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Old Print Article: Futurists Use Machines To Create Dance Music, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1933)

October 8, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his fellow Futurists were sexist and fascistic and militaristic, not unique to them in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century. Some of their ideas were insane (sleep was to be abolished) and some neutral (tin neckties, after all, are no dumber than any other kind), but a few were worth thinking about.

One such political thought: The Futurists thought automation would eventually eliminate poverty and inequality, something that’s possible if not inevitable. A less-important though interesting cultural idea: Machines and industrial sounds should be be used to create dance music. It was very prophetic, if not initially appreciated. Their plan for reinventing boxing never came to fruition, however, as you can read in the following article about a Futurist exposition in Rome from the July 16, 1933 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

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“The Real Risk With AI Isn’t Malice But Competence”

October 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Stephen Hawking’s answered some of the Reddit Ask Me Anything questions that were submitted a few weeks back. Some highlights: The physicist hopes for a world in which wealth redistribution becomes the norm when and if machines do the bulk of the labor, though he realizes that thus far that hasn’t been the inclination. He believes machines might subjugate us not because of mayhem or malevolence but because of their sheer proficiency. Hawking also thinks that superintelligence might be wonderful or terrible depending on how carefully we “direct” its development. I doubt that human psychology and individual and geopolitical competition will allow for an orderly policy of AI progress. It seems antithetical to our nature. And we actually have no place setting standards governing people of the distant future. They’ll have to make their own wise decisions based on the challenges they know and information they have. Below are a few exchanges from the AMA.

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Question:

Whenever I teach AI, Machine Learning, or Intelligent Robotics, my class and I end up having what I call “The Terminator Conversation.” My point in this conversation is that the dangers from AI are overblown by media and non-understanding news, and the real danger is the same danger in any complex, less-than-fully-understood code: edge case unpredictability. In my opinion, this is different from “dangerous AI” as most people perceive it, in that the software has no motives, no sentience, and no evil morality, and is merely (ruthlessly) trying to optimize a function that we ourselves wrote and designed. Your viewpoints (and Elon Musk’s) are often presented by the media as a belief in “evil AI,” though of course that’s not what your signed letter says. Students that are aware of these reports challenge my view, and we always end up having a pretty enjoyable conversation. How would you represent your own beliefs to my class? Are our viewpoints reconcilable? Do you think my habit of discounting the layperson Terminator-style “evil AI” is naive? And finally, what morals do you think I should be reinforcing to my students interested in AI?

Stephen Hawking:

You’re right: media often misrepresent what is actually said. The real risk with AI isn’t malice but competence. A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble. You’re probably not an evil ant-hater who steps on ants out of malice, but if you’re in charge of a hydroelectric green energy project and there’s an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants. Let’s not place humanity in the position of those ants. Please encourage your students to think not only about how to create AI, but also about how to ensure its beneficial use.

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Question:

Have you thought about the possibility of technological unemployment, where we develop automated processes that ultimately cause large unemployment by performing jobs faster and/or cheaper than people can perform them? Some compare this thought to the thoughts of the Luddites, whose revolt was caused in part by perceived technological unemployment over 100 years ago. In particular, do you foresee a world where people work less because so much work is automated? Do you think people will always either find work or manufacture more work to be done? 

Stephen Hawking:

If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

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Question:

I am a student who has recently graduated with a degree in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. Having studied A.I., I have seen first hand the ethical issues we are having to deal with today concerning how quickly machines can learn the personal features and behaviours of people, as well as being able to identify them at frightening speeds. However, the idea of a “conscious” or actual intelligent system which could pose an existential threat to humans still seems very foreign to me, and does not seem to be something we are even close to cracking from a neurological and computational standpoint. What I wanted to ask was, in your message aimed at warning us about the threat of intelligent machines, are you talking about current developments and breakthroughs (in areas such as machine learning), or are you trying to say we should be preparing early for what will inevitably come in the distant future?

Stephen Hawking:

The latter. There’s no consensus among AI researchers about how long it will take to build human-level AI and beyond, so please don’t trust anyone who claims to know for sure that it will happen in your lifetime or that it won’t happen in your lifetime. When it eventually does occur, it’s likely to be either the best or worst thing ever to happen to humanity, so there’s huge value in getting it right. We should shift the goal of AI from creating pure undirected artificial intelligence to creating beneficial intelligence. It might take decades to figure out how to do this, so let’s start researching this today rather than the night before the first strong AI is switched on.

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 Question:

I am a biologist. Your fear of AI appears to stem from the assumption that AI will act like a new biological species competing for the same resources or otherwise transforming the planet in ways incompatible with human (or other) life. But the reason that biological species compete like this is because they have undergone billions of years of selection for high reproduction. Essentially, biological organisms are optimized to ‘take over’ as much as they can. It’s basically their ‘purpose’. But I don’t think this is necessarily true of an AI. There is no reason to surmise that AI creatures would be ‘interested’ in reproducing at all. I don’t know what they’d be ‘interested’ in doing. I am interested in what you think an AI would be ‘interested’ in doing, and why that is necessarily a threat to humankind that outweighs the benefits of creating a sort of benevolent God.

Stephen Hawking:

You’re right that we need to avoid the temptation to anthropomorphize and assume that AI’s will have the sort of goals that evolved creatures to. An AI that has been designed rather than evolved can in principle have any drives or goals. However, as emphasized by Steve Omohundro, an extremely intelligent future AI will probably develop a drive to survive and acquire more resources as a step toward accomplishing whatever goal it has, because surviving and having more resources will increase its chances of accomplishing that other goal. This can cause problems for humans whose resources get taken away.•

 

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“Our Droneport Holds To Buckminster Fuller’s Maxim Of Doing More With Less”

October 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In the Backchannel piece, “Our Robot Sky,” journalist/novelist J.M. Ledgard and architect Lord Norman Foster combine efforts to propose a series of inexpensive cargo droneports around the world, especially in fraught places in desperate need of life-saving supplies. Cheap, pilotless robot planes could handle the deliveries. The first such droneport is proposed for Rwanda and would cost roughly what a new gas station would. 

