Dr. Eugenie Clark, an ichthyologist who specialized in sharks–even sleeping ones–just passed away at 92. She was not a fan of Jaws, the Spielberg blockbuster adapted from Peter Benchley’s novel. From her New York Times obituary by Robert D. McFadden:
For all her scientific achievements, Dr. Clark was also a figure of popular culture who used her books, lectures and expertise to promote the preservation of ecologically fragile shorelines, to oppose commercial exploitation of endangered species and to counteract misconceptions, especially about sharks.
She insisted that Jaws, the 1975 Steven Spielberg film based on a Peter Benchley novel, and its sequels inspired unreasonable fears of sharks as ferocious killers. Car accidents are far more numerous and terrible than shark attacks, she said in a 1982 PBS documentary, The Sharks.
She said at the time that only about 50 shark attacks on humans were reported annually and that only 10 were fatal, and that the great white shark portrayed in Jaws would attack only if provoked, while most of the world’s 350 shark species were not dangerous to people at all.
“When you see a shark underwater,” she said, “you should say, ‘How lucky I am to see this beautiful animal in his environment.’ ”•
Harpo Marx kept his mouth shut even when answering questions on TV (here and here), but Marcel Marceau, mimetic Everyman and French Resistance hero, used his voice quite well when interviewed by James Day in San Francisco in 1974.
There’s a lot more juice in that melon on our shoulders, but how to squeeze it out? Savants, whether congenital or by the consequence of head injury, have a portion of their brains that are super-developed to compensate for a part that’s underwhelming. How can we all unlock these gifts without a “lucky” concussion? From Allie Conti’s Vice interview with psychiatrist Darold Treffert, who specializes in savants:
Question:
How far are scientists from making all of us geniuses?
Darold Treffert:
I don’t know if you’re familiar with Allan Snyder’s work in Australia, but he uses what’s called RTMS, which is a rapid pulsation that you can apply to the scalp and actually immobilize an area of the brain with electrical currents. It’s used in neurology to discover the source of epilepsy, so it’s an accepted procedure. What he said was based largely on the work of Dr. [Bruce] Miller, who who studied 12 patients with dementia and discovered some of them developed some astounding abilities as their dementia proceeded. They tended to have lesions in the left temporal area. So Dr. Snyder said, “What if we took a group of volunteers and we immobilized parts of the left hemisphere temporarily? Would we see any special skills emerge?” He found subjects actually increased their abilities. So he’s developed something he calls the Thinking Cap, which you can put on and use. So there may be some technological approaches to enhancement.
Question:
What other ways can we bring out our inner geniuses, besides newfangled contraptions?
Darold Treffert:
In the long run, I don’t think we’re gonna have some striking technological solutions, although others disagree and feel there will be a capacity to turn on and turn off some of our abilities by using technology. Meditation is another method to access different circuity in the brain. And somebody wrote to me recently indicating that his idea was that the reason that a lot of [retirees] pick up new skills is not just because they have the time, but the aging process itself is producing “brain damage” which is leading them into new areas of ability. And I think that’s probably true.
Question:
If everyone became a genius through a medically induced process, would the world descend into chaos?
Darold Treffert:
I think the more that we access our hidden potential the better. We’re not gonna all be Picassos or Mozarts or Einsteins. So I don’t think that it would be a huge avalanche of new abilities in everyone. To the extent to which we are able to mobilize that would be very manageable and a good thing. I think we would still be a balanced society.•
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Morley Safer’s classic 1983 60 Minutes profile of “Rain Man” George Finn.
My favorite passage of this long-form conversation between Brian Eno and David Graeber is the three-minute stretch just after the 39-minute mark in which the discussion turns to the human proclivity for virtualizing experiences that initially have an evolutionary impulse at their core. (Like eating, for instance.) Perhaps space travel has been reduced to a shadow on a wall for 50 years because of the monetary expense or maybe it’s wired into us to turn from reality and make the play the thing.
