Urban Studies

You are currently browsing the archive for the Urban Studies category.

Old Print Article: Edison Celebrated At Life’s End, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1929/31)

August 26, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If you thought the public mourning over Steve Jobs’ death seemed outsize, just imagine what went on when Thomas Edison, whose contributions were much more foundational, was at life’s end.

While Edison didn’t create the first incandescent lamp (that was Sir Joseph Wilson Swan whom he eventually partnered with), his 1879 invention and business acumen enabled the brightness of modernity. It was this accomplishment among his many that was celebrated with “Light’s Golden Jubilee” in 1929, a live celebration of the Edison bulb that was broadcast on radio. President Hoover was there in person, and Albert Einstein, Madame Curie, Orville Wright and Will Rogers were a few guests who were patched in remotely. Edison reenacted his eureka moment and entire cities put on blinding light shows. It was a merry time that beat by just four days the arrival of the stock market crash that begat the Great Depression.

In 1931, when the inventor died, many American schools were closed and everything from lightbulbs to trains were turned off for a moment in Edison’s honor. A pair of Brooklyn Daily Eagle articles embedded below recall the elaborate expressions of gratitude.

____________________

From October 20, 1929:

From October 21, 1931:

Tags:

“You’re Going To See It All There”

August 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Capitalism run amok is a scary thing. It creates the horrid air quality and high cancer rates in China just as readily as it can create opportunities for the previously underprivileged.

In visiting a couple of the modern Gold Rush towns in fracking-friendly North Dakota, Henrietta Norton and Dan Dennison of the Guardian witnessed many of the social costs of the of rapid transformation of former farmland, but they also find a more complicated story in the wake of the oil price collapse, one in which striving Americans try to remake their fortunes in a tumultuous landscape during a time of economic uncertainty.

The opening:

“You’re going to see it all there – gang banging, sex trafficking, gambling, drugs, all the dark stuff, they’ve ruined the place,” says the man on the front desk at the Super 8 Motel where we stop for the night en route from Fargo.

The Bakken region has been at the heart of the latest oil boom since the early 2000s, when new technology enabled horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to access minerals found in the layers of rock beneath the ground. It occupies 200,000 square miles, and stretches from Montana and North Dakota across into Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada.

In the past five years, there has been a dramatic influx of people in North Dakota. Many towns have become synonymous with the term “man camp”, as tens of thousands of men have arrived in search of work in the rigs, or to lay the pipeline. There’s a joke amongst them: “There’s a woman behind every tree in North Dakota … it’s just that there aren’t any trees.”•

Tags: ,

“They Are Collecting Data From Both Workers And Customers”

August 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Prelude to layoffs in the media industry (and all others) is the influx of efficiency experts and consultants. Conde Nast employees are preparing for just such a plague of analysts, in which each of them will have to account for every hour of their day. Scary for them that they’ll be quantified, even if in such a quaint, old-fashioned way.

The new normal is, of course, to let algorithms measure us at work and, ultimately, at home. Human management in all levels of business is so godawful, plagued by pettiness, bias and incompetence, it’s valid to ask whether algorithms could really do a worse job. Maybe not. But you know when a supervisor is messing with you, and you can appeal to a sense of fairness, even if that’s sometimes futile. It’s really difficult to argue with computer code, which can certainly contain its own biases. In fact, they almost certainly do. Further, there’s no way current AI can truly judge the dynamics of office space, the little things that go into making a company successful or even just a pleasant place to be, something important to us if not our silicon brothers and sisters.

In a smart Aeon essay, Frank Pasquale wonders about the quiet insinuation into our lives of this next-level judge, jury and executioner. He has more hope than I do that these new tools of accountability will themselves be held accountable. An excerpt:

The infancy of the internet is over. As online spaces mature, Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, and other powerful corporations are setting the rules that govern competition among journalists, writers, coders, and e-commerce firms. Uber and Postmates and other platforms are adding a code layer to occupations like driving and service work. Cyberspace is no longer an escape from the ‘real world’. It is now a force governing it via algorithms: recipe-like sets of instructions to solve problems. From Google search to OkCupid matchmaking, software orders and weights hundreds of variables into clean, simple interfaces, taking us from query to solution. Complex mathematics govern such answers, but it is hidden from plain view, thanks either to secrecy imposed by law, or to complexity outsiders cannot unravel.

