By any standards, California’s Luther Burbank was a virtuoso botanist and horticulturist, mixing, matching and creating. Among the hundreds of exotic varieties he hatched from his experimental Santa Rosa farm, greenhouse and nursery–which included plants, potatoes, fruits and flowers–was the spineless cactus. The “plant wizard,” as he was called, was a beloved public figure until months before his death in 1926 when he created a furor by simply expressing his skepticism about an afterlife. “I am an infidel,” he asserted. Burbank was mocked openly in some quarters for such heresy. Twenty years before his dramatic, if abbreviated, fall from grace, he was the subject an admiring1906 New York Times profile. The opening:
Every summer our transatlantic steamers are burdened with great throngs of travelers beginning their pilgrimages to the shrines of departed genius. In America, too, we may visit places made illustrious by the former presence of Washington, Jefferson, Lee, Lincoln, Emerson, Poe, and other native men of genius. But, disguise it as we will, the visits are at last to cemeteries, where everything is described in the past tense.
But there is in America at this moment a man of the very greatest genius, just in the flower of his fame, a visit to whom not only emphasizes his genius and his leadership in thought and living things, but also enables one to see far into the future. There is a searchlight of truth in constant operation at Santa Rosa, Cal., and the mind and heart of Luther Burbank are the lenses through which the light is focused. Long ago I resolved to beg the privilege of standing near the searchlight and making a few observations as it illumined some of the peaks of knowledge I could never hope to scale.
Our so-called “Captains of Industry” are busy men, but many of their duties and responsibilities they may delegate to others. Luther Burbank is the busiest man in the world. I make that statement without fear of successful contradiction. His ship is alone on a vast sea of nature’s secrets. With him on the voyage of discovery are a few near relations to encourage him, a dear friend or two for protection and companionship, and several humble helpers to feed the boilers and oil the engines. But he is more alone than was Columbus, because he has no first officer, no second officer, no mate. Like Columbus, upon him alone falls the responsibility for the expedition; he alone knows why the vessel’s prow is kept always in one direction; he alone has faith that it must ultimately touch the shores of truth and reality.•
Once a thing is developed and the dollar signs are in sight, venture capital is a really effective means of bringing it all home. But in those early days when it’s just risk without reward, government plays a crucial role. For political means, Mitt Romney excoriated the Obama Administration in 2012 for investing in alternative energy companies like Solyndra (a bomb) and Tesla (a boom), but as the philanthropic Bill Gates 2.0 recently pointed out, federal investment in such technologies is vital. Even far-less-essential tools like the Internet would not have gotten off the ground without DARPA dollars.
In a smart Alternet Q&A, Lynn Stuart Parramore asks economist Mariana Mazzucato about the interdependence of public and private sectors in birthing new industries and devices, including the ever-present iPhone. An excerpt:
Lynn Parramore:
We constantly hear that anything to do with government is incompetent and inefficient. Yet as you show, many of the industries and products that make our lives better wouldn’t exist without government-funded research. The whole process of economic growth is hugely interdependent with governmental action.
What about something like the iPhone? Is it a product of Silicon Valley magic and the genius of Steve Jobs? Or is there more to the story?
Mariana Mazzucato:
Economists have recognized that government has a role to play in markets, but only to fix failures, like monopolies, for example. Yet if we look at what governments have done around the world, they have not just stepped in to address failures. They have actually actively shaped and created markets. This is the case in IT, biotech, nanotech and in today’s emerging green economy. Public sector funds have not only supported basic research, but also applied research and even early-stage, high-risk company finance. This is important because most venture capital funds are too short-termist and exit-driven to deal with the highly uncertain and lengthy innovation process.
I often use the iPhone as an example of how governments shape markets, because what makes the iPhone “smart” and not stupid is what you can do with it. And yes, everything you can do with an iPhone was government-funded. From the Internet that allows you to surf the Web, to GPS that lets you use Google Maps, to touchscreen display and even the SIRI voice activated system —all of these things were funded by Uncle Sam through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NASA, the Navy, and even the CIA.
These agencies are allmission driven, which matters to their success, including who they are able to hire. The Department of Energy was recently run by Steve Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, who wanted the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to do for energy what DARPA did for the Internet. Would he have bothered leaving academia to join the civil service just to “fix” markets? Surely not. That’s boring.•
If we’re talking “ever,” then of course diagnostics and other key medical functions will be revolutionized by computer hardware, which continues to grow smaller, faster and cheaper. But will it be later than sooner? Measurement and maintenance of biological functions are much more challenging tasks to perform than simply using a smartphone to order an Uber or burger.
In a FT blog post, Andrew McAfee addresses concerns that the health sector is being left behind in the Digital Age. An excerpt:
All the gear packed into most modern phones — compasses, accelerometers, gyroscopes, thermometers, WiFi and cellular antennas, and so on — have been getting better, smaller and cheaper at a rate that makes Moore’s Law look pokey by comparison. It’s easy to conclude that this is just what happens when the protean properties of silicon are brought to bear on an industry.
At a private event I attended recently, however, the CEO of a global pharmaceutical company said that sensors for healthcare were not improving quickly enough, and that we don’t yet have the gear we need for next-generation diagnosis and monitoring. The current turmoil at the USblood diagnostics start-up Theranosseems to support this view. Adamning exposein the Wall Street Journal revealed (and Theranos has confirmed) that the company uses industry-standard machines instead of its own equipment for most of the blood work it performs, and that its proprietary methods have so far only been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for a single test.
So will the sensor revolution skip healthcare? Will our bodies not ever be brought into the “internet of things”? I think the answer to these questions is “no.” We’ll get great gear in this area, but it might take a while.•
Apple is just crazy enough to (most likely) enter the auto industry, but it assuredly has no intention of going into the non-profit university business. But should the company do just that?
It’s easy to spend someone else’s money, and Apple might be better served by instead investing in an attempt at a latter-day Bell Labs á la Google X, but in a really smart Marginal Revolution post, economist Alex Tabarrok argues that Apple should devote some of its vast banked wealth to buy a university and reinvent it. An excerpt:
Apple is a for-profit corporation not a charity but there are plenty of ways to make money from a non-profit university. Aside from the tax breaks and other deductions, Apple University would be a proving ground for educational technologies that would be sold to every other university in the world. New textbooks built for the iPad and its successors would greatly increase the demand for iPads. Apple-designed courses built using online technologies, a.i. tutors, and virtual reality experimental worlds could become the leading form of education worldwide. Big data analytics from Apple University textbooks and courses would lead to new and better ways of teaching. As a new university, Apple could experiment with new ways of organizing degrees and departments and certifying knowledge. Campuses in Delhi, Seoul, Shanghai, Berlin, and Sao Paulo could provide opportunities for studying abroad. Apple’s reputation would attract top students, especially, for example, if it started with a design and business school. Top students would lead Apple University to be highly ranked. The more prestigious Apple University became the greater would be the demand for Apple University educational products.•
There were three people ahead of me at the checkout line at Best Buy yesterday, and it took 45 minutes to pay for my purchase, so I hope human beings are soon replaced by superintelligent robots. We had our shot. Didn’t pan out.
