Wearables are the first phase of a next-level plan to monitor human biological functions, with Ingestibles being another part of the picture. I don’t doubt these pills will become widespread. Heart pacemakers were enormous originally, bigger than air conditioners, until they rapidly shrunk to fit inside the chest. Monitoring pills will likewise move the machine inside us.
The initial objections to taking a pill that can communicate your vitals to smartphones and other hardware will likely merely be taking a pill. That concern is silly, especially when you consider the amount of medication we already consume, some of it necessary and much of it not. The more pressing issue is putting technology inside ourselves. Functions we now monitor–not always really well, admittedly–will be handled automatically. We won’t have to think much at all. Additionally, info even about our pulse beat will become a commodity–bought, sold and hacked. Invasions of privacy will have an extended meaning. We will be accessed, we will be accessible.
A significant number of people will understandably be hesitant to swallow a digital pill or stick a sensor on their foreheads. And employees are unlikely instantly to see the value in a computer chip skin tattoo that acts as an all-systems pass for work security.
So what can we expect?
Ingestibles
These have understandably been subject to a gamut of robust approvals, and so haven’t hit the mainstream yet. That’s soon set to change.
Largely, they take the shape of a “digital pill” coated in digestible metals such as copper and magnesium embedded in a regular tablet. It dissolves in your stomach acid, releasing a signal to an adhesive patch on your body, which in turn communicates with an app on your smartphone, relaying the info via bluetooth.
Ingestibles are full of sensors that can not only track your vitals but tell you when you last took your medication, if you’re over-medicating or mixing two drugs that shouldn’t be taken together. Critically, it will aid doctors to work out how you’re responding to particular treatment. If you’re concerned about how your body “clears” the chip from your system, rest assured this happens the natural way.•
Had hoped that Nikkei’s purchase of the Financial Times meant the venerable British paper was on higher ground, safe from drowning in red ink like many of the best publications. But it would seem to not be so.
Automation has lately been offered as a lifesaver for the sinking industry, but it’s galling when that transformation is sold as something wonderful for journalists themselves. That’s very unlikely. Jobs will disappear, and while some human intelligence will be augmented, enough will be replaced to leave a bruise. The “worst job in America” may improve for a few lucky souls, but they’ll likely feel increasingly lonely.
Bloomberg is the latest company to promote “automated journalism” as a win-win proposition, though the final score may be much more uneven. A transcript of company EIC John Micklethwait’s memo on the initiative, which was reported by Benjamin Mullin at Poynter.org:
I want to dedicate virtually all this week’s note to an incredibly important subject: automation. I think it is crucial to the future of journalism in a much broader way than many of us realize: It certainly stretches much further than just generating headlines. If we embrace it as a newsroom, apply the brains of our 2,400 journalists and analysts as well as the values of independence, transparency and rigor that Bloomberg’s journalism at its best exemplifies, then we can lead the rest of our industry — and write a lot of amazing stories in the process.
We already use automation quite a lot — to alert our readers to news, to customize news and to spot trends. It plays a big role in many of our new initiatives: In Daybreak, it will let customers tailor their morning news; our equity Movers project relies on computers to tell us when a share has jumped or sunk; Project Cyborg is helping our editors send headlines this earnings season on hundreds of U.S. companies; and computers are helping us instantly translate stories into other languages. But we have only scratched the surface.
So this week we are forming a 10-strong team to lead this initiative. Brad Skillman will head it up from the editorial side and work with our automation czarina, Monique White in News Development, to oversee the creation of smart automated content. The roles available include project coordinators, template writers and engineers. The positions will be posted on {PATH }. We will set up a dedicated wire for some of our stories; in other cases, we will just publish to BN or BFW. Brad, Monique and the group will work with rest of the newsroom to make sure we are tapping our biggest brains for the best ideas. The effort will encompass all of our editorial groups, including BN, BFW and BI. If you have an idea, please take it to them.
Why do we need you, if the basic idea is to get computers to do more of the work? One irony of automation is that it is only as good as humans make it. That applies to both the main types of automated journalism. In the first, the computer will generate the story or headline by itself. But it needs humans to tell it what to look for, where to look for it and to guarantee its independence and transparency to our readers. In the second sort, the computer spots a trend, delivers a portion of a story to you and in essence asks the question: Do you want to add or subtract something to this and then publish it? And it will only count as Bloomberg journalism if you sign off on it. For instance, the computer might be telling you that McDonald’s share price has fallen, while the price of beef has risen. It is up to you to decide whether it is worth writing about this — just as it was up to you to tell the computer to be on the lookout for moves in beef prices.
Done properly, automated journalism has the potential to make all our jobs more interesting. I have written before about journalism moving from covering what has happened to covering why it did. The time spent laboriously trying to chase down facts can be spent trying to explain them. We can impose order, transparency and rigor in a field which is something of a wild west at the moment.•
Short documentary from 1961 about the then-futuristic offices of the Miami Herald, a “self-contained city of over 1,200 inhabitants.” It was a time of typewriters,pneumatic tubesand typesetters, when the era of print seemed limitless, beforetechnological efficiencybegan to destroy the economic model.
Plastics made for a great one-word metaphor in The Graduate, Mike Nichols’ 1967 film about the end of youth in a tumultuous time when many young people wanted nothing to do with advancement in a world of wars and wares. But it wasn’t great career advice. As Juan Enriquez noted in a recent TED Talk about bioengineering, Benjamin Braddock would have received far better counsel had he been offered a different term: Silicon.
For this year’s grads, the academic suggests the best tip would be Lifecode, which he defines as the “various ways we have of programming life.” He also refers to it as a “superpower,” which is not hyperbolic. The engineering of evolution, which will increasingly be in our hands, will require great care if we are to get things right, ethically as well as scientifically. Enriquez notes rightly, however, that waiting too long to use these new tools is as risky as rushing in headlong.
A world in which Virtual Reality is in wide use would present a different way to see things, but what if reality is already not what we think it is?
It’s usually accepted that we don’t all see things exactly the same way–not just metaphorically–and that our individual interpretation of stimuli is more a rough cut than an exact science. It’s a guesstimate. But things may be even murkier than we believe.