Algorithms are increasingly important because businesses rarely thought of as high tech have learned the lessons of the internet giants’ successes. Following the advice of Jeff Jarvis’s What Would Google Do, they are collecting data from both workers and customers, using algorithmic tools to make decisions, to sort the desirable from the disposable. Companies may be parsing your voice and credit record when you call them, to determine whether you match up to ‘ideal customer’ status, or are simply ‘waste’ who can be treated with disdain. Epagogix advises movie studios on what scripts to buy, based on how closely they match past, successful scripts. Even winemakers make algorithmic judgments, based on statistical analyses of the weather and other characteristics of good and bad vintage years.

For wines or films, the stakes are not terribly high. But when algorithms start affecting critical opportunities for employment, career advancement, health, credit and education, they deserve more scrutiny.•

Tags:

“Ultimately, Robots Would Drive A Social Revolution…But Not The One People Fear”

August 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

When the sanguine view is that only 7% of American jobs will disappear in the next ten years, we probably need to brace ourselves. Forrester Research reports that figure, saying some employment loss will be offset by the creation of new positions. Probably true enough, but there’s no guarantee low-skilled workers will be able to be retrained for them, and it’s not like 2025 is some important end date. In the longer run, the truth may end up somewhere between the Forrester number and the more troubling Oxford one of 47% jobs being susceptible to automation.

From Elizabeth Dwoskin at WSJ:

Before a robot takes your job, you’re likely to be working with one side-by-side.

That’s the takeaway from a new report by Forrester Research, Inc.

The report wades into a heady and long-running debate over whether, how, and to what extent will robots take over human jobs – a hotly discussed topic amid recent progress in robotics and artificial intelligence. Most experts agree that machines will depress the job market in coming decades, possibly by as much as 47%, according to a widely reported 2013 Oxford paper.

Forrester takes a less dire view. Examining workforces at large companies across industries, including Delta Airlines Inc., Whole Foods Market Inc., and Lowe’s Companies Inc. as well as many startups, analyst J.P. Gownder estimated that automation would erase 22.7 million US jobs by 2025 — 16% of today’s total. However, that decline would be offset somewhat by new jobs created, making for a net loss of 7%, or 9.1 million jobs.

Ultimately, robots would drive a social revolution, Mr. Gownder found, but not the one people fear.•

Tags: ,

“Uber Is Setting Up A New Self-Driving Car Project”

August 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Uber has shamelessly tried to reposition itself as a job creator when it actually destabilizes good jobs and CEO Travis Kalanick has previously been open about wanting to eliminate all its drivers. Perhaps that’s the future, but let’s be honest about it: Uber is good in many ways, but it isn’t good for Labor. So when the rideshare pretends for publicity purposes that the hiring of military veterans or minorities is central to its mission, it’s an outright lie.

From Russell Brandom at the Verge:

Uber is setting up a new self-driving car project at the University of Arizona, according to an email sent out today to university employees. The new project will focus on self-driving car technology, particularly the mapping and optics challenges involved in developing a fully autonomous vehicle. An official statement from Uber confirmed the news, saying, “we’ll work with some of the world’s leading experts in lens design at the University to improve the imagery we capture and use to build out mapping and safety features..” The project comes just months after a major hiring push for Uber’s Pittsburgh center, which many complained had hired so many experts away from the local robotics lab that they had effectively gutted competing projects.

According to a statement from Arizona’s governor, the partnership will focus on the optics systems necessary for mapping and safety, and will result in a number of Uber’s test vehicles taking up permanent residence in Arizona. Uber will donate $25,000 to the university’s College of Optical Sciences.…•

Tags:

A Brief Note From 1895 About Cowboys On Bikes

August 25, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the December 18, 1895 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“It Houses About 250,000 Individual Animals”

August 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

As Ben Crair reports in a colorful Businessweek piece, on a typical Saturday, about 12,000 visitors make their way to the Zoo Zajac, a ginormous German pet store that houses a quarter-million animals, many of which are exotic or unusual. It’s the Harrods of hamsters and hares.

Not everybody is there to buy; most just want to spend the day gawking in wonder. It’s a great free show, but the business would go belly up if it tried to exist by selling live animals–the real money is in accessories and merchandise. Being located in the European country with the lowest birthrate is a plus: Empty nests have room for birds and such.

The owner, Norbert Zajac, has been threatened and protested for selling puppies, but his greater concern is that a Chinese entrepreneur will eventually create a larger outlet than his, erasing him from the Guinness World Book of Records.

