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“I Saw An Enormous Statue Of Myself, Lying In The Desert, Mouth Open As If I Were Dead. I Entered My Mouth.”

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

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In the 1960s and 1970s, when alternative lifestyles began to bleed from the American margins to the center, novelist Leo Litwak was there to observe these new practices up close, turning his reconnaissance into trippy magazine articles. Below are two examples.

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The impetus for change in 1969’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice comes from two of the titular characters attending guerrilla psychological workshops at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur. Two years prior, Leo Litwak, the novelist, journalist and book reviewer, brought his considerable writing skills to the alternative-therapy retreat for a New York Times Magazine story. A section from “Joy Is the Prize” in which the author is awakened to a repressed memory from WWII:

I never anticipated the effect of these revelations, as one after another of these strangers expressed his grief and was eased. I woke up one night and felt as if everything were changed. I felt as if I were about to weep. The following morning the feeling was even more intense. 

Brigitte and I walked down to the cliff edge. We lay beneath a tree. She could see that I was close to weeping. I told her that I’d been thinking about my numbness, which I had traced to the war. I tried to keep the tears down. I felt vulnerable and unguarded. I felt that I was about to lose all my secrets and I was ready to let them go. Not being guarded, I had no need to put anyone down, and I felt what it was to be unarmed. I could look anyone in the eyes and my eyes were open. 

That night I said to Daniel: “Why do you keep diverting us with your intellectual arguments? I see suffering in your eyes. You give me a glimpse of it, then you turn it off. Your eyes go dead and the intellectual stuff bores me. I feel that’s part of your strategy.”

Schutz suggested that the two of us sit in the center of the room and talk to each other. I told Daniel I was close to surrender. I wanted to let go. I felt near to my grief. I wanted to release it and be purged. Daniel asked about my marriage and my work. Just when he hit a nerve, bringing me near the release I wanted, he began to speculate on the tragedy of the human condition. I told him: “You’re letting me off and I don’t want to be left off.”

Schutz asked if I would be willing to take a fantasy trip.

It was later afternoon and the room was already dark. I lay down, Schutz beside me, and the group gathered around. I closed my eyes. Schutz asked me to imagine myself very tiny and to imagine that tiny self entering my own body. He wanted me to describe the trip.

I saw an enormous statue of myself, lying in the desert, mouth open as if I were dead. I entered my mouth. I climbed down my gullet, entering it as if it were a manhole. I climbed into my chest cavity. Schutz asked me what I saw. “It’s empty,” I said. “There’s nothing here.” I was totally absorbed by the effort to visualize entering myself and lost all sense of the group. I told Schutz there was no heart in my body. Suddenly, I felt tremendous pressure in my chest, as if tears were going to explode. He told me to go to the vicinity of the heart and report what I saw. There, on a ledge of the chest wall, near where the heart should have been, I saw a baby buggy. He asked me to look into it. I didn’t want to, because I feared I might weep, but I looked, and I saw a doll. He asked me to touch it. I was relieved to discover that it was only a doll. Schutz asked me if I could bring a heart into my body. And suddenly there it was, a heart sheathed in slime, hung with blood vessels. And that heart broke me up. I felt my chest convulse. I exploded. I burst into tears.

I recognized the heart. The incident had occurred more than 20 years before and had left me cold.•

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Litwak spent some quality time in the ’60s and ’70s writing about American dreamers, from Ronald Reagan to Walt Disney to Werner Erhard. For his fascinating 1972 New York Times Magazine piece, “Rolfing, Aikido, Hypnodramas, Psychokinesis, and Other Things Beyond the Here and Now” (subscription required), Litwak attended the Association for Humanistic Psychology meeting at Squaw Valley, becoming familiar with all manner of back-cracking, mind-bending, life-altering methods. An excerpt:

The insistence upon active audience participation keeps the meetings from becoming dull. I attended a hypnodrama session at the Hofbrau, an A-frame, chalet-type building, with scripted placards advertising the menu hanging from the walls (“Hier gibts fondue”). The Hofbrau was jammed. We were to be hypnotized, and were then to participate in a hypnodrama. We encircled the fieldstone fireplace in the center of the large dining hall as Ira Greenberg of the Carmelito, Calif., State Hospital led the session. He described hypnosis as a “control of our controls.” It was a technique, he said, that enabled us to concentrate deeply and regress to forgotten states; once these states were recalled, hypnodrama could be used to act them out, enabling us finally to gratify the unsatisfied nurture needs of infancy.

We removed our shoes and lay on the floor flat on our backs. We were instructed to relax. We began with the toes and very gradually worked up to the head. We were assured that the process was pleasant. We were asked to imagine a yardstick within our minds. We slowly counted down the yardstick until we came to the number which we felt represented the depth of our hypnosis. We tried to sink beneath this number. There were a few snores. We were urged to stay awake. We then began a fantasy trip. We flew up the mountain that was behind the Hofbrau; we were told to soar above the crest and enjoy the flight. We then settled down near the crest by a cave; entered inside and walked down a corridor passing several doors, stopping at that one which enclosed a place we had always wished to enter. We passed through this door, looked around, left the cave, descended to the Hofbrau and then awoke. We assembled in groups of five to discuss the experience. An elderly couple, a trifle disgruntled, denied that they were hypnotized and were skeptical that anyone else was. I myself felt quite relaxed and refreshed. A good many of those in the audience said they had been in deep trances.

A hypnodrama was then staged, based on a young woman’s fantasy. When she had been asked to pass through the door to her special place, her fantasy was that she had entered her high-school lavatory; a woman attendant sat at the threshold and refused to acknowledge her; she felt deeply disturbed. Roles were assigned to volunteers. The young lady was returned to hypnosis. She again passed through the door and confronted the impassive woman attendant. She burst into tears, and begged for a demonstration of affection. The attendant rose to comfort her. At the moment of revelation I had to leave for an appointment with the A.H.P. officers who were to brief me on the current state of humanistic psychology.•

“We’re So Obsolete In Cyber

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

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Donald Trump, Jean-Marie Le Pen with a neckwear line, was born into wealth and connections yet feels gypped.

He often expresses this inner void in terms of politics. In the 1980s, when he was a vocal opponent of President Ronald Reagan, he felt Japan was being allowed to rip us off. Now it’s China, Mexico and any nation not overwhelming us with gifts of oil and treasure. We need more. Well, he needs more. And nothing will ever be enough, because endless amounts of bragging and petroleum and steak meat can’t make up for a lack of parental love. 

In the New York Times, Maggie Haberman and David E. Sanger interviewed Trump about foreign policy. The GOP candidate extended his feelings of personal inadequacy to the topic of cyberwar, revealing an appalling lack of knowledge on the topic. An excerpt:

David Sanger:

The question was about cyber, how would you envision using cyberweapons? Cyberweapons in an attack to take out a power grid in a city, so forth.

