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“The Idea Of A City Without Street Signs Is A Bit Startling”

August 2, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If and when driverless cars become the way to travel, whether that day is approaching as fast as Elon Musk thinks or if it’s a further patch down the road, the ramifications will be many. Car ownership won’t be required, nor will it even be necessary for fleets of taxis to be “owned” in any traditional sense. Traffic fatalities will likely plummet, and there should be a salubrious impact on the environment. Of course, the bottom will be pulled out from under the middle class should driving jobs (and all the other enterprises they support) disappear.

Even smaller changes will snake their way through our streets and highways. Case in point: The sun will set on the SUNSET BLVD. street sign and all the rest. Signage won’t be required to direct vehicles and pedestrians provided real-time mapping and augmented reality are adequately developed.

From an Adrienne LaFrance article at the Atlantic:

A map that’s unchanging is actually a map that’s inaccurate. Reality, including the places around us, is always in flux.

Increasingly, digital mobile maps reflect this more liminal state, and—with the help of satellites and GPS and traffic reports and street-level photography—do so with improved precision. (Incidentally, Uber is embarking on its own mapping efforts so it can rely less on Google.) That precision will matter more and more as we head toward a future in which the markings of human-made maps will be read by computers, like the machines that will drive themselves from one place to the next with us sitting inside of them.

And when that happens, the other markers of the old world—like street signs—will eventually disappear. The idea of a city without street signs is a bit startling. Or it was to me, anyway, when my colleague Ian Bogost wrote about it last month. He touched on the same thing that preoccupied the Uber driver I spoke with. Modern maps are free, but they’re enormously valuable.

Google or Apple might restrict access to their mapping services in areas that don’t adopt political positions convenient to their corporate interests. They might even elect to alter the physical environment accordingly. In America, street signs are yoked to signage built for human drivers, mounted atop traffic signals and stop signs. Once those devices aren’t needed, their attached markings might also disappear. Perhaps tech giants could persuade municipalities to remove street signs and markers to realize cleaner, less distracting urban conveyance via the synergy of app-street-and-car transit networks.

It’s jarring to imagine a physical world stripped of these familiar markers, but street signs have already changed dramatically since the early mile markers that dotted the roads of ancient Rome.•

Tags: Adrienne LaFrance

“Is It A Rerun Of The 1930s?”

August 2, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Mentioned a couple days back that Donald Trump’s gross adoration of Vladimir Putin and other autocrats recalls similar warm feelings some American oligarchs felt for Fascists during the 1930s. In an impassioned Guardian essay, Paul Mason, who believes we may soon find ourselves post-capitalism, compares the gathering clouds of that earlier decade to our own WTF moment, with the ugly political rise of the hideous hotelier clearly not an isolated case of extremism.

Mason concludes history isn’t exactly repeating itself, that we’re better off today in our globalized system, save one toxic sticking point, that “an entire generation of humanity has been brutalized.” The writer points to ISIS slayings and minority scapegoating and racist social-media trolling to support his point that we’re worse in this important way eighty years on. Perhaps, but I’m not wholly convinced. Antisemitism in Europe in the first few decades of the 20th century was deeply pernicious and the Jim Crow South was far more heinous than anything that exists in contemporary America, for all our continued instances of racial injustice.

The best argument in favor of our destabilized media, that communication breakdown, is our unmatched access to answer these outrages, to organize against them. There have never been more ways for people of good conscience to refuse to remain silent. Mason is aware of this, acknowledging “we have billions of educated and literate brains on the planet; and we have the concept of universal and inalienable human rights.”

His opening:

Things are happening with machine-gun rapidity: Brexit, the Turkish coup, Islamist massacres in France, the surrounding of Aleppo, the nomination of Donald Trump. From the USA to France to post-Brexit Britain, the high levels of public racism and xenophobia, reflected now in the outpourings of politicians with double-digit poll ratings, have got people asking: is it a rerun of the 1930s?

On the face of it, the similarities are real. Britain’s vote to leave the EU parallels its panicked decision to quit the gold standard in September 1931 – the first major country to quit the global economic system. Labour’s incipient split mirrors the one that left the party out of power for 14 years. And of course the economic background – a depression and a banking crisis – has echoes in the present situation.

But a proper study of the 1930s reveals our situation today to be better and more salvageable in many ways, although in one respect worse.•

Tags: Paul Mason

“This Age Of Implants Is About To Explode”

August 1, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Cyborgism has long been anathema to most, good only for a plot twist in a summer blockbuster, but I think smartphones have subtly won hearts and minds. Those gadgets have grown so close to our hearts, literally and figuratively. When I see someone greedily devouring information from their phone the second they emerge from a subway, it seems like they’ve already melded with a machine, the moments they’ve spent apart the real aberration.

Implants have great potential to treat serious illness (e.g. Alzheimer’s) and to augment intelligence (which will happen someday), but certainly we have to be wary of what their intrusion will mean. Regulating biological processes is one thing and making humans uniformly hackable another. With the Internet of Things, we’re placing ourselves inside a machine, and with chips and such the machine will be placed inside of us.

Jared Keller conducted a Pacific-Standard Q&A with Transhumanist Presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan, who thinks the age of bionic organs is upon us, which is probably too aggressive a prediction. An exchange:

Question:

Aren’t we already kind of cyborgs? We have pacemakers and subdermal implants, and we treat our smartphones as limbs. The historian David Landes even traced the impact of personal technology like eyeglasses and the wristwatch on the course of human civilization.

Zoltan Istvan:

I would argue that the transhumanist age or the cyborg age or whatever you want to call it is already here. That fact is, we sleep with our phones inches away from us and we often depend on vehicles to take us everywhere; this machine age, where we’re dependent on tools, has been here for years.

But what’s really starting to happen is the integration of technology and synthetic parts into our bodies. Yes, there are millions of people who have dentures and artificial hips; some 350,000 people have brain implants, mostly in the form of cochlear implants that cure deafness, or chips to tackle epilepsy. The age of cyborgism has occurred — it basically occurred about five or six years ago rather quietly.

