Good history from the New York Times about the convergence of cars and computers, initially the unintended consequence of the battle over airbags.
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From Douglas Coupland’s latest Financial Times column, a bit about the way we live now, with brains not yet literally plugged into hardware though they might as well be:
“It is incontestable that we are collectively rebuilding our neural structures. For example, notice how, when telling people about an idea to be researched later, the goal is to rattle off search words as a means of establishing future locatability. ‘When you get home just google MOTHER TERESA, TOPLESS and LAWSUIT. You’ll find what I’m talking about right away.’
The way we’re collectively redefining searchability is a reflection of the way we now collectively file away information in our brains – or the way we don’t. One of the great joys of life in 2014 is that we’re all getting much better at knowing what it is we no longer need to know. Freedom from memorisation! Having said this, there’s a part of me that misses being able to bullshit people at dinner parties without having an iPad coming out before dessert to sink an urban legend or debunk a stretched truth.
I wonder if nostalgia for the 20th-century brain is a waste of time. WhiIe I may sometimes miss my pre-internet brain, I certainly don’t want it back.
Everyone’s quick to dump on new technologies but how quickly we forget a two-hour trek in the 1990s to the local library to find something as mundane as a pet supply store phone number in the Yellow Pages in a city 20 miles away.”
Tags: Douglas Coupland
Tums tablets – $10 (Lower East Side)
This is a weird ad. But I bought some TUMS not too long ago because I was having upset stomach problems, hoping this would help. It didn’t really work for me, no idea why. So I have no need for this. Got it for $17, it’s yours for $10. I probably took maybe 4 at most out of the bottle. I’ll be more than happy to let you sample before you buy so you know it’s the real deal.
I know I mock the Huffington Post gleefully and regularly for its insipid attempts to titillate, but it’s not so much the semi-profane fluff that bothers me. What the featherweight news organization did that truly angered me was to publish the anti-vaccination bullshit of that dangerous dimwit Jenny McCarthy. To compound the mistake, once her theories were even more thoroughly debunked, the site distanced itself from the poor judgement without acknowledging any wrongdoing. Not good. While I’m glad that the Huffington Post no longer traffics in this harmful stupidity, it still doesn’t seem to have learned its lesson. Two recent hires: medical blogger Dr. Phil, who is not a doctor, and national security writer Donte Stallworth, who is a 9/11 Truther. Perhaps the site will soon be pretending it never abetted these two geniuses.
Gary Baum of the Hollywood Reporter just did an AMA at Reddit in regards to his reporting about the anti-inoculation issue. A few exchanges follow.
__________________________
Question:
Why is the anti-vaccine movement so strong and how can we educate them?
Gary Baum:
Parents are naturally concerned about their children. They are looking for answers about whatever ails them, and vaccinations — based in a science that is not easy to understand, and backed by corporations which make a profit from their sale — are a ripe target for suspicion.
The anti-vaccine movement has thrived in an environment where respect for science has ebbed. The best way to educate those who are vaccine-skeptical is to remind them of their shared obligation to protect public health. Too often they say it’s simply their personal decision. In the case of immunization, no decision is strictly a personal one. It’s always part of a collective social contract.
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Question:
Why have we allowed celebrities to poison the minds of so many dim witted parents?
Gary Baum:
In every community, there are those who speak louder than others, without any greater purchase on the truth. Mommy-and-me groups, online discussion boards and other intimate social spaces are where the larger vaccine battle is waged on a day-to-day basis.
As for celebrities, whether well or ill-informed, it’s true that due to their fame, they possess a particularly loud voice. Which is why Jenny McCarthy has had a tremendous and undeniable influence on public health, people on both sides of this issue agree. (In fact, it’s one of the few things that they do agree on.)
__________________________
Question:
At what point does a government decide that vaccinations as a public health matter trump the rights of the parents who refuse to vaccinate their children?
