10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
This week, perhaps David Letterman shouldn’t have had Joan Rivers as his final guest.
This week, perhaps David Letterman shouldn’t have had Joan Rivers as his final guest.
- Old Print Articles: Harold McCracken hunts for mummies of prehistoric peoples (1928) + Sir Hubert Wilkins plans a submarine exploration of the North Pole (1929).
- Recently Posted on NYC’s Craigslist: Don’t touch your penis after touching my Penis Peppers + We’ll believe any bullshit you make up.
- In Rise of the Robots, Martin Ford examines automation and unemployment.
- Bernie Sanders did an AMA and discussed technological unemployment.
- In 1992, Andy Grove thought the smartphone “a pipe dream driven by greed.”
- The home of the future may be a Facebook-like Faustian bargain.
- In 1970, a Pennsylvania family enjoyed a networked home computer.
- Stafford Beer’s early-’70s Project Cybersyn may still have lessons to teach.
- SpaceX began with a dream of sending mice to Mars in a rocket.
- Airplanes may already be prone to remote smartphone hacks.
- Google has taken an all-or-nothing approach to driverless cars.
- In the Uber age, taxi-medallion owners may be ruined.
- Postmates wants to become the “Uber of goods,” but so does Uber.
- Nicholas Carr thinks humans and computers should be a permanent team.
- Perhaps software should challenge us rather than replace us.
- Smartphone-guided “cruise control for pedestrians” is troubling.
- William Davies provides a tour of the “Happiness Industry.”
- The DARPA Robotics Challenge is only open to rescue robots–for now.
- The future might be one of multi-species intelligence, but that’s complicated.
- For better or worse, AI will bring about Ambient Intelligence.
- Moore’s Law, amazing though it is, can’t be applied to everything.
- Billionaires can’t find good schools for their kids, so Elon Musk founded his own.
- David Christian teaches history beginning with the origins of the universe.
- Ai Wewei addresses human-rights abuses in the U.S. and China.
- Despite China’s rise, Chinese dialects won’t become global languages.
- Napoleon’s public burial led to many cases of delusions of grandeur.
- An Oliver Sacks reading list of 50 books.
- Joseph Heller’s best novel is not Catch-22.
- International kidnapping is big business.
- A brief note from 1934 about Putty Philpotts.
- A brief note from 1907 about a wonderful habit.
- This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches.
If it isn’t already possible for a cyberterrorist to remotely hack a plane and commandeer its guidance system, such a virtual hijacking will soon be possible. Security expert Hugo Teso has been claiming for years that the deed can be accomplished with just a smartphone, not even a laptop required, and in the last week reports suggest that a commercial plane’s system may have been breached. Once a computer is inside of something, it’s hackable, whether it’s a plane, a driverless car or an autonomous lawnmower. An age of cheap and powerful tools means wonderful and horrible things happen. It will be a permanent race to stay ahead of hackers with ill intent. From Marcel Rosenbach and Gerald Traufetter at Spiegel:
The Spaniard’s name is Hugo Teso, and he now works for a data security firm based in Berlin. For the past several years, he has been commissioned by various companies to try to break in to their computers and networks. But because Teso is also a pilot and continues to hold a valid license, he has developed a reputation in the aviation industry as someone whose tech-security warnings should be taken seriously.
Teso has demonstrated that you don’t even need a computer to hi-jack a plane remotely. A smartphone equipped with an app called PlaneSploit, which Teso himself developed, could be enough. In theorycyber-terrorists could use such an app, or something similar, to take over a plane’s steering system and, in a worst-case scenario, cause the plane to crash.
Danger Facing Airlines and Passengers
Attacks on cockpit computers have been an issue at hacker conferences for years. But airlines and airplane manufacturers have long sought to play down their warnings — or they have ignored them altogether. Last week, though, the debate intensified. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is looking into whether a US-based IT expert named Chris Roberts actually implemented — at least in part, from on board an aircraft — the things that Teso has been warning about and simulating. He claims to have penetrated the entertainment system of a normal passenger jet several times and even to have manipulated the plane’s engines during a flight.
The claims and ensuing investigation have triggered a new debate about a danger potentially facing airlines and passengers.•
Tags: Chris Roberts, Gerald Traufetter, Hugo Teso, Marcel Rosenbach
The Strand in NYC, the only brick-and-mortar bookstore I still go to regularly, asked Oliver Sacks to create a shelf of his favorite titles. Below are the first ten. (The Weisman book is a particular favorite of mine.) See the whole list here.
- The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley
- The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
- Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World by Abraham Pais
- Music, Language, and the Brainby Aniruddh D. Patel
- The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness by Antonio Damasio
- Challenger & Company: the Complete Adventures of Professor Challenger and His Intrepid Team-The Lost World, The Poison Belt, The Land of Mists, The Disintegration Machine and When the World Screamed by Arthur Conan Doyle
- Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande
- The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray’s Anatom by Bill Hayes
- Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea by Carl Zimmer
- Voyage of the Beagle: Charles Darwin’s Journals of Researches by Charles Darwin
Tags: Oliver Sacks
It’s difficult for multi-billionaires to find good grade schools for their children, so Elon Musk designed and founded his own for his sons and some kids of SpaceX employees. From Kwame Opam at Verge:
Musk hired one of the teachers from the boys’ school to help found Ad Astra, and the school now teaches 14 elementary-school-aged kids from mostly SpaceX employees’ families. The CEO wanted his school to teach according to students’ individual aptitudes, so he did away with the grade structure entirely. Most importantly, he says learning should be about problem solving.
