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“The Real Stumbling Block Is The Ethics”

February 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The head transplant has long been a goal of some on the outer edges of scientific research. (Oriana Fallaci profiled the main such controversial pioneer, Dr. Robert White, for Look in 1967.) Now a divisive surgeon, Dr. Sergio Canavero, believes that within two years he’ll be able to successfully transfer a human head from a shattered or dying body and graft it onto a donor body. Sure, if there was some safe way for Stephen Hawking or anyone similarly afflicted with a degenerative disease to have a new lease on life, that would be great, but it almost definitely won’t happen within Canavero’s timeframe and really shouldn’t happen anytime soon. We’re nowhere near close to being able to deal with such an operation, medically or ethically. From Ian Sample at the Guardian:

The Italian doctor, who recently published a broad outline of how the surgery could be performed, told New Scientist magazine that he wanted to use body transplants to prolong the lives of people affected by terminal diseases.

“If society doesn’t want it, I won’t do it. But if people don’t want it, in the US or Europe, that doesn’t mean it won’t be done somewhere else,” he said. “I’m trying to go about this the right way, but before going to the moon, you want to make sure people will follow you.”

Putting aside the considerable technical issues involved in removing a living person’s head, grafting it to a dead body, reviving the reconstructed person and retraining their brain to use thousands of unfamiliar spinal cord nerves, the ethics are problematic.

The history of transplantation is full of cases where people hated their new appendages and had them removed. The psychological burden of emerging from anaesthetic with an entirely new body is firmly in uncharted territory. Another hitch is that medical ethics boards would almost certainly not approve experiments in primates to test whether the procedure works.

But Canavero wants to provoke a debate around these issues. “The real stumbling block is the ethics,” he told New Scientist. “Should this surgery be done at all? There are obviously going to be many people who disagree with it.”•

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“These Robots, Though, Are Just The Start”

February 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I seldom refer to articles from CNN, Jeff Zucker’s golden shower of sorta news, but I will in the case of a new piece, “The Future of War Will Be Robotic,” published on the cable channel’s site by Peter W. Singer, whose work I greatly admire. Singer–not the famed ethicist but the author of Wired for War—points out one of the most important and overlooked stories of the calamity of the Iraq War: the technologizing of the American military machine, which has ramifications overseas and on the homefront. And the U.S. isn’t alone in this arms race in which the limbs are bionic. Singer’s opening:

The rise of the robot on the modern battlefield has happened so fast, it is almost breathtaking — that is, if you are not a robot yourself.

When the U.S. military invaded Iraq just over a decade ago, it only had a handful of unmanned systems, aka drones, in the air, and zero deployed into the ground forces. Today, its inventory in the air numbers well over 7,000, ranging from the now famous Predator and Reaper to the Navy’s new MQ-8 Fire Scout, a helicopter drone that just completed a series of autonomous takeoffs and landing tests from the back of a guided-missile destroyer.

On the ground, the inventory numbers some 12,000, ranging from iRobot’s PackBots, used to search for roadside bombs in Afghanistan, to the U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting Lab’s tests with Qinetiq’s Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System, a tracked robot that mounts cameras and a machine gun.

This revolution is by no means just an American one. At least 87 other countries have used military robotics of some sort, ranging from the UK to China, which has an especially fast-growing drone fleet, as shown off at its recent arms trade show.

A number of nonstate actors have added robots to their wares as well, including most recently both sides of the Syrian civil war, as well as ISIS. Both sides in the Ukraine conflict are also using them.

These robots, though, are just the start. If this was 100 years ago, they would be the equivalent of the Bristol TB 8, the first bomber plane, or the Mark I, the first tank used in battle. A host of changes awaits us. Their size, shape and form will move in wild and, for many, quite scary new directions.•

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“The Effects Of The Autonomous Car Movement Will Be Staggering”

February 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a CBS San Francisco piece, Silicon Valley futurist Zack Canter goes all in on autonomous cars, predicting not only that they will somewhat disrupt private ownership in the near term but that driverless ridesharing will be to individual ownership as the Model T was to the horse and buggy, essentially eliminating it in anything but insignificant numbers.

Well, first things first: The final, difficult elements of the robocar process have to be figured out, everything from object recognition to poor-climate handling. Should that occur, then, yes, taxis with human drivers will be a thing of the past, and those jobs will go away for good. The article’s PricewaterhouseCoopers prognostication that “the number of vehicles on the road will be reduced by 99%” is something none of us alive right now will ever live to see. An excerpt:

A Columbia University study suggested that with a fleet of just 9,000 autonomous cars, Uber could replace every taxi cab in New York City13 – passengers would wait an average of 36 seconds for a ride that costs about $0.50 per mile.14 Such convenience and low cost will make car ownership inconceivable, and autonomous, on-demand taxis – the ‘transportation cloud’ – will quickly become dominant form of transportation – displacing far more than just car ownership, it will take the majority of users away from public transportation as well. With their $41 billion valuation,15 replacing all 171,000 taxis16  in the United States is well within the realm of feasibility – at a cost of $25,000 per car, the rollout would cost a mere $4.3 billion.

FALLOUT

The effects of the autonomous car movement will be staggering. PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that the number of vehicles on the road will be reduced by 99%, estimating that the fleet will fall from 245 million to just 2.4 million vehicles.17

Disruptive innovation does not take kindly to entrenched competitors – like Blockbuster, Barnes and Noble, Polaroid, and dozens more like them, it is unlikely that major automakers like General Motors, Ford, and Toyota will survive the leap. They are geared to produce millions of cars in dozens of different varieties to cater to individual taste and have far too much overhead to sustain such a dramatic decrease in sales. I think that most will be bankrupt by 2030, while startup automakers like Tesla will thrive on a smaller number of fleet sales to operators like Uber by offering standardized models with fewer options.•

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“How Far Are Scientists From Making All Of Us Geniuses?”

