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“Extremely Short Exposures To A Relatively Simple Computer Program Could Induce Powerful Delusional Thinking In Quite Normal People”

December 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In the podcast conversation between Russ Roberts and Gary Marcus, the latter mentions the 1960s computer “psychotherapist” Eliza. Here’s a repost from a year ago about the pre-Siri shrink.

The real shift in our time isn’t only that we’ve stopped worrying about surveillance, exhibitionism and a lack of privacy, but that we’ve embraced these things–demanded them, even. There must have been something lacking in our lives, something gone unfulfilled. But is this intimacy with technology and the sense of connection and friendship and relationship that attends it–often merely a likeness of love–an evolutionary correction or merely a desperate swipe in the wrong direction?

The opening of Brian Christian’s New Yorker piece about Spike Jonze’s Her, a film about love in the time of simulacra, in which a near-future man is wowed by a “woman” who seems to him like more than just another pretty interface:

“In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor of computer science at M.I.T., wrote a computer program called Eliza, which was designed to engage in casual conversation with anybody who sat down to type with it. Eliza worked by latching on to keywords in the user’s dialogue and then, in a kind of automated Mad Libs, slotted them into open-ended responses, in the manner of a so-called non-directive therapist. (Weizenbaum wrote that Eliza’s script, which he called Doctor, was a parody of the method of the psychologist Carl Rogers.) ‘I’m depressed,’ a user might type. ‘I’m sorry to hear you are depressed,’ Eliza would respond.

Eliza was a milestone in computer understanding of natural language. Yet Weizenbaum was more concerned with how users seemed to form an emotional relationship with the program, which consisted of nothing more than a few hundred lines of code. ‘I was startled to see how quickly and how very deeply people conversing with DOCTOR became emotionally involved with the computer and how unequivocally they anthropomorphized it,’ he wrote. ‘Once my secretary, who had watched me work on the program for many months and therefore surely knew it to be merely a computer program, started conversing with it. After only a few interchanges with it, she asked me to leave the room.’ He continued, ‘What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.’

The idea that people might be unable to distinguish a conversation with a person from a conversation with a machine is rooted in the earliest days of artificial-intelligence research.”

“Slowly The Loving Atmosphere Gave Way To Cruelty”

December 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

New West, the magazine that Clay Felker launched as the Left Coast sister to New York, managed to survive only a few years, but it made its mark. A 1977 exposé by Marshall Kilduff and Phil Tracy, “Inside Peoples Temple,” about the Rev. Jim Jones, which alleged all manner of abuses by the preacher, drove him and some of his followers to relocate from California to Guyana, where the real madness began. I didn’t realize until reading this piece what pull Jones had among San Francisco politicos. An excerpt about a family that quit the church.

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“After Elmer and Deanna Mertle joined the temple in Ukiah in Novem­ber, 1969, he quit his job as a chemical technician for Standard Oil Company, sold the family’s house in Hayward and moved up to Redwood Valley. Eventually five of the Mertle’s children by previous marriages joined them there.

“When we first went up [to Redwood Valley], Jim Jones was a very compassionate person,” says Deanna. “He taught us to be compassionate to old people, to be tender to the children.”

But slowly the loving atmosphere gave way to cruelty and physical punishments. Elmer said, “The first forms of punishment were mental, where they would get up and totally disgrace and humiliate the person in front of the whole congregation. . . . Jim would then come over and put his arms around the person and say, ‘I realize that you went through a lot, but it was for the cause. Father loves you and you’re a stronger person now. I can trust you more now that you’ve gone through and accepted this discipline.’”

The physical punishment increased too. Both the Mertles claim they received public spankings as early as 1972 – but they were hit with a belt only “about three times.” Eventually, they said, the belt was replaced by a paddle and then by a large board dubbed “the board of education,” and the number of times adults and finally children were struck increased to 12, 25, 50 and even 100 times in a row. Temple nurses treated the injured.

At first, the Mertles rationalized the beatings. “The [punished] child or adult would always say, ’Thank you, Father,” and then Jim would point out the week how much better they were. In our minds we rationalized … that Jim must be doing the right thing because these people were testifying that the beatings had caused their life to make a reversal in the right direction.”

Then one night the Mertles’ daughter Linda was called up for discipline because she had hugged and kissed a woman friend she hadn’t seen in a long time. The woman was reputed to be a lesbian. The Mertles stood among the congregation of 600 or 700 while their daughter, who was then sixteen, was hit on her buttocks 75 times. “She was beaten so severely,” said Elmer, “that the kids said her butt looked like hamburger.”

Linda, who is now eighteen, confirms that she was beaten: “I couldn’t sit down for at least a week and a half.”

The Mertles stayed in the church for more than a year after that public beating. “We had nothing on the outside to get started in,” says Elmer. “We had given [the church] all our money. We had given all of our property. We had given up our jobs.”

Today the Mertles live in Berkeley. According to an affidavit they signed last October in the presence of attorney Harriet Thayer, they changed their names legally to Al and Jeanne Mills because, at the church’s instruction, “we had signed blank sheets of paper, which could be used for any imaginable purpose, signed power of attorney papers, and written many unusual and incriminating statements [about themselves], all of which were untrue.”•

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“I Do Think Eventually We Will Have Machines That Have The Flexibility Of Human Intelligence”

December 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Google’s translated text isn’t perfect, but it’s far better than I could do. Of course, those algorithms aren’t conscious of their accomplishment, while I’m aware of my shortcoming. Erasing that distinction isn’t a bridge too far, but it’s going to take a long time to cross. EconTalk host Russ Roberts did an excellent podcast this week with cognitive scientist Gary Marcus about the future of AI. A couple of excerpts follow.

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Russ Roberts:

Now, to be fair to AI and those who work on it, I think, I don’t know who, someone made the observation but it’s a thoughtful observation that any time we make progress–well, let me back up. People say, ‘Well, computers can do this now, but they’ll never be able to do xyz.’ Then, when they learn to do xyz, they say, ‘Well, of course. That’s just an easy problem. But they’ll never be able to do what you’ve just said’–say–‘understand the question.’ So, we’ve made a lot of progress, right, in a certain dimension. Google Translate is one example. Siri is another example. Wayz, is a really remarkable, direction-generating GPS (Global Positioning System) thing for helping you drive. They seem sort of smart. But as you point out, they are very narrowly smart. And they are not really smart. They are idiot savants. But one view says the glass is half full; we’ve made a lot of progress. And we should be optimistic about where we’ll head in the future. Is it just a matter of time?