An excerpt:

Today, Zajac’s pet shop fills a 130,000-square-foot warehouse in an industrial part of Duisburg. It’s called Zoo Zajac, and it unfurls, like an airport terminal, along a horseshoe in the road. It’s more than twice the size of the White House and three times as large as a Whole Foods Market. It is, according to Guinness World Records, the biggest pet shop in the world. A visitor can spend as much as €9,000 ($10,000) on a two-toed sloth or as little as €1.19 on a box of crickets. She can buy armadillos, meerkats, coatis, and monkeys; or fill aquariums with jellyfish, tetras, shellfish, and piranhas. Zoo Zajac sells 50 species of tarantula and maintains one of the finest reptile collections in western Europe—better, even, than many zoos. It houses about 250,000 individual animals of 3,000 different species. A walk around the place is essentially an endurance sport, which is why Zajac, a heavy man with two bad knees, zips up and down the aisles on a black moped. The vehicle never leaves the premises and logs more than 2,500 miles a year.•

Tags: ,

Old Print Article: George Bernard Shaw, Early Anti-Vaxxer, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1948)

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

Add George Bernard Shaw to the list of history’s perplexing anti-vaxxers, people who somehow believe inoculations, which have done immense good for humanity, are dubious. A lifelong critic of vaccines, Shaw carried his ludicrous theories into his dotage, and, eventually, his grave. When he was 92, a medical official appealed to him to see if the playwright had experienced a late-life apostasy. No such luck. An article in the August 25, 1948 Brooklyn Daily Eagle told the story.

Tags: ,

“Current Laws Never Envisioned A Vehicle That Can Drive Itself”

August 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In what’s an otherwise very good Fast Company article about autonomous cars, Charlie Sorrel conveniently elides one really important fact: not all the kinks have yet been worked out of the driverless experience. While Google has done extensive testing on the vehicles, inclement weather is still poses a challenge for them and visual-recognition systems need further enhancement. So, yes, legislation and entrenched human behaviors are significant barriers to be overcome, but the machines themselves continue to need fine-tuning.

Still, it’s an interesting article, especially the section about the nature of future cities that await us should we perfect and accept this new normal. An excerpt:

Famously, Google’s self-driving cars have clocked up 1.7 million miles over six years, all without major incident.

“In more than a million miles of real-world testing, autonomous vehicles have been involved in around a dozen crashes (with no major injuries),” says John Nielsen, AAA’s Managing Director of Automotive Engineering and Repair, “all of which occurred when a human driver was in control, or the vehicle was struck by another car.”

Self-driving cars are already way better than people-piloted cars, so what’s the trouble?

“Current laws never envisioned a vehicle that can drive itself, and there are numerous liability issues that need to be ironed out,” Nielsen says. “If an autonomous vehicle gets in a collision, who is responsible? The “driver,” their insurance company, the automaker that built the vehicle, or the third-party supplier that provided the autonomous control systems?”

How will the laws adapt? And how will we adapt? People are hesitant to embrace change, but the change that driverless cars will bring to our cities and lifestyles is enormous. What will it take to get there?•

Tags: ,

“Imagine Such A Weapon Enhanced By An A.I. Technology”

August 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Jerry Kaplan, author of Humans Need Not Apply, thinks technology may make warfare safer (well, relatively). Perhaps, but that’s not the goal of all combatants. He uses the landmine as an example, arguing that a “smarter” explosive could be made to only detonate if enemy military happened across it. But any nation or rogue state using landmines does so precisely because of the terror that transcends the usual rules of engagement. They would want to use new tools to escalate that threat. The internationally sanctioned standards Kaplan hopes we attain will likely never be truly universal. As the implements of war grow cheaper, smaller and more out of control, that issue becomes more ominous.

In theory, robotized weapons could make war less lethal or far more so, but that will depend on the intentions of the users, and both scenarios will probably play out. 

From Kaplan in the New York Times:

Consider the lowly land mine. Those horrific and indiscriminate weapons detonate when stepped on, causing injury, death or damage to anyone or anything that happens upon them. They make a simple-minded “decision” whether to detonate by sensing their environment — and often continue to do so, long after the fighting has stopped.

Now imagine such a weapon enhanced by an A.I. technology less sophisticated than what is found in most smartphones. An inexpensive camera, in conjunction with other sensors, could discriminate among adults, children and animals; observe whether a person in its vicinity is wearing a uniform or carrying a weapon; or target only military vehicles, instead of civilian cars.

This would be a substantial improvement over the current state of the art, yet such a device would qualify as an offensive autonomous weapon of the sort the open letter proposes to ban.

Then there’s the question of whether a machine — say, an A.I.-enabled helicopter drone — might be more effective than a human at making targeting decisions. In the heat of battle, a soldier may be tempted to return fire indiscriminately, in part to save his or her own life. By contrast, a machine won’t grow impatient or scared, be swayed by prejudice or hate, willfully ignore orders or be motivated by an instinct for self-preservation.•

Tags:

“Free Love And The Psychedelic Style Made Good Copy”

August 23, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Image by Ted Streshinsky.