February 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

There’s a lot more juice in that melon on our shoulders, but how to squeeze it out? Savants, whether congenital or by the consequence of head injury, have a portion of their brains that are super-developed to compensate for a part that’s underwhelming. How can we all unlock these gifts without a “lucky” concussion? From Allie Conti’s Vice interview with psychiatrist Darold Treffert, who specializes in savants:

Question:

How far are scientists from making all of us geniuses?

Darold Treffert:

I don’t know if you’re familiar with Allan Snyder’s work in Australia, but he uses what’s called RTMS, which is a rapid pulsation that you can apply to the scalp and actually immobilize an area of the brain with electrical currents. It’s used in neurology to discover the source of epilepsy, so it’s an accepted procedure. What he said was based largely on the work of Dr. [Bruce] Miller, who who studied 12 patients with dementia and discovered some of them developed some astounding abilities as their dementia proceeded. They tended to have lesions in the left temporal area. So Dr. Snyder said, “What if we took a group of volunteers and we immobilized parts of the left hemisphere temporarily? Would we see any special skills emerge?” He found subjects actually increased their abilities. So he’s developed something he calls the Thinking Cap, which you can put on and use. So there may be some technological approaches to enhancement.

Question:

What other ways can we bring out our inner geniuses, besides newfangled contraptions?

Darold Treffert:

In the long run, I don’t think we’re gonna have some striking technological solutions, although others disagree and feel there will be a capacity to turn on and turn off some of our abilities by using technology. Meditation is another method to access different circuity in the brain. And somebody wrote to me recently indicating that his idea was that the reason that a lot of [retirees] pick up new skills is not just because they have the time, but the aging process itself is producing “brain damage” which is leading them into new areas of ability. And I think that’s probably true.

Question:

If everyone became a genius through a medically induced process, would the world descend into chaos?

Darold Treffert:

I think the more that we access our hidden potential the better. We’re not gonna all be Picassos or Mozarts or Einsteins. So I don’t think that it would be a huge avalanche of new abilities in everyone. To the extent to which we are able to mobilize that would be very manageable and a good thing. I think we would still be a balanced society.•

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Morley Safer’s classic 1983 60 Minutes profile of “Rain Man” George Finn.

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Old Print Article: “Science Seeks To Talk With Mars,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1924)

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

Ninety-one years ago, when some scientists believed there could be life on Mars that was not completely unlike that on Earth, a plethora of plans were hatched to begin a dialogue of sorts between the planets when they were to move a scant 36 million miles from one another. The Navy Lieutenant-Commander Fitzhugh Green, whose work in this area is referenced in the below article from the July 7, 1924 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, was later incarcerated due to his opiate addiction. The three stills above are from Aelita: Queen of Mars, the Soviet sci-film released that same year.

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“If I Were A Spy For The Russians, Why The Hell Was I Trapped In Any Airport For A Month?”

February 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

I seriously doubt Edward Snowden will be used as a pawn in the current gamesmanship between Russia and much of the rest of the world. He’s really not that valuable in any practical sense. He proved something–that the U.S. became a surveillance state in the wake of 9/11–which was already pretty obvious to everyone, and apparently approved of by most Americans. And I don’t see how his revelations will change much (except superficially) since technology isn’t going to move sideways or backwards. Regardless of laws, there will be more spying and more leaks proving it. At the same time, I believe in strong protections for whistleblowers who are not gathering information for their own spying purposes.

Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Oscar-winning Citizenfour director Laura Poitras just did an AMA at Reddit. Some Snowden exchanges follow.

_________________________________

Question:

Can you explain what your life in Moscow is like?

Edward Snowden:

Moscow is the biggest city in Europe. A lot of people forget that. Shy of Tokyo, it’s the biggest city I’ve ever lived in. I’d rather be home, but it’s a lot like any other major city.

Question:

Russian journalist Andrei Soldatov has described your daily life as circumscribed by Russian state security services, which he said control the circumstances of your life there. Is this accurate? What are your interactions with Russian state security like? With Russian government representatives generally?

Edward Snowden:

Good question, thanks for asking.

The answer is “of course not.” You’ll notice in all of these articles, the assertions ultimately come down to speculation and suspicion. None of them claim to have any actual proof, they’re just so damned sure I’m a Russian spy that it must be true.

And I get that. I really do. I mean come on – I used to teach “cyber counterintelligence” (their term) at DIA.

But when you look at in aggregate, what sense does that make? If I were a russian spy, why go to Hong Kong? It’s would have been an unacceptable risk. And further – why give any information to journalists at all, for that matter, much less so much and of such importance? Any intelligence value it would have to the russians would be immediately compromised.

If I were a spy for the russians, why the hell was I trapped in any airport for a month? I would have gotten a parade and a medal instead.

The reality is I spent so long in that damn airport because I wouldn’t play ball and nobody knew what to do with me. I refused to cooperate with Russian intelligence in any way (see my testimony to EU Parliament on this one if you’re interested), and that hasn’t changed.

At this point, I think the reason I get away with it is because of my public profile. What can they really do to me? If I show up with broken fingers, everybody will know what happened.

Question:

Don’t you fear that at some point you will be used as leverage in a negotiation? eg; “if you drop the sanctions we give you Snowden”

Edward Snowden:

It is very realistic that in the realpolitik of great powers, this kind of thing could happen. I don’t like to think that it would happen, but it certainly could.

At the same time, I’m so incredibly blessed to have had an opportunity to give so much back to the people and internet that I love. I acted in accordance with my conscience and in so doing have enjoyed far more luck than any one person can ask for. If that luck should run out sooner rather than later, on balance I will still – and always – be satisfied.

_________________________________

Question:

How can we make sure that people still want to leak important information when everyone who does so puts the rest of their lives at stake?

Edward Snowden:

Whistleblower protection laws, a strong defense of the right for someone charged with political crimes to make any defense they want (currently in the US, someone charged with revealing classified information is entirely prohibited from arguing before the jury that the programs were unlawful, immoral, or otherwise wrongful), and support for the development of technically and legally protected means of communications between sources and journalists.

