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“To Fund His Grand Venture, He’d Charge $16,500 Per Head”

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

A private city of conspicuous consumption being built at Burning Man, that Libertarian wet dream, says so much about the weird welter of technology, wealth inequality and batshit politics that make up much of the mishegas modern American landscape. The opening of Felix Gillette’s Bloomberg story about the 1% decamping to the Nevada desert with AC, Wi-Fi and a wait staff:

For his 50th birthday, Jim Tananbaum, chief executive officer of Foresite Capital, threw himself an extravagant party at Burning Man, the annual sybaritic arts festival and all-hours rave that attracts 60,000-plus to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada over the week before Labor Day. Tananbaum’s bash went so well, he decided to host an even more elaborate one the following year. In 2014 he’d invite up to 120 people to join him at a camp that would make the Burning Man experience feel something like staying at a pop-up W Hotel. To fund his grand venture, he’d charge $16,500 per head.

Tananbaum, a contemporary art collector who resembles the actor Bob Saget, grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and graduated from Yale and Harvard, where he earned both an M.D. and an MBA. After years of starting, selling, and investing in health-care companies, he founded Foresite in 2011. A private venture capital firm with $650 million under management, San Francisco-based Foresite specializes in the health-care and pharmaceutical industries.

Busy building his portfolios, Tananbaum only made it to Burning Man in 2009, the festival’s 24th year, but instantly fell under its spell. While his peers in San Francisco’s high finance circles took up kitesurfing or winemaking, he devoted his spare time to preparations for the next burn. “Jim put a tremendous effort into trying to create something very special for the Burning Man community,” says his friend Matt Nordgren, a former quarterback at the University of Texas, who went on to star in the Bravo reality show Most Eligible Dallas. 

For 2014, Tananbaum wanted a camp that was aesthetically novel, ecologically conscious, and exceedingly comfortable.•

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“I Think We’re Heading Towards A World Of What I Call ‘Technological Socialism'”

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

Like most aspiring trillionaires, Peter Diamandis would like to live forever. Who can blame him? In a PC Magazine interview conducted by Evan Dayhevsky, the utopian futurist and author of Bold explains why he believes a small number of trillionaires plus a highly automated society won’t equal bloody revolution. An excerpt:

PCMag:

You’ve mentioned in previous media appearances that in the not crazy distant future, we may see the first trillionaires. 

Peter Diamandis: 

So, we’re at a point now when we’re starting to take on the world’s biggest problems and biggest opportunities. I have two ventures that are big and bold and which I talk about in detail in the book: the first is Planetary Resources. Think about everything that we hold of value here on Earth—metals, minerals, energy, real estate—they are in near infinite quantities in space. You know, some of the asteroids that we [Planetary Resources] are targeting to prospect are trillion-dollar assets. So, that’s one place where we might see the first trillionaires made, and, you know, I’m taking my shot at it.

The second place is in the life sciences. My other company I speak about in Bold is a company I co-founded called Human Longevity, Inc (HLI). Today there are six to seven trillion dollars a year spent on healthcare, half of which goes to people over the age of 65. In addition, people over the age of 65 hold something on the order of $60 trillion in wealth. And the question is what would people pay for an extra 10, 20, 30, 40 years of healthy life. It’s a huge opportunity. These are areas where we may see significant wealth creation.

PCMag:

One of the things you don’t touch on too much in the book are all the people who aren’t entrepreneurs. As things like AI and robotics develop and give businesses the ability produce big ideas, there will be a diminishing need for a human labor force to support it. What does the future hold for all of us non-entrepreneurs and CEOs?

Peter Diamandis: 

I think we’re heading towards a world of what I call “technological socialism.” Where technology—not the government or the state—will begin to take care of us. Technology will provide our healthcare for free. The best education in the world—for free. We’ll have access to more and more energy, better quality water, more nutritious food. So, the cost of living and having your fundamentals met will come down.

So I think we’re heading towards a world where people will be able to spend their time doing what they enjoy rather than what they need to be doing. There was a Gallup poll that said something like 70 percent of people in the United States do not enjoy their job—they work to put food on the table and get insurance to survive. So, what happens when technology can do all that work for us and allow us to actually do what we enjoy with our time?•

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“I Think What We Want Is The Choice To Be Able To Live Indefinitely”

February 6, 2015 in Politics, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Jeb and Hillary have company because Zoltan Istvan has announced his intention to run for the U.S. Presidency in 2016 on the Transhumanist Party ticket. The former National Geographic correspondent believes we’ll soon (within a decade) be electively receiving robotic hearts and eventually be living in a post-gender society in which we can choose when and if we die. We will be able to tweet indefinitely! As often is the case with life-extension enthusiasts, his timeframe seems wacky, and replacing a failing organ in a human being shouldn’t be made to sound as simple as switching out a carburetor in a Chevy. Zach Weissmueller of the Libertarian Reason TV interviewed Istvan, so some government-bashing is included.

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“Brace Yourself. This Is The Economy We’re Now Barreling Toward.”

February 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The main question I’ve asked since beginning this blog–and one you may be weary of by now–is this: How do we reconcile what’s largely a free-market economy with one that’s highly automated? All work that humans currently do that can be replicated by Weak AI will be ceded to the machines. Will the lack of McJobs (fast-food workers, hotel clerks, customer service, etc.) and many knowledge-based ones (here and here) be replaced by work in other yet-to-be hatched industries? If not, how do the majority of people share in the great bounty that automation will yield? I don’t think getting to own really cheap smartphones will be enough. At some point, the people grow tired of bread and Kardashians. The opening of a Salon article about the destabilizing effects of the Peer Economy by that mensch Robert Reich:

How would you like to live in an economy where robots do everything that can be predictably programmed in advance, and almost all profits go to the robots’ owners? 

Meanwhile, human beings do the work that’s unpredictable – odd jobs, on-call projects, fetching and fixing, driving and delivering, tiny tasks needed at any and all hours – and patch together barely enough to live on.

Brace yourself. This is the economy we’re now barreling toward.

They’re Uber drivers, Instacart shoppers, and Airbnb hosts. They include Taskrabbit jobbers, Upcounsel’s on-demand attorneys, and Healthtap’s on-line doctors.

They’re Mechanical Turks.

The euphemism is the “share” economy. A more accurate term would be the “share-the-scraps” economy.

