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“There’s Going To Be A Transition Phase”

August 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If driverless cars were improved markedly and all vehicles were autonomous, accidents and fatalities would likely experience a steep decline. But a shift to robocars will be a gradual one, and highways and streets will long be a mix of both humans and computers at the wheel. How will those two forces learn to share the road? It’ll take time and research.

From Aviva Rutkin at New Scientist:

IN THE near future, you may have to share the road with a robot. Or perhaps we should say that a robot will have to share the road with you.

At the University of California, Berkeley, engineers are preparing autonomous cars to predict what we impulsive, unreliable humans might do next. A team led by Katherine Driggs-Campbell has developed an algorithm that can guess with up to 92 per cent accuracy whether a human driver will make a lane change. She is due to present the work next month at the Intelligent Transportation Systems conference in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain.

Enthusiasts are excited that self-driving vehicles could lead to fewer crashes and less traffic. But people aren’t accustomed to driving alongside machines, says Driggs-Campbell. When we drive, we watch for little signs from other cars to indicate whether they might turn or change lanes or slow down. A robot might not have any of the same tics, and that could throw us off.

“There’s going to be a transition phase,” she says.•

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“It Is Kind Of Dehumanizing”

August 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada, who’ve done brilliant work (here and here) on the NFL’s existential concussion problem and yet still somehow are passionate Niners fans, have written an excellent ESPN The Magazine piece about Chris Borland, the football player who retired after his rookie season to safeguard his health.

The former San Francisco linebacker’s preemptive attempt at self-preservation was a shot across the bow, a shocking move the league hadn’t experienced since the 1960s, when so-called Hippie players voluntarily left the game and its militaristic nature during Vietnam Era. Borland’s decision made news, as you might expect, and he became something of a reluctant political football.

The ESPN article reveals the NFL’s response to Borland’s decision was, well, NFL-like: tone-deaf, corporate and petty. Although he’d left the game, the former player was asked to take a “random” drug test almost immediately. It seems the league wanted to deflate his stance and prove he retired to avoid detection over illegal substances. Unless it was a remarkable coincidence, the NFL hoped to paint Borland a fraud and thereby negate his very valid concerns.

There’s no way humans can safely play football. No helmet can preserve a head from whiplash–in fact the modern one is a weapon that increases the occurrences. People who profit from the sport can make believe otherwise, but there’s no way out but down. Borland and others who’ve made a quick exit, and the stalwarts who’ve awakened to the game’s toll, have underlined that reality.

An excerpt:

Borland has consistently described his retirement as a pre-emptive strike to (hopefully) preserve his mental health. “If there were no possibility of brain damage, I’d still be playing,” he says. But buried deeper in his message are ideas perhaps even more threatening to the NFL and our embattled national sport. It’s not just that Borland won’t play football anymore. He’s reluctant to even watch it, he now says, so disturbed is he by its inherent violence, the extreme measures that are required to stay on the field at the highest levels and the physical destruction 
he has witnessed to people he loves and admires — especially to their brains.

Borland has complicated, even tortured, feelings about football that grow deeper the more removed he is from the game. He still sees it as an exhilarating sport that cultivates discipline and teamwork and brings communities and families together. “I don’t dislike football,” he insists. “I love football.” At the same time, he has come to view it as a dehumanizing spectacle that debases both the people who play it and the people who watch it.

“Dehumanizing sounds so extreme, but when you’re fighting for a football at the bottom of the pile, it is kind of dehumanizing,” he said during a series of conversations over the spring and summer. “It’s like a spectacle of violence, for entertainment, and you’re the actors in it. You’re complicit in that: You put on the uniform. And it’s a trivial thing at its core. It’s make-believe, really. That’s the truth about it.”

How one person can reconcile such opposing views of football — as both cherished American tradition and trivial activity so violent that it strips away our humanity — is hard to see. Borland, 24, 
is still working it out. He wants to be respectful to friends who are still playing and former teammates and coaches, but he knows that, in many ways, he is the embodiment of the growing conflict over football, a role that he is improvising, sometimes painfully, as he goes along.•

 

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Old Print Article: Edison Celebrated At Life’s End, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1929/31)

August 26, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If you thought the public mourning over Steve Jobs’ death seemed outsize, just imagine what went on when Thomas Edison, whose contributions were much more foundational, was at life’s end.

While Edison didn’t create the first incandescent lamp (that was Sir Joseph Wilson Swan whom he eventually partnered with), his 1879 invention and business acumen enabled the brightness of modernity. It was this accomplishment among his many that was celebrated with “Light’s Golden Jubilee” in 1929, a live celebration of the Edison bulb that was broadcast on radio. President Hoover was there in person, and Albert Einstein, Madame Curie, Orville Wright and Will Rogers were a few guests who were patched in remotely. Edison reenacted his eureka moment and entire cities put on blinding light shows. It was a merry time that beat by just four days the arrival of the stock market crash that begat the Great Depression.

In 1931, when the inventor died, many American schools were closed and everything from lightbulbs to trains were turned off for a moment in Edison’s honor. A pair of Brooklyn Daily Eagle articles embedded below recall the elaborate expressions of gratitude.

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From October 20, 1929:

From October 21, 1931:

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“You’re Going To See It All There”

August 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Capitalism run amok is a scary thing. It creates the horrid air quality and high cancer rates in China just as readily as it can create opportunities for the previously underprivileged.

In visiting a couple of the modern Gold Rush towns in fracking-friendly North Dakota, Henrietta Norton and Dan Dennison of the Guardian witnessed many of the social costs of the of rapid transformation of former farmland, but they also find a more complicated story in the wake of the oil price collapse, one in which striving Americans try to remake their fortunes in a tumultuous landscape during a time of economic uncertainty.

The opening:

“You’re going to see it all there – gang banging, sex trafficking, gambling, drugs, all the dark stuff, they’ve ruined the place,” says the man on the front desk at the Super 8 Motel where we stop for the night en route from Fargo.