Donald Trump:

First off, we’re so obsolete in cyber. We’re the ones that sort of were very much involved with the creation, but we’re so obsolete, we just seem to be toyed with by so many different countries, already. And we don’t know who’s doing what. We don’t know who’s got the power, who’s got that capability, some people say it’s China, some people say it’s Russia. But certainly cyber has to be a, you know, certainly cyber has to be in our thought process, very strongly in our thought process. Inconceivable that, inconceivable the power of cyber. But as you say, you can take out, you can take out, you can make countries nonfunctioning with a strong use of cyber. I don’t think we’re there. I don’t think we’re as advanced as other countries are, and I think you probably would agree with that. I don’t think we’re advanced, I think we’re going backwards in so many different ways. I think we’re going backwards with our military. I certainly don’t think we are, we move forward with cyber, but other countries are moving forward at a much more rapid pace. We are frankly not being led very well in terms of the protection of this country.•

“You Can Engineer Yourself Out Of Any Situation”

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

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Perhaps the future will come screaming across the sky, or maybe it will just putter along.

Nevada just became the first state to experience an FAA-approved drone delivery, which may be a harbinger of a different near-term future the way the first online purchase (a copy of the Sting CD Ten Summoner’s Tales) was in 1994. But ground-bound delivery robots on wheels, the tortoise in the race, can also cheaply get groceries and goods to consumers and could be formidable competition. Probably there’s room for both.

From Michael Laris’ Washington Post piece about Starship Technologies‘ autonomous “rolling suitcases” perhaps coming to our nation’s capital soon:

There were no chirpy little R2-D2 sounds, just the quiet churn of bureaucracy starting to roll as [Council Secretary Nyasha] Smith stamped in the legislation. “I want it to speak with me. I want it to have a relationship with me!” [Councilwoman Mary] Cheh said.

As does Allan Martinson, Starship’s chief operating officer, who saw some 6,000 firms as a venture capitalist before deciding to join the robotic delivery startup. This is no phantom product that will have fizzled in a year, he said.

“It’s a real, tangible, solid thing,” Martinson said. “You can engineer yourself out of any situation. That’s the philosophy of this company.”

Martinson said the robots began rolling autonomously last month through parts of London and Tallinn, Estonia’s capital, using proprietary digital maps and sophisticated software. They can also be guided over the web by an operator if they get stumped on their way. To make delivery cheap — from $1 to $3 dollars a trip, hopefully dropping to under $1, company executives said — engineers are trying to keep the hardware basic. That means no laser-pulsing LIDAR, an expensive surveying technology used in many driverless car prototypes.

“It’s basically a mobile phone on wheels,” Martinson said. Its low speed and weight — 4 miles per hour and 40-pounds max — also short-circuit safety concerns, he added. “It’s basically a rolling suitcase. If you go home and try to kill yourself with a suitcase, you’d have to be very inventive.”•

“The Companies Are Engaged In A ‘Platform War'”

March 25, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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The Deep Learning defeat of a human Go champion has coincided with AI research booming in the U.S. like never before, with millions being thrown at freshly minted Ph.D.s in the field and small startups announcing the very immodest goal of “capturing all human knowledge.” Everyone is making a big bet on the sector’s future, and, of course, almost all will go bust. The competition, however, will lead to progress. 

The opening of a NYT article by John Markoff and Steve Lohr:

SAN FRANCISCO — The resounding win by a Google artificial intelligence program over a champion in the complex board game Go this month was a statement — not so much to professional game players as to Google’s competitors.

Many of the tech industry’s biggest companies, like Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft, are jockeying to become the go-to company for A.I. In the industry’s lingo, the companies are engaged in a “platform war.”

A platform, in technology, is essentially a piece of software that other companies build on and that consumers cannot do without. Become the platform and huge profits will follow. Microsoft dominated personal computers because its Windows software became the center of the consumer software world. Google has come to dominate the Internet through its ubiquitous search bar.

If true believers in A.I. are correct that this long-promised technology is ready for the mainstream, the company that controls A.I. could steer the tech industry for years to come.

“Whoever wins this race will dominate the next stage of the information age,” said Pedro Domingos, a machine learning specialist and the author of The Master Algorithm, a 2015 book that contends that A.I. and big-data technology will remake the world.•

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“It’s About The Capability To Design And Build On-Demand”

March 25, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

3dprinterdroneIt would seem Alphabet decided to sell robotics maker and Youtube sensation Boston Dynamics because of that outfit’s dedication to humanoid machines. It’s probably not just a matter of economics. While the company’s grown more circumspect about expenses since its restructuring, it retains plenty of businesses unlikely to pay off immediately–or ever. No, the other reason is probably because AlphaDog and Petman and their progenies will be best suited to military operations and the Google guys have vowed to not become part of that industrial complex.

Even without the search giant, though, the military in America (and other countries) will continue to move forward with drones and robotics and even bioengineering because of the fear that THEY may get these tools before WE do. It’s a new arms race, albeit one with robotic limbs.

From Phil Goldstein’s Fed Tech report on 3D-printed drones possibly coming soon to a military near you:

Eric Spero, an acting team lead in the Army Research Lab’s (ARL) Vehicle Technology Directorate, pushed the AEWE to take a closer look at his team’s tests.

“We saw the trajectories of two beneficial technology areas converging in the future,” Spero said, according to the Army release. “The technologies are 3D printing and small unmanned aircraft systems, sometimes referred to as drones.”

In chaotic battlefield environments, the two technologies could provide soldiers with greater flexibility to accomplish missions that require drones. Spero says that his team’s work is not actually about drones, but rather about using 3D printing to let soldiers create useful technologies on the fly.

“It’s about the capability to design and build on-demand. The concept takes advantage of 3D printing as a future enabler and positions us, as the U.S. military, to take advantage of increasingly better manufacturing technologies,” Spero said.

Spero notes in a white paper that 3D-printed drones could give soldiers in the field an edge — on the fly, as it were.•

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“There Are Over 300 People Hanging Out In Vats Of Liquid Nitrogen”

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

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I don’t want to be in a box or an urn, because why? But what about a freezing tube? Cryonics is a long shot, a moonshot, but of course, steep odds are better than none if immortality is the kind of thing that matters to you. Even before science could make the gigantic leap to reanimate your remains, you would first have to “survive” eons of natural disasters, empire collapse, corporate malfeasance and plain, old indifference. It also assumes that humans of the future, supercharged by bioengineering, will care about waking the “cave people” for anything more than research purposes. They will have to value us the way we value ourselves, which is unlikely. So there’s almost no chance it would work. Almost.

In 1962, James Bedford became the first cryonaut, but the business has never boomed. In a Wait But Why post, Tim Urban looks at the philosophical and practical questions that attend the practice. An excerpt:

When Robert Ettinger was a kid in the 1930s, he read a lot of science fiction, and he assumed that with the world advancing the way it was, scientists would surely have a cure for aging at some point during his lifetime. He would live to see a world where sickness was a thing of the past and death was something people chose to do voluntarily, at a time of their choosing.