In his New Yorker piece about Tracy Daugherty’s Joan Didion biography, The Last Love Song, Louis Menand states that “‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ was not a very good piece of standard journalism.” Well, no. Nor was the Flying Burrito Brothers very good classical music, but each of those assessments is probably beside the point.

Menand claims Didion poorly contextualized the Hippie movement, but the early stages of his own article suffers from the same. He asserts the Flower Child craze and the thorny period that followed it was similar to the Beats of the previous decade, just weekend faddists lightly experimenting with drugs. But the counterculture of the late-1960s blossomed into a massive anti-war movement, a much larger-scale thing, and the youth culture’s societal impact wasn’t merely a creation of opportunistic, screaming journalism. Menand wants to prove this interpretation wrong, but he doesn’t do so in this piece. He offers a couple of “facts” of indeterminate source about that generation’s drug use, and leaves it at that. Not nearly good enough.

I admire Menand deeply (especially The Metaphysical Club) the way he does Didion, but I think her source material approaches the truth far more than this part of Menand’s critique does. Later on in the piece, he points out that Didion wasn’t emblematic of that epoch but someone unique and outside the mainstream, suggesting her grasp of the era was too idiosyncratic to resemble reality. But detachment doesn’t render someone incapable of understanding the moment. In fact, it’s often those very people who are best positioned to.

The final part of the article which focuses on how in the aftermath of her Haight-Ashbury reportage, Didion had a political awakening from her conservative California upbringing, though not an immediate or conventional one. This long passage is Menand’s strongest argument.

An excerpt:

“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is not a very good piece of standard journalism, though. Didion did no real interviewing or reporting. The hippies she tried to have conversations with said “Groovy” a lot and recycled flower-power clichés. The cops refused to talk to her. So did the Diggers, who ran a sort of hippie welfare agency in the Haight. The Diggers accused Didion of “media poisoning,” by which they meant coverage in the mainstream press designed to demonize the counterculture.

The Diggers were not wrong. The mainstream press (such as the places Didion wrote for, places like The Saturday Evening Post) was conflicted about the hippie phenomenon. It had journalistic sex appeal. Hippies were photogenic, free love and the psychedelic style made good copy, and the music was uncontroversially great. Around the time Didion was in San Francisco, the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and soon afterward the Monterey Pop Festival was held. D. A. Pennebaker’s film of the concert came out in 1968 and introduced many people to Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Ravi Shankar. Everybody loved Ravi Shankar.

Ravi Shankar did not use drugs, however. The drugs were the sketchy part of the story, LSD especially. People thought that LSD made teen-age girls jump off bridges. By the time Didion’s article came out, Time had run several stories about “the dangerous LSD craze.” And a lot of Didion’s piece is about LSD, people on acid saying “Wow” while their toddlers set fire to the living room. The cover of the Post was a photograph of a slightly sinister man, looking like a dealer, in a top hat and face paint—an evil Pied Piper. That photograph was what the Diggers meant by “media poisoning.”•

Tags: , , ,

A Brief Note From 1891 About Show Biz

August 22, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the September 29, 1891 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

Old Print Article: “Eyes Dry As Two Sons Visit Rosenbergs For ‘Last Time'” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1953)

August 21, 2015 in Books, Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ethel_Rosenberg_mugshot

In a time of hysteria, justice is only the first casualty. Human lives often follow.

It’s hard to make sense in retrospect of the 1950s trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, accused Soviet spies, because there was very little sensible about the Communist witch hunt of that era. Charged with a crime that “jeopardizes the lives of every man, woman and child in America,” the couple certainly didn’t get a fair hearing.

I thought of this agonizing piece of our history when E.L. Doctorow, author of The Book of Daniel, a fictionalized take on the topic, died recently. As the novel reminds, it was an especially painful period for many Americans because the two Rosenberg children, Michael and Robert (later adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol), were collateral damage. Embedded is a January 4 1953 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article which covers the boys visiting their parents six months before their execution.

Tags: , , ,

“Nonstate Actors And Rogue States Will Create Killer Robots”

August 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a Wall Street Journal article, Christopher Mims writes that killer robots aren’t inevitable, spoiling it for everyone. I mean, we need to be obliterated by really smart robots, the sooner, the better. Please.