The Bakken region has been at the heart of the latest oil boom since the early 2000s, when new technology enabled horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to access minerals found in the layers of rock beneath the ground. It occupies 200,000 square miles, and stretches from Montana and North Dakota across into Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada.

In the past five years, there has been a dramatic influx of people in North Dakota. Many towns have become synonymous with the term “man camp”, as tens of thousands of men have arrived in search of work in the rigs, or to lay the pipeline. There’s a joke amongst them: “There’s a woman behind every tree in North Dakota … it’s just that there aren’t any trees.”•

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“They Are Collecting Data From Both Workers And Customers”

August 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Prelude to layoffs in the media industry (and all others) is the influx of efficiency experts and consultants. Conde Nast employees are preparing for just such a plague of analysts, in which each of them will have to account for every hour of their day. Scary for them that they’ll be quantified, even if in such a quaint, old-fashioned way.

The new normal is, of course, to let algorithms measure us at work and, ultimately, at home. Human management in all levels of business is so godawful, plagued by pettiness, bias and incompetence, it’s valid to ask whether algorithms could really do a worse job. Maybe not. But you know when a supervisor is messing with you, and you can appeal to a sense of fairness, even if that’s sometimes futile. It’s really difficult to argue with computer code, which can certainly contain its own biases. In fact, they almost certainly do. Further, there’s no way current AI can truly judge the dynamics of office space, the little things that go into making a company successful or even just a pleasant place to be, something important to us if not our silicon brothers and sisters.

In a smart Aeon essay, Frank Pasquale wonders about the quiet insinuation into our lives of this next-level judge, jury and executioner. He has more hope than I do that these new tools of accountability will themselves be held accountable. An excerpt:

The infancy of the internet is over. As online spaces mature, Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, and other powerful corporations are setting the rules that govern competition among journalists, writers, coders, and e-commerce firms. Uber and Postmates and other platforms are adding a code layer to occupations like driving and service work. Cyberspace is no longer an escape from the ‘real world’. It is now a force governing it via algorithms: recipe-like sets of instructions to solve problems. From Google search to OkCupid matchmaking, software orders and weights hundreds of variables into clean, simple interfaces, taking us from query to solution. Complex mathematics govern such answers, but it is hidden from plain view, thanks either to secrecy imposed by law, or to complexity outsiders cannot unravel.

Algorithms are increasingly important because businesses rarely thought of as high tech have learned the lessons of the internet giants’ successes. Following the advice of Jeff Jarvis’s What Would Google Do, they are collecting data from both workers and customers, using algorithmic tools to make decisions, to sort the desirable from the disposable. Companies may be parsing your voice and credit record when you call them, to determine whether you match up to ‘ideal customer’ status, or are simply ‘waste’ who can be treated with disdain. Epagogix advises movie studios on what scripts to buy, based on how closely they match past, successful scripts. Even winemakers make algorithmic judgments, based on statistical analyses of the weather and other characteristics of good and bad vintage years.

For wines or films, the stakes are not terribly high. But when algorithms start affecting critical opportunities for employment, career advancement, health, credit and education, they deserve more scrutiny.•

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“Ultimately, Robots Would Drive A Social Revolution…But Not The One People Fear”

August 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

When the sanguine view is that only 7% of American jobs will disappear in the next ten years, we probably need to brace ourselves. Forrester Research reports that figure, saying some employment loss will be offset by the creation of new positions. Probably true enough, but there’s no guarantee low-skilled workers will be able to be retrained for them, and it’s not like 2025 is some important end date. In the longer run, the truth may end up somewhere between the Forrester number and the more troubling Oxford one of 47% jobs being susceptible to automation.

From Elizabeth Dwoskin at WSJ:

Before a robot takes your job, you’re likely to be working with one side-by-side.

That’s the takeaway from a new report by Forrester Research, Inc.

The report wades into a heady and long-running debate over whether, how, and to what extent will robots take over human jobs – a hotly discussed topic amid recent progress in robotics and artificial intelligence. Most experts agree that machines will depress the job market in coming decades, possibly by as much as 47%, according to a widely reported 2013 Oxford paper.

Forrester takes a less dire view. Examining workforces at large companies across industries, including Delta Airlines Inc., Whole Foods Market Inc., and Lowe’s Companies Inc. as well as many startups, analyst J.P. Gownder estimated that automation would erase 22.7 million US jobs by 2025 — 16% of today’s total. However, that decline would be offset somewhat by new jobs created, making for a net loss of 7%, or 9.1 million jobs.

Ultimately, robots would drive a social revolution, Mr. Gownder found, but not the one people fear.•

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“Uber Is Setting Up A New Self-Driving Car Project”

August 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Uber has shamelessly tried to reposition itself as a job creator when it actually destabilizes good jobs and CEO Travis Kalanick has previously been open about wanting to eliminate all its drivers. Perhaps that’s the future, but let’s be honest about it: Uber is good in many ways, but it isn’t good for Labor. So when the rideshare pretends for publicity purposes that the hiring of military veterans or minorities is central to its mission, it’s an outright lie.

From Russell Brandom at the Verge:

Uber is setting up a new self-driving car project at the University of Arizona, according to an email sent out today to university employees. The new project will focus on self-driving car technology, particularly the mapping and optics challenges involved in developing a fully autonomous vehicle. An official statement from Uber confirmed the news, saying, “we’ll work with some of the world’s leading experts in lens design at the University to improve the imagery we capture and use to build out mapping and safety features..” The project comes just months after a major hiring push for Uber’s Pittsburgh center, which many complained had hired so many experts away from the local robotics lab that they had effectively gutted competing projects.

According to a statement from Arizona’s governor, the partnership will focus on the optics systems necessary for mapping and safety, and will result in a number of Uber’s test vehicles taking up permanent residence in Arizona. Uber will donate $25,000 to the university’s College of Optical Sciences.…•

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“The First Order Of Business Should Be Creating A Fair Tax System”

August 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Months before the first 2011 Occupy protest in Zuccotti Park, economist Joseph Stiglitz was bemoaning the 1%, doggedly working to put a spotlight on wealth inequality and the rigged system that abets it. These days, he feels the discussion has evolved but there haven’t been any real material changes. 