The sad truth is that societies that demand whistleblowers be martyrs often find themselves without either, and always when it matters the most.

_________________________________

Question:

Mr. Snowden, if you had a chance to do things over again, would you do anything differently? If so, what?

Edward Snowden:

I would have come forward sooner. I talked to Daniel Ellsberg about this at length, who has explained why more eloquently than I can.

Had I come forward a little sooner, these programs would have been a little less entrenched, and those abusing them would have felt a little less familiar with and accustomed to the exercise of those powers. This is something we see in almost every sector of government, not just in the national security space, but it’s very important:

Once you grant the government some new power or authority, it becomes exponentially more difficult to roll it back. Regardless of how little value a program or power has been shown to have (such as the Section 215 dragnet interception of call records in the United States, which the government’s own investigation found never stopped a single imminent terrorist attack despite a decade of operation), once it’s a sunk cost, once dollars and reputations have been invested in it, it’s hard to peel that back.

Don’t let it happen in your country.•

 

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“Super-Intelligence May Be As Much Of A Curse As A Blessing”

February 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

New knowledge that awakens us from a collective stupor can be initially disquieting, whether it’s in the area of art or politics or science or anything else. It drives us from comfort. But we have a way of adapting, and eventually what shocks us is put in a museum. I would think that superintelligence, should we ever create it, would adapt to fresh–and sometimes disappointing–information as well or better than we would. But in “Will Super-intelligences Experience Philosophical Distress?” an h+ post, philosopher and computer scientist John G. Messerly wonders if this is so. An excerpt:

Will super-intelligences be troubled by philosophical conundrums? Consider classic philosophical questions such as: 1) What is real? 2) What is valuable? 3) Are we free? We currently don’t know the answer to such questions. We might not think much about them, or we may accept common answers—this world is real; happiness is valuable; we are free.
 
But our superintelligent descendents may not be satisfied with these answers, and they may possess the intelligence to find out the real answers. Now suppose they discover that they live in a simulation, or in a simulation of a simulation. Suppose they find out that happiness is unsatisfactory? Suppose they realize that free will is an illusion? Perhaps they won’t like such answers.
 
So super-intelligence may be as much of a curse as a blessing. For example, if we learn to run ancestor simulations, we may increase worries about already living in them. We might program AIs to pursue happiness, and find out that happiness isn’t worthwhile. Or programming AIs may increase our concern that we are programmed. So superintelligence might work against us—our post-human descendants may be more troubled by philosophical questions than we are.•

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“As Soon As We’re Able To, We Virtualize Things”

February 23, 2015 in Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

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My favorite passage of this long-form conversation between Brian Eno and David Graeber is the three-minute stretch just after the 39-minute mark in which the discussion turns to the human proclivity for virtualizing experiences that initially have an evolutionary impulse at their core. (Like eating, for instance.) Perhaps space travel has been reduced to a shadow on a wall for 50 years because of the monetary expense or maybe it’s wired into us to turn from reality and make the play the thing.

From Graeber: “I was watching one of those new Star Wars movies, the really bad ones, and I was thinking, Well, this is a bad movie but the special effects are amazing. I was thinking, Remember those clumsy science-fiction special effects from the ’50s? If people from back then could watch this movie, I’d bet they’d be really impressed. Then I realized, no they wouldn’t, because they thought we’d actually be doing this stuff by now instead of coming up with amazing ways to simulate it. They’d be really bitter and angry. You’re not on the moon? You just come up with better movies to make believe you’re on the moon? Then I realized, simulation, end of history, nothing new. Now I get it. The reason why we have these ideologies that history is coming to an end…we wouldn’t be saying this if we were actually on Mars. It’s just sort of a way of coming to terms with the fact that we can’t acknowledge that we actually thought we’d be doing all this stuff that now we’re just doing virtually.”

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“The Biggest Gains In Labor Savings Will Occur In Nations That Are At The Forefront Of Deploying Industrial Robots”

February 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

“Labor savings” sounds great except if you’re part of the Labor part being “saved.” Then you’re heading to the margins of the economy, perhaps in search of a giant mustache that you can affix to your automobile. The Boston Consulting Group, which I disagree with somewhat about the near-term future of autonomous cars, believes Weak AI, and the technological unemployment it will bring, is at an inflection point. It’s great in the aggregate but maybe not so much for you. Yet you wouldn’t want your nation to be left behind, either. An excerpt from the Robotics Business Review about which countries BCG thinks will own the sector:

Five nations will take the lead

“The biggest gains in labor savings,” says the BCG report,  “will occur in nations that are at the forefront of deploying industrial robots, such as South Korea, China, the U.S., Japan, and Germany.

“Manufacturing labor costs in 2025, when adjusted for normal inflationary increases and net of other productivity measures, are projected to be 18 to 33 percent lower in these economies when advanced robots are factored in.

“In China, one of the world’s largest markets for robots, greater use of automation could compensate for a significant part of the loss in cost competitiveness that is expected to result from rapidly rising factory wages and the growing challenge of finding manufacturing workers.

“Economies where robotics investment is projected to lag—and where low productivity growth is already a problem—are likely to see their manufacturing competitiveness deteriorate further over the next decade. Such nations include France, Italy, Belgium, and Brazil.”•

“If The Computer Thinks It’s You, Then Maybe It Really Is”

February 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In “How to Live Forever,” a lively New Yorker blog post, Tim Wu considers whether the self would continue should we eventually be able to upload our consciousness into a computer. No, we certainly wouldn’t remain in the same sense. Of course, we never remain the same. If we were somehow able to live indefinitely, we’d be markedly different as time went by. Even within our current relatively puny lifespans, great changes occur within us and the through line we tell ourselves exists may be just a narrative trick. But I grant that some sort of container-based consciousness makes for a more radical departure than merely the depredations of time. From the second the changeover occurs, life, or something like it, is altered. From Wu:

Some people don’t consider that a problem. After all, if a copy thinks it is you, perhaps that would be good enough. David Chalmers, a philosopher at the Australian National University, points out that we lose consciousness every night when we go to sleep. When we regain it, we think nothing of it. “Each waking is really like a new dawn that’s a bit like the commencement of a new person,” Chalmers has said. “That’s good enough…. And if that’s so, then reconstructive uploading will also be good enough.”