I’m not one who thinks conscious machines are on the verge of “awakening” and destroying us, but I acknowledge that as AI assumes more responsibilities and is permitted to teach itself via Deep Learning, ghosts within those systems can lead to a cascading disaster.
Forbesreported this month: “The vision of talking to your computer like in Star Trek and it fully understanding and executing those commands are about to become reality in the next 5 years.” Antoine Blondeau, CEO at Sentient Technologies Holdings, recently toldWiredthat in five years he expects “massive gains” for human efficiency as a result of artificial intelligence, especially in the fields of health care, finance, logistics and retail.
Blondeau further envisions the rise of “evolutionary intelligence agents,” that is, computers which “evolve by themselves – trained to survive and thrive by writing their own code—spawning trillions of computer programs to solve incredibly complex problems.”
While Silicon Valley enthusiasts hail the potential gains from artificial intelligence for human efficiency and the social good, Hollywood has hyped its threats. AI-based enemies have been box office draws at least since HAL cut Frank Poole’s oxygen hose in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And 2015 has truly been the year of fictional AI provocateurs and villains with blockbuster movies including Terminator Genisys, Ex-Machina, and The Avengers: Age of Ultron.
But are the risks of AI the domain of libertarians and moviemakers, or are there red flags to be seen in the specter of “intelligence agents?” Silicon Valley cannot have “exponential” technological growth and expect only positive outcomes. Similarly, Luddites can’t wish away the age of AI, even if it might not be the version we see in the movies.•
Let’s not kill all the lawyers–imagine the shitload of personal-injury lawsuits if we tried–but merely replace them with algorithms.
I don’t know if most young attorneys will be done away with inside of a decade, but as soon as software can replace a legal task, it will be adopted. Positions will grow scarcer as the industry becomes more automated.
The opening of an article on the topic by David Kravet at Ars Technica:
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” —Henry VI, Part 2.
Shakespeare interpretations aside, it seems that artificial intelligence is on its way to, well, killing off lawyers. That’s according to arecent survey(PDF) of law firm leaders who say that within 10 years, new attorneys and paralegals could be replaced by an IBM Watson-like computer. The study, which included responses from high-ranking lawyers at 320 firms with at least 50 lawyers on staff, found that 35 percent of the top brass at responding law firms envision replacing first-year associates with some type of AI in the coming decade. Less than 25 percent of respondents gave the same answer in a similar survey in 2011. About 20 percent of those anonymous respondents also said second- and third-year attorneys could also be replaced by technology over the same period. Half of law firm leaders said that paralegals could be killed off by computers.•
Katie Allen has written a Guardian piece about a recent Deloitte study which suggests machines won’t be stealing our jobs. Fucking lazy robots! Get to work!
The research argues that machines have always taken on the worst of jobs, creating better new ones, leaving us with more disposable income for luxuries and grooming and such. I don’t think the report is controversial in its historical view: Technology has traditionally been a job-creating force. The Industrial Revolution was boon, not bane, for workers.
But the past isn’t necessarily prologue. What if it truly is different this time, employment becomes too scarce and the distribution of wealth is exceedingly uneven? In the aggregate, it would be great if AI did a lot of the work, but would you want to be a truck driver right now?
The opening:
In the 1800s it was the Luddites smashing weaving machines. These days retail staff worry about automatic checkouts. Sooner or later taxi drivers will be fretting over self-driving cars.
The battle between man and machines goes back centuries. Are they taking our jobs? Or are they merely easing our workload?
A study by economists at the consultancy Deloitte seeks to shed new light on the relationship between jobs and the rise of technology by trawling through census data for England and Wales going back to 1871.
Their conclusion is unremittingly cheerful: rather than destroying jobs, technology has been a “great job-creating machine”. Findings by Deloitte such as a fourfold rise in bar staff since the 1950s or a surge in the number of hairdressers this century suggest to the authors that technology has increased spending power, therefore creating new demand and new jobs.
Their study, shortlisted for the Society of Business Economists’ Rybczynski prize, argues that the debate has been skewed towards the job-destroying effects of technological change, which are more easily observed than than its creative aspects.•
Sir Martin Rees believes if extraterrestrial life exists it’s probably robotic, which makes Sir Martin Rees the greatest person ever. Now if we can just alert this otherworldly machine intelligence of our whereabouts and it can come down to Earth and eat our tiny, delicious brains, things will be perfect.
I’m only half-kidding.
The best-case scenario is that humans will ultimately evolve into a combination of carbon and silicon, becoming human-ish rather than human. The worst-case scenario: extinction. After all, those who aren’t busy being born are busy dying. In Rees’ excellent Nautilus piece on the topic, the astronomer points out that any life in the inhospitable environs of outer space has probably already successfully transitioned into that of conscious machines. An excerpt:
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: the rate of travel, not the direction of travel. The cautious amongst us envisage timescales of centuries rather than decades for these transformations. Be that as it may, the timescales for technological advance are but an instant compared to the timescales of the Darwinian selection that led to humanity’s emergence—and (more relevantly) they are less than a millionth of the vast expanses of time lying ahead. So the outcomes of future technological evolution will surpass humans by as much as we (intellectually) surpass a bug.
There are, after all, chemical and metabolic limits to the size and processing power of “wet” organic brains. Maybe we’re close to these already. It is remarkable that our brains, which have changed little since our ancestors roamed the African savannah, have allowed us to understand the counterintuitive worlds of the quantum and the cosmos. But there is no reason to think that our comprehension is matched to an understanding of all key features of reality. Scientific frontiers are advancing fast, but we may sometime “hit the buffers.” There may be phenomena crucial to our long-term destiny that we are not aware of, any more than a monkey comprehends the nature of stars and galaxies.
But no such limits constrain silicon-based computers (still less, perhaps, quantum computers): For these, the potential for further development could be as dramatic as the evolution from monocellular organisms to humans. By any definition of “thinking,” the amount and intensity that’s done by organic human-type brains will be utterly swamped by the cerebrations of AI. Abstract thinking by biological brains has underpinned the emergence of all culture and science. But this activity—spanning tens of millennia at most—will be a brief precursor to the more powerful intellects of the inorganic post-human era.
This will be especially true in space, which is a hostile place for biological intelligence.•
Plastic surgery certainly says something about us as individuals and perhaps nationally as well. A mass of people in a particular country choose to lift or resize busts or butts or brows for a variety of factors, some of which are shared. In an Economist article, the natural beauties at that publication assign the popularity of rhinoplasty in Iran to women having to cover everything but the face. That still doesn’t speak to why a smaller nose is thought to be more attractive or why so many Persian men are also opting for them. An excerpt:
MANY would agree that Persians are among the world’s most naturally attractive people. Yet ever more of them are submitting to the knife. It is common to see women walking Tehran’s streets sporting a plaster on the bridge of their nose. “It’s just a thing everyone does,” says one woman who had the operation at the age of 19.