I’m deeply convinced that, within just a few years, this age of implants is about to explode, and you’re going to see dozens of companies coming onto the market seeking [Food and Drug Administration] approval. Over the next 10 years, the thing that’s going to change our lives is bionic organs, and there are already so many companies out there working on this, from artificial hearts to lungs to livers. We’re going to start electively getting better bionic and artificial organs.•

Tags: David Landes, Jared Keller, Zoltan Istvan

“How Do We Resist The Security State?”

August 1, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

It seems the tools we’ve created have plunged us into a permanent state of gamesmanship between listeners and leakers, the governments and corporations that want to know as much as possible about us and those that strike back, who are often as dubious as the ones they seek to neutralize (see: Assange, Julian). I don’t see anyway out, even if the whole thing is needless. Surveillance capitalism certainly isn’t good for citizens and there’s thus far little evidence that we’re safer for all the cameras and tracking by authorities. In fact, the most useful result of ubiquitous video cameras has been the exposure of institutional abuses by private citizens.

In “Resisting the Security State,” a 3 Quarks Daily essay, the excellent thinker Thomas R. Wells argues that the nature of terrorism (“warfare that is more virtual than real”) makes it impervious to surveillance and such. His opening:

Liberalism is a centuries old political project of taming the power of the state so that it works for the ruled not the rulers. Can it survive the security state midwifed by global terrorism? Only if we take back responsibility for managing the dark political emotions of fear and anger that terrorists seek to conjure.

How do we resist the security state?

First, by challenging its effectiveness. PRISM and the other opaquely named universal surveillance programmes seem to have been approximately zero use in predicting terrorist attacks before they happen; last year the TSA failed to detect 67 out of 70 weapons and explosives carried by mystery shoppers. Security expert Bruce Schneier characterises the counter-terrorism security measures that increasingly dominate our experience of public spaces as mostly theatrical, designed to “make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security”. (And actually they can’t even manage that.)

Second, by challenging the cost-effectiveness of the security state even if it worked as it is supposed to. The loss of our privacy is not a small price to pay for preventing terrorism and saving lives. Firstly because we should be consistent. If we wouldn’t give up privacy rights to reduce minor risks of death in other contexts (like installing government cameras in every bathroom to save people from bathtub slips), what rational reason do we have for giving up all our privacy to the government to reduce the risk of terrorism from almost nothing to possibly slightly less? Secondly because privacy is not an ornament but the heart of liberalism. In a liberal society the people should be mysterious and the government should be transparent; the more these are reversed the further we go towards despotism.

But there is a further problem with the security state besides its ineffectiveness and inefficiency: It is a fundamentally incoherent project.•

Tags: Thomas R. Wells

“I Can’t Imagine Spending The Rest Of My Life In An Environment Like That”

August 1, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

When erstwhile Nazi Wernher von Braun wasn’t busy planning on blasting gas chambers into space, the NASA kingpin concerned himself with the psychological effects of epic flights on astronauts. In a 1954 Collier’s article he co-wrote with A Bridge Too Far author, Cornelius Ryan, the following passage appeared:

I am convinced that we have, or will acquire, the basic knowledge to solve all the physical problems of a flight to Mars. But how about the psychological problem? Can a man retain his sanity while cooped up with many other men in a crowded area, perhaps twice the length of your living room, for more than thirty months?•

A decade later, the French speleologist Michel Siffre began embedding himself in caves and underground glaciers to collect reconnaissance about the deep recesses of the mind when subjected to isolation. Sans takeoff, this sort-of astronaut studied time, developing the field of human chronobiology.

Today, with astronaut Scott Kelley having spent close to a year in space, we have a clearer, if still imperfect, understanding of what it might take for humans to reach Mars with intact minds. From Alessandra Potenza at the Verge:

What will be the psychological challenges that astronauts face on their way to the Red Planet, the furthest away any human being has ever been from home?

The Verge asked Scott Kelly, the former NASA astronaut who spent 340 days on the ISS — the longest any American has lived in space. His one-year mission is a stepping stone to future missions to Mars. Kelly told us how his year in space changed him and how he’s gotten a better appreciation for the environment.

Despite the physical and psychological challenges, Kelly said he’d volunteer for a mission to the Red Planet — with one caveat: he has to have a return ticket to Earth. “Having spent a year on the space station,” he says, “I can’t imagine spending the rest of my life in an environment like that, where you can’t go out and get fresh air.”•

Tags: Alessandra Potenza, Scott Kelly

Old Print Article: “Office Serves Coffee in Pneumatic Tubes,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1933)

July 31, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

“I have my manias, and I impose them.”

Italo Balbo, Mussolini’s Air Minister, created an experimental office environment that was a technocrat’s dream, humming with gizmos, even if it shared some of the fascist tendencies of his politics. There was an Automat-style lunchroom and a tubing system that delivered coffee to desks, which was wonderful provided you weren’t aging, sickly or disabled. Then you weren’t allowed to work there. There was no opting out of the system, not until Mussolini ultimately met the business end of a meat hook. An article from the February 23, 1933 Brooklyn Daily Eagle reports on Balbo’s “good ministry.”

“From Its Very Inception, Yahoo Was More Of A Media Company Than A Tech Company”

July 31, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Technology companies can’t be all things to all people, but they can’t remain stagnant, either. Yahoo! began as a hand-made site, with the original surfers amassing information in a rudimentary way, in much the same sense that “computers” were once people, not machines. The erstwhile search giant was more a media company more than a technology one, though things didn’t have to stay that way. Jeff Bezos, after all, didn’t continue selling books from his garage. But the original ethos was never abandoned, and Yahoo! was lapped by other startups, most famously Google, which was started as an AI company.

In his excellent “Week in Tech” conversation with fellow New York Times reporter Mike Isaac, Farhad Manjoo sums up better than anyone else has the reason for the fall of the Filo-Yang outfit. An excerpt:

I think Yahoo’s failure offers one lesson above all for tech companies: Invest in technology. I know that sounds obvious, but it’s one place where Yahoo totally missed the boat from the beginning. It started out in the 1990s as a guide to the web that was created by human beings. In other words, from its very inception, Yahoo was more of a media company than a tech company. And that origin story infected its culture — sure, it had lots of engineers and acquired lots of innovative tech, but at its core Yahoo never really saw itself as a company whose mission was to invent the next big thing.