Gary Baum:
If children are actively infected and at risk of infecting others — and it’s a life-threatening and easily communicable disease, as with tuberculosis or ebola — governments such as the United States can take action. But more often, here in America, individuals’ personal right to do what they wish with their own body, and particularly their kids’ bodies, is held sacrosanct. It’s a complex, thorny issue.•
Tags: Gary Baum, Jenny McCarthy
Unless the numbers are being completely misread or fudged, there’s been a quiet and growing suicide crisis in the U.S. over the last 15 years, afflicting middle-aged people, especially men. More Americans now die by their own hand than in traffic accidents. Getting to the root of that problem is a massive undertaking, but what if there were a simple salve? It’s thought that upping the amount of lithium present in drinking water might significantly decrease the suicide level. But if wing-nuts like the John Birch Society fought mass fluoridation–a campaign spoofed perfectly as a subplot by Stanley Kubrick in Dr. Strangelove–you can imagine the political barriers to such a program. From Anna Fels at the New York Times:
“THE idea of putting a mind-altering drug in the drinking water is the stuff of sci-fi, terrorist plots and totalitarian governments. Considering the outcry that occurred when putting fluoride in the water was first proposed, one can only imagine the furor that would ensue if such a thing were ever suggested.
The debate, however, is moot. It’s a done deal. Mother Nature has already put a psychotropic drug in the drinking water, and that drug is lithium. Although this fact has been largely ignored for over half a century, it appears to have important medical implications.
Lithium is a naturally occurring element, not a molecule like most medications, and it is present in the United States, depending on the geographic area, at concentrations that can range widely, from undetectable to around .170 milligrams per liter. This amount is less than a thousandth of the minimum daily dose given for bipolar disorders and for depression that doesn’t respond to antidepressants. Although it seems strange that the microscopic amounts of lithium found in groundwater could have any substantial medical impact, the more scientists look for such effects, the more they seem to discover. Evidence is slowly accumulating that relatively tiny doses of lithium can have beneficial effects. They appear to decrease suicide rates significantly and may even promote brain health and improve mood.
Yet despite the studies demonstrating the benefits of relatively high natural lithium levels present in the drinking water of certain communities, few seem to be aware of its potential.”
Tags: Anna Fels
If you have a treadmill desk, you should not have a treadmill desk. It is ridiculous. But there’s no doubt that the traditional office space as a personalized bunker has changed, whether you’re working on an unfinished door propped up by two filing cabinets, something resembling a spaceship or no desk at all. From Shane Hickey at the Guardian:
“This move away from the office desk as the main place of productivity is one of the developments in workplace design which has seen the real estate departments of large corporations realise that packing employees tightly into spaces will not necessarily result in greater productivity, according to Philip Tidd from the design and architecture firm Gensler.
‘The idea that the desk is a unit of productivity is changing very, very rapidly. Your productivity is not measured by the amount of time you sit behind a thing called a desk. It is what you do. It is about your output,’ he said. ‘It is about getting the balance of specs right so it is not just get everybody in the open, have open plan but have the right balance of spaces where you can get in a zone of concentration.’
This requirement for varied features in office buildings is cemented by the longer hours of many workers, notably in the technology sector, and as a result new offices are now seen to need different areas for working and letting off steam, a tactic most notably championed by Google.
The new White Collar Factory, which is to open beside east London’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’ and designed by AHMM, will have a running track for the companies that take up space there.”
Tags: Philip Tidd, Shane Hickey
From the March 21, 1866 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“An auction sale of hair of young girls who have taken the veil since 1810, was recently held at a convent near Paris, when 800 pounds of hair were sold for $6,000.”
Stephen Cave, who tackles big subjects, has written a Financial Times piece about that elusive thing called happiness, which we’re supposed to pursue, though it wasn’t always so. An excerpt:
“For most of the past 2,000 years of western culture, happiness on earth was considered neither achievable nor desirable. ‘Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life,’ said God to Adam, in an early example of expectations management. But Christians also saw this misery as the key to the life-to-come: ‘Whosoever doth not bear his cross,’ said Jesus, ‘cannot be my disciple.’ And if the days before painkillers weren’t sorrowful enough already, the faithful would flail their backs to hasten their way to beatitude.