Mims is right, of course, that banning research on Strong Ai is the wrong tack to take to ensure our future. This work is going to go ahead one way or another, so why not proceed, but with caution? He also points out that many of the scientists and technologists signing the Open Letter on Artificial Intelligence are engaged in creating AI of all sorts.

An excerpt about the bad news:

Imagine the following scenario: It’s 2025, and self-driving cars are widely available. Turning such a vehicle into a bomb isn’t much harder than it is to accomplish the same thing with a conventional vehicle today. And the same goes for drones of every scale and description.

It’s inevitable, say the experts I talked to, that nonstate actors and rogue states will create killer robots once the underpinnings of this technology become cheap and accessible, thanks to its commercial use.

“I look back 10 years, and who would have thought people would be using cellphone technology to detonate IEDs?” says retired Rear Admiral Matthew Klunder, who as chief of research spent four years heading up the Navy’s work on autonomous systems.

And what about killing machines driven by artificial intelligence, which could learn to make decisions themselves, a fear that recently bubbled to the surface in an open letter signed by the likes of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking. The letter warned that an arms race was “virtually inevitable” between major powers if they continue to develop these kinds of weapons.•

 

Tags: ,

“Tesla Could Transition To A Fully Autonomous Service By 2025”

August 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s a very big if, but if Tesla has an autonomous electric-car service on the roads by 2025, as Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas predicts, well, that would change everything. No one, though, can predict precisely what it would mean, except that it likely would be bad for Labor. Still, you have to bet it will take much longer to build such a global, robotic fleet.

From CNN Money:

Jonas believes that within the next 18 months, Tesla will share plans for an app-based, on-demand “mobility service.” Commercial introduction to this Uber-like service could occur in 2018, with the Model 3 serving as the backbone.

The first version of this service would be human-driven, just like today’s other ride hailing services. But then Tesla could move to a model where robots do virtually all the work even though real people sit at the driver’s seat just in case it’s required.

Jonas predicted Tesla could transition to a fully autonomous service by 2025, that it would have nearly 600,000 cars in its global fleet — or roughly the same size as Hertz today.

“The holy grail of shared mobility is replacing the mistake-prone, fatigued and expensive human driver with a robot that drives with greater accuracy and precision,” Jonas wrote.•

Tags:

“Sentient Beings Shouldn’t Harm Each Other”

August 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If gene-editing was utilized to keep animals from wanting to harm one another–no more predators, no more prey–you think there might be a few unintended consequences? Some, right? David Pearce, a philosopher and Transhumanist, wants to engineer all suffering out of existence, from the ecosystem to the human brain. Given enough time, I suppose anything is possible. Excerpts follow from two interviews with Pearce.

______________________

The opening of a 2014 i09 Q&A by George Dvorsky:

Question:

The idea of re-engineering the ecosystem such that it’s free from suffering is a radically ambitious project — one that’s been referred to as the “well intentioned lunacy” of a futurist. That said, it’s an idea rooted in history. From where do you draw your ideas and moral philosophy?

David Pearce:

Sentient beings shouldn’t harm each other. This utopian-sounding vision is ancient. Gautama Buddha said “May all that have life be delivered from suffering”. The Bible prophesies that the wolf and the lion shall lie down with the lamb. Today, Jains sweep the ground in front of their feet rather than unwittingly tread on an insect.

My own conceptual framework and ethics are secular — more Bentham than Buddha. I think we should use biotechnology to rewrite our genetic source code; recalibrate the hedonic treadmill; shut down factory farms and slaughterhouses; and systematically help sentient beings rather than harm them.

However, there is an obvious problem. On the face of it, the idea of a pain-free biosphere is ecologically illiterate. Secular and religious utopians tend to ignore the biology of obligate carnivores and the thermodynamics of a food chain. Feed a population of starving herbivores in winter and we’d trigger a population explosion and ecological collapse. Help carnivorous predators and we’d just cause more death and suffering to the herbivores they prey on. Richard Dawkins puts the bioconservative case quite bluntly: “It must be so.” Fortunately, this isn’t the case.•

______________________

From a 2007 interview by Ingo Niermann of the German edition of Vanity Fair:

Vanity Fair:

You claim that it is possible to eradicate all suffering on earth, whether physical or mental. When?