But thirty years later, aging and involuntary death were still very much a thing, and Ettinger, by then a physics professor, realized that science might not solve these problems in time for him to reap the benefits. So he started thinking about how to hack the system.

If, rather than being buried or cremated after his death, he could instead be frozen in some way—then whenever the scientists did eventually get around to conquering mortality, they’d probably also have the tools and know-how to resuscitate him, and he could have the last laugh after all.

In 1962, he wrote about this concept in a book called The Prospects of Immortality, and the cryonics movement was born.

The first person to give cryonics a try was James Bedford, a psychology professor who died of cancer in 1967 at the age of 73 and is doing his thing in a vat of liquid nitrogen in Arizona as you read this. Others slowly began to follow, and today, there are over 300 people hanging out in vats of liquid nitrogen.•

 

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“The Promise Of The Digital Age Is Being Hijacked By A Rampant Form Of Old-Style Capitalism”

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

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There’s an obvious question without an easy answer of whether traditional economic systems will be able to service the needs of the 21st century, at least the needs of those people who aren’t, in Romney-speak, corporations. Early in the Industrial Age, capitalism’s brutish excesses were curbed by labor unions and newspaper muckrakers and tax codes. In the Digital Age, many of those safety nets have come undone, and it’s not clear if they would have on their own been adequate to deal with the gathering storm.

The Uber business model produces some good at high costs, destabilizing businesses and replacing solid jobs with piecework. AI’s continued development will likely bring exceptional benefits to us but also further hollow out the middle. Even if some plans for automation fall by the wayside, enough will probably succeed to upset Labor, causing industries to rise and fall with shocking speed.

If, for example, driverless autos can be perfected in the next 20 years and proliferate, tens of millions of jobs will quickly be gone from every developed country in trucking, taxis, delivery, etc. In fact, a driverless taxi fleet needn’t even have an owner. The cars could “own” themselves, using the fares to automatically pay for repairs and purchase new vehicles. The operation could entirely run itself. Prices for trips from such outfits will be cheap, which is a good thing, since you might not have a job. 

From Antony Funnell’s smart Radio National’s Future Tense piece about the question of capitalism in the Digital Age:

University of Maryland legal academic Frank Pasquale, who focuses on the ethical, legal and social implications of information technology, calls them the ‘Silicon Valley oligarchs’.

‘I think the fundamental problem is that people don’t like to face up to the reality of monopolisation,’ says Pasquale, speaking about the global rise of Uber, Airbnb and other so-called sharing economy companies. ‘It’s much more convenient to believe the comforting myth that these markets are always contestable.

‘A firm like Uber is an appeal to venture capitalists—speculative capital—that wants to see massive returns via monopolisation. Let’s not mistake the business model here. The model here is for one of these firms to come in and to take over various aspects of commerce, to take over the rides that are in an area, to take over availability of non-hotel rooms to sleep in, et cetera. I think that this is really a perversion of the original aspirations of the sharing economy.’

The perils of corporate capitalism ‘running on digital steroids’

For Pasquale, the rise of the oligarchs signals lost potential—the opportunity to enhance genuine sharing and competition through the use of new technologies. But leading US media theorist Douglas Rushkoff goes one step further. In his newly released book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, he warns that the promise of the digital age is being hijacked by a rampant form of old-style capitalism, a modus operandi akin to that of the robber-barons of the 19th century.•

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“Humans, On The Other Hand, Can Be Immensely Flexible”

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

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In 2011, President Obama made a pilgrimage to Silicon Valley and asked tech titans what it would be required to reshore factories making iPhones and such. The NYT recalled a conversation between Obama and Steve Jobs:

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.•

Jobs may have been correct, if for the wrong reasons. The plants actually are moving back to the U.S. in increasing numbers, though there’s a question as to how many jobs will be returning with them and how many will be swallowed up by automation, which has lowered costs enough so that those plants can come home at all. The further question is how many of the positions that escape the rise of the machines will be prone to further automation.

In a Techcrunch article, Jim Rock reports there’s reason for hope, at least in the immediate future, as near-term robots won’t likely have the flexibility human workers possess. An excerpt:  

Although the experts cannot agree on exactly how many robots will enter the economy, it’s safe to say that America’s workforce — from the manufacturer’s factory floor to the open office of a law firm — will look very different once the technology is fully integrated. You must do two things to be a truly valuable worker in this environment: embrace technology and be adaptable.

As millennials age into the workplace, the idea of embracing technology is starting to seem a little more passé. Most office workers know how to use email, run a word processor and maybe even set up a three-way call on their Polycom. As robots enter the workplace, though, knowing the intricacies behind the technology that runs them will become an increasingly coveted skill set.

This is not to say that all white-collar workers should enroll in engineering night classes, but knowing how technology works at a base level will make you better at your job — a job that will more and more likely rely on interacting with robots. Employers need to actively promote training programs that empower employees to work more effectively with new tech.

The second trait that future professionals should focus on is adaptability. Reid Hoffman, co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, shares a story about his visit to the Huawei plant in Shenzhen, China:

I was expecting, as a Silicon Valley technologist, that it would be a complete line of robots…Roughly 60 percent of it was automated and 40 percent of it was still people. You say, ‘Is that just because of low cost?’ No. These are actually high-pay, high-skill jobs. The answer is actually that, in the future, adaptability is key, and people are more adaptable. So when they set up the machine line and it’s all machines, there is a huge amount of retooling to shift from line one to line two, whereas the people are much more easy to shift.”

As robots enter the workforce, most will be extremely proficient at one or two specific tasks. Humans, on the other hand, can be immensely flexible when it comes to how we work.•

“Is Biological Intelligence Really A Universal Dead-End, Destined To Give Way To Machine Supremacy?”

March 23, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Sir Martin Rees wrote these words last year: “Few doubt that machines will gradually surpass more and more of our distinctively human capabilities—or enhance them via cyborg technology. Disagreements are basically about the timescale.”

Count astrobiologist Caleb Scharf as one of the so-called few doubters. In an Aeon piece, he argues that the Singularity may not be near (or even far) and an explosion of intelligence that dwarfs the Cambrian not exactly a done deal. Scharf believes we could possibly become a hive-mind state that settles rather than an exponential one that soars. Or maybe we opt for “turning away from machine fantasies, back to a quieter but more efficient, organic existence.” My very inexpert brain disagrees with both notions, but it’s an excellent essay.

An excerpt:

Superficially, the logic behind the conjectures about cosmic machine intelligence appears pretty solid. Extrapolating the trajectory of our own current technological evolution suggests that with enough computational sophistication on hand, the capacity and capability of our biological minds and bodies could become less and less attractive. At a certain point we’d want to hop into new receptacles, custom-built to suit whatever takes our fancy. Similarly, that technological arc could take us to a place where we’ll create artificial intelligences that are either indifferent to us, or that will overtake and subsume (or simply squish) us.