New software technologies are allowing almost any job to be divided up into discrete tasks that can be parceled out to workers when they’re needed, with pay determined by demand for that particular job at that particular moment.

Customers and workers are matched online. Workers are rated on quality and reliability.

The big money goes to the corporations that own the software. The scraps go to the on-demand workers.

Consider Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk.” Amazon calls it “a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence.”

In reality, it’s an Internet job board offering minimal pay for mindlessly-boring bite-sized chores. Computers can’t do them because they require some minimal judgment, so human beings do them for peanuts — say, writing a product description, for $3; or choosing the best of several photographs, for 30 cents; or deciphering handwriting, for 50 cents.

Amazon takes a healthy cut of every transaction.

This is the logical culmination of a process that began thirty years ago when corporations began turning over full-time jobs to temporary workers, independent contractors, free-lancers, and consultants.

It was a way to shift risks and uncertainties onto the workers – work that might entail more hours than planned for, or was more stressful than expected.•

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“Bureaucracy Is A Utopian Project”

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

In the U.S., the Right pretends it’s attacking bureaucracy while really angling to subjugate unions and workers; the aim is dismantling safety nets, not improving the situation. But that doesn’t mean mountains of paperwork shouldn’t be a bipartisan scourge. It’s often a maze with no exit. David Graeber’s forthcoming book, The Utopia of Rules, sees something even more sinister than incompetence buried in the files and folders. From Cory Doctorow’s review at Boing Boing:

Bureaucracy is pervasive and metastatic. To watch cop-dramas, you’d think that most of the job of policing was crime-fighting. But it’s not. The police are just “armed bureaucrats.” Most of what police do is administrative enforcement — making sure you follow the rules (threatening to gas you or hit you with a stick if you don’t). Get mugged and chances are, the police will take the report over the phone. Drive down the street without license plates and you’ll be surrounded by armed officers of the law who are prepared to deal you potentially lethal violence to ensure that you’re not diverging from the rules.

This just-below-the-surface violence is the crux of Graeber’s argument. He mocks the academic left who insist that violence is symbolic these days, suggesting that any grad student sitting in a university library reading Foucault and thinking about the symbolic nature of violence should consider the fact that if he’d attempted to enter that same library without a student ID, he’d have been swarmed by armed cops.

Bureaucracy is a utopian project: like all utopians, capitalist bureaucrats (whether in private- or public-sector) believe that humans can be perfected by modifying their behavior according to some ideal, and blame anyone who can’t live up to that ideal for failing to do so. If you can’t hack the paperwork to file your taxes, complete your welfare rules, figure out your 401(k) or register to vote, you’re obviously some kind of fuckup.

Bureaucracy begets bureaucracy. Every effort to do away with bureaucracy ends up with more bureaucracy.•

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“Work’s Assumed Virtue Has Always Been About More Than Its Utility Or Market Value”

February 2, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

In the wake of the 2008 economic collapse, austerity felt to many the right thing to do: We needed to punish ourselves. But that policy was moralistic and incorrect, since what we actually needed was to borrow and spend. Is our view of labor also driven by a misplaced sense of morality? Brian Dean asks this question and others in “Antiwork,” a Contributoria essay which reconsiders the meaning of toil. An excerpt:

“Work” is seen as a virtue, but it covers the moral spectrum from charity and art to forced labour and banking. Belief in the inherent moral good of work has been used historically in social engineering, notably during the shift from agriculture to industry, when the Protestant work ethic was used to motivate workers and to justify punishment, including whipping and imprisonment of “idlers”. (In The Making of the English Working Class, historian EP Thompson describes how the ethos of Protestant sects such as Methodism effectively provided the prototype of the disciplined, punctual worker required by the factory owners.)

Work’s assumed virtue has always been about more than its utility or market value. George Lakoff, the cognitive linguist, provided a clue in the frame of “work as obedience.” The first virtue we learn as children is obeying our parents, particularly in performing tasks we don’t enjoy. Later, as adults, we’re paid to obey our employers – it’s called work. Work and virtue are thus connected in our neurology in terms of obedience to authority. That’s not the only cognitive frame we have for the virtue of work, but it’s the one that is constantly reinforced by what Lakoff calls the “strict father” conservative moral system.

This “strictness” moral framing is implicit, for example, in the current welfare system. An increasingly punitive approach is adopted towards those who don’t follow the prescribed “job-seeking” regimen – a trend that most political parties seem to approve of. Politicians boast of getting “tough on dependency culture”, and when they talk of “clamping down” on the “hardcore unemployed”, you’d think they were referring to criminals.

Emphasis on punishment is the sign of an obedience frame. Work itself has a long history as punishment for disobedience, as the Book of Genesis illustrates – Adam and Eve had no work until they disobeyed God, who imposed it as their punishment: “Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.” Unpaid work, or “community service,” is still sometimes dictated as punishment by courts. Workfare programmes similarly involve mandatory work without wages – it looks very much like punishment for the “sin” of unemployment.

Workfare illustrates a difference between framing and spin. The cognitive frame is paternalistic, morally strict, punishment-based (much like “community service”), while the political spin is all about “helping” people “integrate” back into society. Genuine help, of course, shouldn’t require the threat of losing what little income one has.

Morally, it seems that politicians, most of the media and a large section of the public are still stuck in the Puritan codes and scripts that, following the Reformation and into the industrial revolution, dominated social attitudes to work and idleness in England, America and much of Europe.•

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“With This Technology Today, That Transformation Might Happen Much Faster”

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

I agree with two very smart people working in Artificial Intelligence, Andrew Ng and Hod Lipson, when I say that I’m not worried about any near-term scenario in which Strong AI extincts Homo Sapiens the way we did Neanderthals. It’s not that it’s theoretically impossible in the long run, but we would likely first need to know precisely how the human brain operates, to understand the very nature of consciousness, to give “life” to our eliminators. While lesser AI than that could certainly be dangerous on a large scale, I don’t think it’s moving us back down the food chain today or tomorrow.

But like Ng and Lipson, the explosion of Weak AI throughout society in the form of autonomous machines is very concerning to me. It’s an incredible victory of ingenuity that can become a huge loss if we aren’t able to politically reconcile free-market societies with highly autonomous ones. An excerpt from Robert Hof at Forbes’ horribly designed site:

“Historically technology has created challenges for labor,” [Ng] noted. But while previous technological revolutions also eliminating many types of jobs and created some displacement, the shift happened slowly enough to provide new opportunities to successive generations of workers. “The U.S. took 200 years to get from 98% to 2% farming employment,” he said. “Over that span of 200 years we could retrain the descendants of farmers.”