From Graeber: “I was watching one of those new Star Wars movies, the really bad ones, and I was thinking, Well, this is a bad movie but the special effects are amazing. I was thinking, Remember those clumsy science-fiction special effects from the ’50s? If people from back then could watch this movie, I’d bet they’d be really impressed. Then I realized, no they wouldn’t, because they thought we’d actually be doing this stuff by now instead of coming up with amazing ways to simulate it. They’d be really bitter and angry. You’re not on the moon? You just come up with better movies to make believe you’re on the moon? Then I realized, simulation, end of history, nothing new. Now I get it. The reason why we have these ideologies that history is coming to an end…we wouldn’t be saying this if we were actually on Mars. It’s just sort of a way of coming to terms with the fact that we can’t acknowledge that we actually thought we’d be doing all this stuff that now we’re just doing virtually.”
At the beginning of 1970, directly following the Apollo 11 moon landing, Life published Rudi Gernreich’s predictions about the future of fashion. He foresaw a harsh landscape of environmental damage, overpopulation and traffic-clogged highways, all of which would inform designers who would create unisex protective garb made of alternative fabrics. While his fashion prognostications weren’t accurate, embedded in Gernreich’s ideas are some prescient remarks about technological innovations. An excerpt:
In cold, wintry weather, predicts Gernreich, “both men and women will wear heavy-ribbed leotards and waterproof boots. It will be impossible to drive to stores because of traffic, so all clothes will be ordered from a catalogue or TV set. And since animals which now supply wool, fur and leather will be so rare that they must be protected, and weaving fabric such as cotton will be too much trouble, most clothes will be made entirely of cheap and disposable synthetic knits.”
Clothing will not be identified as either male or female, says Gernreich. “So women will wear pants and men will wear skirts interchangeably. And since there won’t be any squeamishness about nudity, see-through clothes will only be see-through for reasons of comfort. Weather permitting, both sexes will go about bare-chested, though women will wear simple protective pasties. Jewelry will exist only as a utility–that is, to hold something up or together, like a belt or for information, like a combination wristwatch, weather indicator, compass and radio. The esthetics are going to involve the body itself. We will train the body to grow beautifully rather than cover it to produce beauty.
The present cult of eternal youth is not honest nor attractive, says Gernreich. “In an era when the body will become the convention of fashion, the old will adopt a uniform of their own. If a body can longer be accentuated, it should be abstracted. The young won’t wear prints but the elderly will because bold prints detract. The elderly will have a cult of their own and the embarrassment of old age will fade away.”•
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Trippy 1973 video showing a soft metallic armor Gernreich dreamed up to promote Max Factor cosmetics. He thought that designs in the future would need to be anonymous because the world was to become harsh and invasive. “Public Privacy” is what he called the look.
In the 1960s, Gernreich predicted a computerized future for attire. He believed that “clothes of the future will involve unisex. They will be interchangeable. Men are going to wear skirts and woman are gonna wear pants.” Not quite right in every detail but correct in a broader sense.
NYU psychologist Gary Marcus is one of the talking heads interviewed for this CBS Sunday Morning report about the future of robots and co-bots and such. He speaks to the mismeasure of the Turing Test, the current mediocrity of human-computer communications and the potential perils of Strong AI. To his comment about the company dominating AI winning the Internet, I really doubt any one company will be dominant across most or even many categories. Quite a few will own a piece, and there’ll be no overall blowout victory, though there are vast riches to be had in even small margins.View here.
Perhaps it was the Space Race or just the oddness of the decade in general, but in 1966 a Michigan father of ten believed he spotted a UFO in the night sky and soon even the skeptical “girls” of Hillsdale were locating saucers with binoculars. Then the sightings went viral across the nation. Walter Cronkite devoted an hour of CBS airtime to confronting the ridiculous controversy. Rocketeer and space pioneer Willy Ley is interviewed and amusing IBM computer commercials are interspersed.
So sad to learn of Oliver Sacks’ terminal illness. I read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat at a young age, and I didn’t know what the hell to make of it, so stunned was I to find out that we’re not necessarily in control of our minds. In this piece of writing and so many others, Sacks examined the brain, that mysterious and scary thing, and because of his work as an essayist as well as a doctor, that organ is today a little less mysterious, a little less scary. It doesn’t mean he was always right, but how could anyone be when sailing in such dark waters? Sacks was accused sometimes of being a modern Barnum who used as diverting curiosities those with the misfortune of having minds that played tricks on them–even stranger tricks than the rest of us experience–and sometimes I cringed at the very personal things he would reveal about his subjects, but I always felt he strived to be ethical. We certainly live in an era when the freak show still thrives, albeit in a slickly produced form, but I don’t think that’s where Sacks’ work has ever lived. His prose and narrative abilities grew markedly during his career as he he came to realize–be surprised by?–his own brain’s capabilities. I hope he has a peaceful and productive final chapter.
