No contemporary authoritarian ruler would think the Internet an ideal tool for propaganda. For all its deficits, it’s still too anarchic to be controlled. Kim Jong-un, for one, just blocks it. Cinema in another era, however, offered fascists larger-than-life spin-machine opportunities.
From early on, Benito Mussolini, Italy’s vulgar, murderous clown, knew film could be manipulated and controlled in a world of limited home technology. He planned to open a sprawling movie studio in 1937 which was to surpass Hollywood, and like his trains were purported to do, it arrived on time, turning Italy into an insane asylum with a studio system. After Il Duce met the business end of a meat hook atop an Esso gas station and the nation was defeated in WWII, the lots served briefly as a refugee camp. Later, Cinecittà, as it was known, became the backbone of a rebuilt Italy’s film industry, acting as the backdrop to American-produced epics like Ben-Hur as well as numerous Federico Fellini projects.
An article in the April 16, 1936 Brooklyn Daily Eagle covered the massive studio’s construction, among other things. An excerpt from it is embedded below.
Why hasn’t someone like myself who loves books–reading them, not collecting them–yet switched to a Kindle? I don’t quite know because despite having issues with Amazon’s impact on the pricing of digital books and what that means for the future of publishing, I’m awed the company has made it possible to easily carry a universal library anywhere in the world. That’s amazing, though it would seem, no sufficiently so for me to “go electric.”
While Bezos’ e-reader can hold everything from Henry James to the King James Bible, Craig Mod is losing his religion in the tool. In an Aeon essay, the writer explains he grew disenchanted (unconsciously, at first) with the Kindle’s lack of development, how the device which seemed poised to surpass the experience of paper reading, has instead become complacent the way monopolies often do. Virtual books were going to have a tough time competing with the physical kind in terms of sheer beauty, but so far they trail in key ways even in functionality. As Mod writes, Amazon’s dominance has made for an isolated infrastructure and the “closed nature of digital book ecosystems hurts designers and reader.”
An excerpt:
In the past two years, something unexpected happened: I lost the faith. Gradually at first and then undeniably, I stopped buying digital books. I realised this only a few months ago, when taking stock of my library, both digital and physical. Physical books – most of all, works of literary fiction – I continue to acquire voraciously. I split my time between New York and Tokyo, and know that with each New York trip I’ll pick up a dozen or more volumes from bookstores or friends. My favourite gifts, to give and to receive, are still physical books. The allure of the curated front tables at McNally Jackson or Three Lives and Company is too much to resist.
The great irony, of course, is that I’ve never read more digitally in my life. Each day, I spend hours reading on my iPhone – news articles, blog posts and essays. Short to mid-length content feels indigenous to the size, resolution and use cases of smartphones, and many online publications (such as this very site) display their content with beautiful typography and layouts that render consistently on any computer, tablet or smartphone. Phones also allow us to share articles with minimal effort. The easy romance between our smartphones and short-to-mid-length articles and video is part of the reason why venture capitalists have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into New York publishing upstarts such as Vox, Vice and Buzzfeed. The smartphone coupled with the open web creates a near-perfect container for distributing journalism at a grand scale.
But what of digital books? What accounts for my unconscious migration back to print?•
The semantics of the Second Machine Age can be tricky. In trying to name hands-free driving, we’ve dreamed up “driverless,” “robocar” and “autonomous car.” Funny thing is, the term “auto” (“by oneself or spontaneous” and “by itself or automatic”), one we already use, would be particularly apt. We held on to the word “computer” when that job transitioned from humans to machines, and the same pattern seems warranted here. The word doesn’t need change–the definition will.
In the same vein, Kevin Roose of Fusionmakes a good point about the word “robot”: Our application of the term is currently so inconsistent, it’s lost its value. Additionally, if (almost) everything in our lives becomes robotic, isn’t the term redundant?
From Roose:
Today, many of the devices in our lives are really robots working under pseudonyms. A “smart thermostat” is a robot that raises and lowers the temperature of your house. A “smart home security system” is a robot that keeps you safe. A coffee maker with a Bluetooth chip is a robot that keeps you caffeinated. And then there are all the so-called “software robots”: personal assistants like Siri and Cortana, financial “robo-advisors,” and apps thattranslate foreign languageson the fly.
As more and more household tasks become automated, the number of robots in our lives is growing rapidly. And the rise of connected devices raises a thorny semantic question: namely, where does “automated process” stop and “robot” begin? Why is a factory machine that moves car parts considered a “robot,” but a Volkswagen with a much more sophisticated code base is just a Jetta?
Instead of trying to gerrymander a definition for “robot” that could account for the differences between all of the varied types of machine intelligence, I propose a different solution: what if we just stopped saying “robot” altogether?•
In a sense, we may be those superintelligent robots of the future we so fear, as carbon and silicon become strange bedfellows. A byline-less Financial Times essay explores the coming age of cyborgism, detailing a few of the challenges that will attend human enhancement and medical miracles. An excerpt:
Beyond resource allocation and patient selection lie broader questions about human identity as computerised implants enter our minds and bodies. Although human-machine hybrids worthy of the name “cyborg” are unlikely to appear in the real world for decades, even if research continues to accelerate and the cost of the technology begins to fall, it is not too soon to think about the implications of electronic enhancement of the healthy as well as the sick.
Some of the questions are similar to those that people have been asking for some time about future genetic enhancement. For instance, there will be issues of equity if a privileged few can afford to implant an electronic memory and mental performance booster beyond the means of the majority. On the other hand, human computerisation will raise some problems of its own, above all security and privacy. Sooner or later we will have to face up to the threat of malicious hacking into personal memories.•
I think we’ve had a good run, but Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journalinsists humans can flourish in an increasingly machine-centric age if we exploit software and such to overhaul our education system, a process stuck not only in the twentieth century but the nineteenth as well.
It is shocking that in 2015 we haven’t utilized computers to reduce the teacher-student ratio to 1:1 or video games to make education more fun as well as more effective. Mims writes that Silicon Valley figures, now with children of their own, aim to bring algorithms to the academic setting. One idea that seems too good to pass up is real-time textbooks.