Gawker took a break from being yeesh! long enough to allow Hamilton Nolan to do his typically smart work, interviewing Stiglitz about how disparity can be mitigated. Simply put, he doesn’t believe fairness can be achieved through charitable donations but will require systemic changes. An excerpt:

Question:

Is there a red line level of inequality past which you think there will be some sort of tipping point?

Joseph Stiglitz:

We’re always gonna have some inequality. There is a small enough level of inequality that, while you might worry about it, it doesn’t have a corrosive effect. We’ve reached a level of inequality where it’s unambiguously clear to me and to most observers that it’s interfering with our economic performance. It’s having a corrosive effect on the way our democracy works. It’s having a corrosive effect on the way our society functions. So we’re in the bad regime. We’re facing very large costs.

The other question that you’re asking is, “Is there a tipping point, a dynamic where things get more and more unequal and increasingly hard to pull back?” I would say yes, and what that point is depends on a number of factors, including the political landscape. I believe a lot of inequality is a result of the policies we make. Those policies are a result of political processes. Political processes are affected by the rules that [govern] how money gets translated into politics. So if you have a political system like the US, where money talks more than in Europe, that is going to have a more corrosive effect—a lower tipping point. I try to be optimistic. I wouldn’t be working so hard if I believed we were over that tipping point. There’s some chance we are over it, but there’s some chance that we’re not. The fight right now is to make sure we don’t go further over it.

Question:

Is it possible to rein it in with our current campaign finance system?

Joseph Stiglitz:

It’s possible, and difficult. We’ve seen successes in the minimum wage campaign. We’ve seen successes in when the Republicans try to restrict voting rights in Pennsylvania, it backfired and people got so angry that they came out and voted. So every once in a while you see an outpouring of democratic forces.

Question:

Where would you set the income tax rates, if it was up to you?

Joseph Stiglitz:

The first order of business should be creating a fair tax system, so that we tax dividends and speculators at the same rate that we tax ordinary income.•

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Old Print Article: George Bernard Shaw, Early Anti-Vaxxer, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1948)

August 24, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Add George Bernard Shaw to the list of history’s perplexing anti-vaxxers, people who somehow believe inoculations, which have done immense good for humanity, are dubious. A lifelong critic of vaccines, Shaw carried his ludicrous theories into his dotage, and, eventually, his grave. When he was 92, a medical official appealed to him to see if the playwright had experienced a late-life apostasy. No such luck. An article in the August 25, 1948 Brooklyn Daily Eagle told the story.

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“When Isis Destroys Ancient Sites It Is Not Just Attacking Buildings”

August 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

What’s most maddening about the Islamic State is that if the rest of the world decided it was not going to allow this atrocious behavior, the group could be put down quite readily. But, of course, that’s not how global politics works, it’s a more fractious and complicated thing, and sometimes that can be galling.

While I’m no longer shocked by the brutal murders committed by these deviants, they still hit me harder than the trashing of antiquities, though that’s another horror. In a Guardian article, Julian Baggini argues that if you inversely feel more outraged about the ISIS assaults on dead cities than living humans, you’re not necessarily being inhumane. An excerpt:

Caring about how people live also means caring about those aspects of human culture that speak to more than our needs for food, shelter and good health. It involves recognising that there are human achievements that transcend our own lives and our own generations. We come and go, but we are survived by the fruits of our peers and those who came before us. There is a humility in seeing, as Rick did in Casablanca, that the problems of a few “little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world”.

When Isis destroys ancient sites it is not just attacking buildings, it is attacking the values their preservation represents, such as a recognition of the plurality of cultures that precede and surround us, as well as a respect for the achievements of past generations and a sense that we are custodians for the generations to follow. The destruction of the Temple of Baal Shamin is a brutally shocking sign that this is an organisation that has no respect for the diverse history and culture of civilisation but seeks instead to erase everything except what it holds dear. It shows that even when Isis does not kill, it doesn’t let people live as they legitimately desire to do, which is a particular kind of terror of its own.

The destruction of people and places might appear to be quite different, but the distinction is not as neat as it first seems.•

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“Current Laws Never Envisioned A Vehicle That Can Drive Itself”

August 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In what’s an otherwise very good Fast Company article about autonomous cars, Charlie Sorrel conveniently elides one really important fact: not all the kinks have yet been worked out of the driverless experience. While Google has done extensive testing on the vehicles, inclement weather is still poses a challenge for them and visual-recognition systems need further enhancement. So, yes, legislation and entrenched human behaviors are significant barriers to be overcome, but the machines themselves continue to need fine-tuning.

Still, it’s an interesting article, especially the section about the nature of future cities that await us should we perfect and accept this new normal. An excerpt:

Famously, Google’s self-driving cars have clocked up 1.7 million miles over six years, all without major incident.

“In more than a million miles of real-world testing, autonomous vehicles have been involved in around a dozen crashes (with no major injuries),” says John Nielsen, AAA’s Managing Director of Automotive Engineering and Repair, “all of which occurred when a human driver was in control, or the vehicle was struck by another car.”

Self-driving cars are already way better than people-piloted cars, so what’s the trouble?

“Current laws never envisioned a vehicle that can drive itself, and there are numerous liability issues that need to be ironed out,” Nielsen says. “If an autonomous vehicle gets in a collision, who is responsible? The “driver,” their insurance company, the automaker that built the vehicle, or the third-party supplier that provided the autonomous control systems?”

