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“I’d Show You Where I Live, But They Don’t Allow Journalists There Any More”

October 19, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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In the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Mims has written a whip-smart profile of 18-year-old venture-capital analyst Tiffany Zhong, and now I want to punch the whole world in the eye.

Just kidding. I love when people get to use their talents, regardless of age. As Mims reports, Zhong, daughter of a tech CEO, is only somewhat unusual in that precocious ecosystem, many Soylent-slurping startup founders no older than or only slightly senior to the Binary Capital wunderkind. It’s become an accepted part of business because of the mythologizing of Jobs and Gates, but it really can’t be stressed how unusual this Silicon Valley arrangement is, with the youngest becoming the leaders, the pyramid turned on its point.

An excerpt:

In a business in which relationships are all-important, Ms. Zhong has already managed to accumulate a set of contacts that would be the envy of anyone charged with finding the next hot consumer-tech startup—the only kind in which Binary Capital invests. Her mentors include Stewart Butterfield, chief executive of Slack, and Steve Sinofsky, former head of Windows at Microsoft Corp. and a board partner at venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

But even more important for Ms. Zhong’s “deal flow”—the startups she finds that Binary Capital, which manages $125 million, will invest in—are the young entrepreneurs with whom she is connected. One of her advantages with the freshest crop of startup founders in the Bay Area is that many of them are the same age as she is, or even younger.

“I’d show you where I live, but they don’t allow journalists there any more,” says Ms. Zhong, as she finishes her dinner at Mau, a noodle shop in San Francisco’s hip, rapidly gentrifying Mission district. Her abode, called Mission Control, is just across the street, and as a sort of high-price commune for extremely young hackers—the oldest resident is 22, she estimates—it has been the subject of many profiles.•

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“Al Michaels Cracked Wise With One Of The Right’s Most Classic Myths: That Income Taxes These Days Are Extraordinarily High”

October 19, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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If you have good luck, accept it graciously. If you have incredibly good luck at a very young age, perhaps it’s best to run in the opposite direction?

As I’ve written in the past, sports announcer Al Michaels, blessed from early on with never having to worry about food and shelter or even more luxurious things–if anyone believes in miracles, it should be him.–has a serious breach where a sense of morality should be, whether we’re talking racist team names or athletes enduring brain injuries. In addition to feigning ignorance about such issues, he’s not above working in a political lie that serves his conservative mindset.

At this point, it’s difficult to know if Michaels is consciously lying or if he’s just fully digested bullshit talking points. From Timothy Burke at Deadspin:

Al Michaels is one of sports broadcasting’s best-known conservatives, and the NBC announcer cracked wise with one of the right’s most classic myths: that income taxes these days are extraordinarily high.

“That’d be $8 today,” Michaels muttered about Bill Belichick’s first job, making $25 a week for the Colts—“$22 after taxes he told us,” partner Cris Collinsworth replied. The truth:
 
Say you take Bill Belichick at his word (this may be difficult for you). If he really did only make $1,300 in income in 1975 (if, indeed, he made $25 a week for an entire year) then he wouldn’t have owed any taxes at all; the standard deduction was $1,600 in 1975. For someone to owe $3 a week in income tax in 1975, they’d have to have earned $3,400 a year.

In 2014, that’s about $15,037. A single person earning that and filing in 2014 would pay about $488 in taxes for the year—or $9.38 a week. That’s $2.13 in 1975 dollars—for a person earning nearly three times what Bill Belichick claimed to earn.•

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“So What Is Next? 3D Printed Cars. Yes, Cars.”

October 19, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Beware anyone who believes, as futurist Gray Scott does, that age-reversal science will seriously emerge by 2025, even if they offer the caveat that it will be “extraordinarily expensive, complex and risky,” but some of the other areas of his IEET article “Seven Emerging Technologies That Will Change the World Forever” are quite plausible.

One in particular I think true is the popularization of 3D printers seriously disrupting Big Auto. Startups in garages used to be primarily for computer companies, but soon, quite fittingly, new cars may be coming from them as well.

An excerpt:

3D Printing

Today we already have 3D printers that can print clothing, circuit boards, furniture, homes and chocolate. A company called BigRep has created a 3D printer called the BigRep ONE.2 that enables designers to create entire tables, chairs or coffee tables in one print. Did you get that?

You can now buy a 3D printer and print furniture!

Fashion designers like Iris van Herpen, Bryan Oknyansky, Francis Bitonti, Madeline Gannon, and Daniel Widrig have all broken serious ground in the 3D printed fashion movement. These avant-garde designs may not be functional for the average consumer so what is one to do for a regular tee shirt? Thankfully a new Field Guided Fabrication 3D printer called ELECTROLOOM has arrived that can print and it may put a few major retail chains out of business. The ELECTROLOOM enables anyone to create seamless fabric items on demand.

So what is next? 3D printed cars. Yes, cars. Divergent Microfactories (DM) has recently created a first 3D printed high-performance car called the Blade. This car is no joke. The Blade has a chassis weight of just 61 pounds, goes 0-60 MPH in 2.2 seconds and is powered by a 4-cylinder 700-horsepower bi-fuel internal combustion engine.•

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“These Future Scientists Would Need To Know Details Of Staggering Complexity About The Brain’s Structure”

October 19, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Let’s say that far in the future–very, very far–scientists have become incredibly brilliant using methods of Intelligence Augmentation we can now barely fathom, enabling them to reawaken or replicate brains cryogenically frozen, organs housed in buildings that somehow have escaped natural disasters, arson, violent revolution, building developers and apathy for eons. Why would tomorrow’s scientists want to spend their time this way? I mean, they might revitalize a couple dozen for the sake of research, but what impetus would they have to “reincarnate” brains much punier than theirs? The only chance for people who decide to freeze themselves after death is that an answer arrives rapidly, in just a few generations, and there’s almost no chance of that happening.

Being able to upload brain content into a computer file is a slightly better bet if that method should be perfected, but who’s to say citizens of the deep future will want such “foreigners” in their midst? Maybe they’ll just give this simple software to children so they can mix and match and create fun, new friends to busy them.

In a New York Times piece, theoretical neuroscientist Kenneth D. Miller doesn’t discount that brains might someday be reconstructed from their detailed information, but he doesn’t think it’s happening anytime soon given the complexity of the mission. The opening:

In recent times it has become appealing to believe that your dead brain might be preserved sufficiently by freezing so that some future civilization could bring your mind back to life. Assuming that no future scientists will reverse death, the hope is that they could analyze your brain’s structure and use this to recreate a functioning mind, whether in engineered living tissue or in a computer with a robotic body. By functioning, I mean thinking, feeling, talking, seeing, hearing, learning, remembering, acting. Your mind would wake up, much as it wakes up after a night’s sleep, with your own memories, feelings and patterns of thought, and continue on into the world.