“It’s important to teach problem solving, or teach to the problem and not the tools,” Musk said. “Let’s say you’re trying to teach people about how engines work. A more traditional approach would be saying, ‘We’re going to teach all about screwdrivers and wrenches.’ This is a very difficult way to do it. A much better way would be, like, ‘Here’s the engine. Now let’s take it apart. How are we gonna take it apart? Oh you need a screwdriver!'”•
Tags: Elon Musk, Kwame Opam
Moore’s Law continues apace fifty years on, which is stunning and great and challenging. The computer chip growing yet shrinking has allowed for everything from smartphones to sensors to Siri to driverless cars, things which are remaking society and economics in fundamental ways, quantifying behavior and vanishing jobs. They may ultimately do more to reorder the way we live than politics ever could.
Since Gordon Moore recognized the pattern in 1965, there’s been a continuous guessing game about when the rule would run into entropy. In 2006, Moore himself said this:
“I think Moore’s Law will continue as long as Moore does anyhow! Ha ha ha… I’m periodically amazed at how we’re able to make progress. Several times along the way, I thought we reached the end of the line, things taper off, and our creative engineers come up with ways around them…Materials are made of atoms, and we’re getting suspiciously close to some of the atomic dimensions with these new structures, but I’m sure we’ll find ways to squeeze even further than we think we presently can.”•
I think futurists get ahead of themselves, however, when they apply Moore’s Law to seemingly everything when it really only applies to integrated circuits. Chemical reactions are certainly not amenable to its rules, which is why battery progress badly trails that of the computer chip. Immortality or a-mortality in any physical sense is not right around the corner because of Moore’s Law.
From Annie Sneed at Scientific American:
Of course, Moore’s law is not really a law like those describing gravity or the conservation of energy. It is a prediction that the number of transistors (a computer’s electrical switches used to represent 0s and 1s) that can fit on a silicon chip will double every two years as technology advances. This leads to incredibly fast growth in computing power without a concomitant expense and has led to laptops and pocket-size gadgets with enormous processing ability at fairly low prices. Advances under Moore’s law have also enabled smartphone verbal search technologies such as Siri—it takes enormous computing power to analyze spoken words, turn them into digital representations of sound and then interpret them to give a spoken answer in a matter of seconds.
Another way to think about Moore’s law is to apply it to a car. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich explained that if a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle had advanced at the pace of Moore’s law over the past 34 years, today “you would be able to go with that car 300,000 miles per hour. You would get two million miles per gallon of gas, and all that for the mere cost of four cents.”•
Tags: Annie Sneed, Brian Krzanich, Gordon Moore
“DO NOT TOUCH eyes, face, genitals,”
Rare Super Hot Peppers
WARNING :::::::: THESE PEPPERS ARE NO JOKE !!!!!!!!
RARE HOT and SUPER HOT PEPPER PLANTS FOR SALE IN CENTRAL NEW JERSEY AREA
$2 EACH or 6 FOR $9.
VARIETIES AVAILABLE INCLUDE:
- JAMAICAN RED MUSHROOM…50,000 shu
- CHOCOLATE SCOTCH BONNET…300,000 shu
- PETER RED or PENIS PEPPER…30,000 shu
- MORUGA SCORPION. . . 2,000,000 shu
WARNING: shu stands for scoville heat units. It’s a measure of capsaicin concentration. JUST AN EXAMPLE: MILITARY PEPPER SPRAY is 2,000,000 shu.
When handling these chiles use protective gloves or the oils could remain in your skin for 2 days.
DO NOT TOUCH eyes, face, genitals, pick your nose or you’re a** before washing hands with soap and COLD water or you will be sorry. Hot water makes it burn more! A mild liquid dish detergent seems to work best.
NOT FOR CHILDREN.
These chile peppers are not for jokes. If you have a friend who knows what they are up against and they take the dare to eat one, okay. But do not trick someone into eating one or you may have to drive them to the hospital! PLEASE handle these mature pepper pods with the same respect you would give a loaded gun! You will need to sign a Waiver and Release of Liability form upon purchase. They are the real deal!
Lost in the collateral damage of the 1973 coup d’etat in Chile that toppled Salvador Allende was Project Cybersyn, a singular computerized business control management system set up by British organizational guru Stafford Beer. “Cybersyn,” a portmanteau for Cybernetic Science, was an odd mélange of socialism, biology, business dynamics, computer science and space-age accoutrements. Telex machines in a Santiago-based control room (which seemed straight out of Star Trek) were used to sync up Chilean factories and provide real-time management for them. Its goal was no less than to regulate the entire national economy. It seems a questionable if fascinating idea whose time has finally arrived, for better or worse, with Big Data and quantification.
The control center was destroyed during the overthrow, but Beer’s influence went far beyond Chile or the business world; Brian Eno, an acolyte, wrote the forward to a collection of Beer essays. The following is an excerpt of Beer’s feelings about Project Cybersyn at its outset:
Dear friends, I should like to greet you personally to this place, in the development of which I have taken enormous personal interest, and for this reason I am asking you to take a special interest in it. What you see is the outcome of 18 months of hard work on the part of a group of extremely professional Chilean engineers who have devoted their efforts to solving corporate management problems. They have created for us a series of tools to help us in the task of controlling the economy. Modern science, and specifically electronic computer science, offers the Government a new opportunity to address modern economic problems. We have seen that the power of this science has not yet been used in the so-called developed countries. We have developed a system on our own. What you are about to hear today is revolutionary – not only because this is the first time that this is applied in the world – it is revolutionary because we are making a deliberate effort to give the people the power that science gives to us, enabling them to use it freely.•
From Eden Medina’s Jacobin piece “The Cybersyn Revolution,” which suggests lessons learned from the project we can apply today, a passage about the lo-fi nature of the future-forward system:
When Project Cybersyn was built during the 1970s, there were approximately fifty computers in all of Chile, and most were outdated. Nor could Chile call up IBM for help. IBM decreased its operations in Chile following Allende’s election because they feared the Chilean government would nationalize them. The Nixon administration had also instituted an “invisible blockade” to destabilize the Chilean economy and prevent Latin America from becoming a “red sandwich” with Cuba on one side and Chile on the other. This further limited Chile’s ability to import US technology.