An excerpt:
At the core of the coming revolution in how schools should function and what classrooms should look like is this simple observation: It is a waste of time to ask teachers to deliver information and test students on it when that task can be reassigned, at least in part, to software.
Countless startups are working on this problem, among them Testive, which produces a cloud-based service to help students prepare for college entrance exams.
“We need to just unburden the teacher from having to disseminate content,” says Testive Chief Executive Tom Rose. “It’s such a reductive way to use a person.”
That machines can be better tutors than humans, in certain circumstances, is a hypothesis with a great deal of intuitive appeal, though data to prove it remain largely anecdotal. That hasn’t stopped schools all across America from adopting “blended learning,” in which traditional instruction is mixed with lessons delivered on PCs and tablets.
But the vision of many entrepreneurs in educational technology is to take those systems to a whole new level.
“The idea that everyone gets the same textbook is a ludicrously archaic idea,” says Jose Ferreira, chief executive of Knewton, a software company that uses adaptive learning to decide exactly which lessons and problems to deliver to students. “In the future, everybody is going to have materials—textbooks, games, whatever—in a materials portfolio that updates in real time, that generates in real time, based on what you know and how you learn best.”•
Outside of governments largely deregulating drones, the easiest way to bring about their proliferation would be for private companies to purchase fleets of them to rent out. That would remove the risk for individuals and small businesses who have a need for them but are reluctant to purchase. Such large-scale outfits making bulk purchases would spur further development and diminish costs, which in turn would lead to more private ownership. It’s worth remembering, however, that privacy will suffer further if the sector thrives.
The business of drones has ascended into the stratosphere, as investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the tiny unmanned aircraft in hopes of turning them into big business.
Now Robert Wolf, the financier who is a confidant of President Obama, is raising his bet on an industry that has already drawn names like Amazon and GoPro and top venture capital firms like Accel Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Mr. Wolf’s advisory firm plans to announce on Wednesday that it is spinning off its drone-services arm into a separate company. The business, Measure, is betting that its ability to fly the devices to take pictures of farmland and oil rigs will draw interest, and dollars, from a potentially huge number of customers.
Nearly two years ago, Mr. Wolf’s 32 Advisors set up Measure to capture that opportunity. Rather than focus on making the drones or the accessories and software that power them, he has banked on creating a fleet of aircraft that can be flown on behalf of customers. For Measure, it is “drones as a service.”
“We think that over the next 24 to 36 months, we’ll be able to fulfill something that doesn’t exist around the world,” Mr. Wolf, Measure’s chairman, said in a telephone interview.•
Following up on the post about Virtual Reality being utilized to treat PTSD and other disorders, here’s a passage from a 52 Insights Magazine interview with San Francisco-based neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley, who’s working on the bleeding edge of video-game therapy. The doctor wants to use the medium to exploit the plasticity of the brain and “retrain” troubled minds. Of course, the potential for the abuse of such tools in the hands of terrorists, sects or authoritarian states is pretty obvious, though those entities have done fairly well without them.
An excerpt:
The Insight:
So what will it look like, say 30 years from now? Would there be something that you can go to your doctor and get or is there something you can go to a healthcare practitioner and talk to about?
Adam Gazzaley:
I would hope that this would be in the next 4 years; this is the immediate future. We’ll start seeing a different class of medicine, what I would call a ‘digital medicine’ that builds on experience and interactivity, being part of what doctors feel comfortable prescribing. I would hope that future is within the next 5 years.
The Insight:
You’re talking about the games specifically?
Adam Gazzaley:
Yes. …
The Insight:
Because you work so deeply in the core of the brain, has there ever been a discussion with you around tackling mental illness? I know that sits a bit on the periphery of what you do, but you do work within multitasking, focus and attention, so I wondered if that was part of what you do?
Adam Gazzaley:
Yeah, that’s pretty much what our main objectives are. If we could use our knowledge of the system to create a relationship through interactivity and the other technologies I’ve described to you. And to improve the function and to minimise the limitation, we think that it could have great impact in the mental health world. That’s a conversation I have daily with the scientists that are in the psychiatric or neurological domain; how these tools could be part of the medicine they are using in the near future.
The Insight:
Could you give us an idea of how that discussion looks, what would be the implementation in an ideal world?
Adam Gazzaley:
The most concrete one would be where a doctor would feel comfortable pulling out a prescription pad and writing down an iPad game for 1 month with the data streaming into their office during each gameplay, with or without a medication as a drug along side it. I think that would be an exciting future, to understand how these worlds will interact with each other; will they be prescribed together or independently? Would you start with the game because it had no side-effects then come in with a drug if needed? All of these are unknowns but very exciting.•
The human brain is the most amazingly complex machine, until the day it becomes a simple one. If we last long enough, that moment will arrive, and consciousness will no longer be the hard problem or any problem at all.
I don’t think intelligent machines are happening anytime soon, but they’re likely if the Anthropocene or some other age doesn’t claim us first. In fact, we may ultimately become them, more or less.But I’m not talking about today or tomorrow. In the meanwhile, Weak AI will be enough of a boon and bane to occupy us.
The problem I have with concerned technologists attempting to curb tomorrow’s superintelligence today is that any prescripts we create now will become moot soon enough as realities shift. New answers will alter old questions. It’s better to take an incremental approach to these challenges, and try to think through them wisely in our era and trust future humans to do the same in theirs.
Already operating on the South Korean border is a sentry robot, dubbed SGR-1. Its heat-and-motion sensors can identify potential targets more than two miles away. Currently it requires a human before it shoots the machine gun that it carries but it raises the question – who will be responsible if the robots begin to kill without human intervention?
The use of autonomous weapons is something that the UN is currently discussing and has concluded that humans must always have meaningful control over machines.
Noel Sharkey co-founded the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and believes there are several reasons why we must set rules for future battlefield bots now.
“One of the first rules of many countries is about preserving the dignity of human life and it is the ultimate human indignity to have a machine kill you,” he said.
But beyond that moral argument is a more strategic one which he hopes military leaders will take on board.