Sitting in his brightly coloured surgery in Tehran, Ali Asghar Shirazi explains that the majority of women—and an increasing number of men—are most preoccupied by the size of their snout. “Iranian noses are generally bigger than European ones,” says Mr Shirazi. “They don’t want Western noses; they want smaller ones.”
The phenomenon is perhaps surprising in a country far more conservative than plastic surgery hotspots such as America, Brazil and South Korea. But there is a good reason why Iranians have a penchant for the alteration. “For ladies who have to cover themselves apart from the face, it is the only thing they can show,” says Mr Shirazi. “A boob job will only get you so far if you have to spend most of the day shrouded in a manteau, the mackintosh-like outer garment almost all Iranian women wear.•
Kurt Waldheim had a past, and it caught up to him, if belatedly. The stunning reveal of his Nazi-linked wartime activities was remembered at the time of his death in James Graff’s 2007 Time article “The Skeletons of Kurt Waldheim“:
When I went to visit Waldheim in 1994, he was ensconced in his opulent offices at the Austrian League for the United Nations — but he was still under siege. Freedom of Information Act requests had pried open the 1987 Washington report that put Waldheim on the Justice Department’s “watch list.” The document placed him in Banja Luka in the summer of 1942, when the Nazis had rounded up the city’s Jews and the Wehrmacht was fighting an anti-partisan offensive in the Kozara Mountains to the north. Reprisal killings against civilians were part of the Germans’ brutal efforts to quell armed dissent in the region. The report didn’t prove any direct personal responsibility of Waldheim, who was serving as a quartermaster’s deputy, but its author, Neal Sher, argued that “one doesn’t have to pull the trigger to be implemented in crimes.” Waldheim was having none of that: “unfounded allegations and accusations, with no proof given,” he told me.
The question of guilt in a command structure is no less complex now than it was then; Waldheim was no card-carrying Nazi, but he had been an officer in a unit that had a very dirty war in the Balkans. His clean-vest spiel particularly rankled me because I’d been spending a fair amount of time in Banja Luka myself. Less than a year before my interview with Waldheim, the city’s principal mosque had been totally razed by Serbs, and most of the Muslim population driven out of the city. In the summer of 1992, Serbs in Banja Luka had taken me on a bizarre tour of the camps further west where they held Muslim prisoners. The cruelty of the conflict, the suffering of thousands languishing in refugee camps, had already left a permanent mark on me. Could the conflict have been any less gutting in 1942?•
Before the Waldheim Affair became an international fiasco during the 1980s and he was banned from the United States, the future Austrian president with the Nazi past spoke with PBS talk show host James Day in New York in 1973.
_______________________
In a science-centric 1978 issue of Penthouse, a periodical published by the leathery beaver merchant Bob Guccione, there’san interviewby Richard Ballad with the late NASA astronomerRobert Jastrow, who possessed an interesting mix of beliefs. A staunch supporter of the Singularity, he saw computers as a new lifeform, and he was also a denier of human-made climate change. An excerpt:
Robert Jastrow:
I say that computers, as we call them, are a newly emerging form of life, one made out of silicon rather than carbon. Silicon is chemically similar to carbon, but it can enter into a sort of metal structure in which it is relatively invulnerable to damage, is essentially immortal, and can be extended to an arbitrarily large brain size. Such new forms of life will have neither human emotions nor any of the other trappings we associate with human life.
Penthouse:
You use the term life to describe what we usually think of as lifeless creatures. One might call them “computers with delusions of grandeur.” How can you say they are a form of life?
Robert Jastrow:
They are new forms of life. They react to stimuli, they think, they reason, they learn by experience. They don’t, however, procreate by sexual union or die — unless we want them to die. We take care of their reproduction for them. We also take care of their food needs, which are electrical. They are evolving at a dynamite speed. They have increased in capabilities by a power of- ten every seven years since the dawn of the computer age, in 1950. Man, on the other hand, has not changed for a long time. By the end of the twentieth century, the curves of human and computer growth will intersect, and by that time, I am confident, quasi-human intelligences wilt be with us. They will be similar in mentality to a fresh- ly minted Ph.D.: very strong, very narrow, with no human wisdom, but very powerful in brute reasoning strength. They will be working in combination with our managers, who will be providing the human intuition. Silicon entities will be controlling and regulating the complex affairs of our twenty-first-century society. The probability is that this will happen virtually within our own lifetime, What happens in the thirtieth century, or the fortieth? There are 6 billion years left before the sun dies, and over that long period I doubt whether biological intelligence will continue to be the seat of intelligence for the highest forms of life on this planet. Nor do I think that those advanced beings on other planets, who are older than we are, if they exist, are housed in shells of bone on a fish model of carbon chemistry Silicon, I think, is the answer. …
Penthouse:
Will humans as we know them die out like the dodo?
Robert Jastrow:
It may be that a symbiotic union will exist between humans and new forces of life, between biological and nonbiological intelligence — and it may now exist on other planets. We might continue to serve the needs of the silicon brain while it serves ours.
Penthouse:
Do you think that the computer beings will triumph in the end?
Robert Jastrow:
Yes. Not “triumph” in the sense of a war but triumph in the same sense that the mammals triumphed over the dinosaurs. It will be the next stage of perfection.•
Jastrow discussing his ideas about the Big Bang and theology:
________________________
The 1970s video below has comments by Randolph Hearst made to NBC News about his daughter Patty, who was at the time doing a walkabout through the Radical Left. The heiress was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, (perhaps) brainwashed, and ultimately joined in the group’s acts of domestic terrorism. “I think she’s staying underground just like a lot of kids stay underground,” her father said, accurately assessing the situation. Before the end of the decade, she was captured, convicted, imprisoned and saw her sentence commuted. In January 2001, Bill Clinton granted her a full pardon.
The Dallas Cowboys under GM Tex Schrammand control-freak coach Tom Landry favoredbleeding-edge technological, computer and neuropsychological systems, but according to psychiatrist Dr. Arnold Mandell’sThe Nightmare Season, the San Diego Chargers of 1973 were hopped up on drugs intended to produce “rageful football syndrome.” Whenever anybody talks about the good old days when sports were “clean,” realize they’re being nostalgic for a yesterday that never actually existed.
From Barbara Wilkins’ 1976People profileof the shrink and his controversial book:
I’ve tried every drug except cocaine,” says Dr. Arnold Mandell. “LSD? An incredibly beautiful, insightful experience. Lithium? It takes my bright edge off. Heroin? Just like morphine, a cosmically sensual experience. Marijuana? Not that interesting.”
Because Mandell, a psychiatrist, is a prominent researcher into brain chemistry and psychopharmacology, his experiments with dangerous drugs are understandable. But it is not so easy to comprehend why Dr. Mandell ever got involved professionally with the San Diego Chargers.