As a result, Beer and the Chilean team came up with an ingenious way to create the data-processing network they needed to link the country’s factories to the central command center: they would connect the one outdated computer they had for the project to another technology that was not state-of-the-art: the telex machine — or rather, several hundred of them. And it worked.
In 1972, a national strike that grew to include forty thousand truck drivers threw the country into a state of emergency and disrupted the distribution of food, fuel, and raw materials for factory production. The government used the telex network created for Project Cybersyn to determine which roads were open, coordinate the distribution of key resources, and maintain factory production.
The Cybersyn network improved government communication and substantially increased the speed and frequency at which the government could send and receive messages along the length of the country. It lacked the technological sophistication of ARPANET, the US military communications system that was the forerunner of the Internet and a contemporary of Chile’s telex system. But the Chilean network used fewer technical resources at a lower cost and proved highly functional nonetheless. Older technologies were creatively re-envisioned and combined with other forms of organizational and social innovation.•
Tags: Eden Medina
In an Edge conversation, Australian professor David Christian, an admitted science geek, recalls asking himself this question: “Could you teach a history course that began with the origins of the universe?” It really doesn’t make sense that we’ve ever taught such studies any other way, just the result of a paucity of imagination or a lack of faith in students.
I don’t know that the universe has any meaning as Christian suspects it might, but as Marshall McLuhan advised, we should use our powers to discern patterns, and I’ll add, to recognize when there’s a break from them, and this analysis should stretch back to the beginning of time, not just the earliest conflicts among the tribes who’ve recently arrived on Earth.
Two brief excerpts from Christian follow.
______________________________
In modern science, and I include the humanities here, science in a German sense of science—rigorous scholarship across all domains—in modern science we’ve gotten used to the idea that science doesn’t offer meaning in the way that institutional religions did in the past. I’m increasingly thinking that this idea that modernity puts us in a world without meaning—philosophers have banged on about this for a century-and-a-half—may be completely wrong. We may be living in an intellectual building site, where a new story is being constructed. It’s vastly more powerful than the previous stories because it’s the first one that is global. It’s not anchored in a particular culture or a particular society. This is an origin story that works for humans in Beijing as well as in Buenos Aires.
It’s a global origin story, and it sums over vastly more information than any early origin story. This is very, very powerful stuff. It’s full of meaning. We’re now at the point where, across so many domains, the amount of information, of good, rigorous ideas, is so rich that we can tease out that story. E.O. Wilson has been arguing for this for a long time. In Consilience he argued for this. It’s the same project.
It turns out, as we tell it at least, there is a coherent story.
______________________________
If you move on to human beings (our fifth threshold of increasing complexity) you can ask the question, which students are dying to ask: What makes humans different? It’s a question that the humanities have struggled with for centuries. Again, I have the hunch that within this very broad story, there’s a fairly clear answer to that. If all living organisms use information about their environments to control and manage the energy flows they need to survive—biologists call it metabolism—or to constantly adjust—homeostasis—then we know that most living organisms have a limited repertoire. When a new species appears, its numbers will increase until it’s using the energy that its particular metabolic repertoire allows it to fill.
Yet look at graphs of human population growth and something utterly different is going on. Here, you have a species that appears in probably the savanna lands of East Africa, but it doesn’t stay there. During the Paleolithic—over perhaps 200,000 years—you can watch the species, certainly in the last 60,000 years, slowly spreading into new niches; coastal niches in South Africa. Blombos Cave is a wonderful site that illustrates that. Then eventually desert lands, forest lands, eventually into ice age Siberia, across to Australia. By 10,000 years ago our species had spread around the world.
This is utterly new behavior. This is a species that is acquiring more, and more, and more information. That is the key to what makes us different.•
Tags: David Christian
Tags: William V. Albright
It’s perplexing the American school system (and no other that I know of) doesn’t employ video games as teaching tools, since they’re both satisfying and edifying and can allow students to pursue knowledge at a personalized pace. It’s a real lost opportunity to think learning can’t be vibrant and fun.
Beyond the classroom, Nicholas Carr wonders why software is created to pose no obstacles to us, to not challenge us but replace us. He addresses this point, among others, in an excellent discussion with Tom Chatfield of BBC Future. An excerpt:
Should life be more like a video game?
Tom Chatfield:
I was glad to see that you use video games in the book as an example of human-machine interactions where the difficulty is the point rather than the problem. Successful games are like a form of rewarding work, and can offer the kind of complex, constant, meaningful feedback that we have evolved to find deeply satisfying. Yet there is also a bitter irony, for me, in the fact that the work some people do on a daily basis is far-less skilled and enjoyable and rewarding.
Nicholas Carr:
Video games are very interesting because in their design they go against all of the prevailing assumptions about how you design software. They’re not about getting rid of friction, they’re not about making sure that the person using them doesn’t have to put in much effort or think that much. The reason we enjoy them is because they don’t make it easy for us. They constantly push us up against friction – not friction that simply frustrates us, but friction that leads to ever-higher levels of talent.