If the self has no meaning, its death has less significance; if the computer thinks it’s you, then maybe it really is. The philosopher Derek Parfit captures this idea when he says that “my death will break the more direct relations between my present experiences and future experiences, but it will not break various other relations. This is all there is to the fact that there will be no one living who will be me.”

I suspect, however, that most people seeking immortality rather strongly believe that they have a self, which is why they are willing to spend so much money to keep it alive. They wouldn’t be satisfied knowing that their brains keep on living without them, like a clone. This is the self-preserving, or selfish, version of everlasting life, in which we seek to be absolutely sure that immortality preserves a sense of ourselves, operating from a particular point of view.

The fact that we cannot agree on whether our sense of self would survive copying is a reminder that our general understanding of consciousness and self-awareness is incredibly weak and limited. Scientists can’t define it, and philosophers struggle, too. Giulio Tononi, a theorist based at the University of Wisconsin, defines consciousness simply as “what fades when we fall into dreamless sleep.” In recent years, he and other scientists, like Christof Koch, at Caltech, have made progress in understanding when consciousness arises, namely from massive complexity and linkages between different parts of the brain. “To be conscious,” Koch has written, “you need to be a single, integrated entity with a large repertoire of highly differentiated states.” That is pretty abstract. And it still gives us little to no sense of what it would mean to transfer ourselves to some other vessel.

With just an uploaded brain and no body, would you even be conscious in a meaningful sense?•

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“The Losers Will Include The Mass Market Auto Brands”

February 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In contrast to the new Economist report which argues that Silicon Valley carmakers will lose the race to traditional ones in creating the vehicle of tomorrow, automotive analyst Marc Winteroff contends, in Phil LeBeau’s CNBC post, that much of Big Auto will disappear once robocars are perfected. The opening:

Marc Winterhoff sees the great auto shake out coming over the next 15-20 years. That’s when self-driving, or autonomous drive, vehicles will take off, according to the head of the automotive practice for the business strategy firm Roland Berger.

“When we start to see critical mass with autonomous drive vehicles, there will be clear winners and losers in the auto industry,” said Winterhoff. “The losers will include the mass market auto brands.”

In a new study looking at the future of mobility and how we’ll transport ourselves in the future, Winterhoff sees a surge in demand for vehicles that offer a premium experience, like Mercedes-Benz or BMW.

He also expects tech firms like Google and Apple to be big winners because they can offer vehicles or branded models where we can take our “connected lives” into our cars in ways we may not be able to imagine right now.•

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“All Clothes Will Be Ordered From A Catalogue Or TV Set”

February 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

At the beginning of 1970, directly following the Apollo 11 moon landing, Life published Rudi Gernreich’s predictions about the future of fashion. He foresaw a harsh landscape of environmental damage, overpopulation and traffic-clogged highways, all of which would inform designers who would create unisex protective garb made of alternative fabrics. While his fashion prognostications weren’t accurate, embedded in Gernreich’s ideas are some prescient remarks about technological innovations. An excerpt:

In cold, wintry weather, predicts Gernreich, “both men and women will wear heavy-ribbed leotards and waterproof boots. It will be impossible to drive to stores because of traffic, so all clothes will be ordered from a catalogue or TV set. And since animals which now supply wool, fur and leather will be so rare that they must be protected, and weaving fabric such as cotton will be too much trouble, most clothes will be made entirely of cheap and disposable synthetic knits.”

Clothing will not be identified as either male or female, says Gernreich. “So women will wear pants and men will wear skirts interchangeably. And since there won’t be any squeamishness about nudity, see-through clothes will only be see-through for reasons of comfort. Weather permitting, both sexes will go about bare-chested, though women will wear simple protective pasties. Jewelry will exist only as a utility–that is, to hold something up or together, like a belt or for information, like a combination wristwatch, weather indicator, compass and radio. The esthetics are going to involve the body itself. We will train the body to grow beautifully rather than cover it to produce beauty.

The present cult of eternal youth is not honest nor attractive, says Gernreich. “In an era when the body will become the convention of fashion, the old will adopt a uniform of their own. If a body can longer be accentuated, it should be abstracted. The young won’t wear prints but the elderly will because bold prints detract. The elderly will have a cult of their own and the embarrassment of old age will fade away.”•

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Trippy 1973 video showing a soft metallic armor Gernreich dreamed up to promote Max Factor cosmetics. He thought that designs in the future would need to be anonymous because the world was to become harsh and invasive. “Public Privacy” is what he called the look.

In the 1960s, Gernreich predicted a computerized future for attire. He believed that “clothes of the future will involve unisex. They will be interchangeable. Men are going to wear skirts and woman are gonna wear pants.” Not quite right in every detail but correct in a broader sense. 

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“Whoever Dominates AI Will Win The Internet”

February 22, 2015 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

NYU psychologist Gary Marcus is one of the talking heads interviewed for this CBS Sunday Morning report about the future of robots and co-bots and such. He speaks to the mismeasure of the Turing Test, the current mediocrity of human-computer communications and the potential perils of Strong AI. To his comment about the company dominating AI winning the Internet, I really doubt any one company will be dominant across most or even many categories. Quite a few will own a piece, and there’ll be no overall blowout victory, though there are vast riches to be had in even small margins. View here.