Actually, Mandell first became interested in football because of his son, Ross, now 13, and he was also a social friend of Chargers owner Gene Klein. And in 1972 San Diego was having such a miserable season that coach Harland Svare was willing to try anything. He asked Mandell to become resident shrink for a team which then included Duane Thomas, the All-Pro recluse, and Tim Rossovich, the linebacker notorious for eating glass. Observing the players close up, Mandell (who insisted that he not be paid) says he discovered that they were typecast: those who played on offense were conservative and more disciplined; most defensive players were free spirits.
Mandell also learned how much some team members depended on amphetamines. “Doc,” one player told him, “I’m not about to go out there against a guy who’s grunting and drooling and comin’ at me with big dilated pupils unless I’m in the same condition.”
Mandell says that 50 to 60 percent of the Chargers used drugs to produce “the rageful football syndrome.” But he argues, “This was not drug abuse. There was great self-discipline. They hated it, but it was drug use for function. Nobody used it off season.”
If Mandell had kept his ruminations to himself, he might still have friends on the team. Instead he wrote a book, The Nightmare Season, out this month, portions of which were published in a San Diego newspaper. His erstwhile friend Gene Klein says, “The book is totally inaccurate. It’s full of lies and innuendos.” And when Harland Svare was fired as general manager, he blamed Mandell’s book for “destroying my credibility” and vowed to “pursue all remedies available.”
“I love Gene,” psychiatrist Mandell says, “I love Harland. If they can’t see the love in the book, it makes me crazy.” The National Football League did not see it either, apparently, and banned Mandell unofficially from NFL locker rooms for life, as well as fining Klein, Svare and eight San Diego players.•
No one need blindly trust Monsanto, but not supporting the development of Genetically Modified Organisms is lunacy. The ability to create strains of food impervious to drought and disease is not just a matter of choice but one of national security–of species security, actually. There’s no reason for thinking natural good and GMOs bad, especially since plenty of poisons exist in nature.
Sadly, many European nations are making it difficult for scientists and private enterprise to pursue these needed safeguards on the global food supply, with their policies having ramifications in Africa.
CALL it the “Coalition of the Ignorant.” By the first week of October, 17 European countries — including Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland — had used new European Union rules to announce bans on the cultivation of genetically modified crops.
These prohibitions expose the worrying reality of how far Europe has gone in setting itself against modern science. True, the bans do not apply directly to scientific research, and a few countries — led by England — have declared themselves open to cultivation of genetically modified organisms, or G.M.O.s. But the chilling effect on biotech science in Europe will be dramatic: Why would anyone spend years developing genetically modified crops in the knowledge that they will most likely be outlawed by government fiat?
In effect, the Continent is shutting up shop for an entire field of human scientific and technological endeavor. This is analogous to America’s declaring an automobile boycott in 1910, or Europe’s prohibiting the printing press in the 15th century.
Beginning with Scotland’s prohibition on domestic genetically modified crop cultivation on Aug. 9, Europe’s scientists and farmers watched with mounting dismay as other countries followed suit. Following the Scottish decision, signatories from numerous scientific organizations and academic institutions wrote to the Scottish government to express grave concern “about the potential negative effect on science in Scotland.”
In theory, terraforming a planet would be an awfully useful thing to know how to do. In practice, wow, not easy.
The dream of remaking Mars as another Earth is certain to be (at best) deferred, as the science needed is as complex as the unintended consequences sure to rear their ugly heads. In the nearer term, perhaps synthetic biology will allow us to rework limited areas of Mars and help us counter drought and environmental damage on the home base.
There is a popular hope, nurtured by futurists like Elon Musk and Craig Venter, that with the right ingredients, Mars can be terraformed into a kind of a paradisiacal facsimile of Earth.
“It’s a fixer-upper of a planet,” Musk told Stephen Colbert on a recent episode of The Late Show. “First you have to live in transparent domes, but eventually you can transform it into an Earthlike planet.”
This is a captivating vision of the future and one that by no means deserves discouragement. But according to NASA astrobiologist Lynn Rothschild, a specialist in synthetic biology, we shouldn’t pin all of our Martian dreams on terraforming alone.
“Terraforming is making a planet Earthlike,” Rothschild told me over the phone. “I think the chance of making Mars like the Earth—an exact replica—is pretty bad.”
A more precise word, Rothschild said, would be “ecopoiesis,” which refers to the process of seeding a new ecosystem into a sterile environment. It’s like a scaled down version of terraforming that can be localized to certain regions—for instance, the Palikir crater where the latest evidence of flowing water was found.
“What I think is the most likely for the foreseeable future is having small areas that are enclosed,” Rothschild said. “Once you establish a smaller enclosed area, then you can start talking about recycling oxygen through algae, and all the stuff we’re working on.”•
Like almost everyone currently running for the American Presidency, Transhumanist Party candidate Zoltan Istvan isn’t getting anywhere near the White House. The difference is, he knows it. The novice politician is campaigning to force cutting-edge biotech and such into the discussion.
A lot of the issues Istvan is discussing are really interesting to me, though the aggressiveness of Transhumanist predictions often give me pause, and the discourse on genetic engineering can be troubling. At Religion Dispatches, Andrew Aghapour conducted what is probably the best interview yet with Istvan. An excerpt about federal religious subsidies and global warming:
Question:
What do you think of religious subsidies—the approximately $80 billion a year that the American government spends on religious institutions through reduced income, property, and investment taxes?
Zoltan Istvan:
We would remove every single one of those deductions. Of course, I say that knowing that that would be an impossibility. But that would be the goal, to remove those types of incentives [and create] a much more fair playing field for the secular-minded folks out there who also have projects that may not be getting the same types of benefits. I actually don’t want to give benefits to anyone doing these projects. I just think it should be a fair playing field. So the idea is we would try to take away those subsidies and put it back into the system.
Personally, I would put it directly into education. One of our main policies at the Transhumanist Party is we want to provide totally free education. And I’m actually also for mandating that everyone in the country goes to college. In the age of much longer life spans, it’s very likely that anyone under twenty will live to one hundred and fifty years old. So, as a nation, if we’re going to be living longer, we should also probably have longer legal educational periods. So I’m also advocating for making college mandatory, just like high school is mandatory. That way, we have a society that’s much more educated and hopefully better to itself.
Question:
What is your position on global warming, and what solutions would you explore as president?
Zoltan Istvan:
Our party, one hundred percent, believes in global warming. There’s no question about it, that it’s happening, and it’s a sad thing. However, there’s also no way to stop global warming at this point. We lost that battle thirty years ago. That was a mistake our species made and we’re now going to have to pay for it. So the Transhumanist Party doesn’t emphasize reducing the carbon footprint as much as it emphasizes the technologies we can use to overcome [its effects.]
What can we do to make it so that the human being can survive any kind of environmental catastrophe? Over the next ten or twenty years, many people are going to become more machine-like. I have a biochip in my hands, my father already has multiple heart [implants], a grandmother has an artificial hip. We are becoming cyborg-like and, when they start coming out with things like robotic hearts and kidneys, there’s no question that we’re going to start remaking our bodies to be much healthier. What would the human being need to survive?