From Foster’s section:

The droneport, where the sky touches the ground, is the critical element for a cargo drone route. No one has created rules for this new type of building. The opportunity to do just that is why I chose to support Redline as the very first project of the Norman Foster Foundation. Jonathan approached me and said, “Look, Norman, you’ve built the biggest airport in the world, now could you build the smallest.” The strange thing is that in ten years time the sum total of all these droneports in Africa will be bigger than the biggest airport in the world.

Our droneport holds to Buckminster Fuller’s maxim of doing more with less. It is grounded in detailed and first-hand study of isolated communities in Africa by Narinder Sagoo, a partner at the firm who has taken the lead on the project. It is very much informed by two previous projects: our 2012 Lunar Habitation for ESA, which binds lunar regolith by use of robots, and Narinder’s Sierra Leone school project, which introduces kit forms in combination with labour and intensive use of locally available materials.

Redline droneports should be affordable, clean energy civic buildings, with a strong visual presence.•

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“Evil Is Something That Only Humans Are Capable Of”

October 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Because of the knowledge they’ve acquired and the many unique experiences they’ve known, some people are a loss to the culture that can’t be replaced when they die. It just becomes a hole where something useful was. Pete Seeger was like that, someone who knew the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement, HUAC, etc. He was steadfastly on hand for all the major American movements until he wasn’t anymore. 

Jane Goodall is that kind of person, too, though thankfully she’s still alive. What a sensational, uncommon life. The primatologist sat for an interview with Philip Bethge and Johann Grolle of Spiegel discussing her conservation efforts, the refugee crisis in Europe and the sometimes atrocious behavior of chimps (and humans). An excerpt about the latter topic:

Spiegel:

Chimps can have a very dark side as well. Did it come as a shock to you when you first became aware of it?

Jane Goodall:

Absolutely! It was horrifying. First, we observed this brutal attack on a female which ended in the killing of her baby. Chimps are brutal, and it is so deliberate. The males go out and get near the boundary of their territory. And they walk very silently trying hard not to make any noise. They will climb into a tree and stare out over hostile territory for hours. They are waiting for the right opportunity. And then they attack.

Spiegel:

Is this comparable to warfare?

Jane Goodall:

It can be. We observed what I call the four-year war. It all started when a big chimp community split into two because there were too many males. About seven males left with some females and babies. However, they didn’t go beyond the range which previously they shared but took up the southern part of it. When relations got completely cold between the two groups, the original group began systematically moving back into the territory they had lost.

Spiegel:

Killing the others?

Jane Goodall:

Yes, every single one. We observed six murders ourselves, and circumstantial evidence showed that the same thing happened to the seventh male. It was horrible.

Spiegel:

Are they intentionally cruel? Do they want to inflict pain?

Jane Goodall:

I thought about this a lot. But I came to the conclusion that being evil is something that only humans are capable of. A chimp would never plan to pull another’s nails out. The chimps’ way of aggression is quick and brutal. I compare them to gang attacks.

Spiegel:

Do you think the chimpanzees’ emotional world is comparable to ours?

Jane Goodall:

In many ways, yes.•

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3 Videos: Jerzy Kosinski (1984), The NFL In 2066 (2015), Henry Kissinger (1975)

October 8, 2015 in Books, Film, Science/Tech, Sports, Videos | Permalink

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Who, after all, was Jerzy Kosinski? I wonder, after a while, if even he knew.

Like a lot of people who move to New York to reinvent themselves, Kosinksi was a tangle of fact and fiction that couldn’t easily be unknotted. He was lauded and reviled, labeled as brilliant and a plagiarist, called fascinating and a fraud. The truth, as usual, probably lies somewhere in between. In essence, he was much like the shadowy, misunderstood, paranoid characters from his own literature. One thing known for sure: He was a tormented soul, who ended his life by suicide in 1991, a plastic bag pulled over his face until he suffocated. He was a regular correspondent of sorts for David Letterman none too long before that. Here he is, in 1984, at the 23:35 mark, talking about overcoming his fear of drowning.

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A spate of game-related deaths to high school football players early this season combined with the reported marked decline in youth participation makes me think that Super Bowl C in 2066 will be played, if at all, by robots. (It should be noted that while young people playing football far less is associated with growing knowledge about brain-injury risk, all American youth sports have declined in the time of smartphones.) The game’s partially cloudy tomorrow hasn’t stopped the reporters at Wired and Sports Illustrated from pooling their talents for a mixed-media look at the future of the NFL, wondering what it will be like when America’s most popular single-game sports event reaches the century mark. There are considerations of players using cutting-edge technology, data-driven exercise, even gene editing, though I haven’t yet come across anything on concussion prevention.

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Baseball playoff season begins at the same time Henry Kissinger receives a biographical treatment, so here’s a video that mixes those two seemingly disparate subjects.

Like the first President he served, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger became quite a baseball junkie, especially in his post-Washington career. At the 15:40 mark of this episode of The Baseball of World of Joe Garagiola, we see Kissinger, who could only seem competent when standing alongside that block of wood Bowie Kuhn, being honored at Fenway Park before the second game of the sensational 1975 World Series. During the raucous run by the raffish New York Mets in the second half of 1980s, both Nixon and Kissinger became fixtures at Shea Stadium. Nixon was known to send congratulatory personal notes to the players, including Darryl Strawberry. It was criminals rooting for criminals.