But he says the rapid pace of technological change today has changed everything. “With this technology today, that transformation might happen much faster,” he said. Self-driving cars, he suggested could quickly put 5 million truck drivers out of work.

Retraining is a solution often suggested by the technology optimists. But Ng, who knows a little about education thanks to his cofounding of Coursera, doesn’t believe retraining can be done quickly enough. “What our educational system has never done is train many people who are alive today. Things like Coursera are our best shot, but I don’t think they’re sufficient. People in the government and academia should have serious discussions about this.”

His concerns were echoed by Hod Lipson, director of Cornell University’s Creative Machines Lab. “If AI is going to threaten humanity, it’s going to be through the fact that it does almost everything better than almost anyone,” he said.•

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“He Advocates What Is Called The Cafeteria Approach To Birth Control”

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

Carl Djerassi, the chemist credited with creating the birth-control pill and abetting the women’s movement and sexual revolution of the 1960s, just passed away. A true polymath, he was devoted to writing plays and collecting art just as much to rewriting the rules of mating. He was also subsequently thwarted by pharmaceutical companies when he wanted to create a male pill. In a 1976 People article, Nancy Faber profiled Djerassi during his tenure as a Stanford professor and recalled his discombobulating relationship with President Nixon. An excerpt: 

Stanford Professor Carl Djerassi invited some students to his house for an evening conference and two of them showed up with a gift. Not exactly an apple for the teacher. It was a box of pink condoms. Djerassi was delighted.

It was the perfect token of esteem for a well-liked faculty member who also happens to be the research chemist who developed the birth control pill. His course in human biology was examining various methods of controlling population. (The unusual gift was brought back from Kenya where the two students had gone to study birth control techniques.)

“I don’t think there is such a thing as one best method of birth control,” Djerassi tells his classes. “If the most important thing is to be 100 percent effective, then the Pill is the best we have. If you are more concerned about side effects, then a condom is a hell of a lot better.” He adds: “It is unrealistic not to expect some side effects. You get them with tobacco, alcohol and penicillin.”

The professor, 52, is not at all reluctant to plunge into the Pill controversy. At a recent campus colloquium, he heard one young woman charge: “Sure, we have control of our fertility now, but at the cost of our health. What kind of control do we really have if we have to make that kind of bargain?” After listening to Djerassi on the subject, another participant admitted: “I’m really surprised that he is so receptive to other ideas. He advocates what is called the cafeteria approach to birth control—whatever works.”

Students are often surprised to learn that Djerassi’s career is rooted in academe as well as in the drug industry. Born in Vienna in 1923, he was educated in the United States (Kenyon College and the University of Wisconsin) after he emigrated when he was 16. He had his Ph.D. by his 22nd birthday. Five years later, in 1951, as an employee of the Mexico City-based Syntex Corporation, Djerassi led the research team that synthesized the first contraceptive pill. …

Restlessly energetic even in his leisure hours, Djerassi hikes and skis despite a fused knee suffered in a skiing accident. Rather than drop either sport, Djerassi collaborated with one of his students in designing a special boot to compensate for the knee’s loss of mobility. When he travels, the professor gets a letter from airline presidents guaranteeing him an aisle seat so he can stretch out his leg.

Djerassi has accumulated an extensive art collection weighted toward pre-Columbian artifacts and an equally impressive number of honors from every corner of the scientific community. He recalls none of the testimonials as vividly as the National Medal of Science awarded him by Richard Nixon in 1973. Two weeks later Djerassi discovered his name on the notorious White House enemies list.•

 

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“[The] Ironically Eternal Marriage Between Democracy And Capitalism [Is] Coming To An End”

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

I can understand Slavoj Žižek looking at China and seeing capitalism stripped of democracy as an impressive beast, but the same was said of Fascism, even Nazism, in the 1930s. They were machines, many thought–even many American business leaders–which could not be stopped. Those states were driven by madmen and China is not, but perhaps there’s ultimately something antithetical to the human spirit embedded inside them all. Well, we shall see. From a recent Žižek address transcribed at Disinformation:

Well people often ask me how can you be so stupid and still proclaim yourself a communist. What do you mean by this? Well, I have always to emphasize that first I am well aware that let’s call it like this – the twentieth century’s over. Which means all not only communists solution but all the big leftist projects of the twentieth century failed. Not only did Stalinist communism although there its failure is much more paradoxical. Most of the countries where communists are still in power like China, Vietnam – their communists in power appear to be the most efficient managers of a very wildly productive capitalism. So okay, that one failed. I think that also and here I in a very respectful way disagree with your – by your I mean American neo-Keynesian leftists, Krugman, Stiglitz and so on. I also think that this Keynesian welfare state model is passé. In the conditions of today’s global economy it no longer works. For the welfare state to work you need a strong nation state which can impose a certain fiscal politics and so on and so on. When you have global market it doesn’t work. And the third point which is most problematic for my friends, the third leftist vision which is deep in the heart of all leftists that I know – this idea of critically rejecting alienated representative democracy and arguing for local grass root democracy where it’s not that you just delegate to the others. Your representatives to act for you, but people immediately engage in locally managing their affairs and so on.

I think this is a nice idea as far as it goes but it’s not the solution. It’s a very limited one. And if I may be really evil here I frankly I wouldn’t like to live in a stupid society where I would have to be all the time engaged in local communitarian politics and so on and so on. My idea is to live in a society where some invisible alienated machinery takes care of things so that I can do whatever I want – watch movies, read and write philosophical books and so on. But so I’m well aware that in all its versions radical left projects of the twentieth century came to an end and for one decade maybe we were all Fukuyamaists for the nineties. By Fukuyamaism I mean the idea that basically we found if not the best formula at least the least bad formula. Liberal democratic capitalism with elements of rebel state and so on and so on. And even the left played this game. You know we were fighting for less racism, women’s right, gay rights, whatever tolerance. But basically we accepted the system. I think and even Fukuyama himself is no longer a Fukuyamaist as I know that if there is a lesson of September 11 if other event is that no we don’t have the answer. That not only is liberal democratic capitalism not the universal model and is just a time of slow historical progress for it to be accepted everywhere. But again try now in Singapore and other examples of very successful economies today demonstrate that this, let’s call it ironically eternal marriage between democracy and capitalism it’s coming to an end.

