kidnapped South Korean Cinema’s Golden Couple”

June 30, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’ve read some titles from the Financial Times “Summer Books 2015” list, including Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, Evan Osnos’ Age of Ambition and Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots, all of which are wonderful–in fact, Harari’s title is the best book I’ve read this year, period. Here are several more suggestions from FT which sound great:

Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel) is an apocalyptic novel about a world in which almost everyone has died in a flu pandemic, and clans roam the earth killing at random. It could hardly sound less promising. And yet Emily St John Mandel’s fourth novel is different partly because she skips over the apocalypse itself — all the action takes place just before or 20 years afterwards — and because it is less about the survival of the human race than the survival of Shakespeare. The book has been on literary shortlists and won prizes and been much praised for its big themes: culture, memory, loss. Yet it works just as well at a less lofty level, as a beautifully written, compulsive read.

A Kim Jong-Il Production (Paul Fischer) The story of how the late North Korean dictator kidnapped South Korean cinema’s golden couple, the director Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife Choi Eun-hee, and put them to work building a film industry in the North. At once a gripping personal narrative and an insight into the cruelty and madness of North Korea.

The Vital Question: Why is Life the Way It Is? (Nick Lane) Biochemist Lane offers a scintillating synthesis of a new theory of life, emphasising the interplay between energy and evolution. He shows how simple microbes, which monopolised Earth for the first 2bn years, took the momentous step towards becoming the “eukaryotic” cells that then evolved into animals, plants, fungi and protozoa.•

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“Things Can Be Simpler If We Base The System On Trust”

June 30, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I certainly don’t know enough about Utrecht’s economy to say if the Dutch city’s plan to provide universal basic income is a good one or what the success or failure of the experiment would mean, if anything, beyond its borders, but it certainly will get rid of a lot of bureaucracy. In the U.S., the measuring of the needs of people across a multitude of plans carries heavy administrative costs. 

From DutcheNews.nl:

Utrecht city council is to begin experimenting with the idea of a basic income, replacing the current complicated system of taxes, social security benefits and top-up benefits.

City alderman Victor Everhardt says the aim is to see if the concept of a basic income works in practice. ‘Things can be simpler if we base the system on trust,’ he told website DeStadUtrecht.nl.

The experiment will start after the summer holidays and is being carried out together with researchers from Utrecht University.

In theory, a basic income consists of a flat income to cover living costs which, supporters say, will free up people to work more flexible hours, do volunteer work and study. Additional income is subject to income tax.

The Utrecht project will focus on people claiming welfare benefits. One group will continue under the present system of welfare plus supplementary benefits for housing and health insurance. A second group will get benefits based on a system of incentives and rewards and a third group will have a basic income with no extras.•

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“The Animating Principle Of Our Constitution Is That The People Themselves Are The Originating Source Of All The Powers Of Government”

June 30, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Not everything should be left to the algorithms, but the drawing of U.S. congressional districts is one that cries out for such a technological shift. When members of congress, who collectively have a seven-percent approval rating, don’t have to worry about the security of their day jobs, gerrymandering has reached a ridiculous level. And if you can’t throw the bums out, you become Bumtown.

A half-step in the right direction is the Supreme Court decision which supports independent redistricting. It will still be people, prone to prejudices, doing the job, but at least it doesn’t allow for an outright “land grab.” 

From Adam Liptak at the New York Times:

The case, Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, No. 13-1314, concerned an independent commission created by Arizona voters in 2000. About a dozen states have experimented with redistricting commissions that have varying degrees of independence from the state legislatures, which ordinarily draw election maps. Arizona’s commission is most similar to California’s.

The Arizona commission has five members, with two chosen by Republican lawmakers and two by Democratic lawmakers. The final member is chosen by the four others.

The Republican-led State Legislature sued, saying the voters did not have the authority to strip elected lawmakers of their power to draw district lines. They pointed to the elections clause of the federal Constitution, which says, “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.”

Justice Ginsburg wrote that the Constitution’s reference to “legislature” encompassed the people’s legislative power when acting through ballot initiatives. “The animating principle of our Constitution is that the people themselves are the originating source of all the powers of government,” she wrote.•

 

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“It Appears To Us That We Are Ourselves Creating Our Own Successors”

June 29, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

While futzing around on Reddit, I came across a link to “Darwin Among the Machines,” a piece from Samuel Butler’s A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, which, amazingly, was written in 1863, when he was beginning to put together Erewhon. An excerpt:

The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious questions of the day. We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Inferior in power, inferior in that moral quality of self-control, we shall look up to them as the acme of all that the best and wisest man can ever dare to aim at. No evil passions, no jealousy, no avarice, no impure desires will disturb the serene might of those glorious creatures. Sin, shame, and sorrow will have no place among them. Their minds will be in a state of perpetual calm, the contentment of a spirit that knows no wants, is disturbed by no regrets. Ambition will never torture them. Ingratitude will never cause them the uneasiness of a moment. The guilty conscience, the hope deferred, the pains of exile, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes—these will be entirely unknown to them. If they want “feeding” (by the use of which very word we betray our recognition of them as living organism) they will be attended by patient slaves whose business and interest it will be to see that they shall want for nothing. If they are out of order they will be promptly attended to by physicians who are thoroughly acquainted with their constitutions; if they die, for even these glorious animals will not be exempt from that necessary and universal consummation, they will immediately enter into a new phase of existence, for what machine dies entirely in every part at one and the same instant?