“All Of This May One Day Be Possible”

October 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Two thoughts about the intersection of human and artificial intelligence:

  1. If we survive other existential risks long enough, we’ll eventually face the one posed by superintelligence. Or perhaps not. That development isn’t happening today or tomorrow, and by the time it does machine learning might be embedded within us. Maybe a newly engineered version of ourselves is the next step. We won’t be the same, no, but we’re not meant to be. Once evolution stops, so do we.
  2. The problem of understanding the human brain will someday be solved. That will be a boon in many ways medically, but there’s some question as to whether this giant leap for humankind is necessary to create intelligent, conscious machines. The Wright brothers didn’t need to simulate the flapping wings of birds in creating the Flyer. Maybe we can put the “ghost” in the machine before we even fully understand it? I would think the brain work will be done first because of the earnest way it’s being pursued by governments and private entities, but I wonder if that’s necessary.

From Ariana Eunjung Cha’s Washington Post piece about Paul Allen’s dual brain projects:

Although today’s computers are great at storing knowledge, retrieving it and finding patterns, they are often still stumped by a simple question: “Why?”

So while Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana — despite their maddening quirks — do a pretty good job of reminding you what’s on your calendar, you’d probably fire them in short of a week if you put them up against a real person.

That will almost certainly change in the coming years as billions of dollars in Silicon Valley investments lead to the development of more sophisticated algorithms and upgrades in memory storage and processing power.

The most exciting — and disconcerting — developments in the field may be in predictive analytics, which aims to make an informed guess about the future. Although it’s currently mostly being used in retail to figure out who is more likely to buy, say, a certain sweater, there are also test programs that attempt to figure out who might be more likely to get a certain disease or even commit a crime.

Google, which acquired AI company DeepMind in 2014 for an estimated $400 million, has been secretive about its plans in the field, but the company has said its goal is to “solve intelligence.” One of its first real-world applications could be to help self-driving cars become better aware of their environments. Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg says his social network, which has opened three different AI labs, plans to build machines “that are better than humans at our primary senses: vision, listening, etc.”

All of this may one day be possible. But is it a good idea?•

 

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“Amazon Will Not Exist As We Know It In 100 Years”

October 7, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

A rose is a rose is a rose, but if you purchase an e-book written by Gertrude Stein, it isn’t what it seems.

When we bought literature in paper form, the “hardware” and “software” were ours for as long as we held onto the physical item, but virtual books (and articles, films, etc.) are leasing agreements that depend on all sorts of infrastructure remaining intact. And to quote the title of the most famous book by another author, Chinua Achebe, things fall apart. When the next companies destabilize today’s tech giants, Amazon and Google and Facebook and Apple, will there be a hole in the culture that’s difficult to recover?

From “When Amazon Dies,” an excellent piece on the topic by Adrienne LaFrance at the Atlantic:

Increasingly, the purchase of digital works is treated like the purchase of software, which has gone from something you buy on a disc to something downloadable with an Internet connection. “You might think you’re buying Microsoft Office, but according to your user agreement you’re merely leasing it,” [media studies professor Siva] Vaidhyanathan said. “You can think of music and video as just another form of software. There is a convergence happening.”

That convergence is built for a streaming world, one that’s driven by an expectation of instant gratification. “One of the things we’re doing increasingly is opting for convenience over dependability. And we’re doing it somewhat thoughtlessly,” Vaidhyanathan told me. “We have to recognize that it is temporary. Anything that is centrally collected in a server somewhere on Earth is ephemeral. Even if Amazon doesn’t go out of business in 20 years, Amazon will not exist as we know it in 100 years.”•

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“No One Will Ever Call It Home”

October 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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It was in 2012 that I first put up a post about CITE, an insta-ghost town planned to be built in the New Mexican desert for the express purpose of testing technologies, and I still can’t say I fully get the concept. Is a discrete soundstage city really required when driverless cars are tested on public streets and highways? Wouldn’t it just be better for tech firms to make agreements with small urban areas for pilot programs? That would seem a truer test.

From Kieron Monks at CNN:

In the arid plains of the southern New Mexico desert, between the site of the first atomic bomb test and the U.S.-Mexico border, a new city is rising from the sand.

Planned for a population of 35,000, the city will showcase a modern business district downtown, and neat rows of terraced housing in the suburbs. It will be supplied with pristine streets, parks, malls and a church.

But no one will ever call it home.

The CITE (Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation) project is a full-scale model of an ordinary American town. Yet it will be used as a petri dish to develop new technologies that will shape the future of the urban environment.

The $1 billion scheme, led by telecommunications and tech firm Pegasus Global Holdings, will see 15-square-miles dedicated to ambitious experiments in fields such as transport, construction, communication and security.•

“Robots Will Be The Farmers Of The Future”

October 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

As we move into the future, a lot more food production traditionally done out of doors will be moving inside, in labs and “vegetable factories,” away from the fickle and increasingly frightening climate. There’s no reason most of the work can’t be automated.

The Japanese firm Spread is currently developing just such an indoor farm that will be fully computerized and robotized. From Sarah Fecht at Popular Science: 

Robots will be the farmers of the future. A company in Japan is building an indoor lettuce farm that will be completely tended by robots and computers. The company, named Spread, expects the factory to open in 2017, and the fully automated farming process could make the lettuce cheaper and better for the environment.

