“The Share Of Americans Convinced That Health Care Is A Right Shrank From A Majority To A Minority”

April 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Obamacare, as it was derisively labeled by those who wanted to scare us from it, has been one of our nation’s most successful large-scale pieces of legislation in recent memory. It’s expanded insurance tremendously, slowed formerly ballooning costs and would seem to be a long-term job creator. (Diagnostics and service aspects of medicine may soon be automated, but many other positions will require a human element for the foreseeable future.) Even Tea Party representatives have enjoyed the benefits.

You would think the populace would be thrilled, but poll numbers stubbornly suggest that the Affordable Healthcare Act has turned off much of the nation to a further sharing of our responsibility for one another. I don’t think of this as a victory for the GOP PR machine. I’m not one of those people who believe that the matter with Kansas is that the citizens have been hoodwinked. The matter with Kansas is Kansans, and to extrapolate that, the matter with America is Americans. I don’t believe we’re fooled. I think we often see things through ideology rather than by results, and that’s a dangerous stance, especially if we are headed for greater wealth inequality, encouraged by AI which will reduce employment opportunities. Perhaps futurists in Silicon Valley believe we’re entering an age of technological socialism, but the people are not enamored with such an idea, even if it would benefit them. From Thomas Edsall at the New York Times:

With the advent of the Affordable Care Act, the share of Americans convinced that health care is a right shrank from a majority to a minority.

This shift in public opinion is a major victory for the Republican Party. It is part of a larger trend: a steady decline in support for redistributive government policies. Emmanuel Saez, an economics professor at Berkeley and one of the nation’s premier experts on inequality, is a co-author of a study that confirms this trend, which has been developing over the last four decades. A separate study, “The Structure of Inequality and Americans’ Attitudes Toward Redistribution,” found that as inequality increases, so does ideological conservatism in the electorate.

The erosion of the belief in health care as a government-protected right is perhaps the most dramatic reflection of these trends. In 2006, by a margin of more than two to one, 69-28, those surveyed by Gallup said that the federal government should guarantee health care coverage for all citizens of the United States. By late 2014, however, Gallup found that this percentage had fallen 24 points to 45 percent, while the percentage of respondents who said health care is not a federal responsibility nearly doubled to 52 percent.•

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“It’s A Battery Company That Happens To Make Electric Cars”

April 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I would love to know if Elon Musk originally viewed Tesla as solely an automaker and realized he had another business, maybe a better one, selling batteries consumers could use to power their homes when some began to repurpose them to do just that.

Electric cars often need power stations between points A and B, houses and commercial buildings don’t have that challenge, and while the company still has plenty of near-term challenges, a developing non-mobile market could ultimately be gigantic. And that’s a market that Tesla has now fully dived into. The opening of Klint Finley’s astute Wired piece labeling Tesla as primarily a battery company:

TESLA IS ADMIRED for building the cars of the future. But it’s not really a car company. It’s a battery company that happens to make electric cars.

At least, that’s the trajectory suggested by the news that Tesla will soon sell mega-batteries for homes and electric utility companies. CEO Elon Musk mentioned the possibility during an earnings call last February, and the plan was reportedly confirmed in an investor letter revealed yesterday. The official announcement is set to come next week.

Selling batteries for homes, businesses, and utilities may seem like a departure for a car company. But for Tesla, it makes perfect sense. An electric car is only as green as the electrical grid that powers it. And if Tesla’s batteries become widespread, they could help utilities take better advantage of inconsistent renewable energy sources like wind and solar. As demand for renewables rises, whether through regulatory mandate or consumer desire, so would utilities’ demand for batteries that could help maintain a consistent flow—a demand Tesla is well-positioned to meet.•

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A Brief Note From 1923 About Pocahontas’ Bones

April 22, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the June 1, 1923 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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“We Have Cameras In His Eyes And In His Chest”

April 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Apart from a few exceptions, any job that can be automated will be automated. Weak AI may seem dull, but it’s capable and relentless. Hanson Robotics is trying with “Han” and “Eva” to make things more interesting while rolling the future forward, developing machines that look like us and can react to voices and recognize faces. Perfect for customer service and myriad other services.