Biology is not up to the task of sustaining pan-stellar civilisations or the far-future human civilisation, the argument goes. The environmental and temporal challenges of space exploration are huge. Any realistic impetus to become an interstellar species might demand robust machines, not delicate protein complexes with fairly pathetic use-by dates. A machine might live forever and copy itself perfectly, unencumbered by the error-prone flexibility of natural evolution. Self-designing life forms could also tailor themselves to very specific environments. In a single generation they could adapt to the great gulfs of time and space between the stars, or to the environments of alien worlds.

Pull all of these pieces together and it can certainly seem that the human blueprint is a blip, a quickly passing phase. People take this analysis seriously enough that influential figures such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have publicly warned about the dangers of all-consuming artificial intelligence. At the same time, the computer scientist Ray Kurzweil has made a big splash from books and conferences that preview an impending singularity. But are living things really compelled to become ever-smarter and more robust? And is biological intelligence really a universal dead-end, destined to give way to machine supremacy?

Perhaps not. There is quite a bit more to the story.•

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“There’s A Certain Chaos In The World And People Need Something That Has Very Clear Moral Boundaries”

March 23, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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In scary times, superheroes and fascists hold appeal. Both are built on a childish desire for easy answers to thorny problems. Never mind that Batman is a disturbed vigilante and Mussolini was only tolerable when hanging upside down from an Esso gas station. Just give us the appearance of strength.

In a really good Salon interview conducted by Scott Timberg, the great writer and artist Daniel Clowes discusses the current adult fascination with Superman and such. An excerpt:

Question:

There’s so much to keep up with. Along with comics, underground and otherwise, there are more superhero movies all the time. You’ve been vocal about your frustration with superheroes.

Daniel Clowes:

I am laughing at the fact that for years, when we were doing “Eightball” and “Hate” and “Love & Rockets” and stuff, we thought, “What we’re doing is really the mainstream stuff. It’s like comics for adults, that a general audience could read… and only the tiniest niche audience of emotional defectives care about superhero comics.”

Question:

Superhero comics seemed to you like some old-world ’50s thing that was dying out.

Daniel Clowes:

Right. And yet they’re dominating our industry. I remember an artist, Bob Burden, saying, “It’s so random. It would be like if all comics were about pilgrims and then we did comics about normal people and we were looked at as the weirdoes.”

So that was our thesis, and then to see with the advent of technology where they could actually make these realistic superhero movies, to see that: No, the entire culture is what the comics shop was in 1985. It repudiates our lofty claims. It says more about our culture than anything else. I’m always kind of saddened when 45-year-old parents of my son’s friends can’t wait to go see “The Avengers.” That shouldn’t be for you. [Laughs]

Question:

The sense that it’s a guilty pleasure or something for kids seems to have disappeared.

Daniel Clowes:

That’s long gone.

Question:

How much does that shift have to do with technology?

Daniel Clowes:

I think there’s a certain chaos in the world and people need something that has very clear moral boundaries, I guess.

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“A Majority Of Workers Also Think That Their Own Specific Professions Or Jobs Won’t Be Impacted”

March 23, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

DRU-dominos-pizza-robot-640x360 (1)dominosdeliveryguy“Nobody knows anything,” William Goldman famously said, in 1983, of the motion-picture industry. I wonder if that analysis remains true.

Hollywood still manufactures bombs, but very few of the tentpoles tank now. There aren’t as many hunches played, which makes the business more stagnant creatively, but most of the big bets come in. More advanced research and marketing and analytics and promotion has made it so, since the artistic merits of comic-book spectaculars are wildly inconsistent. 

Can this new reality of film economics be applied to the wider economy? Not exactly, since there are way more variables in play. Black swans will still smack us in the back of the head. A huge meltdown can delay the inevitable–or jump-start it early. But some things are good bets. It seems pretty clear now that there’ll be a major transition in Labor over the rest of this century. Either many jobs–entire industries, actually–disappear and are replaced by ones we’ve yet to imagine, or they vanish and aren’t replaced in the numbers necessary. Although this upheaval is upon us, it would seem politicians in this year’s American Presidential campaign–and the electorate–aren’t aware that manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back and more professions than they might imagine are going away.

From Sam Becker at Cheat Sheet, the world’s worst-designed website:

Social scientists and economists are getting pretty good at reading the tea leaves from available data. When it comes to forecasting future trends in employment and business, we generally have an idea of where things things are headed. Though there are big, unexpected events that occur and throw everything into flux, we can mostly plot out humanity’s course, on a macro level, over the next several decades.

Unfortunately, for a good portion of the world’s poor and working classes, it doesn’t look too good – even though we’re living in a time of unprecedented wealth and technological innovation. That innovation will ultimately replace workers in droves, and some large-scale economic policy shifts are going to be needed to sort things out.

 

But even as we face the prospect of increasing automation, and fewer employment opportunities, most American workers remain confident – perhaps too confident. A look at some new numbers from Pew Research Center shows that worker sentiment toward the future speaks not just to inflated confidence, but perhaps a sense of denial.

The Pew brief cites a 2013 study from Oxford University, which says that as much as 47% of American jobs are subject to automation in the near future. In other words, as much as half of the American work force may be facing a serious employment crisis, and we’re really doing nothing about it. Using that as a starting point, Pew surveyed Americans to drill further down into this dilemma, and see how Americans feel about the unnerving prospect of mass automation.

As expected, a majority (two-thirds) do expect that within 50 years, robots and computers will take over most of the menial work from human employees. But – and here’s the big hang-up – a majority of workers also think that their own specific professions or jobs won’t be impacted.•

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“The Question Is One Of Time Scales”

March 22, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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It flatters us to believe we’re the end result of an extraordinarily rare evolutionary event, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t so.

Stephen Jay Gould famously asked in 1989 if evolution would play out in the same way if we were able to “rewind the tape of life” to the Cambrian. He was sure it would not, that life was a cascading event that would have headed in a different direction, perhaps a very different one. Others vehemently disagree, thinking that variations would occur, sure, but given enough time, life would have wound up roughly in the same condition. 

In a Nautilus article, Zach Zurich takes up the question, believing the answer may lie in outer space. An excerpt:

Does the rarity of any particular sequence of events imply that major shifts in evolution are unlikely to be repeated? The experiments suggest that’s true, but Conway Morris firmly answers, no. “You’d be daft to say that there aren’t accidents of one sort or another. The question is one of time scales,” he says. Given enough years and enough mutating genomes, he believes that natural selection will drive life toward the inevitable adaptations that best fit the organisms’ ecological niche, no matter the contingencies that occur along the way. He believes that one day, all of the E. coli in Lenski’s experiment would evolve to consume citrate, and that all of Liu’s viruses would eventually scale their adaptive Mount Everests. Further, those experiments were conducted in very simple and controlled environments that don’t come close to matching the complex ecosystems that life must adapt to outside the lab. It’s hard to say how real-world environmental pressures might have altered the results.