We take it that when the state of things shall have arrived which we have been above attempting to describe, man will have become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man. He will continue to exist, nay even to improve, and will be probably better off in his state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than he is in his present wild state. We treat our horses, dogs, cattle, and sheep, on the whole, with great kindness; we give them whatever experience teaches us to be best for them, and there can be no doubt that our use of meat has added to the happiness of the lower animals far more than it has detracted from it; in like manner it is reasonable to suppose that the machines will treat us kindly, for their existence is as dependent upon ours as ours is upon the lower animals. They cannot kill us and eat us as we do sheep; they will not only require our services in the parturition of their young (which branch of their economy will remain always in our hands), but also in feeding them, in setting them right when they are sick, and burying their dead or working up their corpses into new machines. It is obvious that if all the animals in Great Britain save man alone were to die, and if at the same time all intercourse with foreign countries were by some sudden catastrophe to be rendered perfectly impossible, it is obvious that under such circumstances the loss of human life would be something fearful to contemplate—in like manner were mankind to cease, the machines would be as badly off or even worse. The fact is that our interests are inseparable from theirs, and theirs from ours. Each race is dependent upon the other for innumerable benefits, and, until the reproductive organs of the machines have been developed in a manner which we are hardly yet able to conceive, they are entirely dependent upon man for even the continuance of their species. It is true that these organs may be ultimately developed, inasmuch as man’s interest lies in that direction; there is nothing which our infatuated race would desire more than to see a fertile union between two steam engines; it is true that machinery is even at this present time employed in begetting machinery, in becoming the parent of machines often after its own kind, but the days of flirtation, courtship, and matrimony appear to be very remote, and indeed can hardly be realised by our feeble and imperfect imagination.

Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.•

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“The Rise Of The Top 1 Per Cent Is An American Thing”

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

Thomas Piketty is a capitalist, which might surprise some. The French economist simply believes the system is a driving force of wealth inequality if left unfettered and must be constantly treated, like a patient prone to fever. In a Financial Times piece by Anne-Sylvaine Chassany, Piketty discusses the development of his ideas. An excerpt:

Piketty says his interest in inequality crystallised after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the first Gulf war. He recalls visiting Moscow in 1991 and being struck by “the lines in front of shops”. He came back vaccinated against communism — “I believe in capitalism, private property, the market” — but also with a question central to his work: “How come those people had been so afraid of inequality and capitalism in the 19th and 20th century that they created such a monstrosity? How can we tackle inequality without repeating this disaster?”

The first Gulf war, he believed, demonstrated the cynicism of the west: “We are told constantly that states can’t do anything, that it’s impossible to regulate the Cayman Islands and the other tax havens because they are too powerful, and all of a sudden we send a million soldiers 10,000km from home to allow the emir of Kuwait to keep his oil.”

I am halfway through the now tepid bolognese when I ask him why his work had such an impact in the US without causing anything like such a stir in France at the time of its original publication. Piketty says he caught American attention in 2003 when, together with Emmanuel Saez, a fellow French economist who teaches at the University of California, he first compiled historical data on the US’s wealthiest people. In 2009, newly elected President Obama used the French economists’ graph that showed inequality was back to its 1929 peak. “We became the target of Republican think-tanks,” he recalls. The French version of the book acted as a teaser to those critics, he believes, helping propel it to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list for three weeks when it was released in English.

“The rise of the top 1 per cent is an American thing. It’s not by chance that Occupy Wall Street happened in Wall Street, and not in Brussels, Paris or Tokyo,” he says. “It’s different in Europe. Here, inequality takes the form of unemployment and public debt.”

Though Piketty concedes that the global wealth tax he recommends is a “utopian” dream, he also says a confiscatory tax rate of more than 80 per cent on earnings exceeding $1m would work.•

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“Scientific Principles And The Tools They Generate Aren’t Necessarily Liberating”

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

At any moment in history we accept some things that are wrong and others that are even monstrous. But which ones are those in our current age, a time when technology is viewed as totem?

In “Humanist Among the Machines,” an Aeon essay by Ian Beacock, the writer suggests we seek alternatives to the received wisdom of the Digital Age by taking a cue from twentieth-century historian Arnold Toynbee, who pushed back at the “mechanization” of Homo sapiens and its world in an earlier period. 

In one passage, Beacock writes that “As Toynbee recognised, scientific principles and technical innovations might help us build a better railway, a faster locomotive – but they aren’t very good at telling us who can buy tickets, what direction we should lay the track, or whether we should be taking the train at all.” The thing is, technology has gotten pretty good at telling us those type of things and is getting better all the time. Of course, that’s just more reason to pay heed to Beacock’s clarion call. As tech’s influence casts a larger shadow, the light we shine on it should be brighter still. 