In “The Case Against Reality,” a really interesting Atlantic article by Amanda Gefter, the journalist interviews cognitive scientist Donald D. Hoffman who thinks our perception isn’t even a reliable simulacra, that what we take in is nothing like what actually is. Here’s the first exchange from the Q&A after a well-written introduction:
Question:
People often use Darwinian evolution as an argument that our perceptions accurately reflect reality. They say, “Obviously we must be latching onto reality in some way because otherwise we would have been wiped out a long time ago. If I think I’m seeing a palm tree but it’s really a tiger, I’m in trouble.”
Donald D. Hoffman:
Right. The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions—mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.•
Visited Miami Beach many times when younger and the South Beach area once, and I did not approve. The only thing that really interested me were the lessons learned from the Art Deco architecture. For one, Miami has the largest concentration of such buildings in America anywhere outside of NYC. The reason? The city fell into such disrepair in the latter half of the 20th century that nobody cared to raze the glorious old structures and make something new. Disinterest is great for architectural preservation. The other more trivial items were fun. For instance, the exterior walls of the edifices were often built significantly higher than the penthouse apartment to make it look like there was an extra floor at the top, allowing mobsters to build open-air gambling parlors on roofs that were shielded from prying eyes, even binoculars, of police on the street.
Investors certainly care about Miami now, at least until it drowns, and the city is one of the places in the U.S. that is currently urbanizing its suburbs, which sounds odd, but there’s a demand even from those who don’t embrace cities with big shoulders to reside in a place where there’s some there there.
Today the fad in south Florida is not golf villages or retro towns but ready-made city centres. Half an hour’s drive south of Sunrise, another Metropica-like development, City Place Doral, is under construction. Two others with even taller towers, Miami Worldcentre and Brickell City Centre, are going up in central Miami. A huge development called SoLe Mia will rise in north Miami. All will combine “walkable” shopping streets, offices and homes—mostly two- and three-bedroom flats in towers. Like a rash, similar developments are popping up in other American states and as far away as China and Vietnam.
Builders call these developments “mixed-use”, a term that fails to capture what they are up to. The idea of combining flats, offices and shops even in a single building is not new: look at an old New York district like Chelsea. Metropica and its kin try to create urban cores in places that lack them. Whereas new urbanist settlements often promote a small-town ideal, these sell big-city life, which is why they have words like “metro”, “city” and “centre” in their names. The salesmen claim that residents will be able to live, work and be entertained in a single district.
Ersatz city centres are multiplying now partly because it takes about this long after a financial crisis to begin a big project. Another reason is the rising price of land. Jeffrey Soffer of Turnberry Associates, a big Miami developer, points out that south Florida has almost run out of room to sprawl. Pinched between the Everglades in the west and the Atlantic in the east, it must go up. And although some cities, including Miami, are probably building too many high-rise flats, demand is fairly strong. Foreigners want to own them (most of the people buying flats in Metropica are Latin Americans) and young Americans want to rent them, partly because they find it hard to get mortgages to buy family homes. The towers are growing bigger: 48% of flats constructed in America in 2014 were in buildings with at least 50 units.•
Kevin Kelly believes he’s seen the future of Virtual Reality, and it’s name is Magic Leap, a Florida-based firm which awed him when he visited the company’s campus. An excerpt from early in his Wired article:
In this prototype headset, created by the much speculated about, ultrasecretive company called Magic Leap, this alien drone certainly does seem to be transported to this office in Florida—and its reality is stronger than I thought possible.
I saw other things with these magical goggles. I saw human-sized robots walk through the actual walls of the room. I could shoot them with power blasts from a prop gun I really held in my hands. I watched miniature humans wrestle each other on a real tabletop, almost like a Star Wars holographic chess game. These tiny people were obviously not real, despite their photographic realism, but they were really present—in a way that didn’t seem to reside in my eyes alone; I almost felt their presence.•
At first, such tools tool may be toys. Starbreeze Studios announced plans to open a Los Angeles VR arcade. It would be a chance to introduce the technology to the masses that so far have only read the glowing reports. From the press release:
Starbreeze AB, an independent creator, publisher and distributor of high quality entertainment products, today at VRLA Winter Expo announced its intention to establish a VR arcade venue in Los Angeles, named Project StarCade. Aiming to make premium VR experiences accessible for the masses, Starbreeze will create a StarVR powered arcade hall, where VR enthusiasts and novices alike are welcome to experience the exciting technology in an immersive setting.
“We continue to iterate the fact that VR really needs to be experienced in person to fully be able to appreciate the phenomenon, and why not have your first experience in a real premium setting in our StarVR headset? We’ve managed to secure a prime location where people are welcome to step into our StarCade and enjoy our OVERKILL’s The Walking Dead VR experience.” said Starbreeze CTO Emmanuel Marquez. He continued, “We’re developing our own StarCade catalogue of experiences, but we’re open to any content. We will invite developers to join us and give them the opportunity to put their content in our StarCade. We as an industry continuously need to educate ourselves to make VR truly successful, and this is just the first step in our planning to do so.”
Of course, more practical applications will emerge, from education to vocational training to even therapy. Whenever I read something about VR, I immediately wonder what Jacob L. Moreno, the student of Freud who invented the psychodrama (and hypnodrama) would have done with the tool. It’s definitely necessary to be wary of how living in the virtual could impact our behavior in the actual, because no matter how much we’ve gotten into traditional films, TV shows and paintings, VR is a further immersion and will affect our brains differently. But I assume some patients (e.g., soldiers with PTSD) could be aided by such technology.
Below are two videos of Moreno in action at psychodrama theaters (the first in 1964, the second in 1948), places where individuals could act out scenarios from their lives within a group dynamic, hopefully gaining insight into their behavior, especially the self-destructive kind.
It would seem that convoys of driverless trucks would be far easier to test and perfect than other autonomous vehicles. In the early stages of adoption, you could just put two human drivers in the first truck and have them alternate sitting behind the wheel. The trailing rigs could be programmed to follow suit of the lead vehicle. The destinations are also much easier to execute, as they’re predetermined and not changing and challenging like with taxis.