So how did happiness change from being a sin to our foremost earthly goal? The answer in short is that western culture retained the promise of paradise but brought it forward from the next world into this one. The process took a few hundred years, beginning with the Renaissance and the Reformation. But it owes most to the thinkers of the Enlightenment, who combined the Christian belief in progress towards a happier state with a new faith in science and reason. In doing so, they wrote the script to which we still speak: a doctrine that says we can have heaven here and now if only we try hard enough.
Today this message is reinforced by an advertising industry that surrounds us with images of people made gloriously happy by a new car or soft drink; images that are simultaneously a promise and a rebuke to those of us who are feeling only fair-to-middling. Our belief that we can – indeed, should – be much happier is not based on evidence that such a state is possible but, instead, on a narrative of progress, entitlement and consumerism.”
Tags: Stephen Cave
Genetic enhancement in humans isn’t likely around the corner, but it will be pretty impossible to avoid its path at some point in the future even if you disagree with it, the way the online world is currently almost unavoidable. A brief passage from Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence about how designer babies may sway people, even countries, to fall in line:
“Once the example has been set, and the results start to show, holdouts will have strong incentives to follow suit. Nations would face the prospect of becoming cognitive backwaters and losing out in economic, scientific, military, and prestige contests with competitors that embrace the new human enhancement technologies. Individuals within a society would see places at elite schools being filled with genetically selected children (who may also on average be prettier, healthier, and more conscientious), and will want their own offspring to have the same advantages. There is some chance that a large attitudinal shift could take place over a relatively short time, perhaps in as little as a decade, once the technology is proven to work and to provide a substantial benefit.”
Tags: Nick Bostrom
I’m not surprised we’re anonymously assholes online, but I am a little stunned by how much of this virtual ill behavior has ricocheted back into the offline world. The line is blurring. The opening of Andrew Leonard’s Salon interview with OkCupid founder Christian Rudder, whose new book, Dataclysm, paints a grim picture of how his customers behave in regards to race, sex and other matters, when searching for a mate online:
“Question:
So men are sexists, and we’re all racist?
Christian Rudder:
The more you look at the data, the more it does confirm the cynics’ intuition about humanity. People online are free to act out their worst impulses with very little incentive to act out their best. I guess it just goes to show how politeness or propriety keeps us decent human beings. Offline, society actually has a very good effect on behavior in a very large sense.
Question:
That raises an uncomfortable question: Does our wholesale move online undermine how society traditionally keeps us in line?
Christian Rudder:
I’m not qualified to give a real opinion on where society as a whole is headed, but I think when you look at stuff like rage storms on Twitter, or even the thing that happened yesterday — the celebrity nude photos being leaked — you see that there are definitely some disgusting impulses that the Internet can gratify instantaneously. In the same way Cool Ranch Doritos gratify certain taste receptors that are probably not very good for my digestive tract, things like Twitter or Reddit or even OkCupid gratify our tastes in ways that should probably best be left unsated.
Question:
How does that make you feel as a researcher? Have you become more cynical as a result of what you’ve learned by watching how people behave on OkCupid?
Christian Rudder:
I definitely have a certain amount of ambivalence about the Internet generally and what we do at OkCupid. OkCupid does a lot of great things. We do find people love, we do create marriage and children and happiness in a pure sense, in a way that, say, Amazon does not. But there is a downside: In the process of finding that love or sex or whatever they’re looking for, people are able to be more judgmental. It’s a fraught thing. I can see the good and the bad in all this, but where it all comes out in the end, I’m not sure. I think the existence of the Internet is a good thing, but I do wish people exercised more humanity in using these tools.”
