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“What Would ‘Radical Insourcing’ Mean For All The Developing Countries?”

June 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The developed world is having a time of it trying to transition into the Digital Age with its robots and automation and virtual stores. Europe is considering defining robot workers as “electronic persons” who must pay into social security and Paris is threatening tax measures to bring Amazon Prime to heel, hoping to prevent its neighborhood shops going the way of the city’s decimated brick-and-mortar bookstores. In the U.S., workers have gone missing in scary numbers, leading some to suspect the displacement has fueled our Baba Booey of an election cycle. In the long run, this changeover may lead to the end of scarcity, but in the short term it’s an economic, political and cultural problem.

The fallout may prove even more dire for countries in the developing world which relied on Industrialization’s hunger for cheap labor to create a path to relative prosperity. From Sarah O’Connor’s Financial Times article about “radical insourcing”:

Rich countries are beginning to see factories return to their shores — and they have the robots to thank.

Take Adidas. When Herbert Hainer, chief executive, joined the German sportswear company in 1987, factories were beginning to close in Germany and move to China. This month, he announced Adidas would bring some shoe production back to Germany for the first time in three decades thanks to a highly automated factory in Bavaria. “I find it almost uncanny how things have come full circle,” he said.

It is important to keep some perspective. Adidas made 301m shoes last year; the two new factories (the other will be in the US) will produce about 1m. Still, you can see how this trend could take off. …

Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University in the US, believes robots and 3D printers could create a world of “radical insourcing” where developed countries no longer need to outsource production to countries where wages are low.

“Why should a wealthy nation buy from a poorer exporter when it can automate and produce similar goods at home without incurring high labour costs?” he asked in a recent paper.

This would not do much for jobs in developed countries, admittedly. The new Adidas factory will have about 160 staff, a fraction of the number required to make the same number of shoes in Asia. But set aside the rich world for a moment. What would “radical insourcing” mean for all the developing countries that saw manufacturing exports as their path to prosperity?•

Tags: Sarah O'Connor, Tyler Cowen

“You Will Be Able To Escape Your Cramped Apartment In The City For A Bigger Spread Farther Away”

June 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Self-driving cars will be perfected…someday. When he’s not choosing the political system for Mars, Elon Musk predicts they’ll arrive by 2020 or so. Maybe, or perhaps it will take significantly longer, but I think the important point is that it’s pretty sure now that this future will eventually materialize.

My instinct is that having fleets of driverless cars won’t encourage grater sprawl, won’t lead to Suburbs 2.0. Cities are still desired, with working-class folks hanging on for dear life to living in NYC and SF, places which long ago priced out many of them. It’s odd to see this stubborn refusal to be pushed from the crowd in an age in which so many people just sit at home binge-watching near-TV shows regardless of how fancy their address may be.

In fact, autonomous vehicles that you don’t need to own (that no one really needs to own) will likely make urban living less tedious as well as less expensive. There will be no more parking spots to pursue, less rush-hour traffic (supposedly) and a much cleaner environment.

The Internet itself was supposed to empty out cities, allowing people to telecommute and have millions more products than a brick-and-mortar mall could hold delivered quickly to their doorsteps, regardless of where they laid their WELCOME mat. Cities have instead just become more densely populated in the last 20 years.

In his latest Wall Street Journal column, Christopher Mims makes a compelling argument to the contrary, believing driverless cars becoming a going concern would encourage us to fan out and set our self-driving mowers to work on our newly acquired lawns.

His opening:

Imagine a world in which hardly anyone owns a car. Instead, most people subscribe to a service for self-driving cars, probably a mashup of the current players in the space, which include Google, Uber, Lyft, Apple, Chrysler, Volkswagen, Tesla, BMW, Toyota, General Motors, Ford and others.

Call this hypothetical service Applewagen, or Tyft or, what the heck, Goober. The service is great. You whip out your circa-2025 smartwatch, which has all but replaced your phone, bark a command and a self-driving car appears, from a fleet circulating nearby. Maybe there are other people in the car, headed in your direction. Don’t worry, they are friendly. They have four-star ratings just as you do, and anyway they are too absorbed in their augmented-reality headsets to talk to you.

Here is the weirdest thing about this hypothetical future: where you live. Nearly everyone who has studied the subject believes these self-driving fleets will be significantly cheaper than owning a car, which sits idle roughly 95% of the time. With the savings, you will be able to escape your cramped apartment in the city for a bigger spread farther away, offering more peace and quiet, and better schools for the children.•

Tags: Christopher Mims

“Everything That We Formerly Electrified We Will Now ‘Cognitize'”

June 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Quite regularly, articles announce AI and/or the Internet of Things are close to arriving in a writ-large way, and they’re all more or less correct. It’s happening soon, provided you don’t define soon too rigidly. The latter, which will be both boon and bane, seems something we could do right now if we could agree on standards. The former is improving rapidly in so-called Weak AI, which will remove human hands from many of Labor’s wheels. The more complicated Strong AI (the conscious kind) isn’t likely upon us despite the hype. Even before it has the chance to be realized, however, machine intelligence will bring serious peril along with unprecedented promise.

In his latest Washington Post editorial, Vivek Wadhwa sees the Google Glass half full, believing we’re on the brink of major AI advances. He makes a sound if hopeful argument, though he utilizes a quote in his opening from an old Brad Darrach Life article that has had its accuracy questioned. Wadhwa writes “Despite Marvin Minsky’s 1970 prediction that “in from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being,’ we still consider that a feat of science fiction.” Minsky immediately and vehemently denied making this statement to Darrach, and as John Markoff wrote in his recent book, Machines of Loving Grace, other important points of the piece were disputed. Wadhwa’s larger idea that big predictions have been too ambitious in the past is true, though this particular example seems flawed.

