I don’t always agree with Malcolm Gladwell, but I always enjoy reading him for his ideas and because he’s a miraculously lucid writer. He just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.
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Question:
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Tags: Malcolm Gladwell, Peter Thiel, Steve Jobs
The three historical things I’ve hoped to see in my life are an African-American President (done), a female U.S. President (soon, perhaps?) and a new-wave, large-scale women’s movement. The last decade there’s seemed to be a growing tide of feminist consciousness in America. And, no, there’s no way I can quantify that, but it seems to be happening. Will it coalesce into an organized movement?
Because I’m not on social media, I didn’t see the #YesAllWomen insta-campaign until a couple days after it happened, but I thought it was a great sign. Of course, the Digital Age is a double-edged sword for any movement: The connectedness has great utility, but the diffuse nature of culture makes it more difficult for a real movement to form. In our long-tail world, it’s hard for people, even connected ones, to be truly close together.
Here’s a really good New York-centric documentary that focuses on American feminism in the mid-1970s, featuring Rita Mae Brown, Betty Friedan and Margo Jefferson, among many other women.
“A rat done bit my sister Nell (with Wi-Fi on the moon)” is the new lyric.
There are rural parts of America that still depend on dial-up, but the moon now has Wi-Fi. Perhaps that’s because Earth is an inhabited planet where everyone has politics and a profit motive, and the moon knows no such barriers. From Timothy McGrath at Global Post:
“Life on the moon just got a whole lot more awesome. Sure, you’ve got to wear a spacesuit and there’s not much to do in the way of recreation and nightlife.
But that’s all okay now, because there’s Wi-Fi.
Researchers at NASA and MIT have figured out how to beam wireless connectivity from a ground base in New Mexico to the moon using telescopes and lasers.
It’s as cool as it sounds.
Here’s how it works. The transmission utilizes four separate telescopes connected to a laser transmitter that feeds coded pulses of infrared light through it. Those signals travel toward a satellite orbiting the moon. Researchers have managed to make a connection and transfer data at a speed approximating slower Wi-Fi speeds on Earth.”
Tags: Timothy McGrath
A 1981 motorcycle wreck destroyed both of Kent Cochrane’s hippocampuses, leaving him an amnesiac at 30. What was bane for the individual was boon for science: In good part through his travails, we learned that the brain separates factual and personal memories and were able to identify which parts control these functions. Cochrane, who recently passed away, was further plagued in that he didn’t just lose much of the past but also all of the future. He was a man of the moment, always. From Sam Kean at Slate:
“K.C.’s memory loss also had the profound and paradoxical effect of wiping out his future. For the last three decades of his life, he couldn’t have told you what he planned to do over the next hour, the next day, the next year. He couldn’t even imagine those things.
It’s not entirely clear why, but it probably runs deeper than K.C.’s inability to remember his plans. It’s possible that the hippocampus is necessary to project yourself into the future and imagine personally experiencing things in the same way that the hippocampus allows you to put yourself back in time and re-experience the sights, sounds, and emotions of past memories. That’s what your personal memories are really all about.
This loss of his future didn’t pain K.C.; he didn’t suffer or rue his fate. But in some ways that lack of suffering seems sad in itself.” (Thanks 3 Quarks Daily.)
Tags: Kent "K.C." Cochrane, Sam Kean
Ray Kurzweil believes humans will be immortal one day, and it will be sooner than you or I might imagine. And he doesn’t worry about brain implants or the like altering our identity since identity is fluid already naturally. From some of his thoughts about a path to forever in a new Wall Street Journal article by Alexandra Wolfe:
“He thinks that humans will one day be able to live indefinitely, but first we must cross three ‘bridges.’
The first of these is staying healthy much longer. To that end, the smooth-skinned and youthful Mr. Kurzweil consumes 120 vitamins and supplements every day, takes nutrients intravenously (so that his body can absorb them better), drinks green tea and exercises regularly. That regimen keeps his ‘real age’ in the 40s, he says.
The second bridge is reprogramming our biology, which began with the Human Genome Project and includes, he says, the regeneration of tissue through stem-cell therapies and the 3-D printing of new organs.
We will cross the third and final bridge, he says, when we embed nanobots in our brains that will affect our intelligence and ability to experience virtual environments. Nanobots in our bodies will act as an extension of our immune system, he says, to identify and destroy pathogens our own biological cells can’t.
Mr. Kurzweil projects that the 2030s will be a ‘golden era,’ a time of revolution in how medicine is practiced. He compares the human body to a car. ‘Isn’t there a natural limit to how long an automobile lasts?’ he asks. ‘However, if you take care of it and if anything goes wrong, you fix it and maybe replace it, it can go on forever.’ He sees no reason that technology can’t do the same with human parts. The body is constantly changing already, he says, with cells replacing themselves every few days to months.
