Sweden is all but done with cash money, which is fascinating and frightening. Paper currency and coins aren’t, strictly speaking, necessary in a smartphone society, but the digital equivalent is trackable. As cookies can follow our online travels, these digital crumbs mark our every step.
“Now people can’t get away,” a Swedish street vendor tells Liz Alderman in her excellent New York Times piece on the topic. The opening:
STOCKHOLM — Parishioners text tithes to their churches. Homeless street vendors carry mobile credit-card readers. Even the Abba Museum, despite being a shrine to the 1970s pop group that wrote “Money, Money, Money,” considers cash so last-century that it does not accept bills and coins.
Few places are tilting toward a cashless future as quickly as Sweden, which has become hooked on the convenience of paying by app and plastic.
This tech-forward country, home to the music streaming service Spotify and the maker of the Candy Crush mobile games, has been lured by the innovations that make digital payments easier. It is also a practical matter, as many of the country’s banks no longer accept or dispense cash.
At the Abba Museum, “we don’t want to be behind the times by taking cash while cash is dying out,” said Bjorn Ulvaeus, a former Abba member who has leveraged the band’s legacy into a sprawling business empire, including the museum.
Not everyone is cheering. Sweden’s embrace of electronic payments has alarmed consumer organizations and critics who warn of a rising threat to privacy and increased vulnerability to sophisticated Internet crimes. Last year, the number of electronic fraud cases surged to 140,000, more than double the amount a decade ago, according to Sweden’s Ministry of Justice.•
By the 1960s, Glenn Gould believed the new technologies would allow for the sampling, remixing and democratization of creativity, that erstwhile members of the audience would ultimately ascend and become creators themselves. He hated the hierarchy of live performance and was sure its dominance would end. It was probably partly a rationalization that helped enable his reclusiveness, but rise up the audience did.
Mr. Gould himself seemed to grow out of no particular musical tradition. He stressed, in fact, that his musical goal was to rethink the repertory in a radically different fashion. Though he had a career of nine years as a popular and critical success on the concert stage, after a performance in Chicago in March 1964, he never played in public again; after 1967, he said, he never even attended a concert.
He said he considered the concert form an ”immensely distasteful” musical compromise that leads to ”tremendous conservatism” in musical interpretation. Mr. Gould contended that the concert’s aura of commerce, its performing stage and its listening audience interfere with music, turning the artist into a ”vaudevillian.”
”The concert is dead,” he proclaimed. For him, the recording represented the musical future. Mr. Gould was also among the first classical musicians to treat the recording as a distinct art form, with its own possibilities and requirements. The phonograph record, for Mr. Gould, was no more a ”record” of an actual continuous performance than a movie was a record of actual continuous events. It was a spliced construction, edited from recording tape.
”During the last 15 years,” Mr. Gould said in an interview last year, ”I spent very little time at a recording session actually recording.”
About eight minutes an hour were spent at the piano, he explained, producing perhaps four different versions of two minutes of music. The rest of the hour would be spent editing, choosing aspects of one version to merge with those of another. His recording of Sibelius’s works, for example, experiments with different aural atmospheres in each musical section. In his most recent recordings, he acted as producer, working in his own studio.
The musical result could be a concentrated interpretation, put together with as much care as a film editor might put together a movie. Mr. Gould believed such pastiche no more detracted from spontaneity and energy than editing would detract from a well-paced film.
The results, though, have been controversial.•
“I detest audiences,” Gould tells that magnificent bastard Alex Trebek (unseen) in 1966.
___________________________
From a1969 Life piece in which Oriana Fallaci recalls her misbegotten interview with Muhammad Ali:
Question:
Has anyone actually threatened to break your nose off for something you wrote?
Oriana Fallaci:
Something like it happened with Cassius Clay. I had seen him a couple of times, and I went back to his house in Miami to finish the interview. He was eating a melon. I said, Good Morning, Mr. Clay. He keeps on eating the melon and suddenly belches very loud. I think he is just being impolite and I sit down with my tape recorder. And then oooaaagh. He belches again. A big one. Well, I said, let’s go on anyway. And just at that moment, buurp, buurp, whoops, whoops. I turned to him and shouted, I am not going to stay with an animal like you. And I was undoing my recorder, when he took the microphone and threw it against the wall. My microphone! I saw it flying past my head and I took my fists and bam, bam. Went against him. He stood there. So enormous. So tall. And he watched me in a way an elephant watches a mosquito. Black Muslims suddenly came out of all the doors into the room. Evil. Evil. They began to chant. You came for evil. It was like a nightmare. I backed out to my cab, trying to keep my dignity, but really afraid, and went straight to the airport. After the interview was published, Cassius Clay said he was going to break my nose if he ever saw me again. I said, we’ll see, if he breaks my nose, he is going to jail and we will have beautiful news in the papers. I saw him later in New York. I passed with my nose in the air, and he went by without looking at me.•
In 1976, when he was already showing the early, subtle signs of Parkinson’s Syndrome, Muhammad Ali sat for a wide-ranging group interview on Face the Nation, in which he was mostly treated as a suspect by a panel of people who enjoyed privileges that were never available to the boxer. Fred Graham, the Arkansas-born correspondent who’s distinguished himself in other ways during his career, doesn’t come across as the most enlightened fellow here, asking at one point, “Is there ever going to be another Great White Hope, a white heavyweight who will come in and whip all you black heavyweights?” Hyper-political earlier in life, Ali dodged election-year questions as much as possible.
___________________________
Sailor, fisherman, OSS spy and all-around non-conformist, actor Sterling Hayden was ultimately as interesting just being himself as he was when inhabiting a character. In Kim Morgan’s 2014 LARB roundtable interview with Robert Altman collaborators Elliott Gould, George Segal and screenwriter Joseph Walsh, Hayden was discussed. An excerpt:
Question:
So you, George, and Elliott were both in movies with Sterling Hayden [Loving and The Long Goodbye].
Joseph Walsh:
I loved Sterling in the movies, but I never met him personally. [To Segal and Gould] Did you love Sterling?