It’s estimated that eight million American jobs depend on the trucking industry (not only drivers but also support staff and workers at businesses frequented by truckers, like diners and such). Those will likely be gone in a few decades, not offset by savings to consumers realized as automation increases production and reduces prices.
A convoy of self-driving trucks recently drove across Europe and arrived at the Port of Rotterdam. No technology will automate away more jobs — or drive more economic efficiency — than the driverlesstruck.
Shipping a full truckload from L.A. to New York costs around $4,500 today, with labor representing 75 percent of that cost. But those labor savings aren’t the only gains to be had from the adoption of driverless trucks.
Where drivers are restricted by law from driving more than 11 hours per day without taking an 8-hour break, a driverlesstruck can drive nearly 24 hours per day. That means the technology would effectively double the output of the U.S. transportation network at 25 percent of the cost.
And the savings become even more significant when you account for fuel efficiency gains. The optimal cruising speed from a fuel efficiency standpoint is around 45 miles per hour, whereas truckers who are paid by the mile drive much faster. Further fuel efficiencies will be had as the self-driving fleets adopt platooning technologies, like those fromPeloton Technology, allowing trucks to draft behind one another in highway trains.
Trucking represents a considerable portion of the cost of all the goods we buy, so consumers everywhere will experience this change as lower prices and higher standards of living.•
There are good reasons for our fixation on the fall of civilization, on the end of us all, and climate change is at the top of the list. But I think along with valid fears, there is fantasy: We simply would like to imagine society toppling, to shuck it off, to start all over again. There’s just something so heavy about modern life, with its clutter and conditions. The weight is too heavy to bear. That’s why we’re always envisioning the apocalypse, staring at ruins (real and virtual), why we feel like the walking dead.
In addition to the endless fictional content available for binge-watching is disaster tourism, and you couldn’t pick a better-worse place than Chernobyl, site of the largest nuclear catastrophe in world history. We made that. How clever we are. From photographers to writers to sightseers with an eye for necropoles, it’s become a hot spot since it cooled somewhat. In a smart Spiegel piece, Hilmar Schmundt and Phil Thoma write insightfully of the disaster porn “created” during the Soviet Era and those who like to watch.
The opening:
Footsteps crunch across shards of glass and cameras chirp as a group of visitors pushes its way through an evacuated school inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Yellowed school books still sit on the desks, Soviet propaganda hangs on the walls and there are several gas masks dangling about. Mobile phone screens glow in the half-light. Time is kept by the ticking of Geiger counters, the hideous heartbeat of gamma rays.
“It’s quite morbid here,” says Alex, from Munich. The well-dressed 20-something takes a few selfies, smiling coolly in front of the backdrop of ruins. “I like offbeat experiences,” he says. Alex works for an online portal and enjoys traveling to exotic places: to the Nyiragongo volcano in Congo, for example, or to the mountain gorillas in Rwanda. He has also taken a weightless flight with an Airbus and joined a tour through North Korea.
Alex is in Chernobyl with a few friends from school and, as a specialist in strange destinations, the trip was his idea. Chernobyl is a powerful brand name: It has become a post-apocalyptical product, simple to consume.
Singapore may not be Disneyland with the death penalty as William’s 1993 Wired article was famously titled, but how about a theme park as a surveillance state?
I’ve posted before about the city-state’s government investing in copious cameras and sensors in an effort to become the world’s first “smart nation.” Everything will be measured, everything monitored. It seems a deeper and wider realization of Stafford Beer’s efforts in the 1970s to centralize all of Chile’s businesses with Project Cybersyn. Difference is, Singapore’s system is about much more than money.
In a Wall Street Journal article, Jane Maxwell Watts and Newley Purnell report that “any decision to use data collected by Smart Nation sensors for law enforcement or surveillance would not, under Singapore law, need court approval or citizen consultation.” The opening:
SINGAPORE—This wealthy financial center is known world-wide for its tidy streets and tight controls on personal behavior, including famous restrictions on the sale of chewing gum to keep the city clean.
Now Singapore may soon be known for something else: the most extensive effort to collect data on daily living ever attempted in a city.
As part of its Smart Nation program, launched by Prime MinisterLee Hsien Loongin late 2014, Singapore is deploying an undetermined number of sensors and cameras across the island city-state that will allow the government to monitor everything from the cleanliness of public spaces to the density of crowds and the precise movement of every locally registered vehicle.
It is a sweeping effort that will likely touch the lives of every single resident in the country, in ways that aren’t completely clear since many potential applications may not be known until the system is fully implemented.•
The American military has thus far refused to consider using autonomous weapons system, which is good, but is it our choice alone to make? If one world power (or a smaller, rogue nation aspiring to be one) were to deploy such machines, how would others resist? The technology is trending toward faster, cheaper and more out of control, so it’s not difficult to imagine such a scenario. I think in the long run these systems are inevitable, but hopefully there will be much more time to prepare for what they’ll mean.
In a Financial Times column, John Thornhill writes of fears of LAWS (Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems), which could fall into the wrong hands, like warlords or tyrants. Of course, it’s easy to make the argument that all hands are the wrong ones. The opening:
Imagine this futuristic scenario: a US-led coalition is closing in on Raqqa determined to eradicate Isis. The international forces unleash a deadly swarm of autonomous, flying robots that buzz around the city tracking down the enemy.
Using face recognition technology, the robots identify and kill top Isis commanders, decapitating the organisation. Dazed and demoralised, the Isis forces collapse with minimal loss of life to allied troops and civilians.
Who would not think that a good use of technology?
As it happens, quite a lot of people, including many experts in the field of artificial intelligence, who know most about the technology needed to develop such weapons.
In anopen letterpublished last July, a group of AI researcherswarnedthat technology had reached such a point that the deployment of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (or Laws as they are incongruously known) was feasible within years, not decades. Unlike nuclear weapons, such systems could be mass produced on the cheap, becoming the “Kalashnikovs of tomorrow.”•
Before media connected us all every second, there was Robert L. Ripley.
