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Chuck Barris, game-show producer and occasional murderer, realized like P.T. Barnum before him (and reality shows after) that there was money to be made off the marginal and the freakish. But I doubt even Barris could have predicted that during his lifetime the sideshow tent would be relocated to the center ring. That’s the cost of new technologies decentralizing the media, a price that seems high but one we should be willing to pay.
There are few things grosser than David Brooks breathlessly extolling the virtues of meritocracy when he’s not one of the Americans who could withstand the arrival of a system that truly values talent. Here’s someone who’s been lavishly rewarded materially for being a screaming mediocrity, not nearly one of the best writers and thinkers of his generation. If people were actually judged on real flair, almost everything Brooks has would be taken from him. What he defends isn’t a just system but one based on access and privilege, of getting into the right schools and making the right connections, of “achieving” rather than creating anything novel. There are very few people I find interesting who come from Brooks’ model for success.
The opening of a recent Robert Reich article in Salon which sends some of Brooks’ customary hogwash down the drain:
“Occasionally David Brooks, who personifies the oxymoron ‘conservative thinker’ better than anyone I know, displays such profound ignorance that a rejoinder is necessary lest his illogic permanently pollute public debate. Such is the case with his New York Times column last Friday, arguing that we should be focusing on the ‘interrelated social problems of the poor’ rather than on inequality, and that the two are fundamentally distinct.
Baloney.
First, when almost all the gains from growth go to the top, as they have for the last thirty years, the middle class doesn’t have the purchasing power necessary for buoyant growth.
Once the middle class has exhausted all its coping mechanisms – wives and mothers surging into paid work (as they did in the 1970s and 1980s), longer working hours (which characterized the 1990s), and deep indebtedness (2002 to 2008) – the inevitable result is fewer jobs and slow growth, as we continue to experience.
Few jobs and slow growth hit the poor especially hard because they’re the first to be fired, last to be hired, and most likely to bear the brunt of declining wages and benefits.
Second, when the middle class is stressed, it has a harder time being generous to those in need. The ‘interrelated social problems’ of the poor presumably will require some money, but the fiscal cupboard is bare. And because the middle class is so financially insecure, it doesn’t want to, nor does it feel it can afford to, pay more in taxes.
Third, America’s shrinking middle class also hobbles upward mobility. Not only is there less money for good schools, job training, and social services, but the poor face a more difficult challenge moving upward because the income ladder is far longer than it used to be, and its middle rungs have disappeared.
Brooks also argues that we should not be talking about unequal political power, because such utterances cause divisiveness and make it harder to reach political consensus over what to do for the poor.
Hogwash. The concentration of power at the top — which flows largely from the concentration of income and wealth there — has prevented Washington from dealing with the problems of the poor and the middle class.”
Tags: David Brooks, Robert Reich
Automation is, of course, most likely coming for your job. It doesn’t end with travel agents, video-store clerks and bookstore managers. Via Julie Bort at Business Insider, a quote about the future of employment (or, more accurately, unemployment) from Bill Gates during his appearance at the American Enterprise Institute (with full video embedded below):
“Speaking at Washington, D.C., economic think tank The American Enterprise Institute on Thursday, Gates said that within 20 years, a lot of jobs will go away, replaced by software automation (‘bots’ in tech slang, though Gates used the term ‘software substitution’).
This is what he said:
‘Software substitution, whether it’s for drivers or waiters or nurses … it’s progressing. … Technology over time will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of skill set. … 20 years from now, labor demand for lots of skill sets will be substantially lower. I don’t think people have that in their mental model.'”
So much of this era has been marked by creation and destruction, and even in the creative process itself, the teardown of the accepted order is vital. From John Arlidge’s long Time interview with Apple design guru, Jony Ive, who outdid even Braun’s immaculateness with his products:
“Ive is in a good mood today — and not just because he’s celebrating his 47th birthday. He likes the idea of this interview series because he sees himself as more of a maker than a designer. ‘Objects and their manufacture are inseparable. You understand a product if you understand how it’s made,’ he says. ‘I want to know what things are for, how they work, what they can or should be made of, before I even begin to think what they should look like. More and more people do. There is a resurgence of the idea of craft.’
Ive has been a maker ever since he could wield a screwdriver. He inherited his craftsman’s skills from his father, Michael. He was a silversmith who later became a lecturer in craft, design and technology at Middlesex Polytechnic. Ive spent his childhood taking apart the family’s worldly goods and trying to put them back together again. ‘Complete intrigue with the physical world starts by destroying it,’ he says. Radios were easy, but ‘I remember taking an alarm clock to pieces and it was very difficult to reassemble it. I couldn’t get the mainspring rewound.’ Thirty years later, he did the same to his iPhone one day. Just to prove he still could.