So far, the biggest shortcoming in all of the attempts to answer the “tape of life” question is that biologists can only draw conclusions based on just one biosphere—the Earth’s. An encounter with extra-terrestrial life would undoubtedly tell us more. Even though alien organisms may not have DNA, they’d likely show similar patterns of evolution. They would need some material that would be passed down to their descendants, which would guide the development of organisms and change over time. As Lenski says, “What’s true for E. coli is also true for some microbe anywhere in the universe.”

Therefore, the same interactions between convergence and contingency might play out on other planets. And if extraterrestrial life faces similar evolutionary pressures to life on Earth, future humans may discover aliens that have convergently evolved an intelligence like ours.5 On the other hand, if contingent events build on one another, driving the development of life down unique paths as Gould suggested, extra-terrestrial life may be extraordinarily strange.•

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“It’s A Pipe Dream Driven By Greed”

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

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It’s said in his NYT obituary that the just-deceased Intel founder Andy Grove “helped midwife the semiconductor revolution” and that “in some ways [he] was considered ‘the father’ of Silicon Valley.” But even the most plugged in of all can’t know everything, can’t collect and decipher information perfectly.

Case in point: Under a quarter century ago, Grove grew frustrated when others argued smartphones could soon become a reality. Peter H. Lewis’ 1992 New York Times article was prescient about the emergence of smartphones, even if it didn’t realize the tools would be for everyone, not just the executive class. Grove, who’s quoted in the piece, was much further off the mark. An excerpt:

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

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

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

At the other end is Andrew Grove, the chairman of the Intel Corporation, the huge chip maker based in Santa Clara, Calif. He says the idea of a wireless personal communicator in every pocket is “a pipe dream driven by greed.”

These devices are expected to combine the best features of personal computers, facsimile machines, computer networks, pagers, personal secretaries, appointment books, address books and even paperback books and pocket CD players — all in a hand-held box operated by pen, or even voice commands.

Stuck in traffic on a business trip, an executive carrying a personal communicator could send and receive electronic mail and facsimile messages from anywhere in the country. She could also call up a local map on a 3-inch by 5-inch screen, draw a line between her current position (confirmed by satellite positioning signals) and her intended destination, and the device would give her specific driving instructions (as well as real-time warnings about traffic jams or accidents). Certainly, these are just predictions for now, but they sure are fun to think about.•

“There’s A Darker Side To All This, Too”

March 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Our information is inside the machine now, but soon we’ll be there, too.

We now enter queries and likes and itineraries into a networked machine that continues to learn more about us and people like us. Soon the Internet of Things will be established, and the machine will escape its casing and live among us, so quiet, not even making a hum, that we’ll barely notice it. Driverless car technology will mature and we’ll be sitting inside a computer which will be inside another computer. In our pockets will be more computers. They’ll all be measuring and tracking, tabulating, taking a pulse, all the time, not just following us but guiding us. The data will be worthwhile, will help us achieve a safer and, in some ways, saner world, but it will be almost impossible to opt out, to be left alone. We’ll be a known quantity. It will seem like progress.

The opening of “How Self-Driving Cars Will Threaten Privacy,” a wonderfully lucid Atlantic essay by Adrienne LaFrance, which opines that the “price of convenience [will be] surveillance”:

Allow me to join you, if I may, on your morning commute sometime in the indeterminate future.

Here we are, stepping off the curb and into the backseat of a vehicle. As you close the car door behind you, the address of your office—our destination—automatically appears on a screen embedded in the back of a leather panel in front of you. “Good morning,” says the car’s humanoid voice, greeting you by name before turning on NPR for you like it does each day.

You decide you’d like a cup of coffee, and you tell the vehicle so. “Peet’s coffee, half-a-mile away,” it confirms. Peet’s, as it turns out, is a few doors down from Suds Cleaners. The car suggests you pick up your dry cleaning while you’re in the neighborhood. “After work instead,” you say. The car tweaks your evening travel itinerary accordingly.

As we run into Peet’s to grab coffee, the car circles the block. Then, we’re back in the vehicle, en route to your office once again. There’s a lunch special coming up at the vegetarian place you like, the car tells you as we pass the restaurant. With your approval, it makes a reservation for Friday. We ride by a grocery store and a list of sale items appears on the screen. With a few taps, you’ve added them to your existing grocery list. The car is scheduled to pick up and deliver your order this evening.

We’re less than a mile from your office now. Just like every morning, your schedule for the morning—a conference call at 10 a.m., a meeting at 11 a.m.—appears on the screen, along with a reminder that today is a colleague’s birthday.

This is the age of self-driving cars, an era when much of the minutiae of daily life is relegated to a machine. Your commute was pleasant, relaxing, and efficient. Along with promising unprecedented safety on public roadways, driverless cars could make our lives a lot easier—freeing up people’s time and attention to focus on other matters while they’re moving from one place to the next.

But there’s a darker side to all this, too.•

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“His Views Were Often At Odds With The Majority Of The AI Community”

March 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

26minsky-obit-web-facebookJumboThe Humanities has had “physics envy” for quite awhile, trying to turn literature and such into a science for some silly reasons rooted in insecurity. It’s probably less understood outside academic circles that AI also long hoped to be like physics, wrapping up staggering complexities into a few laws. Marvin Minsky wasn’t a believer in such tidiness. A Fold article collects thoughts about the recently deceased AI pioneer from some of his colleagues. One, MIT Professor Patti Maes, recalls his parrying with popular beliefs in the field. An excerpt:

Explorations of Consciousness and Longevity

Some of Marvin’s most fascinating work was around the idea of the Mind As Society and the nature of consciousness. Throughout this work, what stood out was his enormous respect for the human.

“When a person says ‘I’m not a machine’, they’re showing a lack of respect for people….because we are the greatest machine in the world.”

He was curious about the fuzzy ideas people hold about the nature of consciousness and marveled at how we can effectively navigate the world without the slightest idea of how we were doing it.

“The mystery of consciousness to me is not ‘Isn’t it wonderful that we’re conscious’, but it’s the opposite. Isn’t it wonderful that we can do things like talk and walk, and understand without having the slightest idea of how it works.”

He also focused on health and longevity, speaking of immortality as a perfectly reasonable goal. He thought deeply about everything from the priorities we should have as a species to body part replacement.

From Pattie Maes:

“Marvin was always a true original, out-of-the-box thinker. While he is of course widely recognized as one of the founders of the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), his views were often at odds with the majority of the AI community.

For many decades, and even today, AI was plagued by “physics envy.” Researchers sought a few universal principles or mechanisms that could model or produce human-like intelligence. Marvin constantly reminded us that the real solution was likely to be a lot more complex. He described a myriad of different mechanisms that may be involved in producing intelligence in his books ‘The Society of Mind’ and ‘The Emotion Machine’ and emphasized the importance of giving computers large amounts of ‘common sense knowledge’, a problem few AI researchers, even today, have attempted to tackle.

I suspect that gradually the field will come to align with his views, recognizing that his views and writings have a timeless and deep quality.”•

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“The Potential Good And Bad Consequences Are Staggering”

March 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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When someone asks if machines can someday become conscious, my first thought is always this: Well, if that’s what they choose.