Spread already tends several large indoor farms, which have a multitude of environmental benefits. The plants can be grown hydroponically without exhausting soil resources. Up to 98 percent of Spread’s water will be recycled, and the factory won’t have to spray pesticides, since the pests are outdoors. Artificial lighting means the food supply won’t rely on weather variables, and the lighting can be supplied through renewable energy.

Currently Spread grows about 7.7 million heads of lettuce a year, and sells them at about the same price as regular lettuce. It sounds like the company is hoping to increase its production and lower its prices by making their growing process even more automated.•

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“Most People Who Try A Demo Say The Same Thing: How Quickly The Self-Driving Car Feels Normal, And Safe”

October 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In her Guardian column, Jemima Kiss describes driverless cars as a “hard sell for Google,” and I agree with part of her reasoning.

Regulators and entrenched market interests will certainly be a chore to appease. The fallout will be huge, policy-wise, and auto-insurance companies, after all, aren’t not-for-profits and stand to be destabilized out of business. But I think Kiss’ contention that motorist fear of the new technology is overstated. Some may enjoy continuing to drive, but it won’t be because of apprehension about robocars. That worry will quickly abate.

Of course, the bigger point is that Google won’t be alone in trying to change the course of the future, in having automobiles be truly automatic, as Apple, Tesla, Uber, Big Auto and companies in China and Japan will be doing likewise. Google’s biggest challenge will in ensuring it’s one of the companies in the winner’s circle.

An excerpt:

The hard sell for Google will be winning over generations of people who feel safer being in control of their vehicle, don’t know or care enough about the technology, or who simply enjoy driving. Yet most people who try a demo say the same thing: how quickly the self-driving car feels normal, and safe. As the head of public policy quipped, “perhaps we just need to do demos for 7 billion people”. Google’s systems engineer Jaime Waydo helped put self-driving cars on Mars while she worked at Nasa; it may well be that regulation and public policy prove easier there than on Earth.

And before it can get to the public, Google has to get through the regulators. In taking on the auto industry, Google has some mighty pitched battles ahead, not least the radical changes it implies for the insurance industry (who will find the number of accident claims dropping sharply), car makers (who will become partners with Google to equip their autonomous cars) and the labour issues of laying off a whole class of drivers, from cabs to haulage.•

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“People Are Making A Lot Of Bad Decisions”

October 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

As long as people smoke, it’s difficult to argue that free markets are chastened by free wills. It’s an addiction almost always begun in adolescence, yes, but plenty of smokers aren’t even trying to quit despite the horrifying health risks. So we tax cigarettes dearly and run countless scary PSAs, trying to curtail the appetite for destruction and push aside the market’s invisible hand offering us a light.

The cost, of course, goes beyond the rugged individual, transferred onto all of us whether we’re talking about lung cancer or obesity or financial bubbles. Sooner or later, we all pay.

In a NYRB piece about Phishing for Phools, a new book on the topic by economists George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, professional noodge Cass R. Sunstein finds merit in the work, though with some reservations. One topic of note touched on briefly: the micro-marketing of politicians aided by the “manipulation of focus.” An excerpt:

Akerlof and Shiller believe that once we understand human psychology, we will be a lot less enthusiastic about free markets and a lot more worried about the harmful effects of competition. In their view, companies exploit human weaknesses not necessarily because they are malicious or venal, but because the market makes them do it. Those who fail to exploit people will lose out to those who do. In making that argument, Akerlof and Shiller object that the existing work of behavioral economists and psychologists offers a mere list of human errors, when what is required is a broader account of how and why markets produce systemic harm.

Akerlof and Shiller use the word “phish” to mean a form of angling, by which phishermen (such as banks, drug companies, real estate agents, and cigarette companies) get phools (such as investors, sick people, homeowners, and smokers) to do something that is in the phisherman’s interest, but not in the phools’. There are two kinds of phools: informational and psychological. Informational phools are victimized by factual claims that are intentionally designed to deceive them (“it’s an old house, sure, but it just needs a few easy repairs”). More interesting are psychological phools, led astray either by their emotions (“this investment could make me rich within three months!”) or by cognitive biases (“real estate prices have gone up for the last twenty years, so they’re bound to go up for the next twenty as well”).

Akerlof and Shiller are aware that skeptics will find their depiction of human beings as “phools” to be inaccurate and impossibly condescending. Their response is that people are making a lot of bad decisions, producing outcomes that no one could possibly want. In their view, phishing for phools “is the leading cause of the financial crises that lead to the deepest recessions.” A lot of people run serious health risks from overeating, tobacco, and alcohol, leading to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths annually in the United States alone. Akerlof and Shiller think that it is preposterous to believe that these deaths are a product of rational decisions.•

 

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“Many Astronomers Estimate That We’ll Find A Life-Bearing Planet Within 25 To 30 Years, Or Maybe Tonight”

October 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Orson Welles’ 1938 radio drama The War of the Worlds played upon our concerns of what is out there (as well as what is in here), but our fears aren’t unfounded. Making contact with life more intelligent than us could be an existential risk, a situation that keeps Stephen Hawking awake at night.

But one thing scarier than discovering alien life in the universe might be not finding any. If no one else could make a go of it, our days would seem to be numbered. If outer space is a ghost town, isn’t it likely we’ll soon be ghosts as well?

At the Atlantic Science section, Tom Chmielewski writes of the protocol for proceeding should we make contact. An excerpt:

Since the first exoplanet was identified in 1992, astronomers have confirmed the existence of nearly 1,900 planets beyond our solar system. The sheer number of planets increases the statistical probability that Earth-like planets will be found. Some estimate that there are around 140 habitable planets in our stellar neighborhood within 33.6 light years of Earth. Many astronomers estimate that we’ll find a life-bearing planet within 25 to 30 years, or maybe tonight, if we know what to look for.