Elliott Gould:
I loved him. Dan Blocker was supposed to play the part. He was a very good friend of Altman’s. Dan Blocker died and the picture almost went south. And so then we were talking about John Huston, who I loved. Bob cast Sterling Hayden. So Sterling had been in Ireland doing something with R. D. Laing, the poet and philosopher who wrote a book called Knots. And so I asked to spend a little time, a moment alone with Sterling in the house where we shot, where Kathryn and Bob lived, down in Malibu. So we spent that moment alone. And so I knew that Sterling knew that I knew that Sterling knew that I knew that Sterling knew that I understood him. So I just loved him.
I liked the way he wanted to live his life, Sterling Hayden.
Elliott Gould:
I visited him on his péniche, which is like a barge. He had it in France on the Seine and I saw him there. And then he had it sent to Northern California and I visited him there too. He was a great guy. I think he worked in the Yugoslavian Underground during World War II.
Joseph Walsh:
Did he really? Wow. Okay.
Question:
And what’s interesting in The Long Goodbye is this modernized Marlowe, from what Bogart or Powell did but …
Elliott Gould:
Oh, Humphrey Bogart was perfect. Our Marlowe was not perfect at all.
Question:
No, of course. But that’s what I love about it. And that Sterling Hayden, who is now an icon in film noir, he’s really this counterculture type of guy in real life. He fit perfectly in that Altman universe.•
In 1981, Hayden, a restless soul who began looking late in life like Tom Waits’ hobo uncle, visits with Tom Snyder for a long-form interview. In part one, Hayden discusses his failed attempts at writing an article for Rolling Stone about the funeral of Yugoslavia’s late dictator Marshal Tito.
George Pao at the Pew Research Center has published “15 Striking Findings from 2015,” which looks at counterintuitive truths, some of which comment on America’s xenophobic fears. Three examples:
3. For the first time since the 1940s, more immigrants from Mexico are leaving the U.S. than coming into the country. The shift is due to several reasons, including slow economic recovery after the Great Recession that may have made the U.S. less attractive, as well as stricter enforcement of U.S. immigration laws, particularly at the border.
8. People in countries with significant Muslim populations express overwhelmingly negative views of ISIS, according to our spring survey in 11 countries. Recent attacks in Paris, Beirut and Baghdad linked to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have once again brought terrorism and Islamic extremism to the forefront of international relations. Majorities in most of the 11 countries express unfavorable views of ISIS, but the exception is Pakistan, where a majority offer no opinion.
10. Christians are declining as a share of the U.S. population, while the number of U.S. adults who do not identify with any organized religion is growing. While the U.S. remains home to more Christians than any other country, the percentage of Americans identifying as Christian dropped from 78% in 2007 to 71% in 2014. By contrast, religious “nones,” driven in large part by Millennials, have surged seven percentage points in that time span to make up 23% of U.S. adults last year.•
Well, this is rather macabre. In 1878, a decade prior to his Presidency, Benjamin Harrison investigated a number of Ohio medical colleges in search of the stolen corpse of a deceased family friend and was aghast to come face to face with his own freshly fallen father, John Scott Harrison. The jaw-dropping tale isn’t quite as surprising as you might think, asthat state was known in those years for the brisk business conducted by so-called resurrectionists, who were often in cahoots with academics in need of cadavers. Despite the public outcry caused by the scandal, the Dean of Ohio Medical College acknowledged he would likely continue buying stiffs from grave robbers. The full story from the March 13, 1910 New York Times:
One of the strangest, and at the same time the most gruesome stories that ever reached a newspaper office was told byH.E. Krehbiel, the musical critic, the other night. Though it reached a newspaper office and has been known to a few persons in the twenty years succeeding, it was not printed when the incidents happened, because those concerned took the precaution of narrating them in confidence. Here it is, however, as Mr. Krehbiel tells it, long after those most intimately concerned are dead:
“Many years ago I was at work one afternoon in the offices of a Cincinnati newspaper when Benjamin Harrison, afterward President of the United States, and his brother came into the office and began a long conversation with the city editor. They spoke in low tones, which did not reach beyond the desk where they were sitting.
“After nearly half an hour had elapsed the city editor called me over to him and introduced me to the two gentlemen, both of whom seemed to be laboring under strong emotion. Benjamin Harrison appeared to be especially affected. This did not surprise me very much, as I was aware that they had only buried their father, to whom they were both devotedly attached, a few days before. The city editor instructed me to take down their story, giving me also explicitly to understand that, whereas, I was to listen to all they had to say, I was to write no more, and the paper was to print no more than they should decide.
“Now,” continued Mr. Krehbiel, “this is what Benjamin Harrison told me. A few days before the death of his father, the husband of a dear old German woman who lived near their farm also died and was duly buried. When he came from the East to attend his own father’s obsequies this old woman went to him in great distress and told him that the grave of her husband had been opened and his body stolen. Those were the days of body snatchers or ‘resurrectionists,’ before the State had made provision for subjects for medical colleges.
“Mr Harrison went on to say that his old German friend’s distress was so intense that he and his brother had themselves undertaken a search for the body in Cincinnati. This search had occupied them two days and had just ended.
“‘We swore out a search warrant and took a constable with us,’ said Mr. Harrison. ‘One by one we have been to every medical school in the City of Cincinnati. It was a terrible ordeal for us, especially as our own grief was fresh and poignant. We kept up the search without inkling, clue or result, until we had visited every medical school in Cincinnati except one.
“‘The last one was the Ohio State Medical College. We went over there more as a formality than anything else. With search warrant and constable we were enabled there, as elsewhere, to have everything opened to us. We found nothing.
“’Just as we were about to leave the college the constable noted a shaft such as is used in apartment houses. Down this shaft hung the ropes of a hoist. The constable went up to the ropes of a hoist and took hold of the taut rope. He turned to me sharply, saying that there was a weight on the hoist. I told him to pull it up. He did so.
“’Attached to the rope by a hook was the body of my own father. They had known at the colleges whose the body was. They had taken this fiendishly ingenious method of moving it from floor to floor as we in our search had moved from one floor to another.’
“This,” said Mr. Krehbiel, “is the story in Benjamin Harrison’s own words just as he gave it to me.”•
While it won’t much help those who’ve invested their lives in the value of a taxi medallion, it would be beneficial to a growing population of workers if we could figure out a way to protect employees participating, willingly or otherwise, in the Gig Economy. In his latest Financial Times column, Tim Harford has a suggestion: “Libertarianism with a safety net.” If that sounds oxymoronic, it’s intentional. The writer believes we need to consciously uncouple the welfare and corporate states, providing assurances to all citizens so that they can be unmoored without being at risk.