Gary Marcus:

Um, I think it probably is a matter of time. It’s a question of whether are we talking decades or centuries. Kurzweil has talked about having AI in about 15 years from now. A true artificial intelligence. And that’s not going to happen. It might happen in the century. It might happen somewhere in between. I don’t think that it’s in principle an impossible problem. I don’t think that anybody in the AI community would argue that we are never going to get there. I think there have been some philosophers who have made that argument, but I don’t think that the philosophers have made that argument in a compelling way. I do think eventually we will have machines that have the flexibility of human intelligence. Going back to something else that you said, I don’t think it’s actually the case that goalposts are shifting as much as you might think. So, it is true that there is this old thing that whatever used to be called AI is now just called engineering, once we can do it.

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Russ Roberts:

Given all of that, why are people so obsessed right now–this week, almost, it feels like–with the threat of super AI, or real AI, or whatever you want to call it, the Musk, Hawking, Bostrom worries? We haven’t made any progress–much. We’re not anywhere close to understanding how the brain actually works. We are not close to creating a machine that can think, that can learn, that can improve itself–which is what everybody’s worried about or excited about, depending on their perspective, and we’ll talk about that in a minute. But, why do you think there’s this sudden uptick, spike in focusing on the potential and threat of it right now?

Gary Marcus:

Well, I don’t have a full explanation for why people are worried now. I actually think we should be worried. I don’t understand exactly why there was such a shift in the public view. So, I wanted to write about this for The New Yorker a couple of years ago, and my editor thought, ‘Don’t write this. You have this reputation as this sober scientist who understands where things are. This is going to sound like Science Fiction. It will not be good for your reputation.’ And I said, ‘Well, I think it’s really important and I’d like to write about it anyway.’ We had some back and forth, and I was able to write some about it–not as much as I wanted. And now, yeah, everybody is talking about it. I don’t know if it’s because Bostrom’s book is coming out or because people, there’s been a bunch of hyping, AI stories make AI seem closer than it is, so it’s more salient to people. I’m not actually sure what the explanation is. All that said, here’s why I think we should still be worried about it. If you talk to people in the field I think they’ll actually agree with me that nothing too exciting is going to happen in the next decade. There will be progress and so forth and we’re all looking forward to the progress. But nobody thinks that 10 years from now we’re going to have a machine like HAL in 2001. However, nobody really knows downstream how to control the machines. So, the more autonomy that machines have, the more dangerous they are. So, if I have an Angry Birds App on my phone, I’m not hooked up to the Internet, the worst that’s going to happen if there’s some coding error maybe the phone crashes. Not a big deal. But if I hook up a program to the stock market, it might lose me a couple hundred million dollars very quickly–if I had enough invested in the market, which I don’t. But some company did in fact lose a hundred million dollars in a few minutes a couple of years ago, because a program with a bug that is hooked up and empowered can do a lot of harm. I mean, in that case it’s only economic harm; and [?] maybe the company went out of business–I forget. But nobody died. But then you raise things another level: If machines can control the trains–which they can–and so forth, then machines that either deliberately or unintentionally or maybe we don’t even want to talk about intentions: if they cause damage, can cause real damage. And I think it’s a reasonable expectation that machines will be assigned more and more control over things. And they will be able to do more and more sophisticated things over time. And right now, we don’t even have a theory about how to regulate that. Now, anybody can build any kind of computer program they want. There’s very little regulation. There’s some, but very little regulation. It’s kind of, in little ways, like the Wild West. And nobody has a theory about what would be better. So, what worries me is that there is at least potential risk. I’m not sure it’s as bad as like, Hawking, said. Hawking seemed to think like it’s like night follows day: They are going to get smarter than us; they’re not going to have any room for us; bye-bye humanity. And I don’t think it’s as simple as that. The world being machines eventually that are smarter than us, I take that for granted. But they may not care about us, they might not wish to do us harm–you know, computers have gotten smarter and smarter but they haven’t shown any interest in our property, for example, our health, or whatever. So far, computers have been indifferent to us.•

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“Human Interaction May Become A Luxury”

December 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The main cost of our connected world, after the new rules of privacy, is the way it’s changed human interaction, replacing actualities with avatars, making reality less real. Nothing indicates we won’t continue down this road. Another excerpt follows from the Pew Research report “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs.

How will we interact with each other?

Vytautas Butrimas, the chief adviser to a major government’s ministry, expects technological advances to increase the distance between people: “AI and robotics will change the way we interact with other members of society. The tendency will be toward more social isolation and fewer human-to-human contacts taking place. Just look at what is happening at our airport waiting lounges. People sit next to each other but the interaction is not taking place with the neighbor sitting nearby but with a device communicating to some other device. The world will be more bureaucratic and ‘cold’ in 2025 than it is today.”

On the other hand, a self-employed writer, researcher, and consultant wrote, “I expect there will need to be a ‘human please’ option on most commercial and transport interfaces as there are always unpredictable elements. I also expect that consumers will demand tech-free places like restaurants where they can interact with each other.”

As more daily activities are automated, human interaction may become a luxury

Judith Donath, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, responded, “Even simple technologies have been doing this—most of what was a secretary’s job has been replaced by answering machines and Word. Robots will be able to stock store shelves and check out and bag groceries and other store purchases. They’ll do much of today’s custodial work, delivery services, and transportation. Customer service will be almost entirely done with scripted agents. Software agents will work their way up from the crowd scenes in movies to smaller speaking roles, and eventually to fully automated ‘live’ films. Employment will be mostly very skilled labor—and even those will jobs will be continuously whittled away by increasingly sophisticated machines. Live, human salespeople, nurses, doctors, actors will be symbols of luxury, the silk of human interaction as opposed to the polyester of simulated human contact.”

Andrew Bridges, a partner and Internet law litigator and policy analyst at Fenwick & West LLP, wrote, “’Brain work’ will increasingly become a commodity as computing power enables more artificial intelligence. We already see Google Translate displacing translators, investment advice algorithms displacing investment advisors, automated landing systems replacing airplane piloting skills, and so forth. I expect that the world will become increasingly divided between ‘standard’ service and ‘concierge’ service in many aspects, with standard service left entirely to the machines and concierge service resting more upon human relationships.”•

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“They Are About To Particpate In A Revolutionary Concept In The Fast-Food Service”

December 16, 2014 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The fear that we’ll be reduced to McJobs is perhaps scarier than it seems at first blush: What if even such low-paying positions are automated? You don’t need people to take food orders, nor soon will you need them to prepare the meals.