The upcoming 10YSS symposium will focus on both the pragmatic and more theoretical elements of such a discovery: How do we find Earth 2.0? How do we confirm evidence of life? If we find evidence of intelligent life out there, how do we announce it to the world? How will the people of Earth 1.0 react?

“How do you finally decide, ‘Eureka, we found it?’” said Mae Jemison, a former NASA astronaut and the principal for 100YSS. “What are the compelling signs of finding another planet outside of our solar system that indisputably is terrestrially evolved, with earth-like evolved lifeforms? …  What would happen if we could identify it [as Earth 2.0]? How does that change us?”•

 

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“In The Early 2020s We Will Have Elegant Low-Priced Printers For Our Homes”

October 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Vivek Wadhwa, who wisely looks at issues from all sides, has written an excellent Singularity Hub article analyzing which technologies he believes will impact global politics in the next two decades.

In the opening, he asserts something I think very true: an ascendant China isn’t really scary but that state in steep decline would be. He further argues in that first paragraph that fossil fuel is in its dying days, something that probably needs to be true if China, with its world-high cancer and air-pollution rates, is to remain stable. A nation of 1.3 billion will only cough and choke for so long. Solar and wind can’t arrive soon enough for that country, and for us all, though oil-dependent nations unable to transition will be destabilized.

An excerpt about 3D printers:

In conventional manufacturing, parts are produced by humans using power-driven machine tools, such as saws, lathes, milling machines, and drill presses, to physically remove material to obtain the shape desired. In digital manufacturing, parts are produced by melting successive layers of materials based on 3D models — adding materials rather than subtracting them. The “3D printers” that produce these use powered metal, droplets of plastic, and other materials — much like the toner cartridges that go into laser printers. 3D printers can already create physical mechanical devices, medical implants, jewelry, and even clothing. But these are slow, messy, and cumbersome — much like the first generations of inkjet printers were. This will change.

In the early 2020s we will have elegant low-priced printers for our homes that can print toys and household goods. Businesses will use 3D printers to do small-scale production of previously labor-intensive crafts and goods. Late in the next decade, we will be 3D-printing buildings and electronics. These will eventually be as fast as today’s laser printers are. And don’t be surprised if by 2030, the industrial robots go on strike, waving placards saying “stop the 3D printers: they are taking our jobs away.”

The geopolitical implications of these changes are exciting and worrisome.•

 

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“Beyond The Pursuit Of Progress And Productivity Lay Another Impetus For The Automatic Age: Politics”

October 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Nicholas Carr’s The Glass Cage, a must-read if you want to understand all sides of this new machine age, is now out in paper. I like Carr’s thinking when I agree with him, and I like it when I don’t. He always makes me see things in a fresh way, and he’s a miraculously graceful writer. Carr put an excerpt from the book, one about the history of automation, on his blog. Here’s a smaller section from that: 

Automated machines existed before World War II. James Watt’s steam engine, the original prime mover of the Industrial Revolution, incorporated an ingenious feedback device — the fly-ball governor — that enabled it to regulate its own operation. The Jacquard loom, invented in France around 1800, used steel punch cards to control the movements of spools of different-colored threads, allowing intricate patterns to be woven automatically. In 1866, a British engineer named J. Macfarlane Gray patented a steamship steering mechanism that was able to register the movement of a boat’s helm and, through a gear-operated feedback system, adjust the angle of the rudder to maintain a set course.

But the development of fast computers, along with other sensitive electronic controls, opened a new chapter in the history of machines. It vastly expanded the possibilities of automation. As the mathematician Norbert Wiener, who helped write the prediction algorithms for the Allies’ automated antiaircraft gun, explained in his 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings, the advances of the 1940s enabled inventors and engineers to go beyond “the sporadic design of individual automatic mechanisms.” The new technologies, while designed with weaponry in mind, gave rise to “a general policy for the construction of automatic mechanisms of the most varied type.” They opened the way for “the new automatic age.”

Beyond the pursuit of progress and productivity lay another impetus for the automatic age: politics.•

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Old Print Article: The Otherworldly Petrified Forest, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1899)

October 5, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ten years before dying, Amiel Weeks Whipple came upon the most amazing thing, In 1853, the U.S. Army Lt. was leading an expedition of the new Southwestern territory of the United States when his party happened upon fallen, almost translucent logs in what later became known as the Petrified Forest. The “stone trees,” as Whipple dubbed them, and their shards were not just dazzling but had previously proven to have great utility. This rock-like wood had quietly spread across the continent for centuries as it served as an organic munitions plant of sorts for native peoples, providing arrow heads and the like, traded from one tribe to another. An article in the August 14, 1899 Brooklyn Daily Eagle (originally published in the Chicago Record) looked at the land less than a decade before it became a national park.

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“Why Does America Lead The World In School Shootings?”

October 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If I was making a list of the factors behind the rash of American mass shootings, many of them happening in schools, I would lead with ease of access to guns, mental illness and drugs. Additionally, I think our fear of being labeled “losers” in this all-or-nothing age is also a factor.

In Paula Young Lee’s Salon article about the U.S. epidemic of large-scale shootings, she tries to get at the confluence of non-access issues leading to the rampages. An excerpt:

Overall, gun violence is down, but rampage shootings are up. When asked, “Why does America lead the world in school shootings?” the former Associate Director the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Frank Ochberg, listed the following five factors: 1) bullying, 2) major mental illness, 3) violent role models, 4) drugs, and 5) access to guns. Read that list again. Think about it. Consider the order in which it is presented, because factors 1-4 presage the final decision, which is obtaining a gun. But sociologists frequently note two additional factors driving this phenomenon: 6) copycatting, which requires the media circus precisely because the model being copied, Columbine, is the one where the media changed the script, and 7) a distinctly American version of individualism.•

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“It’s Still A Work In Progress”

October 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Initially, heart pacemakers were as big as ovens and external. Soon enough, they shrunk and found a home inside our bodies. Right now, most non-drug performance-enhancement methods are similarly external hardware, but they too will have their day to move within.