Notice how today’s tech behemoths — Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook — offer a completely different outlook on the world. Each of these companies regards software and hardware as their essential areas of expertise, the basis from which they can spin out into so many different areas that are far beyond their primary businesses.

Yahoo never really got that, and so, when the tech world changed, it failed.•

Tags: Farhad Majoo, Mike Isaac

“Is There Violence? Is There Murder?”

July 29, 2016 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

In the pursuit of truth, Werner Herzog has his whole life elected to battle elements natural and human-made. Whether taking epic walks across Germany sans car, lugging cameras to the maw of a live volcano or commanding his cast and crew to pull a 320-ton steamship over a hill, he hasn’t always enjoyed a tension-less relationship with the tools of the Industrial Age, let alone the Digital one.

In 2011’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Herzog offered a mélange of the natural and artificial, the implements of the ancient and modern, trying to make sense of, among other things, cave drawings, 3-D filmmaking, albino crocodiles and nuclear power plants. In the forthcoming Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, he takes a bold step into what technology has wrought, not dismissing its greatness nor drunkenly celebrating its proliferation.

In a smart Vox interview, Emily Yoshida had the happy task of explaining Pokémon Go to the director. It could not have gone better. An excerpt:

Werner Herzog:

Tell me about Pokémon Go. What is happening on Pokémon Go?

Vox:

It’s basically the first mainstream augmented reality program. It’s a game where the entire world is mapped and you walk around with the GPS on your phone. You walk around in the real world and can catch these little monsters and collect them. And everybody is playing it.

Werner Herzog:

Does it tell you you’re here at San Vicente, close to Sunset Boulevard?

Vox:

Yeah, it’s basically like a Google map.

Werner Herzog:

But what does pokémon do at this corner here?

Vox:

You might be able to catch some. It’s all completely virtual. It’s very simple, but it’s also an overlay of physically based information that now exists on top of the real world.

Werner Herzog:

When two persons in search of a pokémon clash at the corner of Sunset and San Vicente is there violence? Is there murder?

Vox:

They do fight, virtually.

Werner Herzog:

Physically, do they fight?

Vox:

No—

Werner Herzog:

Do they bite each other’s hands? Do they punch each other?

Vox:

The people or the…

Werner Herzog:

Yes, there must be real people if it’s a real encounter with someone else.•

Tags: Emily Yoshida, Werner Herzog

“Several Billion People Have A Slot Machine In Their Pocket”

July 29, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Some among us pull out our smartphones a little too desperately, as if chain smokers nervously grasping for the next cigarette. That’s not surprising since both are highly addictive.

Undoubtedly, these devices possess a bounty of wealth, a portable storehouse of knowledge unmatched in human history, but what keeps many coming back are far pettier rewards, likes and swipes and such that are aimed at feeding egos. Some of these incentives are accidental and others purposely designed, with the sum being an endless supply of lottery tickets in our pockets that simply must be checked.

An excerpt from Tristan Harris’ smart Spiegel essay on smartphone addiction:

Here’s the unfortunate truth: Several billion people have a slot machine in their pocket.

When we pull our phone out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what notifications we have received. When we swipe down our finger to scroll the Instagram feed, we’re playing a slot machine to see what photo comes next. When we “Pull to Refresh” our email, we’re playing a slot machine to see what email we got. When we swipe faces on dating apps like Tinder, we’re playing a slot machine to see if we got a match.

Sometimes this is intentional: Apps and websites sprinkle intermittent variable rewards all over their products because it’s good for business. Other times, for example with email or smartphones, it’s an accident.

Another way technology hijacks our minds is by inducing the 1 percent chance we could be missing something important. But Apps also exploit our need for social approval. When we see the notification “Your friend Marc tagged you in a photo” we instantly feel our social approval and sense of belonging on the line. But it’s all in the hands of tech companies.

Facebook, Instagram or SnapChat can manipulate how often people get tagged in photos by automatically suggesting all the faces we should tag. So when my friend tags me, he’s actually responding to Facebook’s suggestion, not making an independent choice. But through design choices like this, Facebook controls the multiplier for how often millions of people experience their social approval.

The same happens when we change our main profile photo. Facebook knows that’s a moment when we’re vulnerable to social approval: “What do my friends think of my new pic?” Facebook can rank this higher in the news feed, so it sticks around for longer and more friends will like or comment on it. Each time they like or comment on it, we get pulled right back in.

Everyone innately responds to social approval, but some demographics, in particular teenagers, are more vulnerable to it than others. That’s why it’s so important to recognize how powerful designers are when they exploit this vulnerability.•

Tags: Tristan Harris

“Data-Enabled Mobile Phones Have Actually Become A Huge Part Of Even Their Remote, Disconnected Community”

July 28, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Democracy is only as good as the people, and information is only useful if those crunching the numbers possess sound, critical minds. Smartphones have allowed those in the furthest corners of the globe to have access to an almost unlimited library of ideas and data. How will they use it?

In America and other developed nations, unending streams of info have created a stubbornly chaotic new normal, with conspiracies growing like weeds and democracy coming to seem less like a village than a lynch mob. Will other people, unencumbered by our baggage, manage the modern arrangement in a saner way?

In a Washington Post piece, Caitlin Dewey writes of a recent Reddit Ask Me Anything with members of the Maasai tribe, who are already connected to the rest of us, which might be a blessing. An excerpt:

Earlier this week, Redditors were given a pretty neat opportunity: Two leaders from the Maasai tribe, a seminomadic people living in Western Kenya, signed on to do an “Ask Me Anything.” Redditors asked about the standard stuff: religious practices, diet, what people in the village do for fun. And then, inevitably, one user asked the chiefs to describe their favorite “kind of Internet porn.”

“They don’t believe it and don’t know what it is,” the chiefs’ interlocutor replied — to a giddily gleeful audience. “Don’t think or know about pornography. They are asking is it normal in America.”