Uber maintains that they are not. That seems defensible: a driver can switch the app on or off at any time, or work for a competitor such as Lyft on a whim. Few employees who acted in this way would be employed for very long.
Then again, does a driver who puts in 60 or 70 hours a week providing Uber-assigned rides according to Uber-determined rules and rates not deserve some sort of security? Some authorities think so: the company has lost a number of rulings in California as judges and arbitrators have found that, in certain cases, Uber drivers are employees.
Such judgments are likely to vary from case to case and place to place, and the uncertainty helps nobody bar the lawyers. Alan Krueger, former chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, draws a parallel with the emergence of the workers’ compensation system a century ago. Sensible rules were agreed, he says, once lawsuits over industrial accidents became expensive and unpredictable.
Farhood Manjoo’s latest New York Times column, “In a Self-Serve World, Start-Ups Find Value in Human Helpers,” argues that the freestyle-chess approach of person-computer tandems tackling tasks (e.g. travel agent) is the best path forward. That’s probably a little too rosy a view.
In the short term and perhaps medium one that combination may be winning, but it also assumes that software won’t continue rapid improvement. The writer acknowledges the opaqueness of pricing that existed pre-smartphone, but seems too nostalgic to completely comprehend how much it bedeviled consumers. Companies that backpedal from a full-on software approach may reap benefits, but the question is for how long.
An excerpt:
Now, rather than consult an insurance agent, you simply search online. You never go into a bank —you just use the tireless A.T.M. — and at the supermarket, there are thoseself-checkout machines. You can buy stocks without a broker, you can publish a book without a publisher, you can sell a house without an agent and you can buy a car without a dealer. Slowly but surely, the robots seem to be replacing all the middlemen and turning the world into a self-serve society.
An economist would praise the great disintermediation for its efficiency. As a customer, you may have a different reaction: Look at all the work you’re now being asked to do. Was it really wise to get rid of all those human helpers?
In many cases, yes, but there remain vast realms of commerce in which guidance from a human expert works much better than a machine. Other than travel, consider the process of finding a handyman or plumber. The Internet has given us a wealth of data about these services. You could spend all day on Craigslist, Yelp or Angie’s List finding the best person for your job, which is precisely the problem.•
Malone, N.Y. – A fire which has been raging in the forests near Lyon Mountain recently has driven the wild animals into the farming districts on the outskirts and wild cats, bears, deer, etc. have been frequently seen near here, and at a wedding two weeks ago bear meat was served, three cubs having been trapped just before the ceremony took place.•
Engineers have dreamed of driverless for almost as long as there have been cars. The first demo I’ve come across isone by Westinghouse in 1930, which utilized telephone instructions, electric eyes and beams of light to maneuver a robocar. It appears to have been merely a novelty, with no actual plans to commercialize the technology. In the 1970s, the efforts were much more earnest, with long-term hopes of monetization. This 1971 video about work being done by the Road Research Laboratory has been released by the Associated Press.
Jacques Inaudi had a great brain–more than one, in a sense.
He was what was known more than a century ago as a “Lightning Calculator,” a sideshow performer who solved complicated mathematical problems in his head in front of live audiences. Few had the facility for numbers displayed by Inaudi, an Italian who toured extensively with vaudeville shows demonstrating his prodigious abilities. The Brooklyn Daily Eagleprofiled the math manon October 15, 1901 (and misidentified his nationality). An excerpt:
Haven’t yet read Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, which I blogged about last month, though it’s on my list, my fucking list. Bookforum has published an excerpt. The authors are hopeful that a technological future–“Marxism basically dressed up with robotics,” as they’ve termed it–will free us from drudgery if we can ever unloose ourselves from the Puritan work ethic. I think regardless of work hours or mindset, the menial, physical or otherwise, will always be part of the human experience. There’s just something small about us.
A passage:
THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY
One of the most difficult problems in implementing a universal basic income (UBI) and building a post-work society will be overcoming the pervasive pressure to submit to the work ethic. Indeed, the failure of the United States’ earlier attempt to implement a basic income was primarily because it challenged accepted notions about the work ethic of the poor and unemployed. Rather than seeing unemployment as the result of a deficient individual work ethic, the UBI proposal recognized it as a structural problem. Yet the language that framed the proposal maintained strict divisions between those who were working and those who were on welfare, despite the plan effacing such a distinction. The working poor ended up rejecting the plan out of a fear of being stigmatized as a welfare recipient. Racial biases reinforced this resistance, since welfare was seen as a black issue, and whites were loath to be associated with it. And the lack of a class identification between the working poor and unemployed—the surplus population—meant there was no social basis for a meaningful movement in favor of a basic income. Overcoming the work ethic will be equally central to any future attempts at building a post-work world. Neoliberalism has established a set of incentives that compel us to act and identify ourselves as competitive subjects. Orbiting around this subject is a constellation of images related to self-reliance and independence that necessarily conflict with the program of a post-work society. Our lives have become increasingly structured around competitive self-realization, and work has become the primary avenue for achieving this. Work, no matter how degrading or low-paid or inconvenient, is deemed an ultimate good. This is the mantra of both mainstream political parties and most trade unions, associated with rhetoric about getting people back into work, the importance of working families, and cutting welfare so that “it always pays to work.” This is matched by a parallel cultural effort demonizing those without jobs. Newspapers blare headlines about the worthlessness of welfare recipients, TV shows sensationalize and mock the poor, and the ever looming figure of the welfare cheat is continually evoked. Work has become central to our very self-conception—so much so that when presented with the idea of doing less work, many people ask, “But what would I do?” The fact that so many people find it impossible to imagine a meaningful life outside of work demonstrates the extent to which the work ethic has infected our minds.