How will the laws adapt? And how will we adapt? People are hesitant to embrace change, but the change that driverless cars will bring to our cities and lifestyles is enormous. What will it take to get there?•

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“Imagine Such A Weapon Enhanced By An A.I. Technology”

August 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Jerry Kaplan, author of Humans Need Not Apply, thinks technology may make warfare safer (well, relatively). Perhaps, but that’s not the goal of all combatants. He uses the landmine as an example, arguing that a “smarter” explosive could be made to only detonate if enemy military happened across it. But any nation or rogue state using landmines does so precisely because of the terror that transcends the usual rules of engagement. They would want to use new tools to escalate that threat. The internationally sanctioned standards Kaplan hopes we attain will likely never be truly universal. As the implements of war grow cheaper, smaller and more out of control, that issue becomes more ominous.

In theory, robotized weapons could make war less lethal or far more so, but that will depend on the intentions of the users, and both scenarios will probably play out. 

From Kaplan in the New York Times:

Consider the lowly land mine. Those horrific and indiscriminate weapons detonate when stepped on, causing injury, death or damage to anyone or anything that happens upon them. They make a simple-minded “decision” whether to detonate by sensing their environment — and often continue to do so, long after the fighting has stopped.

Now imagine such a weapon enhanced by an A.I. technology less sophisticated than what is found in most smartphones. An inexpensive camera, in conjunction with other sensors, could discriminate among adults, children and animals; observe whether a person in its vicinity is wearing a uniform or carrying a weapon; or target only military vehicles, instead of civilian cars.

This would be a substantial improvement over the current state of the art, yet such a device would qualify as an offensive autonomous weapon of the sort the open letter proposes to ban.

Then there’s the question of whether a machine — say, an A.I.-enabled helicopter drone — might be more effective than a human at making targeting decisions. In the heat of battle, a soldier may be tempted to return fire indiscriminately, in part to save his or her own life. By contrast, a machine won’t grow impatient or scared, be swayed by prejudice or hate, willfully ignore orders or be motivated by an instinct for self-preservation.•

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“Dr. Ayers Noticed A Screw Missing From One Of The Trio Of Legs Extending From The Right Side Of The Lobster’s Abdomen”

August 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

bigdogrun

In between GE’s clumsy 1968 Pedipulator, an elephant-esque walking truck, and Boston Dynamics’ stunningly agile Big Dog and Cheetah, biomimetics went through plenty of growing pains. It’s a smart concept: Examine how land and marine creatures overcome obstacles and ape it with AI. Easier said than done, though. In “They’re Robots? Those Beasts!” a 2004 New York Times article, Scott Kirsner profiled Northeastern University’s Joseph Ayers and other roboticists exploring nature for inspiration. The opening:

JOSEPH AYERS was crouched over a laptop in a cool cinder block shed barely big enough to house a ride-on lawn mower, watching a boxy-shelled black lobster through a rectangular acrylic window.

Dr. Ayers’s shed is adjacent to a fiberglass saltwater tank that looks like a big above-ground swimming pool, and through the window, he observed as the seven-pound lobster clambered across the sandy bottom and struggled to surmount small rocks.

”He’s pitched backwards onto his tail, and his front legs aren’t really touching the ground,” said Dr. Ayers, a professor of biology at Northeastern University in Boston, sounding vexed.

A few minutes later, Dr. Ayers noticed a screw missing from one of the trio of legs extending from the right side of the lobster’s abdomen. Were this lobster not made of industrial-strength plastic, metal alloys and a nickel metal hydride battery, Dr. Ayers — the author of several lobster cookbooks, including ”Dr. Ayers Cooks With Cognac” — seemed frustrated enough to drop the robotic lobster into a boiling pot of water and serve it up for dinner.

Dr. Ayers was at his university’s Marine Science Center on the peninsula of Nahant, which pokes out into Massachusetts Bay. He was trying to get his robotic lobster ready for a demonstration in late September for the military branch that funds his work, the Office of Naval Research. By then, he hopes to have the lobster using its two claws as bump sensors.

”When it walks into a rock,” he explained, ”it’ll be able to decide whether to go over it or around it, depending on the size of the rock.”

Dr. Ayers is one of a handful of robotics researchers who regard animals as their muses.•

 

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“Our World Is Different”

August 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The Nobel Physicist Frank Wilczek, author of A Beautiful Question, thinks CERN may soon go a long way beyond the discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle and prove supersymmetry. In a Spiegel Q&A conducted by Johann Grolle, the scientist also explains what the consistency of natural laws says to him:

Spiegel:

Are you astonished that nature obeys laws that we humans are able to understand?

Frank Wilczek:

This fact has deep meaning, and is not at all guaranteed. As a thought experiment, let us assume that the whole world is just a simulation on a gigantic supercomputer, where we are also just part of this simulation. So, roughly speaking, we are talking about a world in which Super Mario thinks that his Super Mario world is real. The laws in such a world wouldn’t necessarily be beautiful or symmetric. They would be whatever the programmer put in there, which means these laws could be arbitrary, they could suddenly change or be different from place to place. And there would be no simpler description of these laws than a very long computer program. Such a world is logically possible, but our world is different. It is a glorious fact that in our world, when we go really deep, we can understand it.•

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“Nonstate Actors And Rogue States Will Create Killer Robots”

August 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a Wall Street Journal article, Christopher Mims writes that killer robots aren’t inevitable, spoiling it for everyone. I mean, we need to be obliterated by really smart robots, the sooner, the better. Please.

Mims is right, of course, that banning research on Strong Ai is the wrong tack to take to ensure our future. This work is going to go ahead one way or another, so why not proceed, but with caution? He also points out that many of the scientists and technologists signing the Open Letter on Artificial Intelligence are engaged in creating AI of all sorts.

An excerpt about the bad news:

Imagine the following scenario: It’s 2025, and self-driving cars are widely available. Turning such a vehicle into a bomb isn’t much harder than it is to accomplish the same thing with a conventional vehicle today. And the same goes for drones of every scale and description.

It’s inevitable, say the experts I talked to, that nonstate actors and rogue states will create killer robots once the underpinnings of this technology become cheap and accessible, thanks to its commercial use.