“The military leaders might say that you save soldiers’ lives by sending in machines instead but that is an extremely blinkered view. Every country, including China, Russia and South Korea is developing this technology and in the long run, it is going to disrupt global security,” he said.
“What kind of war will be initiated when we have robots fighting other robots? No-one will know how the other ones are programmed and we simply can’t predict the outcome.”•
Virtual Reality is usually spoken of in terms of how it will aid work or play, but its greatest efficacy, at least in its nascency, might be in the area of therapy. In the same way that video games seem destined to be a great education tool (but have yet to be properly exploited in this way), VR holds huge promise for creating safe, immersive environments for those trying to put PTSD and other disorders behind them.
Virtual-reality headsets have long been thought of as the ultimate gaming accessory. Now, therapists increasingly are embracing them as an effective therapeutic tool.
The use of immersive virtual reality in mental-health treatment—placing patients in various simulated situations designed to help them deal with their difficulties—has been booming over the past two decades. Therapists, school counselors and even the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs have adopted the technology in the treatment of everything from phobias to depression to substance abuse.
“Virtual reality offers the promise of a fundamentally new way to treat certain psychiatric disorders,” says Elias Aboujaoude, a Stanford University psychiatrist. For instance, he says, it can be used to simulate fear-inducing situations—an encounter with a snake, perhaps, or flying in an airplane—that would be difficult or impossible to reconstruct in a therapist’s office. Such simulations can help people work through their phobias by confronting the situations that disturb them and learning new ways to react, a process known as exposure therapy.
Virtual reality also has proved effective in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, by allowing veterans to safely revisit the kinds of situations they faced in the field, and therapists have found it to be a useful tool in teaching autistic children and adults how to identify certain social cues.•
Speaking of Minority Report, Hitachi says it’s created a system that crunches disparate data (tweets, weather patterns, etc.) and predicts where and when future crimes will occur. Of course, right now it will do so on a macro level as traditional crime-prediction models do, not trying to pinpoint particular people, but as these kinds of tools grow more sophisticated and proliferate, it seems likely they’ll try to operate more and more on a micro one. That could be all kinds of trouble. On the surface, it would be less invasive than stop-and-frisk, but systems, like people, contain all sorts of biases and assumptions.
No one has found a trio of psychic mutant “precogs” who can unanimously foresee future crimes, but Hitachi today introduced a system that promises to predict where and when crime is likely to occur by ingesting a panoply of data, from historical crime statistics to public transit maps, from weather reports to social media chatter. Hitachi says that “about half a dozen” U.S. cities will join a proof of concept test of the technology beginning in October, and though Hitachi hasn’t yet named them, Washington, D.C. could well be on the list. It’s one of several dozen cities in the U.S. and Caribbean countries where the company already provides video surveillance and sensor systems to police departments with its Hitachi Visualization Suite. Hitachi execs provided several examples—even screenshots of the software—featuring D.C. in my conversations with them.
“We don’t have any precogs as part of our system,” says Darrin Lipscomb, cofounder of companies Avrio and Pantascene, which developed crime-monitoring tech that Hitachi later acquired. “If we determined that the precogs were actually somewhat accurate, we could certainly use their predictions to feed into our model,” he says with perfect deadpan. What the new technology, called Hitachi Visualization Predictive Crime Analytics (PCA), does have is the ability to ingest streams of sensor and Internet data from a wide variety of sources.•
In this 1960 clip, Arthur C. Clarke acknowledges the “only thing that is sure about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic,” before promising by the year 2000 we would genetically engineer servant monkeys, abolish cities and utilize instant-communication devices.
He was right, of course, in believing the transistor would allow us to immediately reach one another at all times as well as telecommute, though he felt these changes might mean the end of city living, which, of course, was far off the mark. He was too bold in his predictions about bioengineering, though he’ll likely be right should Homo sapiens survive potential climate-change disaster. (I don’t, however, think that “servant monkeys” will be the direction we go.) Clarke further thought we would tinker with the human brain so that we could learn Chinese overnight and erase bad memories. Unsurprisingly, the co-creator of HAL-9000 envisioned conscious machines zooming past our intelligence, biological evolution reaching its endgame and organic life having served its purpose as a stepping stone to greater knowledge.
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In this clip, philosopher, LSD guru and countercultural icon Dr. Timothy Leary and his wife Rosemary deplane in Algeria and, after a few words with reporters, walk into the waiting of arms of fugitive Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver.
The backstory: During his1970 gubernatorial raceagainst Ronald Reagan in California, Leary was railroaded into a 20-year prison sentence for the dubious charge of possession of two joints. He escaped from the penitentiary, spent time in Algeria with Cleaver before the two had a falling out and was finally recaptured at an airport in Afghanistan. Leary was returned to the states to continue his sentence atFolsom Prison.
California Governor Jerry Brown released Leary in 1976 and the controversial figure spent the last two decades of his life encouraging the construction of space colonies and being an early Internet enthusiast.
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Below is a trailer for Lord of the Universe, a 1974 documentary about adolescent guru Maharaj Ji, who came to some fame in those days for promising to levitate the Houston Astrodome, a plot that never got off the ground. More than any other holy-ish person of the time, the Indian teenager would have fit in quite nicely in Silicon Valley of 2015. He was a technocrat who believed he could disrupt and improve the world. Sound familiar?
Theformer child preacher Marjoe Gortner was hired by OUI, a middling vagina periodical of the Magazine Age, to write a deservedly mocking article about the American visit of the self-appointed messiah. Two excerpts from theresulting report.
The guru’s people do the same thing the Pentecostal Church does. They say you can believe in guru Maharaj Ji and that’s fantastic and good, but if you receive light and get it all within, if you become a real devotee-that is the ultimate. In the Pentecostal Church you can be saved from your sins and have Jesus Christ as your Saviour, but the ultimate is the baptism of the Holy Ghost. This is where you get four or five people around and they begin to talk and more or less chant in tongues until sooner or later the person wanting the baptismal experience so much-well, it’s like joining a country club: once you’re in, you’ll be like everyone – else in the club.