What we are more and more getting today is a capitalism which is brutally efficient but it no longer needs democracy for its functioning.•

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“Here’s My Question… What Changed?”

January 29, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

I’ll always remember what that staunch supporter or meritocracy Charles Murray replied when asked by the New York Times Magazine in 2008 about a certain Wasilla-based Republican:

NYT: What do you think of Sarah Palin? Charles Murray: I’m in love. Truly and deeply in love.

All because she stood up at a convention and read a speech someone else wrote that was full of lies. Can you imagine if the Obamas had behaved like the Palins for the past six years, what odious theories Murray would have espoused? 

At the Daily Beast, Matt Lewis, apparently the last person in America to get the memo that even staunch conservatives have long disdained the adult baby who (briefly) governed Alaska, belatedly announces the love affair is over. You don’t say? It’s a perplexing missive from deep inside an echo chamber. The opening:

Has conservative genuflection at the altar of Sarah Palin finally come to a halt?

In case you missed it, her speech in Iowa this week was not well received on the right. The Washington Examiner’s Byron York called it a “long, rambling, and at times barely coherent speech” and National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke said she slipped into self-parody. And there’s more. The Examiner’s Eddie Scarry, for example, contacted several conservative bloggers who were once Palin fans, but have since moved on.

But here’s my question… what changed?

Yes, in 2008, Sarah Palin delivered one of the finest convention speeches I’ve ever heard (trust me, I was there), but she hasn’t exactly been channeling Winston Churchill ever since. Remember her big speech at CPAC a couple of years ago? You know, the one where she took a swig out of a Big Gulp and said of her husband Todd: “He’s got the rifle, I got the rack.” Not exactly a great moment in political rhetoric.

So why is anyone surprised when, this weekend, she said: “‘The Man,’ can only ride ya when your back is bent?”

Demosthenes, she is not, but there’s nothing new about Palin’s penchant for populism or lowbrow rhetoric. What does feel new is that she has finally gotten around to roundly losing conservative opinion leaders. (OK, this has been a long time coming. In 2011, Conor Friedersdorf noted that the hard right was skewering Palin, and that Kathleen Parker had been vindicated. And as recently as this past April, I wondered whether it was finally safe for conservatives to criticize her publicly. But it does feel like we have finally reached a tipping point where criticizing Palin isn’t only acceptable for conservative opinion leaders, it’s now almost expected.)•

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“There Is Actually A Technology That Does All Of This — Solar Carports”

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

Will the survival of life as we know it on Earth become affordable before it’s too late? When will extinction avoidance achieve its price point? From Chris Mooney of the Washington Post:

America is a nation of pavement. According to research conducted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, most cities’ surfaces are 35 to 50 percent composed of the stuff. And 40 percent of that pavement is parking lots. That has a large effect: Asphalt and concrete absorb the sun’s energy, retaining heat — and contributing to the “urban heat island effect,” in which cities are hotter than the surrounding areas.

So what if there were a way to cut down on that heat, cool down the cars that park in these lots, power up those parked cars that are electric vehicles (like Teslas), and generate a lot of energy to boot? It sounds great, and there is actually a technology that does all of this — solar carports.

It’s just what it sounds like — covering up a parking lot with solar panels, which are elevated above the ground so that cars park in the shade beneath a canopy of photovoltaics. Depending of course on the size of the array, you can generate a lot of power. For instance, one vast solar carport installation at Rutgers University is 28 acres in size and produces 8 megawatts of power, or about enough energy to power 1,000 homes.

Solar carports have many benefits, ranging from aesthetics (yes, the things look very cool) to subtler factors. Like this: Not having to return to a hot car after spending three hours at the mall or a sporting event in the summer. In fact, according to the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy, being able to park in the shade in the summer is actually a substantial contributor to increased vehicle fuel efficiency, because it saves having to cool your car back up by cranking the air conditioner.

So what’s the downside here? And why aren’t solar parking lots to be found pretty much everywhere you turn?

In a word, the problem is cost.•

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“The Idea Is That An Oncoming Robotic Revolution Is Coming Whether We Like It Or Not”

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

A follow-up post to the David Graeber video about so-called bullshit jobs, here are excerpts from two articles about modern employment, one from Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times which looks at the Uberization of work and the other by Joshua Krook of New Intrigue which focuses on labor in a highly automated world.

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From New Intrigue:

The Robotic (Post-Industrial) Revolution:

There is something very curious about politicians constantly obsessing over people getting jobs in the light of the oncoming Robot Revolution.

Now you might think I’m crazy for believing in such things, but then you will have to call the likes of Stephen Hawking crazy too, which is a much, much more difficult task.

There are already articles on the web asking: “What will happen when Robots Take our Jobs?” The idea is that an oncoming robotic revolution is coming whether we like it or not.

And with it, the capacity of robots to do the jobs typically reserved for humans – including high-end, white-collar professional work. The latest robotic innovations out of Japan can play ping pong (“and even decide to take it easy on opponents by missing a few hits”), use sign language to “talk” to humans and “mimic simple greetings.” This is only the beginning.

Despite almost every single instinct of intuition in my body saying that robots will make our lives easier, which is what we’ve been taught (using examples like the washing machine in the 1950s) –by freeing up our time and allowing us to work on things that aren’t menial, boring office jobs– we have to look to history here and realise that that seems like an unlikely outcome. History has a few examples where this is true, but on the whole it has gone the other way, and this time round…

It may even go the other way.•

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From the New York Times:

Various companies are now trying to emulate Uber’s business model in other fields, from daily chores like grocery shopping and laundry to more upmarket products like legal services and even medicine.

“I do think we are defining a new category of work that isn’t full-time employment but is not running your own business either,” said Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s business school who has studied the rise of the so-called on-demand economy, and who is mainly optimistic about its prospects.

Uberization will have its benefits: Technology could make your work life more flexible, allowing you to fit your job, or perhaps multiple jobs, around your schedule, rather than vice versa. Even during a time of renewed job growth, Americans’ wages are stubbornly stagnant, and the on-demand economy may provide novel streams of income.

“We may end up with a future in which a fraction of the work force would do a portfolio of things to generate an income — you could be an Uber driver, an Instacart shopper, an Airbnb host and a Taskrabbit,” Dr. Sundararajan said.

But the rise of such work could also make your income less predictable and your long-term employment less secure. And it may relegate the idea of establishing a lifelong career to a distant memory.