An excerpt:

AI has applications in every area in which data are processed and decisions required. Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly likened AI to electricity: a cheap, reliable, industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything. He said that it “will enliven inert objects, much as electricity did more than a century ago. Everything that we formerly electrified we will now ‘cognitize.’ This new utilitarian AI will also augment us individually as people (deepening our memory, speeding our recognition) and collectively as a species. There is almost nothing we can think of that cannot be made new, different, or interesting by infusing it with some extra IQ. In fact, the business plans of the next 10,000 start-ups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI This is a big deal, and now it’s here.”

AI will soon be everywhere. Businesses are infusing AI into their products and helping them analyze the vast amounts of data they are gathering. Google, Amazon, and Apple are working on voice assistants for our homes that manage our lights, order our food, and schedule our meetings. Robotic assistants such as Rosie from The Jetsons and R2-D2 of Star Wars are about a decade away.

Do we need to be worried about the runaway “artificial general intelligence” that goes out of control and takes over the world? Yes — but perhaps not for another 15 or 20 years. There are justified fears that rather than being told what to learn and complementing our capabilities, AIs will start learning everything there is to learn and know far more than we do. Though some people, such as futurist Ray Kurzweil, see us using AI to augment our capabilities and evolve together, others, such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, fear that AI will usurp us. We really don’t know where all this will go.

What is certain is that AI is here and making amazing things possible.•

Tags: Vivek Wadhwa

“The Contemporary World Is Not Very Well Built For A Large Chunk Of Males”

June 19, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

One of the San Bernardino shooters was a woman and extremism has attracted its brides, sure, but statistics show that violence (mass shootings included) is largely a male problem in the United States–and everywhere else.

Religion may have informed the self-loathing behind the horrific Orlando massacre, but the downward spiral of too many American men transcends faith. It’s a masculinity issue, a deep insecurity, ignited by mental illness or extremist politics or any other gas can laying around. A scary number of us have brains that just aren’t operating properly.

The actual crime statistics nationally aren’t at all bad, at least not when compared to past eras, but the unstable among us are really unstable, with large-scale violent acts now mind-numbingly common.

Were men on the fringes of the country always like this, with the easy access to automatic weapons the only difference? Or is there some fundamental shift in the world that some are unable to assimilate or accept, whether it be rooted in economics or patriarchy or otherwise?

Even before Orlando, economist Tyler Cowen worried about this new abnormal, the aspects expressed in violence and in in myriad other ways, thinking it may be a rebellion by “brutes” against cultures becoming nicer and more feminized. Perhaps that has something to do with it.

The opening of last month’s Marginal Revolution post “What in the Hell Is Going On?“:

Donald Trump may get the nuclear suitcase, a cranky “park bench” socialist took Hillary Clinton to the wire, many countries are becoming less free, and the neo-Nazi party came very close to assuming power in Austria. I could list more such events.

Haven’t you, like I, wondered what is up? What the hell is going on?

I don’t know, but let me tell you my (highly uncertain) default hypothesis. I don’t see decisive evidence for it, but it is a kind of “first blast” attempt to fit the basic facts while remaining within the realm of reason.

The contemporary world is not very well built for a large chunk of males. The nature of current service jobs, coddled class time and homework-intensive schooling, a feminized culture allergic to most forms of violence, post-feminist gender relations, and egalitarian semi-cosmopolitanism just don’t sit well with many…what shall I call them? Brutes?

Quite simply, there are many people who don’t like it when the world becomes nicer. They do less well with nice. And they respond by in turn behaving less nicely, if only in their voting behavior and perhaps their internet harassment as well.•

Tags: Tyler Cowen

A Brief Note From 1899 About Childish Fanatics

June 19, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the March 26, 1899 New York Times:

In New York City about 1832, a period of “great awakening” that begat Mormonism and many other sects, among them one in Kentucky, whose members, in order to win heaven by making themselves as little children, used to crawl on their hands and knees in church, play marbles, trundle hoops, and otherwise manifest their infantile madness.•

“The Design Is Brilliant”

June 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

On the face of it, there doesn’t seem to be many dumber uses for $100 million than trying to develop flying cars, which, even if doable, would end up being hybrids of bad cars and worse planes. Recent reports saying that Larry Page had spent that sum on realizing somebody else’s 20th-century sic-fi dream seemed odd.

The truth is something substantially different, according to an article by Mike Elgan of Computerworld: The Google cofounder is actually working on affordable, auto-piloting, environmentally friendly consumer aircrafts. That could potentially be far more useful, even if it’s also a vision from a different era, when there were predictions of almost every rooftop being a landing strip and screaming headlines that promised all Americans would own their own airplanes by the 1960s.

From Elgan:

Zee.Aero’s first aircraft is a strange creature. It has wings at the very back of the fuselage that curve way down at the edges, as well as two rear propellers that provide forward thrust. Two additional wings grace the very front of the plane. Here’s the strange part: Between the front and back and on either side of the fuselage are four small propellers on each side. Combined with the two at the back, the Zee.Aero plane has 10 propellers. These propellers aren’t powered from a central engine. Each propeller has its own independent electric motor and controller system.

Page reportedly wants the Zee.Aero’s plane to be “downmarket” — an affordable aircraft for ordinary people. Astonishingly, everything we know about Zee.Aero suggests that it’s making all the right decisions.

The design is brilliant. A consumer airplane for the masses absolutely requires electric power, and for two reasons. The first is safety: If one or two of the propellers fails, for whatever reason, the rest can safely continue to operate. The second reason is that if consumer airplanes are to be flying around in large quantities near or over residential areas, they have to be relatively quiet.

