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“The Robots’ Collective Movement Is An Organic Outgrowth Of That Self-Correction”

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

A hammer can be a tool or a weapon depending on how you swing it, and that’s important to remember while we’re being wowed by Boston Dynamics’ new four-legged robot, Spot. Neel V. Patel of Wired noticed something about the viral video showcasing the AI: a moment which is perhaps coincidence or maybe collective behavior, even if it isn’t swarm robotics. An excerpt:

We’ve seen all of this—admittedly amazing—stuff out of BD’s four-legged robots before. But it gets crazier around the 1:20 mark, when a pair of Spots begin trekking up a hill. Spot Number One starts repeatedly colliding into Spot Number Two—and neither loses balance. After a few seconds and a bit of subtle push-and-shove, they straighten out and walk in parallel again, and then turn together once they reach the top of the hill. This is getting creepy, guys—it looks like these robots are exhibiting the same swarm-like behavior that we see in animals.

We checked in with Iain Couzin, a Princeton biologist and expert in the study of collective animal behavior, to get his take on the robots’ seeming hive mind.

We know from Spot’s reaction to that kick that he can dynamically correct his stability—behavior that’s modeled after biological systems. From what Couzin can tell, the robots’ collective movement is an organic outgrowth of that self-correction. When the two Spots collide at the 1:25 mark, they’re both able to recover quickly from the nudge and continue on their route up the hill. “But the collision does result in them tending to align with one another (since each pushes against the other),” Couzin wrote in an email. “That can be an important factor: Simple collisions among individuals can result in collective motion.”

In Couzin’s research on locusts, for example, the insects form plagues that move together by just barely avoiding collisions. “Recently, avoidance has also been shown to allow the humble fruit fly to make effective collective decisions,” he wrote.

It doesn’t look like Spot is programmed to work with his twin brothers and sisters—but that doesn’t matter if their coordination emerges naturally from the physical rules that govern each individual robot. Clearly, bumping into each other isn’t the safest or most efficient way to get your robot army to march in lock step, but it’s a good start.•

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“Could You Get Machines To The Point Where They Can Deal With The Intangibles Of Humanness?”

February 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Excerpts follow from a pair of 1990s interviews with Artificial Intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky. I wonder how much he’s changed his mind one way or another about AI as he enters his 88th year.

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From Claudia Dreifus’ 1998 NYT article:

Question:

How do you define common sense?

Marvin Minsky:

Common sense is knowing maybe 30 or 50 million things about the world and having them represented so that when something happens, you can make analogies with others. If you have common sense, you don’t classify the things literally; you store them by what they are useful for or what they remind us of. For instance, I can see that suitcase (over there in a corner) as something to stand on to change a light bulb as opposed to something to carry things in.

Question:

Could you get machines to the point where they can deal with the intangibles of humanness?

Marvin Minsky:

It’s very tangible, what I’m talking about. For example, you can push something with a stick, but you can’t pull it. You can pull something with a string, but you can’t push it. That’s common sense. And no computer knows it. Right now, I’m writing a book, a sequel to The Society of Mind, and I am looking at some of this. What is pain? What is common sense? What is falling in love?

Question:

What is love?

Marvin Minsky:

Well, what are emotions? Emotions are big switches, and there are hundreds of these. . . . If you look at a book about the brain, the brain just looks like switches. . . . You can think of the brain as a big supermarket of goodies that you can use for different purposes. Falling in love is turning on some 20 or 30 or these and turning a lot of the others off. It’s some particular arrangement. To understand it, one has to get some theory of what are the resources in the brain, what kind of arrangements are compatible and what happens when you turn several on and they get into conflict. Being angry is another collection of switches. In this book, I’m trying to give examples of how these things work.

Question:

In the 1968 Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey, a computer named Hal developed a lethal jealousy of his space companion, a human astronaut. How far are we away from a jealous machine?

Marvin Minsky:

We could be five minutes from it, but it would be so stupid that we couldn’t tell. Though Hal is fiction, why shouldn’t he be jealous? There’s an argument between my friend John McCarthy and me because he thinks you could make smart machines that don’t have any humanlike emotions. But I think you’re going to have to go to great lengths to prevent them from having some acquisitiveness and the need to control things. Because to solve a problem, you have to have the resources and if there are limited resources . . .

Question:

Where were Stanley Kubrick and his co-author, Arthur C. Clarke, right with their 2001: Space Odyssey predictions?

Marvin Minsky:

On just about everything except for the date. It’s quite a remarkable piece.

Question:

Do you believe the National Aeronautics and Space Administration wastes money by insisting on humans for space exploration?

Marvin Minsky:

It’s not that they waste money. It’s that they waste ALL the money.

Question:

If you were heading NASA, how would you run it?

Marvin Minsky:

I would have a space station, but it would be unmanned. And we would throw some robots up there that are not intelligent, but just controlled through teleoperators and you could sort of feel what’s doing. Then, we could build telescopes and all sorts of things and perhaps explore the moon and Mars by remote control. Nobody’s thought of much use for space. The clearest use is building enormous telescopes to see the rest of the universe.•

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From Otto Laske’s 1991 AAAI Press interview:

Otto Laske:

I hear you are writing a science fiction novel. Is that your first such work?

Marvin Minsky:

Well, yes, it is, and it is something I would not have tried to do alone. It is a spy-adventure techno-thriller that I am writing together with my co-author Harry Harrison. Harry did most of the plotting and invention of characters, while I invented new brain science and AI technology for the next century.

Otto Laske:

At what point in time is the novel situated?

Marvin Minsky:

It’s set in the year 2023.

Otto Laske:

I may just be alive to experience it, then …

Marvin Minsky:

Certainly. And furthermore, if the ideas of the story come true, then anyone who manages to live until then may have the opportunity to live forevermore…

Otto Laske:

How wonderful …

Marvin Minsky:

 … because the book is about ways to read out the contents of a person’s brain, and then download those contents into more reliable hardware, free from decay and disease. If you have enough money…

Otto Laske:

That’s a very American footnote …

Marvin Minsky:

Well, it’s also a very Darwinian concept.