‘I want to know what things are for, how they work, what they can or should be made of, before I even begin to think what they should look like’ A love of making is something he shared with Jobs, Apple’s former chief executive who died three years ago. It helped the two men forge the most creative partnership modern capitalism has seen. In less than two decades, they transformed Apple from a near-bankrupt also-ran into the most valuable corporation on the planet, worth more than $665 billion.
‘Steve and I spent months and months working on a part of a product that, often, nobody would ever see, nor realize was there,’ Ive grins. Apple is notorious for making the insides of its machines look as good as the outside. ‘It didn’t make any difference functionally. We did it because we cared, because when you realize how well you can make something, falling short, whether seen or not, feels like failure.'”
Tags: John Arlidge, Jony Ive
A bearded lady who was an attraction at dime museums managed to have an even odder “existence” after her death, as revealed by this article in the March 28, 1862 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Julia Pastrana, the ‘Bearded Woman,’ who was exhibited for some time at Barnum’s Museum, and subsequently in various parts of this country and Europe, died in Moscow in 1860. A London paper gives the follow strange particulars of her posthumous career:
‘On the following day she was embalmed by her medical adviser at the request of her husband, on the understanding that she should be his property, he paying the process of embalming. A dispute arose subsequently as to his right to the body, which rendered it necessary for him to produce the marriage certificate, which he went to America to fetch, and having transmitted the necessary documents to his agent here, he died in New York. The body thus fell into the hands of his agent, and after being shut up for two years, it is now exhibited at the Burlington Gallery, Piccadilly. The figure is dressed in the ordinary costume used during her life, and her bust, face and arms present pretty much the appearance of a well-stuffed animal.
The embalming is effected by injecting a fluid at an opening in the chest. The limbs are plump and round as in life, with the the exception of the fingers, which are somewhat shriveled, and as a specimen of the art of preserving a human body, Julia Pastrana is as great a curiosity now as when she was alive. Her child, which lived thirty-six hours, is also exhibited; its flat nose and thick hair on the head give it an appearance which is most unpleasant to contemplate.”
I’ve said before that wars are exchanges of information with terrible human consequences, and if the competition between human workers and automation isn’t exactly a war, it’s certainly a bloodless coup. Tasks that can be completed by both humans and robots will eventually be totally taken from our hands, completely roboticized.
The Browser pointed me to “The Automatic Corporation,” a blog post by Google software engineer Vivek Haldar which wonders if corporations can be 100% automated. That’s likely not possible for most entities, but the thought experiment does demonstrate how much more creative destruction is coming our way courtesy of algorithms. The opening:
“Corporations can be thought of as information-processing feedback loops. They propose products, introduce them into the marketplace, learn from the performance of the products, and adjust. They do this while trying to maximize some value function, typically profit.
So why can’t they be completely automated? I mean that literally. Could we have software that carries out all those functions?
Software could propose new products within a design space. It could monitor the performance of those products in the marketplace, and then learn from the feedback and adjust accordingly, all while maximizing its value function. If the product is a webapp, most of these steps are already within the reach of full automation. For physical products, what’s missing is APIs that allow a program to order physical products, and move them around in the physical world.
A limited version of what I’m describing already exists. High-frequency trading firms are already pure software, mostly beyond human control or comprehension. The flash crash of 2010 demonstrated this. Companies that are centered around logistics, like FedEx or Walmart, can be already thought of as complex software entities where human worker bees carry out the machine’s instructions.”
Tags: Vivek Haldar
Iran, 1960s.
As the world’s attention is fixed on Ukraine and parts unknown (wherever the missing Malaysian jetliner is), BBC’s Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet just conducted an Ask Me Anything at Reddit about another area of global interest, Iran. A few exchanges follow.
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Question:
What is the biggest misconception we have about life in Iran?
Lyse Doucet:
Iran is one of the most hospitable places in the world. And Iranians are also among the most inventive people I have had the pleasure to spend time with. Please don’t see it as a dark and hostile place. There are different views about the world, but it doesn’t want to turn its back on the world.
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Question:
How do Iranian women feel about their status in society compared to what it was before the Islamic revolution?
Lyse Doucet:
Women’s issues have always been at the heart of Iranian politics since the 1979 Islamic revolution. There have been advances in some areas including access to education including at University level, information and access to birth control, availability of some jobs, but not others. Women are still barred from many high level positions. Many women are hoping for greater freedoms after last year’s election of the reformist President Rouhani. But, like most Iranians, they are also just hoping that sanctions will be lifted and their daily lives will improve…
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Question:
How do you think Irans’ nuclear program is going to pan out?
Lyse Doucet:
That is the big question. on this visit i noticed that iranians, across the political spectrum, expressed support for a comprehensive nuclear deal..but that will require tough choices, on all sides..it’s still not clear there will be a deal by late July..but what is clear is that there will be a lot of work to try to reach one..
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Question:
Why do you think the general attitude of the West (western media) towards Iran has been changing in a positive way in the past few months?