Tags: Andrew Leonard, Christian Rudder
In a WSJ essay, Peter Thiel expands on what he said in his recent AMA, that “capitalism and competition are opposites.” Thiel, who approves of monopolies, doesn’t believe they only benefit individual businesses but broader society as well, as they have the capital to care about workers and ethics and the environment. I disagree strongly, but I’ll acknowledge that we’ve all certainly benefited from Bell Labs, the moonshot division of a government-backed monopoly. An excerpt:
To an economist, every monopoly looks the same, whether it deviously eliminates rivals, secures a license from the state or innovates its way to the top. I’m not interested in illegal bullies or government favorites: By “monopoly,” I mean the kind of company that is so good at what it does that no other firm can offer a close substitute. Google is a good example of a company that went from 0 to 1: It hasn’t competed in search since the early 2000s, when it definitively distanced itself from Microsoft and Yahoo!
Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away. The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: If you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.
How much of the world is actually monopolistic? How much is truly competitive? It is hard to say because our common conversation about these matters is so confused. To the outside observer, all businesses can seem reasonably alike, so it is easy to perceive only small differences between them. But the reality is much more binary than that. There is an enormous difference between perfect competition and monopoly, and most businesses are much closer to one extreme than we commonly realize.
The confusion comes from a universal bias for describing market conditions in self-serving ways: Both monopolists and competitors are incentivized to bend the truth.•
Tags: Peter Thiel
Predictive traffic patterns is one of the logical extensions of our relentless data collection, as are highway lanes that can redraw themselves as need dictates. The former can be done now, while the latter will have to wait for an infrastructure overhaul. From Kristine Lofgren at Inhabitat:
“In most parts of the country, traffic planners review data every few years to adjust traffic signals and improve traffic movement. But thanks to several advanced signal system across the US, that’s all changing. For instance, in Utah, traffic planners can actually adjust a signal in almost real-time because of a system made up of a network of closed-circuit cameras connected to a fiberoptic network. The system allows traffic planners to adjust signals in as few as 30 seconds to react to changing traffic needs.
By some estimates, investing in signaling pays back at a ratio of 40 to 1. That’s something you don’t see with other traffic management strategies like building new roads. Even better, efficient traffic flow means fewer emissions. But Utah’s system can be expensive to install and run. To make the system feasible and affordable for any city, Stephen Smith at Carnegie Mellon University in New Jersey is working on an automated system (Utah’s is monitored by live people) that uses radar censors and cameras so that it can adjust real-time.”
Why can’t I find a stoner to smoke me and my girl out? – 29 (New Rochelle)
So tired of being sober. My girl don’t smoke but I do. I am looking for a stoner to smoke me out. I am a very easy guy to get along with. I am open minded. Looking for women really but guys can respond as well. My girl lets me mess around with other girls as well. I have pipes and bongs just lack the smoke. So if you are looking for a fun loving guy to smoke with hit me up.
Science writer Fred Hapgood dreamed big when Omni asked him, in 1990, to pen “No Assembly Required,” an article that predicted how insect-sized microorganisms would be serving our needs by 2029. None of his prognostications seem even remotely on the horizon just 15 years away. Three excerpts follow, about futuristic dental care, housecleaning and home security.
_______________________________
Dental Microsnails That Brush Your Teeth for You While You Sleep
During the average lifetime a human spends a total of 40 days of his life brushing his teeth. (Sixty if he flosses.) Recent breakthroughs in microtractor technology, however, have now made it possible for us to offer our customers the dental microsnaii.
Just rub onto teeth before sleeping: During the night each microsnaii glued to a pair of traction balls, systematically explores the entire surface of the tooth on which it lands. As it moves, powered by the mouth’s own natural electrochemistry, it secretes minute quantities of bioengineered enzymes that detect and epoxy microcracks in enamel, remove plaque, and shred organic material caught between teeth. You awake to find your smile polished to a high gloss. Microsnails are small enough to be barely detectable by the tongue and harmless if swallowed. They vanish down the gut after they’ve finished their job.
For those interested in the latest in decorative dentistry, Microbots also makes an “artist microsnaii” that colors
your incisors in the pattern of your choice, from a simple checkerboard to selected graphics based on works of
Braque, Klee, Mondrian, and De Kooning. lmages fade after 24 hours.
_______________________________
Tiny Quicker Picker-Uppers
Let your fingers do the housecleaning. Order Micromaids from our catalog and put a thousand domestic servants in the palm of your hand.