One example of that exterior computing power now being used to help athletes train smarter and perform better is IBM’s Watson, in one of its many post-Trebek roles. From Dominic Basulto at the Washington Post:

ORRECO, which has been working with the Oregon Track Club for more than six years and which recently joined the growing IBM Watson ecosystem, will teach Watson how to combine physiological test data, biomarker data, and data on nutrition and sleep into an individualized training program that the Oregon Track Club can use to optimize the schedules and performance of its runners. In addition, Coach Watson will be able to analyze the latest research findings from medical journals.

In doing so, Coach Watson will help to answer questions like “how hard” or “how long” a workout should be, whether an athlete experiencing fatigue should lower the intensity of workouts or take a few days off to recover, and how to optimize sleep schedules around travel. Coach Watson might also be able to spot signs of an upcoming injury weeks in advance through the continuous monitoring of biomarker data (e.g. an iron deficiency in the blood).

It’s still a work in progress — ORRECO chief executive Brian Moore told me that Watson is still a “junior coach coming up through the ranks” — but based on Watson’s previous success at extracting unexpected relationships from the data and proven ability to do trade-off analysis – there’s definitely potential for Coach Watson to provide an extra layer of knowledge for coaches.•

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“The Application To Pets Was No Big Surprise”

October 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Although it has far greater implications, I don’t know if gene manipulation will eventually be viewed very differently than plastic surgery. The timeline is undefined, but it will start with animals, then be used to treat diseases in humans, finally becoming a performance-enhancement tool for our friends and neighbors (and us). It’s easy to say now that we’d opt out, but that won’t be so simple since such changes won’t be merely cosmetic.

In China, gene-editing is being used to design micropigs that permanently remain lap-size and make great pets. From David Cyranoski at Nature:

Cutting-edge gene-editing techniques have produced an unexpected byproduct — tiny pigs that a leading Chinese genomics institute will soon sell as pets.

BGI in Shenzhen, the genomics institute that is famous for a series of high-profile breakthroughs in genomic sequencing, originally created the micropigs as models for human disease, by applying a gene-editing technique to a small breed of pig known as Bama. On 23 September, at the Shenzhen International Biotech Leaders Summit in China, BGI revealed that it would start selling the pigs as pets. The animals weigh about 15 kilograms when mature, or about the same as a medium-sized dog.

At the summit, the institute quoted a price tag of 10,000 yuan (US$1,600) for the micropigs, but that was just to “help us better evaluate the market”, says Yong Li, technical director of BGI’s animal-science platform. In future, customers will be offered pigs with different coat colours and patterns, which BGI says it can also set through gene editing.

With gene editing taking biology by storm, the field’s pioneers say that the application to pets was no big surprise. Some also caution against it. “It’s questionable whether we should impact the life, health and well-being of other animal species on this planet light-heartedly,” says geneticist Jens Boch at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in Germany.•

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“All Our Senses Are Being Controlled”

October 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Even in the twentieth century, Philippe Petit was living in the wrong time.

The high-wire artist, a Marcel Marceau of mid-air, practiced a timeless art in an age when the clock had ascended, quantifying human activity, eclipsing slow progress. In scaling the Twin Towers, one of the major symbols of what Industrialization had created, he briefly chastened the new reality with his old-world acrobatics, conferring upon it a dignity and romance it hadn’t previously known.

As The Walk is released, here’s a piece from a 2014 New York Times Magazine interview Petit did with Jessica Gross, explaining his dual feelings about this century’s technology:

Question:

You seem to have an ambivalent relationship with your computer. In the book, you call it your “necessary evil tool.”

Philippe Petit:

I hate all electronic things that are supposed to help the human being. You don’t smell, you don’t hear, you don’t touch anymore. All our senses are being controlled. At the same time, I am a total imbecile because to have a little iPhone that can take pictures, that can find the nearest hospital, that can tell you the weather in Jakarta — it’s probably fabulous. I’m supposed to be a man of balance, but my state of mind in those things is very unbalanced. I love or I hate.•

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“We observed a type of dancer because you couldn’t call him a walker.”

A Brief Note From 1903 About An Ear Transplant

October 4, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the November 19, 1903 New York Times:

Philadelphia–Dr. Andrew L. Nelden of New York to-day performed the operation of grafting an ear upon the head of a Western millionaire, who the surgeon says he is under bond not to reveal. The operation was to have been performed in New York, but District Attorney Jerome is said to have interfered.

Dr. Nelden advertised for a man willing to sell an ear for $5,000, and from more than 100 applicants he selected a young German, who at one time conducted a restaurant in New York.

Dr. Nelden said to-day:

“The operation has been performed and promises to be successful. It took place at a private hospital here, where I was assisted by a Philadelphia physician and one from New York. I think they will be willing to have their names known later.

“The two men were placed in opposite directions upon an elongated bed. One-half of a volunteer’s ear –the upper half–was cut off, together with about four inches of the skin behind the ear.

“This was twisted around and fitted to a freshly prepared wound upon my patient’s head. The half ear was held in place by bandages, and the two men were bound so that they could not move their heads. They must retain this position for at least twelve days to allow the circulation to come through the flap of skin that still remains as part of the volunteer’s scalp.