Lyse Doucet:
..perhaps because more journalists are now being given visas to visit Iran ..and also because of the success of the nuclear negotiations so far..Also, the new leadership of President Rouhani and his Foreign Minister Javad Zarif are engaging with the world with a different tone.
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Question:
Would you tell us about your Internet experience in Iran?
Lyse Doucet:
I was suprised by how widely used the internet was including social media. Iranians are very inventive. They’ve found ways around the blocks on sites like twitter and facebook. To my relief, I was able to access my email account and use twitter. And Iranians, of all political persuasions, quoted my posts .
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Question:
What is daily life like for the young people of Iran and how does it compare to what we see in the Western world? Do they play video games, go insane over singers/bands, care about fashion and gossip?
Lyse Doucet:
Iranians are sometimes justifiably upset when we imagine they are somehow different from the rest of us. There is a very lively music scene, the fashion is fab (Iranian women even develop glamourous hair styles for their head scarves), Iranians of all political views are on the internet, talking to themselves and to the world. But they would like their restrictions to be lifted, and to have more freedom to come and go.•
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Iran Air TV ad that ran in the U.S. in the 1970s. Because of political fallout from the Islamic Revolution, the final flight from NYC was November 7, 1979.
Tags: Lyse Doucet
Putting up a post about the building of the Houston Astrodome reminded me of this old one about a young guru who believed in 1973 that he could levitate the enclosed stadium.
The world was strange in 1973, even stranger than it is today. That was the year of the three-day festival, Millennium ’73, when thousands of Vietnam War protestors gathered at the Houston Astrodome to hear the words of 15-year-old Shri Guru Maharaj Ji, who they believed was God. The attendees also thought that perhaps they could use their spiritual powers to levitate the stadium and make it fly, which would somehow stop the war.
i found a three-and-a-half-minute clip from the David Loxton documentary The Lord of the Universe, which captures some of the madness surrounding the teenage guru, who later changed his name to Prem Rawat. This segment particularly examines how the controversial event caused a deep rift between Chicago Seven member Rennie Davis and leaders of the Left, including Abbie Hoffman.
“Mose.”
Hey, guys. Just looking for some advice. I’m an animal lover and have several pets in my home. I take good care of them, but my bunny Mose has been acting kinda weird lately. He hasn’t left his cage in a while, he’s been sleeping a lot more and eating a lot less in the past few days. Do you think Mose might be depressed? If so, what should I do?
Putting up a post about speculative, futuristic baseball stadiums reminded me of two facts about the building of the Houston Astrodome during the 1960s:
It was a strange pair of christenings, marked first by the technology of the past and then of the future.
Sports Illustrated asked Populous, the stadium designer responsible for the two expensive clunkers currently housing the New York baseball teams, to imagine stadia of the future, the future being the 2030s. “Living Park,” a more organic and communal structure, is the answer the firm returned. An excerpt from Tim Newcomb’s article:
“Looking forward, there’s no need for the high-arching concrete and steel that separate today’s stadiums from the city around them. [Designers Brian] Mirakian anticipates ‘transformative stadiums that will really build a community.’ The glass structures horseshoed around Living Park, for example, aren’t just premium seating, but also serve to combine the city and stadium. A street front on one side that hosts everything from offices and apartments to retail and restaurants turns into a stadium portal on the backside, offering stellar views onto the field. Instead of rising out of the city, the stadium sinks into it.
Trending data suggested increased urban densification, giving Mirakian the idea to create a linear park environment that allows the building to play as the central theme—a place activated during a game, but where the community can gather at any time, during either the season or offseason. In this case, the building itself is defined by the edges of the city, acting as a window into the building on game days. There’s no need for fanciful facades, as the stadium instead flows with the park and city.”
Tags: Tim Newcomb
From the August 17, 1885 New York Times:
“Victoria, British Columbia–The body of a petrified giant has been found by two farmers who were sinking a well 10 miles from town. Its appearance closely resembles that of a human being. The head gives the appearance of having been scalped. The material is as hard as flint and the arms and legs are broken short off. The veins and ribs are plainly traced. A party has gone out for the legs, arms, and hands, which lie in a hole. The man when alive must have been about 12 feet in height.”
Yes, eventually you’ll have the implant, and those brain chips may arrive in two waves: initially for the treatment of chronic illness and then for performance enhancement. Because of the military’s interest in the latter, however, those waves might come crashing down together. From “The Future of Brain Implants,” an article by Gary Marcus and Christof Koch in the Wall Street Journal:
“Many people will resist the first generation of elective implants. There will be failures and, as with many advances in medicine, there will be deaths. But anybody who thinks that the products won’t sell is naive. Even now, some parents are willing to let their children take Adderall before a big exam. The chance to make a ‘superchild’ (or at least one guaranteed to stay calm and attentive for hours on end during a big exam) will be too tempting for many.