The people who’ve been chanting say, “Speak it out, speak it out,” and everything becomes so frenzied that the baptismalee will finally speak a few words in tongues himself, and the people around him say, “Oh, you’ve got it.” And the joy that comes over everybody’s faces! It’s incredible. It’s beautiful. They feel they have got the Holy Spirit like all their friends, and once they’ve got it, it’s forever. It’s quite an experience.
So essentially they’re the same thing pressing on your eyes while your ears are corked, and standing around the altar speaking in tongues. They’re both illuminating experiences. The guru’s path is interesting, though. Once you’ve seen the light and decided you want to join his movement, you give over everything you have–all material possessions. Sometimes you even give your job. Now, depending on what your job is, you may be told to leave it or to stay. If you stay, generally you turn your pay checks over to the Divine Light Mission, and they see that you are housed and clothed and fed. They have their U. S. headquarters in Denver. You don’t have to worry about anything. That’s their hook. They take care of it all. They have houses all over the country for which they supposedly paid cash on the line. First class. Some of them are quite plush. At least Maharaj Ji’s quarters are. Some of the followers live in those houses, too, but in the dormitory-type atmosphere with straw mats for beds. It’s a large operation. It seems to be a lot like the organization Father Divine had back in the Thirties. He did it with the black people at the Peace Mission in Philadelphia. He took care of his people-mostly domestics and other low-wage earners–and put them up in his own hotel with three meals a day.
The guru is much more technologically oriented, though. He spreads a lot of word and keeps tabs on who needs what through a very sophisticated Telex system that reaches out to all the communes or ashrams around the country. He can keep count of who needs how many T-shirts, pairs of socks–stuff like that. And his own people run this system; it’s free labor for the corporation.
· · · · · · · · · ·
The morning of the third day I was feeling blessed and refreshed, and I was looking forward to the guru’s plans for the Divine City, which was soon going to be built somewhere in the U. S. I wanted to hear what that was all about.
It was unbelievable. The city was to consist of ‘modular units adaptable to any desired shape.’ The structures would have waste-recycling devices so that water could be drunk over and over. They even planned to have toothbrushes with handles you could squeeze to have the proper amount of paste pop up (the crowd was agog at this). There would be a computer in each communal house so that with just a touch of the hand you could check to see if a book you wanted was available, and if it was, it would be hand-messengered to you. A complete modern city of robots. I was thinking: whatever happened to mountains and waterfalls and streams and fresh air? This was going to be a technological, computerized nightmare! It repulsed me. Computer cards to buy essentials at a central storeroom! And no cheating, of course. If you flashed your card for an item you already had, the computer would reject it. The perfect turn-off. The spokesman for this city announced that the blueprints had already been drawn up and actual construction would be the next step. Controlled rain, light, and space. Bubble power! It was all beginning to be very frightening.•
Just a few decades back, the painter Erik Sandberg-Diment was worried about providing for his family so he became a journalist to make money. In 2015, that sentence is enough to make you laugh and cry.
He ended up focusing on computers, tested out so-so cooking software, reviewed the Macintosh with less-than-full appreciation and famously whiffed on the future of laptops. Right or wrong, he was always an entertaining curmudgeon throughout the early PC period, with all its pre-Web frustrations.
Central to the new videotex is the concept of home banking. For the vast majority of people and businesses, however, banking-by-computer is about as convenient as fishing pickles out of the barrel with a toothpick. Home banking programs, even the heavily promoted Pronto sponsored by Chemical Bank, have grown far slower than predicted. V IDEOTEX services claim they will eventually include such features as stock brokerage, travel services, catalogue shopping and even housing exchanges. I doubt, however, that many people will give up shopping in person for the chance to buy a new refrigerator or washing machine by pressing a few keys on a personal computer.
This is a nation of tire kickers, after all. I can’t help but shake my head at the millions of dollars being spent on the development of videotex applications by companies that simply do not seem to grasp the fundamental tenets of personal computing. Personal computing is timesaving, money saving and fun. Videotex is none of the above. ”There have been a lot of very high expectations for information services that have not been met by either teletext or videotex,” says Michelle Preston, the technology industry analyst at the investment firm of L. F. Rothschild, Unterberg, Towbin. ”They simply do not offer enough value to really take off.”
Then there is electronic mail, that thoroughly modern offspring of a calcified postal service and a splintered Ma Bell. Currently, the companies promoting this service, nicknamed e-mail, are also offering such added services as a hookup of the subscriber’s personal computer to the Telex network and a two-hour delivery of letter-quality documents to many parts of the country. They have all discovered that electronic mail alone cannot at this stage attract enough customers to stem the tide of red ink.
Electronic mail allows a message to be typed into a personal computer or a terminal and then transmitted variously through cable, telephone-cum-modem, or satellite link to a receiving personal computer or terminal. One of its alleged advantages is the so-called store and forward message. A user may send messages at any time and, unlike a telephone connection, e-mail does not require the recipient to be on the other end of the line. Then again, the old-fashioned postal service does not require that the recipient be there at the time of delivery either.
When all is said and done, electronic mail is no more efficient, in the vast majority of cases, than the telephone or the postal service it is supposed to replace. Nor does it have the flexibility to be able to deliver packages such as spare parts, in the manner of another innovation, the overnight express service pioneered by Federal Express.
In addition, electronic mail faces the problem of compatibility that has plagued the entire personal computer industry since its inception. At the moment, there are about a dozen services, among them MCI Mail, Western Union’s EasyLink, the ITT Corporation’s Dialcom and General Electric’s Quick-Comm – none of which can be linked with any of the others.
The situation is comparable to there being a dozen different postal services, any one of which may or may not be capable of delivering a message to the particular company for which it is intended. Before even sending the message, a company has to determine whether it can indeed be delivered.
The problem is compounded by the fact that there is no e-mail central. Nor is there any universal directory of subscribers to the different services to help a business determine which potential recipient of its electronic letter subscribes to which service. For now, electronic mail’s solution to the dilemma seems to be the hybrid half e-mail, half regular mail represented by MCI’s now familiar orange envelopes.