Arrange “anthills” (small containers, each the size of a bagel) inconspicuously under chairs and behind furniture (autocamouflaging is standard with this year’s models). When the colony has detected no footfalls in that room for an hour, thousands of Micromaids, legged vehicles the size and shape of a clove, spread-out through the room. They locate loose grains of sand, grit, lint, skin, hair, and other debris, then carry the refuse back to the anthill. If the hill detects vibrations, it releases a high-pitched acoustic signal, summoning the Micromaids to return.
These home bases serve as tiny waste disposal plants. Each contains specialized microbots that process the
trash. Some secrete enzymes and bacteria to break down and sanitize organic matter. Others use tiny pincers to crush and cut up larger items. The anthill then seals the garbage in a polymer bag, which it custom-produces to surround the excreted refuse. The Micromaids carry this package to a preprogrammed location, such as a chute leading to a trash compactor in the basement of your house.
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RoboHornets: The Ultimate Weapon for Home Security
Let’s face it — as wonderful as the twenty-first century can be, home security is a growing challenge for all of us. Here’s how Microbots can help you deal with it: Whenever the nest detects a possible intruder entering a zone you have designated as “private,” a mosquito-size probe takes off and lands quietly on the person’s clothing and locates a flake of skin caught in the garment. An onboard DNA sampler then radios the raw biological data back to the nest, where a DNA fingerprinting lab performs an analysis and checks the results against a list of those individuals cleared for access to the area. If the person is unauthorized, the mosquito probe triggers a loud and explicit warning message from a rooftop speaker while summoning a cloud of other RoboHornets, each carrying a vicious-looking one-inch-long crimson-colored stinger. Any intruder continuing to ignore the warning message will receive a lesson in the sanctity of private property, the memory of which will linger for several months.•
Tags: Fred Hapgood
From the March 2, 1911 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Wellesley, Mass. — Preparations were made at the Wellesley College farm to-day for the Institution to begin breeding its own cats for dissection by the young women students. By so doing Wellesley becomes the first educational institution in the world to raise its own laboratory victims, and makes itself independent of the exigencies of the chase which sometimes yielded fat cats, sometimes thin ones, and frequently mangy ones. The experiment is the result of the arrest and fine imposed on a Wellesley janitor for stealing valuable felines for the college dissection tables.”
After VictrolaHut, RadioShack is the most perplexing American company still in business. Named after an outdated technology and offering none of the advantages of other brick-and-mortar stores let alone online outlets, its stock currently trades for 94 cents, which is about three dollars too high. I wish those folks well, but really! From Sarah Halzack’s Washington Post article about the chain (sort of) trying to reinvent itself:
“The company is pitching the remodeled stores as ‘interactive,’ a word that seems ubiquitous these days as many brick-and-mortar retailers try to create a unique experience in their shops to help ward off online competitors. At the outpost on Seventh Street NW in the District’s bustling Gallery Place neighborhood, the company has added a sleek headphone demonstration station where customers can try out gear from brands such as Beats by Dr. Dre and Skullcandy. A ‘speaker wall’ allows customers to sample many of the speakers sold in the store by controlling them from an iPad. Gadgets such as the iPhone and iPad are displayed so customers can play with them, a set-up that marks a change from before, when the shop only showed printed renderings of what the devices looked like when taken out of the box.
‘It’s really just all about improving the customer experience and delivering on their expectations for us as a brand,’ said Jennifer Warren, RadioShack’s chief marketing officer.
Although these additions might mark a step forward for RadioShack, the ability to test gadgets has long been available at competitors such as Apple and Best Buy. Also, RadioShack plans to remodel only 100 stores by the end of the year — a small fraction of its 4,000 locations.
‘They’re right now effectively catching up to what others have done,’ said Will Frohnhoefer, an equity research analyst at BTIG.”