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“Perhaps Technology Firms Can Accelerate The Future Of The Car”

February 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

As is their wont, technologists would like driverless cars on the road yesterday, but traditional automakers would rather ease into the sector with assisted-driving functions introduced gradually. A new Economist report is bearish on Silicon Valley’s chances of becoming kings of the road even should the industry go electric and autonomous, citing the nouveau carmakers’ lack of infrastructure (in both manufacturing and corporate) in dealing with many problems inherent to the business. I think the piece’s prediction from Boston Consulting that “cars with even limited self-driving features will never exceed 25% of sales” will only be true if they’re eclipsed by fully autonomous models before surpassing that number. Otherwise most models will probably soon have numerous robocar features at the disposal of human drivers. An excerpt:

The head of Google’s autonomous-car project, Chris Urmson, nevertheless argues that the conventional carmakers’ incremental approach will slow them down, and that a leap straight into fully self-driving vehicles will pay off quicker. However, even if he is proved right in terms of developing the technology, there are two other big barriers to overcome: regulatory approval, and drivers’ nervousness at ceding control entirely to a computer.

Carmakers have had to become adept at handling mountains of regulations and fending off liability lawsuits. These will be huge issues when any self-driving car is involved in an accident—which they will be, even if less frequently than ones driven by humans. Slowly feeding in autonomy may be a better way of convincing road users and legislators of the technology’s benefits. In a pessimistic forecast, the Boston Consulting Group reckons demand for cars with even limited self-driving features will never exceed 25% of sales, and fully autonomous ones will account for just 10% of sales by 2035 (see chart 2).

Perhaps technology firms can accelerate the future of the car. But whatever happens, this is a difficult business to break into. Google would like the carmakers it hopes eventually to supplant to help seal their doom by building its vehicles under contract. Unsurprisingly, none seems too keen on this. Apple’s cash pile of $178 billion is more than enough to set up a carmaking division and tool up its factories. But the technology firms have no manufacturing culture, and the skills needed to market, distribute and provide after-sales service for cars is unlike anything they are used to.•

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“We’re Gonna Get More Water, Less Landmass, And Then The Fire That God Said In The Bible – A Solar Storm”

February 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Some people prep for hurricanes, earthquakes and rising sea levels, and it’s easy to understand their trepidation, while others are ready for more outré existential threats: imminent civilization collapse, religious end-of-days and zombie apocalypse. Both types convene at the National Preppers and Survivalists Expo in Lakeland, Florida. From Nicky Woolf’s Guardian report about the gathering of the God-fearing and the gun-toting: 

Chris refuses to tell me his last name. But he did he have opinions to share, beginning with Obama, who is apparently an augur of doom known as The Leopard.

“This is going to be as a result of Wormwood [an angel],” he barks in a thick Long Island accent. “Planet X. 3,357 years ago, it came about. How do you think the Mayan cities and the Pyramids under the Antarctic they just found ended up underwater? Because of Wormwood. Now Wormwood is coming again, we’re gonna get more water, less landmass, and then the fire that God said in the Bible – a solar storm.”

I nod, ticking off a conspiracy theory bingo card in my head.

“If Obama is indeed The Leopard,” Chris continues, ignoring the glazed look in my eyes, “then in the murals – the giant pictures in the Denver airport, have you ever seen that, with the murals with the leopard?” I nod vaguely.

He continues, shifting up through the conspiratorial gears with admirable rapidity. The Illuminati. The Rapture. The All-Seeing eye. Nostradamus. Aliens. Chemtrails. Tick, tick, tick.

I am interrupted from an almost trance-like state by his unorthodox but amusing pronunciation of Fukushima as “Fushushima” and decide that the conversation has gone far enough off-piste, so I ask him about the bug-out team. There are 12 of them, he tells me, plus families; retired law enforcement or military.

Standing uncomfortably close behind me, listening with rapt attention, is Darren Smith, who looks a bit like a movie star; he has the breezy air of the wealthy. He tells me he has already bugged-out – to Belize. There, he and his closed ones are almost completely sustainable, with 10,000 fruit trees, herds of goats, sheep and chickens. Nice, I think.

But Chris seizes on the opportunity to criticise. “Belize? Oh, no no no,” he says, rolling his eyes. “The south Pacific? No, you gotta be at the highest elevations. Colorado will be the highest.”

The news that Colorado would be a good place to go brings Smith to a stop. “But you gotta be out of America, right?” he says. “No, no,” says Chris. “Denver, Wyoming, New Mexico.” Smith looks discomfited.

Before we part, Smith tells me that economically, the western world’s about to fail. “It’s just a cyclical thing.” He says he’s not worried about bogeymen or anything, but says that when the economic system collapses, it could be decades before it’s rebuilt. He’s quite convincing.•

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“Virtual Assistants Will Have Enormous Power”

February 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Richard Waters’ new Financial Times piece anticipates a landscape of powerful digital assistants which don’t only respond to our thoughts but also do the thinking for us, making choices based on…who knows? What’s objectively best for us? Who “bribes” the next-level Siris to win our business? There’s plenty of room for abuse should apps no longer stand alone and erstwhile human decisions become disappeared into the 0s and 1s. The opening:

How smart do you want your smartphone to be? In designing Cortana, the voice-activated “virtual assistant” built into its mobile software, Microsoft is betting that most people are not yet ready to hand too much control of their lives to an artificial brain.

A soft-voiced presence with a slightly sassy attitude drawn from a video game character, Cortana is quite capable of reading your email to see if you have a flight coming up, then using the information to tell you when it is time to leave for the airport.

But Microsoft will not let “her” take the liberty. Instead, the system asks permission, like a discreet human assistant who does not want to assume too much — a step that also helps to confirm the software is on the right track in anticipating your wishes.

“At the moment it’s progressive intelligence, not autonomous intelligence,” says Marcus Ash, group program manager for Cortana, which is enabled on phones with the Windows operating system, including Microsoft’s Lumia devices. People do not want to be surprised by how much their phones are starting to take over, he says: “We made an explicit decision to be a little less ‘magical’ and a little more transparent.”

Niceties like this could soon be a thing of the past. The race is on between some of the biggest tech companies to come up with omniscient guides capable of filtering the complex digital world .