“If this half ear starts to unite properly the lower half of the ear will be grafted in the same manner.”•

“I Want To Raise Public Awareness About The Importance Of Space Flight”

October 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

hawkingabhot

Stephen Hawking fears the unknown, whether it be aliens from other planets or intelligent machines on Earth. In that sense, he’s a physicist operating as a risk manager, though despite his warnings, we probably can only do so much in our time to govern what happens in the future, as questions we can’t anticipate now will arise.

The scientist uses the example of Native Americans being interrupted unexpectedly by Columbus to illustrate what may happen if extraterrestrials descended upon us. But wouldn’t a truer analogy be something completely unforeseen wreaking havoc, a thing that goes far beyond our current imaginations? And while we have more information in our interconnected world than Natives did then, are we really be any more prepared for the darkest of black swans?

Hawking speaks to these issues in a new El Pais interview conducted by Nuño Domínguez and Javier Salas. Two excerpts below.

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Question:

You recently launched a very ambitious initiative to search for intelligent life in our galaxy. A few years ago, though, you said it would be better not to contact extraterrestrial civilizations because they could even exterminate us. Have you changed your mind?

Stephen Hawking:

If aliens visit us, the outcome could be much like when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach. To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.

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Question:

Why should we fear artificial intelligence?

Stephen Hawking:

Computers will overtake humans with AI at some point within the next 100 years. When that happens, we need to make sure the computers have goals aligned with ours.

Question:

What do you think our fate as a species will be?

Stephen Hawking:

I think the survival of the human race will depend on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe, because there’s an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy Earth. I therefore want to raise public awareness about the importance of space flight. I have learnt not to look too far ahead, but to concentrate on the present. I have so much more I want to do.•

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“America Has Started To Dematerialize”

October 2, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

As has been said before, the problem with technology is one of distribution, not scarcity. Not a small challenge, of course.

We’ll need to work our way through what will likely be a wealthier if lopsided aggregate, but we all stand to gain in a more vital way: environmentally. The new tools, through choice and some fortuitousness, are almost all designed to make the world greener, something we desperately need to snake our way through the Anthropocene. 

In Andrew McAfee’s latest post at his excellent Financial Times blog, he pivots off of Jesse Ausubel’s “The Return of Nature,” an essay which says that technological progress and information becoming the coin of the realm have led to a “dematerialization process” in America that is far kinder ecologically. Remember during the 1990s when everyone was freaking out about how runaway crime would doom society even as the problem had quietly (and mysteriously) begun a marked decline? Ausubel argues that a parallel situation is currently occurring with precious resources.

Two excerpts follow: 1) Ausubel asserts that a growing U.S. population hasn’t led to a spike in resource use, and 2) McAfee writes that the dematerialization process may explain some of the peculiarities of the economy.

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From Ausubel:

In addition to peak farmland and peak timber, America may also be experiencing peak use of many other resources. Back in the 1970s, it was thought that America’s growing appetite might exhaust Earth’s crust of just about every metal and mineral. But a surprising thing happened: even as our population kept growing, the intensity of use of the resources began to fall. For each new dollar in the economy, we used less copper and steel than we had used before — not just the relative but also the absolute use of nine basic commodities, flat or falling for about 20 years. By about 1990, Americans even began to use less plastic. America has started to dematerialize. 

The reversal in use of some of the materials so surprised me that Iddo Wernick, Paul Waggoner, and I undertook a detailed study of the use of 100 commodities in the United States from 1900 to 2010. One hundred commodities span just about everything from arsenic and asbestos to water and zinc. The soaring use of many resources up to about 1970 makes it easy to understand why Americans started Earth Day that year. Of the 100 commodities, we found that 36 have peaked in absolute use, including the villainous arsenic and asbestos. Another 53 commodities have peaked relative to the size of the economy, though not yet absolutely. Most of them now seem poised to fall. They include not only cropland and nitrogen, but even electricity and water. Only 11 of the 100 commodities are still growing in both relative and absolute use in America. These include chickens, the winning form of meat. Several others are elemental vitamins, like the gallium and indium used to dope or alloy other bulk materials and make them smarter. …

Much dematerialization does not surprise us, when a single pocket-size smartphone replaces an alarm clock, flashlight, and various media players, along with all the CDs and DVDs.

But even Californians economizing on water in the midst of a drought may be surprised at what has happened to water withdrawals in America since 1970. Expert projections made in the 1970s showed rising water use to the year 2000, but what actually happened was a leveling off. While America added 80 million people –– the population of Turkey –– American water use stayed flat.•

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From McAfee:

Software, sensors, data, autonomous machines and all the other digital tools of the second machine age allow us to use a lot fewer atoms throughout the economy. Precision agriculture enables great crop yields with much less water and fertiliser. Cutting-edge design software envisions buildings that are lighter and more energy efficient than any before. Robot-heavy warehouses can pack goods very tightly, and so be smaller. Autonomous cars, when (not if) they come, will mean fewer vehicles in total and fewer parking garages in cities. Drones will replace delivery trucks. And so on.

The pervasiveness of this process, which Mr Ausubel labels “dematerialisation,” might well be part of the reason that business investment has been so sluggish even in the US, where profits and overall growth have been relatively robust. Why build a new factory, after all, if a few new computer-controlled machine tools and some scheduling software will allow you to boost output enough from existing ones? And why build a new data centre to run that software when you can just put it all in the cloud?•

 

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“I Think This Will Happen Faster Than People Expect”

October 2, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

So many things are at play in the race for the perfected driverless vehicle: economics, environment, geopolitics. There likely won’t be one company or nation that fully wins, though you don’t want to be on the outside looking in. And you need to have ready answers for the what’s likely to be resulting unemployment.