“I think it’s nonsense, utter nonsense,” said Robert B. Reich, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley who was the secretary of labor during the Clinton administration. “This on-demand economy means a work life that is unpredictable, doesn’t pay very well and is terribly insecure.” After interviewing many workers in the on-demand world, Dr. Reich said he has concluded that “most would much rather have good, well-paying, regular jobs.”•

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“There Are Whole Industries That Don’t Really Need To Exist”

January 28, 2015 in Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

David Graeber in a recent British TV appearance explaining why pointless jobs–bullshit jobs, to be more frank–persist in a much more automated world. What happened to the Keynesian dream of a leisure-driven life? The anthropologist’s answer is that not only are many jobs busywork but so are whole industries (telemarketing, lobbying, etc.) His prescription: the basic-income solution.

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“There Will Be More Progress In The Next 30 Years Than Ever”

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

Bill Gates’ AMAs at Reddit are always fun, wide-ranging affairs. Below are some early exchanges from one he’s currently doing.

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Question:

In your opinion, has technology made the masses less intelligent?

Bill Gates:

Technology is not making people less intelligent. If you just look at the complexity people like in Entertainment you can see a big change over my lifetime. Technology is letting people get their questions answered better so they stay more curious. It makes it easier to know a lot of topics which turns out to be pretty important to contribute to solving complex problems.

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Question:

2015 will mark the 30th anniversary of Microsoft Windows. What do you think the next 30 years holds in terms of technology? What will personal computing will look like in 2045?

Bill Gates:

There will be more progress in the next 30 years than ever. Even in the next 10 problems like vision and speech understanding and translation will be very good. Mechanical robot tasks like picking fruit or moving a hospital patient will be solved. Once computers/robots get to a level of capability where seeing and moving is easy for them then they will be used very extensively.

One project I am working on with Microsoft is the Personal Agent which will remember everything and help you go back and find things and help you pick what things to pay attention to. The idea that you have to find applications and pick them and they each are trying to tell you what is new is just not the efficient model – the agent will help solve this. It will work across all your devices.

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Question:

What do you think has improved life the most in poor countries in the last 5 years?

Bill Gates:

Vaccines make the top of the list. Being able to grow up healthy is the most basic thing. So many kids get infectious diseases and don’t develop mentally and physically. I was in Berlin yesterday helping raise $7.5B for vaccines for kids in poor countries. We barely made it but we did which is so exciting to me!

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Question:

What is your opinion on bitcoins or cyptocurency as a whole? Also do you own any yourself?

Bill Gates:

Bitcoin is an exciting new technology. For our Foundation work we are doing digital currency to help the poor get banking services. We don’t use bitcoin specifically for two reasons. One is that the poor shouldn’t have a currency whose value goes up and down a lot compared to their local currency. Second is that if a mistake is made in who you pay then you need to be able to reverse it so anonymity wouldn’t work.

Overall financial transactions will get cheaper using the work we do and Bitcoin related approaches.

Making sure that it doesn’t help terrorists is a challenge for all new technology.

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Question:

Is there anything in life that you regret doing or not doing?

Bill Gates:

I feel pretty stupid that I don’t know any foreign languages. I took Latin and Greek in High School and got A’s and I guess it helps my vocabulary but I wish I knew French or Arabic or Chinese. I keep hoping to get time to study one of these – probably French because it is the easiest. I did Duolingo for awhile but didn’t keep it up. Mark Zuckerberg amazingly learned Mandarin and did a Q&A with Chinese students – incredible.

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Question:

What do you think about life-extending and immortality research?

Bill Gates:

It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer. It would be nice to live longer though I admit.•

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“They Therefore Threaten To Replace The Humans Who Once Made The Day-To-Day Decisions”

January 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The dream of the automated workplace, shared by 1930s European Fascists and technologists in postwar America, is not only aimed at blue collars but white ones also, the secretaries under siege but bosses as well. In hs Aeon essay, “RoboCorp,” Daniel C. Morris makes digestible the complexities of cryptocurrency and DACs (Distributed Autonomous Corporations) while trying to work through the pros and cons of such an arrangement. An excerpt:

“…the true economic significance of automated systems and robotics remains troublingly unclear. While they make our daily lives easier by increasing the productive efficiency of each input unit of human labour, they displace jobs; automated factories need far fewer workers. John Maynard Keynes saw this coming 85 years ago, when he coined the term ‘technological unemployment’.

Technologists (and many economists) argue that workers who lose their simple or repetitive jobs to machines are thereby set free to perform more complicated tasks. One former factory worker might supervise his robot replacement, another might design them, and still others move into entirely new sectors of the economy. Until 2008, that logic seemed to largely hold true – automation increased efficiency without dramatically reducing employment.

But automated logistics and financial systems aren’t just putting rivets into holes. These robots, whether DACs or more centralised systems, are now able to move money around an economy programmatically. They therefore threaten to replace the humans who once made the day-to-day decisions required to run businesses and organisations. Would that be so bad? The machines have already come for the manual and clerical workers; perhaps there’s a certain kind of grim satisfaction in watching them close in on the executive class, too. And yet it would be hasty to predict a broadly egalitarian outcome. The US economist Paul Krugman sees the broader risk: that we will end up ‘a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.’•

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“India Is Going To Need On Order Of A New Chicago Every Single Year For The Fifteen Years”

January 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Gurgaon in India is a libertarian wet dream, a high-tech private city that grew from nothing, knows little or no regulation and has no infrastructure. You want your sewage taken away? Hire a firm to do it. You want to start a business? Don’t worry about pesky rules. You want roads to drive on? Not so much. You’re worried about environmental protection? Wait, what? It’s the free market extrapolated to an extreme.

On the latest EconTalk episode, Russ Roberts and fellow economist Alex Tabarrok have a lively discussion about this private city and other ones which favor “voluntary action.” While the guest is enthusiastic about Gurgaon as something of a model for the next global cities, he acknowledges its faults (“The roads situation is terrible, a disaster”), though he often waves these shortcomings away by saying they’re no worse than in other parts of India. The idea of using some sort of Disneyland approach to building private cities on a large scale, which Tabarrok seriously suggests, seems a little cuckoo to me. An excerpt:

Alex Tabarrok:

Between just 2015 and 2030, in India, the urban population is expected to increase by over a quarter of a billion people. So, just think about that. What that means is that during the next 15 years, even taking into account the reduced infrastructure in India, India is going to need on the order of a new Chicago every single year for the next 15 years. At least. And then continuing on into the future. So we have, around the world, massive increases in the urban population. And most of this is happening in the developing world. And the developing world, of course, is struggling with corruption and with poor governments and with a lack of information. And you know, we just can’t expect governments to work very well in these countries. So how are we going to plan? We can hope, right, that cities will be planned and laid out and the sewage lines will be planned for the future and everything will be divided neatly. You know, the way an urban planner in theory would do it. But that’s just not realistic. So, what can we expect? Are there other ways of doing this? And Gurgaon is one possible alternative route, which involves, you know, leaving a whole lot to the private sector.

