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“It Turns Out That We Are…Creating Highways For Disaster Spreading”

July 24, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Swiss sociologist Dirk Helbing’s Edge essay,”A New Kind Of Socio-Inspired Technology,” a passage about our stunning level of connectivity:

“Our future information society will be characterized by computers that behave like humans in many respects. In ten years from now, we will have computers as powerful as our brain, and that will really fundamentally change society. Many professional jobs will be done much better by computers. How will that change society? How will that change business? What impacts does that have for science, actually?

There are two big global trends. One is big data. That means in the next ten years we’ll produce as many data, or even more data than in the past 1,000 years. The other trend is hyperconnectivity. That means we have networking our world going on at a rapid pace; we’re creating an Internet of things. So everyone is talking to everyone else, and everything becomes interdependent. What are the implications of that? Well, first of all, of course, we have wonderful new gadgets like Facebook, for example, so we can network with each other. We have new services, new opportunities, and that is just fantastic.

But on the other hand, it turns out that we are, at the same time, creating highways for disaster spreading. We see many extreme events, we see problems such as the flash crash, or also the financial crisis. That is related to the fact that we have interconnected everything. In some sense, we have created unstable systems. We can show that many of the global trends that we are seeing at the moment, like increasing connectivity, increase in the speed, increase in complexity, are very good in the beginning, but (and this is kind of surprising) there is a turning point and that turning point can turn into a tipping point that makes the systems shift in an unknown way.”

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“It Is A Girl, As Expected”

July 24, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From the BBC: “Five million ‘test tube babies’ have now been born around the world, according to research presented at a conference of fertility experts. Delegates hailed it as a ‘remarkable milestone’ for fertility treatments. The first test tube baby, Louise Brown, was born in the UK in July 1978. Her mother Leslie Brown died last month.”

The birth of the first test-tube baby:

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“It Has Been Hailed Since Conception As The Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow”

July 24, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Northeast Asia Trade Tower, New Songdo. (Image by Wikipedia.)

The result of Greg Lindsay’s collaboration with John D. Kasarda, Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, grew from a 2010 article the journalist wrote for Fast Company about New Songdo City, South Korea’s ambitious airport-centric, insta-city. The opening:

“Stan Gale is exultant. The chairman of Gale International yanks off his tie, hitches up his pants, and mops the sweat and floppy hair from his brow. He’s beaming like a proud new papa, sprung from the waiting room and handing out cigars to whoever happens by. Beckoning me to follow, he saunters across eight lanes of traffic toward his baby, delivered prematurely days before.

Ten years ago, Gale was a builder and flipper of office parks who would eventually become known for knocking down the Boston landmark Filene’s Basement and replacing it with a hole in the ground. But Gale’s fate began to change in 2001 with a phone call from South Korea. The Korean government had found his firm on the Internet and made an offer everyone else had refused. The brief: Gale would borrow $35 billion from Korea’s banks and its biggest steel company, and use the money to build from scratch a city the size of downtown Boston, only taller and denser, on a muddy man-made island in the Yellow Sea. When Gale arrived to see the site, it was miles of open water. He signed anyway.

New Songdo City won’t be finished until 2015 at least, but in August, Gale cut the ribbon on the 100-acre ‘Central Park’ modeled, like so much of the city, on Manhattan’s. Climbing on all sides will be a mix of low-rises and sleek spires — condos, offices, even South Korea’s tallest building, the 1,001-foot Northeast Asia Trade Tower. Strolling along the park’s canal, we hear cicadas buzzing, saws whining, and pile drivers pounding down to bedrock. I ask whether he’s stocked the canal with fish yet. ‘It’s four days old!’ he splutters, forgetting he isn’t supposed to rest until the seventh.

As far as playing God (or SimCity) goes, New Songdo is the most ambitious instant city since Brasília 50 years ago. Brasília, of course, was an instant disaster: grandiose, monstrously overscale, and immediately encircled by slums. New Songdo has to be better because there’s a lot more riding on it than whether Gale can repay his loans. It has been hailed since conception as the experimental prototype community of tomorrow. A green city, it was LEED-certified from the get-go, designed to emit a third of the greenhouse gases of a typical metropolis its size (about 300,000 people during the day). It’s an ‘international business district’ and an ‘aerotropolis’ — a Western-oriented city more focused on the airport and China beyond than on Seoul. And it’s supposed to be a ‘smart city,’ studded with chips talking to one another, designated as such years before IBM found its ‘Smarter Planet’ religion.”