The creator of Believe It or Not!–a comic strip in the Hearst papers, then a radio program and finally a T.V. show–traveled the globe beginning in the 1920s in search of oddities and curiosities to entertain and inform Americans, long before travel abroad was something possible for most. His items didn’t exactly go viral–everyone caught them all at once during the Newspaper Age. In Ripley’s own wry way, as a spiritual descendant of P.T. Barnum, he worked to make the world smaller, to establish a Global Village.
As an early King of All Media, he was helped aided in his amateur anthropology and archaeology by his able researcher, Norbert Pearlroth, and helped immensely by his onetime sports editor, Walter St. Denis, who suggested the three-word, exclamatory column title that remains a recognizable phrase even in the Internet Age.
Heart problems ended Ripley’s life young, as recorded in his obituary in the May 28, 1949 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
Speaking of solid, middle-class jobs being disappeared by technology, Elon Musk has tipped his hand, if just a bit, on a driverless vehicle that he believes can replace much of public transportation. Could be great for congestion and environmentalism, though not so much for bus drivers.
Tesla’s Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk is working on a self-driving vehicle he says could replace buses and other public transport in order to reduce traffic in cities. But he’s keeping the development a secret.
“We have an idea for something which is not exactly a bus but would solve the density problem for inner city situations,” Musk said Thursday at a transport conference in Norway. “Autonomous vehicles are key,” he said of the project, declining to disclose more. “I don’t want to talk too much about it. I have to be careful what I say.”•
Aspects of the Gig Economy benefit consumers but are terrible for most workers. An Uberization of Labor has increased in the last few years and seems poised to become a large-scale and entrenched apart of American society. If it is here to stay, what’s even worse is many of those piecemeal positions may eventually also be eliminated by automation.
Surprisingly, many Gig workers prefer their office-less lives because of the “greater freedom” it affords them, which is odd since most studies find that this new brand of freelancer has to hustle more hours than if trapped in a cubicle. Are bosses and office politics so awful that we would rather surrender security, vacation days and benefits to not be under the thumb of a fellow human being, even if an algorithm runs us ragged? It would seem so. We find each other intolerable enough to be sold on a Libertarian dream that may end up a nightmare.
According to a 2014 study commissioned by theFreelancers Union, 53 million Americans are independent workers, about 34 percent of the total workforce. A study from Intuit predicts that by 2020, 40 percent of US workers will fall into this category.
While there is considerable disagreement over this projection, what is clear is that “more and more jobs are being moved to independent contractor status,” saysJeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University. Pfeffer cites a recent paper that found that “the percentage of workers engaged in alternative work arrangements rose from 10.1 percent in February 2005 to 15.8 percent in late 2015.” This rise accounts for over 9 million people — more than all of the net employment growth in the US economy over that decade.
To be clear, employers are driving the change. Between 2009 and 2013, the unemployment rate was more than 7 percent, suggesting workers were turning to gigs because they didn’t have a choice. But that’s not to say most independent workers aren’t happy with their job situations. According to the Freelancers Union, a 300,000-plus member nonprofit, nearly nine in 10 of its members surveyed said they would not return to a traditional job if given the chance.•
Moscow is of two minds. To some extent, the capital of Russia must toe the line for Vladimir Putin, a capo with nuclear capabilities, whose backward thinking has dashed the national economy and threatened a new Cold War. But Moscow also rejects the retrograde big picture. The city openly embraces the future, one that’s not only an explosion of conspicuous consumption but also is liveable and sustainable.
In their Spiegel profile of a city in transition, Christian Neef and Matthias Schepp write that “the avant-garde triumphs on Moscow stages” in reference to cutting-edge theater, but all the world’s a stage. An excerpt about Technopolis:
City officials chose a former industrial ruin as the site of Technopolis, the largest of 19 new high-tech parks. The site once housed the Lenin Komsomol auto plant, which the Soviets built in 1930 in collaboration with Ford. After World War II, the plant produced the Moskvich, a copy of Germany’s Opel Kadett.
A real estate developer is now building a giant shopping mall on the site, and the city government has plans to build housing and offices for tens of thousands of people, skyscrapers included. But the pièce de résistance is Technopolis. Several dozen innovative companies have moved into one of the old factory buildings, including a manufacturer of computer-guided drones that deliver products from medication to pizza. City officials were enthusiastic about the company, while military and intelligence officials have voiced security concerns.
The startups are attracting specialists like nanophysicist Irina Rod. She has returned to Russia from the West, where many of her colleagues had emigrated to, “because, with Technopolis, they have finally established the conditions needed to work properly,” she says. Rod, who conducted research at the University of Duisburg-Essen in western Germany for seven years, has spent the last two years working for a joint venture of the Dutch firm Mapper and Russian high-tech holding company Rosnano.
The city government has rolled out the red carpet for such investors, waiving property taxes, reducing corporate income tax by a quarter, setting rents at below market level and guaranteeing a maximum waiting period of six months from the date a startup files an application for incorporation to the date of registration. “For Russia and our sluggish and often corrupt bureaucracy, that is sensational,” says Rod.
The 35-year-old is standing in a clean room, which has special protective features against contamination. She is wearing a white astronaut suit over a sweater and jeans, and her long, blonde hair is tucked under a white hood. Rod is in charge of quality control for microscopically small electronic lenses, which guide beams inside large 3-D printers.
She originally left the country because Russian microscopes were inadequate for the highly specialized research she does. “But now Moscow has an advantage,” she says. “The elevators for rapid professional advancement move twice as fast here.”•
The shocking, recent findings of economist Anne Case and her husband Angus Deaton in regards to the dying off of white, middle-aged Americans has been questioned, as all such eye-popping results should be, but a study of U.S. suicide rates between 1999 and 2014 seems to support their work, suggesting even that the problem is wider and deeper.
The new report a scarily large spike in citizens taking their own lives, close to 25%, and the surge cuts across most racial, gender and age groups. It could be the result of hollowing out of the middle class or the economic collapse or the opioid epidemic or the shift to a more technological age, but it’s probably a confluence of all those things and others. It may be a mismatch disease of some sort, but a mental one.