I am a theoretical neuroscientist. I study models of brain circuits, precisely the sort of models that would be needed to try to reconstruct or emulate a functioning brain from a detailed knowledge of its structure. I don’t in principle see any reason that what I’ve described could not someday, in the very far future, be achieved (though it’s an active field of philosophical debate). But to accomplish this, these future scientists would need to know details of staggering complexity about the brain’s structure, details quite likely far beyond what any method today could preserve in a dead brain.

How much would we need to know to reconstruct a functioning brain?•

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“A Journey Of A Thousand Miles Can Begin With A Single Tap Of The Computer Keyboard”

October 18, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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I was reading Douglas Coupland’s column about the artifacts of air travel in the aftermath of 9/11, and it reminded me of a 1992 New York Times article by Peter H. Lewis about the early days on online airline reservations, something that wasn’t yet perfected at the time of publication. It was a can’t-miss idea whose time was near but not quite there. The opening:

THESE days, a journey of a thousand miles can begin with a single tap of the computer keyboard.

The best way to get somewhere, some travelers assert, is through the personal computer. Using a computer and a modem, which allows two computers to exchange data over telephone lines, travelers can scan flight schedules and fares, check the weather at the destination, research restaurant reviews, uncover unadvertised bargains and in general tap into the knowledge of most of the world’s travel providers and many veteran travelers.

That’s a lot of traveling without leaving home, and it is a clear trend in the business and leisure travel industry. The rise of personal computers and lightweight portable computers, as well as the growing sophistication of automated telephone services, have allowed tens of thousands of individual travelers to gain access to the same information used by professional travel agents.

According to Steven Sieck, vice president for electronic services for the Link Resources Corporation, a market-research company in New York City, more than six million American households have modem-equipped computers capable of tapping into the various information and electronic mail services. Millions of business computers have modems, too.

“Virtually every electronic mail service and on-line service has access to airline guides, typically O.A.G. or Eaasy Sabre,” said Bill Howard, author of the PC Magazine Guide to Notebook and Laptop Computers (Ziff-Davis Press, Berkeley, Calif.). O.A.G. is the Official Airlines Guides Electronic Edition and Eaasy Sabre is the electronic information service owned by the parent of American Airlines. Another popular electronic airline guide is Worldspan Travelshopper, jointly operated by T.W.A., Northwest and Delta airlines.

O.A.G., Eaasy Sabre and Travelshopper are, in essence, data bases that contain scheduling and fare information on tens of thousands of flights daily. Many business customers subscribe directly to O.A.G. or the other services. Others gain access to the services through such consumer information services as Compuserve, which says it has 903,000 subscribers; the Prodigy Services Company, which reports a million members; Dialog Information Systems Inc.; Delphi; Dow Jones News Retrieval, and M.C.I. Mail.

But while on-line travel services are increasingly accessible, the people who might be expected to use them most — frequent flyers in the computer industry — say it is still faster, easier and cheaper to call a travel agent or the travel provider directly.

“Yes, you can use a computer, and it’s almost as good as the way you’ve done it for the past 20 years, and that’s stupid,” said Jim Seymour, a computer consultant who lives in Austin, Tex. “I use the telephone” and a pocket diary, Mr. Seymour said.

Mr. Howard agreed, and said even skilled computer users find the travel services daunting to navigate.•

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“Porn Discovered That Traffic And Data Are The Coin Of The Digital Realm”

October 18, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Horrible men like Larry Flynt and Al Goldstein knew us better than we knew ourselves: Down deep we did have a strong desire for pornography, though even the smut peddlers couldn’t have imagined they’d live to see the day when the predominant medium of the era would allow for the ubiquitous access to videos and live acts of hardcore sex, “a thousand variations, every service with a smile,” as the song said.

The thing is, it would seem impossible for those producing the content to make a buck, but an usual detente between the mongers and aggregators have allowed all sides to surprisingly profit since the old model was disrupted, a reinvention most mainstream media companies have yet to master. An explanation from the resident wankers at the Economist:

With most porn on the internet now free and easy to find, the number of adult sites, and traffic to them, have exploded. The web boasts an estimated 700m-800m individual porn pages, three-fifths in America. PornHub, Mindgeek’s biggest tube, claims to have had nearly 80 billion video viewings last year, and more than 18 billion visits (see chart). In terms of traffic and bandwidth, Mindgeek is now one of the world’s biggest online operators in any industry. The company says its sites serve more than 100m visitors a day, consuming 1.5 terabits of data per second—enough to download 150 feature films.

Earlier than other parts of the online world, porn discovered that traffic and data are the coin of the digital realm. Tsunami-like traffic became the basis for a new business model. The list sites of the web’s early days sold clicks on their sites to traffic brokers, which redirected visitors to pay sites. If one ended up subscribing, the pay site would give the broker a fixed fee or a share of the revenue. Next-Generation Affiliate Tracking Software, known as NATS, which Mr Thylmann developed in the 1990s, was best at monitoring traffic and ensuring that it was paid for. Mindgeek now uses the data it collects to refine ad placement: TrafficJunky, its online advertising network, delivers highly targeted ads, for instance to mobile devices owned by gay people in San Francisco.

Beyond explicit

The traffic the tubes can direct towards pay sites means that their relationship has evolved from hostility to close, if grudging, co-operation. More and more content producers are signing deals to let their stuff appear on tubes: if a viewer clicks through to the originating site and subscribes, the tube will get a cut, sometimes as much as 50%. Since tubes get so many visitors, the bargain may be worthwhile for pay sites even if only one in 1,000 of them decides to subscribe. But the tubes are by far the bigger winners, getting not only commissions but more videos, which in turn drive up their traffic and ad rates. The model has been likened to a “vampiric ecosystem” in which Mindgeek and the other tube sites feed on pay sites, sucking their profitability.

All this will sound painfully familiar to other media firms. Echoing the aggregation deals struck by the tubes with commercial porn producers, social-media sites are starting not just to link to content, but to host it. Snapchat, a messaging app that lets users send each other photos and videos that vanish after a few seconds, allows news outlets to publish articles on its service in return for a share of advertising revenue. Facebook is doing something similar with its Instant Articles service. Indeed, Facebook, Twitter and their like have essentially evolved into traffic-brokers. Many of the clicks they pass on come from links posted by users. But the number of ads, promoted posts and suchlike is growing.•

“Yoko Ono Began To Float”

October 18, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

For every action, a reaction, so it makes sense that John C. Lilly’s sensory-deprivation tanks, his next radical step into self-enlightenment after LSD wore off, are making comeback in a time of endless buzzing, pinging and vibrating. Those seeking a calm state if not an altered one are flocking to the chambers. A fad is reawakened, but is it something more lasting this time?