Zee.Aero has a handful of patents for the innovative multiple propeller system, battery technology and for the airplane itself. One patent says that in “an alternative embodiment, aircraft 100 is an unmanned vehicle that is capable of flight without a pilot or passengers” and that “embodiments without passengers have additional control systems that provide directional control inputs in place of a pilot, either through a ground link or through a predetermined flight path trajectory.

Zee.Aero’s prototypes are already flying at a nearby airport.•

Tags: Larry Page, Mike Elgan

Old Print Article: “Russians Cut Lenin’s Brain Into 15,000 Pieces To Find Secret Of His Greatness,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1929)

June 16, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Vladimir Lenin’s corpse has had a perplexing postscript, but one particular body part, his brain, may have had the most fascinating “afterlife” of all, as the leader’s adoring people sliced it and diced it, hoping to find the source of the genius that propelled the Bolshevik Revolution. In an article in the February 24, 1929 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the paper underestimated the pieces the organ had been pulverized into, numbering it at 15,000, when it was actually more than twice that many.

“In All Likelihood, Only One Will Be Left Standing”

June 15, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ridesharing offers advantages over taxis while destabilizing secure jobs. Like so much of the modern economy, it’s a victory for consumers at the expense of workers. The endgame for cabbies may be Lyft providing reservations in advance, something Uber has now emulated. The funny thing is the two services are locked in a death battle, each hoping to become a monopoly, and if Uber already had the field to itself, it never would have been able to ape its competitor’s innovation. That scenario would be bad for both workers and consumers.

From the Economist:

One of the things that appeals to business travellers about Lyft is the ability to book cars in advance, a service the firm unveiled earlier this year. With Uber, on the other hand, clients can only book a ride as and when they want it, and must hope that there is a driver nearby (although there nearly always is). That explains why Uber announced last week that it will follow Lyft’s example and allow riders to book cars between 30 minutes and 30 days in advance.

All things being equal, that development will sound the death knell for taxis; expect cabs’ share of the business market to diminish to almost nothing in the coming years. That will leave only one battle worth watching: that between Uber and Lyft. In all likelihood, only one will be left standing. As Om Malik, a startup-watcher, pointed out in the New Yorker earlier this year, the importance of network effects means that most competition in Silicon Valley now leads towards one monopolistic winner.•

“I Believe We Are Going To See A Tremendous Increase In Demand For Public Transit”

June 15, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In Adrienne LaFrance’s latest smart Atlantic piece on technology, the writer suggest Honolulu as the ideal place for Google to import its driverless technology, since the Oahu city has optimal weather conditions and terrible traffic. Embedded in the latter part of the article is a counterintuitive contention that makes sense: The rise of the autonomous car may lead to a greater, not lesser, demand for public transit, even if the eternal search for parking spots is removed from the equation. The excerpt:

If driverless cars are going to take off anywhere, Oahu seems like a strong candidate for early adoption. That’s still no guarantee.

“I believe that driverless taxis are going to induce a large-scale abandonment of car-ownership in urban areas over the next two to three decades,” said Shem Lawlor, the director of Clean Transportation at the Blue Planet Foundation in Honolulu. “However, since the pricing will still not be as cheap as walking, biking, or transit—and since it’s logistically impossible for driverless taxi services to ever move a sizable percentage of peak-hour traffic volume, I believe we are going to see a tremendous increase in demand for public transit, biking infrastructure and walkable neighborhoods.”•

Tags: Adrienne LaFrance, Shem Lawlor

“Taxation Will Be Optional”

June 14, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If Silicon Valley Libertarians collectively vomited over a three-square-mile space, the result might resemble the blueprint for Liberland, a planned micronation of 400,000 that aims to be situated on a legally disputed dot of land between Serbia and Croatia. The not-yet-a-nation is the brainchild of right-wing Czech politician Vít Jedlička, who enlisted architects and economists to focus on sustainability and optional tariffs. The experimental mini-country, which will almost definitely never come to fruition, is committed to being a car-less, algae-powered tax haven. If on the off chance it actually was realized to some degree, it would likely be a clusterfuck.

Excerpts from two articles follow, the first from Adele Peters new Fastcoexist piece, the latter from Daniel Nolan’s 2015 Guardian report.

To save space (the whole country is only three square miles) but allow the city to grow, neighborhoods are stacked in layers.

“I envisioned an intimate-scale city,” says Raya Ani, director of RAW-NYC, the architecture firm that created the winning design in response to a competition hosted by Liberland. Rather than build massive skyscrapers to house the 400,000 people who hope to live in the new city, each layer includes smaller, densely arranged buildings that allow sunlight to reach the street.

The underside of each platform is covered with algae—a genetically engineered version that doesn’t require sunlight to grow, and that can be converted into power. “The horizontal surface layer seemed to be the perfect home to grow algae that could power the city,” she says.

The design also includes solar power, and a waste-to-energy system that converts any organic waste to biogas for cooking. Other trash is incinerated to create electricity.

In the design, the neighborhoods are clustered around transit, with libraries, sports arenas, and other public areas no more than a 10-minute walk from public transit. The city is also covered with bike and pedestrian paths—with zero cars.

“It’s a very walkable city where you could reach any point at a reasonable time whether you use the train or you walk,” says Ani.•

From the Guardian:

In the week since Liberland announced its creation and invited prospective residents to join the project, they have received about 200,000 citizenship applications – one every three seconds – from almost every country in the world.

Prospective citizens are also offering Liberland their expertise in areas from solar power and telecoms to town planning and coin minting. “There is a spontaneous ordering taking place,” Jedlicka says. “People have planned the whole city in three days and others really want to move in and invest … what seemed like a dream now really looks possible.”

Liberland’s only stipulations are that applicants respect individual rights, opinions and private property, and have no criminal record or Nazi or Communist party background.

Jedlicka says: “The model citizen of Liberland would be [American founding father] Thomas Jefferson, which is why we established the country on his birthday. Citizens will be able to pursue happiness and this is the place where we can make this happen.”