Like the browser wars of the 1990s, the outcome will help to set the balance of power in the next phase of the internet. By channelling attention and making decisions on behalf of their users, virtual assistants will have enormous power to make or break many other businesses. Many companies — from carmakers to entertainment concerns — aim to develop voice-powered assistants of their own to keep their customers loyal. But the future may belong instead to a handful of all-knowing assistants, much as Google’s search engine managed to suck in so many of the world’s queries on the web.

Though it has not reached the point of mass adoption yet, the potential of this new form of artificial intelligence has all the tech companies scrambling.•

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“If You Get One Report, You Get A Clutch Of Other Reports Following”

February 22, 2015 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Perhaps it was the Space Race or just the oddness of the decade in general, but in 1966 a Michigan father of ten believed he spotted a UFO in the night sky and soon even the skeptical “girls” of Hillsdale were locating saucers with binoculars. Then the sightings went viral across the nation. Walter Cronkite devoted an hour of CBS airtime to confronting the ridiculous controversy. Rocketeer and space pioneer Willy Ley is interviewed and amusing IBM computer commercials are interspersed.

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“These End Points Are Decades Not Centuries Away”

February 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Eventually the Big Bang goes bust, the Earth becomes uninhabitable and then eventually the air goes out of the whole tire that is the universe. The finitude galls me. You? A post at The Conversation has Complex System Simulation lecturer James Dyke answering questions about resources and the lack thereof. An excerpt:

Question:

If the world has a finite amount of natural resources, and these resources have been diminishing steadily since the industrial revolution, how is the model of infinite economic growth possibly expected to continue? Doesn’t it have to end eventually?

James Dyke:

This is a good question, however I think it’s possibly something of a red herring. That is, we don’t have to worry too much about ultimate or absolute limits to growth. What we need to worry about is how we move towards such limits from where we are right now.

We have an increasingly narrow space within which to operate, to organise ourselves on Earth. Essentially, we have seriously eroded our choices.

Question:

Do you agree that it is already too late to prevent global catastrophe caused by global warming?

James Dyke:

No. There is nothing physically insurmountable about the challenges we face. I think it’s very important to continually stress that. Yes, in about a billion years time the increase in the size of the sun will mean the death of the biosphere. We have plenty to play for until then.

Sometimes people talk about social transitions. For example in the UK, drunk driving and smoking in pubs/bars. It’s become the norm to do neither and that happened quite quickly. It always seems impossible before it is done.

Question:

Best estimate. How long do we have to spend all our savings before this hits?

James Dyke:

I find it hard to be optimistic about the welfare of some people around the middle to the end of this century if we continue as we are. If we maintain business as usual with regards carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, biogeochemical inputs (we keep exceeding planetary boundaries) then I find it hard to see how our current connected, distributed, industrialised civilisation can function in the way it currently does.

There is no natural law, no physical principle which means the tremendous increases in wellbeing, industrial output, wealth etc observed over the past 300 years have to continue. Consider the broader historical context and you realise we live in extraordinary times. But we have become habituated to this and simply expect the future to resemble the past – and that includes future rates of change.

What largely keeps our current civilisation aloft is fossil fuel use and an unsustainable consumption of natural capital (sometimes discussed in the context of ecosystem services). There are end points for both of these and these end points are decades not centuries away.•

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“What Exactly Is Bezos Up To At The Washington Post?”

February 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

It’s pretty clear that Jeff Bezos doesn’t have a silver bullet to fire at the vampire world which has feasted on the Washington Post and every other traditional print newspaper, but he has plenty of gold to keep things running and growing until an answer materializes. For that reason, the Post’s chances are much rosier these days, a marked change from the recent period of steep decline. From Isabell Hülsen of Spiegel:

Until a little over a year ago, the Post was a newspaper in a “we’re still here” twilight state. Circulation was declining, as were sales, more than 400 jobs had been cut since 2003 and it was unclear whether the paper stood a chance of surviving. The editorial staff clung to the fact that the Post was still a good newspaper and was still winning Pulitzer prizes — in short, that it was still the Washington Post. But that “we’re still here” attitude was also tinged with an odor of decline.

Since August 2013, a new calendar has begun for the 137-year-old newspaper: B.B. — before Bezos, and A.B. — after Bezos. The Amazon CEO has injected new energy into the editorial staff. Instead of simply bringing in cash to allow the staff to continue the status quo, he plunged the Post into a period of cultural change, determined that the paper would reinvent itself and escape the confines of the printed page.

Bezos wants the paper’s editors and journalists to learn to think big. What does a digital newspaper have to look like in 10 or 20 years to keep millions of readers interested? He has given them time — and a lot of money – to come up with an answer.

Not surprisingly, there is a hint of Amazon in the air at the Post these days. Any experiment that promises to bring in millions of new readers is encouraged and paid for. Bezos reasons that once the Post has penetrated into the lives of millions of Americans, profits will somehow materialize on their own. He applied the same rationale to turn Amazon into the world’s largest Internet retailer, revolutionizing consumption and, with the Kindle, the way we read books.

No Magic Pill To Solve Industry’s Woes

But what exactly is Bezos up to at the Washington Post? Is he trying to turn the old world of newspaper publishers upside-down and provide them with an answer to the question on everyone’s mind: How can journalism survive on the Web? Or is the Post ultimately nothing but an exciting hobby for someone who doesn’t know what to do with all his money?

Bezos’s motives remain a mystery to those at the Post. “But it’s ridiculous to believe that Jeff Bezos came here with a magic pill to solve all the media industry’s problems within a year — that’s a preposterous notion. If he knew already what worked, we would not need any experiments,” says Executive Editor Marty Baron.•

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“He Is The Doctor Who Also Writes About The Dark Continent Of Human Illness”

February 20, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

So sad to learn of Oliver Sacks’ terminal illness. I read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat at a young age, and I didn’t know what the hell to make of it, so stunned was I to find out that we’re not necessarily in control of our minds. In this piece of writing and so many others, Sacks examined the brain, that mysterious and scary thing, and because of his work as an essayist as well as a doctor, that organ is today a little less mysterious, a little less scary. It doesn’t mean he was always right, but how could anyone be when sailing in such dark waters? Sacks was accused sometimes of being a modern Barnum who used as diverting curiosities those with the misfortune of having minds that played tricks on them–even stranger tricks than the rest of us experience–and sometimes I cringed at the very personal things he would reveal about his subjects, but I always felt he strived to be ethical. We certainly live in an era when the freak show still thrives, albeit in a slickly produced form, but I don’t think that’s where Sacks’ work has ever lived. His prose and narrative abilities grew markedly during his career as he he came to realize–be surprised by?–his own brain’s capabilities. I hope he has a peaceful and productive final chapter. 