From Julie Turkewitz of the New York Times:

The practice was once billed as a path to enlightenment and even hallucination for those on the creative frontier. Developed in 1954 by a neuroscientist named John C. Lilly, float tanks took off in the 1970s, bolstered by claims that they could stretch artistic, spiritual and even athletic boundaries.

Dr. Lilly had used the tanks for research, but Mr. and Ms. Perry began building and selling them for commercial use. Mr. Perry described his first float as “scintillating.”

“We thought of it sort of as a spiritual project,” he said of the business. “We considered it our assignment.”

Early accounts of floating took on a poetic quality. “Blinking is an audio event,” one floater wrote in 1977 in a magazine called Coast. “Shifting my ‘vision’ in the darkness to my dominant left eye produces a rumble like a distant thunderstorm.”

Yoko Ono began to float. So did Robin Williams and many of the Dallas Cowboys. Then the AIDS crisis hit, and centers shut down amid public health fears.•

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“The Unusual Star’s Light Pattern Is Consistent With A ‘Swarm Of Megastructures'”

October 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

There’s a shocking possibility that an enigmatic array of debris neighboring a distant star may be a large-scale structure built by alien intelligence, perhaps to collect solar energy. Or maybe not. It doesn’t seem explainable as a natural phenomenon, but whatever is it is that citizen astronomers detected when crowdsourcing the Northern Hemisphere skies, the find is awakening in scientists and non-scientists alike the suspicion that something could be out there. In an Atlantic article, Ross Andersen introduced the baffling scenario to a wider audience. An excerpt:

We know that something strange is going on out there.

When I spoke to [Yale’s astronomy postdoc Tabetha] Boyajian on the phone, she explained that her recent paper only reviews “natural” scenarios. “But,” she said, there were “other scenarios” she was considering.

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.

“When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told me. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”•

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“[GM] Will ‘Absolutely’ Make Cars For An Age When Human Driving Is Defunct”

October 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Completing driverless cars isn’t exactly a self-fulfilling prophecy but the increasing time and money invested in autonomous will likely lead to a large victory at some indeterminate point in the future. Excerpts follow from two pieces on the topic, the first one about GM going all in on the technology at its Warren Technical Center and the other about automated trucks outperforming human workers in Australia.

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From Alex Davies at Wired:

It’s a fitting locale for this kind of testing: Since 1956, the Eero Saarinen-designed Warren campus has served as the automaker’s main research hub. Since 2009, it’s been the home of the country’s largest battery lab, where GM develops and tests the all-important lithium-ion batteries that power the Volt, and will power the Bolt, the affordable car with 200 miles of electric range it intends to introduce in 2017.

And the Volt is a fitting car for the project: an electrified system makes it easier for engineers to tap into the controls, but more importantly, it’s the most forward-looking car in the GM stable. There’s a reason nearly every autonomous prototype out there is electric: When you’re talking bout one technology of the future, it makes sense to pair it with another.

[CEO Mary] Barra adds a third category: connectivity. “You need embedded connectivity to make autonomous work. And that’s where General Motors has a lead,” with nearly two decades of OnStar-equipped vehicles on the market. It’s moving from there to vehicle to vehicle communication, starting with two Cadillac models next year.

Barra says GM isn’t going to rely on the traditional owner-driver model to keep its business going, and will “absolutely” make cars for an age when human driving is defunct. “We are disrupting ourselves.”•

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From Peter Klinger at Yahoo! News:

Rio Tinto says the use of automated trucks in the Pilbara is outperforming its traditional people-driven fleet by 12 per cent as it ramps up technology deployment in its iron ore business.

Addressing the Nikkei Asia Review Forum in Sydney today, Rio Tinto group executive of technology and information Greg Lilleyman said its Mine of the Future program and “pioneering” collaboration with Japanese manufacturer Komatsu “had helped lead the way in our industry”.

Tesla unveils autopilot cars

Mr Lilleyman, who ran Rio’s Pilbara mines before taking on the Brisbane-based technology role two years ago, credited a decision to seek the input of Japanese suppliers with his company’s ability to lower operating costs, cut capital expenditure and “seize growth opportunities in Asia”.

The Mine of the Future program, which had automated trucks as one of its first targets, has been extended to automated drills, drones and use of big data.•

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“We Are Contemplating The Sorts Of Austerities Associated With Wartime Economies”

October 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It is more than a little maddening that Americans freaked out over Ebola, which had very little chance of becoming plague here, yet aren’t a fraction as flustered over a potential catastrophe caused by carbon emissions, a far more likely outcome. Even astoundingly successful capitalist Bill Gates–the sweater-clad, avuncular 2.0 version–has called for serious government curbs on free markets to combat climate change.

In advance of COP 21, Venkatesh Rao has penned an Atlantic piece about the need for a wartime-level approach to reworking the whole of global infrastructure, explaining why it’s possible but not probable to succeed. If death is in the distance but not yet in our faces, are we likely to surrender our luxuries to austerity? Rao acknowledges that a “single cheap and effective solution [could] emerge,” but that’s also not a plausible scenario. An excerpt:

We are contemplating the sorts of austerities associated with wartime economies. For ordinary Americans, austerities might include an end to expansive suburban lifestyles and budget air travel, and an accelerated return to high-density urban living and train travel. For businesses, this might mean rethinking entire supply chains, as high-emissions sectors become unviable under new emissions regimes.

What [Bill] Gates and others are advocating for is not so much a technological revolution as a technocratic one. One for which there is no successful peacetime precedent. Which is not to say, of course, that it cannot work. There is always a first time for every new level of complexity and scale in human cooperation. But it’s sobering to look back at the (partial) precedents we do have.

Of the previous six energy revolutions of comparable magnitude—wind, water, coal, oil, electricity, and nuclear—only nuclear power had anywhere near the same level of early-stage technocratic shaping that we are contemplating. Among technological revolutions outside the energy sector, only space exploration, nuclear-weapons technology, and computing technology have had similar levels of bureaucratic direction.

None of these are true comparables, however, for one critical reason. In each historical case, the revolution was highly focused on a single core technology rather than a broad portfolio of technologies, and a managed transition of infrastructure at civilization scale. In the case of aerospace and computing technologies, the comparison is even weaker: Those sectors enjoyed several decades of organic evolution driven primarily by inventors, private investors, and market forces before technocrats got involved.•

 

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“Some Computer Scientists Rue This Exponential Fallacy”

October 15, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Overpromising is cruel.