I intend that answer somewhat, though not entirely, glibly. Machines will achieve superintelligence long before consciousness, so who knows if we or they execute their awakening, if it should ever occur. Similarly, I believe bioengineering will allow humans to achieve a heretofore unapproached IQ level. Not soon, but someday.

AI, it is often said by very brilliant people, is our conqueror awaiting on the horizon, but I think it’s a distance beyond the further limits of our current perception. When we do get close enough to see them, they may resemble us. They will be another version of ourselves, a new “human” resulting from a souped-up evolution of our own design. We will be the end of us.

Of course, I could be completely wrong. We’re likely to find out the answer, however, since computers and science are probably too decentralized for curiosity to be checked. 

David Gelernter watched AlphaGo’s recent smashing triumph and now fears AI more than he does women who work outside the home. In his WSJ essay “Machines That Will Think and Feel,” he argues that “superhuman robots” will become reality once scientists appreciate that emotion is as vital to their creation as rational thought. An excerpt:

AI prophets envision humanlike intelligence within a few decades: not expertise at a single, specified task only but the flexible, wide-ranging intelligence that Alan Turing foresaw in a 1950 paper proposing the test for machine intelligence that still bears his name. Once we have figured out how to build artificial minds with the average human IQ of 100, before long we will build machines with IQs of 500 and 5,000. The potential good and bad consequences are staggering. Humanity’s future is at stake.

Suppose you had a fleet of AI software apps with IQs of 150 (and eventually 500 or 5,000) to help you manage life. You download them like other apps, and they spread out into your phones and computers—and walls, clothes, office, car, luggage—traveling within the dense computer network of the near future that is laid in by the yard, like thin cloth, everywhere.

AI apps will read your email and write responses, awaiting your nod to send them. They will escort your tax return to the IRS, monitor what is done and report back. They will murmur (from your collar, maybe) that the sidewalk is icier than it looks, a friend is approaching across the street, your gait is slightly odd—have you hurt your back? They will log on for you to 19 different systems using 19 different ridiculous passwords, rescuing you from today’s infuriating security protocols. They will answer your phone and tactfully pass on messages, adding any reminders that might help.

In a million small ways, next-generation AI apps will lessen the friction of modern life. Living without them will seem, in retrospect, like driving with no springs or shocks.

But we don’t have the vaguest idea what an IQ of 5,000 would mean.•

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“Factories Have Been Coming Back, But The Jobs Haven’t”

March 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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In this nativist political season, Donald Trump has promised he’d use taxes to force American companies to not relocate factories overseas, but many of them are glad to stay and others are happily returning. The jobs aren’t coming back, mind you, just the factories. The work is being outsourced beyond our species, with machines taking over most of the tasks. That trend will only continue apace, regardless of where the physical plants are located. That’s the real political issue, the increase in automation, and one that’s been almost completely ignored on the trail. That’s probably because there are no easy answers.

From “Manufacturing Is Never Coming Back,” by Ben Casselman at Five Thirty Eight:

A plea to presidential candidates: Stop talking about bringing manufacturing jobs back from China. In fact, talk a lot less about manufacturing, period.

It’s understandable that voters are angry about trade. The U.S. has lost more than 4.5 million manufacturing jobs since NAFTA took effect in 1994. And as Eduardo Porter wrote this week, there’s mounting evidence that U.S. trade policy, particularly with China, has caused lasting harm to many American workers. But rather than play to that anger, candidates ought to be talking about ways to ensure that the service sector can fill manufacturing’s former role as a provider of dependable, decent-paying jobs.

Here’s the problem: Whether or not those manufacturing jobs could have been saved, they aren’t coming back, at least not most of them. How do we know? Because in recent years, factories have been coming back, but the jobs haven’t. Because of rising wages in China, the need for shorter supply chains and other factors, a small but growing group of companies are shifting production back to the U.S. But the factories they build here are heavily automated, employing a small fraction of the workers they would have a generation ago.•

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“The Company Is Testing Pizza Delivery By Robot In New Zealand”

March 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

pizza-large_trans++3480UNUU8UfSxDSaY1n7MGcv5yZLmao6LolmWYJrXnsDescribed by Domino’s corporate execs as “cheeky and endearing” and a “road to the future,” the DRU robot has begun delivering the sludge the company calls pizza. Better to pull a tire from the rolling machine and gnaw on it.

Delivering pies is drudgery and sometimes dangerous, but it is an entry point into the economy for workers, and when the task is transitioned to robots it will leave a hole in the job market that won’t be easy to replace. The same goes for drivers (trucks, taxi, limo, etc.) when autonomous cars are perfected. Progress is good, but it comes with a price that must be addressed.

From Rhiannon Williams at The Telegraph:

Robots have changed our lives in many ways, from advancing our healthcare and automating our factory lines, to taking on dangerous tasks and even taking our place in warfare.

Now Domino’s have developed possibly the greatest use for robots yet – safe and secure pizza delivery in what the company claims is a world first.

The company is testing pizza delivery by robot in New Zealand, known as the Domino’s Robotic Unit (DRU). The three-foot tall battery-powered unit contains a heated compartment for storing up to 10 pizzas, and is capable of self-driving up to 12.5 miles, or 20 km from a shop.

The robot sports sensors for detecting obstacles on its route, and customers are given a unique code to key into the pizza compartment once it arrives at their house to prevent thieves from trying to steal its goods en route.•

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“The Chinese Government Wants To Know About Everything”

March 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Was reading an article, “Botox and Driverless Cars to Spearhead China Growth,” and thinking the obvious, that despite a disdain for democracy, China has become Western in so many ways, especially technological ones. Of course, our new tools also threaten to make the West resemble China’s autocracy, even if it’s more corporatocracy than governmental. Smartphones are the first step, but driverless cars and the Internet of Things will move us so far into the machine, make it so easy for every step–even thought–to be tracked, that it will be impossible to withdraw. These advances will do great things, but there will be costs.

The opening of G. Clay Whittaker’s Daily Beast piece about China’s Minority Report mission:

China has a new strategy in fighting crime, ripped from science fiction and hastily pasted at the top of the list of paranoia-inducing concepts.

It’s called pre-crime. It goes further than sting operations, counterterrorism, or any other government action to preempt criminal activity ever before.

Like the 2002 film Minority Report, China wants to fight crimes before they happen. They want to know they’ll happen before they’re planned—before the criminal even knows he’s going to be part of them. Bloomberg Business reported that the Communist Party “has directed one of the country’s largest state-run defense contractors, China Electronics Technology Group, to develop software to collate data on jobs, hobbies, consumption habits, and other behavior of ordinary citizens to predict terrorist acts before they occur.”

The Chinese government wants to know about everything: every text a person sends, every extra stop they make on the way home. It’s designed for dissidents, but it means that they’ll know every time a smoker buys a pack of cigarettes, how much gas a car owner uses, what time the new mom goes to bed, and what’s in the bachelor’s refrigerator.