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A Cisco video about Songdo:

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“It’s Not Me…It’s The World That’s Gone Nuts”

July 23, 2012 in Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Paddy Chayefsky discussing Network, arguably America’s best film satire, with Dinah Shore in 1976.

See also:

 

“The Internet Didn’t Get Invented On Its Own”

July 23, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I wholly disagree with L. Gordon Crovitz’s Wall Street Journal editorial “Who Really Invented the Internet?” The piece attempts to discredit the important role that government played in the nurturing of our dominant medium, trying to shift all the credit to the free market. That’s ideology masquerading as history. An excerpt:

“A telling moment in the presidential race came recently when Barack Obama said: ‘If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.’ He justified elevating bureaucrats over entrepreneurs by referring to bridges and roads, adding: ‘The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet.’

It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way.”

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“It Would Be For A Fifth Mode Of Transport”

July 23, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I posted last week about Elon Musk’s plan for a new, superfast mode of transport. One that runs on clean energy and can never crash. Here, at the 43:10 mark, he spends four minutes going into depth about the Hyperloop.

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“Your Opportunity Has Arrived”

July 23, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

As media moguls and tech titans use their billions to stretch into space, here’s Virgin Galactic’s promo film. If you had to wager right now, do you think the first people to land on Mars will be working for a government or a private enterprise? And what’s lost and what’s gained if it’s the latter?

“His Caretakers Got Drunk On The Alcohol Used In Embalming Lenin’s Corpse”

July 22, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Like Albert Einstein’s brain, Vladimir Lenin’s corpse has done its fair share of traveling. Embalmed in 1924 at the behest of Joseph Stalin, Lenin’s leftovers have been considered differently during the many shifts in his homeland’s tortuous politics. Christopher Buckley, more than most, has had a close relationship with the remains. From his New York Times Op-Ed piece, “What’s a Body to Do?“:

“The saga of Lenin’s remains is a uniquely Russian story. His caretakers got drunk on the alcohol used in embalming Lenin’s corpse, and in one instance, one was caught groping the other’s daughter. There are group photos of them striking jaunty poses, as if they’ve gathered for a picnic.

And here was Khrushchev in 1956, growling, ‘The mausoleum stinks of Stalin’s corpse.’ Stalin was embalmed and laid out beside Lenin between 1953 to 1961, until Khrushchev said enough and ordered him buried beneath the Kremlin wall.

Lenin remains — Sleeping Beauty From Hell. Perhaps when his heir, President Vladimir V. Putin, is finished shipping combat helicopters to shore up his friend Bashar al-Assad of Syria he will have time to consider his minister of culture’s modest proposal.

Footnote: In 1991, when I was editing a publication for Forbes, I engaged in a hoax and briefly persuaded the world that the Russian government was preparing to auction off the body.

The story garnered quite a lot of play. A none-too-happy Russian interior minister denounced me for my ‘impudent lie’ and called it ‘an unpardonable provocation.’ (Which sort of made my day.)

But a number of readers of the magazine apparently didn’t get the memo that it was all a hoax. The Kremlin was deluged with offers.”

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“Some Things We Can’t Yet Imagine Will Happen”

July 20, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There might not always be Broadway, but they’ll always be theater. Likewise they’ll always be journalism despite the traditional economic print model being flattened before our eyes. But how will news be delivered and supported? Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger doesn’t have the answers, but he identifies all the right questions in an interview at the Browser. The opening:

“Talking about the future of news, some people might question what the fuss is about. In a couple of clicks they can find all the news they need, and what’s more it’s free. What’s the problem, in a nutshell?

The main if not the only problem is the business model. Otherwise, everything’s wonderful. There’s never been an era with more and better information, and greater ease of creating, consuming and sharing it. It’s a golden age. But at the moment, the economics of it all have yet to settle down and be worked out. There’s going to be a giant shakedown, because too much is happening to be sustained along the lines of the past. So it’s a golden age in terms of what is being created, but it’s not yet a golden age in terms of how it is all going to be paid for. Some things are going to stop, some things are going to begin, and some things we can’t yet imagine will happen. Everything is in transition.

It’s a true cliché that a crisis is also an opportunity, for us to rearrange the lego blocks. You’ve quoted CP Scott, who in 1921, with the advent of the telegraph and the telephone, said: ‘Physical boundaries are disappearing… What a change for the world! What a chance for the newspaper!’ What chances are there for the newspaper today?