Reports of Momentum Machines’ hamburger robot, which can turn out 360 customized sandwiches an hour, reminded me of this industrial video from exactly 50 years ago about AMF, which brought automation and computers to bowling, trying to make fast food even more inhuman.

“It Can Estimate Pain Levels From Children’s Expressions”

December 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We may be on the doorstep of a miraculous mansion, but who will live there? It could be that the Digital Age, like the Industrial Age before it, creates as many jobs as it replaces, but that’s looking less likely, and society being wealthy in the aggregate without concern for the breakdown of the bounty could become a scary thing. From Claire Cain Miller at the New York Times:

“There are certain human skills machines will probably never replicate, like common sense, adaptability and creativity, said David Autor, an economist at M.I.T. Even jobs that become automated often require human involvement, like doctors on standby to assist the automated anesthesiologist, called Sedasys.

Elsewhere, though, machines are replacing certain jobs. Telemarketers are among those most at risk, according to a recent study by Oxford University professors. They identified recreational therapists as the least endangered — and yet that judgment may prove premature. Already, Microsoft’s Kinect can recognize a person’s movements and correct them while doing exercise or physical therapy. 

Other fields could follow. The inventors of facial recognition software from a University of California, San Diego lab say it can estimate pain levels from children’s expressions and screen people for depression. Machines are even learning to taste: The Thai government in September introduced a robot that determines whether Thai food tastes sufficiently authentic or whether it needs another squirt of fish sauce.

Watson, the computer system built by IBM that beat humans at Jeopardy in 2011, has since learned to do other human tasks. This year, it began advising military veterans on complex life decisions like where to live and which insurance to buy. Watson culls through documents for scientists and lawyers and creates new recipes for chefs. Now IBM is trying to teach Watson emotional intelligence.”

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“Her Chin Becomes Painful When It Rains”

December 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A good economy and poor self-image have led some South Koreans to repair to the cosmetic surgeon’s office, from where they sometimes emerge far worse for their “beautification.” The opening of Stephen Evans’ BBC article about the needle and the damage done:

On the train and in the street, you’re told you can “bring your face to life.” “Facial contouring” is on offer – “breast surgery,” “anti-ageing,” “eyeplasty,” “body contouring.” There is “square jaw reduction” (mainly, the adverts imply, for men). Or transforming your face ‘from saggy and loose to elastic and dimensional.’ targeted mostly at women.

One acquaintance of mine complains that her chin becomes painful when it rains. And then it emerges that she went into the surgery for a nose job but got persuaded – or persuaded herself – that it was her chin that really needed its contours changing. The result: a more shapely chin that is also a more painful chin. Despite that, she is now intent on breast enlargement.

In this country, parents tell me that they give their teenage daughters a present of what’s called ‘double eyelid surgery’ which makes eyes more pronounced – “less Asian” is the truth of it. Why, I wonder, when Korean eyes seem so beautiful the way they are?

The retort that blares from the adverts on the train is that “confidence in appearance brings positive energy which can be the foundation of happiness.” Happiness – so easily found at the cut of a knife!

Except that, of course, it’s not.•

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Old Print Article: “Army Experts See Rocket To The Moon Within 18 Months,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1946)

December 15, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

At the conclusion of World War II, America collected as many Nazi rocketeers as we could find and dispatched them to Huntsville, Alabama, to do their voodoo. We dreamed that our new friends would help us develop a space program the world would envy, and while there were bumps along the way, that’s essentially what happened. In the first blush of our post-war power, unbridled enthusiasm for exploration was at high throttle, as evidenced by this article from July 30, 1946 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

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“There Are More And More ‘Surplus Humans'”

December 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Speaking of technological unemployment, there’s a new Pew Research Center report, “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs,” in which some technologists and analysts worry that many professions will be headed down the vortex of an automatic, sensor-activated crapper. In a post at the “Upshot” of the New York Times, Claire Cain Miller pulled a few the prognostications. Two sharply contrasting views follow.

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Most utopian:

“How unhappy are you that your dishwasher has replaced washing dishes by hand, your washing machine has displaced washing clothes by hand or your vacuum cleaner has replaced hand cleaning? My guess is this ‘job displacement’ has been very welcome, as will the ‘job displacement’ that will occur over the next 10 years. This is a good thing. Everyone wants more jobs and less work.”

— Hal Varian, chief economist at Google.

Most dystopian:

“We’re going to have to come to grips with a long-term employment crisis and the fact that — strictly from an economic point of view, not a moral point of view — there are more and more ‘surplus humans.’  ”

— Karl Fogel, partner at Open Tech Strategies, an open-source technology firm.

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“If Robots Happen To Make Things More Efficient, You Want To Be The Place That Has Them”

December 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In conversation with Foreign Affairs’ Gideon Rose, Helen Grenier, founder of iRobot and CyPhy Works, addresses, among other things, the twin threats of technological unemployment and terrorism. An excerpt:

“Question:

Old science fiction used to be filled with flying cars, jetpacks, and things like that. Will those eventually take advantage of the space you’re talking about, or will it be just drones?

Helen Greiner:

I believe that the technologies will come. We already have a lot of technologies in ground robots to sense and avoid things. I want to bring some of those technologies to the flying robot space. I think we can disambiguate the airspace; I see no reason why drones can’t share the airspace with man.

Question:

How will people be safe in a world in which drone technology has proliferated and drones become incredibly easy to purchase and operate?

Helen Greiner:

A terrorist could buy a drone today and start planning an attack with it, and I think the only way we’re actually going to catch that is with human intelligence. Terrorists aren’t going to get drones from a company building them for commercial reasons; they’re going to go to the hobby store and buy the ones that are already freely available, if they want to pack them with explosives. I think it’s a challenge. But you can do the same with a car, and you don’t say, ‘Well, we shouldn’t sell cars because you can use them in a suicide attack.’ All we have to do is figure out who’s going to be doing it and try to stop it.

Question:

You like the idea of a world full of robots, and a lot of people would agree if they helped them do things. But does that world full of robots have as many jobs for ordinary humans?