David Pearce: 

It will technically be possible to get rid of all suffering within a century or two. Its abolition would be practical only if it were agreed in the sense of something like the moon program or the human genome project – if there was a degree of social consensus. There are certainly technological obstacles, but they are dwarfed by the ethical-ideological ones. Many people’s negative reaction to the idea of a world without suffering comes from a fear that someone is going to be manipulating and controlling them. Partly, too, the abolition of suffering seems to make a mockery of one’s life projects. Most of us spend the greater part of our lives seeking happiness for ourself and others we care about. But we do so in extremely inefficient and in many cases self-defeating ways. This is a problem with existing human society. Even though we have made extraordinary progress technologically and medically, we aren’t any happier than our ancestors. Even if we could arrange society in the most utopian way imaginable, there would be some people who would still be depressed and anxious. There would be some people who would be consumed by jealousy or unhappy love affairs. No amount of environmental reform or manipulation is going to get rid of suffering. Only biotechnology can eradicate its neural substrates.

Vanity Fair: 

Statistics say that on the average people in Bangladesh are happier than in the Western World.

David Pearce: 

In Bangladesh, if you lose a child through malnourishment or disease it’s absolutely dreadful, just as it is if you lose a child here. But yes, statistically the hedonic set-point around which our lives fluctuate is pretty similar whether you live in London, Berlin or Bangladesh. If someone offers you a million dollars, for instance, you get a quick boost in the same way that (to use a more extreme example) crack-addicts do. Even though crack-addicts know that the drug is going to make them awfully miserable in the long-term, they still strive for their next hit. Here in the rich West, we know money won’t make us happy, but we strive for it compulsively.

If you take suffering seriously, the only way to eradicate it is by biological reprogramming. In the short run, this may involve superior designer drugs. In the long run, the only realistic way to abolish suffering is through genetic engineering.

Vanity Fair: 

There would be a very simple method to make all people happy straight away: by putting electrodes in their pleasure centres.

David Pearce: 

Wireheading is offensive to human dignity, to our conception of who we are. The real value of wireheading is that it serves as an existence-proof for people who are sceptical that it is possible to be extremely happy indefinitely. Wireheading shows there is no tolerance to pure pleasure. The normal process of inhibitory feedback doesn’t seem to kick in. We don’t understand why this is the case. When we do, it will be a very important discovery.

Vanity Fair: 

The anaesthetist Stuart Meloy discovered accidentally that by putting an electrode in a certain area of the spinal cord a woman could experience endless orgasms. But he had a hard time finding enough people volunteering for a trial.

David Pearce: 

I can’t see wireheading as an evolutionary stable solution. Wireheads will not want to have children, or want to look after their children.

Vanity Fair: 

But what is your idea of paradise engineering? What should an ever-happy life be like?

David Pearce: 

It is not a uniform happiness but a world with a motivational system based entirely on gradients of well-being. Think of your ideal fantasy. With the right biological substrates, the reality could be millions of times better.•

Tags: , ,

Old Print Article: “He Shot Twice To Kill Two,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1929)

August 17, 2015 in Books, Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Col. William “Billy” Breakenridge was tossed into the belly of the beast in 1879 when he became Assistant City Marshal of the hell-raising, often-lethal city of Tombstone, Arizona. Somehow he lived to tell the story, which he did quite literally nearly 50 years later, soon before his death, when he published his autobiography, Helldorado. Even this literary effort, far removed from the gun-slinging madness, caused conflict, as Wyatt Earp, portrayed in its pages as a low-down scoundrel, protested its verity. An article about the book was published in the June 12, 1929 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Tags: ,

“The Remaining Employees Would Just Need To Learn How To Operate The Machines”

August 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Like many in postwar America, Ray Kroc found it rather easy to make money. It’s different today for the franchise, struggling in a much more competitive global economy. The typical McDonalds restaurant has half the staff it did 50 years ago, and there’s a chance that number could go much lower, owing to automation.

How much of the human element can be sacrificed from the Hospitality Industry (restaurants, hotels, etc.)? Probably a good deal, enough to hollow out staffs peopled by low-skill workers as well as novices and retirees. The push for a national $15 minimum wage (which workers dearly need) has some wondering if the process will be hastened.

From Lydia DePillis at the Washington Post:

Of course, it’s possible to imagine all kinds of dramatic productivity enhancements. Persona ­Pizzeria’s [Harold] Miller predicts that drone delivery systems will eventually get rid of the need to come into a restaurant at all, for example. [Middleby Corp COO Dave] Brewer has a bold prediction: He thinks that all the automation working its way into restaurants could eventually cut staffing levels in half. The remaining employees would just need to learn how to operate the machines and fix things when they break.

“You don’t want a $15-an-hour person doing something that the person who makes $7 an hour can do,” Brewer said. “It’s not downgrading the employees. It’s that the employees become managers of a bunch of different systems. They’ll become smarter and smarter.”