It’s a scary thought, especially when you consider that the main target of Chinese pre-crime efforts wouldn’t be “terrorists,” murderers, rapists, or child molesters, but rather dissidents of every shape and size.•

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“Technology May Be Even More Precise Than Human Employees”

March 18, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Collars white and blue will be impacted by automation in the coming decades, the question being whether enough new jobs will be created to make up for the losses of lawyers and livery drivers. 

Two passages follow, one from a Business Insider piece by Kate Taylor on Carl’s Jr. CEO Andy Puzder who boldly stepped into the future (and put his foot in the mouth) in announcing he wants to open an Eatsa-esque automated location, while simultaneously bashing humans laborers, those pests, and their requests for living wages and basic rights. The second excerpt comes from a Financial Times article by Jane Croft about the projected technological transition in the legal profession that will favor some while displacing others.

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From Business Insider:

First and foremost, the technology has to work every time. For the time being, Puzder doesn’t think that it’s likely that any machine could take over the more nuanced kitchen work of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s.

But for more rote tasks like grilling a burger or taking an order, technology may be even more precise than human employees.

“They’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case,” says Puzder of swapping employees for machines.

…

Puzder says that a restaurant that’s 100% automated would have one big plus for millennials: no social interaction.

“Millennials like not seeing people,” he says. “I’ve been inside restaurants where we’ve installed ordering kiosks … and I’ve actually seen young people waiting in line to use the kiosk where there’s a person standing behind the counter, waiting on nobody.”•

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From Financial Times:

Around 114,000 jobs in the legal sector are likely to become automated in the next 20 years as technology transforms the profession, a new study has found.

Automation, changes in the demands from clients and the rise of millennials in the workplace will alter the types of skills sought after by law firms, according to the new study by Deloitte which predicts a tipping point for law firms by 2020.

Technology has already contributed to a reduction of around 31,000 jobs in the sector including roles such as legal secretaries, the report said, as it predicted that another 39 per cent of jobs are at “high risk” of being made redundant by machines in the next two decades.

The sector is currently growing; there has been an overall increase of approximately 80,000 jobs — most of which are higher skilled and better paid, such as barristers and solicitors.

The study also predicts a healthier future for highly skilled lawyers. It points to projections by the Warwick Institute for Employment Research which estimates that 25,000 extra workers will be needed in legal activities sector between 2015 and 2020.•

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“Oooo, Does Coca-Cola Know That I Masturbated?”

March 18, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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In the passage I posted from his recent Reddit AMA, Douglas Rushkoff, who’s just published Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, engaged in an esoteric exchange about possible economic outcomes in our newly wired world. In a FiveThirtyEight podcast hosted by Jody Avirgan, the author notes that corporations collecting metadata, part of our paranoid-making contemporary financial reality, is creepy even if it studies us as parts of groups rather than as individuals. An excerpt:

Jody Avirgan:

We obsess about the creepiness of a corporation or a government kind of knowing about us as individuals, but you say that the part that creeps you out the most is the metadata notion — to think of yourself as grouped, not as an individual.

Douglas Rushkoff:

When people think of privacy, they think of the content rather than the context. So the privacy is like, “Oooo, does Coca-Cola know that I masturbated?”

Jody Avirgan:

I don’t know why Coca-Cola would want to know that, but I bet someone in Coca Cola is trying to figure it out.

Douglas Rushkoff:

And they do. And they do. Believe me, statistically they know.

Jody Avirgan:

I will never be able to forget that notion.You’ve just implanted that in my head.

Douglas Rushkoff:

[Laughs] That’s the social programming of the activist in media trying to plant memetic constructs that slowly deteriorate our brand imagery. It’s not the specific thing that they’re going to find out, it’s the groups that you’re in, it’s the metadata. So that, when you see the study that Facebook knows with 80 percent accuracy whether an adolescent boy is going to [come out as] homosexual in the next six months — that’s weird. Companies know things about you that you don’t yet know yourself, and they only know them in terms of probability. The world that you see is being configured to a probable reality that you haven’t yet chosen.•

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“Just Imagine A Small Lunar Base At One Of The Lunar Poles”

March 18, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Brian Clegg doesn’t believe a moon colony could be profitable, but what if new technologies and better financial planning rendered the project relatively inexpensive? And what if the non-economic gains, at least the immediate ones, could benefit us in numerous other ways?

Jurica Dujmovic of Marketwatch pointed me toward a New Space article by Alexandra Hall, Chris McKay and John Cumbers, which proposes just such a low-cost lunar settlement be established. They believe recent advances in launch capacity and lessons learned from the International Space Station could seriously shave costs.

An excerpt:

Just imagine a small lunar base at one of the lunar poles operated by NASA or an International Consortium and modeled according to the U.S. Antarctic Station at South Pole. The crew of about 10 people would consist of a mixture of staff and field scientists. Personnel rotations might be three times a year. The main activity would be supporting field research selected by peer-reviewed proposals. Graduate students doing fieldwork for their thesis research would dominate the activity. No one lives at the base permanently but there is always a crew present. The base is heavily supported by autonomous and remotely operated robotic devices.

The activities at this Moon base would be focusing on science, as is the case in the Antarctic. It could provide an official U.S. Government presence on the Moon and its motivation would be rooted in U.S. national policy—again as are the U.S. Antarctic bases. A lunar base would provide a range of technologies and programmatic precedents supporting a long-term NASA research base on Mars.

None of these ideas is new, but given that all prior assumptions for execution revolved around such an activity consuming all or most of the NASA budget for decades, then progress has been extremely limited.

Now imagine that the cost of such a lunar base was within NASA’s existing deep space human spaceflight budget of $3–4 billion per year. Suddenly it would be an easy sell and would receive no opposition from the sections of the space community that are focused on other destinations.

The logic that low cost changes the terms of the debate about a NASA Moon base and enables a consensus path forward to establishing a base also applies to private/commercial endeavors. When the cost of a short stay on the Moon drops into the tens of millions of dollars per person, it starts to tap into the same market that has given us private spaceflight participants to the International Space Station (ISS). Furthermore, the presence of a government base is also the presence of a customer on the Moon—a factor that can stimulate the development of services, supplies, and technology to the benefit of all.•

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“The More You Ask Of Viv, The More It Will Get To Know You”

March 18, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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With his AI enterprise, Viv, Dag Kittlaus is not trying to create Frankenstein but Igor, a digital assistant that goes far beyond Siri (which he co-created), one that attaches a pleasing voice to a “giant brain in the sky.” It’s not easy, however, for technologists to discuss such heady enterprises without offering phrases, like the one in the headline, embedded with unintended meanings.

From Marco della Cava’s USA Today piece about technology talk at SXSW, which featured Steven Levy questioning Kittlaus:

When the moderator, tech author Steven Levy, asked Kittlaus if in fact supercomputers might not take over for entrepreneurs, using their digital brains to create things faster than humans, [Dag] Kittlaus nodded.