While typically associated with the protestant work ethic, the submission to work is in fact implicit in many religions. These ethics demand dedication to one’s work regardless of the nature of the job, instilling a moral imperative that drudgery should be valued. While originating in religious ideas about ensuring a better afterlife, the goal of the work ethic was eventually replaced with a secular devotion to improvement in this life. More contemporary forms of this imperative have taken on a liberal-humanist character, portraying work as the central means of self-expression. Work has come to be driven into our identity, portrayed as the only means for true self-fulfilment. In a job interview, for instance, everyone knows the worst answer to “Why do you want this job?” is to say “Money,” even as it remains the repressed truth. Contemporary service work heightens this phenomenon. In the absence of clear metrics for productivity, workers instead put on performances of productivity—pretending to enjoy their job or smiling while being yelled at by a customer. Working long hours has become a sign of devotion to the job, even as it perpetuates the gender pay gap. With work tied so tightly into our identities, overcoming the work ethic will require us overcoming ourselves.
The central ideological support for the work ethic is that remuneration be tied to suffering. Everywhere one looks, there is a drive to make people suffer before they can receive a reward.•
Mostly because of cost, I’ve never been a theatergoer despite living in NYC, but I have to say that Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime, which meditates on AI and memory and how the two interact and inform us, seems like my worlds colliding. Or at least my thoughts. Another one of the dramatist’s “cerebral playgrounds,” as they were described in 2008. Michael Almereyda, a really thoughtful filmmaker I interviewed at the time of his excellent documentary about photographer William Eggleston, is currently adapting the play for the big screen. Two excerpts from reviews of the Playwrights Horizon production follow.
Walter is Marjorie’s husband. Or, rather, he is the exact image of Marjorie’s husband (and Tess’s father), now deceased, as he was some 60 years earlier. Walter is what is called a Prime, the latest device for helping people whose memories are fading, as Marjorie’s definitely is. As Jon says of Walter, “It’s amazing what they can do with a few zillion pixels.”
Primes like Walter, provided by a company called Senior Serenity, are given the outward form that best suits the individual they are created to assist. Then they are fed, word by word, with data about the life of that individual and her (or his) relationship with the person who has been simulated. The recollections that Primes salvage and store are only as accurate and complete as those of the human beings who feed them information.
I think that’s more or less right. Mr. Harrison doesn’t work with such blunt blocks of exposition, but by indirection. The tomorrow he envisions — a bit like that of George Saunders’s sci-fi-flavored short stories — is one that its residents take for granted, and we infer its details gradually by listening to them, the way we might pick up a foreign language.
These people remain people like us, though. A technologically smoother universe hasn’t ironed out classic familial discords and distances or the uncomfortable questions of existence posed when those we love are transformed by age almost beyond recognition. As Jon says to Tess, who has qualms about using the Prime for Marjorie, “How much does she have to forget before she’s not your mom anymore?”
All the humans in this play — which unfolds in a fluid series of naturalistic conversations — wind up feeling reservations about Primes. Yes, these replicants comfort, but in limited and perhaps dangerous ways.•
Walter is a “prime”: a holographic companion customized by a company called Senior Serenity to offer Marjorie comfort and encouragement. “A few zillion pixels” make him appear to be the youthful Walter that Marjorie most wants to see; presumably Marjorie’s daughter, Tess, and son-in-law, Jon, have provided the necessary photographs to feed the illusion. They have also provided the necessary biographical and psychological data, which through the self-improving algorithms of artificial intelligence, and instantaneous access to the world’s knowledge base in the ether, have by the time of the play’s action brought Walter Prime so close to Walter that Marjorie often forgets he’s a simulacrum. So do we, except that in some ways he’s better than a real spouse: When not in use, he sits pleasantly on a sofa, smiling and ready and silent.
The year is 2062 — not so far in the future as it may seem. (Toddlers today will just be pushing 50 then, and Harrison himself, like Marjorie, will be 85.) Likewise, the prime technology isn’t a far leap from the chatbots and virtual-reality holography already in use. The play subtly yet assiduously closes any expected emotional gap as well: Daughters still struggle with their mothers; mothers still flirt with doctors; everyone still grieves as the losses pile up. (The primes are not just for the elderly but for anyone craving the companionship of a departed loved one.) It is a wholly recognizable world — a “prime” of ours, if you will; even though the sterile environment in which Marjorie lives is wired to play Vivaldi at the mere mention of his name, Vivaldi is still being played. (And Jif peanut butter is still being preferred to the natural kind.) The point is that this is not science fiction: “Science fiction is here,” says Tess, who has trouble warming to Walter Prime as a pseudo-father. “Every day is science fiction.”•
“Average is over,” Tyler Cowen told us, and in his new Foreign Affairs piece, Klaus Schwab argues that this will be increasingly true in what he terms the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” a time when the fabric of society may be especially prone to tearing. We have already witnessed the ugly rise of nativist politics in developed nations that are growing in the aggregate but leaving behind what used to be the middle class. We’re richer, yet poorer. “A winner-takes-all economy that offers only limited access to the middle class is a recipe for democratic malaise and dereliction,” writes Schwab, asserting that only the highly skilled will thrive in this new arrangement. But I bet a lot of them will also struggle as the talents that are valued will shift frequently and violently.
An excerpt:
Like the revolutions that preceded it, the Fourth Industrial Revolution has the potential to raise global income levels and improve the quality of life for populations around the world. To date, those who have gained the most from it have been consumers able to afford and access the digital world; technology has made possible new products and services that increase the efficiency and pleasure of our personal lives. Ordering a cab, booking a flight, buying a product, making a payment, listening to music, watching a film, or playing a game—any of these can now be done remotely.
In the future, technological innovation will also lead to a supply-side miracle, with long-term gains in efficiency and productivity. Transportation and communication costs will drop, logistics and global supply chains will become more effective, and the cost of trade will diminish, all of which will open new markets and drive economic growth.
At the same time, as the economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have pointed out, the revolution could yield greater inequality, particularly in its potential to disrupt labor markets. As automation substitutes for labor across the entire economy, the net displacement of workers by machines might exacerbate the gap between returns to capital and returns to labor. On the other hand, it is also possible that the displacement of workers by technology will, in aggregate, result in a net increase in safe and rewarding jobs.
We cannot foresee at this point which scenario is likely to emerge, and history suggests that the outcome is likely to be some combination of the two. However, I am convinced of one thing—that in the future, talent, more than capital, will represent the critical factor of production. This will give rise to a job market increasingly segregated into “low-skill/low-pay” and “high-skill/high-pay” segments, which in turn will lead to an increase in social tensions.