Helen Greiner:

Robots have been in place in factories for decades now, and jobs have changed, but there’re still people in factories. Maybe there are fewer, but we’re able to produce more. If robots happen to make things more efficient, you want to be the place that has them. You can’t stop technology; the world’s going to continue to move forward. I would love to see [technological productivity] change the social contract and how people think of a full workweek—as four days of work or, later on, even three days—because there could be more quality time that people spend with their families.

Question:

Did the Roomba’s making people comfortable with the idea of robots in their homes have a cultural significance beyond the economics?

Helen Greiner:

I believe it did.”

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“It Struck Me That He Might Be The Ultimate Expression Of A Certain Kind Of Citizen Journalism”

December 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

An excerpt from David Carr’s latest piece of wonderfulness, a nuanced excoriation–and appreciation, for lack of a better term–of loathsome pisshole Chuck Johnson, a venomous, irresponsible blogger who fancies himself a “citizen journalist” and is, sort of, in our age of destabilized media:

“The Internet has given us many glorious things: streaming movies, multiplayer games, real-time information and videos of cats playing the piano. It has also offered up some less edifying creations: web-borne viruses, cybercrime and Charles C. Johnson.

His name came out of nowhere and now seems to be everywhere. When the consumer Internet first unfolded, there was much talk about millions of new voices blooming. Mr. Johnson is one of those flowers. His tactics may have as much in common with ultimate fighting as journalism, but that doesn’t mean he is not part of the conversation.

Mr. Johnson, a 26-year-old blogger based in California, has worked his way to the white-hot center of the controversy over a Rolling Stone article about rape accusations made by a student at the University of Virginia. His instinct that the report was deeply flawed was correct, but he proceeded to threaten on Twitter to expose the student and then later named her. And he serially printed her photo while going after her in personal and public ways.

In the frenzy to discredit her, he published a Facebook photo of someone he said was the same woman at a rally protesting an earlier rape. Oops. Different person. He did correct himself, but the damage, now to two different women, was done. …

After watching him set off a series of small mushroom clouds, it struck me that he might be the ultimate expression of a certain kind of citizen journalism — one far more toxic than we’re accustomed to seeing. Once a promising young conservative voice who wrote for The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Daily Caller and The Blaze, Mr. Johnson has a loose-cannon approach that alienated many of his editors. There was a time when that would have been the end of it, but with Twitter as a promotional platform, he has been able to build his own site called GotNews.”

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“If A Computer Was Used During A Game, It Would Be Most Helpful”

December 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

From “Brave New Sports World,” Steve Hymon’s 1992 SI article about the future of AI in athletics, which is marked in equal measures by fear, awe and disbelief:

“In 1989, while doing work for a ‘certain’ government agency, [computer scientist David] Hillman was given the task of coming up with a practical application for neural-network technology, a type of artificial-intelligence programming that is capable of processing diverse streams of information. A fan of the Washington Redskins, Hillman decided to mix work with play, so he created a program that thinks like a defensive coordinator. Between plays of a game, the computer operator uses a mouse to input six pieces of data: down, yards to go, field position, score, quarter and time remaining. Then the computer spits out the probability of the next play’s being an inside run, an outside run, a short pass, a long pass or, when called for, a punt or a field goal attempt. For instance, the computer’s response to a third-and-three situation, with the offense on its own 35-yard line, the score 7-7 and 13 minutes remaining in the second quarter, is a 54% chance the offense will try an inside run, a 22% chance it will throw a short pass, a 12% chance of a long pass and a negligible chance of an outside run.

Initially, Hillman taped and charted three Redskin games from the 1989 season to serve as his data base; then he tested his program by watching several televised 1990 games and comparing the computer’s responses with the teams’ reactions. The results were good: In 70% to 80% of the plays, the computer correctly predicted what the Skins would do. In one game, the computer hit 95% of the plays. The second time he tried, using three Redskin games from the 1991 season as a data base, Hillman’s program nailed 76% of the Redskin plays in last January’s Super Bowl — which is pretty good considering that Washington coach Joe Gibbs is known for coming up with new offensive twists during the playoffs.

‘It’s still up to the defensive coordinator to make a decision,’ says Hillman. ‘But the computer can recommend that during certain situations a certain defense should be used.

‘And I feel like I’m just touching on this superficially,’ says Hillman. ‘With even more variables, such as field condition, the computer should do even better.’

Two questions come to mind. Could Hillman’s program be used in the heat of a game? Would it help?

‘If a computer was used during a game, it would be most helpful,’ says Stanford coach Bill Walsh. When asked whether a computer, perhaps a Wires, might one day call the plays, Walsh says hesitantly, ‘It’s so mind-boggling, I wouldn’t be able to respond.’ Then he switches the subject.

‘In the very near future, I think what will happen will be communication from the sideline to the quarterback through a microphone in the quarterback’s helmet,’ he says.

Walsh’s response is repeated to Hillman, prompting him to describe another scenario. ‘If you have a computer with a voice-recognition system of, say, 300 words, you wouldn’t have to use the mouse to input the data into the computer,’ he says. ‘You could simply tell the computer what the situation is. It would give you the answers, and from the coaches’ booth you could relay the information straight to the players on the field through the headphones in their helmets.'”

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“There’s Another Crucial Element: Maps”

December 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If robocars are to form a convoy on highways and byways, digital cartography will be almost as important as the vehicles themselves, considering there’s no existing visual-recognition system anywhere near human levels. From Greg Miller at Wired:

“Autonomous cars will require maps that differ in several important ways from the maps we use today for turn-by-turn directions. They need to be hi-def. Meter-resolution maps may be good enough for GPS-based navigation, but autonomous cars will need maps that can tell them where the curb is within a few centimeters. They also need to be live, updated second by second with information about accidents, traffic backups, and lane closures. Finally, and this was the point Skillman was trying to make with the 1720 road atlas, they’ll need to take human psychology into account and win the trust of their passengers. ‘The key to making autonomous driving work is to not forget about the driver,’ [Nokia lead maps designer Peter] Skillman said.