Chances are that before a universal e-mail network is ever developed, the whole idea of electronic mail, along with those of teletext and videotex, will have been reduced to the span of a few specialized applications. As a general means of information exchange, the concepts are technologically intriguing. But they are economically naive and, more importantly, no more convenient than the existing alternatives.•
The Economist has a report on the booming drone industry, which has grown many times faster than even most enthusiasts supposed it could, with 15,000 units now sold each month. Legislation clearly hasn’t kept pace with the innovation, so the article suggests the easiest way to arrive at proper rules of the “road” might be to allow the new tools to launch relatively undeterred, enabling us to “lead from behind” with experience as our guide. It certainly worked that way with the fledgling aviation industry of the early twentieth century, when thousands of startups attempted to build on and commodify the Wright brothers’ soaring success.
A hammer, however, is a tool or a weapon depending on how you swing it, and terrorists as well as Taco Bell would like to employ delivery drones. But while criminals might benefit from crowded skies in avoiding early detection, they’re also the least likely to remain within the boundaries of the law, so they can’t be the only priority when drawing up such guidelines. Such concerns probably need to be addressed with myriad approaches.
From a practical standpoint, the Economist identifies the industry’s two key needs: drones able to stay in the air for at least an hour and the development of sense-and-avoid technology.
The opening:
THE scale and scope of the revolution in the use of small, civilian drones has caught many by surprise. In 2010 America’s Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) estimated that there would, by 2020, be perhaps 15,000 such drones in the country. More than that number are now sold there every month. And it is not just an American craze. Some analysts think the number of drones made and sold around the world this year will exceed 1m. In their view, what is now happening to drones is similar to what happened to personal computers in the 1980s, when Apple launched the Macintosh and IBM the PS/2, and such machines went from being hobbyists’ toys to business essentials.
That is probably an exaggeration. It is hard to think of a business which could not benefit from a PC, whereas many may not benefit (at least directly) from drones. But the practical use of these small, remote-controlled aircraft is expanding rapidly. After dragging its feet for several years the FAA had, by August, approved more than 1,000 commercial drone operations. These involved areas as diverse as agriculture (farmers use drones to monitor crop growth, insect infestations and areas in need of watering at a fraction of the cost of manned aerial surveys); land-surveying; film-making (some of the spectacular footage in “Avengers: Age of Ultron” was shot from a drone, which could fly lower and thus collect more dramatic pictures than a helicopter); security; and delivering things (Swiss Post has a trial drone-borne parcel service for packages weighing up to 1kg, and many others, including Amazon, UPS and Google, are looking at similar ideas).•
A Vice story pointed me to a 1976 NASA study of space settlements, which considered, among other things, the psychological ramifications of living in relative darkness and seclusion out there. What struck me about it is that it seems (to a degree) a commentary for life on Earth during a time of Reality TV and smartphones, for how denatured life can feel now. The line about the danger of fulfilling every wish by pushing a button seems particularly meaningful. An excerpt:
The Solipsism Syndrome in Artificial Environment
Some environments are conducive to the state of mind in which a person feels that everything is a dream and is not real. This state of mind occurs, for example, in the Arctic winter when it is night 24 hr a day. It is also known to occur in some youths who have been brought up on television as a substitute to reality.
Solipsism is a philosophical theory that everything is in the imagination, and there is no reality outside one’s own brain. As a philosophical theory it is interesting because is is internally consistent and, therefore, cannot be disproved. But as a psychological state, it is highly uncomfortable. The whole of life becomes a long dream from which an individual can never wake up. Each person is trapped in a nightmare. Even friends are not real, they are a part of the dream. A person feels very lonely and detached, and eventually becomes apathetic and indifferent.
In the small town of Lund, Sweden, the winter days have 6 hr of daylight and 18 hr of darkness. Most of the time people live under artificial light, so that life acquires a special quality. Outdoors, there is no landscape to see; only street corners lit by lamps. These street corners look like theater stages, detached from one another. There is no connectedness or depth in the universe and it acquires a very unreal quality as though the whole world is imagination. Ingmar Bergman’s film Wild Strawberries expresses this feeling very well.
This state of mind can be easily produced in an environment where everything is artificial, where everything is like a theater stage, where every wish can be fulfilled by a push-button, and where there is nothing beyond the theater stage and beyond an individual’s control.
There are several means to alleviate the tendency toward the solipsism syndrome in the extraterrestrial communities:
A large geometry, in which people can see far beyond the “theater stage” of the vicinity to a view which is overwhelmingly visible.
Something must exist beyond each human’s manipulation because people learn to cope with reality when reality is different from their imagination. If the reality is the same as the imagination, there is no escape from falling into solipsism. In extraterrestrial communities, everything can be virtually controlled. In fact, technically nothing should go beyond human control even though this is psychologically bad. However, some amount of “unpredictability” can be built in within a controllable range. One way to achieve this is to generate artificial unpredictability by means of a table of random numbers. Another way is to allow animals and plants a degree of freedom and independence from human planning. Both types of unpredictability must have a high visibility to be effective. This high visibility is easier to achieve in a macrogeometry which allows longer lines of sight.
Something must exist which grows. Interactive processes generate new patterns which cannot be inferred from the information contained in the old state. This is not due to randomness but rather to different amplification by mutual causal loops. It is important for each person to feel able to contribute personally to something which grows, that the reality often goes in a direction different from expectation, and finally that what each person takes care of (a child, for example) may possess increased wisdom, and may grow into something beyond the individual in control. From this point of view, it is important personally to raise children, and to grow vegetables and trees with personal care, not by mechanical means. It is also desirable to see plants and animals grow, which is facilitated by a long line of sight.
It is important to have “something beyond the horizon” which gives the feeling that the world is larger than what is seen.•
Donald Trump, a shrimp-boat barnacle who’s managed to stain adultery’s good name, believes China has “created” the concept of climate change to prevent America from competing in manufacturing. China, with the world’s highest cancer and air-pollution rates, clearly disagrees, finally bowing to political pressure and agreeing to institute cap-and-trade.