An excerpt:

There’s no shortage of writing about Silicon Valley, no lack of commentary about how smartphones and algorithms are remaking our lives. The splashiest salvos have come from distinguished humanists. In The New York Times Book Review, Leon Wieseltier, acidly indicted the culture of technology for flattening the capacious human subject into a few lines of computer code. Rebecca Solnit, in the London Review of Books, rejects the digital life as one of distraction, while angrily documenting the destruction of bohemian San Francisco at the hands of hoodied young software engineers who ride to work aboard luxury buses like “alien overlords.” Certainly there’s reason to be outraged: much good is being lost in our rush to optimisation. Yet it’s hard not to think that we’ve been so distracted by such totems as the Google Bus that we’re failing to ask the most interesting, constructive, radical questions about our digital times. Technology isn’t going anywhere. The real issue is what to do with it.

Scientific principles and the tools they generate aren’t necessarily liberating. They’re not inherently destructive, either. What matters is how they’re put to use, for which values and in whose interest they’re pressed into service. Silicon Valley’s most successful companies often present their services as value-free: Google just wants to make the world’s information transparent and accessible; Facebook humbly offers us greater connectivity with the people we care about; Lyft and Airbnb extol the virtues of sharing among friends, new and old. If there are values here, they seem to be fairly innocuous ones. How could you possibly oppose making new friends or learning new things?

Yet each of these high-tech services is motivated by a vision of the world as it ought to be, an influential set of assumptions about how we should live together, what we owe one another as neighbours and citizens, the relationship between community and individual, the boundary between public good and private interest. Technology comes, in other words, with political baggage. We need critics who can pull back the curtain, who can scrutinise digital technology without either antipathy or boosterism, who can imagine how it might be used differently. We need critics who can ask questions of value.•

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“In The Year 2050, Businesses In Humania Are Egalitarian, Fast-And-Loose, And Porous”

June 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Futurist Stowe Boyd outdid himself when asked to imagine the nature of corporations in 2050, as you can see in his excellent Medium essay. He believes our response to challenges of wealth inequality, climate change and AI will make things break in one of three ways, resulting in scenarios he labels Humania (great), Neo-feudalistan (not-so-great) and Collapseland (yikes!). An excerpt about the most hopeful outcome:

After mounting concern about inequality, the climate, and the inroads that AI and robots were having on society, in the 2020s Western nations — and later other developing countries — were hit by a ‘Human Spring.’ New populist movements rose up and rejected the status quo, and demanded fundamental change. At first the demands were uneven — some groups emphasized climate, or inequality, or the right to work.

But by the mid 2030s, all three forces were more-or-less equal planks in the Humania platform. This led to mandated barriers to inequality — such as limits on the multiple of the salaries of highest to lowest paid workers, and progressive taxation so that the well-off paid much higher taxes by percentage. Additionally, there were worldwide actions to limit oil and coal use, and a dramatic shift to solar in the early 2020s. Concerned that people would be pushed inexorably out of the job market, governments build limits on AI use into international trade agreements, based on a notion of the human right to work.

In the year 2050, businesses in Humania are egalitarian, fast-and-loose, and porous. Egalitarian in the sense that Humania workers have great autonomy: They can choose who they want to work with and for, as well as which initiatives or projects they’d like to work on.

They’re fast-and-loose in that they are organized to be agile and lean, and in order to do so, the social ties in businesses are much looser than in the 2010s. It was those rigid relationships — for example, the one between a manager and her direct reports — that, when repeated across layers of a hierarchical organization, lead to slow-and-tight company.

Instead of a pyramid, Humania’s companies are heterarchies: They are more like a brain than an army. In the brain — and in fast-and-loose companies — different sorts of connections and groupings of connected elements can form. There is no single way to organize. People can choose the sort of relationships that most make sense.

People’s careers involve many different jobs and roles, and considerable periods of time out of work. Basic universal income is guaranteed and generous benefits for family leave are a regular feature of work, such as paternity/maternity leave, looking after ill loved ones, and subsidized opportunities for life-long learning. This is the porous side of things; The edge of the company is permeable, and people easily leave and return.•

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“The Utility Of Having Such A Capability Is Pretty Astounding”

June 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

DARPA wants to be able to terraform Earth and Mars and whatever other sphere it chooses, editing genes in organisms which will allow for the altering of environments, the healing and fine-tuning of atmospheres. Very useful, provided nothing goes wrong. From Jason Koebler at Vice Motherboard:

The goal is to essentially pick and choose the best genes from whatever form of life we want and to edit them into other forms of life to create something entirely new. This will probably first happen in bacteria and other microorganisms, but it sounds as though the goal may to do this with more complex, multicellular organisms in the future.

The utility of having such a capability is pretty astounding: Jackson threw out goals of eradicating vector-borne illnesses, which obviously sounds lovely and utopian. But perhaps more interesting is DARPA’s plan to use specifically engineered organisms to help repair environmental damage. [Deputy Director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office Alicia] Jackson said that after a natural or man-made disaster, it’d be possible to engineer new types of extremophile organisms capable of surviving in a scarred wasteland. As those organisms photosynthesized and thrived, it would naturally bring that environment back to health, she said.