In addition to being a key economic concern, inequality represents the greatest societal concern associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution.•
Writer Lucian Truscott IV is one of the figures featured in the latest 3 Videos, and here’s a little more about him from a 1979 People piece penned by Cheryl McCall at the outset of his very abbreviated marriage to writer-photographer Carol Troy. In an age when people cared at least somewhat about print journalists, the couple was apparently, fleetingly, an F. Scott and Zelda, which is a mixed blessing, of course. An excerpt:
Lucian Truscott IV and Carol Troy both write. His current book is the best-selling novel Dress Gray; hers is Cheap Chic Update. But literary achievement isn’t the only reason the New York Times compared them, a little waspishly, to Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Take Truscott and Troy’s enthusiasm for disagreement.
When they met in 1975 at a party in his New York loft, she found him “awfully gruff.” The following year they were fixed up by a mutual friend. It started off disastrously. “Vassar girls and West Point guys hated each other,” ex-cadet Truscott recalls. “We wouldn’t dance with them at mixers,” Troy (Vassar ’66) explains. They went to dinner at a Japanese restaurant—”Dutch,” Troy says dryly, “and got into a huge fight.” Truscott agrees: “Sparks were flying,” and then adds, “We didn’t know they were sparks of love.”
As befits New York’s literary darlings, they were married in a Roman Catholic church in the artsy SoHo district this past St. Patrick’s Day. Then 250 guests, including Norman Mailer, were bused uptown with champagne aboard to the swank Lotos Club for the reception. (“Our only salvation is in extravagance,” Fitzgerald once wrote.)
Bride and bridegroom are not only handsome and well-thought-of; they’re rich. Dress Gray, a thriller about homosexuality and murder at the military academy, earned $1.4 million before a copy was sold—thanks to subsidiary rights negotiated by the author without an agent. Paramount bought the movie option and Gore Vidal is writing the screenplay.
…
“I wanted to go to West Point my whole life,” says Truscott, 32. His grandfather, Gen. Lucian K. Truscott Jr., was a World War II hero who commanded the Allied landing at Anzio Beach in Italy. Lucian III was West Point ’45, retiring as a colonel to become a watchmaker in 1971. Lucian’s mother, Anne, is a medical secretary; he’s the eldest of five children. The family lived in eight states, Germany and Japan, and Lucian recalls: “I grew up liking Army officers. I bagged their groceries, I washed their cars, I mowed their lawns.”
At West Point he was, however, less than a model cadet. In his sophomore year he began a letter-writing campaign to New York’s Village Voice. One epistle, he remembers, contained the line: “Jerry Rubin is palpably full of sh**.” On campus he challenged compulsory chapel attendance (it was found unconstitutional three years after he graduated).
But Truscott’s most serious transgression was getting caught—with three other cadets—using a telephone credit card number that reportedly belonged to the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society. “Hell, I wasn’t calling a subversive,” Truscott claims. “I was calling my grandmother.” Nevertheless, West Point slapped him with 30 demerits for “gross lack of judgment.” Truscott barely graduated—658th in a class of 800.
He began serving his five-year Army commitment in 1969 as an infantry lieutenant at Fort Carson, Colo. There he wrote an article on heroin addiction among enlisted men for the Voice, in which he admitted he had smoked marijuana. That, plus a refusal to serve on courts-martial because “they were patently unfair and ridiculous,” led to his resignation and a general discharge under “other than honorable conditions” in 1970. Conservative military columnist Col. Robert Heinl wrote that Truscott had “disparaged and derogated” West Point’s creed: “Duty, honor, country.”
Truscott settled on a barge in New Jersey and joined the Voice staff, freelancing on the side. Five years later he met Troy. The daughter of Francis Troy, a Borden executive, and his wife, Bernice, she grew up living American Graffiti in the suburbs of San Francisco. Dolled up in tight skirts, sweater sets and Weejuns, she liked to cruise in her parents’ hot-pink Mercury with black interior (she still owns it). After Vassar and studying film at Stanford, she turned journalist, working for Newsday, Oui and a pre-publication issue of People, among others.
During this time she made a virtue of scrimping, developing the skills she later wrote about in Cheap Chic. (It was a hit even though Troy recalls Barbara Walters describing the book on the Today show as “written only for skinny young girls who didn’t have jobs.”) Now she and Truscott visit flea markets and garage sales to furnish their New York loft and a $100,000 Victorian carriage house in Sag Harbor.
Lucian, purposely avoiding military subjects, has begun a novel about a businesswoman. “Writing doesn’t have to be a painful, gut-wrenching experience, the 3 a.m. of the soul that Fitzgerald talked about,” he says cheerfully. “I like the experience of writing.” Troy, 34, is doing a screenplay about the fashion industry and pondering a magazine editing job.
Though Fiat heiress Delfina Rattazzi has thrown a party for them and they rate a table at Manhattan’s celebrity feeding trough, Elaine’s, Truscott and Troy have an unpretentious side. Evenings they may show slides or reminisce about souvenir matchbooks and place mats. They hang out in unsung places like the Spring Street Bar in SoHo. Carol takes modern dance classes and when in Sag Harbor Lucian body-surfs. He gave up tennis, which he learned at West Point from Lt. Arthur Ashe, and skiing because “that stuff has become so chichi.”
They expect to have children within the decade, though Troy isn’t quivering with anticipation. “I don’t know anything about kids,” she says, “because I was an only child. But I’m sure Lucian will be a good father. I don’t know how many we’ll have. They make so much noise. One sounds like a lot.”•
Paris–Walter Finker, the Viennese biologist, has succeeded in transplanting the heads of insects. Before the Academy of Vienna yesterday he gave an account of his operation and the results, about which the Matin‘s scientific editor says “if true it means a real revolution in the science of physiology and biology.”
The Matin adds:
“This discovery is so astonishing that before discussing it we must make all possible reserves.
“Finkler took a series of insects–butterflies and caterpillars–and with fine scissors cut their heads off. He then immediately grafted these heads onto which [another] head had originally belonged. After a few weeks the insects operated on began to recover, but to the intense surprise of the professor the newly formed insects began in every case to assume the characteristics of the heads which had been grafted on to them.