If you look at that and compare it to what we know about how people gain expertise, how we build talent, it’s very, very similar. We know that in order to gain talent you have to come up against hard challenges in which you exercise your skills to the utmost, over and over again, and slowly you gain a new level of skill, and then you are challenged again.
And also I think, going even further, that the reason people enjoy videogames is the same reason that people enjoy building expertise and overcoming challenges. It’s really fundamentally enjoyable to be struggling with a hard challenge that we then ultimately overcome, and that gives us the talent necessary to tackle an even harder challenge.
One of the fundamental concerns of the book is the fear that we are creating a world based on the assumption that the less we have to engage in challenging tasks, the better. It seems to me that that is antithetical to everything we know about what makes us satisfied and fulfilled and happy.•
Tags: Nicholas Carr, Tom Chatfield
An article I found in a 1970 Life magazine is probably the earliest profile I’ve ever read of an average American family (well, a relatively affluent one) having a networked home computer. An added bonus is that it was written by Michael Shamberg, a guerilla filmmaker and journalist who has gone on to produce some crazy documentaries and Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained. The opening:
Computers for the home have been envisioned by science-fiction writers and engineers ever since a huge, unwieldy prototype was developed 25 years ago. The whole futuristic age the prophesied, with an omnipotent electronic monster named Horace in every living room, is still a long way from realization, but compact consumer computers have quietly entered the household. While the market hardly rivals TV sets or refrigerators, the computer-as-home-appliance is now more than just a toy for the wealthy or a mysterious instrument for technical specialists.
Those pioneer families who have one, like the Theodore Rodmans of Ardmore, Pa., have discovered their obedient machine can perform a large variety of useful functions. Dr. Rodman originally brought it home for medical research, but then his family found it could plan mortgage payments, help out with homework, even play with the children. Although the cost is still high, computers like theirs have come within possible reach of a two-car family budget. A small, self-contained model is available for $8,000, complete. The Rodmans’ computer system, called time-sharing, uses a Teletype terminal connected to a big central unit via telephone. It costs $110 a month rent, plus $7.50 per hour of use.
The Rodmans’ computer is no anthropomorphic robot that can accomplish physical feats. It cannot flip the light switch, monitor the thermostat or do the cooking. Rather, it is a sophisticated mental appendage with a capacity for problem-solving that is limited only by the family’s imagination. Neither Dr. Rodman nor his family had ever operated, much less programmed, a computer before a terminal was installed in their home last August. Since then they have assigned it so many chores that Mrs. Rodman says, half seriously, “It’s really become a member of the family.”
“For me, the main physical effect of having a computer at home is that I’m able to spend a lot more time with my family,” says Dr. Rodman, who is a lung specialist on the faculty of Temple University medical school in Philadelphia. “For all of us the real impact is mental. Programming a computer is like thinking in a foreign language. It forces you to approach problems with a high degree of logic. Because we always have a computer handy, we turn to it with problems we never would have thought of doing on one before.”•
Institutional racism in the American justice system and the sustained tragedy of Gitmo have allowed autocratic nations ready ripostes when called out on their human-rights abuses. China, a communist capitalist country with no tolerance for free speech, has been one to particularly turn the tables in recent years. In a Spiegel interview conducted by Bernhard Zand, artist Ai Weiwei addresses this dynamic. An excerpt:
Spiegel:
Only two or three years ago, China was defensive when questioned about human rights issues. Now officials often reverse the accusation: What about the cases of racism in the United States? What about the violation of privacy by Western secret services?
Ai Weiwei:
No state or society can claim to have established human rights once and for all. What we have seen in the US lately is shameful. I use this word advisedly. If people are being abused or even killed during an arrest, this is highly disturbing. There are many cases and layers of racist behavior in the US — from police treatment to the issues of education and job opportunities. In America, however, such cases are being discussed publically.
Spiegel:
And in China?
Ai Weiwei:
China is at a different stage of development, human rights are violated here much more often. And still, we see improvements even here. There is the current case of a policeman who shot a man at a railway station right in front of his family. At least, there was a public investigation against this policeman (which cleared him of wrongful action in the first instance). Something like this would never have happened only a few years ago, never. Such a case would have been dealt with as an “internal police matter,” no one would ever have heard of it again. This can’t be done anymore. The Internet has established a public sphere and developed a pressure which the government can no longer ignore. We should use this public sphere and redefine — beyond China’s borders — what a government is allowed to do, where its powers end and where the realm of a citizen’s privacy begins.•
Tags: Ai Weiwei, Bernhard Zand
Robert Lane Greene, the Economist language columnist and author of You Are What You Speak, just conducted an unsurprisingly whip-smart Ask Me Anything at Reddit. One questioner wondered whether we should all be learning a Chinese dialect, and Greene used that opening to explain that the language is not headed for global-tongue status even as the nation gains great prominence on the world stage. The exchange:
Question:
If you’re going to learn a language, should everyone who doesn’t know Chinese learn it?
Lane Greene:
I’ve written about this several times, most recently
http://www.economist.com/comment/2610697
but also
http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/robert-lane-greene/should-you-teach-your-kids-chinese
and in my book.
The short version is this: China is hugely important and getting important faster. But Chinese is not getting more important at anything like the same rate as China.
What does this mean for the learner? If you plan to do any business that might involve intensive contact with China, definitely, learn Mandarin – it’ll be advantageous to understand the country and its people better than your competitors.