Otto Laske:

Yes, of course.

Marvin Minsky:

There isn’t room for every possible being in this finite universe, so, we have to be selective …

Otto Laske:

And who selects, or what is the selective mechanism?

Marvin Minsky:

Well, normally one selects by fighting. Perhaps somebody will invent a better way. Otherwise, you have to have a committee …

Otto Laske:

That’s worse than fighting, I think.•

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“Why Should We Expect Our Fate Then To Be Any Different That That Of Chimps Now?”

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

I think human beings will eventually go extinct without superintelligence to help us ward off big-impact challenges, yet I understand that Strong AI brings its own perils. I just don’t feel incredibly worried about it at the present time, though I think it’s a good idea to start focusing on the challenge today rather than tomorrow. In his Medium essay “Russell, Bostrom and the Risk of AI,” Lyle Cantor wonders whether humans are to computers as chimps are to humans. An excerpt:

Consider the chimp. If we are grading on a curve, chimps are very, very intelligent. Compare them to any other species besides Homo sapiens and they’re the best of the bunch. They have the rudiments of language, use very simple tools and have complex social hierarchies, and yet chimps are not doing very well. Their population is dwindling, and to the extent they are thriving they are thriving under our sufferance not their own strength.

Why? Because human civilization is little like the paperclip maximizer; We don’t hate chimps or the other animals whose habitats we are rearranging; we just see higher value arrangements of the earth and water they need to survive. And we are only every-so-slighter smarter than chimps.

In many respects our brains are nearly identical. Yes, the average human brain is about three times the size of an average chimp’s, but we still share much of the same gross structure. And our neurons fire at about 100 times per second and communicate through salutatory conduction, just like theirs do.

Compare that with the potential limits of computing. …

In terms of intellectual capacity, there’s an awful lot of room above us. An AI could potentially think millions of times faster than us. Problems that take the smartest humans years to solve it could solve in mintues. If a paperclip maximizer (or value-of-Goldman Sachs-stock maximzer or USA hegemony maximzer or refined-gold maximizer) is created, why should we expect our fate then to be any different that that of chimps now?•

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“Perhaps It’s Because We’re Threatened By The Idea That Human Thinking Isn’t Unique”

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

What’s so disquieting about machines thinking like us–out-thinking us, even!–is probably that it means we’re not so special. I sense, though, that such a feeling of insecurity occurs only at first blush. It was supposedly so terrible if computers could best us at chess, and then the world went on, inferior humans still competing in the game and working in tandem with software to create hybrid super-teams. We adapt after the disruption. Our job is to continually redefine why we’re here. From Tania Lombrozo at NPR:

Part of what’s fascinating about the idea of thinking machines, after all, is that they seem to approach and encroach on a uniquely human niche, homo sapiens — the wise.

Consider, for contrast, encountering “thinking” aliens, some alternative life form that rivals or exceeds our own intelligence. The experience would be strange, to be sure, but there may be something uniquely uncanny about thinking machines. While they can (or will some day) mirror us in capabilities, they are unlikely to do so in composition. My hypothetical aliens, at least, would have biological origins of some kind, whereas today’s computers do so only in the sense that they are human artifacts and, therefore, have an origin that follows from our own.

When it comes to human-like robots and other artifacts, some have described an “uncanny valley“: a level of similarity to natural beings that may be too close for comfort, compelling yet off. We might be slightly revolted by a mechanical appendage, for instance, or made uneasy by a realistically human robot face.

Examples of the “uncanny valley” phenomenon are overwhelmingly visual and behavioral, but is there also an uncanny valley when it comes to thinking? In other words, is there something uncanny or uncomfortable about intelligence that’s almost like ours — but not quite? For instance, is there something uncanny about a chat bot that effectively mimics human conversation, but through a process of keyword matching that bears little resemblance to human learning and language production?

My sense is that the valley of “uncanny thinking” is real, but elicits a more existential than visceral response. And if that’s so, perhaps it’s because we’re threatened by the idea that human thinking isn’t unique, and that maybe human thinking isn’t so special.•

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“The Whole Circus Is, In A Word, Bewildering”

February 11, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If rolling robots can deliver sundries to hotel guests, certainly they can transport medicine and fresh linen to hospital patients. That’s the situation at the newly opened University of California, San Francisco’s Mission Bay medical facility, which employs more than two dozen robot helpers, which are enjoying deferential treatment from their human cohorts. From Matt Simon at Wired:

Far down the hospital hall, double doors part to reveal the automaton. There’s no dramatic fog or lighting—which I jot down as “disappointing”—only a white, rectangular machine about four feet tall. It waits for the doors to fully part, then cautiously begins to roll toward us, going about as fast as a casual walk, emitting a soft beep every so often to let the humans around it know it’s on a very important quest. It’s not traveling on a track. It’s unleashed. It’s free.

The robot, known as a Tug, edges closer and closer to me at the elbow of the L-shaped corridor and stops. It turns its wheels before accelerating through the turn, then suddenly halts once again. Josh, the photographer I’d brought along, is blocking its path, and by way of its sensors, the robot knows it. Tug, it seems, is programmed to avoid breaking knees.

This hospital—the University of California, San Francisco’s Mission Bay wing—had opened four days before our visit. From the start, a fleet of Tugs has been shuffling around the halls. They deliver drugs and clean linens and meals while carting away medical waste and soiled sheets and trash. And by the time the fleet spins up to 25 robots on March 1, it’ll be the largest swarm of Tug medical automatons in the world, with each robot traveling an admirable average of 12 miles a day.

The whole circus is, in a word, bewildering. The staff still seems unsure what to make of Tug. Reactions I witness range from daaawing over its cuteness (the gentle bleeping, the slow-going, the politeness of stopping before pancaking people) to an unconvincingly restrained horror that the machines had suddenly become sentient. I grew up in Silicon Valley and write for WIRED and even I’m confused about it. The whole thing is just weird.