“Bodies lost their original color and took the color of the insect whose head they were wearing. A female insect on to which a male head had been grafted became a male.
‘Not only did the professor succeed in changing the heads of insects and larvae of the same species, but he grafted the heads of one species on to another, an operation hitherto considered quite impossible.•
Always enjoy reading Adrienne Lafrance in the Atlantic. Her latest article explores the competition to create the first truly driverless car, with the entrants including contemporary tech powerhouses (Google, Tesla, Uber, Apple) and Big Auto stalwarts. Google, having entered the race early and conducted ample road-testing, is commonly believed to have the advantage, but that may not be so. Certainly there were plenty of “champions” crowned early in the original automobile race of the late 1800s and early 1900s, before the game played out.
My guess is that as in that competition, there’ll be quite a few winners in the sector and many more losers. Should 3D printers become ubiquitous after driverless is perfected, the field will shift again, with smaller players no longer barred from entry. One important question is whether the implementation of the technology should be gradual or if the machine should be “born whole.” Such a decision is considered crucial because, as Lafrance writes, “the amount of money at stake is potentially unprecedented.”
An excerpt:
Self-driving cars promise to create a new kind of leisure, offering passengers additional time for reading books, writing email, knitting, practicing an instrument, cracking open a beer, taking a catnap, and any number of other diversions. Peope who are unable to drive themselves could experience a new kind of independence. And self-driving cars could re-contextualize land-use on massive scales. In this imagined mobility utopia, drone trucks would haul packages across the country and no human would have to circle a city block in search of a parking spot.
If self-driving vehicles deliver on their promises, they will save millions of lives over the course of a few decades, destroy and create entire industries, and fundamentally change the human relationship with space and time. All of which is why some of the planet’s most valuable companies are pouring billions of dollars into the effort to build driverless cars.
“This is an arms race,” said Larry Burns, a professor of engineering at the University of Michigan and a former GM executive who also serves as an advisor to Google. “You’re going to see a new age for the automobile.”
* * *
Many people have declared Google the frontrunner in the race for self-driving cars. The company has the road experience, mapping databases, artificial intelligence know-how, and, presumably, a significant head start. As of October, its fleet of vehicles had logged 1.3 million miles of test-driving in fully-autonomous mode since 2012—the distance-equivalent of 90 years of human driving, the company said. But that doesn’t mean Google will ultimately win. The major players each bring unique and formidable advantages.•
As far as I can tell, Edward Luce of the Financial Times was the first to argue that even should Donald Trump’s candidacy dissolve, the hatred he unloosed would remain. It was waiting for agency, and the GOP opportunist–or worse yet, hatemonger–supplied it. Now it’s here for the long haul, regardless of who’s the eventual nominee.
In Luce’s latest column, he pens a letter to America in the guise of Joe Biden, appealing to the fading American middle class to say no to their worst impulses. He wonders if U.S. politics is merely a reality show now, accepting of a bachelor who hands out only thorns. An excerpt:
Fellow Americans, we are in danger of electing someone who could do great damage to our country. When fear takes over, humans forget reason. Since 9/11 almost a quarter of a million Americans have died ingun violence. Thousands were children. Some of them were gunned down in their classrooms. We did not call these acts of terrorism. Don’t misunderstand me. I am not suggesting we take away everyone’s guns. I am realistic. But you should know that your chances of being killed in everyday gun violence are several thousand times greater than dying from terrorism on US soil. Forty Americans have been killed by terrorists since 9/11. We need to keep our sense of perspective.
Who are we? Is America turning into a game-show democracy that can be manipulated to laugh and cry and boo on a whim by the host with trophy wives? Are we the kind of people who would close our shutters to a fifth of the world and two per cent of our law-abiding citizens? Would we set up a police state so that we could round up 11m Mexicans? Is that who we are?•
Lucian Truscott IV, the great, great, great, great grandson of Thomas Jefferson and graduate of the United States Military Academy, began his writing career penning pieces on hippies and heroin addiction, eventually making his mark at the Village Voice and Rolling Stone. In 1972, he was assigned by the former to reviewHunter S. Thompson’s genius, drug-fuelled phantasmagoria Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. An excerpt:
Hunter Thompson lived in Aspen then, and his ranch, located outside town about 10 miles, tucked away up a valley with National Forest land on every side, was the first place I stopped. It was late afternoon and Thompson was just getting up, bleary-eyed and beaten, shaded from the sun by a tennis hat, sipping a beer on the front porch.
I got to know him while I was still in the Army in the spring of 1970, when he and a few other local crazies were gearing up for what would become the Aspen Freak Power Uprising, a spectacular which featured Thompson as candidate for sheriff, with his neighbor Billy for coroner. They ran on a platform which promised, among other things, public punishment for drug dealers who burned their customers, and a campaign guaranteed to rid the valley of real estate developers and ‘nazi greedheads’ of every persuasion. In a compromise move toward the end of the campaign, Thompson promised to “eat mescaline only during off-duty hours.” The non-freak segment of the voting public was unmoved and he was eventually defeated by a narrow margin.
In the days before the Freak Power spirit, Thompson’s ranch served as a war room and R&R camp for the Aspen political insurgents. Needless to say there was rarely a dull moment. When I arrived last summer, however, things had changed. Thompson was in the midst of writing a magnum opus, and it was being cranked out at an unnerving rate. I was barely across the threshold when I was informed that he worked (worked?) Monday through Friday and saved the weekends for messing around. As usual, he worked from around midnight until 7 or 8 in the morning and slept all day. There was an edge to his voice that said he meant business. This was it. This was a venture that had no beginning or end, that even Thompson himself was having difficulty controlling.
“I’m sending it off to Random House in 20,000-word bursts,” he said, drawing slowly on his ever-present cigarette holder. “I don’t have any idea what they think of it. Hell, I don’t have any idea what it is.”
“What’s it about?” I asked.
“Searching for The American Dream in Las Vegas,” replied Thompson coolly.•
In 1974, Truscott, again representing the Voice, tagged along with another gonzo character, Evel Knievel, at the time of his Snake River Canyon spacecycle jump, a spectacle promoted (in part) by professional wrestling strongman Vince McMahon Jr. Truscott shows up in this awesome video at 6:22, giving the event all the respect it deserved while simultaneously summing up his reporting career. (Because of privacy settings, you have to click through and watch it on the Vimeo site.)