Crucial to this flourishing, he believes, is fiscal policy. Liberland is the dream of a man whose earlier membership of the Czech Civic Democratic party and current loyalty to the Free Citizens party puts him firmly on the right. Staunchly anti-EU, Jedlicka says he has “pretty close relations” with the Swiss People’s party and “will meet with British politicians to discuss Nigel Farage’s plans to leave the EU”.

“Taxation will be optional and people will only finance specific development projects,” says Jedlicka. “We have to see how the foreign ministries react and we need to explain to them the kind of prosperity we can bring to the region. It will bring in money from all over the world: not only to Liberland, which would be a tax haven, but to the whole area. We could turn this area into a Monaco, Liechtenstein or Hong Kong.•

Tags: Adele Peters, Daniel Nolan, Vít Jedlička

“That City Will Be Run Not By Politicians But By A Central Computer That Will Distribute Resources As Needed”

June 14, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Jacque Fresco, one of those fascinating people who walks through life building a world inside his head, hoping it eventually influences the wider one, is now into his second century of life. A futurist and designer who’s focused much of his work on sustainable living, technology and automation, Fresco is the brains behind the Venus Project, which encourages a post-money, post-scarcity, post-politician utopia. He’s clearly a template for many of today’s Silicon Valley aspiring game-changers.

Caroline Winter of Bloomberg Businessweek traveled to Middle-of-Nowhere, Florida (pop: Fresco + girlfriend and collaborator Roxanne Meadows), to write “The 100-Year-Old Man Who Lives in the Future,” a smart portrait of the visionary after ten decades of reimagining the world according to his own specifications. He doesn’t think the road to a computer-governed utopia will be smooth, however. As Winter writes: “Once modern life gets truly hard, Fresco believes there will be a revolution that will clear the way for the Venus Project to be built. ‘There will be a lot of people getting shot, including me,’ he says wryly.”

An excerpt from her story is followed by one from a 1985 Sun Sentinel profile by Scott Eyman, and two videos, the first about Project Venus and the second a 1974 interview conducted by a pre-suspenders Larry King.

From Bloomberg:

To reach the Venus Project Research Center, a utopian compound created by a 100-year-old futurist, drive through vast stretches of fields, orchards, and dirt roads in south-central Florida. There’s little cell phone service and no signs of other humans on the way to a white gate. A sandy path flanked by lush tropical trees leads to a cluster of white dome-like structures. Inside one sits Jacque Fresco, hunched on a couch within his own model of an ideal society.

Fresco, now hard of hearing, gave me a nod when I visited in March. “Thank you for driving all this way,” said Roxanne Meadows, 67, a former portrait artist and Fresco’s longtime girlfriend and collaborator. A dozen people had turned out that day to see the secluded 21-acre property, including Venus Project devotees from as far away as Australia.

Fresco’s 100th birthday bash, held days earlier at a convention center in Fort Myers, drew more than 600 fans. For them, these rounded retro structures in the wilds of Florida are a hint of what could be: a master plan for a City of the Future without money, a place where all needs are met by technology. That city, Fresco says, will be run not by politicians but by a central computer that will distribute resources as needed. It’s a vision he’s been working on for most of his life. “A machine doesn’t have emotions,” Fresco likes to say. “It’s not susceptible to corruption.” Social engineering and favorable living circumstances will ensure that people act responsibly toward one another.•

From the Sun Sentinel:

You can hear the glorious, smoothly humming hydraulic future in Jacque Fresco`s eager voice, see it in the eye in your mind. Cities and their inhabitants thrive under the sea. Houses are heated by pipes laid beneath highways that conduit the gathered asphalt heat into private residences. Grain is stored in the natural refrigerator of the polar regions.

Fossil fuels have been abandoned, as solar power runs everything from your air-conditioning — if you need it in houses that are properly built and insulated, which you probably won`t — to your backyard barbecue, where a mirror and two pyrex reflectors cook both sides of the meat at the same time. And when something goes wrong with your car, two handles are turned, the entire engine unit pulls out, a courtesy engine is plugged in and you`re back on the road while the garage works to find the problem.

Welcome to the future, or at least Jacque Fresco`s vision of it. It all seems eminently attainable . . . until you open your eyes and look around. What you see are 22 acres with four organically flowing domed structures — two of which are finished, one of which is furnished — a little lake with a baby alligator sunning himself by the water`s edge, and a landscaped path leading back among 400-year-old cypress trees. It is here, on this quiet patch of land in Venus, Fla., that Jacque Fresco and his companion, Roxanne Meadows, are constructing a prototype of the possible.

“I tried walking around with a briefcase, and selling myself,” says the peppery Fresco, a vigorous and muscular 69. “And I found that people think you`re an idiot if you don`t have anything to show them, if all you have are ideas and a vision. All right. I`ll show them something.”

Welcome to the world of Jacque Fresco, social conceptualist and inventor, one of those people who create something tangible where before there existed only that most intangible of intangibles: an idea.•

Tags: Caroline Winter

Old Print Article: Mussolini As A “Fascinating Character,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1925)

June 13, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

It almost never ends well for a demagogue nor for the demagogue’s people. Fascists are merely vulgar clowns until they’re in a position to do grave damage.

Was reading a passage from a 1925 article that ran in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle which begins this way: “Benito Mussolini is a fascinating character.” The writer wonders why Il Duce’s insane utterings demand rapt attention when others making similar statements would be jeered from the stage. That thought, of course, brings to mind the odious campaign of Donald Trump, a deeply wounded man who works a room like Torquemada as a Reality TV host.