It’s really weird. And I’m not sure I like it much.•

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“Every Intimate Aspect Of Your Life Is Under Potential Bureaucratic Scrutiny”

February 11, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I think the most defining negative quality of bureaucracy is simply incompetence. Look at the example of relief efforts in New York City in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. When the federal government was in charge, FEMA did quite well. But when $100 million was shifted to the city, the efforts were a fiasco. A program called Build It Back was established by Mayor Bloomberg, and in his final 14 months in office not a single destroyed home was built back. Not one. Local homeowners living in ruins or in shelters were summoned to government offices numerous times to provide information, but while paperwork piled high, no one was helped. (So far during the de Blasio Administration, a little more than 300 homes have been completely repaired out of more than one thousand where work has begun.)

When David Graeber looks at bureaucracy, he senses something more sinister than ineptitude. He sees the potential for routine violence. In an interview about his forthcoming book, The Utopia of Rules, with David Whelan of Vice, the anthropologist looks into our future and believes an Orwellian nightmare may be headed our way. I don’t agree with Graeber’s vision of technological dreams vanishing or of library fines being commonly treated as felonies, but we’re already living in a society where “quality-of-life” policing is often used as racial punishment and certainly we’re being more tracked and quantified each day. An excerpt: 

Vice:

OK, say we’re 50 years from now, this moment. What’s happening?

David Graeber:

Research investment has changed. Flying cars are scrapped. They say to hell with going to Mars. All this space age stuff is done. Money moves elsewhere, such as information technology. And now every intimate aspect of your life is under potential bureaucratic scrutiny, which means fines and violence.

Vice:

What happens if you step out of line?

David Graeber:

Bureaucratic societies rely on the threat of violence. We follow their rules because if we don’t there’s a chance we’ll get killed. A good way to think of this is through libraries.

Vice:

Libraries?

David Graeber:

Say you want to go get a book by Foucault from the library describing why life is all a matter of physical coercion, but you haven’t paid an overdue fine and therefore you don’t have a currently valid personal ID. You walk through the gate illegally. What’s going to happen?

Vice:

A smacked bottom?

David Graeber:

Men with sticks will eventually show up and threaten to hit you.

Vice:

Wait. This actually happens?

David Graeber:

Yeah. Check out the UCLA Taser incident in 2006. They Tasered him, told him to get up, then Tasered him again.

Vice:

What’s the point in that?

David Graeber:

The point is bureaucracy. They don’t care who he is or why he’s there. It doesn’t matter who you are. You just apply the same rules to everybody, because that’s “fair.”

Vice:

But if you’re at the top of the bureaucratic tree, those rules don’t apply.

David Graeber:

Bureaucracy provides an illusion of fairness. Everyone is equal before the law, but the problem is it never works like that. But to advance in a bureaucratic system the one thing you CANNOT do is point out all the ways the system doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. You have to pretend it’s a meritocracy.•

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“He Floated An Idea Called Pipex, A Network Of Pneumatic Tubes That Would Shuttle Important Documents Around San Francisco”

February 11, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Hyperloop sprang directly from the fertile mind of Elon Musk, but should his tubular dream take off across the futuristic test tracks to be built in Texas and then in the wider world, the Uber investor Shervin Pishevar will have played a key role, having nudged his buddy to make public the plans before putting a team together to attempt to will the travel system into reality. Pishevar had previously hoped to employ pneumatic tubes for a different purpose: to shuttle documents in the manner of New York’s long-lost pneumatic-mail service. From Bruce Upbin at Forbes:

Sci-fi writers and other dreamers have long envisioned fast, tubular travel. Rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard in 1909 wrote a paper that wasn’t too far off from Musk’s proposal. In 1972 Robert Salter of the RAND Corp. conceived a supersonic transcontinental underground railway called the Vactrain. Shervin Pishevar was one of those dreamers. Back in the dot-com era he floated an idea called Pipex, a network of pneumatic tubes that would shuttle important documents around San Francisco. It didn’t go anywhere.

But Pishevar has. Mention his name around Silicon Valley and you might well get an eye roll. A big-hearted oversharer quick with hugs, tears and humble-brags, he drops the names of celebrity friends (Jay Z, Edward Norton, Sean Penn) likes dimes in a jukebox.

“He’s unquestionably a promoter,” says one Valley investor who’s done deals with him. “But there are many good things that come from being a promoter.” Ask anyone at Menlo Ventures, where Pishevar engineered one of the $4 billion venture firm’s greatest investments ever, in a then-small-but-growing taxi app called Uber.

Pishevar was initially turned down by Uber and its backers when it closed its second round of funding at the end of 2011. Pishevar was giving a talk in Algeria when he got a call from Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, saying he was back in if he could come meet Kalanick in Dublin. Pishevar grabbed the next flight to Ireland. “I didn’t really know Shervin, [but] I was getting e-mails from him and intros from everybody he knows,” Kalanick told FORBES in 2012. “I met with him because I had to.” The two hit it off, walking the streets of Dublin for hours. They signed a term sheet in the wee hours of the morning. Menlo left with an estimated 8% of Uber, at a valuation of $290 million. The company is now worth $42 billion. “I always tell people: Lesson number one: Get on that plane,’” says Pishevar, whose Uber and other holdings are worth about $500 million.

That score is the capstone of this immigrant’s rags-to-riches American dream. Pishevar was six when his mother fled post-revolution Iran in 1980, toting him and his two siblings. His father, who had run a big part of Iran’s TV network under the Shah, had barely escaped a year earlier and was driving a cab in Washington, D.C. His mother, a teacher, got a job as a maid at a Ramada Inn. Pishevar’s English was so bad that his second-grade teacher threatened to hold him back until his father pressed her to let him move up. By the time he was 10, though, he was calling local radio stations and debating Middle Eastern politics. “I think he was born 40 years old,” says his brother Afshin, who sold his law firm to move to L.A. as Hyperloop’s general counsel.