His vision of the future raises the question of what it means to be human. Yet he believes that adding technology to our bodies doesn’t change our essence. ‘The philosophical issue of identity is, Am I the same person as I was six months ago?’ he says. ‘There’s a continuity of identity.'”
Tags: Alexandra Wolfe, Ray Kurzweil
When the computer is in everything, everything can be hacked. No doubt Google and others are building serious safety features into their driverless-car software because the new vandalism, not to mention terrorism, could be turning an autonomous car the wrong way down a one-way street. From Alex Hern at the Guardian:
“Wil Rockall, a director at KPMG, warns that ‘the industry will need to be very alert to the risk of cyber manipulation and attack.’
‘Self-drive cars will probably work through internet connectivity and, just as large volumes of electronic traffic can be routed to overwhelm websites, the opportunity for self-drive traffic being routed to create ‘spam jams’ or disruption is a very real prospect.’
Rockall suggests that manufacturers could build safety features in to lessen the risk of this happening. ‘The industry takes safety and security incredibly seriously. Doubtless, overrides could be built in so that drivers could shut down many of the car’s capabilities if hacked. That way, humans will still be able to ensure their cars don’t route them on the road to nowhere.’
But Google’s prototype self-driving car, revealed on Tuesday, is largely controlled using an app, and has just two physical buttons: stop, and go. The company has taken a very different approach to firms like Audi and Volvo, who market the driverless features as an addition to, rather than replacement for, a traditional driver.”
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“Cars without steering wheels,” 1950s:
Tags: Alex Hern, Wil Rockall
At the Philosopher’s Beard, the whiskered one wonders whether capitalism as we know it has a future in an automated society, arguing for a universal basic income based on human decency, not employment status. An excerpt:
“Unless we intervene, the same economic system that has produced this astonishing prosperity will return us to the Dickensian world of winners and losers that characterised the beginning of capitalism, or worse. The problem is this, how will ordinary people earn a claim on the material prosperity of the capitalist economy if that economy doesn’t need our labour anymore?
The Crisis
The original industrial revolution was basically an energy revolution that replaced puny human brawn with fossil fuel powered machines that were orders of magnitude faster and stronger. Human workers were displaced into the new jobs created by this prosperity, some managing and servicing the machines that made actual things, but most into ‘services’, producing intangible goods such as education by cognitive efforts that the technological revolution in productivity couldn’t reach. We are now living through a second industrial revolution that is replacing puny human brains with machine intelligence. Any kind of work that can be routinised can be translated into instructions for computers to do, generally more cheaply and reliably than human employees can. That includes increasingly sophisticated cognitive labour like driving, legal discovery, medicine, and document translation. Even university lecturers are at risk of being replaced by technology, in the form of Massive Open Online Courses [previously], while the digital cloning of actors promises to allow filmmakers to cheaply manufacture whatever cast they please.
Just like the original industrial revolution this is creating large numbers of losers whose skills are no longer valued by the market. But this time it is not clear that new jobs will appear for these people to move into, for this time the machines can follow us nearly anywhere we try to go. This time technological unemployment may become a permanent fact that we have to deal with by changing how capitalism works. Our birthright as humans – the ability to produce things by our labour that others find valuable – may become economically worthless.”
In a Popular Science piece, Erik Sofge offers a smackdown of the Singularity, thinking it less science than fiction. An excerpt:
“The most urgent feature of the Singularity is its near-term certainty. [Vernor] Vinge believed it would appear by 2023, or 2030 at the absolute latest. Ray Kurzweil, an accomplished futurist, author (his 2006 book The Singularity is Near popularized the theory) and recent Google hire, has pegged 2029 as the year when computers with match and exceed human intelligence. Depending on which luminary you agree with, that gives humans somewhere between 9 and 16 good years, before a pantheon of machine deities gets to decide what to do with us.
If you’re wondering why the human race is handling the news of its impending irrelevance with such quiet composure, its possible that the species is simply in denial. Maybe we’re unwilling to accept the hard truths preached by Vinge, Kurzweil and other bright minds.
Just as possible, though, is another form of denial. Maybe no one in power cares about the Singularity, because they recognize it as science fiction. It’s a theory that was proposed by a SF writer. Its ramifications are couched in the imagery and language of SF. To believe in the Singularity, you have to believe in one of the greatest myths ever told by SF—that robots are smart, and always on the verge of becoming smarter than us.
More than 60 years of AI research indicates otherwise.”