A profile of Sacks by Diane Sawyer with good 1969 footage of his work as a young doctor.
Artist/urban philosopher Liam Young, working with sci-fi writers, has created a trio of dystopian, futuristic cities, including one that exaggerates–somewhat–the intrusion of corporations on metropolitan life, an avenue Ray Bradbury earnestly suggested we pursue in the 1990s. From Shaunacy Ferro at Fast Company, Young’s description of his moving-yet-static vision of “Samsung City”:
“The Samsung city is based on this strange condition in Korea where Samsung, the tech company, had moved into property development,” Young explains, describing a series of Samsung-branded tower blocks that got him thinking about the fact that Apple has revenues comparable to the GDPs of some nations. “What would happen if we started to form brand and nationalistic allegiances to tech companies in the same way we do in countries?”•
The 1960s video report embedded below about computers includes footage of American college students asking concerned questions about automation and the coming technological unemployment. No different than today, really. Luddite-ism is never the answer, though political solutions may be required. A couple weeks back, Newsweek referred to its 1965 cover story, “The Challenge of Automation.” An excerpt:
In 1965, America found itself facing a new industrial revolution. The rapid evolution of computers provoked enormous excitement and considerable dread as captains of industry braced themselves for the age of automation.
Newsweek devoted a special edition to discussing “the most controversial economic concept of the age” in January 1965. “Businessmen love it. Workers fear it. The government frets and investigates and wonders what to do about it,” the report began. “Automation is wiping out about 35,000 jobs every week or 1.8 million per year.”•
Here’s a real rarity: Walter Cronkite and Bill Stout of CBS News interviewing authors Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke about the future of space exploration on the day of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The two writers (and Cronkite) were inebriated by the excitement of the moment, believing we would in short shrift colonize the universe. Clarke thought travel to other planets would end war on Earth, which, of course, has not yet come close to occurring. Heinlein called for female astronauts, saying “it does not take a man to run a spaceship.” Both believed the first baby born in space would be delivered before the end of the twentieth century, and Heinlein was sure there would be retirement communities established on the moon in that same time frame. Go here to view the video
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of SNL, here’s what’s likely the show’s most infamous moment, a 1981 performance by Fear, booked at the behest of the punk band’s fan John Belushi during Lorne Michaels’ five-year absence from the program. Donald Pleasence, looking like a defrocked priest who still performs exorcisms to make some extra cash, provides the introduction. Twenty-thousand dollars worth of damage was done to the stage.
Marc Goodman, law-enforcement veteran and author of the forthcoming book Future Crimes, sat for an interview with Jason Dorrier of Singularity Hub about the next wave nefariousness, Internet-enabled and large-scale. A question about the potential for peril writ relatively small with Narrow AI and on a grand scale if we create Artificial General Intelligence. An excerpt::
Question:
Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates have expressed concern about artificial general intelligence. It’s a hotly debated topic. Might AI be our “final invention?” It seems even narrow AI in the wrong hands might be problematic.
Marc Goodman:
I would add Marc Goodman to that list. To be clear, I think AI, narrow AI, and the agents around us have tremendous opportunity to be incredibly useful. We’re using AI every day, whether it’s in our GPS devices, in our Netflix recommendations, what we see on our Facebook status updates and streams—all of that is controlled via AI.
With regard to AGI, however, I put myself firmly in the camp of concern.
Historically, whatever the tool has been, people have tried to use it for their own power. Of course, typically, that doesn’t mean that the tool itself is bad. Fire wasn’t bad. It could cook your meals and keep you warm at night. It comes down to how we use it. But AGI is different. The challenge with AGI is that once we create it, it may be out of our hands entirely, and that could certainly make it our “final invention.”