“Yes, it will happen,” he said. “It’s just a matter of when.”

Kittlaus, it can be argued, is hastening the arrival of that day. Later this year, he will unveil Viv, an open source and cloud-based personal assistant that will allow humans “to talk to the Internet” and have the Internet talk back.

“The more you ask of Viv, the more it will get to know you,” he said. “Siri was chapter one, and now it’s almost like a new Internet age is coming. Viv will be a giant brain in the sky.”

Kittlaus said Viv would differ from Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Amazon’s Echo by being able to make mental leaps.

For example, asking Viv “What’s the weather near the Super Bowl” would cause it to “write its own program to find the answer, one that first determines where the Super Bowl is, and then what the weather will be in that city,” he said.•

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A Brief Note About Pre-Edison Talking Machines

March 17, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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From the April 26, 1925 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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“I Have Wanted That To Be The Future For…Forever”

March 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Steve Wozniak just completed one of his wide-ranging AMAs at Reddit, providing thoughtful commentary on myriad subjects. On the state of the company he cofounded, he admires Tim Cook’s management though he has misgivings about the Apple Watch (and who doesn’t!). The Woz longs for the day when we can talk to machines that know us as well as–even better than–our human friends, which will be wonderful and creepy. In the Apple/FBI scrum, he comes down on the side civil liberties, which is unsurprising if you know his history. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

What is Tim Cook doing right/wrong, in your opinion?

Steve Wozniak:

Tim Cook is acknowledging the employees of Apple and the customers of Apple as real people. He is continuing a strong tradition that Steve Jobs was known for of making good products that help people do things they want to do in their life, and not taking the company into roads of, “Oh, we’ll make all our money like by knowing you and advertising to you.” We’ll make good products. And you know, I started out as a hardware product guy, so I’m glad to see that.

I worry a little bit about – I mean I love my Apple Watch, but – it’s taken us into a jewelry market where you’re going to buy a watch between $500 or $1100 based on how important you think you are as a person. The only difference is the band in all those watches. Twenty watches from $500 to $1100. The band’s the only difference? Well this isn’t the company that Apple was originally, or the company that really changed the world a lot. So it might be moving, but you’ve got to follow, you know. You’ve got to follow the paths of where the markets are.

Everything else, I’m very approving of Tim Cook, because every time we have a new iOS update, I’m very happy that it’s doing things that really affect people. Like transferring calls from my phone to my computer, etc. I really love even the Airplay, and all that. So, I love the software, and I love the hardware, and nothing’s letting me down. So I approve very strongly of Tim Cook and the new Apple. I dearly miss Steve Jobs too, but, that’s all.

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Question:

What are your thoughts on the FBI/DOJ vs Apple ordeal at the moment?

Steve Wozniak:

All through my time with personal computers from the start, I developed an attitude that things like movement towards newer, better technologies – like the Macintosh computer, like the touchscreen of the iPhone – that these were making the human more important than the technology. We did not have to modify our ways of living. So the human became very important to me. And how do you represent what humanity is?

You know what, I have things in my head, some very special people in my life that I don’t talk about, that mean so much to me from the past. Those little things that I keep in my head are my little secrets. It’s a part of my important world, my whole essence of my being. I also believe in honesty. If you tell somebody, “I am not snooping on you,” or, “I am giving you some level of privacy; I will not look in your drawers,” then you should keep your word and be honest. And I always try to avoid being a snoop myself, and it’s rare in time that we can look back and say, “How should humans be treated?” Not, “How can the police run everything?”

I was brought up in a time when communist Russia under Stalin was thought to be, everybody is spied on, everybody is looked into, every little thing can get you secretly thrown into prison. And, no. We had our Bill of Rights. And it’s just dear to me. The Bill of Rights says some bad people won’t do certain bad things because we’re protecting humans to live as humans.

So, I come from the side of personal liberties. But there are also other problems. Twice in my life I wrote things that could have been viruses. I threw away every bit of source code. I just got a chill inside. These are dangerous, dangerous things, and if some code gets written in an Apple product that lets people in, bad people are going to find their way to it, very likely.

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Question:

What is your opinion on how immersive our technology is becoming? We use computers in some form, almost constantly. Do you ever feel in your own life you that it becomes overwhelming?

Steve Wozniak:

I have that feeling all the time because I like a nice, quiet, simple life. I grew up shy. I’m more into products than I’m into socializing. And I do not carry around my phone answering every text message instantly. I am not one of those people.

I wait until I’m alone in my places and get on my computer and do things where I think I’m more efficient. I really see a lot of people that are dragged into it, but you know, I don’t criticize them. When you have change, it’s not that the change in how people are behaving different to you is bad or good, it’s just different.

So that’s sort of the modern way, and you know the millennials, every generation wants to criticize the next generation for missing out on things like personal human contact, but I’ll tell you a little story. When we started Apple, Steve Jobs and I talked about how we wanted to make blind people as equal and capable as sighted people, and you’d have to say we succeeded when you look at all the people walking down the sidewalk looking down at something in their hands and totally oblivious to everything around them!

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Question:

What is your favorite up and coming gadget? Anything people don’t know about yet?

Steve Wozniak:

Well, I would think probably one of them is certainly the Oculus Rift, or any of the VR headsets. I love putting mine on and watching a basketball game live; it was just an experience that you can’t believe. Sometimes I come out of a VR world, take off the helmet, and I can’t believe I’m actually sitting in my office, at a desk at home. So, that’s one of the big ones.

Right now, Amazon Echo; it’s getting so popular among the people that use it and they speak so highly of it, and it’s so inexpensive. I see a lot of developers that went into smartphones jumping onto that. It’s a platform, and when you have a platform that everybody else is writing apps for and connecting to, basically they’re advertising your company as much as you are.

Obviously, I’m very interested in the evolution of self-driving cars. Right now, the assist that they give you for keeping in your lane and cruise control…the cruise control started back in 2004 actually, adjusting your distance. I love driving my Tesla so much, I just smile! I sit there in the driver’s seat, and I kinda look over at my wife, and I just smile. I’m so happy, not using my hands or feet. So, I think the progression towards self-driving cars is going to be a good one. But it falls into that category of AI.

Now, the AI that impresses me, I fell in love 10 years ago – well not 10 years ago, but whenever it started; Siri was an app you could buy for the iPhone, and I bought it. And for one year, Apple didn’t have it. I just spoke of it as the app that changed my life, because I get to live as a human, saying things out of my head the way I would to another human, and a machine understands me. And I have wanted that to be the future for…forever.

Actually, ever since our Newton message pad, where I could type in, “Sara, dentist, Tuesday, 2 PM,” and click the assist button, and it would open up the calendar; Tuesday at 2 PM, it would put the word dentist, and it would grab Sara out of my contact list. I hand wrote with my own muscles a message for myself, for a human, and a machine understood me. So, I want that to get better and better; machines understanding what we mean, so that we can eventually communicate with them as our best, most trusted friends that know our own hearts and souls better than other humans.•

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