Fully autonomous cars will be ready to hit the road as soon as 2017 (according to Sergey Brin), or perhaps sometime in the 2020s (according to more conservative forecasts), or maybe never (according to naysayers). The timing may be uncertain, but cars are already becoming more autonomous, creeping across a spectrum from current models with adaptive cruise control and assisted parallel parking to future vehicles that can navigate from A to B while you take a nap or make a sandwich. Much of the attention has focused on the sensors and other technology inside the cars and on the legal questions they raise (if an autonomous car causes an accident, who’s to blame? what if the car was hacked?), but there’s another crucial element: maps.”

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“Someday People Will Hike Through The Canyons Of Mars. I Just Don’t Know When Or How Or Who.”

December 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Long-range space exploration plans know their limitations, as changing politics lead to shifting priorities. In a 2007 New York Times essay, Dennis Overbye fretted about the failure of the Space Age to stretch much further than boots on the moon, but he also presciently realized that new-millennium geopolitics and technologist gazillionaires would likely help us shoot for Mars. An excerpt:

Our machines have gone ahead of us. But someday people will hike through the canyons of Mars. I just don’t know when or how or who. Maybe it will be the Chinese, who seem to still feel that they have something to prove as a nation. Maybe it will be billionaire adventurers — like the Google founders who just put up a $25 million prize for the first private Moon lander, who are free to risk their own money and don’t have to answer to Congress when things go wrong, as they sometimes will — who make the dream come true, for at least a few.

There will always be someone willing to ride a pillar of fire into the unknown, but it won’t be me. I don’t want to go to Mars anymore. I no longer have the stuff — if in fact I ever did — to camp out in a tin can for two years. I’d be afraid to be so far from the Earth and my family for so long.

I don’t want my daughter to go either, for the same reason. When our children do go off forever across the void then we will have a chance to find out if we are as strong as our ancestors who bundled their children onto ships in the hope they would reach a better world across the ocean. Someday, somebody will go and not come back, and humans will have escaped their nest, for better or for worse.

There is no galactic immortality. Everything we are and have done, the whole Milky Way with its billions of stars, is eventually destined to be swallowed up in a black hole. Neither ourselves nor our works will survive the end of the universe, if dark energy eventually blows it apart, no matter what we do. All we own is the present, so it behooves each of us to live each moment impeccably, guided by whatever lights we choose. Speaking only for myself, while we are around we might as well embrace the light and the unknown, the violence and vastness that terrify us.

My sci-fi dreams are dead, but Sir Richard Branson and his fellow space entrepreneurs say they have business plans. If Mr. Branson manages to get the cosmologist Stephen Hawking into space and back, he will have done more for the cause of space exploration than 25 years of space shuttles going around in circles.

Watching the Apollo astronauts recount their travels to the Moon in the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, I was wiping away tears for a time when we had bold dreams and leaders who, for whatever motives, could make them happen. Neil Armstrong’s footprints on the Moon are as crisp as the day he made them.

I will always be glad I was alive when he took that small step, even if we are still waiting for the next big leap.•

 

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“As A People, We Disinvest In America”

December 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Via the wonderful Browser, I came across David Cay Johnston’s Al Jazeera essay, “America Should Be More Like Disneyland,” which suggests the U.S. invest in infrastructure and our future like Walt did with his walled-in world. It’s not the first time a thinker has suggested we look to a corporation for tips on saner public governance. In the 1990s, Los Angeles sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury, worried by the Rodney King riots and crime against his own family members, thought American cities were becoming hyper-violent and needed to turn themselves over to corporations which would make large-scale malls of metropolises. He had, of course, missed the macro picture: Crime was actually diminishing in the U.S. at a remarkable rate. It still is. Johnston’s ideas are far more reasonable. An excerpt:

“At the park’s grand opening on July 17, 1955, Walt Disney said, ‘This happy place’ is ‘dedicated to the ideals, the dreams and the hard facts that have created America.’

To raise the $17 million ($150 million in today’s money) needed to turn Anaheim’s orange groves into the Magic Kingdom, Disney mortgaged his home and created a Sunday night television show on ABC. Today the Disney Co. owns ABC, because Walt Disney’s vision of a richer future paid off beyond even his imagination.

But as a people, we disinvest in America. Even though the country could borrow at extremely low interest rates, we refuse to take the risk. Instead, we let infrastructure deteriorate, cut school budgets, close libraries, raise college tuition and pay ever more for police and security even though crime has been declining for decades.

In an era when human knowledge is expanding at a rapidly accelerating rate, Congress cuts budgets for basic research, thereby encouraging smart young scientists to go overseas because they can get funding abroad. And of course the countries that receive them will reap the benefits of their discoveries.

Disney’s brother Roy and other critics thought Disneyland was too audacious and costly an idea to succeed. Yet it not only prompted a wave of theme parks around the world, including the complete remake of Las Vegas, starting in 1989 with the Mirage, a themed casino resort on the Disneyland model.

Creating a happy place

Imagine if we applied that same vision of a better world from infrastructure to education and scientific research or even to just having public restrooms — and clean ones at that.”

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“The Big Question Is Whether Something Like This Can Really Take Off”

December 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’m not an irredeemable cynic because I didn’t have much hope that an elevated-pod transportation system would skim the sky in Tel Aviv just as scheduled. It’s easier, however, for a private concern to install such rich infrastructure, as Google is planning to do with pedal-and-solar powered pods on its sprawling campus, with the help of an outfit named Shweeb. From Adele Peters at Fast Company:

“The pods come in different sizes that can hold two, five, or 12 people, and can also be connected to carry packages or other cargo. The guideways that hold the cars can also double as carriers for power lines and cables. ‘We’ve envisioned the guideway that the pod runs on to become a conduit for all things electrified,’ [Stephen] Bierda says. ‘It’s a multi-purpose piece of infrastructure.’

Cyclists can throw a bike in the back of a pod, and ultimately, the company believes that the system will make it easier to bike on the ground by getting cars off the road. ‘It’s 3-D transport,’ Bierda says. ‘That leaves the surface level—streets and sidewalks—for people to walk and cycle on.’

The system is at least 30% cheaper to build than other mass transit infrastructure, and fully renewably powered. It can also be tied to the grid to feed excess electricity back to the city. ‘We envision this as a public utility,’ Bierda explains. ‘If it’s run like a utility, that also helps secure the air rights to build over streets, and parks, and parking lots.’

First built for an amusement park in New Zealand, the system won $1 million in Google’s 10^100 competition in 2010 for further development as a form of alternative transportation. The system will use tech from Google’s robocars to track the pods, and Google’s Mountain View campus will be one of the first to build a track. Some 22 other customers are also waiting in line.