The assembled Redditors went wild. It was their crowning achievement. They concluded that they had, in what may have been the Redditiest moment ever Reddited, introduced the concept of Internet porn to a culture that had not encountered it.

But what actually happened is slightly more complicated … and truthfully, more fascinating. Chief Joseph and Assistant Chief Leshan had, in fact, seen Internet porn before, because data-enabled mobile phones have actually become a huge part of even their remote, disconnected community.

As distant as the Maasai may seem from the modern world — the tribe has access to neither running water nor electricity, and many of the questions in the AMA centered on customs like drinking goats’ blood and circumcision without anesthetics — they do increasingly have access to forums like Reddit.

As Adam Schiller, the 24-year-old volunteer who set up the AMA, put it: “Imagine having porn before you have power.”•

Tags: Caitlin Dewey

“His Real Subject Was The Irreducibility Of Consciousness”

July 28, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Truly understanding the consciousness of a human being let alone a different species is impossible for us. Someday, though not soon, we’ll likely be able to map the brains of beasts (including us) and upload them into computers. Then perhaps an unparalleled sense of empathy will be possible (though it will bring along with it all sorts of complications). Currently, AI is as inept as Homo sapiens in making this magic happen.

Excerpts from: 1) Elizabeth Kolbert’s NYRB piece “He Tried to Be a Badger,” which looks at the lack of human understanding of our fellow creatures, and 2) Alan Smeaton’s Irish Times article, “Artificial Intelligence Is Dead,” which focuses on the limitations of machines achieving and perceiving consciousness.

From Kolbert:

In his classic essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” the philosopher Thomas Nagel attempts to enter the pteropine mind. Bats, he notes, spend a lot of their time dangling upside down. At night, they swoop around, searching for bugs and issuing high-pitched chirps that allow them to navigate in the dark. A person can imagine what it’s like to hang by his toes from a rafter. He may also be able to envisage having webbed arms, and maneuvering via echolocation, and catching insects on the fly. From this, he can get a sense of what it would be like for him to behave like a bat. But still he would not know what it’s like tobe a bat. Even in his wildest dreams, a person has access only to the resources of the human mind, and here, according to Nagel, lies the rub: “Those resources are inadequate to the task.”

Nagel’s essay first appeared in 1974, in the journal The Philosophical Review. It could just as well have been titled “What Is It Like to Be an Aardvark?” or “What Is It Like to Be a Zebra?” The gap separating humans from bats is much the same as—or at least of a similar magnitude to—that which separates us from sloths and pangolins and manatees and meerkats. Like us, these animals are mammals, and we concede that they are capable of some sort of subjective experience. (“Too far down the phylogenetic tree,” Nagel observes, and “people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all.”)

Though Nagel wasn’t much interested in other species—his real subject was the irreducibility of consciousness—to those who were, his question became a kind of taunt, an elbow thrust across academic disciplines.•

From Smeaton:

Automatic recognition of image and video content is now much more than just recognising faces in pictures: it now assigns captions or tags to describe what is in the picture. Facebook uses this to make images accessible to the blind and Google Photos use it to tag personal photos.

IBM’s Watson system can read in text documents and answer questions about their content. Watson was fed the entire contents of Wikipedia and competed in the US game show Jeopardy against two previous champions. Watson won.

Jeopardy is like a cross between University Challenge and Only Connect, requiring extensive real world knowledge, and clever analysis of language. Watson is now being applied by IBM to medicine and scientific literature to help users understand the huge volume of scientific information being produced daily.

Think also of self-driving cars, soon to be navigating our roads, avoiding obstacles, including each other, in order to take us safely and economically to our destinations.

These examples, and many others, are all being touted as forms of AI.

But are they AI? Well, no actually. Companies like calling their technologies AI. It sounds better, it’s more futuristic, but it’s not AI: it’s actually data analytics.

IBM’s Watson, for example, achieves what it does by analysing sentences to draw connections across sentences, paragraphs, documents. What makes it clever is that it does this for really complex text, and it does it at enormous scale, processing vast amounts of data.

It is not reading and understanding in the way we envisaged an AI machine would.•

Tags: Alan Smeaton, Elizabeth Kolbert

“This Is The Future Of ‘Made in China'”

July 27, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Promises of a robotics revolution in China have been so overheated that there’s a credibility gap, but Saša Petricic of CBC News reports of real progress in what’s likely a necessary transition for the graying nation. Of course, the world isn’t exactly flat, and what’s needed in a state that’s severely restricted childbirth for decades may not be the best thing for other countries. The thing is, if China truly becomes Ground Zero for robots supplanting human labor, such a changeover will soon occur in places where there’s no shortage of people who need jobs. Victories in the macro can be awfully messy in the micro.

An excerpt:

Supply of cheap labour drying up

The industrial robots might also solve a growing problem: China’s dwindling supply of cheap, low-skilled labour. For three decades, that was the magic ingredient that pushed this economy to become the second biggest in the world. Millions of labourers left the countryside and flooded the industrial cities, lifting themselves out of poverty and their children into the middle class.

But now, there aren’t enough of those children. The population is aging. The so-called demographic dividend is fading.

“It’s becoming harder and harder to recruit workers and to keep them,” said Chen. “This work is intense and tiring, so we have to pay people more and more to lure them and keep them.”
The wage in this plant is around $1,200 a month, more than double the average in this region.

Young people, especially, are turning away from the tedious, repetitive factory work their parents sought.

And as overall wages have been skyrocketing in China at a rate of 10 per cent a year, the cost of industrial robots has been plummeting. It cost the Ying Ao factory about $4 million to install the nine robots, about the same amount as a year’s worth of salaries for the 256 workers they replaced.

The cost is expected to drop by a further 20 per cent worldwide in the next decade, according to a study by the Boston Consulting Group.