In technology and science, you see it especially in the area of life extension. The fountain of youth has been with us ever since people had time to stop and ponder, but the irrational rhetoric has grown louder since gerontologist Aubrey de Grey said in 2004 that “the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already.” What nonsense. I’m all in favor of working toward longer and healthier lives, but there’s no need to overheat the subject.

When it comes to a Singularitarian paradise of conscious machines, Ray Kurzweil’s pronouncements have ranged further and further into science fiction, promising superintelligence in a couple of decades. That’s not happening. Again, working toward such goals is worthwhile, but thinking that tomorrow is today is a sure way to disappoint.

Weak AI (non-conscious machines capable of programmed tasks) is the immediate challenge, with robots primed to devour jobs long handled by humans. That doesn’t mean we endure mass technological unemployment, but it could mean that. In a Nature review of three recent books on the topic (titles by John Markoff + Martin Ford + David A. Mindell), Ken Goldberg takes a skeptical look at our machine overlords. An excerpt:

Rise of the Robots by software entrepreneur Martin Ford proclaims that AI and robots are about to eliminate most jobs, blue- and white-collar. A close reading reveals the evidence as extremely sketchy. Ford has swallowed the rhetoric of futurist Ray Kurzweil, and repeatedly asserts that we are on the brink of vastly accelerating advances based on Moore’s law, which posits that computing power increases exponentially with time. Yet some computer scientists rue this exponential fallacy, arguing that the success of integrated circuits has raised expectations of progress far beyond what historians of technology recognize as an inevitable flattening of the growth curve.

Nor do historical trends support the Luddite fallacy, which assumes that there is a fixed lump of work and that technology inexorably creates unemployment. Such reasoning fails to consider compensation effects that create new jobs, or myriad relevant factors such as globalization and the democratization of the workforce. Ford describes software systems that attempt to do the work of attorneys, project managers, journalists, computer programmers, inventors and musicians. But his evidence that these will soon be perfected and force massive lay-offs consists mostly of popular magazine articles and, in one case, a conversation with the marketing director of a start-up.•

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“Too Bad This Bipartisan Agreement Is Contradicted By The Evidence”

October 15, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

American drug laws are dumb beyond belief, and apart from selling these substances to children, no one should go to prison for their sale or use. There are more effective (and less-expensive) ways of managing the situation. 

While our perplexing “war on drugs” might be silly, it may not be the reason for mass incarceration, a belief echoed resoundingly this political season, even by politicians who were calling for mandatory minimums not too long ago. In a Washington Post editorial, Charles Lane writes of a new study that seems to dispel the myth that our cells are bulging because of nonviolent drug offenders. An excerpt:

At the last Republican debate, on Sept. 16, former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina charged that “two-thirds of the people in our prisons are there for nonviolent offenses, mostly drug-related.” …

Too bad this bipartisan agreement is contradicted by the evidence. Fiorina’s numbers, for example, are exaggerated: In 2014, 46 percent of all state and federal inmates were in for violent offenses (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault), according to the latest Justice Department data. And this is a conservative estimate, since the definition of violent offense excludes roughly 30,000 federal prisoners, about 16 percent of the total, who are doing time for weapons violations.

Drug offenders account for only 19.5 percent of the total state-federal prison population, most of whom, especially in the federal system, were convicted of dealing drugs such as cocaine, heroin and meth, not “smoking marijuana.”

Undeniably, the population of state prisons (which house the vast majority of offenders) grew from 294,000 in 1980 to 1,362,000 in 2009 — a stunning 363 percent increase — though it has been on a downward trajectory since the latter date.

But only 21 percent of that growth was due to the imprisonment of drug offenders, most of which occurred between 1980 and 1989, not more recently, according to a review of government data reported by Fordham law professor John Pfaff in the Harvard Journal of Legislation. More than half of the overall increase was due to punishment of violent offenses, not drugs, Pfaff reports.•

 

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“The Field Of Anti-Aging Research Is Known For Attracting A Mix Of Serious Scientists, Vitamin Entrepreneurs, Futurists, And Cranks”

October 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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A recent post concerned Liz Parrish, the BioViva CEO, who surprisingly announced herself as patient zero for the company’s experimental youth-restoring gene therapies, a move whose specifics are shrouded in secrecy. This treatment will not be cheap and widely available in three years, despite what the firm says, but many other questions are left unanswered. Antonio Regalado of Technology Review looks into the turbulent aftermath of the shocking proclamation. An excerpt:

Elizabeth Parrish, the 44-year-old CEO of a biotechnology startup called BioViva, says she underwent a gene therapy at an undisclosed location overseas last month, a first step in what she says is a plan to develop treatments for ravages of old age like Alzheimer’s and muscle loss. “I am patient zero,” she declared during a Q&A on the website Reddit on Sunday. “I have aging as a disease.”

Since last week, MIT Technology Review has attempted to independently verify the accuracy of Parrish’s claims, particularly how she obtained the genetic therapy. While many key details could not be confirmed, people involved with her company said the medical procedure took place September 15 in Colombia.

The experiment seems likely to be remembered as either a new low in medical quackery or, perhaps, the unlikely start of an era in which people receive genetic modifications not just to treat disease, but to reverse aging. It also raises ethical questions about how quickly such treatments should be tested in people and whether they ought to be developed outside the scrutiny of regulators. The field of anti-aging research is known for attracting a mix of serious scientists, vitamin entrepreneurs, futurists, and cranks peddling various paths to immortality, including brain freezing.

Parrish’s assertions set off a scramble among members of her company’s scientific advisory board to understand what had occurred. •

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“I Have No Idea How To Get American ‘Back’ To The ‘Pre-Gun’ Condition”

October 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Malcolm Gladwell has written a powerful New Yorker piece about the new abnormal in America of mass violence perpetrated by teenage boys and young men, often at schools. While these acts are a small fraction of U.S. gun violence, they leave deep scars. Gladwell looks for answers at the intersection of developmental disorders, the easy access to weapons and a fatal type of “fan fiction” that has gone viral in the past two decades, with Columbine in 1999 being the shot heard ’round the world.

The article’s most important point, I think, is that there’s no pattern of history among the killers, who come from backgrounds good or bad. What they seem to share is a seemingly inexplicable attraction to spectacles of public violence that have preceded them and provided a modus operandi.

As a dedicated reader of newspapers from the 19th and early-20th century, I can assure you there were always very deeply troubled people in America, probably way more than there are now (per capita, anyhow). They just didn’t have such easy access to guns or at least the type of automatic weapons that exist today, nor were they easily connected to the violent delusions of others.