The value of a human touch

Not everybody, however, agrees that machines could make that much of a dent in labor costs. Implementing new systems is expensive, and mistakes can be devastating. And for some concepts, it’s possible that the presence of employees is actually a restaurant’s competitive advantage. Compared with grocery stores and gas stations, many people come to restaurants exactly because they want some human interaction.•

____________________________

An industrial video from 50 years ago about AMF, which brought automation and computers to bowling, trying to make fast food even more inhuman.

Tags:

“I See A Time When Every Home Will Have A Drone”

August 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I can’t find a transcript of the recent address by NASA’s Parimal Kopardekar at an unmanned aerial systems conference at the Ames Research Center, but there’s some coverage of it by Elizabeth Weise at Stuff.co.nz. The aviation expert thinks we’ll all soon–very soon–have a drone to do our bidding, conducting research and running errands. Of course, once they’re ubiquitous, it will be easy to introduce mayhem into the system, easier than it is with the traditional postal system. That’s something we’ll have to work on.

Weise’s opening:

Forget getting the latest, greatest cell phone. The next indispensable tech tool may be a drone of your own. And daily life may never be the same.

“I see a time when every home will have a drone. You’re going to use a drone to do rooftop inspections. You’re going to be able to send a drone to Home Depot to get a screw driver,” said Parimal Kopardekar, manager of Nasa’s Safe Autonomous System Operations Project at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

And this won’t happen in some long-distant future. “This is in five or 10 years,” Kopardekar said.

Kopardekar gave a keynote talk at a conference on Unmanned Aerial Systems Traffic Management hosted by Nasa and the Silicon Valley Chapter of the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International last week.

“We can completely transform aviation. Quickly,” said Dave Vos, lead of Google’s secretive Project Wing, which is working with Nasa – as are some 100 other companies – on an air traffic control system for small, low-altitude drones.

An effective air traffic system – needed to keep the skies under 500 feet from turning into a demolition derby – will play a major role in turning drones from a plaything into an engine of the economy, one affecting package delivery, agriculture, hazardous waste oversight and more.•

Tags: , ,

“Many Workers Called It A River Of Intrigue And Scheming”

August 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Things deemed inconvenient if you are employed at Amazon: getting cancer, having a relative get cancer, miscarriages. If you are “selfish” enough to engage in these activities, you’ll be put on notice and likely reduced to tears. Jeff Bezos’ gigantic success has long been reported to be a ridiculously bruising and demanding workplace only a sociopath could love, a place that attracts the highest achievers and routinely lays them low. 

Tremendous job by Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld of the New York Times for the deepest profile yet of a company that’s the envy of the business world and a pretty horrible place to work. How can Amazon get away with such practices, a seeming social experiment that preys on workers psychologically? “Unfairness is not illegal,” is the way one lawyer in the piece puts it. The question is whether some of the tools used to quantify employees at the online retail behemoth will become common. Probably.

An excerpt about Elizabeth Willet, a former Army Captain who discovered a new kind of combat during her brief employment at Amazon:

Ms. Willet’s co-workers strafed her through the Anytime Feedback Tool, the widget in the company directory that allows employees to send praise or criticism about colleagues to management. (While bosses know who sends the comments, their identities are not typically shared with the subjects of the remarks.) Because team members are ranked, and those at the bottom eliminated every year, it is in everyone’s interest to outperform everyone else.

Craig Berman, an Amazon spokesman, said the tool was just another way to provide feedback, like sending an email or walking into a manager’s office. Most comments, he said, are positive.

However, many workers called it a river of intrigue and scheming. They described making quiet pacts with colleagues to bury the same person at once, or to praise one another lavishly. Many others, along with Ms. Willet, described feeling sabotaged by negative comments from unidentified colleagues with whom they could not argue. In some cases, the criticism was copied directly into their performance reviews — a move that Amy Michaels, the former Kindle manager, said that colleagues called “the full paste.”

Soon the tool, or something close, may be found in many more offices. Workday, a human resources software company, makes a similar product called Collaborative Anytime Feedback that promises to turn the annual performance review into a daily event. One of the early backers of Workday was Jeff Bezos, in one of his many investments. (He also owns The Washington Post.)

The rivalries at Amazon extend beyond behind-the-back comments. Employees say that the Bezos ideal, a meritocracy in which people and ideas compete and the best win, where co-workers challenge one another “even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting,” as the leadership principles note, has turned into a world of frequent combat.•

Tags: , , , , ,

A Note From 1869 About An Impractical Invention

August 16, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the May 19, 1869 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Any Of Us Could, Of Course, List The Differences Between The Two Cities Of Mirages”

August 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

How different would the world be if everyone could write as immaculately as Pico Iyer?