It’s breathtaking news with a caveat: The process won’t be easily enforceable in a country rife with corruption and political opaqueness. But it’s a critical first step, and one that will hopefully make the type of impact that America’s Clean Air Act has. From Michael Greenstone’s NYT Upshot post about that U.S. legislation and how it relates to China’s bold move:
The history and impact of the Clean Air Act can serve as a valuable case study for countries that are struggling today with the extraordinary pollution that we once faced. In Northern China, where pollution is curtailing lives by an average offive years, the government has at last declared a “war on pollution.” While enforcement is not perfect, the government has improved transparency andamendedenvironmental protection laws to impose stricter punishments against polluters.
The hundreds of millions of life-years saved from improved air quality in our country didn’t happen by accident or overnight. This happened because a collective voice for change brought about one of the most influential laws of the land.
As the United States and other nations continue to debate the costs of environmental regulation, they can do so with the knowledge that the benefits can be substantial. As proof, we need look no further than the five extra years residents of Weirton-Steubenville are living and the hundreds of millions of years gained by Americans throughout the nation.•
Effective Altruism is certainly better than doing no good at all, and belittling its true believers while doing less than them doesn’t make anyone morally superior, but there’s something of Pangloss’ misplaced confidence in believing back-of-the-napkin “moral calculations” and “philanthropic formulas” can cure the ills of a spinning, jagged world resistant to such neat solutions. While EA adherents clearly don’t think the rising tide of consumerism will, on its own, lift all boats, they do feel enough people using rigorous logic to co-opt capitalism to benefit those less fortunate is the most effective life preserver.
In “Stop the Robot Apocalypse,” her excellent if misleadingly titled London Review of Books piece about William MacAskill’s Doing Good Better, Amia Srinivasan wonders about this system of charity that’s certainly more nebulous than Utilitarianism. She asks, among other things, if the participation of Effective Altruists in capitalism actually perpetuates and exacerbates the wrongs they purport to heal. She also questions if it’s wise to icily wring all emotion from decisions about the “worthiness” or “arbitrariness” of a cause.
An excerpt:
Doing Good Better is a feel-good guide to getting good done. It doesn’t dwell much on the horrors of global inequality, and sidesteps any diagnosis of its causes. The word ‘oppression’ appears just once. This is surely by design, at least in part. According to MacAskill’s moral worldview, it is the consequences of one’s actions that really matter, and that’s as true of writing a book as it is of donating to charity. His patter is calculated for maximal effect: if the book weren’t so cheery, MacAskill couldn’t expect to inspire as much do-gooding, and by his own lights that would be a moral failure. (I’m not saying it doesn’t work. Halfway through reading the book I set up a regular donation to GiveDirectly, one of the charities MacAskill endorses for its proven efficacy. It gives unconditional direct cash transfers to poor households in Uganda and Kenya.)
But the book’s snappy style isn’t just a strategic choice. MacAskill is evidently comfortable with ways of talking that are familiar from the exponents of global capitalism: the will to quantify, the essential comparability of all goods and all evils, the obsession with productivity and efficiency, the conviction that there is a happy convergence between self-interest and morality, the seeming confidence that there is no crisis whose solution is beyond the ingenuity of man. He repeatedly talks about philanthropy as a deal too good to pass up: ‘It’s like a 99 per cent off sale, or buy one, get 99 free. It might be the most amazing deal you’ll see in your life.’ There is a seemingly unanswerable logic, at once natural and magical, simple and totalising, to both global capitalism and effective altruism. That he speaks in the proprietary language of the illness – global inequality – whose symptoms he proposes to mop up is an irony on which he doesn’t comment. Perhaps he senses that his potential followers – privileged, ambitious millennials – don’t want to hear about the iniquities of the system that has shaped their worldview. Or perhaps he thinks there’s no irony here at all: capitalism, as always, produces the means of its own correction, and effective altruism is just the latest instance.
Yet there is no principled reason why effective altruists should endorse the worldview of the benevolent capitalist. Since effective altruism is committed to whatever would maximise the social good, it might for example turn out to support anti-capitalist revolution. And although MacAskill focuses on health as a proxy for goodness, there is no principled reason, as he points out, why effective altruism couldn’t also plug values like justice, dignity or self-determination into its algorithms. (There’s also no reason why one couldn’t ‘earn to give’ to help radical causes; Engels worked at a mill in Manchester to support Marx’s writing of Capital.) Effective altruism has so far been a rather homogeneous movement of middle-class white men fighting poverty through largely conventional means, but it is at least in theory a broad church.•
Part 2 of Alexander R. George’s 1938 Brooklyn Daily Eaglefeature about life 25 years in the future isn’t quite as daring as Part 1, focusing instead on sensible if very hopeful predictions for a society still dealing with the fallout of the Great Depression and yet to lead the Allies to victory in WWII: longer lifespans, healthier citizens, etc. Perhaps most interesting are the fashion prognostications. Americans did wearer fewer and less-formal clothes by 1963, and women discarded corsets, but those expected glass raincoats that protected against lightning never did come to pass.
Speaking of the think tank that helped Steven Spielberg create the world of tomorrow for 2002’s Minority Report, Wiredreconvened some of the principals of that very productive two-day retreat to mark the tenth anniversary of the film. It sounds like it was a fascinating experience if a harried and discombobulating one. An excerpt:
Alex McDowell (production designer, Minority Report):
It was two full days at the Shutters Hotel in Santa Monica.
We pretended to be a conference of dental technicians or something boring.
Douglas Coupland (novelist, author of Generation X and Microserfs):
We sat around a big U-shaped table like that scene in 2001 — in that conference room on the moon.
Joel Garreau (principal of consulting firm The Garreau Group, in 1999 a reporter at the Washington Post):
I don’t think many of us knew what the fuck we were getting ourselves into.
Peter Schwartz (futurist, co-founder of scenario-planning firm Global Business Network):
We would ask questions: What about advertising? What about transportation? What about newspapers? What about food?
Stewart Brand (editor of Whole Earth Catalog):
They had graphic artists there who could immediately draw things that were being described.
Harald Belker (automotive designer):
We were supposed to just watch and listen and see what people had to say.