Tags: Erik Sofge, Ray Kurzweil, Vernor Vinge
I’ve already posted the video of the “fight” between Muhammad Ali and Rocky Marciano, which was filmed scenes of the two then-undefeated heavyweight champions (the latter a long-retired one) with a computer supposedly scientifically deciding the winner. Ali needed a paycheck while living in exile in his own country during his military holdout, and Marciano wanted one more glow of warmth from the spotlight. It was to be his very last hurrah, as it turned out, as the older fighter died in a plane crash soon after the filming concluded. The sadness over his sudden death, the antipathy by some toward Ali during the Vietnam War, and the race of those feeding “expertise” into the computers, probably gave Marciano the hypothetical victory more than science did. In both boxers’ primes, I think Ali would have won convincingly. Here’s the brief copy from a 1970 Life magazine article that ran with photos from the film the week after it played in theaters:
“The only two heavyweight champions who never lost a professional fight are Rocky Marciano and Cassius (Muhammad Ali) Clay, and this has provoked many a nonprofessional fight among their fans. So Miami Promoter Murray Woroner decided to make a hypothetical ‘Super Fight’ of it, using a computer. First he matched the two champions and filmed 75 rounds of Hollywood-style fighting, finishing three weeks before Marciano’s death in a plane crash last summer. Then the skills and weaknesses of each fighter–as diagnosed by 1,500 sportswriters, fighters and managers–were programmed. The computer punched out a blow-by-blow reading and selected film segments were matched to it.
Seven possible endings were shot: a knockout, TKO and decisions for each man, and a draw. To foil any gambling capers, the seven endings were held in bonded secrecy until the last minute. When the film was shown at 750 theaters and arenas around the country last week, the result was dramatically uncomputerlike. Cut to simulated ribbons and even floored once, Marciano came back to knock Clay out in the 13th round. ‘It takes a good champion to lose like that,’ Clay smiled afterwards.”
Tags: Muhammad Ali, Murray Woroner, Rocky Marciano
This prime 1972 episode of the Mike Douglas Show features John & Yoko as co-hosts. At the 34:20 mark, there’s an appearance by consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who has been right about so many things (airbags, corporate greed, conservation, etc.) and so wrong about one–the 2000 American Presidential election.
There was no difference between the two major-party candidates, Nader said, staying in the race until the end, which turned out to be very bitter for the country. The difference between Dubya and Al Gore was 4,500 U.S. troops dying or not, a 100,000 Iraqis dead or alive, a focus on environmentalism or business as usual as the clock kept running out. For some–perhaps for all–it was the difference between life and death. Adults who can’t see shades of gray always stun me, but it was the same impulses that drove Nader’s righteous career which led him to be the spoiler in 2000.
Tags: John Lennon, Louis Nye, Mike Douglas, Ralph Nader, The Chambers Brothers, Yoko Ono
“Within such containers…man could live as comfortably as he does at home.”
We were aware, more than seven decades ago, that the moon could be a landing pad, a rocket launcher and a nonpareil space observatory. Our failure to execute in this area is one of will, not knowledge. An article about the moon and its uses from the December 29, 1940 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Los Angeles (U.P.)–The moon, not so many centuries hence, probably will the earth’s much-prized ‘airport’ for rocket travel.
When that time comes, if it does, scientists in heavy Man-from-Mars suits probably will flock to the moon and build big telescopes of a size not dreamed of on earth.
Whenever they take off their suits, the rocket men and the scientists will have to live in big, air-tight caverns dug into the surface of the moon.
They will breathe air shipped from the earth, or manufactured chemically from the rocks on the moon.
This peek at the moon’s possibilities as sort of an ‘off-atmosphere’ base for the earth is made by the scientists at Griffith Observatory in their monthly publication. They termed their forecast something between ‘sober scientific description and fantasy.’
Proper Fuel Needed
Rocket travel, in the first place, depends upon discovery of a proper fuel, but they said this problem ‘is not as fantastic as it sounds’ and added:
‘Considering the marvels of scientific inventions during the past century, one is very much tempted to guess that shortly after the time that the human race has gained enough sense to live at peace, our scientists will provide the means of travel, and observatories upon the moon will become realities.’
When men learn to flit from earth to Venus, et cetera, the observatory suggests the moon doubtless will become an ‘intermediate base’ for big rocket ships.
The moon has slight gravity pull compared to the earth; a man could jump like a giant grasshopper, and rocket ships could take off easily. Further the moon has practically no atmosphere, hence there will not be the friction of air slowing down the rockets.
These same two qualities will send astronomer hurrying to the moon, the observatory predicts. Telescopes would be so light in weight that they could be built in sizes dwarfing the 200-incher now under construction in Pasadena, Cal. There would be none of the destruction from ‘boiling air’ as on earth. Astronomers could see much farther, and better. Further, the moon has a black night two weeks long–a paradise for astronomers.
But the lack of air on the moon will present its difficulties, as well. Earthmen going to the moon will have to have something to breathe.
‘Assuming that some day man does make direct use of the moon,’ says the observatory, ‘his protection would probably come in two forms:
‘First, by making great airtight caverns within the surface of the moon. In these caverns the air either would be carried from the earth or much more probably formed chemically from the oxides at the surface of the moon. Within such containers, which might be of very large size, man could live as comfortably as he does at home.
‘Second, outside of these it would be necessary for him to wear some sort of cumbersome suit, the reverse of that used by the diver, and to carry with him in tanks his necessary supply of oxygen.’