And that’s where terraforming Mars comes in.•

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“It Is Confusing To Me That We Get Mad At Companies That Are Providing A Solution”

June 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a recent episode of EconTalk, host Russ Roberts invited journalist Adam Davidson of the New York Times to discuss, among other things, his recent article “What Hollywood Can Teach Us About the Future of Work.” In this “On Money” column, Davidson argues that short-term Hollywood projects–a freelance, piecemeal model–may be a wave of the future. The writer contends that this is better for highly talented workers and worrisome for the great middle. I’ll agree with the latter, though I don’t think the former is as uniformly true as Davidson believes. In life, stuff happens that talent cannot save you from, that the market will not provide for.

What really perplexed me about the program was the exchange at the end, when the pair acknowledges being baffled by Uber’s many critics. I sort of get it with Roberts. He’s a Libertarian who loves the unbridled nature of the so-called Peer Economy, luxuriating in a free-market fantasy that most won’t be able to enjoy. I’m more surprised by Davidson calling Uber a “solution” to the crisis of modern work, in which contingent positions have replaced FT posts in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse. You mean it’s a solution to a problem it’s contributed to? It seems a strange assertion given that Davidson has clearly demonstrated his concern about the free fall of the middle class in a world in which rising profits have been uncoupled from hiring.

The reason why Uber is considered an enemy of Labor is because Uber is an enemy of Labor. Not only are medallion owners and licensed taxi drivers (whose rate is guaranteed) hurt by ridesharing, but Uber’s union-less drivers are prone to pay decreases at the whim of the company (which may be why about half the drivers became “inactive”–quit–within a year). And the workers couldn’t be heartened by CEO Travis Kalanick giddily expressing his desire to be rid of all of them before criticism intruded on his obliviousness, and he began to pretend to be their champion for PR purposes.

The Sharing Economy (another poor name for it) is probably inevitable and Uber and driverless cars are good in many ways, but they’re not good for Labor. If Roberts wants to tell small-sample-size stories about drivers he’s met who work for Uber just until their start-ups receive seed money and pretend that they’re the average, so be it. The rest of us need to be honest about what’s happening so we can reach some solutions to what might become a widespread problem. If America’s middle class is to be Uberized, to become just a bunch of rabbits to be tasked, no one should be satisfied with the new normal.

From EconTalk:

Russ Roberts:

A lot of people are critical of the rise of companies like Uber, where their workforce is essentially piece workers. Workers who don’t earn an annual salary. They’re paid a commission if they can get a passenger, if they can take someone somewhere, and they don’t have long-term promises about, necessarily, benefits. They have to pay for their own car, provide their own insurance, and a lot of people are critical of that, and my answer is, Why do people do it if it’s so awful? That’s really important. But I want to say something slightly more optimistic about it which is a lot of people like Uber, working for Uber or working for a Hollywood project for six months, because when it’s over they can take a month off or a week off. A lot of the people I talk to who drive for Uber are entrepreneurs, they’re waiting for their funding to come through, they’re waiting for something to happen, and they might work 80 hours a week while they’re waiting and when the money comes through or when their idea starts to click, they’re gonna work five hours a week, and then they’ll stop, and they don’t owe any loyalty to anyone, they can move in and out of work as they choose. I think there’s a large group of people who really love that. And that’s a feature for many people, not a bug. What matters is–beside your satisfaction and how rewarding your life is emotionally in that world–your financial part of it depends on what you make while you’re working. It’s true it’s only sort of part-time, but if you make enough, and evidently many Uber drivers are former taxi drivers who make more money with Uber for example, if you make enough, it’s great, so it seems to me that if we move to a world where people are essentially their own company, their own brand, the captain of their own ship rather than an employee, there are many good things about that as long as they have the skills that are in demand that people are willing to pay for. Many people will unfortunately will not have those skills. It’s a serious issue, but for many people those are enormous pluses, not minuses. 

Adam Davidson:

Yes, I agree with you. Thinking of life as an Uber driver with that as your only possible source of income, I would guess that might be tough. Price competition is not gonna be your friend. Thinking about a world where you have a whole bunch of options, including Task Rabbit, and who knows what else, Airbnb, to earn money in a variety of ways, that’s at various times and at various levels of intensity, that strikes me as only good. If we could shove that into the 1950s, I think you would have seen a lot more people leaving that corporate model and starting their own businesses or spending more time doing more creative endeavors. That all strikes me as a helpful tool. It does sound like some of the people who work at Uber have kind of been jerks, but it does seem strange to me that some people are mad at the company that’s providing this opportunity. It is tough that lots of Americans are underemployed and aren’t earning enough. That’s a bad situation, but it is confusing to me that we get mad at companies that are providing a solution.•

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“Robots ‘Will Be Benign For Quite Some Time'”

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

Despite what some narratives say, Bill Gates was completely right about the Internet and mobile. That doesn’t mean he’ll be correct about every seismic shift, but I think his intuition about autonomous cars is almost definitely accurate: Driverless functions will be useful if partially completed and a societal game-changer if completely perfected. Just helpful or a total avalanche. In an interview conducted by Financial Times Deputy Editor John Thornhill, Gates discussed these matters, among many others. An excerpt from Shane Ferro’s article at Business Insider (which relies on Izabella Kaminska tweets from the event):

With regards to robots, the economy, and logistics, the takeaway seems to be that Gates thinks we’re in the fastest period of innovation ever, and it’s still unclear how that will affect the economy.