James Baker has asserted he’s unafraid of a Trump Presidency, our checks and balances there to restrain his worst impulses. But a sick, authoritarian mind even scribbling in the margins of the Constitution could wreak havoc. The scariest part of the report below is that it argued the Italian dictator was already in steep decline, but just think how much suffering he caused before ultimately meeting the business end of a meat hook.

Tags: Benito Mussolini, Donald Trump

“I’m Torn”

June 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The swarm intelligence system known as UNU, which recently did a Reddit AMA about politics, returned to conduct one about futurism. Human extinction, Brexit, driverless cars, Mars colonization, technological unemployment and marijuana legalization were among the topics. The question isn’t whether all of the answers are correct–they wont be–but whether such systems can get to the point where they outperform groups of humans educated on a topic. A few exchanges below.

Question:

What are the chances that humanity will go extinct before we become an interplanetary species?

UNU:

UNU SAYS: “1%”

COMMENTARY: UNU expressed a high level of faith in humanity. Or, maybe he expects us to reach Mars pretty soon. Either way, it seems we will reach another planet before we wipe ourselves out.

Question:

What will be the average human life-span in 2050?

UNU:

UNU SAYS: “98 years old”

COMMENTARY: UNU expressed high conviction on this point.

It’s worth pointing out that people who live to 98 years old in 2050 will have lived most of their life under current technology. It would be interesting to ask UNU what the lifespan of people BORN in 2050 would be.

Question:

How long until we can hail autonomous taxis?

UNU:

UNU says: 7 years.

Let’s check back on this one in 2023.

Question:

Will Space X hit their target to put people on Mars in 2025?

UNU:

UNU SAYS: “I’m Torn”

COMMENTARY: UNU was highly conflicted on this question. In fact, it took two tries to reach an answer.

Question:

Will the UK vote to leave the EU in the upcoming referendum

UNU:

UNU SAYS: “I DOUBT IT”

COMMENTARY: UNU expressed high certainty around this answer, but did not go for the stronger answers of “I don’t believe”

Question:

Do you think robots will take our jobs?

UNU:

UNU SAYS: “Yes”

COMMENTARY: UNU was surprisingly certain about this fact.

Question:

When will universal basic income be implemented in Europe?

UNU:

UNU says: 5 years

Europe is way ahead of the US on this one, according to UNU.

Question:

The first permanent settlement on Mars will be in __ years?

UNU:

UNU SAYS: “60 YEARS”

Question:

Is the first person to live 200 years already born?

UNU:

UNU says: totally disagree

Note: except for Peter Thiel, of course.

Question:

How many years until cannabis is federally legal in the US?

UNU:

UNU SAYS: Cannabis will be federally legal in the US within 10 years.

Question:

When will artificial/lab grown meat be as common as traditional meat?

UNU:

UNU SAYS: 25 YEARS

Question:

Will artificial intelligence eventually overthrow the human race as the dominant lifeforms on Earth? Yes, no, possibly, or unlikely?

UNU:

UNU says: i doubt it

Let’s call that “unlikely?”•

“Nobody Believed Him”

June 10, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Sometimes mental illness wears the trappings of the era in which it’s experienced. Mike Jay has written beautifully in the last couple of years about such occurrences attending the burial of Napoleon Bonaparte and the current rise of surveillance and Reality TV. The latter is something of a Truman Show syndrome, in which sick people believe they’re being observed, that they’re being followed. To a degree, they’re right, we all are under much greater technological scrutiny now, though these folks have a paranoia which can drive such concerns into crippling obsessions.

Because we’re all connected now, the “besieged” have found one another online, banning together as “targeted individuals” who’ve been marked by the government (or some other group entity) for observation, harassment and mind control. In “United States of Paranoia: They See Gangs of Stalkers,” Mike McPhate of the New York Times has written one of the best and most troubling articles of the year. It clearly demonstrates that the dream of endless information offering lucidity has been dashed for a surprising amount of people, that the inundation of data has served to confuse rather than clarify. These shaky citizens resemble those with alien abduction stories, except they seem to have been “shanghaied” by the sweep of history. The opening:

Nobody believed him. His family told him to get help. But Timothy Trespas, an out-of-work recording engineer in his early 40s, was sure he was being stalked, and not by just one person, but dozens of them.

He would see the operatives, he said, disguised as ordinary people, lurking around his Midtown Manhattan neighborhood. Sometimes they bumped into him and whispered nonsense into his ear, he said.

“Now you see how it works,” they would say.

At first, Mr. Trespas wondered if it was all in his head. Then he encountered a large community of like-minded people on the internet who call themselves “targeted individuals,” or T.I.s, who described going through precisely the same thing.

The group was organized around the conviction that its members are victims of a sprawling conspiracy to harass thousands of everyday Americans with mind-control weapons and armies of so-called gang stalkers. The goal, as one gang-stalking website put it, is “to destroy every aspect of a targeted individual’s life.”

A growing tribe of troubled minds

Mental health professionals say the narrative has taken hold among a group of people experiencing psychotic symptoms that have troubled the human mind since time immemorial. Except now victims are connecting on the internet, organizing and defying medical explanations for what’s happening to them.•

Tags: Mike McPhate, Timothy Trespas

“The Idea Of The Underground City Has Become More Controversial”

June 10, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Earlier in the week, I published a post about science writer Fred Hapgood’s 2003 prediction that automated drilling would lead to the rapid development of underground cities and even a global subway system. It proved to be a dream deferred, at the very least.

A few decades earlier, when American cities were marked by blight and in desperate need of renewal, underground real estate was often theorized as an important piece of the puzzle, a haven for pedestrians in climate-controlled environments. Montreal took advantage of this underutilized resource thanks largely to the subterranean visions of urban planner Vincent Ponte, but most cities failed to capitalize.