After graduating from Berkeley in 1998, Pishevar returned to Maryland and started a series of companies, including an early operating system, WebOS, as well as the Social Gaming Network and Webs.com, which eventually sold to Vistaprint for $117.5 million. In 2007 he moved to San Francisco and began writing small checks to startups on the side. Menlo Ventures hired him as an investing partner in June 2011, and he got the San Francisco firm into Tumblr, Warby Parker and Uber.

Two years ago Pishevar raised $153 million to start his own fund, Sherpa Ventures, with former Goldman Sachs venture investor Scott Stanford. Rather than only backing existing startups, their idea was to build new companies from scratch around talented people. One of the first ideas he put in motion: Hyperloop Tech.•

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“It Was The Software That Did It – A Clear-Cut Case Of What Economists Call Technological Unemployment”

February 10, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Working off futurist Martin Ford’s forthcoming book Rise of the Robots, Zoë Corbyn of the Guardian analyzes the next phase of labor, in which many of the human laborers will be phased out. The opening:

It could be said that the job of bridge toll collector was invented in San Francisco. In 1968, the Golden Gate Bridge became the world’s first major bridge to start employing people to take tolls.

But in 2013 the bridge where it all began went electronic. Of its small band of collectors, 17 people were redeployed or retired and nine found themselves out of work. It was the software that did it – a clear-cut case of what economists call technological unemployment. Licence-plate recognition technology took over. Automating jobs like that might not seem like a big deal. It is easy to see how it might happen, just as how we buy train tickets at machines or book movie tickets online reduces the need for people.

But technology can now do many more things that used to be unique to people. Rethink Robotics’ Baxter, a dexterous factory robot that can be programmed by grabbing its arms and guiding it through the motions, sells for a mere $25,000 (equivalent to about $4 an hour over a lifetime of work, according to a Stanford University study). IPsoft’s Amelia, a virtual service desk employee, is being trialled by oil industry companies, such as Shell and Baker Hughes, to help with employee training and inquiries. Meanwhile, doctors are piloting the use of Watson, IBM’s supercomputer, to assist in diagnosing patients and suggesting treatments. Law firms are using software such as that developed by Blackstone Discovery to automate legal discovery, the process of gathering evidence for a lawsuit, previously an important task of paralegals. Rio Tinto’s “mine of the future” in Western Australia has 53 autonomous trucks moving ore and big visions for expansion. Even the taxi-sharing company Uber is in on the act – it has just announced it will open a robotics research facility to work on building self-driving cars.

The upshot will be many people losing jobs to software and machines, says Silicon Valley-based futurist Martin Ford, whose book The Rise of the Robots comes out this year. He forecasts significant unemployment and rising inequality unless radical changes are made.•

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“The Sharing Economy Only Works For People Who Already Have Financial Stability”

February 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If you don’t need a great job, the Peer Economy is for you. If it’s an elective weekend gig to make a few extra bucks, you’re okay. But if you took the bait and were drawn into such employment on a full-time basis, you’re probably living on the margins now, and you may be joined there by others whose jobs you unwittingly disrupted. From “I Am Not an Uber,” Annie Julia Wyman’s n+1 report about Los Angeles drivers employed by the ridesharing service:

A few men said they had made as much as $3,000 a week when they started working for Uber in 2012; some gave up other jobs in order to drive full-time. When Uber dropped fares drastically, supposedly in order to compete with Lyft (a rideshare app most successful on the West Coast and whose brand, at least, is friendlier, more transparent, and community-based), some drivers to whom I spoke said they found themselves earning as little as a few dollars an hour. One man texted me PDFs documenting his pay in October 2013 and his pay in October 2014. On the 2014 report, the driver’s total income is much lower, but you can’t see the number of trips he completed. This omission of the trip number column is intentional, he says: Uber wants to hide the fact that it is hurting its drivers. Meanwhile, company representatives maintain that drivers can earn $25.79 an hour and that drivers are provided with both weekly emails with policy updates and with 24-hour support. Uber’s stated intent is to “help drivers build their own small businesses” and to keep creating jobs. As of December 2014, Uber claims to have created fifty thousand of them, including jobs for military veterans, who drive without paying anything to the company at all.

The roughly twenty-eight men and two women at the meeting stressed that they all work full time, sometimes up to fifteen hours a day. They call part-time drivers “weekend warriors” and cite them as evidence that the sharing economy only works for people who already have the financial stability to treat driving as a kind of mildly lucrative hobby. One man took me aside and outlined his typical Monday, stressing that he couldn’t spare the money for more than one cup of coffee or the time for bathroom breaks. “I’m not a big thinker,” he said, pulling his knit cap down over his eyes, “I’m not a philosopher or a lawyer. But the country will be better when people like me are treated better.” He laughed and insisted that he, unlike many Americans, would pay his taxes. He then scrutinized my notebook to make sure I hadn’t written down his name, a strong hint that he—and probably other drivers at the meeting—was an undocumented worker.•

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“About 1.2 Million Additional Advanced Robots Are Expected To Be Deployed In The U.S. By 2025”

February 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

 

It’s possible that the robotization of the workplace will lead to growth in new and more interesting industries yet imagined, but it’s worth searching for solutions right now should that scenario not play out to the degree that’s necessary. From Paul Davidson at USA Today:

Manufacturers will significantly accelerate their use of robots in U.S. factories over the next decade as they become cheaper and perform more tasks, constraining payroll growth, according to a study out Tuesday.

The development is expected to dramatically boost productivity and slow the long-standing migration of factories across the globe to take advantage of low-cost labor, says the Boston Consulting Group report.

“Advanced robotics are changing the calculus of manufacturing,” says Harold Sirkin, a senior partner at the management consulting firm.