But there’s still quite a way to go. Robots “will be benign for quite some time,” Gates said. The future of work is not in immediate danger — although the outlook is not good for those who have a high school degree or less. 

Gates was also asked about Uber. He seems to think the real disruption to the driving and logistics industry is not going to come until we have fully driverless cars. That’s the “rubicon,” he says.

Kaminska relays that currently, Gates thinks that Uber “is just a reorganization of labour into a more dynamic form.” However, and this is big, Uber does have the biggest research and development budget out there on the driverless vehicle front. And that’s to its advantage.•

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“The Robotic Future Will Involve Dramatic Tradeoffs”

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

“We face a future in which robots will test the boundaries of our ethical and legal frameworks with increasing audacity.” writes Illah Reza Nourbakhsh in his Foreign Affairs article “The Coming Robot Dystopia,” and it’s difficult to envision a scenario in which the pace doesn’t get just faster, cheaper and at least somewhat out of control. 

We live in a strange duality now: On one hand, citizens worry that government has too much access to their information–and that’s true–but government is likely tightening its grip just as it’s losing it. Technology easily outpaces legislation, and it’s possible that at some point in the near future even those who espoused hatred of government may be wistful for a stable center. 

From Nourbakhsh:

Robotic technologies that collect, interpret, and respond to massive amounts of real-world data on behalf of governments, corporations, and ordinary people will unquestionably advance human life. But they also have the potential to produce dystopian outcomes. We are hardly on the brink of the nightmarish futures conjured by Hollywood movies such as The Matrix or The Terminator, in which intelligent machines attempt to enslave or exterminate humans. But those dark fantasies contain a seed of truth: the robotic future will involve dramatic tradeoffs, some so significant that they could lead to a collective identity crisis over what it means to be human.

This is a familiar warning when it comes to technological innovations of all kinds. But there is a crucial distinction between what’s happening now and the last great breakthrough in robotic technology, when manufacturing automatons began to appear on factory floors during the late twentieth century. Back then, clear boundaries separated industrial robots from humans: protective fences isolated robot workspaces, ensuring minimal contact between man and machine, and humans and robots performed wholly distinct tasks without interacting.

Such barriers have been breached, not only in the workplace but also in the wider society: robots now share the formerly human-only commons, and humans will increasingly interact socially with a diverse ecosystem of robots.•

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“The South Is The Last Bastion Of Liberty And Independence”

June 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

It doesn’t matter when our families moved to America, because all of us here own the past. 

Slave owners weren’t complete monsters–though they certainly were monstrous selectively–and those of us who got here much later might have acted just as abominably if we had been born to landed parents in the antebellum South–in fact, we probably would have. As the Confederate flag is hopefully lowered for good, the best thing we can do is realize that it’s possible for any people, any nation, to live within a delusion that’s unspeakably cruel to some. And we should ask ourselves if the American flag looks different to native peoples than the Stars and Bars appears to most of the rest of us.

From Campbell Robertson in the New York Times:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — It has been quite a few years since the lost cause has appeared quite as lost as it did Tuesday. As the afternoon drew on and their retreat turned into a rout, the lingering upholders of the Confederacy watched as license plates, statues and prominently placed Confederate battle flags slipped from their reach.

“This is the beginning of communism,” said Robert Lampley, who was standing in the blazing sun in front of the South Carolina State House shortly after the legislature voted overwhelmingly to debate the current placement of the Confederate battle flag. “The South is the last bastion of liberty and independence. I know we’re going to lose eventually.”

“Our people are dying off,” he went on, before encouraging a white reporter to “keep reproducing.” …

“You’re asking me to agree that my great-grandparent and great-great-grandparents were monsters,” said Greg Stewart, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the executive director of Beauvoir, the last home of Jefferson Davis.

Mr. Stewart was livid at the “reckless and unnecessary” statement by Philip Gunn, the Republican speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives, that the Confederate battle saltire needed to be removed from the Mississippi state flag. Mr. Stewart pointed out that the state had voted by huge margins to keep the flag as it was in 2001, and that should have been that.•

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“There’s Not Very Much Point To Have A Man Walking On The Moon”

June 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Excellent job by Daniel Oberhaus of Vice Motherboard with his smart interview of Noam Chomsky and theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss about contemporary scientific research and space exploration. Chomsky is disturbed by the insinuiation of private enterprise into Space Race 2.0, a quest for trillions, while Krauss thinks the expense of such an endeavor permanently makes it a moot point. I’m not so sure about the “permanently” part. Both subjects encourage unmanned space missions as a way to speed up science while scaling back costs. The opening:

Vice:

The cost of entry is so high for space, and arguably for science as well, that the general public seems to be excluded from partaking right from the start. In that light, what can really be done to reclaim the commons of space?

Noam Chomsky:

If you look at the whole history of the space program, a lot of things of interest were discovered, but it was done in a way that sort of ranges from misleading to deceitful. So what was the point of putting a man on the moon? A person is the worst possible instrument to put in space: you have to keep them alive, which is very complex, there are safety procedures, and so on. The right way to explore space is with robots, which is now done. So why did it start with a man in space? Just for political reasons.