Fears have been expressed that earthmen would be in danger of constant bombardments of meteorites on the moon, but the observatory said there is no evidence of this. The bombardments would kick up great clouds of dust on the moon, and no such clouds have been observed through the telescopes.”
From the January 21, 1913 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Enid, Okla.–A kick on the head by a mule was worth $2,800 to John Allen, a farmer living near here. Immediately after Allen was operated on today for a fracture of the skull, which the mule’s hoof had inflicted last Saturday, he remembered where he had buried that amount of money during the financial panic of 1907.”
Tags: John Allen'
From a brief post at Priceonomics, a correction to the oft-quoted Stewart Brand phrase “Information wants to be free”:
“But that’s not what the quote said. Or rather, that’s only half the quote. Here’s the full quote said by Stewart Brand in 1984:
‘On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life.
On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.
So you have these two fighting against each other.”
In a later book, Brand shortened the statement to: ‘Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive…That tension will not go away.'”
Tags: Stewart Brand
At the Financial Times, Tim Harford explains why (almost) nobody saw the financial collapse of 2008 coming and why economic predictions are usually so lacking:
“Why are forecasts so poor? The chief explanation is that the economy is complicated and we don’t understand it well enough to make forecasts. We don’t even fully understand recent economic history.
Ben Chu, economics editor of The Independent, recently took a look at the UK recession of the 1990s in the light of two decades of data revisions. From the vantage point of 1995, the economy in late 1992 was slightly smaller than the economy in early 1988. But today’s best guess is that the economy of late 1992 was almost 6 per cent larger than in early 1988. The Office for National Statistics has substantially revised its view.
Not only is it difficult to forecast the future, then – forecasting the past isn’t straightforward either. What chance does any prognosticator have?
A second explanation for forecasting’s fallibility is that there is little incentive to do better. The kind of institutional chief economist whose pronouncement makes it into Consensus Forecasts will stick to the middle of the road. Most countries, most of the time, are not in recession, so a safe strategy is never to forecast one. Of course there are the mavericks who receive media attention for making provocative predictions and are lionised when they are right. Their incentives are different but it is unclear that their overall track record is any better.”
Tags: Tim Harford
A team of hackers got the go-ahead from NASA to attempt to contact and “reawaken” a long-decommissioned satellite, funding the mission with crowdsourced money. So far, so good. From the Economist:
“It appears to have survived unscathed the long occupancy of the orbit in which it was parked. However, celestial mechanics have put the satellite about 250,000km off from where it was expected. Mr Cowing and his colleagues are slightly worried that it may bash into the moon or wander too close to Earth. The craft has antennas measuring 30 metres and extending in four directions, which at a certain altitude above Earth could cause problems. ‘It’s a 360-foot spinning cookie cutter,’ says Mr Cowing.
That the reboot project has got that far is remarkable. Unable to receive a clear go-ahead or an outright no from NASA a few months ago, it set out to raise funds hoping that this might prompt the space agency to acquiesce. It is the first time in NASA’s history that operational control has been handed over, and NASA made the announcement on May 23rd with due fanfare.
With the original software, computers or telecoms gear long gone, the team—with the help of some original mission members and others in and out of NASA who knew where to find the old manuals—recreated the equipment, including a software-defined radio system that allows talking and listening to the satellite. The Arecibo Observatory also provided help: it installed gear purchased by the Reboot Project and allowed it to use Arecibo’s huge satellite dish free during downtimes. The team faced downpours of rain and even an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.8 while one of the volunteers worked near the dish.’
Much remains to be determined. Mr [Keith] Cowing and his colleagues have yet to decide whether the satellite is to explore more comets or to use it for other purposes.”
Tags: Keith Cowing
In much the same way that we don’t travel by flying car, we also aren’t waited on by robotic servants. Rodney Brooks, the MIT roboticist who was one of the central figures in Errol Morris’ Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, is disheartened with what he sees as the sector stalling out. Of course, the same thing was said many times about personal computing, that it hadn’t sealed the deal, until, of course, it began to, dramatically. And just because all our sci-fi dreams haven’t come to fruition that doesn’t mean that what we have achieved has been miniscule. From Sharon Gaudin at Computerworld:
“Russ Tedrake, an associate professor in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, acknowledged Brooks’ points about the state of robotics today, but said big positive changes could come soon via research being pushed by major companies like Google.
‘He’s right that there are lots of things that we haven’t done yet that we had expected to do right now. The early promise was that we’d have robots everywhere by now,’ said Tedrake. ‘Look at Google’s purchase of robotics companies. That’s a massive change in the robotics landscape. The number of companies that are starting robotics and asking how they can work with robots is extremely exciting.’
Will many homes have their own robot that will babysit the kids, make dinner and clean the windows any time soon?
Probably not, according to Tedrake. However, we may have something similar.
‘Maybe we’ll have several small, special-purpose robots instead of one general-purpose robot,’ he said. ‘They might clean your house, cook dinner and mop the floor. Maybe we’ll call them appliances instead of robots.'”