Even if parents don’t invest in brain implants, the military will. A continuing program at Darpa, a Pentagon agency that invests in cutting-edge technology, is already supporting work on brain implants that improve memory to help soldiers injured in war. Who could blame a general for wanting a soldier with hypernormal focus, a perfect memory for maps and no need to sleep for days on end? (Of course, spies might well also try to eavesdrop on such a soldier’s brain, and hackers might want to hijack it. Security will be paramount, encryption de rigueur.)
An early generation of enhancement implants might help elite golfers improve their swing by automating their mental practice. A later generation might allow weekend golfers to skip practice altogether. Once neuroscientists figure out how to reverse-engineer the end results of practice, “neurocompilers” might be able to install the results of a year’s worth of training directly into the brain, all in one go.
That won’t happen in the next decade or maybe even in the one after that. But before the end of the century, our computer keyboards and trackpads will seem like a joke; even Google Glass 3.0 will seem primitive.”
Tags: Christof Koch, Gary Marcus
August Engelhardt, far right.
August Engelhardt wasn’t the only European thinker to run Kurtz-like into the heart of darkness, but he may have been the maddest of all.
In 1902, the 25-year-old German health reformer, who practiced sun worship and a strict coconut diet, retreated from Bavarian university life to Kabakon Island in New Guinea, which he purchased from his mother country with an inheritance. He brought a library’s worth of books to keep him company and invited others from home to join him in “paradise.” Things did not go well, and it’s a marvel that Engelhardt was able to survive until 1919, though some of his acolytes weren’t nearly so “aged” when they expired.
Despite the title of this New York Times piece from the October 15, 1905 edition, as you can see in the top photo, some women eventually made their way to Engelhardt’s folly, though they were very infrequently attracted by Kabakon’s severe cocovorism and nudism. The far larger error in the Times story, however, is the fact that 1905 wasn’t nearly the end of his life or experiment; Engelhardt recovered from his serious illness and returned to Kabokon, unable to to depart from his radical lifestyle anymore than T.E. Lawrence could leave the sands, drawn again and again by some ineffable void inside.
I suppose the most generous assessment of Engelhardt came from an Australian captain after visiting the colony: “Could the world do without living examples in self-sacrifice—even if their ideals are wrong? And would we not all fall asleep, if it were not for a sprinkling of extremists?”
An excerpt from the Times article:
August Engelhardt was at least sincere in his faith and in the observance of its tenets. For days he lived alone, eating nothing but bread fruit and cocoanuts, swimming in the sea or the still lagoon; studying in the fauna and flora of his island by day, or lying on the hot beach; by night sleeping in a hollow scooped out of the sand.
Occasionally he saw, or thought he saw, men moving in the cocoa groves, and once when he went to investigate he discovered for a certainty that he was not alone on the island. A number of lithe, naked, dark-skinned men and women ran hastily away. But the natives were few and harmless; apparently, too, they feared if they did not actually worship this great man with white skin and shaggy yellow hair who emerged glistening from the lagoon, or appeared suddenly in the cocoa groves. They kept away from him and were even more exclusive when his companions came.
It may be supposed that Engelhardt led a dreary life on Kahakua while awaiting the arrival of his disciples, but if one may judge the student’s temperament from his acts it seems more likely that this was the happiest period of his existence on the atoll. He had left the world behind him; he was free. Of the food of his choice he lacked none, and the balmy air of the Pacific, the warm sun of the tropics, and the cool spray of the ‘combers’ were his playthings. At dawn the nature feasted upon his eyes with beauty as the sun, his god, climbed over the horizon, tinted the palm crests with gold, the sea with amber and opal and crimson, and bathed the kneeling figure on the beach with a mantle that was his inspiration. By day Engelhardt’s joy was that of a dream realized. At sunset the lagoon clasped his god in a broil of molten lava; then came the night, with the great dome of stars, the breeze rustling though the cocoa fronds, and the Pacific chanting like a great organ, lulling him to sleep.
But there was an end to this, and a beginning to disillusion. The vessel which was to have brought his converts dropped anchor in the lagoon. A boat came ashore with four men in it, two of them sailors, the other two Engelhardt’s staunchest disciples. They were Max Lutzow, at one time director of the well-known Orchestra of Berlin, and Heinrich Eukens, a student of Bavaria and a native of Heligoland. The other converts, upon the departure of Engelhardt and his eloquence, had received the attention of other sects, and been convinced that Kahakua was full of cannibals, sweltering with fever miasma; in brief, that Engelhardt was leading them to death.
It was a great blow to Engelhardt, but the die had been cast. The vessel sailed away, and he, with Lutzow and Eukens, was left on the island. The two new arrivals were delighted with the appearance of Engelhardt. Weeks of life under the sun, in the salt sea, and living upon fruit, had brought him to a state of wonderful physical perfection. His skin was like copper and against it his yellow hair shone like gold. The two disciples immediately joined him in his method of living. For days theirs was an idyllic state, and they were contented. But an end came. The sudden change had been too much for the less-rugged constitution of Eukens, who contracted a cold, developed fever, and died quite suddenly. He had been given no remedies, as it was contrary to the faith of the sun worshippers.