But here’s what it doesn’t mean: Chinese is not on a path to become a world language. It is overwhelmingly spoken by Chinese people, most of them in historically Chinese areas and the diaspora. It is not a lingua franca of wider communication. What does a Japanese person speak to a Cambodian? What does a Chinese businessman in Germany speak? A Swede holidaying in Portugal? You get my drift: lingua franca status comes when non-natives use a language for its practical access to lots of other people, including other non-natives.
So Chinese will get more important, no doubt. But it’s not on its way to lingua franca status.
And finally, I think the Chinese writing system is a huge impediment for the foreign learner, and therefore to the rise of the language in wider circles.•
Tags: Robert Lane Greene
Before cars or even bicycles were perfected, there were walking machines like the Aeripedis, or Pedomotive Carriage. They aimed to remove much of the strain of ambulation though, of course, the process still had to be manged by your brain.
When I heard about Max Pfeiffer’s “cruise control for pedestrians” last month, I thought at first it might be an April Fools’ Day joke, but that’s not the case. The system combines smartphone GPS and electrodes attached to your legs to offload your navigational responsibilities to the cloud. More or less, it’s “automated walking,” and the movements can be remotely directed by another party. If you’re someplace unfamiliar and don’t know what direction in which to head, actuated navigation can do the thinking for you, guide your every step.
At Wired UK, Evan Selinger argues that the scheme is a road to hell. An excerpt:
In order to truly get a handle on the significance of “actuated navigation,” we need to do more than just imagine rosy possibilities. We’ve also got to confront the basic moral and political question of outsourcing and ask when delegating a task to a third party has hidden costs. To narrow down our focus, let’s consider the case of guided strolling. On the plus side, Pfeiffer suggests that senior citizens will appreciate help returning home when they’re feeling discombobulated, tourists will enjoy seeing more sights while freed up by the pedestrian version of cruise control, and friends, family, and co-workers will get more out of life by safely throwing themselves into engrossing, peripatetic conversation. But what about the potential downside?
Critics have identified several concerns with using current forms of GPS technology. They have reservations about devices that merely cue us with written instructions, verbal cues, and maps that update in real-time. Nicholas Carr warns of our susceptibility to automation bias and complacency, psychological outcomes that can lead people to do foolish things, like ignoring common sense and driving a car into a lake.Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly lament that it’s “dehumanising” to succumb to GPS orientation because it “trivialises the art of navigation” and leaves us without a rich sense of where we are and where we’re going. Both of these issues are germane. But while, in principle, technical fixes can correct the mistakes that would erroneously guide zombified walkers into open sewer holes and oncoming traffic, the issue of orientation remains a more vexing existential and social problem.
Pfeiffer himself recognises this dilemma. He told WIRED.co.uk that he hopes his technology can help liberate people from the tyranny of walking around with their downcast eyes buried in smartphone maps. But he also admitted that “when freed from the responsibility of navigating…most of his volunteers wanted to check email as they walked.” At stake, here, is the risk of unintentionally turning the current dream of autonomous vehicles into a model for locomotion writ large.•
__________________________________
“Actuated navigation is a new kind of navigation, reducing cognitive load.”
Tags: Evan Selinger
When I was a child, my grandmother used to say, “There once was a girl named Patty Hearst who got kidnapped. Don’t you get kidnapped.” But nobody wanted me, so I went and played in traffic.
These are scary times for the internationalist, with rogue states of no defined boundaries and narco-terrorism. America’s ability to set global order has waned after the disaster of the Iraq War and the rise of China. Who will keep you from being kidnapped and used as barter if you’re an executive on the go and the places you’re going include Belgrade and Caracas and Mexico City, or even more dangerous locales where drones are aimed at your head and knives at your throat? No one, that’s who. You’re on your own, MacGyver.
Luckily, Andy “Orlando” Williams of the private security firm Risks Incorporated is here to help save your ass with a three-day kidnap and ransom course. The journalist Mitch Moxley enrolled, participated in a variety of exercises, submitted briefly to a waterboarding, and filed a report for Slate. An excerpt:
As we drive to an office in nearby Pembroke Pines, [Andy “Orlando”] Wilson briefs me on the bourgeoning business of international kidnapping. The White House’s recent acknowledgment of the accidental killing of two al-Qaida hostages in Pakistan in January, as well as the dark news from Syria in recent months, both overshadows and underscores the fact that kidnappings are a global scourge. As incidents have increased worldwide, a parallel industry has emerged, one that includes insurance companies, negotiators, lawyers, and security firms like Risks Inc. In a 2010 investigation, London’s Independent newspaper dubbed this the “hostage industry,” and estimated its worth at about $1.6 billion a year.
“You don’t have to be rich. People will kidnap you for next to nothing,” Wilson says. “Venezuela is out of control. Mexico is out of control.” Most of his clients for the Florida course are executives or wealthy individuals who live in high-risk areas, primarily in Latin America. (Wilson also offers the course in Belgrade, Serbia.) Other students have included American businessmen who travel to potentially dangerous locations, security contractors, and an international yacht captain. (Lambros Y. Lambrou, a trial lawyer in Manhattan and a father of two, took Wilson’s kidnap course to help ensure his family’s safety when they travel to countries like Mexico and Serbia, where his wife is from. “We live in a very uncertain world sometimes,” Lambrou says. “Unfortunately, most of the time the only person you have to protect you is yourself.”)•
Mike Jay has already demonstrated that mental illness is often expressed in the terms of the era in which it’s experienced. In a really smart London Review of Books piece about Laure Murat’s new title, The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon: Towards a Political History of Madness, Jay writes of Philippe Pinel, a psychiatrist who reshaped and expanded the notion of insanity and its treatments in the wake of the French Revolution, when citizens who went mad often focused their anxieties on the guillotine, with one patient believing he’d been beheaded and subsequently had another victim’s skull attached to his neck.