Tags: Rodney Brooks, Russ Tedrake, Sharon Gaudin
I still have no idea why “electronic brain” seems to have been the favored term for computers in the pre-1960s U.S. In fact “computer” was often treated like a silly word to be mocked. Well, by any name, such a machine and its memory helped American Airlines keep track of reservations six decades ago, according to an article in the July 13, 1952 Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The story:
“American Airlines is using an electronic ‘brain’ to keep accurate and up-to-the-moment information on plane seats available.
By manipulating keys on a gadget resembling a small adding machine, a ticket agent can in a matter of seconds determine space available and make or cancel reservations.
The brain housed in American’s hangar at Laguardia Field, consists of a battery of electronic tubes and a ‘memory’ in which is stored the inventory of seats. The memory consists of two magnetized drums on which more than 1,000 flights for a period of ten days is recorded.
Let’s assume that a passenger requests three seats for a flight to Chicago:
1. The agent at one of the remote ticket offices selects a destination plate from a file. This plate is notched like a house key.
2. He inserts the plate in a slot behind eight lucite push-buttons. This sets up the connection with the memory drum at LaGuardia. The eight lucite keys have printed data on flight number, departure time, etc.
3. The agent then pushes buttons designating the date and number of seats requested.
4. In less than a second the brain responds by lighting lucite lamps corresponding to those flights which have three seats available.
5. The passenger makes his choice of flight and the agent flips a key to ‘sell.’
6. A green light indicates that the brain has completed the transaction, subtracting thee seats from the inventory for that flight on the memory drum.”
You can’t blame the CEO of Uber for not trying to fight the advent of driverless cars–he wouldn’t win that war. But like the rest of us, he probably should be a little concerned about the job loss caused by the market disruption. From Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider:
“Uber CEO Travis Kalanick sat for a keynote interview at Code Conference this afternoon in Southern California.
During the interview, Code editor Kara Swisher asked Kalanick what he thinks of self-driving cars.
‘Love it. All day long,’ said Kalanick.
‘The reason Uber could be expensive is you’re paying for the other dude in the car. When there is no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere is cheaper. Even on a road trip.’
Kalanick said that self-driving cars ordered up through a service like Uber will eventually bring the cost of ridership so far down that car ownership will ‘go away.’
He said self-driving Uber fleets will also be safer and ‘more environmentally friendly.’
Obviously lots of Uber drivers will lose their jobs over time if this vision comes to life. Kalanick is OK with that.”
Tags: Nicholas Carlson, Travis Kalanick
From “The Age of the Robo-Builder Is Upon Us,” Tom Cheshire’s Wired UK look at the long-term future of building, when no effort will be required:
“Fabio Gramazio and his partner Matthias Kohler recently programmed an industrial robot to work on a Swiss winery. It prefabricated the façade, stacked bricks and applied adhesive, and cranes installed it. ‘We’re replacing the brick module with a machine and controlling the process with algorithms,’ says Gramazio. ‘It’s beyond what could be done with a human.’
The pair have also presented some more speculative projects, including having drones assemble high-rises in Singapore. But to make these scenarios real, Gramazio knows he has to approach the less eye-catching core of the construction industry: ‘If you want to change the logic of building, you have to attack concrete.’ He’s working on a new type of reinforced concrete — one whose reinforcement is a structure extruded by the industrial robot, which allows for more complex structures. ‘We’re currently doing it with plastics, but we’re working with steel, glass, carbon and natural fibres.’ That’s some way off, but Gramazio is thinking long term. ‘If you want complete change, this is 50 to 100 years away,’ the 43-year-old says. ‘And that’s nothing.'”
Norman Mailer pursued immortality through subjects as grand as his ego, and it was the Apollo 11 mission that was Moby Dick to his Ahab. He knew the beginning of space voyage was the end, in a sense, of humans, or, at least, of humans believing they were in the driver’s seat. Penguin Classics is republishing his great 1970 writing, Of a Fire on the Moon, 45 years after we touched down up there. Together with Oriana Fallaci’s If The Sun Dies, you have an amazing account of that disorienting moment when technology, that barbarian, truly stormed the gates, as well as a great look at New Journalism’s early peak. Below are some of the posts that I’ve previously put up that refer to Mailer’s book.