I don’t see much of a realistic answer for arms control in the long term. The laws should certainly be rewritten to address gun proliferation, but the country is already awash in weapons and with 3D printers coming our way, it will be a tricky battle to win, even without discussing the thorny politics. Similar frustrations are likely in trying to prevent copycat violence among teenage boys, perhaps ones on the autism spectrum, in the Internet Age. For all the good the democratization of media has encouraged, we’re also prone to its dark mirror.

Gladwell conducted a really good Reddit AMA about the subject. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

That was the toughest article I had to get through in a while but that is a testament to your writing style. What do you think are the ways we can fix this culture of violence? Do you think pop culture is to blame?

As a member of the media, what are the steps you can take to stop this kind of problem?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Pop culture is to blame, absolutely. But the issue is that pop culture today is not what it was thirty years ago. The internet has created a rabbit warren for the all sorts of twisted fantasies: the paradox of the internet is that the group who seem to use it the most (teenagers) are those least well-equipped to deal with its pathologies.

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Question:

Mass shootings (and even more so school shootings seem to be the very definition of outliers (1% or less). Why are we focusing on those instead of the 60% of gun deaths that are suicides or 30% that are non-mass homicides? It seems we have it all backwards.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Another very good question. Yes, you are quite right. The magnitude of gun violence in the U.S. is such that school shootings represent a very minor part of the problem. In a logical world, we would be talking way more about the other 99 percent. That said, I think the issue with this particular genre of violence is that it has the potential to spread: that was the point of my article. What began as a problem specific to teens were serious troubles and disorders has now engulfed teenagers who are, for all intents and purposes, normal. That’s scary, because we don’t know where the epidemic will lead.

_____________________________

Question:

Are you concerned that your article’s focus on autism spectrum disorders as a correlate for schooling shooting behavior plays into the typical distraction of “mental health” we hear about after most mass shootings? America doesn’t have a monopoly on mental illness, but we seem to have one on school shootings.

Relatedly, do you worry that a story like this stigmatizes the mentally ill even further?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Very important question. First of all I was writing about a case in which the subject’s ASD was at the center of his entire legal experience. It was his diagnosis with mild ASD that led to him being put on probation–instead of behind bars. So I had to deal with it. The second half of the piece, which I gather you’ve read, is explicitly about trying to explain how we should NOT confuse John LaDue’s attitudes and condition for those of the classic school shooters, like Eric Harris. That’s why I have the long discussion of “counterfeit deviance”–the notion that we need to be very careful in assessing the criminality of people with ASD when it comes to certain kinds of behaviors: someone like John LaDue might be very innocently drawn into a troubling pattern of behavior. I was trying to fight the tendency to stigmatize those with ASD. I hope that came across.

_____________________________

Question:

Do you believe that curbing this school attack trend is more a matter of understanding/addressing the psychological condition you describe in the article, or equally or more to do with gun control?

Malcolm Gladwell: 

I think that gun control is crucial for lowering the overall homicide rate: there’s no question in my mind that the easy availability of guns in the U.S. is a huge contributor to the fact that we have a homicide rate several times higher than other industrialized nations. But school schooters are a far more complicated issue: they are a subgenre of homicide that is about a specific fantasy that has taken hold of some teenaged boys. We could crack down on guns and still have a Columbine.

_____________________________

Question:

A lot of people will put these shootings down to sheer ‘craziness’ and they consider them isolated incidents, but here in Ireland we too have ‘crazy’ people and people who aren’t stable, but they don’t have guns so they don’t end up killing people. So surely guns are the problem? Because if you don’t have a gun then you aren’t mobilised to shoot, so this idea of ‘copycats’ you have is really interesting to think about, I couldn’t agree with you more. Excellent article and I look forward to a response!

Malcolm Gladwell:

I couldn’t agree more. Except that I have no idea how to get American “back” to the “pre-gun” condition like Ireland or England or any other Western nation is in. Remember its not just guns that are the issue here. It is the existence of an accompanying powerful fantasy about how they ought to be used.•

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“There’s No Fortune To Be Made”

October 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

During the 2012 Presidential election, Mitt Romney took the Obama Administration to task for wasting taxpayer money with stimulus funds loaned to Solyndra and Tesla, two failed companies. The former had indeed gone belly up, while Elon Musk’s auto company paid back the money ahead of scheduled and has since become a substantial firm, one whose batteries may be repurposed to help cultivate a wider green revolution.

Anyone who’s spent time around venture capital folks knows they have more misses than hits, but they can end up far ahead in the aggregate if they continually take wise risks. In trying to combat climate change with research-and-development monies, governments should be held to this same standard and not an impossible one. The free market isn’t incentivized to change to alternative energies, and change is dearly needed.

In an Atlantic interview by James Bennet, Bill Gates names gov’t R&D and carbon taxes as desperately needed tools, stressing that “by 2050, wealthy nations like China and the United States…must be adding no more carbon to the skies.” An excerpt:

On why the free market won’t develop new forms of energy fast enough:

Well, there’s no fortune to be made. Even if you have a new energy source that costs the same as today’s and emits no CO2, it will be uncertain compared with what’s tried-and-true and already operating at unbelievable scale and has gotten through all the regulatory problems, like “Okay, what do you do with coal ash?” and “How do you guarantee something is safe?” Without a substantial carbon tax, there’s no incentive for innovators or plant buyers to switch.

And for energy as a whole, the incentive to invest is quite limited, because unlike digital products—where you get very rapid adoption and so, within the period that your trade secret stays secret or your patent gives you a 20-year exclusive, you can reap incredible returns—almost everything that’s been invented in energy was invented more than 20 years before it got scaled usage. So if you go back to various energy innovators, actually, they didn’t do that well financially. The rewards to society of these energy advances—not much of that is captured by the individual innovator, because it’s a very conservative market. So the R&D amount in energy is surprisingly low compared with medicine or digital stuff, where both the government spending and the private-sector spending is huge.

On why the free market won’t develop new forms of energy fast enough:

Well, there’s no fortune to be made. Even if you have a new energy source that costs the same as today’s and emits no CO2, it will be uncertain compared with what’s tried-and-true and already operating at unbelievable scale and has gotten through all the regulatory problems, like “Okay, what do you do with coal ash?” and “How do you guarantee something is safe?” Without a substantial carbon tax, there’s no incentive for innovators or plant buyers to switch.•

 

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“They Have Also Taught A Robot Named Rosie To Make Sandwiches And Popcorn”

October 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s pretty needless to have a robot maître d’ take orders in an autonomous restaurant–beyond novelty, of course–but a Robohow project that’s used Wikihow instructions to train machines in this function demonstrates how customizable and flexible AI may become: One machine that can be taught different tasks depending on need.