In 1840, French heads became confused in a different sense, when Napoleon Bonaparte’s remains were laid to rest in an elaborate public ceremony, and soon enough, a quarter of all cases of mental illness in the nation were being diagnosed as delusions of grandeur. An excerpt:
Morbid terror of the guillotine was occasionally recorded in Bicêtre until the 1850s, but by that time it had been usurped by the most celebrated delusion of them all. On 15 December 1840 the remains of Napoleon Bonaparte, rumoured to be miraculously uncorrupted, were taken to the Invalides accompanied by vast crowds and laid to rest in a grandiose imperial ceremony. That same year, Bicêtre admitted at least a dozen Napoleons to its wards.
‘Delusions of grandeur’, of which believing oneself to be Napoleon became the archetype, rose to extraordinary medical and cultural prominence during the July Monarchy. By 1840 it accounted for a quarter of all diagnoses of insanity. It was a form of monomania, the term coined by Esquirol to describe an uncontrolled delusion or obsession (idée fixe) in one who might otherwise appear sane. He conceived it as a disease of the passions, a consequence of ‘self-love, vanity, pride and ambition’, and hence a moral failing as much as a pathology. Mad Napoleons were always irascible and imperious, reciting their interminable compositions, brooking no argument and demanding that everyone submit to their will. Doctors told tales of miraculous cures effected in the Pinelian manner by humouring them, but their blind rages were more commonly addressed with beatings, straitjackets, cold showers and solitary confinement.
During the 1830s monomania became a term of everyday speech, and delusions of grandeur inseparable from the Romantic spirit of the age. The return of Napoleon’s remains catalysed a sense that the era of heroism had passed, the passions of political struggle replaced by bourgeois dullness. Blockbuster novels traded in impossibly heroic narratives, their protagonists adopting grandiose false identities and concealing fateful secrets; Balzac claimed that what Napoleon ‘did with the sword, I will accomplish with the pen’. Characters embarked on fantastic quests that inevitably recalled Don Quixote, whom Esquirol had cited as the perfect example of the monomaniac. For some psychiatrists, ‘the impact of modern novels’ was itself becoming one of the leading causes of madness.Napoleon – who declared during his final years on St Helena that ‘my life is a novel!’ – was the figure in whom reality and fantasy were conjoined. He was the apotheosis of Rousseau’s new man, who had transcended the limits of history and taken his place among the immortals. Unlike any sovereign before or since he was entirely self-made, and thus uniquely compelling to the delusional. A pretender to the monarchy would always remain just that, but a fake Napoleon might through supreme effort of will become the real thing.•
Tags: Laure Murat, Mike Jay, Philippe Pinel
Go mummy-hunting in the Aleutian Islands, you say? But I’m not finished tweeting yet!
Harold McCracken, arctic explorer and big-game hunter and magazine editor and inaugural director of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, was forever risking his hide on rugged fact-finding missions, hoping to recover one shard or another of the past. On the occasion of a spelunking expedition he was to make to search for preserved prehistoric corpses, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle ran an article about the dangerous sojourn in its April 22, 1928 edition. The opening of the piece follows.
Tags: Charles H. Stoll, Harold McCracken, Mrs. Merle L. Stoll
I wish everyone writing about technology could turn out prose as sparkling and lucid as Nicholas Carr. In a New York Times opinion piece, he stresses that while people are flawed, so are computers, and our silicon counterparts thus far lack the dexterity we possess to react to the unforeseen. He suggests humans and machines permanently remain a team, allowing us to benefit from the best of both.
I think that’s the immediate future, but I still believe market forces will ultimately cede to robots anything they can do as well (or nearly as well) as humans. And I’m curious as to the effects of Deep Learning on the impromptu responses of machinery.
From Carr:
While our flaws loom large in our thoughts, we view computers as infallible. Their scripted consistency presents an ideal of perfection far removed from our own clumsiness. What we forget is that our machines are built by our own hands. When we transfer work to a machine, we don’t eliminate human agency and its potential for error. We transfer that agency into the machine’s workings, where it lies concealed until something goes awry.
Computers break down. They have bugs. They get hacked. And when let loose in the world, they face situations that their programmers didn’t prepare them for. They work perfectly until they don’t.
Many disasters blamed on human error actually involve chains of events that are initiated or aggravated by technological failures. Consider the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447 as it flew from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The plane’s airspeed sensors iced over. Without the velocity data, the autopilot couldn’t perform its calculations. It shut down, abruptly shifting control to the pilots. Investigators later found that the aviators appeared to be taken by surprise in a stressful situation and made mistakes. The plane, with 228 passengers, plunged into the Atlantic.The crash was a tragic example of what scholars call the automation paradox. Software designed to eliminate human error sometimes makes human error more likely. When a computer takes over a job, the workers are left with little to do. Their attention drifts. Their skills, lacking exercise, atrophy. Then, when the computer fails, the humans flounder.•
Tags: Nicholas Carr
One question asked of Bernie Sanders in his AMA yesterday that I failed to include was a query about technological unemployment. He gets it, even if some of the potential jobs for people he mentioned will be disrupted by robotics soon enough. Some already are. The exchange:
Question:
What do you think will have to be done regarding massive unemployment due to automation permanently killing jobs with no fault on the people losing these jobs?