A piece of Superintelligence that Nick Bostrom adapted for Slate which stresses that AI doesn’t need be like humans to surpass us:
“An artificial intelligence can be far less humanlike in its motivations than a green scaly space alien. The extraterrestrial (let us assume) is a biological creature that has arisen through an evolutionary process and can therefore be expected to have the kinds of motivation typical of evolved creatures. It would not be hugely surprising, for example, to find that some random intelligent alien would have motives related to one or more items like food, air, temperature, energy expenditure, occurrence or threat of bodily injury, disease, predation, sex, or progeny. A member of an intelligent social species might also have motivations related to cooperation and competition: Like us, it might show in-group loyalty, resentment of free riders, perhaps even a vain concern with reputation and appearance.
An AI, by contrast, need not care intrinsically about any of those things. There is nothing paradoxical about an AI whose sole final goal is to count the grains of sand on Boracay, or to calculate the decimal expansion of pi, or to maximize the total number of paper clips that will exist in its future light cone. In fact, it would be easier to create an AI with simple goals like these than to build one that had a humanlike set of values and dispositions. Compare how easy it is to write a program that measures how many digits of pi have been calculated and stored in memory with how difficult it would be to create a program that reliably measures the degree of realization of some more meaningful goal—human flourishing, say, or global justice.”
Tags: Nick Bostrom
Peter Thiel, the contrarian Libertarian who would like to defeat death and taxes, just conducted one of his periodic Reddit AMAs. A few excerpts follow from his latest one, including an exchange about Uber, a company reviled by the Lyft investor.
____________________________
Question:
At Disrupt this week, you mentioned that “Uber was the most ethically challenged company in Silicon Valley.” However, if the power law holds true, isn’t it optimal strategy to do anything to win?
Peter Thiel:
Not optimal if you break the law to the point where the company gets shut down (think Napster). I’m not saying that will happen to Uber, but I think they’ve pushed the line really far.
____________________________
Question:
A lot of people on Reddit care about Net Neutrality, and also have a healthy distrust of government. The commonly proposed solution being suggested by the EFF and other pro-technology and net neutrality organizations is to classify broadband/internet service as a Title II common carrier (AKA as a ‘telecommunication service’ that can not discriminate data, instead of ‘information service’ which can). My main hesitation with this is that this would give the FCC even more control over ISPs, which may have unintended consequences on the freedom on the internet. What are your views on current net neutrality issues, and do you have any ideas on this or other solutions?
Peter Thiel:
We’ve had these debates about net neutrality for over 15 years. It hasn’t been necessary so far, and I’m not sure anything has changed to make it necessary right now.
And I don’t like government regulation: We need the US government to regulate the internet about as much as we need the EU to regulate Google — I suspect the cons greatly outweigh the pros, especially in practice.
____________________________
Question:
What is one thing you believe to be true that most do not?
Peter Thiel:
Most people believe that capitalism and competition are synonyms, and I think they are opposites. A capitalist accumulates capital, and in a world of perfect competition all the capital gets competed away: The restaurant industry in SF is very competitive and very non-capitalistic (e.g., very hard way to make money), whereas Google is very capitalistic and has had no serious competition since 2002.
____________________________
Question:
Why do you think more wealthy people don’t fund anti-aging research? What do you think could be done to encourage them to do more?
Peter Thiel:
Most people deal with aging by some strange combination of acceptance and denial. I think the psychological blocks to thinking about aging run very deep, and we need to think about it in order to really fight it.
____________________________
Question:
What did you think when you first met Elon Musk?
Peter Thiel:
Very smart, very charismatic, and incredibly driven — a very rare combination, since most people who have one of these traits learn to coast on the other two.
It was kind of scary to be competing against his startup in Palo Alto in Dec 1999-Mar 2000.
____________________________
Question:
What was your reaction to The Social Network movie?
Peter Thiel:
The zero-sum world it portrayed has nothing in common with the Silicon Valley I know, but I suspect it’s a pretty accurate portrayal of the dysfunctional relationships that dominate Hollywood.•
Tags: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel
Mont Blanc is the most-climbed mountain in the world, its considerable dangers seemingly disappeared into the crush of bodies swarming its base. From Lukas Eberle and Victoria Weidemann at Spiegel:
“Business with the White Lady is booming. In both Italy and nearby Switzerland, there are some 50 companies offering guided tours up the mountain; in France, there are 70, with 20 of those based in Chamonix. Including training, preparation and acclimatizing to the altitude, the trip to the top takes about a week with customers paying an average of €1,500 ($1,940), including the guide.