“This is the future of ‘Made in China,'” said Zhang Tao, the deputy manager for intelligent manufacturing in the hub city of Foshan. “I think it may be too optimistic to say robots will replace humans in three years … but you could say there will be much more co-operation.”•

Tags: Saša Petricic

“They’d Be ‘Enthusiastic’ About A Brain Chip To Enhance Their Thinking Power”

July 27, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Roughly five years ago, Google’s Larry Page pronounced that “eventually you’ll have the implant,” speaking of a chip added to the human brain to enhance intelligence and memory and more. It’s not without precedent for hardware to shrink and be implanted inside of us. Pacemakers were external and the size of ovens before they slid inside chests and heads. Of course, that hardware regulated only biological processes, not thoughts and knowledge. I think it inevitable that such enhancement is realized in one form or another, but it’s important to remember that those who are more intelligent are not necessarily morally superior.

From Allen Cone at UPI:

WASHINGTON, July 26 (UPI) — A third of U.S. adults in a recent Pew Research Center survey said they’d be “enthusiastic” about a brain chip to enhance their thinking power.

The survey of 4,726 adults examined public attitudes about three emerging technologies that could improve a person’s health, cognitive ability or physical capacity.

Responses showed that a majority of American adults are uneasy, or “worried” about all three. But in all three cases, at least a third of respondents were “enthusiastic.”

–Using implanted brain chips to boost our thinking power: 69 percent worried vs. 34 percent enthusiastic.

–Editing the genes of babies to eliminate hereditary flaws and diseases: 68 percent worried vs. 49 percent enthusiastic.

–Transfusing synthetic blood to give people much greater speed, strength and stamina: 63 percent worried vs. 36 percent enthusiastic.•

Tags: Allen Cone

“He Made It Clear That He Hoped To Harm Hillary Clinton’s Chances Of Winning The Presidency”

July 27, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Donald Trump is an American Berlusconi at the very least and perhaps a Mussolini, but a fascist’s rise to power doesn’t happen on its own–it takes a village. Joining strange bedfellows James Baker, Peter Thiel, Mike Ditka, Chachi and the underwear model in support of a Trump Administration is Julian Assange, Wikileaks very own alleged Bill Cosby. One of the main things making Assange’s posture as a journalist dicey is the fear he would used hacked information to service his own political beliefs and personal feuds, not hold all parties involved to the same ideal. He’s now admitted as much, saying he timed the email release about the DNC to try to enable a Trump victory. It’s a perversion of democracy, though I suppose you have to credit Assange for his transparency.

From Charlie Savage at the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Six weeks before the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks published an archive of hacked Democratic National Committee emails ahead of the Democratic convention, the organization’s founder, Julian Assange, foreshadowed the release — and made it clear that he hoped to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency.

Mr. Assange’s remarks in a June 12 interview underscored that for all the drama of the discord that the disclosures have sown among supporters of Bernie Sanders — and of the unproven speculation that the Russian government provided the hacked data to WikiLeaks in order to help Donald J. Trump — the disclosures are also the latest chapter in the long-running tale of Mr. Assange’s battles with the Obama administration.

In the interview, Mr. Assange told a British television host, Robert Peston of the ITV network, that his organization had obtained “emails related to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication,” which he pronounced “great.” He also suggested that he not only opposed her candidacy on policy grounds, but also saw her as a personal foe.

At one point, Mr. Peston said: “Plainly, what you are saying, what you are publishing, hurts Hillary Clinton. Would you prefer Trump to be president?”

Mr. Assange replied that what Mr. Trump would do as president was “completely unpredictable.” By contrast, he thought it was predictable that Mrs. Clinton would wield power in two ways he found problematic.•

Tags: Charlie Savage, Julian Assange

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

July 26, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Paddy Chayefsky, that brilliant satirist, offered a spectacular pre-Beale rant 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.

“We Are Living In An Age Of Shocks And Crises”

July 26, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

The messenger is supposed to bring the truth, not his or her wishes. It was more than 50 years ago when Marshall McLuhan predicted a Global Village, and those who believed the theorist was happy about this development were listening, at best, with one ear. The prospect frightened him.

McLuhan feared the whole world being connected, thought it an invitation for mayhem, rightly believing local skirmishes would be played out on a gigantic stage. Believing a flatter world will be a more peaceful one assumes that everyone is driven by money, not ideology, not madness.

Everything seems to arrive with more speed and regularity now, social justice and sorties alike. The whole world is in you pocket now, and it’s exploding.

Excerpts from 1) Mathieu von Rohr’s Spiegel essay “Apocalypse Now,” and 2) Nicholas Carr’s Rough Type post “The Global Village of Violence.”

From von Rohr:

We are living in an age of shocks and crises that could well be traumatizing in their rapid succession and concentration, since it’s not yet clear whether they’re only a temporary jolt or the beginning of a trend with no end in sight. Of course, the sheer number of conflicts has remained constant in recent years. But there is much indication that we find ourselves in a new era of global instability. The biggest geopolitical stories of our time are the destabilization in the Middle East, the European security order and the European Union. In addition, there has been a societal shift in many Western countries: Many citizens are angry at the elites, because they see themselves as victims of globalization, free trade and migration. This anger has enabled the rise of political movements from the fringe to the mainstream in only a few years: Donald Trump, the Brexit movement, Front National and the Alternative for Germany, or AfD. The classic political camps are dissolving as the battle between the political left and the right is replaced by one between Isolationists and Internationalists.

Every now and then, there are phases in international politics during which more happens in the span of a few weeks than would otherwise happen in decades. Do 2014 and 2016 fall into that category? They’re not comparable to the most dramatic phases of the past century, when both World Wars broke out; nor are they anything like 1989, when the Cold War ended and the world order was rearranged. It’s also unclear whether this year will end with the same chaotic violence it started with.

But it is rather likely that global insecurity will become the new status quo.•

From Carr:

We assume that communication and harmony go hand in hand, like a pair of flower children on a garden path. If only we all could share our thoughts and feelings with everyone else all the time, we’d overcome our distrust and fear and live together peaceably. We’d see that we are all one. Facebook and other social media disabuse us of this notion. To be “all one” is to be dissolved — and for many people that is a threat that requires a reaction.

Eamonn Fitzgerald points to a recently uploaded video of a Canadian TV interview with Marshall McLuhan that aired in 1977. By the mid-seventies, a decade after his allotted minutes of fame, McLuhan had come to be dismissed as a mumbo-jumbo-spewing charlatan by the intelligentsia. What the intelligentsia found particularly irritating was that the mumbo jumbo McLuhan spewed fit no piety and often hit uncomfortably close to the mark.