Bernie Sanders:
Very important question. There is no question but that automation and robotics reduce the number of workers needed to produce products. On the other hand, there is a massive amount of work that needs to be done in this country. Our infrastructure is crumbling and we can create millions of decent-paying jobs rebuilding our roads, bridges, rail system, airports, levees, dams, etc. Further, we have enormous shortages in terms of highly-qualified pre-school educators and teachers. We need more doctors, nurses, dentists and medical personnel if we are going to provide high-quality care to all of our people. But, in direct response to the question, increased productivity should not punish the average worker, which is why we have to move toward universal health care, making higher education available to all, a social safety net which is strong and a tax system which is progressive.•
Tags: Bernie Sanders
Postmates wants to become the “Uber of goods,” but Uber also wants to fulfill that function, and the “venerable” rideshare company aims to upend the Silicon Valley upstart, founded by German-born entrepreneur Bastian Lehmann, which will deliver an iPad or eye drops to your home or office in under an hour, with the help of non-FT freelancers. The job is very flexible, which is helpful, because you might have time for another job that offers great benefits.
It’s amazing to reflect on services like UrbanFetch or Kozmo, which attempted the same business model during Web 1.0, a time before universally fast downloads, let alone smartphones. The reverse of Miniver Cheevy, they were born too early. Now we have the technology.
From Thomas Schulz’s Spiegel article about the potential Valley unicorn:
Postmates has set itself an ambitious goal — to be the Uber of goods, with a vast network of couriers, linked, like Uber’s drivers, via a sleek app, waiting for users to hit a button on their smartphones and send them forth to pick up anything that money can buy. Like Uber’s drivers, Postmates couriers aren’t employees but “independent contractors.” Anyone with a bike, car, truck, scooter or motorcycle can register and decide exactly when they want to work. …
Game-Changing
Postmates currently takes 70,000 orders a week. Available in 26 major metropolitan areas, the company has raised nearly $60 million in venture capital and presides over the world’s third largest network of couriers, after Uber and Lyft. A few weeks ago, Starbucks announced it would be teaming up with Postmates so that customers can now have their skinny lattes delivered to their door.
The loft premises in a brick building in downtown San Francisco, where the company has been headquartered for the last eight months, are already getting too small. A total of 198 staff members — many of whom boast IT degrees from Ivy League universities — sit at back-to-back computers crammed into two floors. Lunch is eaten al desko.
The start-up’s rise has been so meteoric that many in Silicon Valley thought Postmates could be the next addition to the Unicorn List — one of those rare companies that prove to be game-changers or build whole new markets, such as Airbnb and Uber.•
Tags: Bastian Lehmann, Thomas Schulz
While the 73-year-old Socialist Congressperson Bernie Sanders has to pretend he can win the Presidency, he probably realizes, unlike, say, Ted Cruz, that he has no real shot at victory. What points does he feel his protest candidacy is particularly positioned to make?
An Ask Me Anything at Reddit he just conducted reveals a number of priorities, including the issue of surveillance. It’s good Sanders mentions that the private sector, as much as government, is hopeful of turning society into an Orwellian state, though I don’t see any way such a reach is kept in check, regardless of law. The tools will almost definitely stay ahead of legislation, obliterate it. I’m more hopeful about remedying income inequality and electoral reform.
There are also questions about space-exploration funding and universal basic income. A few exchanges below.
___________________________
Question:
As the longest serving independent in congress, what are your thoughts about electoral reform in the United States?
Bernie Sanders:
The major issue in terms of our electoral system is truly campaign finance reform. Right now, we are at a moment in history where the Koch brothers and other billionaires are in the process of buying politicians and elections. We need to overturn Citizens United with a constitutional amendment. We need to pass disclosure legislation. We need to move toward public funding of elections. We also have got to see an increased federal role in the outrageous gerrymandering that Republican states have created and in voter suppression. These are the main issues that I’ll be tackling in the coming months.
___________________________
Tags: Bernie Sanders
Predictions by technologists tend to be optimistic, their timeframes often as aggressive as their ambitions, but there’s no denying the Internet’s relentless attempts to quantify are being visited upon us more and more in the physical realm. Those efforts will only increase, even if it’s anyone’s guess when an “emotion chip” will be realized. We went to the cloud, and now the cloud is coming to us. It will be seamless.
From Neil Howe’s Forbes piece about the potential of a “digital fog”:
Long considered the stuff of science fiction, AI’s great leap forward has been driven by a perfect storm of technological change. First is a growth in capabilities: Rapid advancements in computing power and falling hardware costs have made AI-related computations much cheaper to perform. Second is the advent of Big Data, which has enabled deep-learning algorithms in which the systems themselves learn bottom-up from a vast, fast-expanding universe of digital information.
Tech gurus speculate that the marriage of Big Data, the Internet of Things, and AI will eventually result in “ambient intelligence”—an ever-present digital fog in tune with our behavior and physiological state. Affectiva’s founder, Rana el Kaliouby, predicts in The New Yorker that before long, devices will have an “emotion chip” that functions unseen in the background the way that geolocation does in phones. Verizon has drafted plans for a sensor-laden media console that could scan a room and determine a driver’s license worth of information about its occupants. All these data would then determine the console’s selection of TV advertising: Signs of stress might prompt a commercial for a vacation, while cheery humming could result in more ads with upbeat messages.
What kind of mark will AI ultimately leave on society?•
Tags: Neil Howe
Remember when workers were being nickeled and dimed? Ah, the good old days.