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Oriana Fallaci did as much serious journalism as anyone during her era, but she wasn’t above the lurid if the story was good and the check likely to clear. Case in point: Her 1967 Look magazine article “The Dead Body and the Living Brain,” about pioneering head-transplant experimentation. In the piece, Fallaci reports on the sci-fi-ish experiments that Prof. Robert White was conducting with rhesus monkeys at a time when consciousness about animal rights was on the rise. The opening:
Libby had eaten her last meal the night before: orange, banana, monkey chow. While eating she had observed us with curiosity. Her hands resembled the hands of a newly born child, her face seemed almost human. Perhaps because of her eyes. They were so sad, so defenseless. We had called her Libby because Dr. Maurice Albin, the anesthetist, had told us she had no name, we could give her the name we liked best, and because she accepted it immediately. You said “Libby!” and she jumped, then she leaned her head on her shoulder. Dr. Albin had also told us that Libby had been born in India and was almost three years, an age comparable to that of a seven-year-old girl. The rhesuses live 30 years and she was a rhesus. Prof. Robert White uses the rhesus because they are not expensive; they cost between $80 and $100. Chimpanzees, larger and easier to experiment with, cost up to $2,000 each. After the meal, a veterinarian had come, and with as much ceremony as they use for the condemned, he had checked to be sure Libby was in good health. It would be a difficult operation and her body should function as perfectly as a rocket going to the moon. A hundred times before, the experiment had ended in failure, and though Professor White became the first man in the entire history of medicine to succeed, the undertaking still bordered on science fiction. Libby was about to die in order to demonstrate that her brain could live isolated from her body and that, so isolated, it could still think.•
Fallaci wasn’t always insightful when assessing her subjects, missing out entirely on Indira Gandhi’s dictatorial leanings and Alfred Hitchcock’s deep seediness, but she was accurate in her judgment of Muammar el-Qaddafi when conversing with that shock jock Charlie Rose in 2003.
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In Fran Lebowitz’s 1993 Paris Review Q&A, the writer’s maternal nature, or something like it, came to the fore. An excerpt:
Question:
Young people are often a target for you.
Fran Lebowitz:
I wouldn’t say that I dislike the young. I’m simply not a fan of naïveté. I mean, unless you have an erotic interest in them, what other interest could you have? What are they going to possibly say that’s of interest? People ask me, Aren’t you interested in what they’re thinking? What could they be thinking? This is not a middle-aged curmudgeonly attitude; I didn’t like people that age even when I was that age.
Question:
Well, what age do you prefer?
Fran Lebowitz:
I always liked people who are older. Of course, every year it gets harder to find them. I like people older than me and children, really little children.
Question:
Out of the mouths of babes comes wisdom?
Fran Lebowitz:
No, I’m just intrigued by them, because, to me, they’re like talking animals. Their consciousness is so different from ours that they constitute a different species. They don’t have to be particularly interesting children; just the fact that they are children is sufficient. They don’t know what anything is, so they have to make it up. No matter how dull they are, they still have to figure things out for themselves. They have a fresh approach.•
In this 1977 Canadian talk show, Lebowitz, selling her bookMetropolitan Life,was concerned that digital watches and calculators and other new technologies entitled kids (and adults also) to a sense of power they should not have. She must be pleased with smartphones today.
DARPA is on one hand a sort of moonshot laboratory, but it doesn’t engage in the frivolous end of futurism. Like Bell Labs, it chooses outlandish visions it believes can be realized (the Internet, driverless cars, humanoid robots). A Tech Insider report by Paul Szoldra surveys the defense wing’s thoughts about life three decades on. An excerpt:
So what’s going to happen in 2045?
It’s pretty likely that robots and artificial technology are going to transform a bunch of industries, drone aircraft will continue their leapfrom the military to the civilian market, and self-driving cars will make your commute a lot more bearable.
But DARPA scientists have even bigger ideas. In a video series from October called “Forward to the Future,” three researchers predict what they imagine will be a reality 30 years from now.
Dr. Justin Sanchez, a neuroscientist and program manager in DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, believes we’ll be at a point where we can control things simply by using our mind.
“Imagine a world where you could just use your thoughts to control your environment,” Sanchez said. “Think about controlling different aspects of your home just using your brain signals, or maybe communicating with your friends and your family just using neural activity from your brain.”
According to Sanchez, DARPA is currently working on neurotechnologies that can enable this to happen. There are already some examples of these kinds of futuristic breakthroughs in action, like brain implants controlling prosthetic arms.•
MIT’s David Autor has bet the under on the Second Digital Age destroying jobs, though you might not agree these days if you invested your life savings in the value of a taxi medallion. He believes the short- and mid-term fears of the rise of the machines are unfounded and have crossed into hysteria. Time will tell, but he does acknowledge that the shifting of McJobs from high school juniors to those approaching senior citizen age is a downward spiral.
Inconversationwith Social Europe Editor-in-Chief Henning Meyer, Autor explains how two very different nations, Norway and Saudi Arabia, have taken vastly different approaches to abundance, a wonderful thing not always evenly distributed. What’s left unspoken is that the latter state has hidden beneath its vast wealth aquiet epidemic of poverty.
An excerpt:
Take, for example, two countries: Norway and Saudi Arabia. Both of them have huge amounts of sovereign wealth. You could say it’s like they have a machine that creates wealth for them. It’s not a computer, it’s just oil, but that’s okay; it creates surplus. You could say, “In those countries, maybe no-one needs to do anything, because they just have so much money,” but Norway and Saudi Arabia have handled this completely differently.
In Saudi Arabia only a little bit more than 10% of the private-sector workforce is Saudi, and the rest is guest workers. That is a recipe for long-term economic and social problems. In Norway just about everybody works, men and women, much more than most other European countries, but they don’t work that many hours. They have kept themselves relevant, and engaged, and prosperous, and actually pretty happy if you believe the data.
So, there are ways to deal with the challenge of abundance, but it’s not a bad problem to have on the scale of social problems that one could face. That’s what we’re talking about here, it’s the problem of abundance – in other words, abundant productivity, abundance of capability to do things with machines that we used to require human labour and toil for.