“Their Children Would Also Have Bigger Brains”

April 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

When speaking of neural enhancement being distributed unfairly because of wealth inequality, it’s important to remember that even without drugs or prosthetics or engineering, we already have a similar playing field and that it’s very much divided into haves and have nots. Brain function, even size, is already influenced by poverty. From Chris Gyngell’s Practical Ethics post about a fictional brain-growing drug:

A new drug, Numarol, is currently being trialled which increases the surface area of the brain in children. Numarol causes children to have bigger brains, do better in cognitive tests and generally improves their life prospects. One critic of Numarol recently pointed out it would be very expensive, and only the rich would be able to afford it. Its release would likely create a significant difference in brain size between the highest and lowest socioeconomic groups. Numarol would create a world in which biological inequalities are forged from economic ones. The rich would not only have bigger houses, better cars, and better healthcare than the poor, their children would also have bigger brains. Such a world would be abhorrent.

But we already live in this world. Numarol is fictional, but the rich do have children with bigger brains than the poor. Social inequalities have already been written into our biology. 

This is the lesson from one of largest studies of brain morphology and structure in children. Brains of children from the lowest income bracket — less than US$25,000 — had up to 6% less surface area than those from children whose parental income was more than US$150,000. These differences in brain size where then found to be associated with differences in performance in a number of cognitive tests measuring working memory, vocabulary, and reading ability. These associations were independent of age, sex, parental education level and genetic ancestry (which was assessed through a whole genome analysis).

The relationship between family income and brain size was more pronounced among children in the poorest families where “income disparities of a few thousand dollars were associated with major differences in brain structure, particularly in areas associated with language and decision-making skills.”•

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

April 22, 2015 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

“I am 64 years old, 5’9″ 220 lbs.”

For voyeur couple (NYC)

I am from Montreal, Canada. I am 64 years old, 5’9″ 220 lbs. I do not drink, do not smoke. If you’d like a “companion” for your wife for a short while (a week or so?), perhaps I could come down and visit…and occupy the bed while you, sir, sleep on the couch.

“Travel To The Earth’s Surface And Back Would Be Relatively Hard. Is That Correct?”

April 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a book which sprang from the Whole Earth Catalog successor, CoEvolution Quarterly, Stewart Brand included his 1975 discussion about space colonization with physicist Gerard O’Neill. The interviewee’s take on the economics of space travel was ridiculously hopeful for the time (and still in ours) but not theoretically impossible in the long run if we last. An excerpt: 

Stewart Brand:

If “in wildness is the preservation of the world,” then in what is the preservation of the space colony?

Gerard O’Neill:

Making it wild, I think. The long-term plan, really dream, that I would have is a situation in which, in 50, 100, 150 years, it would be so cheap to replicate large communities that you would be building quite large ones, many, many square miles in land area for each one, and they would be very thinly populated. And so the natural development it seems to me, is toward a situation where you have a great many wild species involved, and as wild an environment as you choose to make. I would imagine one on which there is a lot of forest and park area and wild areas, and a relatively small amount which is manicured and put into the form that people like to have for their dwellings.

Stewart Brand:

Now you’re restating your question, whether a planet’s surface is the best place for a wilderness?

Gerard O’Neill:

Maybe so. But this situation that I was just describing, this possibility if pursued, is one that could occur both on the Earth and in the communities of course. Because the existence of the space communities as a place to which many people might choose to move would also be perhaps the only realistic non-violent way in which the Earth’s population might really decrease.

Stewart Brand:

I’m trying to imagine the trapped feeling that one might have. Travel between communities would be relatively easy. Travel to the Earth’s surface and back would be relatively hard. Is that correct?

Gerard O’Neill:

It would be interesting to compare it in terms of real income. Passage between the colonies and the Earth probably corresponds to passenger travel back and forth between Europe and the United States in, say, the 1700’s. It’s the kind of thing that Benjamin Franklin did to go and negotiate treaties in France. It was not the sort of thing that the ordinary guy was able to accomplish.