Coupland:
It was a big deal back then to have that real-time feedback.
Schwartz:
What about weapons? Surveillance — how did it work? One that moved very quickly was the gesture control of computers. That really began with Jaron. There was pretty quick agreement about what you saw onscreen.
Lanier:
We were doing these glove technologies that could be combined with displays. That was totally commonplace during that time as a demo thing — not as a consumer product. My recollection is that I brought in a working one. I could just pack one in the trunk.
Coupland:
I put together a whole book for it — a 2080 style book. We were told it was 2080, but then it ended up being 2050.•
Speaking of desolate factories, here’s another twist: China’s rising middle class and aging population has made it difficult for many plants to find the necessary supply of cheap labor. The nation’s economic problems have temporarily eased the migration away from factory work, but automation seems the only answer in the longer run. As Daniel Kahneman has said: “robots will show up in China just in time.”
Factory managers tell the same story at industrial estates across Dongguan, in the southern province of Guangdong, which has gone from small town to a megacity of more than 7m people over the past two decades as manufacturers flooded in to take advantage of the vast supply of cheap labour.
A closely watched factory survey on Wednesday revealed that Chinese manufacturing is having its worst month since the depths of the financial crisis. But while heavily indebted steel and cement plants lie idle across China and luxury goods manufacturers have seen their sales slump, the jobs market in the south, one of the country’s most economically dynamic regions, is still in good health for those willing to travel from elsewhere and take up tough manufacturing work.
The problem for factory owners is that their pool of labour has been shrinking in recent years because of the rapidly ageing population and the growth of less-stressful job openings in the service sector, selling cappuccinos and cinema tickets to China’s expanding middle class.
Facing this long-term challenge, many manufacturers from TAL to Foxconn, the Taiwanese maker of iPhones and iPads, are increasing their investments in robots and automation.•
Douglas Coupland, when working as a member of Steven Spielberg’s think tank on Minority Report, advised the director that the future would be much quieter. Well, certain parts of it will be, and some of them are pieces that rumbled with human activity for as long as they existed. Actually, in many cases, Coupland’s tomorrow has already arrived.
Photographer Edgar Martins’ new series, 00:00.00, captures eerie moments when cutting-edge Munich BMW factories are slowed to a stop, their almost-humanless hum silenced, reminding us that they exist and operate while we busy ourselves elsewhere. Soon, these operations won’t need even a few of us, and we’ll have to find other things to do with our time. We’ll have to redefine what humans are here for, a process that will continue as long as we do, and we’ll require fresh political solutions to navigate this new normal.
“Factories and data processing centers are, perhaps, the most relevant production centers of our times,” Martins says. “I’m interested in how technology is shaping our lives and how we have become increasingly dependent on it, for better or worse. I’m also interested in the notion of technological utopias and the dreams and aspirations we attach to technological advancements and progress.”
Car factories have helped shape the world we live in and will reshape it again as companies react to climate change, he says. “The automotive industry faces some major challenges over the next decades, as it aims to deal with the inherent shortcomings and pitfalls of the internal combustion engine and its environmental repercussions.”•
It must have been grand in 1963, what with families living in glass or rubber houses, driving cars 140 miles-per-hour, owning their own airplanes and feasting on “pill dinners.”
None of that actually happened, of course, but those were the futuristic predictions in Part One of two-part article by Alexander R. George in a March 22, 1938 Brooklyn Daily Eagle about what was to come in just 25 years. The idea about newspapers being delivered directly into the home by some sort of wire facsimile is impressive, however, even if it’s a little too bold in timeline.
It’s too late to save ourselves, but one gift we could give to people of the future, should they exist, is to explore and map the genomes of those creatures given to remarkably long lives. They’ve somehow developed internal methods for suppressing tumors and other flaws in the DNA that normally accompany aging. Such mysteries, once solved, may allow us to make the human lifespan more elastic.
It’s certainly not just size that matters, as David Robson explains in his BBC Future article “The Secrets of Living to 200 Years Old,” since there are both rats and whales able to grind nature’s inexorable march to a relatively slow crawl. An excerpt:
Several lines of evidence suggest there are brakes that can slow [the aging] progress. For instance, a common diabetes drug,metformin, can modestly slow ageingin mice. And simply changing one gene involved in cell metabolism in a roundworm can lead it to live many times longer than its parents; while it is unlikely the same changes would help more complex organisms, it hints that ageing is not beyond our control. “Ageing is a surprisingly plastic process that can be manipulated,” [the University of Liverpool’s Joao Pedro] de Magalhaes says.
Scientists like de Magalhaes and [Harvard’s Vadim] Gladyshev are now on the hunt for other candidates, using real-life Methuselahs as their guide. Across mammals alone, expectedlifespan can vary 100-fold, from shrews that live for no longer than 1.5 years to the bowhead whales that can live for more than 200. It is as if, for various reasons, natural selection has somehow pushed certain creatures to evolve their own elixir of life.
“Metformin extends lifespan in mice modestly, but when you look at different species, the capacity of natural selection to extend lifespan is incredibly more powerful,” says de Magalhaes. “They will have probably evolved entirely different ways of living longer, and resisting cancer and other age-related diseases.” And each of those could lead to better medicine. Or as Gladyshev puts it: “Nature changes lifespan all the time, so the question is, how does it do it? And can we target those mechanisms, thereby increasing human longevity?”
The most interesting creatures are the extreme outliers; single species that seem to outlive even their closest relatives.•
Unlike the newspaper and music industries, which were upended by the Internet, the traditional TV model is doing just fine–or really, really not.
Michael Wolff, the least beloved of all the Muppets, has written a book about the triumph of this hoary medium in the Computer Age, one of two new titles on which Jacob Weisberg bases his wonderfully written NYRB piece “TV vs. the Internet: Who Will Win?” Weisberg notes: “Most commercials are directed at young people, based on the advertising industry’s belief in establishing brand loyalty early. That’s why so much ad-supported programming caters to the tastes of teenagers.”