In “What Happened to the Dream of Underground Cities?” Ernie Smith of Vice “Motherboard” wonders what went wrong. An excerpt:

A funny thing happened since Ponte had his time in the sun. To put it simply, the idea of the underground city has become more controversial. Now, urban leaders see them as an antiseptic way to draw in suburbanites, rather than a way to give people flavor of the actual city. They’re almost seen as a way to get around the city, rather than to dive in. That may have been a good idea when downtowns were seen as scary by tourists, but during an era when high-rise lofts are common and bars are hipper than ever? Not so much.

In fact, one of Ponte’s project cities, Dallas, has spent years pushing back against the urban planning work he put in 45 years ago. Onetime Dallas city mayor Laura Miller, speaking to the New York Times in a 2005 interview, didn’t mince words.

”If I could take a cement mixer and pour cement in and clog up the tunnels, I would do it today,” Miller told the Times, the very newspaper where Ponte made his argument for underground cities 38 years earlier. ”It was the worst urban planning decision that Dallas has ever made. They thought it was hip and groovy to create an underground community, but it was a death knell.”

The city has since de-emphasized the tunnels in its marketing, and in 2011, a report on the city’s future development referred to Ponte’s grand idea as “a sterile, unexciting environment that draws life from streets above.”

Unfortunate for Dallas, but for Montreal, the urban area under the surface remains lively—it has become one of the things Montreal is known for, a tourist must-see with four stars on TripAdvisor. Like most other big Canadian cities, Toronto has one as well, built up around the same time as Montreal’s, but it’s used by a third as many people as Montreal’s is on a daily basis.

Outside of Montreal, at least, urban renewal came not from the massive network of tunnels, but from a massive change in perception. We like our downtowns these days.•

Tags: Ernie Smith

“The Last Stop On This Train Is The Ultimate Megaproject: A Supersonic World Subway”

June 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

When I posted a passage from science writer Fred Hapgood’s overly ambitious 1990 Omni piece which had Venter-esque visions of micro-organisms doing our bidding, it reminded me of another of his articles. In 2003, he wrote in Wired that he believed automation coming to underground drilling technology would soon make entire subterranean cities, even a supersonic global subway, possible.

Well, a lot of things are possible, but that doesn’t mean they’re politically attractive, financially feasible or even desired. But it’s still a fun read. An excerpt:

Among the first wave of tunneling projects under way are subway extensions, highway re-siting projects, and petrochemical repositories. These will pave the way to further standardization and automation needed for transnational, Chunnel-type digs. The East – which has never been shy about big engineering – will likely plow down first, linking Japan and Korea, China and Japan, and Taiwan and China. The West might follow by tunneling under the Gibraltar and Bering straits.

The last stop on this train is the ultimate TBM megaproject: a supersonic world subway. Maglev trains running through depressurized tunnels are the logical successor to airplanes, at least between large cities. Magnetic levitation would eliminate rolling resistance, and the vacuum does the same to air resistance. The trains could “fly” down the tracks at many times the speed of the Concorde – without creating a sonic boom. In a couple of decades, we may see a world where major international cities are within a few hours’ commute of each other.

By 2005, some under-urban highway projects will start to include parking lots. Where there is parking, malls will spring up. By 2008, developers might offer these retailers subterranean warehouse space, then offices, and, finally, full-fledged industrial parks. By 2013, we could see some hotels, probably marketed to international commuters and located just below the financial centers of Tokyo, London, and New York.•

Tags: Fred Hapgood

“McDonald’s Have Become De-Facto Community Centers”

June 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

McDonald’s food is junk that will harm your health, but it’s the lesser of two evils for those dealing with low income, homelessness, poverty, lonely senior years and other tears in the fabric of American society. In an excellent Guardian article, Chris Arnade writes of struggling citizens drawn to these fast food places by the cheap coffee, free wi-fi and a generous policy that allows them to sit for hours. They find kindred souls, hold Bible studies, check headlines, etc. To many, McDonald’s arches represent an unsavory, low-rent remnant of the last century, but to these people left behind in a transitioning country, it looks like brick-and-mortar salvation in an increasingly virtual world. It’s not mentioned in the article, but public libraries have become the same kind of haven in our Digital Age, a place to gather for those who have nowhere else to go.

The opening:

In the morning of their wedding, Omar and Betty shared a breakfast of egg McMuffins at a small McDonald’s table, dressed in their finest clothes. Before driving to a Houston courthouse to be married, they walked into the attached child’s play area and joked about one day bringing their kids there.

Few understand celebrating at a McDonald’s, but for Omar and Betty it made sense. They don’t have a lot of money, and McDonald’s is part of their life. It is that way in many poor and middle-income neighborhoods, where McDonald’s have become de-facto community centers and reflections of the surrounding neighborhood.

When many lower-income Americans are feeling isolated by the deadening uniformity of things, by the emptiness of many jobs, by the media, they still yearn for physical social networks. They are not doing this by going to government-run community service centers. They are not always doing this by utilizing the endless array of well-intentioned not-for-profit outreach programs. They are doing this on their own, organically across the country, in McDonald’s.•

Tags: Chris Arnade

A Brief Note From 1942 About A House Call

June 7, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the June 20, 1942 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“They Replaced Horses, Didn’t They?”

June 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There’s no easy answer if it’s different this time than during the Industrial Revolution and the tens of millions of jobs that are automated into oblivion aren’t replaced by equal or better positions. Most often the best possible solution offered is that we need an education system that enables adult Americans to transition into higher-skilled positions and instills children with greater critical thinking that will allow for a more flexible mindset as industries rapidly rise and fall. That would be wonderful, but I think it ignores reality to some extent. If the new normal is abnormal by the standards we’ve come to expect, then, regardless of schooling, some–perhaps many, too many–will be left behind. What becomes of them? What becomes of us?