WASHINGTON — Suicide in the United States has surged to the highest levels in nearly 30 years, a federal data analysis has found, with increases in every age group except older adults. The rise was particularly steep for women. It was also substantial among middle-aged Americans, sending a signal of deep anguish from a group whose suicide rates had been stable or falling since the 1950s.
The suicide rate for middle-aged women, ages 45 to 64, jumped by 63 percent over the period of the study, while it rose by 43 percent for men in that age range, the sharpest increase for males of any age. The overall suicide rate rose by 24 percent from 1999 to 2014, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, which released the study on Friday. …
The data analysis provided fresh evidence of suffering among white Americans. Recent research has highlighted the plight of less educated whites, showing surges in deaths from drug overdoses, suicides, liver disease and alcohol poisoning, particularly among those with a high school education or less. The new report did not break down suicide rates by education, but researchers who reviewed the analysis said the patterns in age and race were consistent with that recent research and painted a picture of desperation for many in American society.•
Somehow missed the Atlantic interview from a couple weeks ago that Ross Andersen conducted with Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, who’s dedicated $100 million to speed tiny probes to Alpha Centauri in just 20 years time. This article is better and deeper by far than anything else I’ve read on the subject, revealing how and why the entrepreneur, named for Gagarin and raised on Asimov, believes he can accomplish his mission and explaining the smaller details (e.g., ground-based laser beams vs. space-based).
An excerpt about the desert power station that is planned to propel the crafts:
Milner told me that a ground-based laser could run off a giant power plant devoted solely to the mission. It could be a solar array in the Atacama desert, given how much sunlight pours onto its stark landscape. To make it work, the array would have to stretch for tens of miles, and it would need a battery large enough to store fodder for the daily firing of the world’s most powerful laser cannon.
The laser team would need to time its daily blast carefully, to avoid destroying the satellites and planes that pass overhead. When fired, the beam would shoot up through the atmosphere, and slam into the disc-like probe, sending it hurtling toward the edge of the solar system. After only a few minutes, the probe would be traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light. It would pass Mars in less than an hour. The next day, it would streak by Pluto. (New Horizons took 9 years to achieve this feat.) As the probe headed deeper into the Kuiper belt’s recesses, another one would pop out from the mothership, and float into the laser’s line of sight.
“If you have a reasonable sized battery, and a reasonable sized array, and a reasonable sized power station, you probably can do one shot a day,” Milner told me. “And then you recharge and shoot again. You can launch one per day for a year and then you have hundreds on the way.”
By sending a whole stream of probes, you get more data, and also redundancy. Any encounter with interstellar dust would be fatal for a thin, flimsy disc traveling at cosmic speeds. A few hundred probes would probably be enough to guarantee that one slipped through—although it’s not a certainty.•
Great sadness over the death of Prince, who was as good as any pop musician of his era and probably better at his peak, though I wouldn’t be surprised if his demise was hastened by living inside a sealed bubble, a delusion of his own design, much the same as Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson. When you recuse yourself from the world, the mind tends to race, and it doesn’t always wind up in a safe place. At any rate, terrible to see him go so young.
In 2010, Peter Willis of the Mirrorvisited Paisley Park for what he terms the “most bizarre interview I’ve ever had with a celebrity.” An excerpt:
Unlike most other rock stars, he had banned YouTube and iTunes from using any of his music and had even closed down his own official website.
He said: “The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it.
“The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good.
“They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.”
Then he led me to his recording studio in the complex and invited me to sit in his leather swivel chair at the enormous mixing desk.
Wow! I had finally arrived at the epicentre of Prince’s world – the scene of fabled all-night-long sessions in which he apparently played up to 27 instruments.
This is where the genius behind classics such as Purple Rain, When Doves Cry, 1999 and Let’s Go Crazy created his music. The walls were a vibrant reddish purple, flickering candles lined every ledge and the smell of incense filled the air.
Prince jabbed a few buttons and hidden speakers burst into life with my preview. He looked at me for a reaction and I told him it was brilliant, as indeed it was.
“This one’s called Compassion,” said Prince. But as I tried to jot down the title he looked aghast, grabbed my wrist and pleaded: “Please, please. It’s a surprise, don’t spoil it for people.”
A religious man
He told me how these were trying times and to emphasis the point, chivvied me into another room, switched on the TV and showed me an evangelical TV documentary blaming corporate America for a range of woes from Hurricane Katrina to asthmatic children.
He said that one problem was that “people, especially young people, don’t have enough God in their lives.”•
Ray Kurzweil thinks humans who can survive to 2030 will become immortal, but I’m willing, regrettably, to bet the over.
I don’t doubt there can be radical life extension if Homo sapiens persevere long enough, but the answers may be a lot more complicated than medical science riding a wave of Moore’s Law. Computing power, nanotechnology and genetic code will all likely be key to such a breakthrough, but time, that precious thing, is sadly not on our side.
An excerpt from David Hochman’s very good Playboy Interview with Google’s Director of Engineering:
Ray Kurzweil:
The point is health care is now an information technology subject to the same laws of acceleration and progress we see with other technologies. We’ll soon have the ability to rejuvenate all the body’s tissues and organs and develop drugs targeted specifically at the underlying metabolic process of a disease rather than taking a hit-or-miss approach. But nanotechnology is where we really move beyond biology.
Playboy:
Tiny robots fighting disease in our veins?
Ray Kurzweil:
Yes. By the 2020s we’ll start using nanobots to complete the job of the immune system. Our immune system is great, but it evolved thousands of years ago when conditions were different. It was not in the interest of the human species for individuals to live very long, so people typically died in their 20s. The life expectancy was 19. Your immune system, for example, does a poor job on cancer. It thinks cancer is you. It doesn’t treat cancer as an enemy. It also doesn’t work well on retroviruses. It doesn’t work well on things that tend to affect us later in life, because it didn’t select for longevity.
We can finish the job nature started with a nonbiological T cell. T cells are, in fact, nanobots—natural ones. They’re the size of a blood cell and are quite intelligent. I actually watched one of my T cells attack bacteria on a microscope slide. We could have one programmed to deal with all pathogens and could download new software from the internet if a new type of enemy such as a new biological virus emerged.