His companions buried him in the sand. For days they wandered listlessly about the island, the spell of which had been broken. But at length they realized that such an undertaking could not be expected to succeed without suffering.
They began again, and things went well, although the gloom attending the death of Eukens never left them. Lutzow, the musician, developed the physical strength which characterized Engelhardt. For a year the two men lived comparatively happily, except for one thing, which is the one ray of humor in the whole history.
It was understood that the world of civilization–art, letters, dress, and diet–had been forgotten, but the genius of Lutzow was something which was all Lutzow and nothing of Engelhardt. Lutzow and his music could not be separated. Donizetti was his favorite, although the long hours of the idle day he did not forget passages from Wagner, Verdi, Mascagni, Bach, Liszt, Beethoven, and others. Engelhardt loved music, but he had a particular aversion to Donizetti and a positive horror of Bizet, who was associated in his mind with “Carmen,” who in turn was the bête noir of his faith.
Engelhardt tolerated the music as long as he could; then, unable to associate with a human musical, he quarreled with Lutzow. It was a bitter quarrel, for the student had hurt the musician to the quick. Eventually the two men became so estranged that Lutzow applied one night for permission to sleep away from the island on the Wesleyan mission cutter from Ulu, which was in the lagoon.
That night the cutter dragged her moorings and was carried on the tide through the narrows to the open sea. Cross-currents prevented the craft from pulling back for two days, during which Lutzow still observant of the sun-worshippers’ faith, refused to take shelter, and also refused all nourishment that was not fruit. There was no fresh fruit on board, consequently he starved. He lay upon the deck of the cutter, too, for two days and two nights, exposed to a cold, wet wind. Shorty after the cutter put back into the lagoon the musician developed a high temperature. He grew worse, lingered for a week, then died.
He was buried in the sand by Engelhardt beside the unfortunate Eukens. The Wesleyan missionaries offered to take Engelhardt back to civilization. He flew into a rage, said he owned the island, and forbade them ever to drop anchor in the lagoon of Kahakua again.
So the cutter sailed away to Ulu and Engelhardt was left alone in the Palm Temple. For nearly two years more he continued to live the ‘pure, natural life,’ but the charm had been completely broken by the death of his two disciples.
Then in 1903 came a drought which reduced the fruit crop. The little left of it was wiped out in the Spring of 1904 by a storm. Engelhardt had the alternative of casting in his lot with the natives and eating hogflesh, or sending a request for succor to Ulu or Herbertshohe. He did neither in his stubborness, and starvation and thirst did their work.
One day a canoe paddled into Herbertshohe, driven by two natives who said the white man was sick and possessed of devils; wandering about Kahakua preaching his doctrine to the trees and frightening the natives. Would the German officials please come and take him away?
Engelhardt refused all nourishment to the last, refused all medicine, and accused the missionary of interfering with his convictions. He wrought himself up to a great frenzy, fell upon the deck, and was restrained only with difficulty from flinging himself overboard and swimming back to his island. Before the beach had sunk below the horizon the man was dead. Then the launch put back.
Wrapped in a German flag, August Engelhardt, founder and last survivor of the sun worshippers, was laid to rest beside Lutzow and Eukens on the beach at Kahakua.”•
Engelhardt in 1911, six years after his “death.”
No publication birthed on the Internet is better than Aeon, a provocative stream of essays about technology, consciousness, nature, the deep future, the deep past and other fundamental concerns of life on Earth. In a world of brief tweets and easy access, the site asks the long and hard questions. Two great recent examples: Michael Belfiore’s “The Robots Are Coming,” a look at society when our silicon sisters no longer have an OFF switch; and Ross Andersen’s “Hell on Earth,” an examination of how infinite life extension will impact the justice system. (And if you’ve never read Andersen’s work about philosopher Nick Bostrom, go here and here.) Excerpts from these essays follow.
From “The Robots Are Coming”:
“Robots in the real world usually look nothing like us. On Earth they perform such mundane chores as putting car parts together in factories, picking up our online orders in warehouses, vacuuming our homes and mowing our lawns. Farther afield, flying robots land on other planets and conduct aerial warfare by remote control.
More recently, we’ve seen driverless cars take to our roads. Here, finally, the machines veer toward traditional R U R territory. Which makes most people, it seems, uncomfortable. A Harris Interactive poll sponsored by Seapine Software, for example, announced this February that 88 per cent of Americans do not like the idea of their cars driving themselves, citing fear of losing control over their vehicles as the chief concern.
The main difference between robots that have gone before and the newer variety is autonomy. Whether by direct manipulation (as when we wield power tools, or grip the wheel of a car) or via remote control (as with a multitude of cars and airplanes), machines have in the past remained firmly under human control at all times. That’s no longer true and now autonomous robots have even begun to look like us.