The big question is whether something like this can really take off; planners started talking about personal rapid transit systems in the 1950s, but the idea hasn’t had much success.”

 

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“Even The Pets.com Idea Is Looking Mighty Good”

December 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Irrational exuberance and ponderous dial-up connections doomed many a venture during Web 1.0, that stone-age time before computers could slide out of our pockets, summon cars and photograph our genitals. In retrospect, not all these first-wave business ideas were bad ones. From a Wired piece by Robert McMillan about the revenge of the 1990s dot-bombs:

“Now that the internet has become a much bigger part of our lives, now that we have mobile phones that make using the net so much easier, now that the Googles and the Amazons have built the digital infrastructure needed to support online services on a massive scale, now that a new breed of coding tools has made it easier for people to turn their business plans into reality, now that Amazon and others have streamlined the shipping infrastructure needed to inexpensively get stuff to your door, now that we’ve shed at least some of that irrational exuberance, the world is ready to cash in on the worst ideas of the ’90s.

WebVan burned through $800 million trying to deliver fresh groceries to your door, and today, we have Amazon Fresh and Instacart, which are doing exactly the same thing—and doing it well. People laughed when Kozmo flamed out in 1998, but today, Amazon and Google are duking it out to provide same-day shopping delivery. A year ago, Kozmo.com even told WIRED it was making a comeback ‘in the near future.’

We’re still waiting for Kozmo 2.0. But there’s also good reason to applaud the folks behind Flooz.com. They wanted to create their own internet-based currency, and though Flooz was a flop, bitcoin has now shown that digital currency can play huge role in the modern world.

Even the Pets.com idea is looking mighty good.”

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“Will Computer-Based Technologies Someday…Render Live Games Obsolete?”

December 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

The intersection of athletics and computers at the dawn of the World Wide Web was the crux of Donald Katz’s 1995 Sports Illustrated article about Paul Allen attempting to work his Microsoft mindset into the NBA. An excerpt:

Besides the thronelike easy chairs built into the wall along one side of the regulation basketball court and the Santa Fe-style high-desert oil paintings on the opposite wall, the distinguishing features of Allen’s arena are video monitors of the sort that can be seen everywhere on his estate. Each of the screens is electronically tethered to dozens of other monitors and computer systems inside the Allen compound. Simply touching a display on one of the screens can achieve high-speed access to satellites circling the globe and therefore to just about any sports event being broadcast anywhere in the world. Inside his plush 20-seat theater, equipped with a 10-by-14-foot screen,

Allen can view ultra-high-definition video images that less-privileged consumers won’t be able to see for several years. And if Paul Allen must miss a Blazer game because he’s out at sea on his 150-foot yacht, the team will tape the game at a cost of around $30,000 and beam it to him as a digital stream of private entertainment.

From any keyboard inside his home, Allen can also access computers strewn throughout the vast web of his futuristic business empire. He can send E-mail out to Blazer forward Buck Williams or to coach P.J. Carlesimo’s address in cyberspace. “I’m not using these —- computers, and I’m not readin’ no E-mail!” Carlesimo declared upon being presented with his laptop shortly after he was hired by the Blazers last summer. But since then P.J. has seen the light and joined his boss in what Allen has long called ‘the wired world.’ …

Allen, 42 and the 13th-richest American, has lately spent $1.2 billion of his $4.6 billion Microsoft-spawned fortune on a broad array of digital satellites, wireless communications outfits, multimedia software and communications hardware firms, futuristic research companies and high-profile entertainment ventures. Last March, Allen underscored the convergence of Hollywood and the digital media age through his investment of $500 million in DreamWorks SKG, the studio being assembled by Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg. And as Allen’s executives and research scientists work more subtly to merge economic power, advanced technologies and big-time sports, they are similarly defining a future in which the experience of sports will surely be changed.

Down in Portland, Allen’s Trail Blazer organization is managing the construction of a $262 million sports arena called the Rose Garden, which will be strewn with computers and wired with miles of fiber-optic cable. The 70 luxury suites inside the Rose Garden will be equipped with teleconferencing gear and be fed channels full of computer-generated sports statistics. The concourses of the Rose Garden will be draped with glowing video screens, and Allen eventually wants to feed stats and replays and stock quotes and weather reports and images of games being played in other places to a tiny screen located at every seat.

Not unlike other team owners who have invested in new stadiums and arenas over the past year, Allen is considering a virtual-reality entertainment center next door to the Rose Garden. An official Blazer “home page” already connects on-line fans to the team’s own Internet address. The Blazers’ staff includes a seasoned multimedia software developer assigned to create sports products that the Blazers can sell to other teams. “My mission,” team president Marshall Glickman proclaimed early in this past NBA season, “is to integrate Paul Allen’s world of computers and communications with my own world of sports.”

During the ‘information superhighway’ media frenzy that began toward the end of 1993, a Seattle Times reporter imagined a day in the not-too-distant future when a fan who got home late during a Seattle SuperSonic game could digitally fast-forward through the recorded action until he caught up with the real-time telecast. After a Shawn Kemp dunk, the reporter presumed, the viewer could click on the image of Kemp and call up his latest stats, read stories about Kemp from newspapers all over the world or connect with the Shawn Kemp Fan Club in Indiana. Another click would automatically order Shawn Kemp souvenirs or tickets to a coming Sonic game. The viewer could change the camera angle from which he or she was seeing the game, focusing on Kemp or watching the action from overhead.

And all of this, the newspaper article pointed out, could occur within the boundaries of Allen’s multimedia portfolio. “Once the high-speed digital channel is wired into people’s houses,” Allen says before finally nailing a three-point basket, “all of that– and more — becomes pretty easy to do.”