Barbara Ehrenreich, who’s spent much of her journalistic career studying the indignities of the working class, has penned a New York Times review of Martin Ford’s excellent book, Rise of the Robots, an extended diagnosis and concise prescription for the potential mass automation of work. The machines, he argues, are coming for your job, whether your collar is white or blue.
Ford is decidedly in the this-time-it’s-different camp who believe that unlike the the Industrial Revolution, which replaced farm jobs with better ones, this second machine age will not create new positions for people who have their careers disappeared. He also argues that the earlier fear of automation, a twenty-or-so-year period beginning in the late 1940s and cresting in the mid-1960s, wasn’t incorrect, just early.
The author’s argument is supported by academic research of all manner, but it’s a compelling and lucid one deserving of a wide readership. While he addresses the longer term possibility of Strong AI, which would clearly make the situation even more pressing, Ford focuses mostly on the type of Weak AI (non-conscious machines) set to invade every industry from taxi to delivery to law to medicine. In fact, the first inroads have already been made, and they’ve been dazzling. If Moore’s Law holds out a little while longer, the march of the non-wooden soldiers will come at a brisk pace, and the idea of near-universal employment will become an impossibility. No nickels for you, no dimes. What then?
Despite the alarmist topic of the book, Ford is reasoned and cautious, conservative even. Like myself, he argues against the most-quoted Piketty approach to combating income inequality, education, as a panacea. A worthwhile thing, sure, but not a broad answer. Ford asserts that we’ll most likely need to opt for a guaranteed basic income (incentivized to promote work whenever possible) to be funded in part from shifting tax responsibilities from workers to capital. (His feelings on the need for basic income have been shared by disparate thinkers: Andrew McAfee, Charles Murray, Friedrich Hayek, Eric Brynjolfsson, etc.) Easier said than done considering our political climate, but if wealth and productivity increase in the next few decades while employment continually ticks down, Americans at some point will likely not be pacified by bread and Kardashians.
From Ehrenreich:
In the late 20th century, while the blue-collar working class gave way to the forces of globalization and automation, the educated elite looked on with benign condescension. Too bad for those people whose jobs were mindless enough to be taken over by third world teenagers or, more humiliatingly, machines. The solution, pretty much agreed upon across the political spectrum, was education. Americans had to become intellectually nimble enough to keep ahead of the job-destroying trends unleashed by technology, both robotization and the telecommunication systems that make outsourcing possible. Anyone who wanted a spot in the middle class would have to possess a college degree — as well as flexibility, creativity and a continually upgraded skill set.
But, as Martin Ford documents in Rise of the Robots, the job-eating maw of technology now threatens even the nimblest and most expensively educated. Lawyers, radiologists and software designers, among others, have seen their work evaporate to India or China. Tasks that would seem to require a distinctively human capacity for nuance are increasingly assigned to algorithms, like the ones currently being introduced to grade essays on college exams. Particularly terrifying to me, computer programs can now write clear, publishable articles, and, as Ford reports, Wired magazine quotes an expert’s prediction that within about a decade 90 percent of news articles will be computer-generated. …
This is both a humbling book and, in the best sense, a humble one. Ford, a software entrepreneur who both understands the technology and has made a thorough study of its economic consequences, never succumbs to the obvious temptation to overdramatize or exaggerate. In fact, he has little to say about one of the most ominous arenas for automation — the military, where not only are pilots being replaced by drones, but robots like the ones that now defuse bombs are being readied for deployment as infantry. Nor does Ford venture much into the spectacular possibilities being opened up by wearable medical devices, which can already monitor just about any kind of biometric data that can be collected in an I.C.U. Human health workers may eventually be cut out of the loop, as tiny devices to sense blood glucose levels, for example, learn how to signal other tiny implanted devices to release insulin.
But Rise of the Robots doesn’t need any more examples; the human consequences of robotization are already upon us, and skillfully chronicled here.•
Tags: Barbara Ehrenreich, Martin Ford
Futurist and philosopher Melanie Swan has a thought-provoking and well-written Edge essay response to the question, “What do you think about machines that think?” She suggests a cafeteria approach to future intelligence, envisioning, among other things, a world in which humans enhanced cognitively would share terrain with those unenhanced.
I wonder about that. Today’s wealth inequality has caused problems and may lead to more serious ones (especially if Narrow AI is the job killer it appears to be), but that’s nothing compared to what would likely happen if superintelligent people were living aside those of much inferior thinking ability. Homo sapiens had company from several other species of humans at one point not too long ago, but we finished vanquishing them all with the fall of the Neanderthals, and perhaps we didn’t even do it on purpose. The sweep of our progress may have just swept everyone else away. Tremendous disparity in future intelligence may lead to something similar whether we’re talking about an intramural contest among humans, or humans vying with sentient machines, should they develop. The writer believes in “trust-building models for inter-species digital intelligence,” but I’m skeptical.
The opening of Swan’s essay:
Considering machines that think is a nice step forward in the AI debate as it departs from our own human-based concerns, and accords machines otherness in a productive way. It causes us to consider the other entity’s frame of reference. However, even more importantly this questioning suggests a large future possibility space for intelligence. There could be “classic” unenhanced humans, enhanced humans (with nootropics, wearables, brain-computer interfaces), neocortical simulations, uploaded mind files, corporations as digital abstractions, and many forms of generated AI: deep learning meshes, neural networks, machine learning clusters, blockchain-based distributed autonomous organizations, and empathic compassionate machines. We should consider the future world as one of multi-species intelligence.
What we call the human function of “thinking” could be quite different in the variety of possible future implementations of intelligence. The derivation of different species of machine intelligence will necessarily be different than that of humans•
Tags: Melanie Swan