It’s of an order that Scott was talking about. That was a fantastic thing – a man in his eighties who could see that these new technological advances meant that the Manchester Guardian would have access to, and would be able to distribute, news at a speed and with a range that was unimaginable when he started being editor. The same thing was true with me. When I became editor [in 1995], it was essentially a print product. But now [with the website] we’ve been catapulted into global reach and influence.”

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“Executives On The Go Will Begin Carrying Pocket-Sized Digital Communicating Devices”

July 20, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of a 1992 New York Times article by Peter H. Lewis that foresaw smartphones, although it didn’t quite get that the devices would be for the masses:

“Sometime around the middle of this decade no one is sure exactly when — executives on the go will begin carrying pocket-sized digital communicating devices. And although nobody is exactly sure what features these personal information gizmos will have, what they will cost, what they will look like or what they will be called, hundreds of computer industry officials and investors at the Mobile ’92 conference here last week agreed that the devices could become the foundation of the next great fortunes to be made in the personal computer business.

‘We are writing Chapter 2 of the history of personal computers,’ said Nobuo Mii, vice president and general manager of the International Business Machines Corporation’s entry systems division.

How rich is this lode? At one end of the spectrum is John Sculley, the chief executive of Apple Computer Inc., who says these personal communicators could be ‘the mother of all markets.’“‘

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“As We Expand Out Into The Solar System Then, Sure, Earth Could Have Its Own Government”

July 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “The Future Will Seem Normal“ at the Next Big Future,” Brian Wang’s new post about Earth forty years from now, which is interesting if very accelerated and sci-fi-ish:

“I do not see world government as inevitable (over the next 40 years for sure). But we are seeing this extra layer getting more powers. Trade organizations and treaties. But the UK and China leadership are smart enough to not give up currency sovereignty. They know the game that Germany and France are running.

Long term as we expand out into the solar system then sure Earth could have its own government, but there will still be the layers below. Not sure how it would all split out – like US federal versus states versus local. Or Canada – federal v provinces.

I see a lot more power vesting in the cities. I see mega cities forming. Especially with Sky city – factory mass produced skyscrapers at about ten times less cost and high speed transportation (high speed rail in China and perhaps low pressure or vacuum trains at higher speeds and high energy efficiency, the US could go pocket airports, robot electric cars, and small planes, beamed power could make that work.)

You could have 50 major cities in the 50-300 million pop range. Say 7 in China, 3 in the 200-400 million range and 4 in the 50 million range. Similar number in the US but smaller populations.”

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“We Will Be Able To Design Our Own Products At Home With The Aid Of AI Design Assistants”

July 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

At Foreign Policy, Vivek Wadhwa of Singularity University hits back at the idea that China is manufacturing America into the ground. Quite the contrary, he argues that manufacturing jobs are returning to the U.S. because of our superior knowledge of AI, though many of the tasks will be handled by robotic hands rather than human ones. A note in the article about the coming personalization of even large-scale products:

“Neil Jacobstein, who chairs the AI track at the Silicon Valley-based graduate program Singularity University, says that AI technologies will find their way into manufacturing and make it ‘personal’: that we will be able to design our own products at home with the aid of AI design assistants. He predicts a ‘creator economy’ in which mass production is replaced by personalized production, with people customizing designs they download from the Internet or develop themselves.

How will we turn these designs into products? By ‘printing’ them at home or at modern-day Kinko’s — shared public manufacturing facilities such as TechShop, a membership-based manufacturing workshop, using new manufacturing technologies that are now on the horizon.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“You Would Go From Downtown L.A. To Downtown San Francisco In Under 30 Minutes”

July 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Paypal founder, Tesla kingpin and private-sector space pioneer Elon Musk has a vision for the future of travel, and it doesn’t require wheels or wings. From Megan Garber at the Atlantic, Musk briefly describing his vision:

“This system I have in mind, how would you like something that can never crash, is immune to weather, it goes 3 or 4 times faster than the bullet train… it goes an average speed of twice what an aircraft would do. You would go from downtown L.A. to downtown San Francisco in under 30 minutes. It would cost you much less than an air ticket than any other mode of transport. I think we could actually make it self-powering if you put solar panels on it, you generate more power than you would consume in the system. There’s a way to store the power so it would run 24/7 without using batteries. Yes, this is possible, absolutely.”

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“For A Guy Who Likes Gadgets, Here’s The Ultimate”

July 19, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A 1958 concept car that was a transformer of sorts, all at the push of a button.