Early evidence indicates that many of the innovations now understood only by technologists like Allen will intensify our experience of spectator sports — just as audio CDs have enhanced the secondhand experience of a live symphony. The informational and visual options available to fans sitting at home or in the stands are already multiplying as sports become proving grounds for advanced digital technologies. But these technologies also raise a broad array of questions, from immediate concerns (Will computerized gambling soon be inextricably linked with big-time sports?) to new business issues (Will people pay for new services?). Then there are longer-term issues: Will computer-based technologies someday offer sportslike entertainment so enthralling and convenient and highly customized that games created from bits of the best of real sports and bits of the best sports fantasies render live games obsolete?•

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“The Industry Has A Long History Of Producing Sequels”

December 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A global marketplace essentially demands Hollywood build franchises and make sequels, with their relatively controllable advertising costs, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. While the long-ago serials were B-movie productions, cheaply made things, and sequels from the ’70s through the ’90s usually exploited a product rather than nurtured it, by the new century no expense was spared to make several highly entertaining variations on a theme. That doesn’t mean success is always–or even often–achieved, but that’s the intention. A little from Matthew Garrahan of the Financial Times about the unsure early attempts to build can’t-miss franchises:

“While the current vogue for producing and maintaining franchises is relatively new in Hollywood, the industry has a long history of producing sequels. In the 1930s, episodic movie ‘serials’ such as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon drew cinema audiences week after week. The horror movies produced by Universal Studios in the same decade also spawned numerous sequels, such as Bride of Frankenstein and Dracula’s Daughter. In the decades that followed, the biggest studios produced countless genre movies — comedies, westerns, musicals, gangster films — featuring stars such as James Cagney, Fred Astaire, John Wayne and the Marx Brothers, in which the lead actor would often play variations on the same character.

The paradigm shifted in the 1970s, when The Godfather: Part II became the first sequel to win best picture at the Academy Awards. But, far from ushering in an era of critical excellence, the studios saw instead an opportunity to squeeze their successes for all they were worth, spawning a catalogue of inferior follow-ups to hit films over the next 20 years. The blockbuster success of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 Oscar-winning Jaws, for instance, spawned four sequels, each worse than its predecessor (Spielberg wisely declined to be involved in any of them), culminating in the appalling Jaws: The Revenge (1987) regarded widely as one of the worst films ever made. ‘I’ve never seen it, but by all accounts it’s terrible,’ Michael Caine, the film’s star, once said. ‘However, I have seen the house it built and it’s terrific.’

In the 1980s and early 1990s a clear trend for sequels had been established, particularly with action films. Assuming the first film was a success, a second could be produced using essentially the same plot but in a different setting.”

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“The C5 Had An Almost Instant Image Problem”

December 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

AI can kill all of you humans, and Sir Clive Sinclair will not give a fig. But until that fine day when we’re eminated by machines even more unfeeling than ourselves, let us meditate for a moment on a product the entrepreneur thrust upon the world in 1985, the Sinclair C5. It was a battery-powered EV tricycle, and it was a gigantic flop, the Edsel of pedal transport, a DeLorean dreamed up without the aid of cocaine courage. Was the vehicle wrong or just the time? From Jack Stewart’s BBC piece “Was the Sinclair C5 30 Years Too Early?“:

The C5 had an almost instant image problem. The press and public saw the C5 less as a new mode of transport, and more as a toy – and an expensive one at that. Yours for only £399 (£1,120), and if you wanted to go uphill, you would have to pedal. But the C5 went from drawing board to prototype without any market research, according to Andrew Marks, who wrote an investigation into the vehicle’s failure for the European Journal of Marketing four years after the C5 was released. Sir Clive believed he could create a market where none had existed before, using changes in legislation that allowed electric pedal vehicles and improving battery technology. But, as Marks argues, the C5 programme seemed to be dictated by the company’s conviction, rather than by public demand.

The C5 was also immediately criticised for its safety, or lack thereof. ‘I don’t like the ideas of driving it in traffic, frankly,’ says [BBC reporter Dick] Oliver in [his] report. The driving position was extremely low, making it effectively invisible to other vehicles. It could also be operated by anyone over 14 years old in the UK, without a license or helmet. Famed racing driver Stirling Moss expressed his concerns too.

‘If people get into it and in any way think that they’re in a car because they’re sitting down, then they’re in trouble.’

Media reviews were also harsh about the range – the battery did not live up to expectations – and there was too much exposure to the elements. In retrospect a January launch in London may not have been the most enticing demonstration to carry out. The poor reception meant orders were minimal, and production ceased around eight months later.•

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“Imagine a vehicle that can drive you five miles for a penny”:

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“[It’s] An External Digestive Tract That Fits Around The Stomach”

December 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Holy shit, the Earth is dying! Let’s get the fuck out of here!

Easier said than done, of course. What might be helpful as we colonize the solar system are bio-spacesuits. From Liz Stinson’s Wired piece about MIT designing Neri Oxman, who’s been working on organic second skins:

“If you’re planning on extended interplanetary travel, you’re going to need more than a standard spacesuit. Sustaining human life on, say, Mercury or the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, means battling the worst of conditions. ‘Crushing gravity, ammonius air, prolonged darkness and temperatures that would boil glass or freeze carbon dioxide,’ says Neri Oxman, a designer and professor at MIT’s Media Lab. Sounds like paradise, doesn’t it?

For a new speculative design project called Wanderers Oxman and her team of students partnered with 3D printing behemoth Stratasys and the computational design duo Deskriptiv to build four wearable skins that serve as bio-augmented space suits. Each is designed to battle a specific extreme environment by transforming elements found there into ones that can sustain human life. ‘Some are designed to photosynthesize, converting daylight into energy, others bio-mineralize to strengthen and augment human bone,’ Oxman explains. In doing so, they offer a wild glimpse of a future in which the barriers between biology and technology have fallen away.

Mushtari, designed for life on the moons of Jupiter, is an external digestive tract that fits around the stomach. Oxman designed the organ system to digest biomass, absorb nutrients and expel waste. Humans would be able to convert daylight into consumable sucrose via photosynthetic bacteria that flows through the translucent 3-D printed tracts.”

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“If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them”

December 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I put up a post last month about taxi commissions needing to compete with Uber at its own game, creating an app that will allow medallion owners and their drivers to offer customers the best of ridesharing (smartphone hailing, digital payments) without the negative (surge pricing, unethical business and labor practices), and it seems that NYC and Chicago were already thinking along those lines. Now it will come down to properly executing the system. From Mike Isaac at the New York Times:

“If you can’t beat them, join them.

Regulators in Chicago have approved a plan to create one or more applications that would allow users to hail taxis from any operators in the city, using a smartphone. In New York, a City Council member proposed a similar app on Monday that would let residents ‘e-hail’ any of the 20,000 cabs that circulate in the city on a daily basis.

It is a new tack for officials in the two cities, a reaction to the surging use of hail-a-ride apps like Uber and Lyft.