I got a good, long look at the future of robotics at an event run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (known as the DARPA Robotics Challenge, or DRC Trials), outside Miami in December. What I saw by turns delighted, amused, and spooked me. My overriding sense was that, very soon, DARPA’s work will shift the technological ground beneath our feet yet again.”
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From “Hell on Earth”:
“It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Hitler got off easy, given the scope and viciousness of his crimes. We might have moved beyond the Code of Hammurabi and ‘an eye for an eye’, but most of us still feel that a killer of millions deserves something sterner than a quick and painless suicide. But does anyone ever deserve hell?
That used to be a question for theologians, but in the age of human enhancement, a new set of thinkers is taking it up. As biotech companies pour billions into life extension technologies, some have suggested that our cruelest criminals could be kept alive indefinitely, to serve sentences spanning millennia or longer. Even without life extension, private prison firms could one day develop drugs that make time pass more slowly, so that an inmate’s 10-year sentence feels like an eternity. One way or another, humans could soon be in a position to create an artificial hell.
At the University of Oxford, a team of scholars led by the philosopher Rebecca Roache has begun thinking about the ways futuristic technologies might transform punishment. In January, I spoke with Roache and her colleagues Anders Sandberg and Hannah Maslen about emotional enhancement, ‘supercrimes’, and the ethics of eternal damnation. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript of our conversation.
Ross Andersen:
Suppose we develop the ability to radically expand the human lifespan, so that people are regularly living for more than 500 years. Would that allow judges to fit punishments to crimes more precisely?
Rebecca Roache:
When I began researching this topic, I was thinking a lot about Daniel Pelka, a four-year-old boy who was starved and beaten to death [in 2012] by his mother and stepfather here in the UK. I had wondered whether the best way to achieve justice in cases like that was to prolong death as long as possible. Some crimes are so bad they require a really long period of punishment, and a lot of people seem to get out of that punishment by dying. And so I thought, why not make prison sentences for particularly odious criminals worse by extending their lives?
But I soon realised it’s not that simple. In the US, for instance, the vast majority of people on death row appeal to have their sentences reduced to life imprisonment. That suggests that a quick stint in prison followed by death is seen as a worse fate than a long prison sentence. And so, if you extend the life of a prisoner to give them a longer sentence, you might end up giving them a more lenient punishment.
The life-extension scenario may sound futuristic, but if you look closely you can already see it in action, as people begin to live longer lives than before. If you look at the enormous prison population in the US, you find an astronomical number of elderly prisoners, including quite a few with pacemakers. When I went digging around in medical journals, I found all these interesting papers about the treatment of pacemaker patients in prison.”
Tags: Michael Belfiore, Nick Bostrom, Rebecca Roache, Ross Andersen
“Wake the fuck up.”
Where the hell is that fucking plane? Isn’t anyone else besides me worried about this? The government knows where it is but not telling us. I’ll tell you my theory. That plane is the Middle East. The passengers were gassed on that plane and they took it to where they wanted to go. That plane is going to show up somewhere packed with explosives. Wake the fuck up before a disaster happens. Don’t sit back and wait.
Putting up a post about the Pew Research Center’s “Digital Life in 2025” reminded me of a piece Douglas Coupland published in Toronto’s Globe and Mail in 2010 called “The Radical Pessimist’s Guide to the Next 10 Years.” It’s a dark and dystopic list of 45 things you need to know even if you’d rather not. Coupland was joking but only a little. Here are a half-dozen choice predictions:
38) Knowing everything will become dull
It all started out so graciously: At a dinner for six, a question arises about, say, that Japanese movie you saw in 1997 (Tampopo), or whether or not Joey Bishop is still alive (no). And before long, you know the answer to everything.
20) North America can easily fragment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989
Quebec will decide to quietly and quite pleasantly leave Canada. California contemplates splitting into two states, fiscal and non-fiscal. Cuba becomes a Club Med with weapons. The Hate States will form a coalition.
16) ‘You’ will be turning into a cloud of data that circles the planet like a thin gauze
While it’s already hard enough to tell how others perceive us physically, your global, phantom, information-self will prove equally vexing to you: your shopping trends, blog residues, CCTV appearances – it all works in tandem to create a virtual being that you may neither like nor recognize.
6) The middle class is over. It’s not coming back
Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day?
That’s where all the other jobs that once made us middle-class are going – to that same, magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel-agency jobs vanished, never to return. However, this won’t stop people from self-identifying as middle-class, and as the years pass we’ll be entering a replay of the antebellum South, when people defined themselves by the social status of their ancestors three generations back. Enjoy the new monoclass!