A handful of nations, including the U.S. and China, are poised to reap the biggest benefits of the automation wave.

About 1.2 million additional advanced robots are expected to be deployed in the U.S. by 2025, BCG says. …

Within two years, the number of advanced industrial robots in the U.S. will begin to grow by 10% a year, up from current annual growth of 2% to 3%, the study says.

The impact on U.S. factory workers is mixed.

Replacing employees with robots is projected to result in a manufacturing workforce that’s 22% — or a few million workers — smaller by 2025 than it otherwise would have been. But factory payrolls are still expected to rise because of an expanding economy and the growing tendency of manufacturers to move some production back to the U.S. from overseas — a trend known as reshoring, Sirkin says.•

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“As Far As The Eye Can See, What’s Left Of Civilised Society Is Sheathed In Glass”

February 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

What would it be like if the worst dream came true and climate change killed most of us, made the majority of the Earth uninhabitable? How would the relatively small band of survivors carry on should this ingenious machine we’ve built for ourselves no longer be sustainable? The opening of “Scorched Earth, 2200 A.D.,” Linda Marsa’s excellent Aeon speculation about life among the ruins:

Stare out the window from my tiny flat on the 300th floor, hermetically sealed in a soaring, climate-controlled high-rise, honeycombed with hundreds of dwellings just like mine, and survey the breathtaking vistas from my lofty perch more than half a mile above ground: the craftsman cottages with their well-tended lawns, the emerald green golf courses, the sun-washed aquamarine swimming pools and the multimillion-dollar mansions that hug the sweeping sands from Malibu to Palos Verdes. These images evoke feelings of deep nostalgia for a Los Angeles that doesn’t exist anymore, back in the halcyon days before my great-grandparents were born, when procreation wasn’t strictly regulated and billions of people roamed freely on Earth.

There are only about 500 million of us left, after the convulsive transformations caused by climate change severely diminished the planet’s carrying capacity, which is the maximum population size that the environment can sustain. Most of us now live in what the British scientist James Lovelock has called ‘lifeboats’ at the far reaches of the northern hemisphere, in places that were once Canada, China, Russia and the Scandinavian countries, shoehorned into cities created virtually overnight to accommodate the millions of desperate refugees where the climate remains marginally tolerable.

What I ‘see’ outside my window is an illusion, a soothing virtual imitation of a world that once was, summoned by impulses from my brain. Yet the harsh reality is unsettling. As far as the eye can see, what’s left of civilised society is sheathed in glass – the ribbons of highways ferrying the bullet trains that encircle megacities where millions cram into skyscrapers hundreds of stories high; the vast tracts of greenhouses covering chemically enhanced farms where fruits and vegetables are grown and livestock graze; and even the crowded subterranean villages artificially lit to mimic the experience of walking outside on a sunny, spring day.

Before the seismic shocks of the great upheavals, people’s movements were unfettered, and they could breathe unfiltered air, roam in the woods or simply watch their kids play soccer outdoors. Today, the unprotected strips of land exposed to the elements are forbidden zones, plagued by drenching rains with howling 100-mile-an-hour winds, alternating with fierce dust storms, the deadly soil tsunamis that rumble up from the deserts that blanket what used to be the United States. When there is a break in the wild weather, the scorching sun relentlessly cooks the atmosphere to temperatures of 180 degrees or more by midday, making it impossible to step outside without body armour and oxygen tanks.

Our political structures have shifted, too.•

 

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“One Company Thinks It Has Come Up With A Solution – Flying Robot Waiters”

February 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Bellhops, desk attendants and bank tellers are beginning to go robotic, and you can add waiters to the list. In Singapore, such restaurant service workers are in short supply and drones are a measure of desperation, but if the machines succeed there, they become an option for places where there’s no paucity of willing human capital. Even if it’s more gimmick than solution, the kitchen-to-table technology still shows the flexibility of relatively inexpensive Weak AI. From Tessa Wong at the BBC:

In Singapore food is a national obsession. But finding enough people to bring the food to diners is increasingly becoming a problem.

One company thinks it has come up with a solution – flying robot waiters. They are sturdy, reliable, and promise never to call in sick at the last minute.

Infinium Robotics’ drones, due to be introduced at a local restaurant-bar chain by the end of this year, can carry up to 2kg (4.4lbs) of food and drink – that’s about two pints of beer, a pizza, and two glasses of wine.

The unpiloted robots whizz above the heads of diners on paths charted by a computer programme, and navigate using infra-red sensors placed around the restaurant. …

Infinium Robotics’ chief executive officer Junyang Woon says that his technology frees up capacity: “So staff are able to interact more with customers and enhance their dining experience.”

Drones can pose safety and liability issues, especially when used indoors. In December, a drone crashed into someone’s face at a TGI Fridays outlet in New York.

But Mr Woon says their machines use onboard cameras and sensors to ensure they do not collide with one another or with people. Their blades are covered with grates.•

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“The Most Exciting Work On Digital Fabrication Is The Creation Of Life From Scratch”

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

In an Edge essay, MIT physicist Neil Gershenfeld explains the far bigger applications of digital fabrication, which many now think of as merely an Etsy-friendly maker tool, describing mind-blowing processes long desired and feared, which could improve the world remarkably (or not). An excerpt:

A year ago for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, I ran a meeting because every federal agency pretty much wanted to talk to me about their 3D printing initiative. I was yelling at them that it’s sort of shuffling deckchairs. That’s not the new opportunity. I got together all of these agencies, and then I got together the people at the frontiers of this emerging field of the deep sense of digital fabrication as coding construction. What’s emerging from that is in a whole bunch of areas we’re discovering we can do things that were just not considered remotely possible before.       

On the very smallest scale, the most exciting work on digital fabrication is the creation of life from scratch. The cell does everything we’re talking about. We’ve had a great collaboration with the Venter Institute on microfluidic machinery to load designer genomes into cells. One step up from that we’re developing tabletop chip fab instead of a billion dollar fab, using discrete assembly of blocks of electronic materials to build things like integrated circuits in a tabletop process.                          