“I look back 10 years, and who would have thought people would be using cellphone technology to detonate IEDs?” says retired Rear Admiral Matthew Klunder, who as chief of research spent four years heading up the Navy’s work on autonomous systems.

And what about killing machines driven by artificial intelligence, which could learn to make decisions themselves, a fear that recently bubbled to the surface in an open letter signed by the likes of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking. The letter warned that an arms race was “virtually inevitable” between major powers if they continue to develop these kinds of weapons.•

 

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“Tesla Could Transition To A Fully Autonomous Service By 2025”

August 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s a very big if, but if Tesla has an autonomous electric-car service on the roads by 2025, as Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas predicts, well, that would change everything. No one, though, can predict precisely what it would mean, except that it likely would be bad for Labor. Still, you have to bet it will take much longer to build such a global, robotic fleet.

From CNN Money:

Jonas believes that within the next 18 months, Tesla will share plans for an app-based, on-demand “mobility service.” Commercial introduction to this Uber-like service could occur in 2018, with the Model 3 serving as the backbone.

The first version of this service would be human-driven, just like today’s other ride hailing services. But then Tesla could move to a model where robots do virtually all the work even though real people sit at the driver’s seat just in case it’s required.

Jonas predicted Tesla could transition to a fully autonomous service by 2025, that it would have nearly 600,000 cars in its global fleet — or roughly the same size as Hertz today.

“The holy grail of shared mobility is replacing the mistake-prone, fatigued and expensive human driver with a robot that drives with greater accuracy and precision,” Jonas wrote.•

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“Sentient Beings Shouldn’t Harm Each Other”

August 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If gene-editing was utilized to keep animals from wanting to harm one another–no more predators, no more prey–you think there might be a few unintended consequences? Some, right? David Pearce, a philosopher and Transhumanist, wants to engineer all suffering out of existence, from the ecosystem to the human brain. Given enough time, I suppose anything is possible. Excerpts follow from two interviews with Pearce.

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The opening of a 2014 i09 Q&A by George Dvorsky:

Question:

The idea of re-engineering the ecosystem such that it’s free from suffering is a radically ambitious project — one that’s been referred to as the “well intentioned lunacy” of a futurist. That said, it’s an idea rooted in history. From where do you draw your ideas and moral philosophy?

David Pearce:

Sentient beings shouldn’t harm each other. This utopian-sounding vision is ancient. Gautama Buddha said “May all that have life be delivered from suffering”. The Bible prophesies that the wolf and the lion shall lie down with the lamb. Today, Jains sweep the ground in front of their feet rather than unwittingly tread on an insect.

My own conceptual framework and ethics are secular — more Bentham than Buddha. I think we should use biotechnology to rewrite our genetic source code; recalibrate the hedonic treadmill; shut down factory farms and slaughterhouses; and systematically help sentient beings rather than harm them.

However, there is an obvious problem. On the face of it, the idea of a pain-free biosphere is ecologically illiterate. Secular and religious utopians tend to ignore the biology of obligate carnivores and the thermodynamics of a food chain. Feed a population of starving herbivores in winter and we’d trigger a population explosion and ecological collapse. Help carnivorous predators and we’d just cause more death and suffering to the herbivores they prey on. Richard Dawkins puts the bioconservative case quite bluntly: “It must be so.” Fortunately, this isn’t the case.•

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From a 2007 interview by Ingo Niermann of the German edition of Vanity Fair:

Vanity Fair:

You claim that it is possible to eradicate all suffering on earth, whether physical or mental. When?

David Pearce: 

It will technically be possible to get rid of all suffering within a century or two. Its abolition would be practical only if it were agreed in the sense of something like the moon program or the human genome project – if there was a degree of social consensus. There are certainly technological obstacles, but they are dwarfed by the ethical-ideological ones. Many people’s negative reaction to the idea of a world without suffering comes from a fear that someone is going to be manipulating and controlling them. Partly, too, the abolition of suffering seems to make a mockery of one’s life projects. Most of us spend the greater part of our lives seeking happiness for ourself and others we care about. But we do so in extremely inefficient and in many cases self-defeating ways. This is a problem with existing human society. Even though we have made extraordinary progress technologically and medically, we aren’t any happier than our ancestors. Even if we could arrange society in the most utopian way imaginable, there would be some people who would still be depressed and anxious. There would be some people who would be consumed by jealousy or unhappy love affairs. No amount of environmental reform or manipulation is going to get rid of suffering. Only biotechnology can eradicate its neural substrates.

Vanity Fair: 

Statistics say that on the average people in Bangladesh are happier than in the Western World.

David Pearce: 

In Bangladesh, if you lose a child through malnourishment or disease it’s absolutely dreadful, just as it is if you lose a child here. But yes, statistically the hedonic set-point around which our lives fluctuate is pretty similar whether you live in London, Berlin or Bangladesh. If someone offers you a million dollars, for instance, you get a quick boost in the same way that (to use a more extreme example) crack-addicts do. Even though crack-addicts know that the drug is going to make them awfully miserable in the long-term, they still strive for their next hit. Here in the rich West, we know money won’t make us happy, but we strive for it compulsively.

If you take suffering seriously, the only way to eradicate it is by biological reprogramming. In the short run, this may involve superior designer drugs. In the long run, the only realistic way to abolish suffering is through genetic engineering.

Vanity Fair: 

There would be a very simple method to make all people happy straight away: by putting electrodes in their pleasure centres.

David Pearce: 

Wireheading is offensive to human dignity, to our conception of who we are. The real value of wireheading is that it serves as an existence-proof for people who are sceptical that it is possible to be extremely happy indefinitely. Wireheading shows there is no tolerance to pure pleasure. The normal process of inhibitory feedback doesn’t seem to kick in. We don’t understand why this is the case. When we do, it will be a very important discovery.