3) The future is going to happen no matter what we do. The future will feel even faster than it does now
The next sets of triumphing technologies are going to happen, no matter who invents them or where or how. Not that technology alone dictates the future, but in the end it always leaves its mark. The only unknown factor is the pace at which new technologies will appear. This technological determinism, with its sense of constantly awaiting a new era-changing technology every day, is one of the hallmarks of the next decade.
1) It’s going to get worse
No silver linings and no lemonade. The elevator only goes down. The bright note is that the elevator will, at some point, stop.•
What little I know of 20th-century avant opera concerns the otherworldly work of Robert Ashley, the iconoclastic Ann Arbor-born composer of Perfect Lives and other droning, enigmatic slices of American surrealism intended for TV whether the medium was ready or not for his Lynchian “sitcoms.” Ashley, who in his mature years resembled Andy Williams’ Martian doppelganger, something of an avuncular extraterrestrial, familiar yet unnameable, recently passed away. Here’s the opening of Mark Swed’s 1992 Los Angeles Times piece about his singular career at midpoint:
“One of the most offbeat incidents in American opera occurred a dozen years ago when the city of Chicago hosted the now-defunct annual New Music America Festival and presented a complete performance of Robert Ashley’s radically innovative seven-part opera Perfect Lives. The incident was the unwitting involvement of then-Mayor Jane Byrne.
The mayor, wanting election-year publicity any way she could get it, insisted the festival be named ‘Mayor Byrne’s New Music America’ in return for her allocating considerable city resources and cash. So at her welcoming speech, which was covered by local television news and given on the Perfect Lives set, someone played a joke on her. The opera employs lots of voice-altering electronics, and the microphone she spoke into was rigged, splitting her voice into octaves. She became a breathy soprano and male baritone duet. She sounded like Laurie Anderson.
What made the occasion remarkable was not that a puerile prank was played on a public official, but the brilliance of the result. In the reality-skewered world of Ashley, Jane Byrne belongs on the late-night news impersonating Laurie Anderson, not the other way around.
Ashley’s operas are about the transformation of just such ordinary landscapes into astonishing ones. They are operas intended for television, surreal as rock videos.”
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“The Park,” part one of Perfect Lives:
Tags: Mark Swed, Robert Ashley
From the June 3, 1898 New York Times:
“Sioux City, Iowa–Loaded with wealth, but deserted and starving, John Rochel, once a well-known manufacturer in Sioux City, perished last April on the trail between Dawson City and Alaskan points. The news of his death reached here in a letter to his widow, written by Richard Hendrickson, from Seattle, under date of March 24.
The details of Rochel’s death are meagre, but from what can be gleaned it appears that he was returning from the mines, after disposing of a valuable claim. His party was short of provisions, and as Rochel, who was quite an old man, delayed the march, it was decided to abandon him. Rochel had been engaged here in the manufacture of brick, but was tempted from home by the stories of immense wealth in Alaska. From all accounts he was among the luckiest of the miners at Dawson City, but was unable to bring his winnings back to civilization. His body will be brought here for burial.”
The oil-soaked boomtown of Williston, North Dakota, with its 0.3% unemployment rate during a national recession, is both dream and curse. It’s not exactly Deadwood, but lawlessness and a raft of social problems have attended the latter-day gold rush. From multimedia reporting by Jude Sheerin and Anna Bressanin at BBC News Magazine:
“The male-to-female ratio here is widely estimated to be about 10:1. Many women do not feel safe walking the streets alone.
Bailey Moreland, 25, a barista at Meg-A-Latte coffee shop, carries a stun gun everywhere she goes.
She has had men hit on her even after she points out that she is not only heavily pregnant but happily engaged.
‘Being in a bar, going to the gas station, walking on the street, you’ll get hooted and hollered at,’ she says.
‘I don’t make eye contact with anybody.’
But for many in a nation still bruised by recession, the modern-day gold rush here is a symbol of America’s genius for reinvention.
One of them is Carl Trudel, a 37-year-old maintenance man at the Fox Run motorhome park on the city outskirts.
He sold everything he had after the property market went bust in Florida to migrate north in 2012.
The singleton’s loyal companion in the trailer he calls home is his dog, Dooley. He lavishes affection on the Staffordshire terrier.
Living in Williston is ‘not easy’ and can be ‘very lonely,’ says Trudel.
Yet despite its rowdy bars, runaway prices, long queues at the laundrette or petrol station, and the often-bare supermarket shelves, he seems content.
‘If you have the ambition, the plan, the skills, you will make it here,” insists Trudel. ‘It’s really up to you.
‘But absolutely the American dream is here. That’s why I’m here. And so far it’s happening. Absolutely.'”
Tags: Anna Bressanin, Bailey Moreland, Carl Trudel, Jude Sheerin
From Kurt Vonnegut’s 1988 missive to the people of 2088, via Letters of Note, the guidance wise political leaders would give to citizens in regards to Mother Nature:
Tags: Kurt Vonnegut
I have doubts that Mars One will actually blast off in 2024 (or ever), let alone become a global reality show, but let’s say it does. What will govern this handful of astronauts should lawlessness occur as the cameras beam the crimes back to Earth? That’s what Anders Herlitz of Practical Ethics wonders.