A profile of Sacks by Diane Sawyer with good 1969 footage of his work as a young doctor.

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“There Is Shared Danger And A Sense Of Strong Commitment That Is Very Impressive”

February 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

As surprising as it is that so many middle-class youths are drawn today via social media to ISIS, Patty Hearst, practically American royalty, being kidnapped in 1974 by the Symbionese Liberation Army and then converted somehow to its terrorist cause, completely stunned the world. She didn’t go willingly, but she became a willing accomplice, brainwashed probably, though a lot of Americans were unforgiving. It seems like some of the same factors that work for ISIS may have helped the SLA remake the debutante as “Tania.” Whatever the situation, USC psychiatrist Dr. Frederick J. Hacker, whom the family hired while she was still on the lam to help them understand their daughter’s descent into terrorism, probably should not have discussed the case with Barbara Wilkins of People magazine while she was still at large, but he did. An excerpt:

Question:

Why did the Hearsts consult you?

Dr. Frederick J. Hacker:

I had published a book on terrorism in Germany in 1973—dealing with the Olympic tragedy in Munich and the Arab-Israeli situation. In September ’73, I became a negotiator in Vienna between the government and two Arab terrorists. After that, I was invited to speak at Harvard and the State Department and to testify before the House Committee on Internal Security. That was how the Hearsts heard about me and my work.

Question:

When did you get involved in the case of Patricia Hearst?

Dr. Frederick J. Hacker:

When a Mr. Gould of the Hearst newspapers called me up, on behalf of the family, about four weeks after the kidnapping. I went up to Hillsborough to visit the Hearsts. I told them to take the SLA at face value, to take the political message seriously. And I urged them to get a concession for every concession they made.

Question:

What have you discovered about Patty Hearst?

Dr. Frederick J. Hacker:

I had not known her before, of course. By now everyone has read what her life had been. She was an average, intelligent girl. She lived an unspectacular life with her former tutor. She was more liberal than her family but was still relatively conservative. She was totally without political interests. She was sheltered. She’d gone to Europe with some other girls and, prior to Steve [her fiance Steven Weed], she’d had three or four other boyfriends. She was never very close to any of her sisters. The oldest sister, a polio victim, had deep religious convictions. Patty had a bad relationship with her mother, but a fairly good one with her father. They could talk. When she was kidnapped, Patty was picking out her silverware pattern, because she had talked Steve into marrying her.

Question:

What is the lure of the SLA for a girl like Patty Hearst?

Dr. Frederick J. Hacker:

In spite of everything, the sense of close proximity among these people gives a feeling of family, of community and caring. There is shared danger and a sense of strong commitment that is very impressive to the uncommitted.

Question:

Was Patty’s conversion voluntary?

Dr. Frederick J. Hacker:

Everybody asks how voluntary her conversion was. I raise the question, “How intentional was the SLA’s conversion of Patricia?” Maybe they didn’t want to convert her at first. Let’s look at it this way. She’s kidnapped, and she’s frightened and inclined to believe these people are really monsters. Then they treat her very nicely. She begins to talk to them, to the girls. She finds they are very much the kind of people she is—upper-middle-class, intelligent, white kids. She finds a poetess, a sociologist. They tell her how they have found a new ideal and how lousy it was at home. Perhaps she started to think, “Well, at my home it wasn’t so hot either.” This may be what happened. There is a strong possibility, of course, that she was brainwashed. Maybe they did use drugs, although none was found in the bodies after the L.A. shoot-out. …

Question:

Was Patricia in on the kidnapping from the beginning?

Dr. Frederick J. Hacker:

She was undoubtedly a genuine victim. All the talk that she was in cahoots is nonsense. All the evidence, in fact, is against it, including the testimony of her boyfriend, who has no conceivable reason to lie. Why did she have her identification with her? A kidnap victim doesn’t—unless someone else grabs it and takes it along.

Question:

What makes a terrorist?

Dr. Frederick J. Hacker:

A number of different things. Usually the terrorist is imbued with the righteousness of his cause, and fanatacized by the idea of remediable injustice. For example, as long as you could tell women that it was God’s will that they were mistreated by men and that it was irremediable, there was no movement to change things. As soon as it becomes clear that an injustice is not fated, is not obligatory, and that there are alternatives, then the dominant group is in trouble.

Question:

Are there different kinds of terrorists?

Dr. Frederick J. Hacker:

I distinguish three categories—the criminal, the mentally deranged and the political. With the SLA, it is not easy to confine them to one category. They are criminally involved because some of their tactics are criminal. Some actions are loony and the details are ludicrous. When Cinque’s body was found, he was wearing heavy pants, army boots up to his calf and three pairs of woolen socks—in Southern California where the temperature was 80°. He had a compass and a canteen. That’s inappropriate. They stole from that sporting goods store, but they certainly did not need the money. Hundreds and hundreds of dollars were found on all the bodies. Only the outside of the folded money burned. There were nutty elements. What kind of an army is 20 people, or 10 people? They were also political, and that is what made it so hard.

Question:

These radical movements seem to attract middle-and upper-middle-class children rather than the lower-middle-class and poor. Why?

Dr. Frederick J. Hacker:

You are asking who becomes a revolutionary. The leaders of a revolution don’t come from the class they are trying to liberate. The to-be-liberated group doesn’t have the means to lead itself out of oppression.

Question:

What can be done about terrorism?