‘Demand is huge, we have reached our capacity,’ says Bernard Prud’homme, head of the Chamonix tourism bureau. The municipality, he says, ‘is no longer advertising’ for Mont Blanc. ‘No ads, no campaigns. Otherwise, the routes would be even fuller.’
Mont Blanc has become symbolic of modern-day mountaineering. No longer reserved for experts, the highest peaks are now also frequented by adventure-seekers and outdoor enthusiasts. Mountains like Mont Blanc have come to be seen as tourist destinations.
The routes are prepared with anchors and fixed ropes, with climbers simply clipping in. Last year, the Refuge du Goûter opened at an altitude of 3,835 meters, a futuristically designed mountain hut build by the Club Alpin Français, to provide shelter for those heading to the top. It is designed to withstand wind-speeds of up to 300 kilometers per hour (185 miles per hour). Indeed, the mountain is becoming domesticated, made available for consumption. But that hasn’t made it any less dangerous. On the contrary, it is one of the deadliest mountains in the world.”
I have no interest in comic-book blockbusters or most of the contemporary culture aimed at aging fanboys (and girls) longing for YA comfort, but in his long-form New York Times Magazine essay, “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture,” A.O. Scott finds solace in this regression. An excerpt:
“It is now possible to conceive of adulthood as the state of being forever young. Childhood, once a condition of limited autonomy and deferred pleasure (‘wait until you’re older’), is now a zone of perpetual freedom and delight. Grown people feel no compulsion to put away childish things: We can live with our parents, go to summer camp, play dodge ball, collect dolls and action figures and watch cartoons to our hearts’ content. These symptoms of arrested development will also be signs that we are freer, more honest and happier than the uptight fools who let go of such pastimes.
I do feel the loss of something here, but bemoaning the general immaturity of contemporary culture would be as obtuse as declaring it the coolest thing ever. A crisis of authority is not for the faint of heart. It can be scary and weird and ambiguous. But it can be a lot of fun, too. The best and most authentic cultural products of our time manage to be all of those things. They imagine a world where no one is in charge and no one necessarily knows what’s going on, where identities are in perpetual flux. Mothers and fathers act like teenagers; little children are wise beyond their years. Girls light out for the territory and boys cloister themselves in secret gardens. We have more stories, pictures and arguments than we know what to do with, and each one of them presses on our attention with a claim of uniqueness, a demand to be recognized as special. The world is our playground, without a dad or a mom in sight.”
Tags: A.O. Scott
Norbert Wiener’s worried vision for an automated America never was realized–until maybe now, that is. In an article in the August 18, 1950 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the cyberneticist and mathematician explained how the second Industrial Revolution might be a mixed blessing. The story:
Cambridge, Mass. — If Russia doesn’t ruin us the robots will, a noted scientist predicted today. Dr. Norbert Wiener, professor of mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Moscow and the new mechanical brains might even prove unwitting allies in driving the United States into a “decade or more of ruin and despair.”
Wiener is the bearded former boy prodigy who earned his doctorate of philosophy at the age of 19 and went on to develop the new science of ‘cybernetics’–the use of communication in controlling men or machines.
Will Take Over Tasks
He said the United States is on the verge of a “second industrial revolution” in which robot factories operated by so-called mechanical brains will take over all the routine tasks of production from men.
“Short of any violent political changes or another great war, I should give a rough estimate that it will take the new tools 10 or 20 years to come into their own,” Wiener said.
But he added that the demands of a war with Russia would speed the development of robot factories and “almost inevitably see the automatic man age in full swing within less than five years.”
What happen to humans when the robots take over?
May Be a Good Thing
Wiener has a word of warning about that in a new book, The Human Use of Human Beings, which will be published Monday by Houghton Mifflin Company.