Lawrence Krauss:

Of course we should [pressure the government to divert more funds to space programs]. But again, if you ask me if we should appropriate funds for the human exploration of space, than my answer is probably not. Unmanned space exploration, from a scientific perspective is far more important and useful. If we’re doing space exploration for adventure, then it’s a totally different thing. But from a scientific perspective, we should spend the money on unmanned space exploration.

Noam Chomsky:

John F. Kennedy made it a way of overcoming the failure of the Bay of Pigs and the fact that the Russians in some minor ways had gotten ahead of us, even though the American scientists understood that that wasn’t true. So you had to have a dramatic event, like a man walking on the moon. There’s not very much point to have a man walking on the moon except to impress people.

As soon as the public got bored with watching some guy stumble around on the moon, those projects were ended. Then space exploration began as a scientific endeavor. Things continue to develop like this to a large extent. Take, again, the development of computers. That was presented under the rubric of defense. The Pentagon doesn’t say, ‘We’re taking your tax money so that maybe your grandson can have an iPad.’ What they say is, ‘We’re defending ourselves from the Russians.’ What we’re actually doing is seeing if we can create the cutting edge of the economy.•

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“Saudi Arabia Also Has Some Of The World’s Most Intense Sunlight”

June 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Saudi Arabia is not customarily a place associatd with green energy and women’s rights, but a rich country that wants to stay that way needs to adapt. Two excerpts from articles about the nation transforming in at least some ways: Jeffrey Ball’s Atlantic piece “Why the Saudis Are Going Solar” and Juliane von Mittelstaedt and Samiha Shafy’s Spiegel feature “Lifting the Veil.”

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From Ball:

The Saudis burn about a quarter of the oil they produce—and their domestic consumption has been rising at an alarming 7 percent a year, nearly three times the rate of population growth. According to a widely read December 2011 report by Chatham House, a British think tank, if this trend continues, domestic consumption could eat into Saudi oil exports by 2021 and render the kingdom a net oil importer by 2038.

That outcome would be cataclysmic for Saudi Arabia. The kingdom’s political stability has long rested on the “ruling bargain,” whereby the royal family provides citizens, who pay no personal income taxes, with extensive social services funded by oil exports. Left unchecked, domestic consumption could also limit the nation’s ability to moderate global oil prices through its swing reserve—the extra petroleum it can pump to meet spikes in global demand. If Saudi rulers want to maintain control at home and preserve their power on the world stage, they must find a way to use less oil.

Solar, they have decided, is an obvious alternative. In addition to having some of the world’s richest oil fields, Saudi Arabia also has some of the world’s most intense sunlight. (On a map showing levels of solar radiation, with the sunniest areas colored deep red, the kingdom is as blood-red as a raw steak.) Saudi Arabia also has vast expanses of open desert seemingly tailor-made for solar-panel arrays.•

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From Von Mittelstaedt and Samiha Shafy:

In 2012, Saudi Arabia began enforcing a law that allows only females to work in lingerie stores. Gradually, women were also granted the right to sell abayas, make-up, handbags and shoes. Children’s toys. Clothes. Slowly but surely, men were banished from these realms.

Female participation in the workforce, however, brought with it a host of new problems. How could women get to work, when they’re not allowed to drive? Who was going to look after their children? What happens if they’re expecting? More laws have subsequently been passed, from a right to ten-weeks of paid parental leave, to a right to work part-time and a right to childcare support. A revolution started by lingerie. Only in Saudi Arabia.

Society has undergone dramatic change in the last ten years, ever since the late King Abdullah succeeded to the throne in 2005. The change has been especially dramatic since 2011. The main reason for the transformation is that a growing number of women are now working, and not just as civil servants, teachers and doctors. They’re increasingly better-educated and financially independent and above all, they’re a far more visible presence. They’re leaving the isolation of their homes and are free to travel around inside the country, at least, to stay in hotels, and to set up companies. There are now even women’s shelters in Saudi Arabia and discussions of violence against women are no longer the taboo they used to be. The way women are perceived has changed – as has the way they perceive themselves.

“I used to be afraid all the time, I avoided speaking to strangers,” says Alamri. “But then I started to open up and meet people, and to enjoy life.” Her husband, however, began to stop by the store where she worked. He spied on her and told her she wasn’t allowed to speak to strange men. At home, he shouted at her. She began to ask herself why she needed him. She was earning money, after all. Not a lot, but enough to support herself. After two years, she filed for divorce.•

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“The End Of Work Is Still Just A Futuristic Concept For Most Of The United States”

June 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I was on the subway the other day and a disparate group of six people of different ages, races and genders began a spontaneous conversation about how the they couldn’t afford to live anywhere nice anymore and how the middle class was gone in America, that the country wasn’t for them anymore. Small sample size to be sure, but one that’s backed up by more than four decades of research. Part of the problem could be remedied politically if finding solutions was in vogue in America, but the bigger picture would seem to be a grand sweep of history that announced itself in the aftermath of the Great Recession, as profits returned but not jobs.