These are the kinds of ways we want to attack the green problem. It is very unique and a bit radical, but unfortunately we blew it as a species and there’s no turning the ship of global warming around any more. It’s too late.•
Saul Bass the late, great master of the film-title sequence, didn’t just have a burst of brilliance in the ’50s and ’60s and then fade to black. He still had plenty in reserve when major directors of the next generation who’d grown up on his work, including Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme, came of age and enlisted his talents.
The Art & Science site at Medium has republished part of a 1977 interview Herbert Yager conducted with Bass. The opening:
Question:
How did you get involved with movie titles?
Saul Bass:
I began as a graphic designer. As part of my work, I created film symbols for ad campaigns. I happened to be working on the symbols for Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones and The Man With The Golden Arm and at some point, Otto and I just looked at each other and said, “Why not make it move?”
It was as simple as that.
Until then, titles had tended to be lists of dull credits, mostly ignored, endured, or used as popcorn time.
There seemed to be a real opportunity to use titles in a new way — to actually create a climate for the story that was about to unfold.
Question:
When The Man With The Golden Arm opened in New York in 1952, the symbol was used on the marquee, a testimony to the effectiveness in that medium. How did the symbol function when you translated it to film?
Saul Bass:
The film was about drug addiction. The symbol — the arm — in its jagged form expressed the disjointed, jarring existence of the drug addict.
To the extent that it was an accurate and telling synthesis of the film in the ad campaign, those same qualities came with it into the theater and with the addition of motion and sound it really came alive and set up the mood and texture of the film.
Question:
You made the transition from purely graphic devices to live action early in your career. How did the titles from In Harm’s Way and Seconds represent the next evolutionary step?
Saul Bass:
As I said before, I started in graphics. Then, as you’ve seen, I began to move that graphic image on film. Somewhere down the line, I felt the need to come to grips with the realistic — or live action — image which seemed to me central to the notion of film. And then a whole new world opened to me.•
In Brian MacIver’s Christian Science Monitor article about autonomous automobiles, former GM executive Larry Burns predicts that Google driverless cars may be road-ready by 2018. That seems very aggressive, but if it’s true, that development would have great benefits, including lives saved and environmental damage mitigated, and pose equally formidable challenges. The piece highlights liability as a major issue, and it’s certainly an obstacle, but it seems a much more surmountable one to me than replacing the tens of millions of jobs that will disappear in the transition.
An excerpt:
For [SAFE CEO] Robbie Diamond, the importance of autonomous electric cars is linked to safeguarding the country’s energy security – and national security.
“We are dependent on one fuel source for the entire transportation sector,” Diamond says. Even as domestic oil production increases, he says, Americans should reduce their reliance on oil across the board.
Diamond also says the driverless car industry “needs to be a faster tortoise or a more focused hare” to make these vehicles widely available as soon as possible.
As for Domino’s Pizza, the country’s largest pizza restaurateur, having a fleet of autonomous vehicles would greatly reduce operating costs for franchises delivering hundreds of pizzas every day.
“Ten million miles per week are covered by Domino’s delivery drivers,” [VP of communications] Lynn Liddle says during the panel at the National Press Club. According to her, most of the company’s delivery drivers use their own cars, gas, and insurance. Franchise owners reimburse them for on-the-job use of their own vehicles. Trimming back could increase profitability for franchises, even if it pushes out drivers.•
Mental illness often expresses itself in terms of the era in which it’s experienced, whether it’s the time of Napoleon’s belated funeral procession or one of a parade of cameras. We live in the latter, and it’s not only the deeply ill who feel paranoid, and for good reason. We are being monitored and measured, corporations wanting what’s in our heads, and with the Internet of Things, the ubiquity of surveillance will reach full saturation, seeming coincidences that are anything but will multiply.
Walter Kirn has written an excellent Atlantic piece about this sense of Digital Age disquiet. His opening:
I knew we’d bought walnuts at the store that week, and I wanted to add some to my oatmeal. I called to my wife and asked her where she’d put them. She was washing her face in the bathroom, running the faucet, and must not have heard me—she didn’t answer. I found the bag of nuts without her help and stirred a handful into my bowl. My phone was charging on the counter. Bored, I picked it up to check the app that wirelessly grabs data from the fitness band I’d started wearing a month earlier. I saw that I’d slept for almost eight hours the night before but had gotten a mere two hours of “deep sleep.” I saw that I’d reached exactly 30 percent of my day’s goal of 13,000 steps. And then I noticed a message in a small window reserved for miscellaneous health tips. “Walnuts,” it read. It told me to eat more walnuts.
It was probably a coincidence, a fluke. Still, it caused me to glance down at my wristband and then at my phone, a brand-new model with many unknown, untested capabilities. Had my phone picked up my words through its mic and somehow relayed them to my wristband, which then signaled the app?
The devices spoke to each other behind my back—I’d known they would when I “paired” them—but suddenly I was wary of their relationship. Who else did they talk to, and about what? And what happened to their conversations? Were they temporarily archived, promptly scrubbed, or forever incorporated into the “cloud,” that ghostly entity with the too-disarming name?
It was the winter of 2013, and these “walnut moments” had been multiplying…•
I am a horrible person who doesn’t give a crap about Back to the Future Day, or more broadly speaking, most of our culture. What can I tell you?
On this oh-so-sacred day, The Conversationinvited a number of thinkers to imagine life in 2045. One recurrent theme in the responses is that everything will be a computer and the experience will be seamless.
It’s likely the Internet of Things becomes the thing and the concept of computers changes radically. I’ll bet against that reality being seamless in three decades, however, not just because I think a lack of friction can be soporific and dangerous, but because things seldom are without wrinkles.
Excerpts follow from two of the predictions.
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Michael Cowling Senior Lecturer & Discipline Leader, Mobile Computing & Applications, CQUniversity Australia
By the year 2045, the word “computer” will be a relic of the past, because computers as we know them will be built so seamlessly into every facet of our lives that we won’t even notice them anymore.
Every device around us will become a possible input and output device for us to access a seamless computing experience customised to our own particular needs, and fed from our own personal repository of information stored privately and securely in what we today call the “cloud”, but in the world of 2045 might simply be our digital essence.
It’s hard for us to imagine it now, surrounded by individual devices like our phone, tablet and laptop that each require separate configuration, but by 2045 those devices will be much less important, and we will be able to move away from these individual “personal” devices towards a much more ubiquitous digital existence.
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Justin Zobel Head, Department of Computing & Information Systems, University of Melbourne
Interfaces will have become seamless by 2045 and are accessed continuously through familiar, unconscious actions.
During your morning run, body radar triggers a gentle vibration against your skin; someone is approaching around a blind corner.
In the kitchen, active contact lenses create the illusion that your friend is with you, by generating an image and overlaying it on the room. The image is stable, no matter how your head and eyes move. In conversation, she is present but also thousands of kilometres away.