As they gain traction in the 2030s, nanobots in the bloodstream will destroy pathogens, remove debris, rid our bodies of clots, clogs and tumors, correct DNA errors and actually reverse the aging process. One researcher has already cured type 1 diabetes in rats with a blood-cell-size device.
Playboy:
So if we can hang on for 15 more years, we can basically live forever?
Ray Kurzweil:
I believe we will reach a point around 2029 when medical technologies will add one additional year every year to your life expectancy. By that I don’t mean life expectancy based on your birthdate but rather your remaining life expectancy.•
In his just completed Reddit Ask Me Anything, Sir Richard Branson had the following exchange:
Question:
Who did you look up to when you were growing up?
Richard Branson:
I looked up to Sir Freddie Laker, the pioneer of cheap air travel who was driven out of business by British Airways. It was he who told me to “Sue the bastards!” when BA tried to do the same to us. We took his advice and succeeded. He also suggested I use myself to put Virgin on the map, which led to ballooning and boating adventures.•
Excerpts follow from two pieces about the late British aviation entrepreneur.
Before his actual obituary in 2006, Laker, who helped democratize plane travel and opened the heavens to the masses, was “laid to rest” once before in the early ’80s, when the wings came off his business model. The opening of Terry Smith’s 1982People articleabout Laker Airways when the Skytrain was falling:
If any doubt remained that Sir Freddie Laker is a knight of the people, the events of this month have dispelled it. The bankruptcy of Laker Airways, which in 1977 pioneered cut-rate transatlantic air travel, struck Laker’s countrymen like the demise of an old friend. Within hours of the announcement a group of private citizens set up Freddie’s Friendly Fund, quixotically dedicated to saving Skytrain. In the first 24 hours they received $1 million in pledges—and by last week the tally was up to $5.5 million. In addition, the rock group Police promised to turn over the receipts of a Los Angeles concert totaling $185,000. From two schoolboys who donated 16 pence at a Laker airport counter to the group of Liverpool businessmen who offered $1 million, grateful travelers have rallied to Sir Freddie’s side. Says Laker stewardess Lisa Holden, who has spent her recent days gathering signatures on a petition of support: “If public opinion was anything to go by, we’d never go out of business.”
Unfortunately, Laker’s $388 million debt is more than even such extraordinary goodwill can erase. A British bank hoping to raise a last-minute $64.7 million fund to keep Laker flying admitted defeat, and an offer by the airline’s 2,500 employees to take a huge pay cut was similarly futile. For Laker staffers who lobbied vociferously at 10 Downing Street last week, their plea for government assistance was largely a symbolic last stand. “I’ll go under with Laker,” said Capt. Terry Fenton. “I won’t find another job as a pilot, I won’t find any other job. There are no jobs. I’ll have to sell my house, just the same as 90 percent of the people here today.”
Laker was a victim of problems that have thrown other airlines into a tail-spin—skyrocketing fuel prices and decreased passenger traffic. When Pan Am (which lost $348 million in 1981) slashed its New York-London fare last November, Sir Freddie’s prospects darkened. The decline of the British pound also sapped his resources. Currently trying to sell the insolvent British Airways, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s government announced that it could not intervene on Laker’s behalf.•
Laker lived high and fell far, though for a while he used aggressive pricing and sharp advertising to become the center of commercial aviation, making relatively cheap transatlantic fares a reality. From his 2006 New York Times obituarypenned by Jeff Bailey:
Laker Airways began service in 1977 and upset the staid world of trans-Atlantic travel then dominated by British Airways, Pan American World Airways and Trans World Airlines, sharply cutting fares and greatly expanding the number of people flying across the ocean.
“Traditional airlines were flying half-empty 747’s between Europe and the U.S.,” said Robert L. Crandall, former chief executive of American Airlines. Then along came Sir Freddie, charging about $240 for a round trip, and his planes were full.
Mr. Crandall recalled going to London in the early 1980’s to meet with him, and being picked up at the airport by Sir Freddie in a Jaguar convertible and driven along country lanes at ’70 to 80 miles an hour. Sir Freddie then took Mr. Crandall and his wife to a country pub for lunch.
The established carriers eventually matched Laker’s low fares. Passengers drifted away from Laker, and the company, having grown too quickly by most accounts, could not meet its debt obligations.
Laker’s liquidators later sued competing airlines, claiming a conspiracy to drive the upstart out of business. The litigation was settled, and Sir Freddie received $8 million for his Laker stock, though he lost many of his personal assets.
While it lasted, with Sir Freddie appearing in cheeky advertisements (‘Fly me,’ he said), Laker Airways was the talk of the aviation industry.•
Action figure of Fran Lebowitz or, perhaps, Harry Styles.
Fran Lebowitz thinks we look sloppy because we’re wearing clothes that weren’t intended for us. “What people don’t know is: Clothes don’t really fit you unless they’re made for you,” she told Elle last year. Sure, that’s true, but who can afford custom-made outfits?
The promise of 3D printing is that it will destabilize manufacturing, a transition that will be attended by both positive and negative results. One item on the plus side is that clothing may be much cheaper and made to fit individuals to the minutest specifications. Of course, that won’t be so good for garment workers, tailors, etc.
In a Factor-Tech piece, Lucy Ingham write of 3D printers moving bespoke beyond the boutique and manufacturing from factories to shops. Eventually, the creative process will likely relocate even further, directly into many homes. The opening:
A project between Loughborough University and clothing manufacturer the Yeh Group is set to make it possible to manufacture entire garments and footwear that perfectly fit their intended wearer in just 24 hours.
The project, which will run for the next 18 months, has come about as a result of advancements in additive manufacturing, enabling clothing to be printed in their entirety from a raw material such as polymer, without the waste and associated costs normally associated with clothing production.