In a NYRB essay, he meditates on Las Vegas and Pyongyang, two vastly different symbolic cities that are each rooted in a denatured fantasy, both of them oases or mirages, depending on if your wager can conquer the long odds or not. In the former, you’ll likely get taken, and in the latter you might get killed. An excerpt:

Any of us could, of course, list the differences between the two cities of mirages. The one is a shameless efflorescence of capitalism that is, for its enemies, a glittering symbol of the decadence and emptiness of the West; the other the world’s last by-the-book, state-controlled monument to Stalinist brutality, whose forty-story blocks are consciously designed to cow citizens and remind them that it’s a privilege never to leave their hometowns without permission or to be executed simply for glimpsing a foreign newspaper.

The one is a sort of adolescent’s Girls Gone Wild vision of freedom run amok, in which visitors are encouraged to believe that you can do and be anything you like, for a night; the other is a terrifying model of order and regimentation in which even the woman who chatted me up on a showpiece subway train might well have been a prop set there by the government. While drunken frat boys get themselves photographed next to bikini-clad showgirls dressed as flamingoes on Las Vegas Boulevard, in Pyongyang every visitor—on every visit—is obliged to get up in jacket and tie, pass through a dust-cleaning machine, and bow before the embalmed figures of the nation’s two departed leaders. When Hunter Thompson wrote, “For the loser, Vegas is the meanest town on earth,” he hadn’t been to Pyongyang, where even the sometime-winners are abruptly sent before the firing squads.

Yet both cities are products of a mid-twentieth-century spirit that saw what power and profit could be found in constructing mass fantasies ab nihilo—in the deserts of the West, out of the rubble of the Korean War.•

Tags:

“It Is Raising Questions Of Privacy And Concerns About Potential Misuse”

August 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

As we witnessed with horror in Ferguson, the tools we create to fight wars overseas find their way back to the home front, free markets taking over where DARPA and other Defense departments trail off. Beyond guns and drones, surveillance equipment is the latest boomerang returning, and there are few rules in place to moderate their use, the technology, as usual, outstripping legislation. 

From Timothy Williams at the New York Times:

SAN DIEGO — Facial recognition software, which American military and intelligence agencies used for years in Iraq and Afghanistan to identify potential terrorists, is being eagerly adopted by dozens of police departments around the country to pursue drug dealers, prostitutes and other conventional criminal suspects. But because it is being used with few guidelines and with little oversight or public disclosure, it is raising questions of privacy and concerns about potential misuse.

Law enforcement officers say the technology is much faster than fingerprinting at identifying suspects, although it is unclear how much it is helping the police make arrests.

When Aaron Harvey was stopped by the police here in 2013 while driving near his grandmother’s house, an officer not only searched his car, he said, but also took his photograph and ran it through the software to try to confirm his identity and determine whether he had a criminal record.•

Tags:

“What Is The Greatest Social And Economic Risk Of The Coming Decade?”

August 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It amazes me that California’s water shortage seems to be viewed in this country as a regional problem for them, when it’s clearly a grave concern for us. As farmers in that state search deeper and deeper for the scarce liquid hoping to stave off personal disaster, we all near a collective one. If California dying of thirst isn’t a national emergency, I don’t know what is. Globally, the water crises may be the most serious threat to world peace. From the Spiegel report “World Without Water“:

“Water is the primary principle of all things,” the philosopher Thales of Miletus wrote in the 6th century BC. More than two-and-a-half thousand years later, on July 28, 2010, the United Nations felt it was necessary to define access to water as a human right. It was an act of desperation. The UN has not fallen so clearly short of any of its other millennium goals than the goal of cutting the number of people without this access in half by 2015.

The question is whether water is public property and a human right. Or is it ultimately a commodity, a consumer good and a financial investment?

The world’s business leaders and decision makers gathered at the annual meeting in snow-covered Davos, Switzerland in January to discuss the most pressing issues of the day. One of the questions was: What is the greatest social and economic risk of the coming decade? The selection of answers consisted of 28 risks, including wars, weapons of mass destruction and epidemics. The answer chosen by the world’s economic elite was: water crises.

Consumers have recognized for years that we need to reduce our consumption of petroleum. But very few people think about water as being scarce, even though it’s the resource of the future, more valuable than oil because it is irreplaceable. It also happens to be the source of all life.•

 

A Brief Note From 1911 About Hair Tonic

August 12, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the September 28, 1911 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

Tags:

« Older entries § Newer entries »