Early on in the clip, the interviewer notes that McLuhan had long ago predicted that electronic communication systems would turn the world into a global village. Most of McLuhan’s early readers had taken this as a utopian prophecy. “But it seems,” the interviewer says, with surprise, “that this tribal world is not very friendly.”•

Tags: Marshall McLuhan, Mathieu von Rohr, Nicholas Carr

“Our Information About What’s Wrong In The World Is Getting Better”

July 26, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Think Ray Kurzweil is brilliant, though I have many disagreements with him, especially what I feel is the increasingly frantic timeline for his outré predictions. The futurist likes to tout his amazing record for accuracy as a prognosticator, but there have been jaw-dropping clunkers and there’ll likely be more. Additionally, his belief that ingesting thousands of dollars of supplements daily will enable him to survive until eternal life is possible–he thinks that day is very soon, of course–seems likewise foolhardy.

Two things I agree with Kurzweil about: 1) The world seems worse when tools allow us to better gather information about injustice, and 2) Sooner or later, we’ll increase human intelligence through bioengineering, even if the specter of such currently freaks out people.

From Todd Bishop at Geekwire:

On the effect of the modern information era: People think the world’s getting worse, and we see that on the left and the right, and we see that in other countries. People think the world is getting worse. … That’s the perception. What’s actually happening is our information about what’s wrong in the world is getting better. A century ago, there would be a battle that wiped out the next village, you’d never even hear about it. Now there’s an incident halfway around the globe and we not only hear about it, we experience it.

Why machines won’t displace humans: We’re going to merge with them, we’re going to make ourselves smarter. We’re already doing that. These mobile devices make us smarter. We’re routinely doing things we couldn’t possibly do without these brain extenders.•

Tags: Ray Kurzweil, Todd Bishop

Old Print Article: “Artist Pictures Earth Before The Coming Of Man,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1927)

July 25, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Our visual understanding of prehistoric megafauna and other creatures is aided greatly by the work of Charles R. Knight, the painter who gained nationwide attention beginning in the 1920s for his interpretations of dinosaurs and birds long extinct. He certainly couldn’t work from life or memory or photographs, so he became a hunter of facts, an interviewer of scholars, a measurer of skeletons. For an article in the July 31, 1927 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, reporter Frank J. Costello visited the paleoartist in his Upper West Side Manhattan studio and studied his process. The piece’s opening below.

“Decline Can Be As Self-Sustaining As Success”

July 25, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Capturing greatness is rare enough, recapturing it even more unlikely.

Someday Silicon Valley will also founder, the way former Industrial Era powers Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Detroit did. Clusters built around a narrow type of enterprise almost always do, since specialization can be wonderfully beneficial for a while but has a relatively short shelf life. Once the boom goes bust, bringing it back is almost impossible. Cities like New York that are open for business in a broad way have a better shot at continued prosperity, their fickleness and willingness to constantly tear down an asset.

From the Economist piece “Silicon Valley 1.0“:

Cleveland is a reminder that decline can be as self-sustaining as success. There are three reasons why clusters fail. One is that they over-specialise in products that are later improved elsewhere. Sheffield stuck to steelmaking even as others learned to make it better and cheaper. A second is that they complacently fail to upgrade their productivity. Detroit succumbed to Japanese carmakers in the 1970s and 1980s because it thought more about providing its cars with ornate fins (and its workers with gold-plated benefits) than it did about their performance. The third is that they suffer from an external shock from which they fail to recover, as could be the case with the City of London in the wake of Brexit.

Naomi Lamoreaux, an economic historian at Yale University, says Cleveland falls into the third category. It led in a wide variety of industries into the 1920s, including cars, chemicals, paints and varnishes, machine tools and electrical machinery as well as iron and steel. It spent money on R&D. But then came a series of external shocks. The Depression destroyed the local financial institutions that had supported Cleveland’s start-ups. Regulations adopted in its wake gave New York’s banks such a competitive advantage that local capital markets withered. The federal government’s wartime policy of dispersing manufacturing industry eroded the city’s industrial base.

Fanning the flames of hate

Cleveland’s decline became self-reinforcing. Firms downsized, closed or relocated. The inner city fell prey to crime and dysfunction. The white middle-class moved to suburbia. Politicians responded not with pragmatic ideas for reform but by whipping up anger and resentment, which only hastened white- and business-flight. Dennis Kucinich, the mayor in 1977-79, who much later ran for president, refused to privatise the electric utility and, in 1978, took the city into bankruptcy. A once-proud city was mocked as “the mistake on the lake”. To cap it all, Cleveland paid the price for its earlier successes: by 1969 the Cuyahoga River was so polluted that it caught fire, an event that is still celebrated in one of its local brews, Burning River Pale Ale.

The city’s story is also a warning that rebuilding clusters is fiendishly hard.•

“So How Shall We All Live?”

July 25, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The writer Calum Chace, an all-around interesting thinker, is conducting a Reddit AMA based on his new book, The Economic Singularity, which sees a future–and not such a far-flung one–when human labor is a thing of the past. It’s certainly possible since constantly improving technology could make fleets of cars driverless and factories workerless. In fact, there’s no reason why they can’t also be ownerless.

What happens then? How do we reconcile a free-market society with an automated one? In the long run, it could be a great victory for humanity, but getting from here to there will be bumpy. A few exchanges follow.

Question:

So it seems to me that most of the benefit of capitalism for working-class people come from jobs. Companies need a workforce, and are willing to pay for it. So a lot of the profit gets spread around to a lot of people.

If a few companies could break this model on a large scale, by leveraging automation to allow a relatively small core group of employees to operate a national or international corporation, then that would force everyone to do it in order to stay competitive.

I’m assuming that this is some of what you’re talking about in the book (just guessing from the title and an amazon summary).

I could see the first fully (>98%) automated company making waves in a decade or two. People on /r/futorology like to wax utopian, but a company with <100 employees and billions in automated infrastructure isn’t going to allow themselves to be operated for the public good. The product might be cheap, but it’s not free, and that company is no longer employing enough people to matter.