Japan announced it will be testing robo-cabs in 2016, while China reports it has already tested driverless buses. 

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From Jun Hongo at the WSJ:

Japan’s cabinet office, Kanagawa prefecture and Robot Taxi Inc. on Thursday said they will start experimenting with unmanned taxi service beginning in 2016. The service will be offered for approximately 50 people in Kanagawa prefecture, just south of Tokyo, with the auto-driving car carrying them from their homes to local grocery stores.

According to the project organizers, the cabs will drive a distance of about three kilometers (two miles), and part of the course will be on major avenues in the city. Crew members will be aboard the car during the experiment in case there is a need to avoid accidents. …

Shinjiro Koizumi, son of former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and a vice minister in the current government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, appeared at an event Thursday afternoon to promote the driverless-taxi effort. “There are a lot of people who say it’s impossible, but I think this will happen faster than people expect,” he said.•

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From The Economic Times:

BEIJING: A Chinese bus-maker has claimed that its driverless bus has completed a successful trial operation on an intercity road in central China’s Henan Province, where it automatically changed lanes and stopped at traffic signals.

The 10.5-metre hybrid bus by Yutong Bus Co. Ltd. ran around 32.6 kilometres on the intercity road linking Zhengzhou City with Kaifeng City in late August, state-run Xinhua news agency reported today.

The driverless bus has passed all tests, including identifying all 26 traffic lights on the road, automatically changing lanes and overtaking vehicles in neighboring lanes, the company said.

The bus is installed with two cameras, four laser radars, one set of millimetre wave radar and integrated navigation system.•

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“Artificial Intelligence Is Quietly Everywhere”

October 2, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The Economist has a good if brief review of three recent titles about Artificial Intelligence and what it means for humans, John Markoff’s Machines of Loving Grace, Pedro Domingos’ The Master Algorithm and Jerry Kaplan’s Humans Need Not Apply.

I quote the opening of the piece below because I think it gets at an error in judgement some people make about technological progress, in regards to both Weak AI and Strong AI. There’s the idea that humans are in charge and can regulate machine progress, igniting and controlling it as we do fire. I don’t believe that’s ultimately so even if it’s our goal.

Such decisions aren’t made in cool, sober ways inside a vacuum but in a messy world full of competition and differing priorities. If the United States decided to ban robots or gene editing but China used them and prospered from the use, we would have to also enter the race. It’s similar to how America was largely a non-militaristic country before WWII but since then has been armed to the teeth.

The only thing that halts technological progress is a lack of knowledge. Once attained, it will be used because that makes us feel clever and proud. And it gives us a sense of safety, even when it makes things more dangerous. That’s human nature as applied to Artificial Intelligence.

An excerpt:

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) is quietly everywhere, powering Google’s search engine, Amazon’s recommendations and Facebook’s facial recognition. It is how post offices decipher handwriting and banks read cheques. But several books in recent years have spewed fire and brimstone, claiming that algorithms are poised to obliterate white-collar knowledge-work in the 21st century, just as automation displaced blue-collar manufacturing work in the 20th. Some people go further, arguing that artificial intelligence threatens the human race. Elon Musk, an American entrepreneur, says that developing the technology is “summoning the demon.”

Now several new books serve as replies. In Machines of Loving Grace, John Markoff of the New York Times focuses on whether researchers should build true artificial intelligence that replaces people, or aim for “intelligence augmentation” (IA), in which the computers make people more effective. This tension has been there from the start. In the 1960s, at one bit of Stanford University John McCarthy, a pioneer of the field, was gunning for AI (which he had named in 1955), while across campus Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the computer mouse, aimed at IA. Today, some Google engineers try to improve search engines so that people can find information better, while others develop self-driving cars to eliminate drivers altogether.•

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“Making It To Mars Won’t Be Easy”

October 2, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Robinson-Crusoe-on-Mars

I’m firmly of the camp that believes humans shouldn’t currently be involved in space exploration beyond building rockets and robots. There’ll be time for us to take small steps and giant leaps later on, after our machine friends have conducted reconnaissance and at least semi-civilized these alien lands.

But no one is listening to me, as the new Space Race, being waged between private and public entities across the globe, is rushing to plant humans and flags on Mars ASAP. It’s a far cry from 1991, when the revived Life magazine wrote of a 150-year plan to gradually terraform our neighbor with orbiting solar reflectors and other far-flung equipment, making Mars hospitable ahead of our arrival. The due date has clearly been pushed up, complicating what will be a long and lonely trip under any circumstances.

From Sidney Perkowitz at h+:

Making it to Mars won’t be easy. It’s the next planet out from the sun, but a daunting 140 million miles away from us, on average – far beyond the Earth’s moon, which, at nearly 250,000 miles away, is the only other celestial body human beings have set foot on.

Nevertheless, NASA and several private ventures believe that by further developing existing propulsion methods, they can send a manned spacecraft to Mars.

One NASA scenario would, over several years, pre-position supplies on the Martian moon Phobos, shipped there by unmanned spacecraft; land four astronauts on Phobos after an eight-month trip from Earth; and ferry them and their supplies down to Mars for a 10-month stay, before returning the astronauts to Earth.

We know less, though, about how a long voyage inside a cramped metal box would affect crew health and morale. Extended time in space under essentially zero gravity has adverse effects, including loss of bone density and muscle strength, which astronauts experienced after months aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

There are psychological factors, too. ISS astronauts in Earth orbit can see and communicate with their home planet, and could reach it in an escape craft, if necessary.

For the isolated Mars team, home would be a distant dot in the sky…•

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