Russ Roberts:

When you talk about that increasing urbanization, say, in India, the most likely way that’s going to happen is that the existing cities in India are going to get larger. And they are going to have increasing stress on their current infrastructure systems, which are not very effective, from what I understand, already. And so, the likely result of this urbanization and population growth is going to be muddling through with a big set of imperfections. It seems to me China is taking a different approach. China is saying: We need a bunch of new cities. So they are just building them. They are building cities out in the middle of relatively nowhere, from scratch. With lots of buildings, lots of infrastructure, from the top down. And I did read today–I didn’t get to click through on the tweet, but somebody tweeted that the Chinese, some Chinese officials were bidding in auctions to keep land prices high in some of the cities that they are worried about. This is not likely to be a successful strategy for creating value. But China has taken a different approach. It might be a lot better.

Alex Tabarrok:

So, current urban areas are certainly going to grow. But there’s also no question that we’re going to need entirely new cities–both in India and China and elsewhere. And you just look at the United States. Even in the United States, which has long been majority-urbanized, we’ve seen growth, really essentially new cities. Like Houston, has grown in the past 50 years from 100,000 to, you know, several million people. And so forth. You think about the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain: the creation of new cities like Birmingham and so forth. It’s not just London getting bigger, in other words. Although that happened as well. So, I want to put China aside for a minute, and maybe come back and talk about that. But I want to keep on, on Gurgaon, for a little bit longer, because I want to talk about what has worked, and what hasn’t.

Russ Roberts:

Yeah, go ahead.

Alex Tabarrok:

So, fire prevention in Gurgaon works really well. So, what has happened is these private developers buy a chunk of land. And within that chunk of land you have excellent infrastructure; you have excellent delivery of services. So, the developers will build office parks. And within the office parks, you have sewage. But the sewage doesn’t go anywhere. It just–once it leaves the office park–well, sometimes it will go to a small treatment plant. You’ll also have electricity–electricity 24 hours, but funded with diesel, provided with diesel. Which is inefficient. You don’t get all the economies of scale. You do get excellent fire protection. It’s pretty interesting: Gurgaon has India’s only private fire department. And it’s the only fire department really in all of India which has equipment which can reach the top of these skyscrapers.

Russ Roberts:

Good idea.

Alex Tabarrok:

Yeah, exactly. The public system is a complete disaster. You also have delivery of transportation. So, these private firms hire taxis, sort of like Uber but a totally private system to bring their workers, ferry their workers, all over the city.

Russ Roberts:

Yeah. By the way, it’s important to mention: we’ve had some discussions of private busses here, in Chile with Mike Munger. But of course many firms in Silicon Valley outside of San Francisco bus workers into their companies and have major, significant private bus companies.

Alex Tabarrok:

Exactly. It’s very similar.

Russ Roberts:

They are running them themselves. I don’t think they are hiring them out. But they are not public.

Alex Tabarrok:

Exactly. It’s very similar to that.•

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“You’ve Got An iPhone Now And A Better TV, But Your Median Income Hasn’t Changed”

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

The American middle class is thinner and grayer than it used to be and that’s not just due to the Great Recession. The trend lines have been headed in that direction for decades. Thomas Piketty has suggested that the green shoots of widespread prosperity, like the period the U.S. enjoyed in the aftermath of WWII, are more exception than rule. But belief in the American Dream, that those who work hard will be rewarded, is difficult to shake no matter what the numbers say, and many still vote their aspirations rather than their actuality, which can lead to policy mismatched to reality. From Dionne Searcey and Robert Gebeloff at the New York Times: 

The middle class that President Obama identified in his State of the Union speech last week as the foundation of the American economy has been shrinking for almost half a century.

In the late 1960s, more than half of the households in the United States were squarely in the middle, earning, in today’s dollars, $35,000 to $100,000 a year. Few people noticed or cared as the size of that group began to fall, because the shift was primarily caused by more Americans climbing the economic ladder into upper-income brackets.

But since 2000, the middle-class share of households has continued to narrow, the main reason being that more people have fallen to the bottom. At the same time, fewer of those in this group fit the traditional image of a married couple with children at home, a gap increasingly filled by the elderly.

This social upheaval helps explain why the president focused on reviving the middle class, offering a raft of proposals squarely aimed at concerns like paying for a college education, taking parental leave, affording child care and buying a home. …

According to a New York Times poll in December, 60 percent of people who call themselves middle class think that if they work hard they will get rich. But the evidence suggests that goal is increasingly out of reach. When middle class people look up, they see the rich getting richer while they spin their wheels.

“The middle has basically stayed the same; it hasn’t improved,” said Lawrence F. Katz, an economist at Harvard University. “You’ve got an iPhone now and a better TV, but your median income hasn’t changed. What’s really changed is the penthouse has become supernice.”•

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“The Union’s Victory Had Wider Repercussions”

January 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

From an Economist review of Don Doyle’s new book, The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War, which analyzes the global ramifications of the War Between the States:

The Union’s victory had wider repercussions. Spain, fearing American naval power, began withdrawing from its colonies in Latin America and the Caribbean. Ulysses Grant, a civil-war general, turned his military attention south, to Mexico, where Napoleon III had installed an Austrian, Maximilian, as emperor. When the threat of an alliance between France and the Confederacy was dashed, Napoleon withdrew his support and in 1867 Maximilian was executed by Mexican troops. Across the ocean, Britain’s republicans marched to victory that same year, forcing the passage of the Reform Act, while Napoleon III lasted just four more years, until the Paris Commune seized France’s capital. Democracy had not just survived, but flourished.