Vanity Fair: 

The anaesthetist Stuart Meloy discovered accidentally that by putting an electrode in a certain area of the spinal cord a woman could experience endless orgasms. But he had a hard time finding enough people volunteering for a trial.

David Pearce: 

I can’t see wireheading as an evolutionary stable solution. Wireheads will not want to have children, or want to look after their children.

Vanity Fair: 

But what is your idea of paradise engineering? What should an ever-happy life be like?

David Pearce: 

It is not a uniform happiness but a world with a motivational system based entirely on gradients of well-being. Think of your ideal fantasy. With the right biological substrates, the reality could be millions of times better.•

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“The Remaining Employees Would Just Need To Learn How To Operate The Machines”

August 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Like many in postwar America, Ray Kroc found it rather easy to make money. It’s different today for the franchise, struggling in a much more competitive global economy. The typical McDonalds restaurant has half the staff it did 50 years ago, and there’s a chance that number could go much lower, owing to automation.

How much of the human element can be sacrificed from the Hospitality Industry (restaurants, hotels, etc.)? Probably a good deal, enough to hollow out staffs peopled by low-skill workers as well as novices and retirees. The push for a national $15 minimum wage (which workers dearly need) has some wondering if the process will be hastened.

From Lydia DePillis at the Washington Post:

Of course, it’s possible to imagine all kinds of dramatic productivity enhancements. Persona ­Pizzeria’s [Harold] Miller predicts that drone delivery systems will eventually get rid of the need to come into a restaurant at all, for example. [Middleby Corp COO Dave] Brewer has a bold prediction: He thinks that all the automation working its way into restaurants could eventually cut staffing levels in half. The remaining employees would just need to learn how to operate the machines and fix things when they break.

“You don’t want a $15-an-hour person doing something that the person who makes $7 an hour can do,” Brewer said. “It’s not downgrading the employees. It’s that the employees become managers of a bunch of different systems. They’ll become smarter and smarter.”

The value of a human touch

Not everybody, however, agrees that machines could make that much of a dent in labor costs. Implementing new systems is expensive, and mistakes can be devastating. And for some concepts, it’s possible that the presence of employees is actually a restaurant’s competitive advantage. Compared with grocery stores and gas stations, many people come to restaurants exactly because they want some human interaction.•

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An industrial video from 50 years ago about AMF, which brought automation and computers to bowling, trying to make fast food even more inhuman.

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“In Terms Of Books Or Things Written On Paper, Nothing Much Is Going To Change”

August 17, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

In 1999, Michael Crichton played what he knew to be a fool’s game and predicted the future. He was not so successful about culture. Things he got wrong: Printed matter will be unchanged, movies will soon be dead, communications will be consolidated into fewer hands. Well, he did foresee YouTube.

Crichton, who was fascinated by science and often accused of being anti-science, commenting in a 1997 Playboy interview on technology creating moral quandaries we’re not prepared for:

I think we’re a long way from cloning people. But I am worried about scientific advances without consideration of their consequences. The history of medicine in my lifetime is one of technological advances that outstrip our ethical systems. We’ve never caught up. When I was in medical school—30-odd years ago—people were struggling to deal with mechanical-respiration systems. They were keeping alive people who a few years earlier would have died of natural causes. Suddenly people weren’t going to die of natural causes. They were either going to get on these machines and never get off or—or what? Were we going to turn the machines off? We had the machines well before we started the debate. Doctors were speaking quietly among themselves with a kind of resentment toward these machines. On the one hand, if somebody had a temporary disability, the machines could help get them over the hump. For accident victims—some of whom were very young—who could be saved if they pulled through the initial crisis, the technology saved lives. You could get them over the hump and then they would recover, and that was terrific.

But on the other hand, there was a category of people who were on their way out but could be kept alive. Before the machine, ‘pulling the plug’ actually meant opening the window too wide one night, and the patient would get pneumonia and die. That wasn’t going to happen now. We were being forced by technology to make decisions about the right to die—whether it’s a legal or religious issue—and many related matters. Some of them contradict longstanding ideas in an ethically protected world; we weren’t being forced to make hard decisions, because those decisions were being made for us—in this case, by the pneumococcus.

This is just one example of an ethical issue raised by technology. Cloning is another. If you’re knowledgeable about biotechnology, it’s possible to think of some terrifying scenarios. I don’t even like to discuss them. I know people doing biotechnology research who have decided not to pursue avenues of research because they think they’re too dangerous. But we go forward without sorting out the issues. I don’t believe that everything new is necessarily better. We go forward with the technology while the ethical issues are still up in the air, whether it’s the genetic variability of crop streams, which is a resource in times of plant plagues, to the assumption that we all have to be connected all the time. The technology is here so you must use it. Do you? Do you have to have your cell phone and your e-mail address and your Internet hookup? I was just on holiday in Scotland without e-mail. I had to notify people that I wouldn’t be checking my e-mail, because there’s an assumption that if I send you an e-mail, you’ll get it. Well, I won’t get it. I’m not plugged in, guys. Some people are horrified: “You’ve gone offline?” People feel so enslaved by technology that they will stop having sex to answer the telephone. What could be so important? Who’s calling, and who cares?•

“I See A Time When Every Home Will Have A Drone”

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

I can’t find a transcript of the recent address by NASA’s Parimal Kopardekar at an unmanned aerial systems conference at the Ames Research Center, but there’s some coverage of it by Elizabeth Weise at Stuff.co.nz. The aviation expert thinks we’ll all soon–very soon–have a drone to do our bidding, conducting research and running errands. Of course, once they’re ubiquitous, it will be easy to introduce mayhem into the system, easier than it is with the traditional postal system. That’s something we’ll have to work on.

Weise’s opening:

Forget getting the latest, greatest cell phone. The next indispensable tech tool may be a drone of your own. And daily life may never be the same.

“I see a time when every home will have a drone. You’re going to use a drone to do rooftop inspections. You’re going to be able to send a drone to Home Depot to get a screw driver,” said Parimal Kopardekar, manager of Nasa’s Safe Autonomous System Operations Project at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

And this won’t happen in some long-distant future. “This is in five or 10 years,” Kopardekar said.