They’ll have a global reach (through subcontracted shipping companies) coupled with automated vehicles that don’t need to sleep or visit family. They can legally exist in whichever country is cheapest tax-wise, and still destroy the competition on the other side of the globe.

So, lots of rambling. But that’s my question, basically.In your opinion, what might the replacement for capitalism look like?

Calum Chace:

Yes, I think you’ve identified exactly the first stage of the argument. Intelligent machines are probably going to render most of us unemployable.

So how shall we all live? The answer, initially at least, will be some form of Universal Basic Income (UBI) which is often discussed here and at a sister Reddit page specifically on the subject. UBI will have to be paid for by taxes, and that raises some tricky questions about how the rich people who pay the taxes are going to respond.

I am fundamentally optimistic. The people who are going to be richest are those who own the AI, since that will generate much of the value throughout the economy. The likes of Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates etc etc don’t seem to me to be primarily motivated by money, but by an excitement about the future and a desire to see it arrive sooner.

So I don’t think they will want the rest of us to starve. The mechanism by which UBI is phased in, and how it pans out across international boundaries are going to take a lot of detailed planning. Which we haven’t started yet.

Question:

I also think people are underestimating VR & crowdsourcing’s role.

If VR makes things like microtasking more attractive to do and enables the microtaskers (crowd-workers) to do more, then flexwork/ gig-work might become even more popular. I have an ebook that I’m finishing up now that explores this a little bit (& even ties it to robotics).

Do you have any guesses for VR and the future of work?

Calum Chace:

Yes, I talk about the gig economy (microtasking) in my book. A report by PwC says that 7% of US adults are already engaged in it. I’m not sure whether the experience is so great for most of them at the moment, though. Are they “micro-entrepreneurs” or “instaserfs” – members of a new “precariat”? Either way, it will probably get bigger.

It’s hard to avoid waxing lyrical about the potential impact of VR. Oculus Rift has made nothing like the splash since its launch this year a lot of people (including me) expected it to, but it’s probably just obeying Amara’s Law, that we tend to over-estimate the effect of a technology in the short run and under-estimate the effect in the long run.

In that long run I can well imagine VR bringing about the long-awaited death of geography, but it’s probably going to take a while yet. Meanwhile, I’m not sure it will have that much impact on overall levels of employment, other than adding some because of all the virtual experiences that need to be created.

Question:

I think the outcome can be wonderful: a world of radical abundance.

Calum Chace:

I very much agree with you there, I think that all (7 billion + of us globally) are going to be vastly richer from all of this.

For example, when AI can administer the expertise of top doctors & consultants to everyone on the planet for pennies, this is wealth unlike humanity has ever known before.

I wonder though, on the road to this future, are we in for some quite chaotic breaks from the past.

Exactly, and the sooner we start thinking seriously about where we want to get to and how best to get there, the more likely we are to make the journey successfully.

I think the more people who are aware of what is coming, the better. I’m encouraged by the remarkable sea-change in awareness of AI progress that has already occurred. The publication of Bostrom’s Superintelligence led to high-profile comments by the three wise men (Hawking, Musk and Gates) and the publication of Ford’s Rise of the Robots was another seminal moment.

Like a lot of people here, I’ve been talking about the huge importance of AI to anyone who would listen for years and years. I got a lot of benign virtual pats on the head. Now people are listening.

Self-driving cars will probably be the canary in the coal mine. Once they are common sights, people won’t be able to avoid thinking seriously about what is coming.

But we need a positive narrative about the good things that can happen so that the response isn’t panic, or a rush into the embrace of the next populist demagogue who happens along.•

Tags: Calum Chace

“He Stresses This Does Not Mean The End Of Eating For Pleasure”

July 24, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Rob Rhinehart’s Soylent is a tougher sell in developed countries with endless food magazines and cooking shows, though those chugging Red Bulls and wolfing down Devil Dogs shouldn’t look askance at the meal-replacement beverage. The beverage would seem to hold special promise as a sustenance provider in places where scarcity still reigns supreme.

Two excerpts follow from Tom Braithwaite’s smart Financial Times profile of Rhinehart, who somehow manages to live off the grid while living in Los Angeles.

Rhinehart is convinced we will start to abandon three meals a day and instead sip functional foods whenever we need to. “Being wrapped up in breakfast, lunch, dinner came from an agricultural society and the industrial revolution. We don’t work on farms, we don’t work on assembly lines and I don’t think we should eat like we do. I think people will switch to eating when hungry rather than eating on a schedule.”

He stresses this does not mean the end of eating for pleasure. “You get home from work, you’re not in the mood to cook or you’re running out the door in the morning, you don’t have time, but then Friday or Saturday night rolls around and you want to go out with your friends. That’s what I think we’ll move towards.”•

One foot in the future and one foot in the past seems to sum up Rhinehart. His latest project is building a home in Los Angeles, off the grid. This is surprisingly possible in one of the world’s most urban environments. He found disused land in an unfashionable part of town and plonked a shipping container in it, which he now lives in.

This might be eccentric but it’s not a millionaire’s whimsy. The land was cheap because it is not served by electricity or water; the shipping container was $1,500. Rhinehart proudly says he is not wealthy — whatever his paper worth, he draws a fairly modest salary.

“Do you wanna see a picture?” he says, passing me his phone. “The only drawback is the area’s still a little rough, so it got graffitied.”

The container’s power is solar-generated. Of course there is no need for a kitchen. Rhinehart is currently relying on a “Porta Potty” but has hopes for advances in new toilets that vaporise waste. He once tried to save water by taking an antibiotic to minimise trips to the toilet. “I massacred my gut bacteria,” he wrote in his blog.•

Tags: Rob Rhinehart, Tom Braithwaite

“Pandemonium Broke Out With Wild Clapping And Cheering”

July 24, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

The VCR, which helped the masses shift time and become programmers, is no more, with the last company that produced the technology, Japan’s Funai Corporation, bowing from the anachronistic business.