From Michelle Starr at Cnet:

The team has been using the website WikiHow as a robotic learning tool. It turns out that WikiHow’s step-by-step instructions are perfect for breaking down an activity into its component tasks, and teaching robots to understand verbal, rather than programmed, commands.

To date, they have trained the Willow Garage PR2 robot to make pancakes and pizza using WikiHow. They have also taught a robot named Rosie to make sandwiches and popcorn. This is part of a broader mission to advance machine learning, as well as teach robots how to perform human-scale manipulation activities that can be spoken by an operator, an interface anyone can use.

The latest step in this research involves the humanoid robot Romeo from Aldebaran robotics. Romeo has been trained to act as a waiter, greeting and taking a food order from a human “customer” in a restaurant simulation.•

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“Intelligence Amplification Is An Old Concept”

October 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

My guess, and we’re all only guessing, is that the superintelligence so many philosophers and technologists fear will ultimately be a tool for the next iteration of humans, who’ll be just as human as we are, even though they’ll differ from us even more radically than we do from, say, Homo floresiensis. Is there a chance that we can be subsumed by intelligent machines? Sure, but I think a merger more likely.

In a Conversation essay, Alvin DMello writes of Intelligence Augmentation aids, from papyrus to HoloLens. An excerpt:

Lately there has been some major speculation about the threat posed by superintelligent AI. Philosophers such as Nick Bostrom have explored many issues in this realm.

AI today is far behind the intelligence possessed by any individual human. However, that might change. Yet the fear of superintelligent AI is predicated on there being a clear distinction between the AI and us. With IA, that distinction is blurred, and so too is the possibility of there being a conflict between us and AI.

Intelligence amplification is an old concept, but is coming to the fore with the development of new augmented reality devices. It may not be long before your own thinking might be enhanced to superhuman levels thanks to a seamless interface with technology.•

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“The Implications Of A Connected Neocortex Are Quite Literally Unfathomable”

October 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Ray Kurzweil, who will never die, is a brilliant and amusing inventor and thinker, but I believe he’s wrong in predicting that in 20 years or so we’re going to have nanobots introduced into our systems that allow us to directly plug our brains into the Internet. In what appears to be a Singularitarian circle jerk, some other futurists, including his associate Peter Diamandis, are very excited by his pronouncement, though let’s remember that Kurzweil has sometimes been wildly off in his prognostications. Remember when computers disappeared in 2009 because information was written directly onto our retinae by eyeglasses and contact lenses? Neither do I.

Such developments aren’t theoretically impossible, but such an aggressive timeline and so little attention to the downsides is puzzling. From Diamandis at Singularity Hub:

The implications of a connected neocortex are quite literally unfathomable. As such, any list I can come up with will pale in comparison to reality…but here are a few thoughts to get the ball rolling.

Brain-to-Brain Communication

This will deliver a new level of human intimacy, where you can truly know what your lover, friend or child is feeling. Intimacy far beyond what we experience today by mere human conversation. Forget email, texting, phone calls, and so on — you’ll be able to send your thoughts to someone simply by thinking them.

Google on the Brain

You’ll have the ability to “know” anything you desire, at the moment you want to know it. You’ll have access to the world’s information at the tip of your neurons. You’ll be able to calculate complex math equations in seconds. You’ll be able to navigate the streets of any cities, intuitively. You’ll be able to hop into a fighter jet and fly it perfectly. You’ll be able to speak and translate any language effortlessly.

Scalable Intelligence

Just imagine that you’re in a bind and you need to solve a problem (quickly). In this future world, you’ll be able to scale up the computational power of your brain on demand, 10x or 1,000x…in much the same way that algorithms today can spool up 1,000 processor cores on Amazon Web Service servers.•

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“[They Will] Measure Emotions In Real Time To Make Actionable Business Decisions”

October 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

When I wrote a brief piece a few years back about Coma, the 1978 Michael Crichton film about corporatized organ theft in a world of wealth disparity, I suggested that no business of tomorrow would want our organs, but they would desire the content of one organ in particular, our brains. It started with search engines and software tracking preferences, locations, etc. The Internet of Things will make the process ubiquitous, yet it’ll seem mundane.

From Brooks Barnes’ NYT article about Disney providing seed money to start-ups:

Roughly half of the companies selected this time involve using data – in one case collected directly from people’s brains – to make products more appealing.

Emotiv, for instance, relies on neuroscience and futuristic headgear to “measure emotions in real time to make actionable business decisions,” Tan Le, the company’s chief executive, said during her presentation. Emotiv technology also allows users to move objects – Jedi-like – with only their thoughts.

Decisive collects information from social media (shares, emojis, comments) to provide a real-time score for how consumers respond to products. (Red images apparently generate less interest than purple images.) Using artificial intelligence software, Imperson allows fans to chat seamlessly online with people who don’t exist, namely cartoon characters. Some details can be “remembered” by the character from chat to chat to enhance the depth of the interaction.•

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“There’s Been That Strain In Our Democracy And In American Politics For A Long Time. And It Pops Up Every So Often.”

October 12, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Marilynne Robinson (the writer) and Barack Obama (the President) are the type of people I’m happy if surprised America still turns out. They seem of this time but of another as well, with a sense of history that feels as if it’s being rapidly churned out of the collective memory. 

In a conversation that took place recently in Iowa, and is now being published in two parts in the New York Review of Books (read part one), the pair have a wide-ranging talk, touching on many topics, including how fear–and the exploitation of it–is a large part of the contemporary political discourse. Obama, despite having his Administration and supporters mentioned in the same breath as slavery and Nazism by Ben Carson alone, is confident the madness will pass. An excerpt:

President Obama:

Why did you decide to write this book of essays? And why was fear an important topic, and how does it connect to some of the other work that you’ve been doing?

Marilynne Robinson:

Well, the essays are actually lectures. I give lectures at a fair rate, and then when I’ve given enough of them to make a book, I make a book.

President Obama:

So you just kind of mash them all together?

Marilynne Robinson:

I do. That’s what I do. But it rationalizes my lecturing, too. But fear was very much—is on my mind, because I think that the basis of democracy is the willingness to assume well about other people.

You have to assume that basically people want to do the right thing. I think that you can look around society and see that basically people do the right thing. But when people begin to make these conspiracy theories and so on, that make it seem as if what is apparently good is in fact sinister, they never accept the argument that is made for a position that they don’t agree with—you know?

President Obama:

Yes.