“I Think I Know What’s Going To Happen In Our World”

July 19, 2012 in Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Paddy Chayefsky, that brilliant satirist, holding forth spectacularly on the Mike Douglas Show in 1969. It starts with polite chatter about the success of his script for Marty but quickly transitions into a much more serious and futuristic discussion. The writer is full of doom and gloom, of course, during the tumult of the Vietnam Era; his best-case scenario for humankind to live more peacefully is a computer-friendly “new society” that yields to globalization and technocracy, one in which citizens are merely producers and consumers, free of nationalism and disparate identity. Well, some of that came true. All the while, he wears a fun, red lei because one of his fellow guests is Hawaii Five-0 star Jack Lord. Gwen Verdon, Lionel Hampton and Cy Coleman share the panel.

Chayefsky joins the show at the 7:45 mark.

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“We Will Preserve A Brain, Slice It Up, Simulate It On A Computer, And Hook It Up To A Robot Body”

July 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of “The Strange Neuroscience of Immortality,” Evan R. Goldstein’s odd and fascinating new Chronicle article about the ad infinitum view of life:

“In the basement of the Northwest Science Building here at Harvard University, a locked door is marked with a pink and yellow sign: ‘Caution: Radioactive Material.’ Inside researchers buzz around wearing dour expressions and plastic gloves. Among them is Kenneth Hayworth. He’s tall and gaunt, dressed in dark-blue jeans, a blue polo shirt, and gray running shoes. He looks like someone who sleeps little and eats less.

Hayworth has spent much of the past few years in a windowless room carving brains into very thin slices. He is by all accounts a curious man, known for casually saying things like, ‘The human race is on a beeline to mind uploading: We will preserve a brain, slice it up, simulate it on a computer, and hook it up to a robot body.’ He wants that brain to be his brain. He wants his 100 billion neurons and more than 100 trillion synapses to be encased in a block of transparent, amber-colored resin—before he dies of natural causes.

Why? Ken Hayworth believes that he can live forever.

But first he has to die.

‘If your body stops functioning, it starts to eat itself,’ he explains to me one drab morning this spring, ‘so you have to shut down the enzymes that destroy the tissue.’ If all goes according to plan, he says cheerfully, ‘I’ll be a perfect fossil.’ Then one day, not too long from now, his consciousness will be revived on a computer. By 2110, Hayworth predicts, mind uploading—the transfer of a biological brain to a silicon-based operating system—will be as common as laser eye surgery is today.”

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“Thousands frozen, and pets too”:

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“This Panoramic Unit On France Is Narrated By Charles Boyer”

July 18, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Some 1960 archival footage touting Panorama, a multimedia educational tool.

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“There Are Now Far More Books Available, Far More Quickly, On The iPhone Than In The New York Public Library”

July 18, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In the New Republic, David A. Bell looks at the future role of brick and mortar libraries in a world without paper, pages and print. The opening:

“THEY ARE, in their very different ways, monuments of American civilization. The first is a building: a grand, beautiful Beaux-Arts structure of marble and stone occupying two blocks’ worth of Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. The second is a delicate concoction of metal, plastic, and glass, just four and a half inches long, barely a third of an inch thick, and weighing five ounces. The first is the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the main branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL). The second is an iPhone. Yet despite their obvious differences, for many people today they serve the same purpose: to read books. And in a development that even just thirty years ago would have seemed like the most absurd science fiction, there are now far more books available, far more quickly, on the iPhone than in the New York Public Library.

It has been clear for some time now that this development would pose one of the greatest challenges that modern libraries—from institutions like the NYPL on down—have ever encountered. Put bluntly, one of their core functions now faces the prospect of obsolescence. What role will libraries have when patrons no longer need to go to them to consult or to borrow books?”

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“We Will Have Serious Voice Recognition”

July 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Bill Gates predicted Apple’s Siri in 1987. From the great Paleofuture blog at the Smithsonian: “Gates predicts the perfection of a technology that has been around for decades, but one that many people of 2012 might associate with the name Siri: voice recognition. ‘Also, we will have serious voice recognition. I expect to wake up and say, ‘Show me some nice Da Vinci stuff,’ and my ceiling, a high-resolution display, will show me what I want to see—or call up any sort of music or video. The world will be online, and you will be able to simulate just about anything.'”

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“On July 19, 1957, Five Men Stood At Ground Zero Of An Atomic Test”

July 17, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Incredible footage of extreme volunteerism via that excellent Robert Krulwich.