“With 3D printing there is no limit to what you can build and it is this design freedom which makes the technology so exciting by bringing to life what was previously considered to be impossible,” said Dr Guy Bingham, senior lecturer in product and industrial design at Loughborough University,
“This landmark technology allows us as designers to innovate faster and create personalised, ready-to-wear fashion in a digital world with no geometrical constraints and almost zero waste material. We envisage that with further development of the technology, we could 3D print a garment within 24 hours.”•
The term “middle class” was not always a nebulous one in America. It meant that you had arrived on solid ground and only the worst luck or behavior was likely to shake the earth beneath your feet. That’s become less and less true for four decades, as a number of factors (technology, globalization, tax codes, the decline of unions, the 2008 economic collapse, etc.) have conspired to hollow out this hallowed ground. You can’t arrive someplace that barely exists.
Middle class is now what you think you would be if you had any money. George Carlin’s great line that “the reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it” seems truer every day. It’s not so much a fear of falling anymore, but the fear of never getting up, at least not within the current financial arrangement. Those hardworking, decent people you see every day? They’re just as afraid as you are. They are you.
In the spirit of the great 1977 Atlantic article “The Gentle Art of Poverty” and William McPherson’s recent Hedgehog Review piece “Falling,” the excellent writer and film critic Neal Gabler has penned, also for the Atlantic, an essay about his “secret shame” of being far poorer than appearances would indicate. An excerpt:
I know what it is like to have to juggle creditors to make it through a week. I know what it is like to have to swallow my pride and constantly dun people to pay me so that I can pay others. I know what it is like to have liens slapped on me and to have my bank account levied by creditors. I know what it is like to be down to my last $5—literally—while I wait for a paycheck to arrive, and I know what it is like to subsist for days on a diet of eggs. I know what it is like to dread going to the mailbox, because there will always be new bills to pay but seldom a check with which to pay them. I know what it is like to have to tell my daughter that I didn’t know if I would be able to pay for her wedding; it all depended on whether something good happened. And I know what it is like to have to borrow money from my adult daughters because my wife and I ran out of heating oil.
You wouldn’t know any of that to look at me. I like to think I appear reasonably prosperous. Nor would you know it to look at my résumé. I have had a passably good career as a writer—five books, hundreds of articles published, a number of awards and fellowships, and a small (very small) but respectable reputation. You wouldn’t even know it to look at my tax return. I am nowhere near rich, but I have typically made a solid middle- or even, at times, upper-middle-class income, which is about all a writer can expect, even a writer who also teaches and lectures and writes television scripts, as I do. And you certainly wouldn’t know it to talk to me, because the last thing I would ever do—until now—is admit to financial insecurity or, as I think of it, “financial impotence,” because it has many of the characteristics of sexual impotence, not least of which is the desperate need to mask it and pretend everything is going swimmingly. In truth, it may be more embarrassing than sexual impotence.•
I’m more deterministic about technology than John Markoff, but I really enjoyed his latest book, Machines of Loving Grace. One tidbit from that title: “At Stanford Research Institute, Douglas Engelbart sent the entire staff of his lab through EST training and joined the board of the organization.” Engelbart is the Augmented Intelligence pioneer most known today for 1968’s “Mother of All Demos.”
EST, the so-called self-improvement system that features copious mental abuse, is the brainchild of Werner Erhard, who was born John Rosenberg and rechristened himself after aNazi rocketeer(misspelling it!).The profane self-help peddler came to wide prominence in the 1970s, with the aid of apostles in entertainment and intellectual circles, from John Denver to Buckminster Fuller to Silicon Valley technologists. Now an octogenarian, Erhard still unabashedly calls himself a “hero.” Excerpts follow from two articles written during the EST salesman’s headiest decade.
I wanted to get as far away from Jack Rosenberg as I could get,” explains Werner Erhard. His reason is clear: Jack Rosenberg was a loser. Born in Lower Merion, Pa., Rosenberg married at 18, fathered four children and worked as a construction company supervisor—until he dropped out in 1960. Leaving his family, he took off for St. Louis with a girlfriend (now his second wife and mother of three). To start fresh, Rosenberg adoptedspace scientist Wernher von Braun‘s first name (misspelling it) and former West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard’s last name. “Freudians,” Werner Erhard concedes, “would say this was a rejection of Jewishness and a seizure of strength.”
The rest of Erhard’s spiritual hegira has become legend among his cult. For eight years he worked as a crackerjack instructor of encyclopedia salesmen. Then one morning while driving down the freeway south of San Francisco, to which he moved in 1964, he was suddenly struck by the realization that “I was never going to make it. No matter how much money or recognition I achieved, it would never be enough.”
To overcome this hopelessness, Erhard experimented with just about every method guaranteed to bring peace of mind. “I tried yoga, Dale Carnegie, Zen, Scientology, encounter groups, t-groups, psychoanalysis, reality therapy, Gestalt, love, nudity, you name it,” he recalls. “But when it was over, that was not it.”
Once again, Erhard was behind the wheel when he finally “got it”—a religious happening that the faithful call “The Experience.” And what is ‘it’? Replies the Master: “What is it, is it. When you drop the effort to make your life work, you begin to discover that it’s perfect the way it is. You can relax. It’s all going to unfold.”
Not much of a message, perhaps, but as packaged, promoted and proselytized by Erhard in a two-weekend, 60-hour course (price $250), his movement, known as est (Latin for ‘it is,’ as well as Erhard Seminars Training), has turned out more than 63,000 converts in 12 U.S. cities. Another 12,000 hopefuls are on the waiting list. Among the alumni of est’s psychic boot camps are Emmy winner Valerie Harper (who thanked Erhard on TV for changing her life), Cloris Leachman,John Denver, astronautBuzz Aldrinand activistJerry Rubin.•
From a 1979 People articleabout the auto-racing exploits of EST scream machine:
For hours mechanics have been fine-tuning the squat red-and-silver race car, while assistants check their clipboards and keep the Watkins Glen (N.Y.) bivouac free of litter and strangers. One fan wanders through in a T-shirt with the baffling slogan: ‘Before I was different, now I’m the same.’ Presently the driver emerges from an enormous van, astronaut-like in his creamy flame-proof suit, and heads for the Formula Super Vee racer (named for its Volkswagen engine). At the wave of a flag he will roar around a 3.3-mile Grand Prix course at speeds up to 130 mph.