Regulators in New York have not yet voted on the bill on the e-hail app, which was first proposed by Benjamin Kallos, a councilman who represents the Upper East Side and Roosevelt Island.

In Chicago, the plan to create such apps is part of the so-called Taxi Driver Fairness Reforms package, a plan backed by a taxi union and City Council members that would update regulations around taxi cab lease rates and violations like traffic tickets, among others. The city is expected to solicit third-party application developers to build the official app or set of apps. The City Council gave no further details on its selection criteria, nor did it give information on how the initiative would be financed.

‘These reforms represent what is necessary to further modernize this growing industry,’ Rahm Emanuel, Chicago’s mayor, said in a statement.”

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“All Of A Sudden, Hybridization Will Skyrocket”

December 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Climate change is in the process of killing off an amazing array of species, perhaps humans among them. Another ramification of rising temperatures is the consolidation of species newly introduced to one another by the vanishing of habitats. It’s biodiversity disappearing into itself. The opening of “A Strange New Gene Pool of Animals Is Brewing in the Arctic,” Tim McDonnell’s Nautilus article about the rules of modern mating:

“The journey began in spring 2010, just as the sea ice surrounding the North Pole began its annual melt. Two bowhead whales, 50-foot-long behemoths that scour the Arctic seas for plankton, each started from their homes on opposite sides of North America—one in the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska, the other in Baffin Bay on the west side of Greenland. As the summer progressed, sea ice shrank (to its third-lowest cover in the last 30 years), and the whales swam toward each other through the now ice-free passage above the continent. Two independent teams of scientists from Canada and the United States watched the whales closely via satellite. ‘We were all pretty excited,’ recalls Kristen Laidre, a biologist at the University of Washington and member of the U.S. team.

In September, in an inlet some 1,800 miles north of Fargo, North Dakota, where the North American landmass dissolves into the Arctic Ocean, the whales met in the middle. They spent two weeks together, and although not much happened before they turned around, the meeting was historic. The fossil record indicates the last time Pacific and Atlantic bowhead whales came into contact was at least 10,000 years ago.

In the last 40 years, the Arctic has warmed by about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit, more than twice the overall global rise in that same period. Already grizzly bears are tromping into polar bear territory while fish like cod and salmon are leaving their historic haunts to follow warming waters north. One tangible result of the migration, scientists report, is that animals will learn to live with new neighbors. But polar biologists worry that animals could get a little too friendly with each other. With less ice clogging Arctic seas, whales are ranging farther; meanwhile, animals like seals that breed on the ice have fewer places to go. In both cases, the chances of encountering a different species jump. ‘All of a sudden, hybridization will skyrocket,’ says Brendan Kelly, a polar ecologist at the National Science Foundation.”

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“The Historic Invention Was Treated With Scant Respect”

December 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Ross Perot, who believed back in 1969 that we would one day be guided by a computerized town hall, has put a small portion of his billions toward saving the ENIAC, the world’s first operational digital computer, from the scrap heap. The opening of a Wired piece about the salvaging by Brendan L. Koerner, expert on fraught rescue missions:

“Eccentric billionaires are tough to impress, so their minions must always think big when handed vague assignments. Ross Perot’s staffers did just that in 2006, when their boss declared that he wanted to decorate his Plano, Texas, headquarters with relics from computing history. Aware that a few measly Apple I’s and Altair 880’s wouldn’t be enough to satisfy a former presidential candidate, Perot’s people decided to acquire a more singular prize: a big chunk of ENIAC, the ‘Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer.’ The ENIAC was a 27-ton, 1,800-square-foot bundle of vacuum tubes and diodes that was arguably the world’s first true computer. The hardware that Perot’s team diligently unearthed and lovingly refurbished is now accessible to the general public for the first time, back at the same Army base where it almost rotted into oblivion.

ENIAC was conceived in the thick of World War II, as a tool to help artillerymen calculate the trajectories of shells. Though construction began a year before D-Day, the computer wasn’t activated until November 1945, by which time the U.S. Army’s guns had fallen silent. But the military still found plenty of use for ENIAC as the Cold War began—the machine’s 17,468 vacuum tubes were put to work by the developers of the first hydrogen bomb, who needed a way to test the feasibility of their early designs. The scientists at Los Alamos later declared that they could never have achieved success without ENIAC’s awesome computing might: the machine could execute 5,000 instructions per second, a capability that made it a thousand times faster than the electromechanical calculators of the day. (An iPhone 6, by contrast, can zip through 25 billion instructions per second.)

When the Army declared ENIAC obsolete in 1955, however, the historic invention was treated with scant respect: its 40 panels, each of which weighed an average of 858 pounds, were divvied up and strewn about with little care. Some of the hardware landed in the hands of folks who appreciated its significance—the engineer Arthur Burks, for example, donated his panel to the University of Michigan, and the Smithsonian managed to snag a couple of panels for its collection, too. But as Libby Craft, Perot’s director of special projects, found out to her chagrin, much of ENIAC vanished into disorganized warehouses, a bit like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

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“Zara Built 14 Automated Factories In Its Home Country Spain, Where Robots Work 24/7”

December 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Outsourcing has meant sending work beyond borders, but in the next wave the word will mean sending work beyond humanity. It’s happening already, of course, and the fashion retailer Zara is just one example. From Amit Bagaria at India Times:

“At the other end of the spectrum is Zara, which has built its strategy around consumer trends, embracing the fast-changing tastes of its customers. Zara has developed a highly responsive supply chain that enables delivery of new fashions as soon as a trend emerges.

Zara comes up with 36,000 new designs every year, and it delivers new products as many as 2-6 times each week to its 1900+ stores around the world.  Store orders are delivered in 24-48 hours. It takes the company only 10-15 days to go from the design stage to the sales floor. How is Zara able to do this? By being fast and flexible.

Rather than subcontracting manufacturing to China, India or Bangladesh, Zara built 14 automated factories in its home country Spain, where robots work 24/7 cutting and dyeing fabrics and creating semi-finished products, which are then finished to suits, shirts, dresses and the like by about 350 finishing shops in Northwestern Spain and Portugal. 

Imagine the foresight robots don’t (yet) form a labour union and also don’t take the weekend off. Some American apparel companies are now partly following the Zara model, getting their longer-lead-time goods manufactured (semi-finished) in Asia and doing the finishing work in the US.”

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