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“It Was Not A Despair He Felt, Or Fear–It Was Anesthesia”
When he wrote about the coming computer revolution of the 1970s at the outset of the decade in Of a Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer couldn’t have known that the dropouts and the rebels would be leading the charge. An excerpt of his somewhat nightmarish view of our technological future, some parts of which came true and some still in the offing:
“Now they asked him what he thought of the Seventies. He did not know. He thought of the Seventies and a blank like the windowless walls of the computer city came over his vision. When he conducted interviews with himself on the subject it was not a despair he felt, or fear–it was anesthesia. He had no intimations of what was to come, and that was conceivably worse than any sentiment of dread, for a sense of the future, no matter how melancholy, was preferable to none–it spoke of some sense of the continuation in the projects of one’s life. He was adrift. If he tried to conceive of a likely perspective in the decade before him, he saw not one structure to society but two: if the social world did not break down into revolutions and counterrevolutions, into police and military rules of order with sabotage, guerrilla war and enclaves of resistance, if none of this occurred, then there certainly would be a society of reason, but its reason would be the logic of the computer. In that society, legally accepted drugs would become necessary for accelerated cerebration, there would be inchings toward nuclear installation, a monotony of architectures, a pollution of nature which would arouse technologies of decontamination odious as deodorants, and transplanted hearts monitored like spaceships–the patients might be obliged to live in a compound reminiscent of a Mission Control Center where technicians could monitor on consoles the beatings of a thousand transplanted hearts. But in the society of computer-logic, the atmosphere would obviously be plastic, air-conditioned, sealed in bubble-domes below the smog, a prelude to living on space stations. People would die in such societies like fish expiring on a vinyl floor. So of course there would be another society, an irrational society of dropouts, the saintly, the mad, the militant and the young. There the art of the absurd would reign in defiance against the computer.”
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Some more predictions from Norman Mailer’s 1970 Space Age reportage, Of a Fire on the Moon, which have come to fruition even without the aid of moon crystals:
“Thus the perspective of space factories returning the new imperialists of space a profit was now near to the reach of technology. Forget about diamonds! The value of crystals grown in space was incalculable: gravity would not be pulling on the crystal structure as it grew, so the molecule would line up in lattices free of shift or sheer. Such a perfect latticework would serve to carry messages for a perfect computer. Computers the size of a package of cigarettes would then be able to do the work of present computers the size of a trunk. So the mind could race ahead to see computers programming go-to-school routes in the nose of every kiddie car–the paranoid mind could see crystal transmitters sewn into the rump of ever juvenile delinquent–doubtless, everybody would be easier to monitor. Big Brother could get superseded by Moon Brother–the major monitor of them all might yet be sunk in a shaft on the back face of the lunar sphere.”
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In his 1970 Apollo 11 account, Of a Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer realized that his rocket wasn’t the biggest after all, that the mission was a passing of the torch, that technology, an expression of the human mind, had diminished its creators. “Space travel proposed a future world of brains attached to wires,” Mailer wrote, his ego having suffered a TKO. And just as the Space Race ended the greater race began, the one between carbon and silicon, and it’s really just a matter of time before the pace grows too brisk for humans.
Supercomputers will ultimately be a threat to us, but we’re certainly doomed without them, so we have to navigate the future the best we can, even if it’s one not of our control. Gary Marcus addresses this and other issues in his latest New Yorker blog piece, “Why We Should Think About the Threat of Artificial Intelligence.” An excerpt:
“It’s likely that machines will be smarter than us before the end of the century—not just at chess or trivia questions but at just about everything, from mathematics and engineering to science and medicine. There might be a few jobs left for entertainers, writers, and other creative types, but computers will eventually be able to program themselves, absorb vast quantities of new information, and reason in ways that we carbon-based units can only dimly imagine. And they will be able to do it every second of every day, without sleep or coffee breaks.
For some people, that future is a wonderful thing. [Ray] Kurzweil has written about a rapturous singularity in which we merge with machines and upload our souls for immortality; Peter Diamandis has argued that advances in A.I. will be one key to ushering in a new era of ‘abundance,’ with enough food, water, and consumer gadgets for all. Skeptics like Eric Brynjolfsson and I have worried about the consequences of A.I. and robotics for employment. But even if you put aside the sort of worries about what super-advanced A.I. might do to the labor market, there’s another concern, too: that powerful A.I. might threaten us more directly, by battling us for resources.
Most people see that sort of fear as silly science-fiction drivel—the stuff of The Terminator and The Matrix. To the extent that we plan for our medium-term future, we worry about asteroids, the decline of fossil fuels, and global warming, not robots. But a dark new book by James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, lays out a strong case for why we should be at least a little worried.
Barrat’s core argument, which he borrows from the A.I. researcher Steve Omohundro, is that the drive for self-preservation and resource acquisition may be inherent in all goal-driven systems of a certain degree of intelligence. In Omohundro’s words, ‘if it is smart enough, a robot that is designed to play chess might also want to build a spaceship,’ in order to obtain more resources for whatever goals it might have.”