A step up from that, we had a paper in Science last year showing we can make the world’s highest performance ultralight material for things like airplanes by digitizing composites into little linked loops of carbon fiber instead of making giant pieces. Now we’re working with the aerospace industry on making printers of jumbo jets. But the printers are really assemblers.

Bigger scale, we’re working with Homeland Security on geoprinting. Extreme events like Katrina or Sandy do tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of damage. National technical means to defend against them are bags of wet sand. We’re now developing machines that are like robotic ribosomes that link discrete parts to build geological scale features to make landscape. We’re working with NASA on doing this in space, leading up to the idea of how you bootstrap a civilization. There’s a series of books by David Gingery on how to make a machine shop starting with charcoal and iron ore. You make a furnace and you melt it, and then you make hand tools, then slowly you bootstrap up to make a machine shop. When people think about a notion like colonizing space and bootstrapping a civilization, that’s what they’re thinking of implicitly.•

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“What Fraction Of The Population Would You Say Has The Potential To Become A Serial Killer?”

February 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Sometimes I think Bill James’ opinions are quite plausible (the JFK assassination) and sometimes a little bonkers (the Dowd Report, the Penn State scandal), but he certainly doesn’t steer from dangerous waters. In his latest batch of Hey Bill questions, the baseball analyst, who is also a true-crime historian, answers a query about serial murderers. The exchange:

Question:

What fraction of the population would you say has the potential to become a serial killer, under the right circumstances? If you or I had been subjected to the “right” stimuli, could either of us ever murder a series of strangers, or do you have to be born with your wiring all wrong? And if it is (as I hope) only a fraction of potential serial killers among us with screwed-up wiring, how many of them actually kill people?

Bill James:

Well, I suppose I’ll pay a price for saying this in public, but I have always felt that there was just some very small difference that separated me from the serial murderers, some “switch” in my makeup that was different. . .but just one switch, or just two or three switches, nothing big. As to being subjected to the “right” stimuli. . .well, in all candor my childhood WAS very much like the childhood that many of these people have. But whereas they react, as a first manifestation of their condition, by torturing animals, I am just opposite; I could never stand to cause suffering or to see suffering in an animal or to another person; I was always hyper-sensitive to it, rather than insensitive to it. I am certain, in the same way that gay people are certain that they are born gay, that I was born this way and could not choose to be different. . .and I am grateful that I was, as I shudder to think who I would have become if a few switches were flipped the other way. I think, responding to the question “is it only a fraction of potential serial killers among us”. . .I think that all of the switches have to be turned one way for a person to turn out that way, and that there are not that many people who have all 28 switches set in the serial-murderer position. . ..but that there are many, many of us who have 24 or 25 switches pointed in that direction, with just a few that are somewhere else. This isn’t to be taken to imply that I have any sympathy for these people or think that their guilt should in any sense be lifted from them. We all have choices, to do good or to do evil, but the people who choose to do good are not really very much different from those who choose to be wicked.•

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“For 300 Years, Higher Education Was Not Disrupted Because There Was No Technological Core”

February 9, 2015 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Harvard Business School’s Professor Clayton Christensen, student of disruption, being interviewed by VC veteran Mark Suster about the near-term future of higher education, provides the money quote: “In fifteen years from now half of U.S. universities may be in bankruptcy.” America’s higher-education system has been one of our greatest triumphs, one of the great marvels of all civilization, but the growing costs seem unsustainable and the giant money at stake makes nimble reinvention difficult. Some sea change will likely occur.

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“Introducing Spot”

February 9, 2015 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Boston Dynamics, now property of that AI company Google, shows off its latest four-legged robot, Spot. The unguided stair climb is most impressive.

“Consciousness Is A Much Different Story”

February 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

David W. Buchanan, one of IBM’s Watson enablers, agrees with me that Strong AI with human-extincting powers isn’t happening in the foreseeable future, but in arguing against the likelihood of our imminent elimination in a Washington Post editorial, he does concede the growing power of Weak AI, which will continue to introduce automation into more and more workplaces. That could be a great thing or a destabilizing one that encourages even greater income inequality. From Buchanan, a passage about what he terms the “consciousness fallacy”:

Science fiction is partly responsible for these fears. A common trope works as follows: Step 1: Humans create AI to perform some unpleasant or difficult task. Step 2: The AI becomes conscious. Step 3: The AI decides to kill us all. As science fiction, such stories can be great fun. As science fact, the narrative is suspect, especially around Step 2, which assumes that by synthesizing intelligence, we will somehow automatically, or accidentally, create consciousness. I call this the consciousness fallacy. It seems plausible at first, but the evidence doesn’t support it. And if it is false, it means we should look at AI very differently.

Intelligence is the ability to analyze the world and reason about it in a way that enables more effective action. Our scientific understanding of intelligence is relatively advanced. There is still an enormous amount of work to do before we can create comprehensive, human-caliber intelligence. But our understanding is viable in the sense that there are real businesses that make money by creating AI.

Consciousness is a much different story, perhaps because there is less money in it. Consciousness is also a harder problem: While most of us would agree that we know consciousness when we see it, scientists can’t really agree on a rigorous definition, let alone a research program that would uncover its basic mechanisms. The best definitions capture the idea that consciousness grounds our experiences and our awareness. Certainly consciousness is necessary to be “someone,” rather than just “something.” There is some good science on consciousness, and some progress has been made, but there is still a very long way to go.