Excerpts follow from 1) Jonah Engel Bromwich’s New York Times article “The Long, Final Goodbye of the VCR,” and 2) Lillian Ross’ 1970 New Yorker piece (subscription required) about the Cartrivision system, which offered a proto-Netflix service.

From Bromwich:

In 1956, Ampex Electric and Manufacturing Company introduced what its website calls “the first practical videotape recorder.” Fred Pfost, an Ampex engineer, described demonstrating the technology to CBS executives for the first time. Unbeknown to them, he had recorded a keynote speech delivered by a vice president at the network.

“After I rewound the tape and pushed the play button for this group of executives, they saw the instantaneous replay of the speech. There were about 10 seconds of total silence until they suddenly realized just what they were seeing on the 20 video monitors located around the room. Pandemonium broke out with wild clapping and cheering for five full minutes. This was the first time in history that a large group (outside of Ampex) had ever seen a high-quality, instantaneous replay of any event.”

Fred Pfost “First Public Video Tape Recorder Demonstrations” (Web 84) Video by Audio Engineering Society (AES)

At the time, the machines cost $50,000 apiece. But that did not stop orders from being placed for 100 of them in the week they debuted, according to Mr. Pfost. “This represented an amount almost as great as a year’s gross income for Ampex,” he wrote.

The first VCRs for homes were released in the 1960s, and they became widely available to consumers in the 1970s, when Sony’s Betamax and JVC’s VHS formats began to compete. VHS gained the upper hand the following decade; but Sony stopped producing Betamax cassette tapes only in 2016.•

From Ross’ conversation with Cartrivison executive Samuel Gelfman, who realized way back then what a disruptive technology he was working with:

“What is Cartrivision?” we asked.

“One of the greatest instruments of social change–the greatest, I would say, since the printing press,” Mr. Gelfman said. “Our set is a color-television set, but it’s also a cartridge-television. With this set, you can have your own cartridge library. You slip a cartridge in the slot, press the button, and watch up to two hours of your own choice of movie. A great football game. Anything you want. What’s more, we’ve built in an off-the-air recorder to pick up shows when you’re not at home. It doubles as a camera with a portable microphone. You can make your movies and have instant replay. We’ll sell you the set for between eight and nine hundred dollars. Our cartridges–blank ones–from nine-ninety-eight for a fifteen-minute tape to twenty-four ninety-eight for a two-hour tape. The movie cartridges we’ll rent. Three dollars for overnight. What’s important is for the first time we’re going to be able to provide what you want to see. You don’t have to worry about sponsors anymore.”•

Here’s a What’s My Line? episode in which the system is demonstrated by company spokesperson Art Rosenblatt in 1972, the year it came to the market and the one before it was pulled.

Tags: Jonah Engel Bromwich

A Brief Note From 1925 About A Plastic Surgeon

July 22, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the July 3, 1925 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Tesla Is Designing ‘The Machine That Makes The Machine'”

July 22, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Every time I start to criticize Elon Musk, I remember to be thankful he’s not Peter Thiel.

Walter Isaacson famously named Benjamin Franklin when searching for an historical antecedent for Musk, but the Tesla-Space X-Hyperloop-aspiring-Martian billionaire seem to have his heart set on being a multi-planetary Thomas Edison.

In his just-released “Master Plan, Part Deux,” Musk expounds on a vision that would be daunting if it was being attempted by a wonderfully funded Bell Labs or NASA or even a superpower government let alone a struggling private company. The sections on solar roofs and autonomous transport are particularly fascinating.

As Will Oremus writes in a Slate column, one aspect of Musk’s ambitions didn’t make big news despite having world-changing implications. An excerpt:

On Wednesday night, Elon Musk announced a new master plan for his company. It is the philosophical successor to his original master plan, published 10 years ago when few had heard of Tesla and fewer cared. If that first plan seemed implausibly audacious, this one borders on schizophrenic—a compendium of goals so futuristic and disparate that it would be a marvel for any company to achieve one of them, let alone all. They include (deep breath):

Building at least four all-new models: a “new kind of pickup truck,” a compact SUV, a semi truck, and a bus-like mass transport vehicle that delivers its passengers from door to door. They’ll all be fully electric, of course.

Developing and implementing a fully autonomous driving system that will require no human involvement. The system will have such redundancy that a failure of any part of the driving system will not compromise its ability to navigate safely.

Creating a car-sharing platform through which Tesla owners can, at the tap of a button, rent out their self-driving vehicle to a “Tesla shared fleet” when they’re not using it. Others can then summon the car for a ride, generating income for its owner which can help to pay off the price of buying it.

Merging Tesla and SolarCity, the country’s largest solar power company, and together developing a seamlessly integrated system that can both capture and store solar power on your rooftop, turning your home into its own energy utility. And then “scale that throughout the world.”

Not even cracking the top four objectives in the new plan is Musk’s recently stated intention to essentially reinvent the mass production process, developing a heavily automated factory that can churn out cars five to 10 times more efficiently than before. In other words, Musk writes, Tesla is designing “the machine that makes the machine—turning the factory itself into a product.”•

Tags: Elon Musk, Will Oremus

“The Machine Is Just The Brush”

July 22, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

When I first became aware of Chuck Close’s portraiture, long before his artistic and personal metamorphosis, the work immediately seemed to me pointillism for the computer age, his very human hand–seriously compromised following a massive seizure–somehow capable of producing pixels.

As amazing as Close’s parade of faces are, it would be different, even troubling, for some if they’d been painted with a computer rather than a brush attached to flesh. They might be viewed as inferior even if the pictures looked exactly the same. That’s because we tend to value the skills we know more than emergent ones.

In “There Is No Difference Between Computer Art and Human Art,” a provocative Aeon essay, Oliver Roeder argues for the erasure of the line between algorithms making art and music and people doing so. He writes: “‘Computer art’ doesn’t really exist in an any more provocative sense than ‘paint art’ or ‘piano art’ does. The algorithmic software was written by a human, after all, using theories thought up by a human.”

Well there is some difference between the two, as there is between oral histories and those published by a printing press. That doesn’t mean the work with a digital tool attached is lesser, however. It can be greater.