There are 29 other qualifiers in this Gold Cup event, but only driver Werner Erhard claims he is here for the sake of mankind. Erhard, the founder of est (Erhard seminars training), says that when he slides into his 164-horsepower Argo JM4, he is raising consciousness, not merely dust.
‘Real people—you and me—feel like they don’t make any difference in this lousy world,’ says the 43-year-old Erhard. He is tall and loose-limbed with icy blue eyes; he insists on eye contact during a conversation. If his listener looks away, even momentarily, Erhard stops talking. He wants everyone to understand why he is driving fast cars these days in addition to heading the $20 million business that est has become, plus a 1977 spin-off, his program ‘to end world hunger by 1997.’ ‘I wanted to organize a high-performance team,’ Erhard continues, ‘that could master a complex skill in a very short time with winning results and show that everyone involved makes a big difference, from grease monkeys to spectators.’ In order to prove this estian point, Erhard says he considered such adventures as skydiving and karate, but rejected them as not collective enough. ‘Auto racing was perfect!’ he exclaims. ‘I hadn’t driven a car in six years and didn’t know the first thing about racing. Whatever we’d achieve, we’d achieve together.’”
Campuses, theme parks and other small, contained areas in warm-weather locales seem like Ground Zero for driverless cars, since they’re usually well-maintained and more predictable and mappable than wide-open spaces. Modestly-sized neighborhoods may be in the same category. Case in point: Beverly Hills would like autonomous vehicles, which could be summoned with a smartphone, to supplement its current public-transportation system.
Futurists have suggested that one day, self-driving cars might augment or even replace public transport, but for the town elders of Beverly Hills, this future is nearer than you’d think. Earlier this month, the city’s council voted unanimously to create a program to “develop autonomous vehicles as public transportation.”
The council’s vision is for self-driving vehicles to provide “on-demand, point-to-point transportation,” with citizens “requesting a ride using their smartphone.” The shuttles wouldn’t replace public transportation, but augment it, with Beverly Hills Mayor John Mirisch describing how autonomous vehicles would solve the “first/last mile” problem for residents using the city’s future subway — the Purple Line Extension — to get in and out of the city.
“This is a game-changer for Beverly Hills and, we hope, for the region,” said Mirisch in a press release. “Beverly Hills is the perfect community to take the lead to make this technology a reality. It is now both feasible and safe for autonomous cars to be on the road.”•
When Jonathan Franzen, who’s not going to stop, met President Obama, he informed our Commander in Chief that Richard Nixon was the “last Liberal President.” Obama responded, “Yeah, the only problem was he was crazy.” Largely true on both counts.
I’ve mentioned before that Nixon, who succeeded LBJ and his “War on Poverty,” attempted to establish Guaranteed Basic Income in the U.S., which came awfully close to happening. For a number of reasons, technological and political among them, the idea probably has more currency among Liberal, Conservative and Libertarian think tanks than anytime since, though those vying for higher office, Bernie Sanders included, dare not speak its name. If GBI resulted in a total dismantling of all other social safety nets, it could do more harm than good. If done correctly, however, it could help working-class people survive the hollowing out of the middle.
At Alternet, Rutger Bregman recalls Nixon’s effort. An excerpt:
Few people today are aware that the United States was just a hair’s breadth from realizing a social safety net at least as extensive as those in most western European countries. When President Lyndon B. Johnson declared his “War on Poverty” in 1964, Democrats and Republicans alike rallied behind fundamental welfare reforms.
First, however, some trial runs were needed. Tens of millions of dollars were budgeted to provide a basic income for more than 8,500 Americans in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Iowa, North Carolina, Indiana, Seattle and Denver in what were also the first-ever large-scale social experiments to distinguish experimental and control groups. The researchers wanted answers to three questions: (1) Would people work significantly less if they receive a guaranteed income? (2) Would the program be too expensive? (3) Would it prove politically unfeasible?
The answers were no, no and yes.
Declines in working hours were limited across the board. “[The] declines in hours of paid work were undoubtedly compensated in part by other useful activities, such as search for better jobs or work in the home,” noted the Seattle experiment’s concluding report. For example, one mother who had dropped out of high school worked less in order to earn a degree in psychology and get a job as a researcher. Another woman took acting classes; her husband began composing music. “We’re now self-sufficient, income-earning artists,” she told the researchers. Among youth included in the experiment, almost all the hours not spent on paid work went into more education. Among the New Jersey subjects, the rate of high school graduations rose 30 percent.
And thus, in August 1968, President Nixon presented a bill providing for a modest basic income, calling it “the most significant piece of social legislation in our nation’s history.” A White House poll found 90 percent of all newspapers enthusiastically receptive to the plan. The National Council of Churches was in favor, and so were the labor unions and even the corporate sector (see Brian Steensland’s book The Failed Welfare Resolution, page 69). At the White House, a telegram arrived declaring, “Two upper middle class Republicans who will pay for the program say bravo.” Pundits were even going around quoting Victor Hugo—“Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come.”
It seemed that the time for a basic income had well and truly arrived.•
Chemtrails are bullshit, of course, but in 1950s America, there was definitely something in the air.
That was especially true if you lived in desert areas in which the U.S. government was conducting A-bomb tests. Windstorms at just the wrong moment could cause havoc, blowing radioactive mist into unsuspecting nearby communities.
One such bomb, nicknamed “Harry,” was detonated in Nevada on May 19, 1953, with gusts carrying its fallout 135 miles, running headlong into 5,000 people, including those on the set of Howard Hughes’ film The Conqueror. Legend has it that a cancer cluster among cast and crew was the result, although that seems more urban legend than medical fact. Nonetheless, some citizens were outraged by the recklessness, and the bomb was rechristened “Dirty Harry” in retrospect.
A month earlier, the Atomic Energy Commission had carried out another detonation in same state. Just after the explosion, a pair of radio-controlled planes carrying mice and monkeys were flown through the radioactive cloud. The strange scene, which was conducted in the name of biomedical research, was recorded in an article in the April 6, 1953 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
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