The cost of going back and forth to the Earth – I made some rough estimates on what that might be with the technology of let’s say 20 – 30 years from now, still nothing far out like nuclear power or anything like that – and came out to about $3,000 per person for a round trip. Among the colonies it should be very easy, very cheap. From one community to another, even 5,000 miles away would probably be as little as $100 or something like that. A few dollars in energy costs is enough to launch a vehicle over that kind of distance.•

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“I Think We Will Start To Incorporate Neural Prosthetics”

April 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Not sure if it will occur in the next five decades, but brain enhancement is our future. In a New York Q&A, neuroscientist Heather Berlin tells Adam K. Raymond about the path forward. Everything she says seems plausible except for the potential controlling or curtailing of neural prosthetics because some will initially have unequal access to it. That I doubt. The opening:

Question:

What surprising things will we be able to do with our brains in the next 50 years?

Heather Berlin:

I think we will start to incorporate neural prosthetics. For example, electrical implants can stimulate parts of the brain to treat psychiatric illness. I think in the future we will start using these implants for cognitive enhancement — to help increase our memory or to increase our attention. Or to make us not need as much sleep and stay alert longer.

If people have neural implants, it will be possible for them to control a cursor on a computer or type emails just by using their thoughts. I also think we’ll be able to decode people’s thoughts at some level and predict what they might be thinking, maybe not with 100 percent accuracy, but maybe 70 or 80 percent.

Question:

How would that work?

Heather Berlin:

With an implant that records information. For example, there are studies where they’ll show someone a picture while they’re in an fMRI machine. We can show a person, say, a picture of a fish and a cat, and we can record what their brain activity looks like. Then we can show them a picture and without knowing the picture, look at the brain activity and predict what the person is seeing, whether it’s a fish or a cat.

That’s what we have already. Fifty years in the future we’ll get better at decoding this information. We’ll be able to predict what a person is seeing based on this brain activity or maybe even what they’re thinking.

Question:

And you think this stuff will be elective, the kind of thing people do for fun?

Heather Berlin:

The kind of stuff we’re using now to treat psychiatric illness will eventually be used for cognitive enhancement. Like the way we have plastic surgery to get a better nose or breast implants, you’ll be able to get these neural implants that will increase cognitive function. Maybe only people who can afford it get neural implants, and they have an advantage. Maybe it’s going to be like performance-enhancing drugs, where it’s going to have to be controlled.•

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Old Print Article: “Nobile And Amundsen Are Heroes Of An Arctic Drama,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1928)

April 21, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

As difficult as it was to believe that Roald Amundsen had survived his many explorations, at the end it was just as tough to accept that he’d perished.

The early twentieth-century Norwegian explorer was so secretive about his missions that credit for discovering the South Pole in 1912 at first went to his British rival Capt. Robert Scott, until the truth prevailed. So when the ultra-resourceful Amundsen and his party went missing in 1928 when flying to the Arctic to attempt a rescue of crew members of the crashed airship Italia, some in the American media believed, or wanted to believe, that he had only lost contact for the moment. Sadly, the disappearance was permanent; not even wreckage was ever recovered. An article from the June 20 Brooklyn Daily Eagle of that year, which hoped against hope.•

 

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“Climate Change Will Be Deemed Intolerable For Humans Long Before It Speeds Up Extinction Rates”

April 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Old Print Articles, Science/Tech | Permalink

There aren’t many things that can kill most of the life on Earth, though there are some (climate change for one) that can claim a heartbreaking part of it.

Recent discussion about the existential threat of global warming has led Stewart Brand to fret that perhaps all these apocalyptic daydreams may be stunting the progress of conservationists. He contends in a new Aeon essay that there’s no onrushing Sixth Extinction, as it’s been called, and though he acknowledges great concern for defaunation and ecosystem functioning, he believes humans will act with drastic measures if necessary before we bury ourselves in a global Easter Island. He further argues that biotech might allow us to reverse species endangerment and increase biodiversity.