In a New York Times piece, Eduardo Porter, who doesn’t support Universal Basic Income, tries to think through this potentially scary scenario in which scarcity isn’t a problem but distribution is a big one. The opening:

They replaced horses, didn’t they? That’s how the late, great economist Wassily Leontief responded 35 years ago to those who argued technology would never really replace people’s work.

Horses hung around in the labor force for quite some time after they were first challenged by “modern” communications technologies like the telegraph and the railroad, hauling stuff and people around farms and cities. But when the internal combustion engine came along, horses — as a critical component of the world economy — were history.

Cutting horses’ oat rations might have delayed their replacement by tractors, but it wouldn’t have stopped it. All that was left to do, for those who cared for 20 million newly unemployed horses, was to put them out to pasture.

“Had horses had an opportunity to vote and join the Republican or Democratic Party,” Leontief wrote, they might have been able to get “the necessary appropriation from Congress.”

Most economists still reject Professor Leontief’s analogy, but the conventional economic consensus is starting to fray. The productivity figures may not reflect it yet but new technology does seem more fundamentally disruptive than technologies of the past. Robots are learning on their own. Self-driving cars seem just a few regulations away from our city streets.

As the idea sinks in that humans as workhorses might also be on the way out, what happens if the job market stops doing the job of providing a living wage for hundreds of millions of people? How will the economy spread money around, so people can afford to pay the rent?•

Old Print Article: The Fall Of May Otis Blackburn’s Los Angeles Cult, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1929)

June 6, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

May Otis Blackburn may not have been the first Los Angeles cult leader, but she did do her voodoo several decades before Krishna Venta, L. Ron Hubbard or Charles Manson. Unsurprisingly, it did not end well.

“The Divine Order of the Royal Arms of the Great Eleven” (aka “The Blackburn Cult”) was established in 1922, after the “Queen and High Priestess” claimed the angels Gabriel and Michael were communicating divine messages to her and her daughter, Ruth Wieland Rizzio. They were assigned to write a book dictated to them by the angels, the publication of which somehow leading to the apocalypse.

Before the decade was through, the group was linked to animal sacrifices, sex scandals, an attempted resurrection of a deceased teen girl, poisonings and a follower being baked to death in a brick oven. When Blackburn was found guilty of grand larceny in 1930, the cult lost its agency. An article in the October 11, 1929 Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported on the grisly undertakings.

Tags: May Otis Blackburn, Ruth Wieland Rizzio.

“So Who Is Going To Lose Their Job?”

June 5, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Despite the fears of really brilliant people like Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines aren’t likely to enslave or eradicate humans anytime soon. It’s not impossible that eventually brains can be put into machines (and vice versa), but none of us will be alive to see that day. Hopefully our descendants will make good decisions.

The more pressing problem is that Weak AI has a good chance over the next few decades to eliminate millions of solid jobs, and then what do all the truckers, cabbies, delivery drivers, front-desk people, bellhops, fast-food workers and others do? It’s been said that we should retrain them for positions that are more analytical and cerebral, but that’s easier said than done. Some will be left behind by the sweep of history. How many?

In Brian Fung’s smart Washington Post piece “Everything You Think You Know About AI Is Wrong,” the writer tries to identify the challenges ahead and the course we can take to meet them. An excerpt:

So who is going to lose their job?

Partly because we’re better at designing these limited AI systems, some experts predict that high-skilled workers will adapt to the technology as a tool, while lower-skill jobs are the ones that will see the most disruption. When the Obama administration studied the issue, it found that as many as 80 percent of jobs currently paying less than $20 an hour might someday be replaced by AI.

“That’s over a long period of time, and it’s not like you’re going to lose 80 percent of jobs and not reemploy those people,” Jason Furman, a senior economic advisor to President Obama, said in an interview. “But [even] if you lose 80 percent of jobs and reemploy 90 percent or 95 percent of those people, it’s still a big jump up in the structural number not working. So I think it poses a real distributional challenge.”

Policymakers will need to come up with inventive ways to meet this looming jobs problem. But the same estimates also hint at a way out: Higher-earning jobs stand to be less negatively affected by automation. Compared to the low-wage jobs, roughly a third of those who earn between $20 and $40 an hour are expected to fall out of work due to robots, according to Furman. And only a sliver of high-paying jobs, about 5 percent, may be subject to robot replacement.

Those numbers might look very different if researchers were truly on the brink of creating sentient AI that can really do all the same things a human can. In this hypothetical scenario, even high-skilled workers might have more reason to fear. But the fact that so much of our AI research right now appears to favor narrow forms of artificial intelligence at least suggests we could be doing a lot worse.•

Tags: Brian Fung

A Note From 1911 About A Very Brief Marriage

June 3, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the May 28, 1911 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

Tags: Anna Phillips, Edwin Phillips, James Richardson

“A Few Places Will Let Ems Go Wild”

June 2, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Currently marching to the end of everything else I’m reading so I can start Robin Hanson’s The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth, which sounds like remarkable science fiction, though the author insists it’s science–or will be soon enough.

“Em” refers to brain emulations, computer reproductions of top-notch human brains which will provide gray matter for robots. These ems will then grow that intelligence far beyond our abilities. It’s will be something like Moore’s Law for intellect. We can use this method to produce inexpensive armies of ems to handle all the work, with Hanson predicting the world economy could continually increase at a heretofore impossible pace. Or maybe the ems will grow resentful and harm us. Perhaps a little of both.

Here’s a fuller description from the book’s website:

Many think the first truly smart robots will be brain emulations or ems. Scan a human brain, then run a model with the same connections on a fast computer, and you have a robot brain, but recognizably human.