If the new machines are used wisely, he said, it may in the long run ‘make this a good thing and the source of the leisure which is necessary for the cultural development of man on all sides.
But Wiener said the depression of the 1930s will look like “pleasant joke’ in comparison with what will happen if the nation misuses the new machines which can calculate, remember, pass judgement and even succumb to nervous breakdowns.
“Thus the new industrial revolution is a two-edged sword,” he said. “It may be used for the benefit of humanity, assuming that humanity survives long enough to enter a period in which such a benefit is possible.”•
Tags: Norbert Wiener
Here’s another video that’s popped up again after being unavailable for a spell. It’s narrated 1977 footage of innovations aimed to aid the deaf and blind. At the 3:40 mark, there’s excellent footage of the Kurzweil Reading Machine and its inventor.
Tags: Ray Kurzweil
Those preparing for one apocalypse or another (and their personal shoppers) are driven by myriad forces: facts, prejudices and profits among them. But I’ll add another cause to those obvious ones: hope. I don’t believe the culture of dystopia is ringing cash registers because people are literally hopeful that billions of human beings will die, but I do think many hold dear the fantasy of a post-civilization because of the disquiet the developed word causes. To think that it could all be over is to ease anxieties. Maybe we don’t only fear scarcity but also the absence of it. From Jason Concepcion at Grantland:
“Modern life is way too dark for stories about building great nations. Tides are in full ebb. Dystopian fiction and media is a reaction to our reaction to the now constant whisper of bad fucking news: terrorism, financial crisis, the erosion of the middle class, historic drought, racial animus, global warming, choosing between water and energy. In dystopian stories, as in real life, the only sane reaction to a stranger with a gun is fear and flight.
Dystopias reflect the fear that our future will be one of scarcity, without the the promise of a great manifest destiny. ‘In a way, how can you be a sane and compassionate human being and not be increasingly alarmed by what’s happening to the planet, when it’s potentially civilization-ending?’ said author David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) recently in the New York Times.
Dystopian fiction takes the stark drama of the frontier and moves it into your neighborhood. This modern-frontier idea manifests itself most tellingly on reality television. Shows like Doomsday Castle and Doomsday Preppers take environmental and economic fears and view them through the lens of America’s demographic shift.
Both shows can be summed up as terrified white people stockpiling food and guns. One man on Doomsday Preppers explains his system for hiding and securing food supply caches thusly: ‘Out here in the rural areas, people are going to be spilling out to take what farmers have. I’m not going to allow my family to be a target.'”
Time Travel wanted
Looking for a way to travel or send information into the past. Please help.
From Mattathias Schwartz’s largely negative Technology Review critique of Nicholas Carr’s latest book, The Glass Cage, which focuses on the dark side of automation, some smart commentary about the real nature of Facebook:
“Carr spends most of The Glass Cage treating automation as though it were a problem of unenlightened personal choices—suggesting that we should often opt out of technologies like GPS in favor of manual alternatives. Yet the decision to adopt many other innovations is not always so voluntary. There is often something seductive and even coercive about them. Consider a technology that Carr himself discusses: Facebook, which seeks to automate the management of human relationships. Once the majority has accepted the site’s addictive design and slight utility, it gets harder for any one individual to opt out. (Though Facebook may not look like an example of automation, it is indeed work in disguise. The workers—or ‘users’—are not paid a wage and the product, personal data, is not sold in a visible or public market, but it does have a residual echo of the machine room. Personal expression and relationships constitute the raw material; the continuously updated feed is the production line.)
Carr flirts with real anger in The Glass Cage, but he doesn’t go far enough in exploring more constructive pushback to automation. The resistance he endorses is the docile, individualized resistance of the consumer—a photographer who shoots on film, an architect who brainstorms on paper. These are small, personal choices with few broader consequences. The frustrations that Carr diagnoses—the longing for an older world, or a different world, or technologies that embody more humanistic and less exploitative intentions—are widespread. For these alternatives to appear feasible, someone must do the hard work of imagining what they would look like.”
Tags: Mattathias Schwartz, Nicholas Carr