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While Apollo 11 traveled to the moon and back in 1969, the astronauts were treated each day to a six-minute newscast from Mission Control about the happenings on Earth. Here’s one that was transcribed in Norman Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon, which made space travel seem quaint by comparison:
“Washington UPI: Vice President Spiro T. Agnew has called for putting a man on Mars by the year 2000, but Democratic leaders replied that priority must go to needs on earth…Immigration officials in Nuevo Laredo announced Wednesday that hippies will be refused tourist cards to enter Mexico unless they take a bath and get haircuts…’The greatest adventure in the history of humanity has started,’ declared the French newspaper Le Figaro, which devoted four pages to reports from Cape Kennedy and diagrams of the mission…Hempstead, New York: Joe Namath officially reported to the New York Jets training camp at Hofstra University Wednesday following a closed-door meeting with his teammates over his differences with Pro Football Commissioner Pete Rozelle…London UPI: The House of Lords was assured Wednesday that a major American submarine would not ‘damage or assault’ the Loch Ness monster.”
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“There Was An Uneasy Silence, An Embarrassed Pall At The Unmentioned Word Of Nazi”
“What we are seeking in tomorrow’s trip is indeed that key to our future on earth.”
Norman Mailer’s book Of a Fire on the Moon, about American space exploration during the 1960s, was originally published as three long and personal articles for Life magazine in 1969: “A Fire on the Moon,” “The Psychology of Astronauts,” and “A Dream of the Future’s Face.” Mailer used space travel to examine America’s conflicted and tattered existence–and his own as well. In one segment, he reports on a banquet in which Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi rocket engineer who became a guiding light at NASA, meets with American businessmen on the eve of the Apollo 11 launch. An excerpt:
“Therefore, the audience was not to be at ease during his introduction, for the new speaker, who described himself as a ‘backup publisher,’ went into a little too much historical detail. ‘During the Thirties he was employed by the Ordinance Department of the German government developing liquid fuel rockets. During World War II he made very significant developments in rocketry for his government.’
A tension spread in this audience of corporation presidents and high executives, of astronauts, a few at any rate, and their families. There was an uneasy silence, an embarrassed pall at the unmentioned word of Nazi–it was the shoe which did not drop to the floor. So no more than a pitter-patter of clapping was aroused when the speaker went quickly on to say: ‘In 1955 he became an American citizen himself.’ It was only when Von Braun stood up at the end that the mood felt secure enough to shift. A particularly hearty and enthusiastic hand of applause swelled into a standing ovation. Nearly everybody stood up. Aquarius, who finally cast his vote by remaining seated, felt pressure not unrelated to refusing to stand up for The Star-Spangled Banner. It was as if the crowd with true American enthusiasm had finally declared, ‘Ah don’ care if he is some kind of ex-Nazi, he’s a good loyal patriotic American.’
Von Braun was. If patriotism is the ability to improve a nation’s morale, then Von Braun was a patriot. It was plain that some of these corporate executives loved him. In fact, they revered him. He was the high priest of their precise art–manufacture. If many too many an American product was accelerating into shoddy these years since the war, if planned obsolescence had all too often become a euphemism for sloppy workmanship, cynical cost-cutting, swollen advertising budgets, inefficiency and general indifference, then in one place at least, and for certain, America could be proud of a product. It was high as a castle and tooled more finely than the most exquisite watch.
Walt Disney with Wernher von Braun.
Now the real and true tasty beef of capitalism got up to speak, the grease and guts of it, the veritable brawn, and spoke with fulsome language in his small and well-considered voice. He was with friends on this occasion, and so a savory and gravy of redolence came into his tone, his voice was not unmusical, it had overtones which hinted of angelic super-possibilities one could not otherwise lay on the line. He was when all was said like the head waiter of the largest hofbrau in heaven. ‘Honored guests, ladies and gentlemen,’ Von Braun began, ‘it is with a great deal of respect tonight that I meet you, the leaders, and the captains in the mainstream of American industry and life. Without your success in building and maintaining the economic foundations of this nation, the resources for mounting tomorrow’s expedition to the moon would never have been committed…. Tomorrow’s historic launch belongs to you and to the men and women who sit behind the desks and administer your companies’ activities, to the men who sweep the floor in your office buildings and to every American who walks the street of this productive land. It is an American triumph. Many times I have thanked God for allowing me to be a part of the history that will be made here today and tomorrow and in the next few days. Tonight I want to offer my gratitude to you and all Americans who have created the most fantastically progressive nation yet conceived and developed,’ He went on to talk of space as ‘the key to our future on earth,’ and echoes of his vision drifted through the stale tropical air of a banquet room after coffee–perhaps he was hinting at the discords and nihilism traveling in bands and brigands across the earth. ‘The key to our future on earth. I think we should see clearly from this statement that the Apollo 11 moon trip even from its inception was not intended as a one-time trip that would rest alone on the merits of a single journey. If our intention had been merely to bring back a handful of soil and rocks from the lunar gravel pit and then forget the whole thing’–he spoke almost with contempt of the meager resources of the moon–‘we would certainly be history’s biggest fools. But that is not our intention now–it never will be. What we are seeking in tomorrow’s trip is indeed that key to our future on earth. We are expanding the mind of man. We are extending this God-given brain and these God-given hands to their outermost limits and in so doing all mankind will benefit. All mankind will reap the harvest…. What we will have attained when Neil Armstrong steps down upon the moon is a completely new step in the evolution of man.'”