At your desk, the contact lenses create the illusion of a screen in front of you. Its actions are controlled by finger gestures, while your rapid, subtle muscle movements are interpreted as a stream of text to be captured in an email.•
Netflix is at loggerheads with the movie-theater industry because it’s making its own feature films to be released simultaneously on every screen, from big to pocket-sized. That makes financial sense in the macro, though not for exhibitors who bank on a period of exclusivity.
Even further: As the technology improves, why couldn’t you walk into a store on the day Star Wars: The Force Awakens is released and buy a pair of 3-D or virtual reality or augmented reality glasses preloaded with the film. Or better yet, have permanent headwear and just wirelessly download the film in one of these formats the day it drops. It removes the communal element of filmgoing, but our binging culture has made it clear that not everyone wants that.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this week published an Amazon patent for an odd-sounding pair of augmented reality smart glasses.
The patent explains how the smart glasses might be wired or wirelessly connected to a device such as a tablet and display video or images from that device in front of the wearer’s eyes. Tapping on the tablet, it explains, transitions a surface in the display from opaque to transparent, making it possible to interact with the real world without taking the glasses off.
“On the one hand, a large screen is beneficial for watching movies, playing games and even reading email comfortably,” reads the patent, which was filed in September 2013. “On the other hand, the larger the screen, the bigger the device, which may be less desirable for a light and portable product. Another problem consumers experience with portable devices, like tablet devices, is the lack of ability to immerse themselves in a tablet experience, such as watching a movie on an airplane.”
To wit: Smart glasses that can switch in and out of transparency might offer the best of both words, providing a big and immersive image while not completely isolating their wearers from the rest of the world.•
The future usually arrives…later. Some things, however, zoom past the anticipation-and-frustration period.
Tell someone in 1980 about the future of cellphones or in 1990 about the near-term reality of the Internet or in 2000 about the development of drones or driverless. None of these advances seemed possible.
If we are to snake our way through the Anthropocene, it would be really advantageous if solar and other renewables were among these black swan technologies. In a Washington Post editorial, Vivek Wadhwa predicts energy will soon be clean, ubiquitous and free. That doesn’t seem likely, but I suppose it’s not impossible. One important caveat: There are entrenched corporate interests that don’t want to see it happen and could slow down the process.
Wadhwa’s opening:
In the 1980s, leading consultants were skeptical about cellular phones. McKinsey & Companynotedthat the handsets were heavy, batteries didn’t last long, coverage was patchy, and the cost per minute was exorbitant. It predicted that in 20 years the total market size would be about 900,000 units, and advised AT&T to pull out. McKinsey was wrong, of course. There were more than 100 million cellular phones in use in 2000; there are billions now. Costs have fallen so far that even the poor — all over world — can afford a cellular phone.
The experts are saying the same about solar energy now. They note that after decades of development, solar power hardly supplies 1 percent of the world’s energy needs. They say that solar is inefficient, too expensive to install, and unreliable, and will fail without government subsidies. They too are wrong. Solar will be as ubiquitous as cellular phones are.•
Pierre Trudeau, Justin’s dad, was the cool, cosmopolitan Prime Minister of Canada for all but ten months from 1968 to 1984, a relatively hip media sensation, one who would receive visits from John & Yoko as well as heads of state. Part of the fun of his second administration was watching him try to contain his frustration when in close proximity to American President Ronald Reagan. It wasn’t easy. From a 1982UPI reportabout an interview David Frost conducted with Trudeau, who spoke of his children:
Trudeau said his political legacy to Canada would be patriation of the constitution, the National Energy Progam and his stand on the relation of rich to poor nations.
He said his greatest professional achievement was political longevity.
“It is an achievement, I think, in this turbulent society and changing world … to have managed to keep our party, with its values hopefully corresponding to the Canadian general will, a long time in office,” he said.
In the interview, Trudeau also spoke reservedly about his own talents.
“I realized that I wasn’t among the geniuses and I’d have to work harder if I wanted to perform with some degree of excellence,” Trudeau said. “I certainly realized I wasn’t very handsome nor very strong physically or strong in a health sense.”
The prime minister, 62, spoke of his ‘joy’ at becoming a father. “I want to see these young boys grow up into pre-teenagers, and then teenagers, and hopefully beyond, and give them the time they deserve,” he said.
“I realize that the longer I wait, the less they will need me, and less I will be able to give them.”•
Trudeau on responding to personal attacks in a 1972 interview.
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In 1969, computer-processing magnate Ross Perot had a McLuhan-ish dream: an electronic town hall in which interactive television and computer punch cards would allow the masses, rather than elected officials, to decide key American policies. In 1992, he held fast to this goal–one that was perhaps more democratic than any society could survive–when he bankrolled his own populist third-party Presidential campaign. The opening of “Perot’s Vision: Consensus By Computer,” a New York Times article fromthat year by the late Michael Kelly:
WASHINGTON, June 5— Twenty-three years ago, Ross Perot had a simple idea.
The nation was splintered by the great and painful issues of the day. There had been years of disorder and disunity, and lately, terrible riots in Los Angeles and other cities. People talked of an America in crisis. The Government seemed to many to be ineffectual and out of touch.
What this country needed, Mr. Perot thought, was a good, long talk with itself.
The information age was dawning, and Mr. Perot, then building what would become one of the world’s largest computer-processing companies, saw in its glow the answer to everything. One Hour, One Issue
Every week, Mr. Perot proposed, the television networks would broadcast an hourlong program in which one issue would be discussed. Viewers would record their opinions by marking computer cards, which they would mail to regional tabulating centers. Consensus would be reached, and the leaders would know what the people wanted.
Mr. Perot gave his idea a name that draped the old dream of pure democracy with the glossy promise of technology: “the electronic town hall.”
Today, Mr. Perot’s idea, essentially unchanged from 1969, is at the core of his ‘We the People’ drive for the Presidency, and of his theory for governing.
It forms the basis of Mr. Perot’s pitch, in which he presents himself, not as a politician running for President, but as a patriot willing to be drafted ‘as a servant of the people’ to take on the ‘dirty, thankless’ job of rescuing America from “the Establishment,” and running it.
In set speeches and interviews, the Texas billionaire describes the electronic town hall as the principal tool of governance in a Perot Presidency, and he makes grand claims: “If we ever put the people back in charge of this country and make sure they understand the issues, you’ll see the White House and Congress, like a ballet, pirouetting around the stage getting it done in unison.”
Although Mr. Perot has repeatedly said he would not try to use the electronic town hall as a direct decision-making body, he has on other occasions suggested placing a startling degree of power in the hands of the television audience.
He has proposed at least twice — in an interview with David Frost broadcast on April 24 and in a March 18 speech at the National Press Club — passing a constitutional amendment that would strip Congress of its authority to levy taxes, and place that power directly in the hands of the people, in a debate and referendum orchestrated through an electronic town hall.•
A 1992 NBC News report on the unlikely popularity of Perot’s third-party candidacy for the White House.