I’ll also point out that there are concerns about narrow AI too.
We’ve seen examples of criminals using narrow AI in some fascinating ways. In one case, a University of Florida student was accused of killing his college roommate for dating his girlfriend. Now, this 18-year-old freshman had a conundrum. What does he do with the dead body before him? Well, he had never murdered anybody before, and he had no idea how to dispose of the body. So, he asked Siri. The answers Siri returned? Mine, swamp, and open field, among others.
So, Siri answered his question. This 18-year-old kid unknowingly used narrow AI as an accomplice after the fact in his homicide. We’ll see many more examples of this moving forward. In the book, I say we’re leaving the world of Bonnie and Clyde and joining the world of Siri and Clyde.•
Bellhops, desk attendants and bank tellers are beginning to go robotic, and you can add waiters to the list. In Singapore, such restaurant service workers are in short supply and drones are a measure of desperation, but if the machines succeed there, they become an option for places where there’s no paucity of willing human capital. Even if it’s more gimmick than solution, the kitchen-to-table technology still shows the flexibility of relatively inexpensive Weak AI. From Tessa Wong at the BBC:
In Singapore food is a national obsession. But finding enough people to bring the food to diners is increasingly becoming a problem.
One company thinks it has come up with a solution – flying robot waiters. They are sturdy, reliable, and promise never to call in sick at the last minute.
Infinium Robotics’ drones, due to be introduced at a local restaurant-bar chain by the end of this year, can carry up to 2kg (4.4lbs) of food and drink – that’s about two pints of beer, a pizza, and two glasses of wine.
The unpiloted robots whizz above the heads of diners on paths charted by a computer programme, and navigate using infra-red sensors placed around the restaurant. …
Infinium Robotics’ chief executive officer Junyang Woon says that his technology frees up capacity: “So staff are able to interact more with customers and enhance their dining experience.”
Drones can pose safety and liability issues, especially when used indoors. In December, a drone crashed into someone’s face at a TGI Fridays outlet in New York.
But Mr Woon says their machines use onboard cameras and sensors to ensure they do not collide with one another or with people. Their blades are covered with grates.•
Harvard Business School’s Professor Clayton Christensen, student of disruption, being interviewed by VC veteran Mark Suster about the near-term future of higher education, provides the money quote: “In fifteen years from now half of U.S. universities may be in bankruptcy.” America’s higher-education system has been one of our greatest triumphs, one of the great marvels of all civilization, but the growing costs seem unsustainable and the giant money at stake makes nimble reinvention difficult. Some sea change will likely occur.
In a Big Think video, Andrew McAfee explains how automation is coming for your collar, white or blue, limo driver and lawyer alike. He leaves off by talking about new industries being created as old ones are being destroyed, but from his writing in The Second Machine Age, the book he co-authored with Eric Brynjolfsson, it’s clear he fears the shortfall between old and new may be significant and society could be in for a bumpy transition.
Jeb and Hillary have company because Zoltan Istvan has announced his intention to run for the U.S. Presidency in 2016 on the Transhumanist Party ticket. The former National Geographic correspondent believes we’ll soon (within a decade) be electively receiving robotic hearts and eventually be living in a post-gender society in which we can choose when and if we die. We will be able to tweet indefinitely! As often is the case with life-extension enthusiasts, his timeframe seems wacky, and replacing a failing organ in a human being shouldn’t be made to sound as simple as switching out a carburetor in a Chevy. Zach Weissmueller of the Libertarian Reason TV interviewed Istvan, so some government-bashing is included.
The Andy Warhol quote about everybody in the future being famous for 15 minutes was as prophetic as anything Marshall McLuhan ever said or wrote, but the late Pop Artist’s elevation of the excruciatingly banal has perhaps been equally prescient. In our egalitarian world, talent really isn’t necessary to entertain any longer–just share your minutiae, just live in public. A few spectacles of prowess, like, say, the Super Bowl, still attract attention, but it’s the long tail or ordinariness that wins in the bigger picture. Case in point: In South Korea, that hyper-wired world, “performance eating” has become a phenomenon. It’s food porn, sure, but Stephen Evans of the BBC suspects more is at play. An excerpt:
How do you fancy eating your dinner at home in front of a webcam and letting thousands of people watch? If they like the way you eat, they will pay you money – maybe a few hundred dollars a night… a good salary for doing what you would do anyway. This is happening now in South Korea.