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Wernher von Braun inducted into the Space Camp Hall of Fame:
Tom Lehrer eviscerates Wernher von Braun in under 90 seconds:
Tags: Norman Mailer
From the November 17, 1936 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Siamese twins, one of whom is in a critical condition with pneumonia while the other remains in good health, were in New York Hospital, 119 E. 74th St., Manhattan, today.
Lucio Godina is fighting for his life with a temperature of 105, while Simplicio Godina is in perfectly normal condition. Their age is 28.”
Tags: Lucio Godina, Simplicio Godina
My take on the New York Times as a business is that it’s a great publication with real value within the right structure (as part of Bloomberg, for instance), but it probably won’t flourish financially again as a family-owned, independent company.
Financial journalist David Warsh was perplexed by the Times’ internal “Innovation Report” that was recently leaked and has written a scathing article on the topic for Politico Magazine. The opening:
“For all the reporting about the unceremonious manner in which Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. replaced executive editor Jill Abramson with Dean Baquet, the strongest evidence that the needle on his tenure as publisher of the New York Times has reached the danger zone is the company’s internal “Innovation Report” that someone at the New York Times Co. leaked last week, perhaps in hopes of offsetting the bad publicity.
Prepared by an eight-person newsroom team led by Sulzberger’s son, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the glossy, 96-page report is likely to have the opposite effect. It amounts to a clarion call to blow up the 163-year-old business in order to go into competition with the likes of BuzzFeed, Vox, Business Insider, the as-yet unformed First Look Media and the Huffington Post. And what a recipe for disaster that would be: abandoning the great news and insight that is at the heart of the Times brand to chase after audience in a game it can never hope to win.
Astoundingly, the report doesn’t so much as mention the Times’ much more menacing digital competitors, Bloomberg News and Reuters, breakthrough innovators whose news-gathering resources are far greater than those of the newspaper company. On every page, the ‘Innovation Report’ betrays its authors’ failure to understand what the Times’ fundamental business is about.”
Tags: Arthur Sulzberger, David Warsh
Michael Crichton pushed his book Electronic Life: How To Think About Computers while visiting Merv Griffin in 1983. The personal computing revolution was upon us, but the Macintosh had yet to reach the market, so it still seemed so far away, especially to the tech-challenged host.
If the sea level rises high enough, it will sink us all. But the first casualties of melting glaciers will likely be island nations. The opening of Stephen Leahy’s Vice article “The Nations Guaranteed to Be Swallowed By the Sea“:
“Imagine the street you live on is knee-deep in floodwater, and it’s ruining everything in sight, including your home. Now imagine that those awful floodwaters never, ever recede. Instead, the water just keeps rising and rising until your entire country drowns.
For a number of island nations, that’s ultimately the significance of the recent reports about the unstoppable melt of the massive ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, along with hundreds of glaciers.
‘We’ve already lost some island atolls. On others the rising sea is destroying homes, washing away coffins and skeletons from graves,’ Tony de Brum, the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, told me. ‘Now with every full moon the high tides brings salt water into our streets. We’re moving further inland but can’t move much further.’
The Marshall Islands are located in the northern Pacific Ocean, and are home to some 70,000 people spread out over 24 low-lying coral atolls. Low-lying, as in six feet above sea level on average. Not only do rising seas flood and erode shorelines, they also make groundwater too salty too drink and ‘poison’ the land with salt so crops and even coconuts trees can’t grow.“
Tags: Stephen Leahy, Tony de Brum
I’ve posted before about Google pushing the near-term limits of what Elon Musk thinks is possible with autonomous vehicles. We’ll see how that turns out, but here’s a description the Verge’s David Pierce of Google’s new steering wheel-less autonomous taxi prototype which will definitely be all over the media and perhaps all over city streets:
“Speaking about self-driving cars last September, Elon Musk preached caution. The man who wants to send us all to space and shuttle us between cities at outrageous speeds told the FT that ‘my opinion is it’s a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars.’
Somewhere deep inside the secret labs at Google X, Sergey Brin must have read that and smiled. And then climbed into his tiny car — the one with a strange smiley face for a front and a noticeably missing steering wheel — and with a single button press instructed his car to drive him wherever billionaires go to cackle at the short-sightedness of other billionaires.
On Tuesday night, onstage at the Code Conference in California, Brin revealed an entirely new take on a self-driving car, one decidedly more ambitious than anything we’ve seen before. Google’s as-yet-unnamed car isn’t a modified Lexus. It doesn’t just park itself. It’s an entirely autonomous vehicle, with no need for steering wheels or gas pedals or human intervention of any kind. You can’t drive it even if you want to.
The Google Car is fully electric, big enough for two passengers. It’ll only go 25 miles per hour. Your involvement with the car consists of four things: get in, put on your seatbelt, press the Start button, and wait.”
Tags: David Pierce, Elon Musk, Sergey Brin