It is tempting to conflate something that we understand better with something we hardly understand at all, and scientists are not immune to this temptation.•

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“Human Adventures In Space Are Just Sporting Events, They’re Not Science”

February 8, 2015 in Science/Tech | Permalink

Freeman Dyson, climate-change denier, has also said “no” to humans as a pivotal part of space exploration, despite once believing flying Mayflowers would eventually land on asteroids. Dyson says machines must do the pioneering and if we want to colonize worlds beyond our own, we have to spend centuries devising and executing such “urban planning” and need to be open to altering our physiology. Listen to audio of these and other Dyson ideas at Raw Science.•

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“To Fund His Grand Venture, He’d Charge $16,500 Per Head”

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

A private city of conspicuous consumption being built at Burning Man, that Libertarian wet dream, says so much about the weird welter of technology, wealth inequality and batshit politics that make up much of the mishegas modern American landscape. The opening of Felix Gillette’s Bloomberg story about the 1% decamping to the Nevada desert with AC, Wi-Fi and a wait staff:

For his 50th birthday, Jim Tananbaum, chief executive officer of Foresite Capital, threw himself an extravagant party at Burning Man, the annual sybaritic arts festival and all-hours rave that attracts 60,000-plus to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada over the week before Labor Day. Tananbaum’s bash went so well, he decided to host an even more elaborate one the following year. In 2014 he’d invite up to 120 people to join him at a camp that would make the Burning Man experience feel something like staying at a pop-up W Hotel. To fund his grand venture, he’d charge $16,500 per head.

Tananbaum, a contemporary art collector who resembles the actor Bob Saget, grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and graduated from Yale and Harvard, where he earned both an M.D. and an MBA. After years of starting, selling, and investing in health-care companies, he founded Foresite in 2011. A private venture capital firm with $650 million under management, San Francisco-based Foresite specializes in the health-care and pharmaceutical industries.

Busy building his portfolios, Tananbaum only made it to Burning Man in 2009, the festival’s 24th year, but instantly fell under its spell. While his peers in San Francisco’s high finance circles took up kitesurfing or winemaking, he devoted his spare time to preparations for the next burn. “Jim put a tremendous effort into trying to create something very special for the Burning Man community,” says his friend Matt Nordgren, a former quarterback at the University of Texas, who went on to star in the Bravo reality show Most Eligible Dallas. 

For 2014, Tananbaum wanted a camp that was aesthetically novel, ecologically conscious, and exceedingly comfortable.•

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“The Brain Data Suggested That Passive Twitter Use Increased A Sense Of Personal Relevance By 27 Percent”

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

The always great Steven Levy filed a story at Backchannel about Twitter usage measured by neuroscience, which revealed greater stimulation of emotion and memory in test subjects than they displayed during more general web use. Not surprising, since personal engagement is more intense in tweets than on newsfeeds, even personalized ones. Clearly such info can be, for better or worse, used by the company for neuromarketing purposes. An excerpt:

[Twitter senior director of market research Jeffrey] Graham’s team arranged a study at Twitter’s UK headquarters. One hundred and fourteen people participated, in groups of around twenty. Videos of the sessions show people putting on the helmets, which look like a cross between a Snoopy-style Red Baron helmet and a polka dot shower cap destined for Katy Perry’s cranium in a music video.

Then, during 45-minute sessions, they alternated between normal Web-surfing activities and using Twitter — reading their timelines, tweeting, and other birdy stuff.

Graham had hoped that the brain profiles of people using Twitter would show the difference between his employer and more static Web use. “When I go on Twitter, oftentimes I really get sucked into it,” he says. “I get this strong anticipation to see what engagement is going to be.” But he admits that he had no idea what the data would actually show.

The results were more than he’d dreamed of. The study first tried to measure a neural signature that tends to correlate with information relating to you—a “sense of personal relevance.” It did this by comparing how participants’ brains activated when either passively scrolling and browsing on Twitter, actively tweeting and retweeting, or engaging in normal online activity. The brain data suggested that passive Twitter use increased a sense of personal relevance by 27 percent. Active use boosted that number to 51 percent. The representative from NeuroInsight told Twitter that in all the testing the research company has done, there’s been only one result as high: when people opened personal mail. (The physical kind.)

The most dramatic results reflected emotional intensity.•

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“A Lot Of These Trends Are Putting Pressure Even On Fairly Educated, High-Paid [Workers]”

February 8, 2015 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In a Big Think video, Andrew McAfee explains how automation is coming for your collar, white or blue, limo driver and lawyer alike. He leaves off by talking about new industries being created as old ones are being destroyed, but from his writing in The Second Machine Age, the book he co-authored with Eric Brynjolfsson, it’s clear he fears the shortfall between old and new may be significant and society could be in for a bumpy transition.

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“I Think We’re Heading Towards A World Of What I Call ‘Technological Socialism'”

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

Like most aspiring trillionaires, Peter Diamandis would like to live forever. Who can blame him? In a PC Magazine interview conducted by Evan Dayhevsky, the utopian futurist and author of Bold explains why he believes a small number of trillionaires plus a highly automated society won’t equal bloody revolution. An excerpt:

PCMag:

You’ve mentioned in previous media appearances that in the not crazy distant future, we may see the first trillionaires. 

Peter Diamandis: 

So, we’re at a point now when we’re starting to take on the world’s biggest problems and biggest opportunities. I have two ventures that are big and bold and which I talk about in detail in the book: the first is Planetary Resources. Think about everything that we hold of value here on Earth—metals, minerals, energy, real estate—they are in near infinite quantities in space. You know, some of the asteroids that we [Planetary Resources] are targeting to prospect are trillion-dollar assets. So, that’s one place where we might see the first trillionaires made, and, you know, I’m taking my shot at it.

The second place is in the life sciences. My other company I speak about in Bold is a company I co-founded called Human Longevity, Inc (HLI). Today there are six to seven trillion dollars a year spent on healthcare, half of which goes to people over the age of 65. In addition, people over the age of 65 hold something on the order of $60 trillion in wealth. And the question is what would people pay for an extra 10, 20, 30, 40 years of healthy life. It’s a huge opportunity. These are areas where we may see significant wealth creation.