I fear Derek Thompson’s excellent Atlantic feature “A World Without Work” may be accurate in its position that this time it’s different, that technological unemployment may take root in America (and elsewhere), and I think one of the writer’s biggest contributions is explaining how relatively quickly the new normal can take hold. (He visits Youngstown, a former industrial boomtown that went bust, to understand the ramifications of work going away.)

I don’t believe a tearing of the social fabric need attend an enduring absence of universal employment provided wealth isn’t aggregated at one end of the spectrum, but I don’t have much faith right now in government to step into the breach should such opportunities significantly deteriorate. Much of Thompson’s piece is dedicated finding potential solutions to a radical decline of Labor–a post-workist world. He believes America can sustain itself if citizens are working fewer hours but perhaps not if most don’t need to punch the clock at all. I’m a little more sanguine than that if basic needs are covered. Then I think we’ll see people get creative.

An excerpt:

After 300 years of breathtaking innovation, people aren’t massively unemployed or indentured by machines. But to suggest how this could change, some economists have pointed to the defunct career of the second-most-important species in U.S. economic history: the horse.

For many centuries, people created technologies that made the horse more productive and more valuable—like plows for agriculture and swords for battle. One might have assumed that the continuing advance of complementary technologies would make the animal ever more essential to farming and fighting, historically perhaps the two most consequential human activities. Instead came inventions that made the horse obsolete—the tractor, the car, and the tank. After tractors rolled onto American farms in the early 20th century, the population of horses and mules began to decline steeply, falling nearly 50 percent by the 1930s and 90 percent by the 1950s.

Humans can do much more than trot, carry, and pull. But the skills required in most offices hardly elicit our full range of intelligence. Most jobs are still boring, repetitive, and easily learned. The most-common occupations in the United States are retail salesperson, cashier, food and beverage server, and office clerk. Together, these four jobs employ 15.4 million people—nearly 10 percent of the labor force, or more workers than there are in Texas and Massachusetts combined. Each is highly susceptible to automation, according to the Oxford study.

Technology creates some jobs too, but the creative half of creative destruction is easily overstated. Nine out of 10 workers today are in occupations that existed 100 years ago, and just 5 percent of the jobs generated between 1993 and 2013 came from “high tech” sectors like computing, software, and telecommunications. Our newest industries tend to be the most labor-efficient: they just don’t require many people. It is for precisely this reason that the economic historian Robert Skidelsky, comparing the exponential growth in computing power with the less-than-exponential growth in job complexity, has said, “Sooner or later, we will run out of jobs.”

Is that certain—or certainly imminent? No. The signs so far are murky and suggestive. The most fundamental and wrenching job restructurings and contractions tend to happen during recessions: we’ll know more after the next couple of downturns. But the possibility seems significant enough—and the consequences disruptive enough—that we owe it to ourselves to start thinking about what society could look like without universal work, in an effort to begin nudging it toward the better outcomes and away from the worse ones.

To paraphrase the science-fiction novelist William Gibson, there are, perhaps, fragments of the post-work future distributed throughout the present. I see three overlapping possibilities as formal employment opportunities decline. Some people displaced from the formal workforce will devote their freedom to simple leisure; some will seek to build productive communities outside the workplace; and others will fight, passionately and in many cases fruitlessly, to reclaim their productivity by piecing together jobs in an informal economy. These are futures of consumption, communal creativity, and contingency. In any combination, it is almost certain that the country would have to embrace a radical new role for government.•

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“Machines Are Beginning To Make Inroads Into Each Of Them”

June 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Excerpts from a pair of recent Harvard Business Review articles which analyze the increasing insinuation of robots in the workplace. The opening of Walter Frick’s “When Your Boss Wears Metal Pants” examines the emotional connection we quickly make with robots who can feign social cues. In “The Great Decoupling,” Amy Bernstein and Anand Raman discuss technological unemployment, among other topics, with Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, authors of The Second Machine Age.

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From Frick:

At a 2013 robotics conference the MIT researcher Kate Darling invited attendees to play with animatronic toy dinosaurs called Pleos, which are about the size of a Chihuahua. The participants were told to name their robots and interact with them. They quickly learned that their Pleos could communicate: The dinos made it clear through gestures and facial expressions that they liked to be petted and didn’t like to be picked up by the tail. After an hour, Darling gave the participants a break. When they returned, she handed out knives and hatchets and asked them to torture and dismember their Pleos.

Darling was ready for a bit of resistance, but she was surprised by the group’s uniform refusal to harm the robots. Some participants went as far as shielding the Pleos with their bodies so that no one could hurt them. “We respond to social cues from these lifelike machines,” she concluded in a 2013 lecture, “even if we know that they’re not real.”

This insight will shape the next wave of automation. As Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee describe in their book The Second Machine Age, “thinking machines”—from autonomous robots that can quickly learn new tasks on the manufacturing floor to software that can evaluate job applicants or recommend a corporate strategy—are coming to the workplace and may create enormous value for businesses and society.•

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From Bernstein and Raman:

Harvard Business Review:

As the Second Machine Age progresses, will there be any jobs for human beings?

Andrew McAfee:

Yes, because humans are still far superior in three skill areas. One is high-end creativity that generates things like great new business ideas, scientific breakthroughs, novels that grip you, and so on. Technology will only amplify the abilities of people who are good at these things.