It’s often said that if you want to see the future look at how technology is emerging in perhaps the most connected country on the planet. The food phenomenon is called mukbang – a combination of the Korean word for eating (muk-ja) and broadcasting (bang-song).
I have seen this future in the eighth-floor apartment of Lee Chang-hyun in Seoul (pictured at work, above). At around midnight, he goes online with a couple of friends and performs his meal, spicy raw squid one day, crab the next. “Perform” is the right word. He is extravagant in his gestures, flaunting the food to his computer camera to tantalise the viewers. He eats noisily and that’s part of the show. He’s invested in a good microphone to capture the full crunch and slurp.
This is not a private affair. Some 10,000 people watch him eating per day, he says. They send a constant stream of messages to his computer and he responds verbally (by talking) and orally (by eating, very visibly and noisily).
If the audience like the performance, they allocate him what are called “star balloons” and each of these means a payment to him and to the internet television channel on which he performs. He is coy about how much he earns but the BBC has estimated, by noting the number of star balloons on his screen, that it would run into several hundred dollars for a two-hour stint.
Hisperformance-eating is part of a phenomenonwhich says something about the way society is changing and about the way television is changing – in Korea today, and perhaps, in your own country, tomorrow.•
It was a smooth ride for a short while, but it’s long been believed by some astute observers that vinyl had a better future in couches than in music. From Paul Morley’s new Guardian piece about Brian Eno:
“I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn’t last, and now it’s running out. I don’t particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you’d be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history’s moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it.”•
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“Are you fed up with constantly searching for the records you want?”
Arthur C. Clarke cribbed elements of gestating, early ’60s Bell Labs projects (e.g., picturephones) for 2001: A Space Odyssey. In 1976, he was interviewed by AT&T about the future of communications. He knew the world would soon be interconnected, social and mobile on a grand scale.
Martine Rothblatt, biopharmaceuticals CEO and Sirius radio founder, believes mind clones, digital reproductions of human brains that exist outside the body, are merely one to two decades away. They will exist as avatars on screens, she says, and will make us immortal. Nothing theoretically impossible about eventually understanding the “code” behind a human mind and recreating it externally, but I remain extremely skeptical of her timeline. Watch a Bloomberg report here.
Japan’s graying, thinning population knows a scarcity of labor, a problem likely to grow worse. A solution: Open up what’s a very homogenous country to immigrants. But Japan’s chosen not to staff up with foreign humans but with foreigners to the species, setting up hologram desk clerks and robot bank tellers. If this AI, the Weak kind but impressive nonetheless, works there, wouldn’t such machines also be employed in places where humans are still readily looking to land a position? From Julian Ryall at the Telegraph:
Standing less than 23 inches tall and with only three digits on hands that are too big for his body, Nao is an unusual appointment at Japan’s biggest bank.
Officials of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc believe, however, that this humanoid robot is likely to be an important addition to its operations.
Unveiling Nao in Tokyo on Monday, officials at the bank pointed out that the android is able to speak no fewer than 19 languages and can determine customers’ emotions from their facial expressions.
Nao is still undergoing some minor adjustments, officials said, but the bank anticipates that several of the robots will be meeting and greeting customers in branches from April.
Designed by Aldebaran Robotics SA, a Paris-based subsidiary of SoftBank Corp, Nao gave a demonstration of his skills, greeting a customer with a breezy “Hello and welcome” in fluent English.
“I can tell you about money exchange, ATMs, opening a bank account or overseas remittance,” the android added. “Which one would you like?”
Japanesecompanies are investing heavily in robots, both as a solution to the nation’s ageing and shrinking population and as a growing business opportunity.•
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The future of computerized banking, as envisioned in 1969:
William S. Burroughs reading in 1981 from Naked Lunch on Saturday Night Live, the rare pleasing moment during the the show’s most arid patch, those years when Tony Rosato could be a cast member and Robert Urich a host. Lauren Hutton intros him.