After Lincoln’s death Avenir National, a French newspaper, wrote that he “represented the cause of democracy in the largest and the most universal understanding of the word. That cause is our cause, as much as it is that of the United States.” To commemorate the Union’s victory a French artist crafted a statue out of copper sheeting, a figure representing freedom, tall and proud, holding a torch aloft. The Statue of Liberty stands today in New York harbour, the copper now green with age, her gaze fixed across the Atlantic on Europe.•

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“They Are Reluctant To Spend A Few Billions Of Dollars To Get Back An Infinite Quantity Of Money”

January 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a 1979 interview conducted by NASA veteran and journalist Phil Konstantin for Southwest Airlines magazine, Isaac Asimov held forth on the odds of humans surviving on Earth and flourishing in space. An excerpt:

Southwest Airlines:

How about orbital space colonies? Do you see these facilities being built or is the government going to cut back on projects like this?

Isaac Asimov:

Well, now you’ve put your finger right on it. In order to have all of these wonderful things in space, we don’t have to wait for technology – we’ve got the technology, and we don’t have to wait for the know-how – we’ve got that too. All we need is the political go-ahead and the economic willingness to spend the money that is necessary. It is a little frustrating to think that if people concentrate on how much it is going to cost they will realize the great amount of profit they will get for their investment. Although they are reluctant to spend a few billions of dollars to get back an infinite quantity of money, the world doesn’t mind spending $400 billion every years on arms and armaments, never getting anything back from it except a chance to commit suicide.

Southwest Airlines:

Do you think that we will avoid a self-inflicted global catastrophe?

Isaac Asimov:

The chances don’t look so good, but they don’t look so black, either. The birth rate is going down over most of the world, and if it continues to go down, then perhaps we can bring a halt to the population explosion before it completely overwhelms us. There is always the danger of nuclear war, but we’ve kept away from it now for thirty-five years. And maybe we can keep on keeping away from it. We’ve been polluting and using up our energy, but I think more and more we are aware of the dangers of this. And perhaps, we will do something about it. To my way of thinking, the biggest obstacle to solving the problems we have, and we have some of the solutions, is that the world is dividing up into separate nations, all of which are more concerned over their own short-term interests than over the long-term survival of the human species. And as long as that is so, then I don’t think we will have a chance, because we will all go down the tube quarreling, so to speak.

Southwest Airlines:

Do you see this as the foreseeable future, or will we have enough sense to avoid this?

Isaac Asimov:

Well, I do see this tendency to draw back from the brink. In other words, we to tend to realize that we can’t afford to quarrel, the earth is too small for that, and the United States and the USSR do keep talking and now it looks as though the US and China are going to keep talking. I would like to see the Soviet Union and China have a detente, too. I would like to see initiative toward peace between Israel and Eygpt expanded to include the rest of the Middle East. All of these things are hopeful beginnings. The various detentes are hopeful beginnings, but they are only beginnings, and at the rate they are moving, we will never make it. So, we will have to go faster.•

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“Uber Says Nearly Half Its Drivers Become Inactive After A Year – Either Because They Quit Or Are Terminated”

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

The Peer Economy may be a good idea whose time has come, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for workers. In America, it’s a crumb tossed to those squeezed from the middle class by globalization, automation, etc. Keeping employees happy isn’t a goal of Uber and others because it treats labor like a dance marathon, the music never stopping, new “employee-partners” continually being supplied by a whirl of desperation. From Douglas MacMillan at the WSJ:

The sheer numbers of Uber’s labor pool and rate of growth are hard to fathom. The company added 40,000 new drivers in the U.S. in the month of December alone. The authors of the paper say the number of new drivers is doubling every six months. At the same time, Uber says nearly half its drivers become inactive after a year – either because they quit or are terminated.

If those trends continue, Uber could end this year with roughly half-a-million drivers in the U.S. alone.

That growth is being driven mainly by UberX, the company’s service for non-professional drivers that first rolled out in 2012. UberX has create a new part-time job opportunity for people who have never driven professionally, which account for 64% of Uber’s total number of drivers.

Most, or 62% of Uber drivers, have at least one additional source of income. Which could mean that at least for some, Uber is not economically feasible as a full-time job.

Uber claims an average driver makes $19.04 an hour, after paying Uber a commission, higher than the $12.90 average hourly wage (including tips, Uber says) that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates for taxis and chauffeurs. Uber drivers make the most average pay in New York, followed by San Francisco and Boston.

The average pay for former taxi drivers on Uber is $23 per hour; for former black car drivers it’s $27 per hour.

But the paper’s authors admit these figures don’t include expenses that come out drivers own pockets, including gas, maintenance and insurance. And a number of people with experience driving for the company say Uber has made it more difficult to make a good wage because it frequently cuts prices as a way to entice new passengers.

A drop in prices can have a profound effect on driver pay.•

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“Today’s Automatic Machines With Their Electronic Brains Are The Advance Guard Of A New Army Of Workers”

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

It took decades longer than predicted in the 1954 Popular Mechanics article “Is the Automatic Factory Here?” for “electronic brains” to mature enough to replace human workers en masse in a concentrated time frame, but the day of reckoning is apparently finally here–and we’re still only at the beginning. The automated workplace’s eventual arrival was clear during the peace-dividend period in post-WWII America, with its bowling-ball return machines and device-driven assembly lines. The question is whether, as in the ’50s and ever since, new opportunities will arise to replace those disappeared by Weak AI. An excerpt:

Automatic brains and tools are even marching out of the shops and into the offices. A new electronic system for a Chicago mail-order firm gulps down catalogue orders as fast as 10 operators can press keys. In much less than a second, an operator can find out the total number of orders on file for a particular item. The machine does the work of 39,000 adding machines and much of the brain work of 40-odd girls who formerly classified and recorded the orders.

Dr. Simon Ramo, head of the Ramo-Woolridge Corporation and one the nation’s leading authorities on “synthetic intelligence” declares flatly: “It is possible for engineers today, on the basis of known science, to produce devices which could displace a very large fraction of the white-collar workers who are doing routine paperwork which can be reduced to simple thought processes.”

Today’s automatic machines with their electronic brains are the advance guard of a new army of workers. An appropriate word has popped into the language to describe these “synthetic” workers and thinkers, a word that likely will be as commonplace as the word electronics within five years. That word is automation.

Down-to-earth engineers, supervisors and even businessmen are becoming experts on automation. This is not a Rube Goldberg dream nor the zany Technocracy of the early ’30s, but a new Industrial Revolution, a revolution that is coming slowly but inevitably.