There are challenges that come with that. One is the leisure challenge; the other is, of course, some skills become less relevant faster than others. The people who have clearly been affected by the thrust of technological change, over the last 30 years especially, have been low-educated adults whose skills are more closely replaceable by automation, not actually necessary in the lowest-skilled jobs, but many have been displaced from middle-skilled jobs.
If I’m a clerical worker or a production worker and that type of work no longer exists, I can still do table waiting, I can still do security, I can still do cleaning, and actually I’ll probably displace an even less-educated worker who wanted that job. For example, in the US we see very few teenagers anymore working at so-called ‘teen’ jobs; they’re held by adults.
It does create challenges and they are distributional challenges.•
In a New York Times editorial, neurobiologist Ji Xiaohua (who writes under the pen name Ji Shisan) sees the Google Glass as half full, believing jobs disappeared by new technologies and systems will be replaced by heretofore unimagined ones. Well, it’s always worked that way in the past.
The pivotal element is the timeframe of such advances. If we ease into a new normal over the rest of the century, we probably would be able to adjust, if in an often lurching manner. But what if, for example, driverless is perfected and widely implemented in the next two decades? That would mean an abrupt end of tens of millions of jobs in the U.S. alone. Degree of difficulty and mountains of bureaucracy may prevent us from finding out how we’d cope, but the scenario is possible.
An excerpt:
It seems likely that developed countries will undergo the most disruptive changes — in some economies, the service sector accounts for over 70% of gross domestic product. In developing countries, the impact on white-collar workers is unlikely to be immediate, due to slower adoption of AI technology, though such regions may experience a decline in outsourced manufacturing jobs with further advances in robotics. This sounds worrisome only because we can’t anticipate the new jobs that these technologies will bring and the new businesses that people will devise, as they always have. The future’s still bright, thanks to our creativity — our unique trait.
In July, an open letter from more than 1,000 AI and robotics researchers and other prominent figures — Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Steve Wozniak among them — warned against using AI in warfare and called for a ban on autonomous weapons. Even that technology is not as advanced as the sentient robots envisioned in the 2015 movies Ex Machina or Chappie. These movies imagine “strong” AI, or AI that is generalized, and able to carry out most human activities, as opposed to “weak” or narrow AI, which is task-specific. No one can say whether strong AI will be created, and if so, when. I asked some Chinese AI scientists about it, and given their responses, I may as well have been asking about the possibility of alien life.
That would be a world in which perhaps even child care jobs are threatened, but thank goodness we have many years before the dawn of strong AI-directed robots. In that future, we may not need to work very hard to support ourselves. The robots will be doing most of the labor, while we will have the time and leisure to explore what it is to be human.•
Clamor for Stan Smiths is such that Adidas is building a new automated factory to meet demand. The company hopes robots will help it respond more nimbly to rapidly changing tastes, but promises this people-less plant and others like it will merely complement existing suppliers. Of course, it’s really a harbinger of a worker-less direction. The jobs that would have been will never be, and then the ones that actually are will be gone. Why would it be any other way?
The new “Speedfactory” in the southern town of Ansbach near its Bavarian headquarters will start production in the first half of 2016 of a robot-made running shoe that combines a machine-knitted upper and springy “Boost” sole made from a bubble-filled polyurethane foam developed by BASF.
“An automated, decentralized and flexible manufacturing process… opens doors for us to be much closer to the market and to where our consumer is,” said Chief Executive Herbert Hainer.
Larger rival Nike is also investing heavily in new manufacturing methods. But it has not yet put a date on when it expects that to result in more U.S.-based production.
Adidas plans high volume production in the near future and will establish a global network of similar factories, although it expects them to complement existing suppliers rather than replace them as it seeks to keep growing fast.
“This is on top. It is a separate business model,” Gerd Manz, head of technology innovation at Adidas, told journalists.
Adidas currently makes about 600 million pairs of shoes and items of clothing and accessories a year. It plans to grow sales by almost half again by 2020.
The new factory will still use humans for parts of the assembly process, around 10 people will be on the ground for testing purposes during the pilot phase, but Adidas is working towards full automation.•
In addressing the Bank of England, the institution’s Chief Economist Andrew G Haldane tries to answer if it’s different this time in regard to technological unemployment. Haldane argues that even successful long-term technological transitions have been visited by “hollowing out” effects which have exacerbated wage gaps. As for the Second Machine Age, a time when AI may become highly competent at cognitive processing, the economist sees job value shifting from IQ to EQ, with emotional intelligence becoming the supreme skill. He further thinks wealth distribution of some sort may become necessary.
An excerpt that provides a thumbnail account of the tech job threat through history:
Certainly, the Ancient Civilisations of Greece and Rome wrestled with the problem of how to deal with the consequences of workers displaced by technological advance. The responses then included large-scale public work programmes and income support policies for the needy. Indeed, they have an eerie echo in many of today’s public policy debates.
The debate about technological unemployment really picked up pace in the 19th century, with the blossoming of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Then, it spilt over into the streets with worker protests and machine breaking, most notably by the Luddite movement. These fears about technological displacement gathered intellectual support from no less a figure than the classical economist, David Ricardo (Ricardo (1821)).
Yet the intellectual tide was by no means in one direction. It was accepted that technological advance could damage some workers in the short run. But its benefits to most workers in the longer-run were felt likely to dominate. In the middle of the 19th century, that view came to prominence through such figures as John Stuart Mill (Mill (1848)) and Karl Marx (Marx (1867)), two unlikely intellectual bedfellows.
The technology debate was re-stirred in the 1930s, at the time of mass unemployment during the Great Depression. In his essay, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”, Keynes predicted on-going technological advance and workers being replaced by machines (Keynes (1930)). Yet far from being a threat, Keynes viewed this as a huge opportunity. He predicted that, by 2030, the average working week would have shrunk to 15 hours. Technology would give birth to a new “leisure class”.
Debates on the relationship between jobs and technology stirred again during the 1960s in the US, during the 1970s in advanced economies, and again in the 1980s and 1990s in the UK and parts of Europe. In each case, the prompt was rising rates of unemployment. And in each case, this debate subsided as unemployment rates fell.
Moving into the 21st century, this debate has once again been re-kindled.•