Marilynne Robinson:

Because [of] the idea of the “sinister other.” And I mean, that’s bad under all circumstances. But when it’s brought home, when it becomes part of our own political conversation about ourselves, I think that that really is about as dangerous a development as there could be in terms of whether we continue to be a democracy.

President Obama:

Well, now there’s been that strain in our democracy and in American politics for a long time. And it pops up every so often. I think the argument right now would be that because people are feeling the stresses of globalization and rapid change, and we went through one of the worst financial crises since the Great Depression, and the political system seems gridlocked, that people may be particularly receptive to that brand of politics.•

 

 

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“I Don’t Want To See My Kids Disassembled So Their Molecules Can Be Used To Make More Hard-Drive Space For Machines”

October 11, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Ben Goertzel, the Brazilian-born, U.S.-trained mathematician, is an academic and entrepreneur focused on the big thoughts of our age: intelligent machines, life extension, uploading brain content, etc. He guesses the Singularity will happen this century (I would bet the over), but in general speaks of amazing things that are theoretically possible without stamping an overly aggressive ETA on them. He’s certainly right in saying that AI is going to be developed no matter what, so it’s best as many conscientious people as possible are involved in that process.

Goertzel lives part of the time in Hong Kong, and here’s a piece of a South China Morning Post Magazine article by Sarah Lazarus in which he discusses his ideas:

MANUFACTURING EVIL All new technologies come with potential risks and rewards. Since the beginning of humanity, we have pushed forwards regardless. When we switched from hunter-gathering to agriculture, when we created the industrial revolution, we had no idea whether these transformations would bring danger. It’s the same with AI. The worst possible outcomes are extremely dark. This does worry me – I don’t want to see my kids disassembled so their molecules can be used to make more hard-drive space for machines. The best possible outcomes are utopic and amazing. I have a research team called iCog Labs, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. When I visit, it seems like half the people live on the street, suffering from hunger and disease. If we can resolve these problems with AI, by making it so cheap to create material wealth that, even with our perverted economic system, everyone has enough to get by and be happy, that’s a big plus. AI will be created whether I’m involved or not. I hope to have a positive impact on how it’s used – to my mind it’s better that the work’s done by people who want to benefit the planet, than by people in a top-secret military project.

ACHIEVING IMMORTALITY I work on AI for various companies. The range of applications is huge. I’m collaborating with Hanson Robotics to create robots that look and think like humans, and with investment management firm Aidyia Holdings, which uses AI to outperform human traders on the stock market. I’m also interested in life extension. I remember realising, at a very young age, that everyone was going to die one day. I couldn’t understand why others just accepted this. It seemed like a really bad idea to me. I’ve signed up to have my body transported to a facility in Arizona and frozen, if I die. When the technology’s ready, I will be brought back to life. Ideally, though, we’ll find a cure for ageing before I die. The best way would be to build a superhuman thinking machine and let it solve all the hard science problems.

I can’t resist seeing what the current technology can do. I’m working with a team to compare the DNA of supercentenarians – people who have lived to 110 years or more – with the DNA of people who lived to 80. We’ve found specific genes we think are responsible for their longevity and we’re applying for patents. The question is, can you edit the DNA of an adult human to give them that capability?•

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“I Have Aging As A Disease”

October 11, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Remember Sy Sperling, who wasn’t only the President of Hair Club for Men, the rug company, but also a client? Elizabeth Parrish is reportedly the Sy Sperling of gene therapy, a significantly bolder endeavor.

The CEO of BioViva says she’s volunteered herself as Patient Zero, the first to receive the company’s experimental, regenerative daily injections to reverse aging. Parrish is a completely healthy 44-year-old person, apart from gradually dying like the rest of us. I’m highly skeptical, of course, that such therapies will be successful, widely available and affordable in a handful of years–or at any point in the foreseeable future–though if our species survives long enough, I think they’ll become reality and make our current state of medicine seem as barbaric to future people as surgery sans anesthesia is to us.

In a Reddit AMA, Parrish was unsurprisingly asked many questions about the cosmetic aspect of the research (regrowing hair lost to baldness, looking younger, etc.), but the paramount goal is clearly longer and healthier lives. A few exchanges follow.

_____________________________

Question:

  1. What criteria did you use in picking patient zero? How old were they? Did they have any medical conditions which would be fixed by age reversal?
  2. Suppose you’ve proven to have cured aging with this first patient. How soon before I’m cured also?
  3. How soon will you be confident enough that your treatment is working? At the one year mark? The full 8 years?
  4. In the talk that you gave in May, you said that it is your wish to distribute this cure for free. How will you and your team accomplish that?

Elizabeth Parrish:

  1. I am patient zero. I will be 45 in January. I have aging as a disease.
  2. We are working as hard as we can to bring it to the world as quickly and safely as possible.
  3. We will will evaluate monthly and within 12 months we will have more data.
  4. We will work with governments and insurance providers.

Question:

Are you patient zero because it would be unethical to ask someone else to be patient zero? Because it seems to me that the researcher shouldn’t be the patient unless there’s no other option.

Elizabeth Parrish:

It was the only ethical choice. I am happy to step up. I do feel we can use these therapies in compassionate care scenarios now but we will have to work them back into healthier people as we see they work as preventive medicine.

Question:

How do you feel about being patient zero? Are you apprehensive at all?

Elizabeth Parrish:

I am happy to be patient zero. It is for the world, for the sick children and sick old people. My life has been good. I understand the risks but I research how people die and I am happy to say that today I do not know how I will die now. Tomorrow or in the long future I was up for a change.

_____________________________

Question:

Can you control the aging reversal to determine a prefered age?

Elizabeth Parrish:

We cannot control the aging reversal to a specific year today, that will come in the future. It is hypothesized that you will not reverse in physical appearance to less than a young adult. We see this in mice as well.

_____________________________

Question:

I have only read titles about anti-aging therapy and don’t really know what it’s all about. What are the actual expected results in layman terms? Does a 50 year old individual start looking younger, regaining muscle growth potential, higher testosterone levels, etc or does it just influence a subset of factors?

Elizabeth Parrish:

If you don’t look younger we have failed. Aging is one of the most visual diseases on the planet and includes things that we all know like wrinkles and grey hair, but also brain atrophy, muscle wasting and organ damage.

_____________________________

Question:

How did you administer the treatment? Injection? Where? How many?

Elizabeth Parrish:

Doctors do it by injections in various parts of the body.

_____________________________

Question:

What are your thoughts on accessibility to anti-aging therapy and what is BioViva doing to ensure ethical and fair access to it’s tech?