Dr. Frederick J. Hacker:

First, you must change the “remediable” conditions that produce the terrorist solution—for instance, somehow you get rid of the Palestinian refugee camps. Second, the mass media must effect restraint so that terrorist crime does not become fashionable. Finally, I believe we must establish task forces led by law enforcement executives who are advised by responsible behavioral scientists.•

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“We Want To Hold A ‘Superhuman’ Sporting Event”

February 19, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Performance Enhancing Drugs may not be fair, but the same can be said of genetics. You can train as hard as you want, but it’s unlikely you’ll ever run as fast as Usain Bolt (unless you are a sheep). Trying to counteract Mother Nature’s clear favoritism, a sporting competition using technology as an equalizer is planned to run concurrent to the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, which hopes to have its own robotics angle. From Keiko Sato at Asahi Shimbun:

In a bid to level the playing field of the future, a group of researchers are creating sports that can be contested by anyone with the assistance of robotics and high-tech assistive technologies.

That will allow the young and old, disabled and able-bodied, and professional and amateur alike to compete on an equal footing.

“In line with the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, we want to hold a ‘superhuman’ sporting event,” said Masahiko Inami, professor of human enhancement at Keio University Graduate School, at the inaugural meeting of the Superhuman Sports Committee in October, which was held 50 years after the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

The group had been developing a plan for the creation of the committee since September 2013, when Tokyo was selected to host the 2020 Games.

Consisting of about 40 members including robotics researchers, prosthetic leg engineers, former professional athletes and game designers, the group aims to create new events, synthesizing various areas of expertise.

Using advanced assistive devices and robotic technologies, even children or those who are not adept at sports can acquire a “superhuman ability” and compete with superior athletes and adults.

But it is not interesting if technology alone determines the outcome, Inami said.

“It is important to create balanced rules so participants can compete using their own strength and sweat to a certain extent,” he said.•

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“Journalists Have Been Replaced By Youtube”

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

I was working as an editor at a magazine during Andy Samberg’s first year at SNL, and I’m still annoyed that I wasn’t allowed to run an interview with him like I wanted to in the weeks after the “Lazy Sunday” video he did with Parns had made Youtube into a sensation. I was already familiar with the Lonely Island stuff (The ‘Bu, especially), and I could see where those guys were going to take the show. I asked a talented friend who’s a music and comedy writer to conduct the Q&A, but when I pitched the story in a meeting, I was told this by another editor who had the power to nix such a piece: “I’ve seen Samberg on stage and he isn’t funny.” Oy gevalt!

Youtube, of course, has done much more than humor, finding a place in its decade of existence in major world events, a big piece of the puzzle that has undercut traditional media. It’s been a sword with two edges: Some of that has been great and some of it has been ISIS recruitment. I don’t think it would matter at all if Youtube disappeared today–there would just be other outlets to do the job–but it was the first to civilize (to a certain extent) the wild landscape of visual media on the Internet. And it still regularly amazes me. From Matt Schiavenza at the Atlantic: 

YouTube videos have played a significant role in many major world events. In Iran, footage of the death of Neda Soltan, a young protester, went viral and accelerated the country’s anti-government demonstrations in 2009. More recently, the Islamic State has relied on Internet videos for propaganda purposes. Earlier this month, ISIS released a film showing Muadh al-Kasasbeh, a Jordanian pilot held hostage by the group, burning to death in a cage. The video sparked widespread outrage in Jordan, whose government promptly vowed retaliation. Online video did not create terrorism—but it reduced the barriers to entry for groups like ISIS to broadcast their message.

“Extremists don’t need a middleman anymore,” wrote Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic last December. “Journalists have been replaced by YouTube.”

The meteoric rise of YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter has bolstered the dreams of idealists who want to use technology to solve the world’s problems, a point of view frequently skewered by skeptics like writer Evgeny Morozov. While YouTube’s spread has allowed people to see the world from more points of view, the powers of democratized video can only go so far in pushing along change.•

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“Over Time Robots ‘Can Leave All Future High-Tech Workers And, Potentially, All Future Low-Tech Workers Worse Off”

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

A highly automated society needs coders until there is a critical mass of code and then the machines can take over. Whither will the high-tech worker go? From Victoria Stilwell at Bloomberg:

Have you ever worried that robots would one day be the ruin of humanity? According to a newly published paper, you might not be too far off base. 

Four researchers from Boston University and Columbia University simulated an economy featuring two types of workers – high-tech employees who produce new software code, and low-tech workers who produce human services (people such as artists, priests, psychologists and the like). 

At first, high demand for code-writing high-tech employees increases their wages. However, over time, the amount of legacy code grows. As this happens, and as some smart machines become better able to learn tasks, writing new code becomes redundant, the authors state.

Demand for code-writing high-tech workers then becomes limited to those who are needed for general code maintenance like updates and repairs. The rest of the high-tech workers end up going into the service sector, which consequently pushes down wages for employees in that industry. And lower incomes reduce the amount of goods and services that workers are able to buy.

While there can be several of these so-called “boom-bust” tech cycles, over time robots “can leave all future high-tech workers and, potentially, all future low-tech workers worse off,” the paper states. “In short, when smart machines replace people, they eventually bite the hands of those that finance them.”•

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“What Would Happen If We Started To Form Brand And Nationalistic Allegiances To Tech Companies?”

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

Artist/urban philosopher Liam Young, working with sci-fi writers, has created a trio of dystopian, futuristic cities, including one that exaggerates–somewhat–the intrusion of corporations on metropolitan life, an avenue Ray Bradbury earnestly suggested we pursue in the 1990s. From Shaunacy Ferro at Fast Company, Young’s description of his moving-yet-static vision of “Samsung City”:

“The Samsung city is based on this strange condition in Korea where Samsung, the tech company, had moved into property development,” Young explains, describing a series of Samsung-branded tower blocks that got him thinking about the fact that Apple has revenues comparable to the GDPs of some nations. “What would happen if we started to form brand and nationalistic allegiances to tech companies in the same way we do in countries?”•

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