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“What It’s Now Becoming Is An Extension Of Your Mind”

July 17, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Internet is an extension of the mind but so are books. People couldn’t memorize enough knowledge, so there were those faithful volumes of collected information to do the remembering, the reminding. But there are some not-so-subtle differences between the two tools. Readers would have to seek out information in books, whereas the Internet can be the proactive and anticipate what you want to know–what you need to know–before it even occurs to you. The functions are more complicated, as are the concerns. Although I’m in the camp that thinks it’s a huge win in the big picture. From Stephen Shankland’s new CNet article about Google’s planned future shock:

“What it’s now becoming is an extension of your mind, an omnipresent digital assistant that figures out what you need and supplies it before you even realize you need it.

Think of Google diagnosing your daughter’s illness early based on where she’s been, how alert she is, and her skin’s temperature, then driving your car to school to bring her home while you’re at work. Or Google translating an incomprehensible emergency announcement while you’re riding a train in foreign country. Or Google steering your investment portfolio away from a Ponzi scheme.

Google, in essence, becomes a part of you. Imagine Google playing a customized audio commentary based on what you look at while on a tourist trip and then sharing photo highlights with your friends as you go. Or Google taking over your car when it concludes based on your steering response time and blink rate that you’re no longer fit to drive. Or your Google glasses automatically beaming audio and video to the police when you say a phrase that indicates you’re being mugged.

Exciting? I think so. But it’s also, potentially, a profoundly creepy change.”

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“Someone With Enough Money, And Vanity And Arrogance, Might Attempt It One Day”

July 17, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We’re really going to eventually do this, aren’t we? We’re going to take the genetic materials of a Neanderthal and clone a member of the species. Some scientist somewhere won’t be able to resist the temptation. From a brief piece at Discover with paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer:

“Could we ever clone these extinct people?

Stringer: Science is moving on so fast. The first bit of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA was recovered in 1997. No one then could have believed that 10 years later we might have most of the genome. And a few years after that, we’d have whole Denisovan and Neanderthal genomes available. So no one would have thought cloning was a possibility. Now, at least theoretically, if someone had enough money, and I’d say stupidity, to do it, you could cut and paste those Denisovan mutations into a modern human genome, and then implant that into an egg and then grow a Denisovan.

I think it would be completely unethical to do anything like that, but unfortunately someone with enough money, and vanity and arrogance, might attempt it one day.These creatures lived in the past in their own environments, in their own social groups. Bringing isolated individuals back, for our own curiosity or arrogant purposes, would be completely wrong.”

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“Every One Of Us Is Directly Descended To Some African Who Was Taken From His Homeland”

July 17, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Alex Haley appears on To Tell the Truth in 1972 to discuss his genealogical investigations, four years before Roots was published and became a phenomenon.

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“When This Child Was Born, The Obstetrician, Looking At It Was Horrified”

July 16, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Dr. Fredric Neuman’s harrowing Psychology Today article, “The Cyclops Child,” is one of the more bruising things I’ve read in a long time. It’s the psychiatrist’s recollection of being witness to horribly, hopelessly deformed newborns when he was an intern 50 years ago. The doctors would tell the parents that the child was born dead, and the infant would surreptitiously be given minimal care until it passed away. It was done to spare the feelings of the parents, but it’s obvious they should have been told and involved in the decision. Regardless, it’s a heartrending story. The opening paragraph:

“Probably every physician can think of one patient who affected him more than any other. The patient who has haunted me through the years was a child that I saw for only a little time at the very beginning of my career. I was an intern at a Catholic institution. I mention that because it seems to me relevant to the ethical considerations that swirled about the care of this infant. When this child was born, the obstetrician, looking at it was horrified. It was a ‘monster.’ That was the medical term used to describe a grossly misshapen baby. The doctor was concerned, then, first of all, about the effect on its mother of seeing the child. Therefore, he told the parents that it was born dead; and that the body had been disposed of.  But the child was alive. This particular ‘monster’ had deformities that were not consistent with it living for any length of time. The obstetrician must have recognized that immediately and chose to spare the parents the special anguish of looking at and knowing about this abnormal birth. But did he have the right to tell them a lie about such a critical matter? I’m not sure that there is a law to deal with such a strange situation, but I am sure the obstetrician violated medical canons. He short-circuited the parents’ wishes and concerns. Plainly, they had the right to know the truth. If a medical malpractice action had been instituted, the doctor would have been liable. By telling this lie, he was risking his career. The other people in the delivery suite were also complicit and also liable. As far as I was concerned, however, he had done the right thing.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“I Study The Future Of Crime And Terrorism, And, Frankly, I’m Afraid”

July 16, 2012 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Global Security Expert Marc Goodman focuses his TED Talk on the bleak side of our brave new world.

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