The second category is emotion, interpersonal relations, caring, nurturing, coaching, motivating, leading, and so on. Through millions of years of evolution, we’ve gotten good at deciphering other people’s body language…

Eric Brynjolfsson:

…and signals, and finishing people’s sentences. Machines are way behind there.

The third is dexterity, mobility. It’s unbelievably hard to get a robot to walk across a crowded restaurant, bus a table, take the dishes back into the kitchen, put them in the sink without breaking them, and do it all without terrifying the restaurant’s patrons. Sensing and manipulation are hard for robots.

None of those is sacrosanct, though; machines are beginning to make inroads into each of them.

Andrew McAfee:

We’ll continue to see the middle class hollowed out and will see growth at the low and high ends. Really good executives, entrepreneurs, investors, and novelists—they will all reap rewards. Yo-Yo Ma won’t be replaced by a robot anytime soon, but financially, I wouldn’t want to be the world’s 100th-best cellist.•

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“I Doubt Everything, Even My Own Senses At Times”

June 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

The unanswered questions that we have about the Snowden Affair are probably a little different than the ones circulating in the head of cybersecurity expert and former fugitive John McAfee, who has written an unsurprisingly strange, paranoid and colorful piece on the topic for International Business Times. An excerpt:

The Russian interviewer also asked me about Snowden: “In your opinion, is Edward Snowden a real character or one invented by the intelligence services?”

And this was my answer

“I doubt everything, even my own senses at times. Is the apparent US government the real US government? Could the real government be a committee of the largest corporate entities who mount this play of democracy to veil the real machinations?

Are the divisions of the world into apparent “countries” even real? Are the apparent divisions within my own country real? Do we really have a tripartite system of government, where the executive, legislative and judicial divisions are, in fact, real divisions? I could go on forever.

As to Edward Snowden, I find the following inconsistencies to be very troubling:

1. He is a man of soft character and limited experience in the difficult and dangerous world into which he so willingly and knowingly thrust himself. I have personally been a fugitive. I have experienced many dangers and difficult situations, and even I with my excellent survival skills would not willingly bring down such wrath upon myself. Why would a man of Snowden’s apparent character do so?

2. He was safe in Hong Kong prior to entering Russia. With no offense to your country, I believe that Snowden was smart enough to know that he could have faded into the back alleys and byways of Hong Kong and, with his talents, have led a thriving existence there. Chinese women are equally as attractive as Russian women and not quite so dangerous. It is cheaper to live in Hong Kong and the weather is better. It is, quite frankly, a colourful place full of opportunity for a clever person. Why did he leave for Russia?

3. I doubt the truth of it all because my only source of information on the subject I have obtained through the world’s press. What truth can there be in it?”•

 

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“Bioengineers Will Take The Old Sapiens Body And ­Intentionally Rewrite Its Genetic Code”

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

In a New Statesman essay, Yuval Noah Harari, author of the great book Sapiens, argues that if we’re on the precipice of a grand human revolution–in which we commandeer evolutionary forces and create a post-scarcity world–it’s being driven by private-sector technocracy, not politics, that attenuated, polarized thing. The next Lenins, the new visionaries focused on large-scale societal reorganization, Harari argues, live in Silicon Valley, and even if they don’t succeed, their efforts may significantly impact our lives. An excerpt:

Whatever their disagreements about long-term visions, communists, fascists and liberals all combined forces to create a new state-run leviathan. Within a surprisingly short time, they engineered all-encompassing systems of mass education, mass health and mass welfare, which were supposed to realise the utopian aspirations of the ruling party. These mass systems became the main employers in the job market and the main regulators of human life. In this sense, at least, the grand political visions of the past century have succeeded in creating an entirely new world. The society of 1800 was completely destroyed and we are living in a new reality altogether.

In 1900 or 1950 politicians of all hues thought big, talked big and acted even bigger. Today it seems that politicians have a chance to pursue even grander visions than those of Lenin, Hitler or Mao. While the latter tried to create a new society and a new human being with the help of steam engines and typewriters, today’s prophets could rely on biotechnology and supercomputers. In the coming decades, technological breakthroughs are likely to change human society, human bodies and human minds in far more drastic ways than ever before.

Whereas the Nazis sought to create superhumans through selective breeding, we now have an increasing arsenal of bioengineering tools at our disposal. These could be used to redesign the shapes, abilities and even desires of human beings, so as to fulfil this or that political ideal. Bioengineering starts with the understanding that we are far from realising the full potential of organic bodies. For four billion years natural selection has been tinkering and tweaking with these bodies, so that we have gone from amoebae to reptiles to mammals to Homo sapiens. Yet there is no reason to think that sapiens is the last station. Relatively small changes in the genome, the neural system and the skeleton were enough to upgrade Homo erectus – who could produce nothing more impressive than flint knives – to Homo sapiens, who produces spaceships and computers. Who knows what the outcome of a few more changes to our genome, neural system and skeleton might be? Bioengineering is not going to wait patiently for natural selection to work its magic. Instead, bioengineers will take the old sapiens body and ­intentionally rewrite its genetic code, rewire its brain circuits, alter its biochemical balance and grow entirely new body parts.

On top of that, we are also developing the ability to create cyborgs.•

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