I wonder something else: How will viewers respond when one of the astronauts dies onscreen on a strange and lonely planet? Since these transplanted Martians won’t be returning, death is a given. If the Apollo 11 astronauts had died on the moon, much of the world would have been inconsolable. Would that be the case now? Has reality TV, in all its glorious stupidity, prepared us for bad things happening to foolhardy people? Is the melding of the real and the fictional so ingrained in us now that the blow will be softened? And if so, does that say something good about us (sophistication, maturity, acceptance) or something bad (desensitization)?
From Herlitz:
“I wonder what happens when the first crime is committed. We are going to put four persons inside a spaceship. They will travel with this spaceship for a year. As they arrive to Mars, they will live together in a confined space for the foreseeable future. I wonder what happens when property rights for the first time are violated. What happens when Ann cheats Charlie and jumps out of the vessel before him, thus becoming the first man on Mars, even though they had an agreement that Charlie would be the first? What happens when the first punch is thrown? What happens when the first rape occurs, when the first murder is committed? There will be no law enforcement in any conventional sense. One wonders: will there even be laws? But perhaps more important: since the crew will not return to earth, there will be no consequences of these people’s actions beyond those that they inflict upon each other. And all of this will be broadcasted. We are about to put four volunteers from around the world in a small capsule, give them resources enough to survive for a very long time, and send them to a different planet on which they will live their lives, and we broadcast all this for the world to see. I wonder if this will not so much be a giant leap for mankind, as it will be the materialisation of Lord of the Flies in the arenaTM. Will this be a giant leap backward, where we turn space into a postmodern amphitheatre, and gather gladiators from around the world to meet there?”
Tags: Anders Herlitz
Art Linkletter’s daughter Diane plunged to her death from a six-story window in 1969, perhaps influenced to suicide by LSD. Timothy Leary was the most famous proponent of the drug. Talk show host Stanley Siegel, that button-pusher, thought it a good idea in 1977 to have Linkletter and Leary speak by phone on live TV.
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The Pew Research Center released its “Digital Life in 2025” report. Here are two items from its “15 Theses About the Digital Future,” neither of which is particularly surprising.
From “More-hopeful theses”:
• Information sharing over the Internet will be so effortlessly interwoven into daily life that it will become invisible, flowing like electricity, often through machine intermediaries.
David Clark, a senior research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, noted, “Devices will more and more have their own patterns of communication, their own ‘social networks,’ which they use to share and aggregate information, and undertake automatic control and activation. More and more, humans will be in a world in which decisions are being made by an active set of cooperating devices. The Internet (and computer-mediated communication in general) will become more pervasive but less explicit and visible. It will, to some extent, blend into the background of all we do.”
Joe Touch, director at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, predicted, “The Internet will shift from the place we find cat videos to a background capability that will be a seamless part of how we live our everyday lives. We won’t think about ‘going online’ or ‘looking on the Internet’ for something — we’ll just be online, and just look.understood.”
From “Less-hopeful theses”:
• Dangerous divides between haves and have-nots may expand, resulting in resentment and possible violence.
Oscar Gandy, an emeritus professor at the Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania, explained, “We have to think seriously about the kinds of conflicts that will arise in response to the growing inequality enabled and amplified by means of networked transactions that benefit smaller and smaller segments of the global population. Social media will facilitate and amplify the feelings of loss and abuse. They will also facilitate the sharing of examples and instructions about how to challenge, resist, and/or punish what will increasingly come to be seen as unjust.”
Tags: David Clark, Joe Touch, Oscar Gandy
“He had big, muscular fingers, and he snapped them with a sound like the crack of a black snake whip.”
Prior to antibiotics and penicillin, lesser methods were used to treat a raft of ailments–including, um, finger snapping. From an article about the fad in the December 19, 1896 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“A friend who was born in Central Illinois asked me the other day whether I have ever heard of the snapping craze that raged in the back country districts in his part of the state some thirty odd years ago. I have inhabited this planet for a little over half a century and have always been interested in popular delusions, but I had never before heard of the snappers. My friend said that a snapping doctor, who came from nobody knew where, started a curious movement by lectures in rural schoolhouses and churches. His theory was that all diseases could be thrown off by bringing the body up to a condition of high nervous tension by a peculiar method of snapping the fingers, which he had discovered and which he alone was competent to teach. He had big, muscular fingers, and he snapped them with a sound like the crack of a black snake whip. He soon got his audiences to work snapping and made them believe that they were experiencing marked benefits from the performance. For complete instruction in the art, however, he charged $50.
The craze had a run of a few months, and while it raged the school children snapped their fingers at recess time, and in the farmhouses men and women gathered evenings to practice the marvelous new healing art.”