The first Industrial Revolution replaced man’s muscles with machinery. The new revolution, most automation experts firmly believe, will replace man’s routine brainwork with machines. Dr. Ramo says:

“Surely no one can deny that the replacing of man’s brains will effect some sort of revolution. The biggest factor in changing all business and industry must be the coming of the age of synthetic electronic intelligence.”•

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“Within Two Decades, We Will Have Almost Unlimited Energy, Food And Clean Water”

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

The 2015 version of the Gates Annual Letter makes bold and hopeful predictions for the world by 2030 (infant mortality halved, an HIV vaccine, Africa a prosperous continent, etc.) In the spirit of the missive, Politico invited other thinkers to consider life 15 years hence. Below are two examples representing polar opposites, neither of which seems particularly likely.

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Technology for the good

By Vivek Wadhwa, fellow at the Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University

Technology is advancing faster than people think and making amazing things possible. Within two decades, we will have almost unlimited energy, food and clean water; advances in medicine will allow us to live longer and healthier lives; robots will drive our cars, manufacture our goods and do our chores. It will also become possible to solve critical problems that have long plagued humanity such as hunger, disease, poverty and lack of education. Think of systems to clean water; sensors to transform agriculture; digital tutors that run on cheap smartphones to educate children; medical tests on inexpensive sensor-based devices. The challenge is to focus our technology innovators on the needs of the many rather than the elite few so that we can better all of humanity.•

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No breakthroughs for the better

By Leslie Gelb, president emeritus and board senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations

The world of 2030 will be an ugly place, littered with rebellion and repression. Societies will be deeply fragmented and overwhelmed by irreconcilable religious and political groups, by disparities in wealth, by ignorant citizenry and by states’ impotence to fix problems. This world will resemble today’s, only almost everything will be more difficult to manage and solve.

Advances in technology and science won’t save us. Technology will both decentralize power and increase the power of central authorities. Social media will be able to prompt mass demonstrations in public squares, even occasionally overturning governments as in Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, but oligarchs and dictators will have the force and power to prevail as they did in Cairo. Almost certainly, science and politics won’t be up to checking global warming, which will soon overwhelm us.

Muslims will be the principal disruptive factor, whether in the Islamic world, where repression, bad governance and economic underperformance have sparked revolt, or abroad, where they are increasingly unhappy and disdained by rulers and peoples. In America, blacks will become less tolerant of their marginalization, as will other persecuted minorities around the world. These groups will challenge authority, and authority will slam back with enough force to deeply wound, but not destroy, these rebellions.

A long period of worldwide economic stagnation and even decline will reinforce these trends. There will be sustained economic gulfs between rich and poor. And the rich will be increasingly willing to use government power to maintain their advantages.

Unfortunately, the next years will see a reversal of the hopes for better government and for effective democracies that loomed so large at the end of the Cold War.•

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“Are Comic Books Good Or Are They Not Good?”

January 25, 2015 in Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Dr. Frederic Wertham did some wonderful things in his career, but his anti-comic book crusade was not among them. In 1954, when the fear of panels had gone worldwide, he squared off in Washington at congressional hearings with Mad magazine publisher William Gaines, who did not yet resemble a plate of spaghetti that had fallen to the floor.

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“[America’s] Education System Favors The Well-Off More Than Anywhere Else In The Rich World”

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

I’m not a geneticist, but I doubt successful, educated parents are necessarily more likely to have preternaturally clever children than their poorer counterparts, as is argued in a new Economist article about the role of education in America’s spiraling wealth inequality. Of course, monetary resources can help provide a child every chance to realize his or her abilities, ensuring opportunities often denied to those from families of lesser material means. That, rather than genes, is the main threat to meritocracy. An excerpt:

Intellectual capital drives the knowledge economy, so those who have lots of it get a fat slice of the pie. And it is increasingly heritable. Far more than in previous generations, clever, successful men marry clever, successful women. Such “assortative mating” increases inequality by 25%, by one estimate, since two-degree households typically enjoy two large incomes. Power couples conceive bright children and bring them up in stable homes—only 9% of college-educated mothers who give birth each year are unmarried, compared with 61% of high-school dropouts. They stimulate them relentlessly: children of professionals hear 32m more words by the age of four than those of parents on welfare. They move to pricey neighbourhoods with good schools, spend a packet on flute lessons and pull strings to get junior into a top-notch college.

The universities that mould the American elite seek out talented recruits from all backgrounds, and clever poor children who make it to the Ivy League may have their fees waived entirely. But middle-class students have to rack up huge debts to attend college, especially if they want a post-graduate degree, which many desirable jobs now require. The link between parental income and a child’s academic success has grown stronger, as clever people become richer and splash out on their daughter’s Mandarin tutor, and education matters more than it used to, because the demand for brainpower has soared. A young college graduate earns 63% more than a high-school graduate if both work full-time—and the high-school graduate is much less likely to work at all. For those at the top of the pile, moving straight from the best universities into the best jobs, the potential rewards are greater than they have ever been.

None of this is peculiar to America, but the trend is most visible there. This is partly because the gap between rich and poor is bigger than anywhere else in the rich world—a problem Barack Obama alluded to repeatedly in his state-of-the-union address on January 20th (see article). It is also because its education system favours the well-off more than anywhere else in the rich world.•

“There’s The Longer-Term Problem Of So-Called Strong AI”

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

In a Backchannel interview largely about strategies for combating global poverty, Steven Levy asks Bill Gates about the existential threat of superintelligent AI. The Microsoft founder sides more with Musk than Page. The exchange:

Steven Levy:

Let me ask an unrelated question about the raging debate over whether artificial intelligence poses a threat to society, or even the survival of humanity. Where do you stand?

Bill Gates:

I think it’s definitely important to worry about. There are two AI threats that are worth distinguishing. One is that AI does enough labor substitution fast enough to change work policies, or [affect] the creation of new jobs that humans are uniquely adapted to — the jobs that give you a sense of purpose and worth. We haven’t run into that yet. I don’t think it’s a dramatic problem in the next ten years but if you take the next 20 to 30 it could be. Then there’s the longer-term problem of so-called strong AI, where it controls resources, so its goals are somehow conflicting with the goals of human systems. Both of those things are very worthy of study and time. I am certainly not in the camp that believes we ought to stop things or slow things down because of that. But you can definitely put me more in the Elon Musk, Bill Joy camp than, let’s say, the Google camp on that one.•

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