Kopardekar gave a keynote talk at a conference on Unmanned Aerial Systems Traffic Management hosted by Nasa and the Silicon Valley Chapter of the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International last week.

“We can completely transform aviation. Quickly,” said Dave Vos, lead of Google’s secretive Project Wing, which is working with Nasa – as are some 100 other companies – on an air traffic control system for small, low-altitude drones.

An effective air traffic system – needed to keep the skies under 500 feet from turning into a demolition derby – will play a major role in turning drones from a plaything into an engine of the economy, one affecting package delivery, agriculture, hazardous waste oversight and more.•

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“Many Workers Called It A River Of Intrigue And Scheming”

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

Things deemed inconvenient if you are employed at Amazon: getting cancer, having a relative get cancer, miscarriages. If you are “selfish” enough to engage in these activities, you’ll be put on notice and likely reduced to tears. Jeff Bezos’ gigantic success has long been reported to be a ridiculously bruising and demanding workplace only a sociopath could love, a place that attracts the highest achievers and routinely lays them low. 

Tremendous job by Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld of the New York Times for the deepest profile yet of a company that’s the envy of the business world and a pretty horrible place to work. How can Amazon get away with such practices, a seeming social experiment that preys on workers psychologically? “Unfairness is not illegal,” is the way one lawyer in the piece puts it. The question is whether some of the tools used to quantify employees at the online retail behemoth will become common. Probably.

An excerpt about Elizabeth Willet, a former Army Captain who discovered a new kind of combat during her brief employment at Amazon:

Ms. Willet’s co-workers strafed her through the Anytime Feedback Tool, the widget in the company directory that allows employees to send praise or criticism about colleagues to management. (While bosses know who sends the comments, their identities are not typically shared with the subjects of the remarks.) Because team members are ranked, and those at the bottom eliminated every year, it is in everyone’s interest to outperform everyone else.

Craig Berman, an Amazon spokesman, said the tool was just another way to provide feedback, like sending an email or walking into a manager’s office. Most comments, he said, are positive.

However, many workers called it a river of intrigue and scheming. They described making quiet pacts with colleagues to bury the same person at once, or to praise one another lavishly. Many others, along with Ms. Willet, described feeling sabotaged by negative comments from unidentified colleagues with whom they could not argue. In some cases, the criticism was copied directly into their performance reviews — a move that Amy Michaels, the former Kindle manager, said that colleagues called “the full paste.”

Soon the tool, or something close, may be found in many more offices. Workday, a human resources software company, makes a similar product called Collaborative Anytime Feedback that promises to turn the annual performance review into a daily event. One of the early backers of Workday was Jeff Bezos, in one of his many investments. (He also owns The Washington Post.)

The rivalries at Amazon extend beyond behind-the-back comments. Employees say that the Bezos ideal, a meritocracy in which people and ideas compete and the best win, where co-workers challenge one another “even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting,” as the leadership principles note, has turned into a world of frequent combat.•

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A Note From 1869 About An Impractical Invention

August 16, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the May 19, 1869 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“She Says Their Brilliance Tells Only Part Of The Story”

August 15, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Anyone who’s studied Silicon Valley for about five minutes knows that community’s shocking success is a hybrid of public-private investment, not just some free-market dream realized. Before the Y Combinator, there’s often an X factor, namely a government incubator like DARPA which births and nurtures ideas until they can crawl into the arms of loving venture capitalists. The Internet, of course, is the most obvious example. Even the transistor itself sprang from Bell Labs, which was essentially a government-sanctioned monopoly.

The economist Mariana Mazzucato hasn’t been shy about shooting down the excesses of the sector’s mythologizing, which boasts that brilliant upstarts with startups simply think (ideate!) their way into billions. Not quite. These lone creators don’t only lack the funds to develop an Internet or transistor, Mazzucato doesn’t believe they have the time or stomachs for such risks, either. The market demands corporations opt for safer short-term gain or the shareholders will revolt. (Look at the blowback Google’s received for its moonshot investments, perhaps one reason it reorganized itself into Alphabet this week.) The companies aren’t, then, caged lions held back by regulation, but, as Mazzucato sees it, usually kittens unable to roar on their own.

From John Thornhill at the Financial Times:

Even Silicon Valley’s much-fabled tech entrepreneurs are not as smart as they like to think. Although Mazzucato lavishes praise on the entrepreneurial genius of the likes of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, she says their brilliance tells only part of the story. Many of the key technologies used by Apple were first developed by public-sector agencies. Most of the key technologies that do the clever stuff inside your iPhone — including its geo-positioning system, the Siri voice-recognition service and multi-touch screen — were the offspring of state-funded research. “Government has invested in basic research, it has invested in applied research, it has invested in concrete companies [such as Tesla] all the way downstream, doing what venture capital should be doing if it was really playing the role it says it plays,” she says. “It is an incredibly active, mission-oriented role.”

One of the original engines of Silicon Valley’s creativity, she argues, was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), founded by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1958 following the alarm caused by the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik rocket. Darpa, run by the US Department of Defense, has since pumped billions of dollars into cutting-edge research and was instrumental in developing the internet. According to Mazzucato, the publicly funded National Institutes of Health has played a similar role in nurturing the US pharmaceuticals industry. The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (Arpa-E), set up by President Barack Obama and run by the US Department of Energy, is designed to stimulate green technology.

Mazzucato points to the critical role played by government agencies in other economies, such as China, Brazil, Germany, Denmark, and Israel, where the state is not just acting as a market regulator, it is actively creating and shaping markets. For instance, the Yozma programme in Israel that provided the funding and expertise to create the so-called “start-up nation”. “My whole point to business is, ‘Hello, if you want to make profits in the future, you had better understand where the profits are coming from’. This is a pro-business story. This is not about socialism,” she says.