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In Lauren Weiner’s 2012 New Atlantis article about Ray Bradbury, she provided a tidy description of the Space Age sage’s youthful education:
Bradbury spent his childhood goosing his imagination with the outlandish. Whenever mundane Waukegan was visited by the strange or the offbeat, young Ray was on hand. The vaudevillian magician Harry Blackstone came through the industrial port on Lake Michigan’s shore in the late 1920s. Seeing Blackstone’s show over and over again marked Bradbury deeply, as did going to carnivals and circuses, and watching Hollywood’s earliest horror offerings like Dracula and The Phantom of the Opera. He read heavily in Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, L. Frank Baum, and Edgar Rice Burroughs; the latter’s inspirational and romantic children’s adventure tales earned him Bradbury’s hyperbolic designation as “probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world.”
Then there was the contagious enthusiasm of Bradbury’s bohemian, artistic aunt and his grandfather, Samuel, who ran a boardinghouse in Waukegan and instilled in Bradbury a kind of wonder at modern life. He recounted: “When I was two years old I sat on his knee and he had me tickle a crystal with a feathery needle and I heard music from thousands of miles away. I was right then and there introduced to the birth of radio.”
His family’s temporary stay in Arizona in the mid-1920s and permanent relocation to Los Angeles in the 1930s brought Bradbury to the desert places that he would later reimagine as Mars. As a high-schooler he buzzed around movie and radio stars asking for autographs, briefly considered becoming an actor, and wrote and edited science fiction “fanzines” just as tales of robots and rocket ships were gaining in popularity in wartime America. He befriended the staffs of bicoastal pulp magazines like Weird Tales,Thrilling Wonder Stories, Dime Mystery, and Captain Future by bombarding them with submissions, and, when those were rejected, with letters to the editor. This precocity was typical. Science fiction and “fantasy” — a catchall term for tales of the supernatural that have few or no fancy machines in them — drew adolescent talent like no other sector of American publishing. Isaac Asimov was in his late teens when he began writing for genre publications; Ursula K. Le Guin claimed to have sent in stories from the age of eleven.•
Groucho Marx sasses Bradbury on You Bet Your Life in 1955.
Today there are dual Space Races, the one out there and the one in our heads, and they both have militaristic ramifications.
On the latter subject: DARPA is using neurotechnologies to try to develop robot soldiers or robot-like human ones, a topic on which Tim Requarth has written a very smart Foreign Policy piece. While these tools hold amazing promise for treating many diseases, they also could be utilized to supercharge the war machine. The U.S. Defense department isn’t investing hundreds of millions of dollars into neuroweaponry research on the off chance it might meet with success, but because it feels the work is doable. Those areas include brain-to-brain communication, exoskeletons and memory augmentation, all areas Requarth addresses.
An excerpt:
There is a potentially dark side to these innovations. Neurotechnologies are “dual-use” tools, which means that in addition to being employed in medical problem-solving, they could also be applied (or misapplied) for military purposes.
The same brain-scanning machines meant to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease or autism could potentially read someone’s private thoughts. Computer systems attached to brain tissue that allow paralyzed patients to control robotic appendages with thought alone could also be used by a state to direct bionic soldiers or pilot aircraft. And devices designed to aid a deteriorating mind could alternatively be used to implant new memories, or to extinguish existing ones, in allies and enemies alike.
Consider [Neuroscientist Miguel] Nicolelis’s brainet idea. Taken to its logical extreme, says bioethicist Jonathan Moreno, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, merging brain signals from two or more people could create the ultimate superwarrior. “What if you could get the intellectual expertise of, say, Henry Kissinger, who knows all about the history of diplomacy and politics, and then you get all the knowledge of somebody that knows about military strategy, and then you get all the knowledge of a DARPA engineer, and so on,” he says, referring to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “You could put them all together.” Such a brainet would create near-military omniscience in high-stakes decisions, with political and human ramifications.
To be clear, such ideas are still firmly in the realm of science fiction. But it’s only a matter of time, some experts say, before they could become realities. Neurotechnologies are swiftly progressing, meaning that eventual breakout capabilities and commercialization are inevitable, and governments are already getting in on the action. DARPA, which executes groundbreaking scientific research and development for the U.S. Defense Department, has invested heavily in brain technologies. In 2014, for example, the agency started developing implants that detect and suppress urges. The stated aim is to treat veterans suffering from conditions such as addiction and depression. It’s conceivable, however, that this kind of technology could also be used as a weapon—or that proliferation could allow it to land in the wrong hands. “It’s not a question of if nonstate actors will use some form of neuroscientific techniques or technologies,” says James Giordano, a neuroethicist at Georgetown University Medical Center, “but when, and which ones they’ll use.”
People have long been fascinated, and terrified, by the idea of mind control. It may be too early to fear the worst—that brains will soon be vulnerable to government hacking, for instance—but the dual-use potential of neurotechnologies looms.•
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Miguel Nicolelis’ TED Talk on brain-to-brain communication.
Products purchased in the past were of the finished variety, with no chance at organic upgrades. Software and the cloud began to change that, and now with the Internet of Things and Deep Learning, objects from refrigerators to cars will be upgradeable in real time, taking in information as it becomes available. The potential for good to come of this is remarkable, and the downside, a constant invasion of privacy, is undeniable.
Elon Musk, who has a love/hate affair with AI, is excited that his EVs will learn as they go.Katie Fehrenbacher of Fortunereports that at the unveiling of the company’s autopilot system, the Tesla CEO stressed the self-improving capacity of the cars: “The whole fleet operates as a network. When one car learns something, they all learn it.”
The opening:
While Tesla’s newhands-free drivingis drawing a lot of interest this week, it’s the technology behind-the-scenes of the company’s newly-enabled autopilot service that should be getting more attention.
At an event on Wednesday Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk explained that the company’s new autopilot service is constantly learning and improving thanks to machine learning algorithms, the car’s wireless connection, and detailed mapping and sensor data that Tesla collects.
Tesla’s cars in general have long been using data, and over-the-air software updates, to improve the way they operate.
Machine learning algorithms are the latest in computer science where computers can take a large data set, analyze it and use it to make increasingly accurate predictions. In short, they are learning.•
In Julie Turkewitz’s brightNew York Times articleabout the renaissance of sensory deprivation tanks, she mentions that it was a training method at one point of the Dallas Cowboys, a football team led from 1960 by a control-freak head coach in Tom Landry, who favored bleeding-edge technological, computer and neuropsychological systems (see here and here). Excerpts follow from two articles about the Cowboys utilization of tech and tanks.
DALLAS— The clear plastic mats lead out of the locker room, past the blue and silver banner that says Cowboys, and into a smaller meeting room where the blackboard is clean. In this room, there is no need for X’s and O’s. The Dallas Cowboys who voluntarily enter the room climb into the team’s new sensory deprivation tank, a white fiberglass box that is eight feet long, four feet wide and four feet high. One by one, they float on their backs in water for an hour at a time in a peaceful world where their minds can be cleared of mistakes and pressures, and then refilled with information that can help win football games.
”The think tank,” said D.D. Lewis, the linebacker. The Dallas organization, given credit for bringing football into the computer age during the 1960’s, is trying something new for the 80’s. The Cowboys will experiment with a new teaching method that combines two ideas -closed-circuit television and a controlled environment.