That’s an interesting companion for this snippet from “Where Did Everybody Go?” an Advertising Age article published today about the paucity of viewers greeting the new season, those remaining on the couch now grayer than Japan: “The most disconcerting PUT (people using television) data concerns younger viewers, who are ditching traditional TV faster than anyone could have anticipated.”
Weisberg is admiring of aspects of Wolff’s book but ultimately thinks “his analysis is too categorical and in places simply wrong.” An excerpt:
Wolff contends that television learned a useful lesson from the gutting of the music industry. The record companies were at first lackadaisical in protecting their intellectual property, then went after their own customers, filing lawsuits against dorm-room downloaders. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1998, sites hosting videos such as YouTube appeared to be within their rights to wait for takedown notices before removing pirated material. But Viacom, led by the octogenarian Sumner Redstone, sued YouTube anyway. Its 2007 lawsuit forced Google, which had bought YouTube the previous year, to abandon copyright infringement as a business model. Thanks to the challenge from Viacom, YouTube became a venue for low-value content generated by users (“Charlie Bit My Finger”) and acceded to paying media owners, such as Comedy Central, a share of its advertising revenue in exchange for its use of material. “Instead of a common carrier they had become, in a major transformation, licensors,” Wolff writes. Where it might have been subsumed by a new distribution model, the television business instead subsumed its disruptor.
Wolff is dismissive of newer threats to the business. He regards cord cutting—customers dropping premium cable bundles in favor of Internet services such as Netflix—as an insignificant phenomenon. But even if it gathers steam, as recent evidence suggests may be happening, cord cutting leaves Comcast and Time Warner Cable, the largest cable companies, in a win-win position, since they provide the fiber optic cables that deliver broadband Internet to the home as well as those that bring TV. Even if you decide not to pay for hundreds of channels you don’t watch, you’ll pay the same monopoly to stream House of Cards. (This won’t provide much comfort, however, to companies that own the shows, which stand to lose revenue from both cable subscribers and commercials priced according to ratings.)•
Robots have been members of the U.S. military since at least 1928, and the only question in the long term is whether our warriors will ultimately be wholly silicon or if we’ll use brain chips, drugs, exoskeleton suits and genetic manipulation to alter humans into fighting “machines.” We’ll certainly develop both, but the former’s lack of flexibility for the foreseeable future makes battlefield Transhumanism, dicey though it is from an ethical standpoint, more doable for now.
Questions abound for this new arms race: If war is relatively painless (for one side, in some cases), will it make aggression more attractive? How will these experiments in pain vaccines and teleportation eventually inform civilian life? Will humanitarian crises like Syria’s collapse be eliminated by these tools?
In “Engineering Humans for War,” Annie Jacobsen’s excellent Atlantic article, she looks at DARPA’s goal of creating a real-life Iron Man in numerous ways, including a super-soldier suit called TALOS (Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit), which the department expects to have operational by 2018. An excerpt:
For decades after its inception in 1958, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—DARPA, the central research and development organization of the Department of Defense—focused on developing vast weapons systems. Starting in 1990, and owing to individuals like [Retired four-star general Paul F.] Gorman, a new focus was put on soldiers, airmen, and sailors—on transforming humans for war. The progress of those efforts, to the extent it can be assessed through public information, hints at war’s future, and raises questions about whether military technology can be stopped, or should.
Gorman sketched out an early version of the thinking in a paper he wrote for DARPA after his retirement from the Army in 1985, in which he described an “integrated-powered exoskeleton” that could transform the weakling of the battlefield into a veritable super-soldier. The “SuperTroop” exoskeleton he proposed offered protection against chemical, biological, electromagnetic, and ballistic threats, including direct fire from a .50-caliber bullet. It “incorporated audio, visual, and haptic [touch] sensors,” Gorman explained, including thermal imaging for the eyes, sound suppression for the ears, and fiber optics from the head to the fingertips. Its interior would be climate-controlled, and each soldier would have his own physiological specifications embedded on a chip within his dog tags. “When a soldier donned his ST [SuperTroop] battledress,” Gorman wrote, “he would insert one dog-tag into a slot under the chest armor, thereby loading his personal program into the battle suit’s computer,” giving the 21st-century soldier an extraordinary ability to hear, see, move, shoot, and communicate.
At the time Gorman wrote, the computing technology needed for such a device did not yet exist.•
I admire the London Review of Books, but I was a little surprised when its longtime editor Mary-Kay Wilmers recently told the Financial Times that the periodical has had to lean more heavily on political content because they’re aren’t enough worthy books to fill its pages with critiques.
That isn’t true, I don’t think, even if it’s a frequent refrain: Our digital culture has developed in such a way as to diminish literature, people now won’t read more than 140 characters, the quality of the written word is in steep decline.
Except I truly believe we’re living in a golden age for books, with so many great titles that it’s impossible to keep up with them. Certain corners of the publishing world have been destabilized, particularly by Amazon’s business practices, but in the big picture it seems we have rich and varied contributions from a much wider array of writers.
Maybe future generations raised on smartphones won’t be as accepting of literature (though I don’t think so), and perhaps books will become so cheap that writing won’t attract great talent (not likely), but for now at least, it’s a wonderful time to be a reader.
Another thing that’s often said is that in the near future, all books will be read on screens and not at all on dead trees. This transition wouldn’t mean the death of books, of course, as just the medium would change, and whatever influence this new instrument has on books in the long run, it would be far from lethal and perhaps even more likely prove beneficial. The changeover certainly would, however, sink bookstores. This passage may still materialize, but for now, the tide has receded.
“E-books were this rocket ship going straight up,” said Len Vlahos, a former executive director of the Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit research group that tracks the publishing industry. “Just about everybody you talked to thought we were going the way of digital music.”
But the digital apocalypse never arrived, or at least not on schedule. While analysts once predicted that e-books would overtake print by 2015, digital sales have instead slowed sharply.
Now, there are signs that some e-book adopters are returning to print, or becoming hybrid readers, who juggle devices and paper. E-book sales fell by 10 percent in the first five months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, which collects data from nearly 1,200 publishers. Digital books accounted last year for around 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as they did a few years ago.
E-books’ declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media, like music and television.•