Her arguments stray into more radical territory as we discuss how the fruits of this technological innovation should be distributed. If you accept that the state is part responsible for the success of many private sector enterprises, she says, should it not share in more of their economic gains?•

 

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“It Is Raising Questions Of Privacy And Concerns About Potential Misuse”

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

As we witnessed with horror in Ferguson, the tools we create to fight wars overseas find their way back to the home front, free markets taking over where DARPA and other Defense departments trail off. Beyond guns and drones, surveillance equipment is the latest boomerang returning, and there are few rules in place to moderate their use, the technology, as usual, outstripping legislation. 

From Timothy Williams at the New York Times:

SAN DIEGO — Facial recognition software, which American military and intelligence agencies used for years in Iraq and Afghanistan to identify potential terrorists, is being eagerly adopted by dozens of police departments around the country to pursue drug dealers, prostitutes and other conventional criminal suspects. But because it is being used with few guidelines and with little oversight or public disclosure, it is raising questions of privacy and concerns about potential misuse.

Law enforcement officers say the technology is much faster than fingerprinting at identifying suspects, although it is unclear how much it is helping the police make arrests.

When Aaron Harvey was stopped by the police here in 2013 while driving near his grandmother’s house, an officer not only searched his car, he said, but also took his photograph and ran it through the software to try to confirm his identity and determine whether he had a criminal record.•

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“‘Instant Newspapers’ Will Be Printed In U.S. Homes By Electromagnetic Waves”

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

Hugo Gernsback may have been America’s first professional futurist, and while he wasn’t always right he was always interesting. Gernsback invented the first home radio kits right after the turn of the nineteenth century and sold his gadgets by mail order from his Brooklyn offices. He loved science fiction as much as science–saw them as complements, really–and published some of the earliest examples of the form in his publications, including Amazing Stories. He coined the term “television,” and when he wasn’t explaining the concept to 1920s newbies, he was conducting early broadcasts, an expensive endeavor that helped bankrupt him.

Just four years before his death, the July 26, 1963 issue of Life profiled the man in “Barnum of the Space Age,” which reported his prophecies for the future. The opening:

Science is now so big, so flamboyant and so barnacled with politicians, press agents, generals and industrialists that Hugo Gernsback, who invented it back in 1908 (and has re-invented it, annually, since) can scarcely make himself heard above the babble of the late-comers. Although he is now 78, Gernsback is still a man of remarkable energy who raps out forecasts of future scientific wonders with the rapidity of a disintegrator gun. He believes that millions will eventually wear television eyeglasses–and has begun work on a model to speed the day. “Instant newspapers” will be printed in U.S. homes by electromagnetic waves, in his opinion, as soon as U.S. publishers wrench themselves out of the pit of stagnant thinking in which Gernsback feels they are wallowing at present. He also believes in the inevitability of teleportation–i.e., reproducing a ham sandwich at a distance by electronic means, much as images are now reproduced on a television screen.Gernsback pays absolutely no attention, while issuing such pronunciamentos, to the fact that the public is rapidly becoming inured to scientific advance and that scientists themselves may not actually stand in need of his advice and counsel. He paid as little attention to the head-tapping some of his announcements set of in the 1920s–a period in which he was often considered nuttier than Albert Einstein himself.

Gernsback, in fact, has felt himself impelled to preach the gospel of science ever since his youth in Luxembourg–not so much, apparently, for the good of science as for his own satisfaction and the delights of seeing his name in the papers. In 55 years as a self-appointed missionary, he has stiffly ignored both the cackling of the heathen and the cries of competing apostles. Moreover, as founder, owner, and guiding spirit of Gernsback Publications, Inc., a New York-based publishing enterprise which has produced a succession of scientific and technical books and magazines (among them Amazing Stories, the first science-fiction monthly), he has not only provided himself with a method of firing endless barrages of opinion, criticism and augury but the means of making a good deal of money as well.

Neither Gernsback’s instinct for the unorthodox, however, nor his unabashed sense of theater has prevented his full acceptance as a member of the science community. Dozens of today’s top scientists were attracted to their calling by reading his magazines as boys, and a good many–including Dr. Donald H. Menzel, director of the Harvard Observatory– earned money for college tuition by writing for them. He is heralded as the “Father” of modern science fiction (the statuettes which are annually awarded to its top writers are, in his honor, known as Hugos, but he is simultaneously a member of the American Physical Society and a lecturer before similar learned groups. The greatest inventors and scientists of the early 20th Century–among them Marconi, Edison, Tesla, Goddard, DeForest and Oberth–corresponded freely with him and came, in many cases, to admire and confide in him as well. The Space Age caused no diminution of this cozy relationship with the great; RCA’s General David Sarnoff is among his friends and pen pals, and so are former Atomic Energy Commissioner Lewis L. Strauss and President Kennedy’s science adviser, Dr. Jerome Wiesner.

This admiration is solidly based. Gernsback, in his unique career, has not only done his best to prepare the public mind for the “wonders” of science but has sometimes managed to tell science itself just what wonders it was about to produce. for instance, he conceived the essential principles of radar aircraft detection in 1911–a year when the airplane itself was barely able to stagger off the ground. This early concept was so complete that Sir Robert Watson-Watt, whose radar tracking devices helped save London in the Battle of Britain, considers him the original inventor.

Gernsback not only coined the word “television” (he refuses to accept credit for that since he has discovered a Frenchman used an equivalent of the word a little earlier) but in 1928, as owner of New York’s radio Station WRNY, actually instituted daily telecasts with crude equipment. His list of successful scientific prophecies is almost endless and the perspicacity with which he has reported scientific thinking on the part of others is remarkable. In the 1920s, to make the point, he was force-feeding his readers all sorts of crazy stuff about atomic energy and about the problems of weightlessness and orbital rendezvous to be encountered in “space flying.”

It is, therefore, difficult not to believe that U.S. science has been influenced in many ways as a result of Gernsback’s extraordinary career in evangelism…•

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