Some research has shown that the use of videotape on television screens can increase learning. And the controlled environment – a dark, enclosed, weightless, timeless space aided by a heavy salt solution warmed to body temperature – can isolate the player from the world, eliminate distractions and simplify learning.
This environment is a long way from the traditional football classroom with its rows of chairs and reels of film. Soon after the film Altered States put the idea of floating into the national consciousness, the people who call themselves America’s Team are talking more about reaching the alpha state than the end zone. Once the television screen is installed directly over the player’s head as he floats on his back, the Cowboys will attempt to improve an athlete’s rate of learning, and eventually his performance, through the use of edited information given on an individual basis.
”I think you will see in five to 10 years there will be a drastic change in the utilization of videotape by football teams, or sports teams,” said Joe Bailey, the club’s vice president for administration. ”If you assume that coaches are teachers, and if you look into the classrooms of today, they’re probably a little bit different than the classrooms you were in. I think there’s a brave new world out there as far as the education process is concerned.”
Or, as Coach Tom Landry said, ”You just have to get an edge someplace.” How the Cowboys look for their edge, and what they do to achieve it, has been debated. Steve DeVore, one of the creators of SyberVision, a California company that has researched the concept of improving physical performance through visual stimulation, was critical of the way the Cowboys plan to use videotape as a learning tool in the tank environment. ”It’s a gimmick,” Mr. DeVore said.
Mr. DeVore said that one hour of training under the company’s system, which does not involve the use of tanks, can have the same effect as 10 hours on a practice field. ”It’s a powerful, powerful process,” Mr. DeVore said of the use of videotapes as a learning tool to improve physical performance. ”If it’s in the wrong hands, in an environment that cannot be controlled, it can be dangerous. It’s like fire. It can warm you, but if it gets out of control, it can burn you.”
The real problem with emotion in the Dallas setup is that, like Dorsett’s resilience, it doesn’t compute. “America’s Team” has been skillfully manufactured to dispatch opponents with methodical precision. Any new device which may enhance the juggernaut is tested–the latest being a Sensory Deprivation Tank, a silent, water-filled coffin, in which, according to Dorsett, Kicker Rafael Septien lives–and anything that can be computerized, is. The motifs are conservatism (players are encouraged to marry, buy homes and settle in the community) and stability (the ruling quartet–owner Clint Murchison, Schramm, Brandt and Landry–has been with the club since its inception 21 years ago). The result is The System, and a team that is remarkably consistent–could any other club lose a quarterback like Staubach and not miss a beat?–but which seems to lack soul.•
Using information gained through astrology, tarot cards and hypnosis is probably only a marginally dumber way to play financial markets than by employing sober study and analysis. You could wind up in a barrel supported by suspenders either way. About two decades ago, all manner of hoodoo was apparently welcomed by those looking to make a killing in the market. The opening of Douglas Martin’s 1994 New York Times article about New Age coming Wall Street:
WALL STREET has traditionally been home to bulls and bears. But lately, more extraordinary beings are finding their way to the trading rooms and executive suites of the city’s financial community. These are the psychics, hypnotists and astrologers who bring an extra dimension to the already arcane science of investing money.
Call it a foolish fad, but believers claim that billions of dollars are managed by people who consult planetary movements in advance; and some 27.5 million Americans review the stars to make decisions, according to a 1990 Gallup poll. No one has calculated how many do so for investments, but a mini-industry has emerged around New-Age Wall Street. Consider: A hotel near the stock exchanges is offering a new guest service, a tarot card reader. At the Wall Street Hypnosis Center, 165 William Street, a dozen or so traders visit monthly to keep their unconscious minds honed for split-second decisions. And at the New York Astrology Center, Eighth Avenue at 37th Street, computers and stars are used for investment advice.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, while hardly endorsing metaphysics, finds nothing intrinsically wrong with such unorthodox means of analysis, if fully disclosed, says Michael Jones, a spokesman.
As J. P. Morgan once intoned: “Millionaires don’t hire astrologers. Billionaires do.”
You . . . Are . . . Getting . . . Richer
The hypnotist’s words flow like a stream, as New-Age music fills the book-lined room. “You’re comfortably embraced by the clouds, floating and drifting, floating and drifting,” Ruth Roosevelt purrs. “You get a perspective up here. You see opportunities you didn’t realize you had.”
Ms. Roosevelt, founder of the Wall Street Hypnosis Center, helps clients quit smoking, lose weight — and make investment choices.
She continues: “Perhaps you see a trading pattern that needs to be changed.”
She suggests to her client, Damon Vickers, chief equity strategist for Equigrowth Advisors, an investment company with $15 million under management, that he may find solutions in his subconscious. She says a new hedge fund he is establishing will be doing gangbuster business in a year’s time.
“You’ve been making the money, because you’ve been disciplined,” she says, seeking to underline one of his main trading goals. “You’ve reined in your emotions, so you have clarity of thought and purpose.”
Ms. Roosevelt, who charges $100 an hour, began her practice two years ago, after a long career as a trader, most recently at Prudential Securities, where she was a vice president. She switched to hypnosis, she says, because of a fascination with the mind.
“There is very little I don’t know about the emotions a trader can have,” said Ms. Roosevelt, who studied hypnosis at, among other places, the New York Training Institute for Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
Ms. Roosevelt sees trading as akin to primitive humans dealing with physically dangerous situations. “At the moment of truth, is it fight or flight, attraction or retrenchment, fear or greed?” she asked. The goal is to bring control and composure to an overpowering situation. This comes from the unconscious, she says.
In practice, this means some traders have to learn to curb their urge to gamble, and let profits run. Others have to pull the trigger and take a sensible risk. Some have developed an aversion to picking up a phone and need to regress to earlier situations — say, calling a girl (or a boy) for a date.
“The trance enhances their power,” she said. “It will enable them to have greater control over themselves or other people.”
To outsiders, it can seem a lot like losing control. Mr. Vickers thinks the benefits are such that he doesn’t care if his customers know about his hypnosis. “If it bothers people, I don’t want them as customers,” he said. “I can’t be anybody but myself.” More Towels? Tarot?
Barrie L. Dolnick is the resident conjurer at the glossy Millenium Hotel at 55 Church Street. Just call the concierge and Ms. Dolnick, a 33-year-old former advertising executive in London and New York, will appear with tarot cards, charms and astrological charts.
Ms. Dolnick turned to conjuring full time because it had already proved profitable part time. At a rate of $100 an hour, she sees more than 200 regular clients in her Union Square office, in addition to those at the Millenium.•
In 1969, computer-processing magnate Ross Perot had a McLuhan-ish dream: an electronic town hall in which interactive television and computer punch cards would allow the masses, rather than elected officials, to decide key American policies. In 1992, he held fast to this goal–one that was perhaps more democratic than any society could survive–when he bankrolled his own populist third-party Presidential campaign. The opening of
In Lauren Weiner’s