Train an em to do some job and copy it a million times: an army of workers is at your disposal. When they can be made cheaply, within perhaps a century, ems will displace humans in most jobs. In this new economic era, the world economy may double in size every few weeks.•

The writer has a timeframe of roughly a century for when his outré vision can be realized. You know me: I always bet the way, way over when it comes to such dizzying visions.

Hanson just conducted an AMA at Reddit on this topic and others. A few exchanges follow.

Question:

I understand how brain emulations could make things cheaper by flooding labour markets, but they will still only be as smart as the brains they were emulated from. Won’t scientific progress still be constrained by the upper limits of human intellect? Is there any way for brain emulations to get smarter than humans? I am aware that they could think faster than humans because they run on computers.

In your talks about brain emulations, you say that biological humans will have to buy assets to make money. Since the economy will grow very quickly with lots of emulated workers, it won’t take very many assets to generate a decent income. You also say that brain emulations will not earn very much money because there will be so many of them that wages will fall to the cost of utilities. Why don’t brain emulations buy assets like humans are supposed to in this future economy, and where are humans supposed to get the wealth to buy assets from since they won’t be able to work?

Robin Hanson:

Eventually, ems will find ways to make their brains smarter. But I’m not sure that will make much difference.

Humans need to buy assets before they lose their ability to earn wages. After is too late.

Question:

If and when Em like entities come into existence do you think society will embrace them be against them and actively try to stop them or will it be a case of “ready or not here I come” and they will force themselves upon us as their emergence will be like evolution?

Robin Hanson:

Most places will probably try to go slow, with commissions, reports, small trials, etc. A few places will let ems go wild, perhaps just due to neglect. Those few places can quickly grow to dominate the world economy. This may induce conflict, but eventually places allowing ems will win. Ems may resent and even retaliate against the places that tried to prevent them or hold them back.

Question:

So in this new economy humans wont actually be getting anymore “stuff” as all the growth will come from demand created by these Em?

Robin Hanson:

Humans will own a big % of the em economy, and use it to buy lots of “stuff” from ems.

Question:

Will we live in a utopia in 100 years?

Robin Hanson:

I don’t think humans are capable of seeing any world, no matter how nice, as “utopia”. We raise our standards and compete for relative status.•

Tags: Robin Hanson

A Brief Note From 1883 About A Cannibal

May 31, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the April 13, 1883 New York Times:

Denver, Col.–The trial of Alfred G. Packer, charged with having murdered his five companions in San Juan County in 1872, in progress at Lake City for the last few days, was concluded to-night, and the case was given to the jury. The evidence shows that a party of six was organized in Southern Utah in 1872 to prospect in Southern Colorado. While in the vicinity of the present site of Lake City a blinding storm came on and the party lost their way. Their food gave out and for days they lived on rose buds. The men became desperate, and some of them went crazy. While his companions were in this condition Packer deliberately fell upon and butchered the whole party, and for several weeks lived on flesh cut from their bodies. During the trial yesterday Packer calmly made a statement taking two hours for its delivery. He related the experience of the party from their setting out from Utah, closing with the most sickening details of the murder and his subsequent feasting on human flesh. He claims that the killing was done in self-defense. The evidence showed that each member of the party, except Packer, possessed quite a large amount of money, upon which Packer has since been living. After nine years wandering he was captured a few weeks ago near Fort Fetterman, Wyoming. While the evidence is entirely circumstantial, yet it is deemed conclusive. A verdict of guilty is confidently expected.•

“The City Will Talk To Us More”

May 31, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Cities are pretty much cities throughout history, and tomorrow’s urban centers won’t differ so greatly physically from today’s in the more obvious ways. There will probably be some new infrastructure to try to deal with rising sea levels and occasionally something like phone booths will come and go, but the buildings will still look like buildings.

The real changes will be more subtle, so quiet you won’t even hear a hum. In the same way driverless cars will carry on “conversations” with one another and all types of gadgets in the cloud, the Internet of Things will allow a city’s skyscrapers and furniture to communicate with its inhabitants and collect endless information about them. Much of that new reality will be beneficial, helping to ease traffic and lower crime, but it will also place all of us inside of a machine with no opt-out button.

In a Curbed interview conducted by Patrick Sissons, MIT’s Carlo Ratti, author of The City of Tomorrow, discusses smart buildings, among other topics. An excerpt:

Question:

One of the topics you discuss in your book is this idea of buildings being more reactive and smart. How interactive will architecture get, and how will it change the look of our cities?

Carlo Ratti:

I think it’ll be very interactive. But overall, the interaction will happen through people; our lives will change a lot, but public space won’t. A city from Roman times doesn’t look terribly different from a city today. The shift is more about how our human life and interactions in the city will change, not the shapes of buildings. That’s where we’ll see a lot of transformation.

Question:

It’s not really as much about infrastructure changes, but how we interact with the infrastructure.

Carlo Ratti:

Yes. The city will talk to us more. We’ll have new buildings, new materials, and more interactive facades, but overall, the key components will remain the same. Buildings are about horizontal floors for living, vertical walls for partitions, facades that protect us from the outside, and windows that give us a view of the outside. They were like that a hundred years ago, and they’ll be there tomorrow and in the future.

Question:

What are some great examples of these new types of buildings and architecture?

Carlo Ratti:

The project we did at the World Expo in Zaragoza, Spain, the Digital Water Pavilion, offered a vision of digital, fluid architecture. Think about a park; there are so many things you can do, between interactive lights and more responsive technology. This coming technological change is like the internet. That transformed so many parts of our lives, and the upcoming Internet of Things will do the same to our environment and cities. For instance, the city of Melbourne successfully developed an “internet of trees,” which allows residents to visualize and map urban forests.. It’s a platform, like an open street map for trees, that will help them grow, monitor, and measure, and help people take care of their parks, and compare them against those of other cities.•

Tags: Carlo Ratti, Patrick Sissons

Urban Studies