Elizabeth Parrish:

Our goal is to build laboratories that will have the mission of a cGMP product at a reduced cost. Gene therapy technology is much like computing technology. We had to build the super computer which cost $8 million in 1960. Now everyone has technologies that work predictably and at a cost the average person can afford. We need to do the same with these therapies. What you will get in 3-5 years will be vastly more predictable and effective that what we are doing today and at a cost you or your insurance can cover.

_____________________________

Question:

When do you think an ageing treatment will be available to the general public?

Elizabeth Parrish:

If the results are good we hope to have something to the general public, that is cost acceptable, in 3-5 years.•

 

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“The Only Threat From Biotech Is That Humans Will Not Adequately And Quickly Use It”

October 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In an h+ opinion piece, futurist Harry J. Bentham says many true things about synthetic biology, a sector of science that could go a long way toward creating resource abundance and medical miracles.

That said, I have two disagreements with him: 

  1. Bentham’s contention that businesspeople are hampering synthbio’s development due to greed, instead focusing on manufacturing trifling products to make a quick buck, seems off the mark. Let’s face it: Plenty of people have no affinity or talent for this type of work. But more than at any time in history, many major American technological companies aren’t driven mainly by profits but also by impact. In fact, “changing the world” is the new coin of the realm. I doubt in a different age that Google would be trying to create a purely private Bell Labs (which was essentially a government-sponsored monopoly) as it is with Google X, with many projects aimed at helping health and environment. Other such companies are sponsoring R&D in similar ventures, also hoping for breakthroughs. Whether they’ll be successful in landing these moonshots is another matter, but they are trying.
  2. While synthetic bio holds great promise and will likely be necessary at some point for the survival of humans, saying it has “no adequate risk” if it’s utilized isn’t accurate.

From Bentham:

Although discovery and invention continue to stun us all on an almost daily basis, such things do not happen as quickly or in as utilitarian a way as they should. And this lack of progress is deliberate. As the agenda is driven by businessmen who adhere to the times they live in, driven more by the desire for wealth and status than helping mankind, the goal of endless profit directly blocks the path to abolish scarcity, illness and death.

Today, J. Craig Venter’s great discoveries of how to sequence or synthesize entire genomes of living biological specimens in the field of synthetic biology (synthbio) represent a greater power than the hydrogen bomb. It is a power we must embrace. In my opinion, these discoveries are certainly more capable of transforming civilization and the globe for the better. In Life at the Speed of Light (2013), that is essentially Venter’s own thesis.

And contrary to science fiction films, the only threat from biotech is that humans will not adequately and quickly use it. Business leaders are far more interested in profiting from people’s desire for petty products, entertainment and glamour than curing cancer or creating unlimited resources to feed civilization. But who can blame them? It is far too risky for someone in their position to commit to philanthropy than to stay a step ahead of their competitors.•

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“It May Be Fortuitous That The Trolley Problem Has Trickled Into The World Of Driverless Cars”

October 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Now five decades old, the thought experiment known as the Trolley Problem is experiencing new relevance due to the emergence of driverless cars and other robotized functions requiring aforethought about potential moral complications. Despite criticisms about the value of such exercises, I’ve always found them useful and including them in the conversation about autonomous designs surely can’t hurt.

Lauren Cassani Davis of the Atlantic looks at the merging of a stately philosophical scenario and cutting-edge technology. An excerpt about Stanford mechanical engineer Chris Gerdes:

Gerdes has been working with a philosophy professor, Patrick Lin, to make ethical thinking a key part of his team’s design process. Lin, who teaches at Cal Poly, spent a year working in Gerdes’s lab and has given talks to Google, Tesla, and others about the ethics of automating cars. The trolley problem is usually one of the first examples he uses to show that not all questions can be solved simply through developing more sophisticated engineering. “Not a lot of engineers appreciate or grasp the problem of programming a car ethically, as opposed to programming it to strictly obey the law,” Lin said.

But the trolley problem can be a double-edged sword, Lin says. On the one hand, it’s a great entry point and teaching tool for engineers with no background in ethics. On the other hand, its prevalence, whimsical tone, and iconic status can shield you from considering a wider range of dilemmas and ethical considerations. Lin has found that delivering the trolley problem in its original form—streetcar hurtling towards workers in a strangely bare landscape—can be counterproductive, so he often re-formulates it in terms of autonomous cars:

You’re driving an autonomous car in manual mode—you’re inattentive and suddenly are heading towards five people at a farmer’s market. Your car senses this incoming collision, and has to decide how to react. If the only option is to jerk to the right, and hit one person instead of remaining on its course towards the five, what should it do?

It may be fortuitous that the trolley problem has trickled into the world of driverless cars: It illuminates some of the profound ethical—and legal—challenges we will face ahead with robots. As human agents are replaced by robotic ones, many of our decisions will cease to be in-the-moment, knee-jerk reactions. Instead, we will have the ability to premeditate different options as we program how our machines will act.•

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“It Describes The Rise Of What It Calls ‘Digital Amnesia'”

October 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The cloud being an extension of our brains and our devices portals into that cloud definitely means we have access to dramatically more information than ever before. No disputes there. Until we develop some way, organic or not, to increase elasticity of human memory without compromising other faculties, we have to prioritize what we remember ourselves and what we “outsource” to machines.

Except that isn’t usually a conscious process, so we may not be deciding as much now what’s stored in us and what’s placed elsewhere. To me, that’s still preferable to life before the deluge of data, with whatever being lost more than made up for by the windfall of knowledge, even if the prioritization of it is transformed.

One caveat: It’s a more complicated situation if the actual process of memorization is deteriorating, not just being altered, by reliance on our external “memory banks.” Is the type of muscle memory an elite athlete learns not being built up in our ability to remember because of the new normal?

I don’t notice it in myself yet. Sure, I’ll reach for something that’s surprisingly no longer there, but my warehouse of facts seems the same in quantity. The inventory is just different, more fitfully filed, though the contents still seem valuable. But I find myself continuing to check, never quite trusting the system.

From Sean Coughlan at BBC:

The survey suggests relying on a computer in this way has a long-term impact on the development of memories, because such push-button information can often be immediately forgotten.

“Our brain appears to strengthen a memory each time we recall it, and at the same time forget irrelevant memories that are distracting us,” said Dr. [Maria] Wimber.

She says that the process of recalling information is a “very efficient way to create a permanent memory.”

“In contrast, passively repeating information, such as repeatedly looking it up on the internet, does not create a solid, lasting memory trace in the same way.” …

The study from Kaspersky Lab, a cybersecurity firm, says that people have become accustomed to using computer devices as an “extension” of their own brain.

It describes the rise of what it calls “digital amnesia,” in which people are ready to forget important information in the belief that it can be immediately retrieved from a digital device.•

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