PCMag:

One of the things you don’t touch on too much in the book are all the people who aren’t entrepreneurs. As things like AI and robotics develop and give businesses the ability produce big ideas, there will be a diminishing need for a human labor force to support it. What does the future hold for all of us non-entrepreneurs and CEOs?

Peter Diamandis: 

I think we’re heading towards a world of what I call “technological socialism.” Where technology—not the government or the state—will begin to take care of us. Technology will provide our healthcare for free. The best education in the world—for free. We’ll have access to more and more energy, better quality water, more nutritious food. So, the cost of living and having your fundamentals met will come down.

So I think we’re heading towards a world where people will be able to spend their time doing what they enjoy rather than what they need to be doing. There was a Gallup poll that said something like 70 percent of people in the United States do not enjoy their job—they work to put food on the table and get insurance to survive. So, what happens when technology can do all that work for us and allow us to actually do what we enjoy with our time?•

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“The Reveal Is Always Going To Be Imminent But It Will Never Quite Happen. That’s The Future.”

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

For Douglas Coupland, the future (that scary thing) and the present have merged. Everyone is a pioneer now, without any movement westward or in any other direction. Everything is within sight, even if most of it is just out of reach. What is the effect on the human mind of permanent tantalization? The opening of his latest Financial Times column:

I’ve spent much of my life waiting for the future to happen, yet it never really felt like we were there. And then, in this past year, it’s become almost instantly and impossible to deny that we are now all, magically and collectively, living in that far-off place we once called the future — and we all know we’re inside it, too. It’s here, and it feels odd. It feels like that magical moment when someone has pulled a practical joke on you but you haven’t quite realised it yet. We keep on waiting for the reveal but the reveal is never going to happen. The reveal is always going to be imminent but it will never quite happen. That’s the future.

What was it that pulled us out of the present and dumped us in this future? Too much change too quickly? One too many friends showing us a cool new app that costs 99 cents and eliminates thousands of jobs in what remains of the industrial heartlands? Maybe it was too much freakish weather that put us in the future. Or maybe it was texting almost entirely replacing speaking on the phone. Or maybe it was Angelina Jolie’s pre-emptive mastectomy. Or maybe it was an adolescent comedy about North Korea almost triggering nuclear war — as well as incidentally revealing Sony’s thinking on Angelina Jolie. Or maybe it was Charlie. How odd that much of what defines the future is the forced realisation that there are many people who don’t want a future and who don’t want the future. They want eternity.

I feel like I’m in the future when I see something cool and the lag time between seeing something cool and reaching for my iPhone camera is down to about two seconds as opposed to 30 seconds a few years back. I feel like I’m in the future whenever I look for images of things online and half the images I see are watermarked and for sale. I feel like I’m in the future when I daydream of bingeing on season three of House of Cards on my new laptop that weighs nothing, never overheats and its battery goes on for ages.

How long is this sensation of futurity going to last? Is it temporary? Maybe society will go through a spontaneous technological lull allowing the insides of our brains to take a time holiday and feel like they’re in 1995, not 2015. But to be practical, that’s probably not going to happen. Ever. Ever.•

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“I Think What We Want Is The Choice To Be Able To Live Indefinitely”

February 6, 2015 in Politics, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Jeb and Hillary have company because Zoltan Istvan has announced his intention to run for the U.S. Presidency in 2016 on the Transhumanist Party ticket. The former National Geographic correspondent believes we’ll soon (within a decade) be electively receiving robotic hearts and eventually be living in a post-gender society in which we can choose when and if we die. We will be able to tweet indefinitely! As often is the case with life-extension enthusiasts, his timeframe seems wacky, and replacing a failing organ in a human being shouldn’t be made to sound as simple as switching out a carburetor in a Chevy. Zach Weissmueller of the Libertarian Reason TV interviewed Istvan, so some government-bashing is included.

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“Some 10,000 People Watch Him Eating Per Day, He Says”

February 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The Andy Warhol quote about everybody in the future being famous for 15 minutes was as prophetic as anything Marshall McLuhan ever said or wrote, but the late Pop Artist’s elevation of the excruciatingly banal has perhaps been equally prescient. In our egalitarian world, talent really isn’t necessary to entertain any longer–just share your minutiae, just live in public. A few spectacles of prowess, like, say, the Super Bowl, still attract attention, but it’s the long tail or ordinariness that wins in the bigger picture. Case in point: In South Korea, that hyper-wired world, “performance eating” has become a phenomenon. It’s food porn, sure, but Stephen Evans of the BBC suspects more is at play. An excerpt:

How do you fancy eating your dinner at home in front of a webcam and letting thousands of people watch? If they like the way you eat, they will pay you money – maybe a few hundred dollars a night… a good salary for doing what you would do anyway. This is happening now in South Korea.

It’s often said that if you want to see the future look at how technology is emerging in perhaps the most connected country on the planet. The food phenomenon is called mukbang – a combination of the Korean word for eating (muk-ja) and broadcasting (bang-song).

I have seen this future in the eighth-floor apartment of Lee Chang-hyun in Seoul (pictured at work, above). At around midnight, he goes online with a couple of friends and performs his meal, spicy raw squid one day, crab the next. “Perform” is the right word. He is extravagant in his gestures, flaunting the food to his computer camera to tantalise the viewers. He eats noisily and that’s part of the show. He’s invested in a good microphone to capture the full crunch and slurp.

This is not a private affair. Some 10,000 people watch him eating per day, he says. They send a constant stream of messages to his computer and he responds verbally (by talking) and orally (by eating, very visibly and noisily).

If the audience like the performance, they allocate him what are called “star balloons” and each of these means a payment to him and to the internet television channel on which he performs. He is coy about how much he earns but the BBC has estimated, by noting the number of star balloons on his screen, that it would run into several hundred dollars for a two-hour stint.

His performance-eating is part of a phenomenon which says something about the way society is changing and about the way television is changing – in Korea today, and perhaps, in your own country, tomorrow.•

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Andy Warhol eats a burger:

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