It’s a great piece, the kind Aeon spoils us with regularly. While I agree climate change isn’t likely to extinct all of Homo sapiens in the foreseeable future, even in a century or two, it could possibly reduce population with a viciousness. Brand’s gut feeling aside, there’s no guarantee we’ll make intelligent political decisions to protect our tomorrow and that of other fauna and flora. We certainly haven’t demonstrated such big-picture fortitude yet. And bioengineering our way out of trouble means plenty of unintended consequences, no matter how careful we are. Aggressive environmentalism and conservation is still the key, which is something I imagine Brand would concur with.

From Brand:

Anyone who doubts the reality of global warming need only talk to a few field biologists. Everyone doing field research is discovering how sensitive the organisms they study are to slight changes in average temperature, in the length of the growing season, in rainfall patterns. But just because organisms are sensitive to change doesn’t mean they are threatened by it. Any creature or plant facing a shifting environment has three choices: move, adapt or die. …

Move, adapt or die. When organisms challenged by climate change respond by adapting, they evolve. When they move, they often encounter distant cousins and hybridise with them, sometimes evolving new species. When they die, they leave a niche open for other species to migrate or adapt into, and a warming climate tends to open the way for more species rather than fewer. In the same Nature essay, Thomas wrote: ‘Global-diversity gradients dictate that more warm-adapted species are available to colonise new areas than cold-adapted species retreating from those areas as the climate warms.’

Throughout 3.8 billion years of evolution on Earth, the inexorable trend has been toward an ever greater variety of species. With the past two mass extinction events there were soon many more species alive after each catastrophe than there were before it.

There is no reason to be sanguine about climate change. It is the most serious problem currently facing humanity and nature. It might lead to the loss of some species that we lament greatly, but it will also usher in new species, and unless there is extremely ‘abrupt’ climate change, net biodiversity is unlikely to decrease dramatically. Abrupt-change scenarios have been dropping out of the climate models lately, thanks to ever-improving data and growing knowledge about climate dynamics. My own prediction is that climate change will be deemed intolerable for humans long before it speeds up extinction rates, and even if radical steps have to be taken to head it off, they will be taken.•

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“The Goal Isn’t To Do Away With Bartenders”

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

Whenever I read that new robots will “work alongside humans, not replace them,” I think two things:

  1. Some humans will be immediately replaced.
  2. The rest (or almost all of them) will eventually be replaced.

It’s great if we have AI that can do the drudgery for us, delivering products and waxing floors and stocking warehouse shelves, but unless this new machine age somehow creates a corresponding number of jobs to replace those lost, we’re headed for some difficult challenges. And, no, not even bartenders are safe.

From Timothy Aeppel at WSJ:

Robots aren’t about to elbow bartenders out of a job.

But versions of them could start showing up at your favorite watering holes. Indeed, some are already out there.

The Makr Shakr is the creation of an Italian company and consists of robotic arms that mix cocktails, and then place them on a conveyor belt to be carried across the bar to the waiting customer or a server. The first two installations are on Royal Caribbean cruise ships, where they’re the centerpieces of “Bionic Bars.”

The goal isn’t to do away with bartenders, who are still needed to tend the machines and, when necessary, deliver the drinks. Carlo Ratti, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and cofounder of Makr Shakr, says the project began when he was asked to design a machine that would allow people to interact with robots in an unexpected setting. “It started as something to shock people in a tangible way,” he says, to show them “what the third industrial revolution is all about.”

Another example is the “Bartendro,” a box with hoses and flashing lights that can mix an array of drinks—but it too needs to be tended by a human, who among other things puts the glass into position under the pour spout and then delivers the drink to the customer.

Machines like these are designed to work alongside humans, not replace them.•

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“We Have To Allow For The Possibility That Don Lemon Might Be Wrong”

April 21, 2015 in Excerpts | Permalink

The only time I’ve ever felt sympathy for Rand Paul was when he was interviewed on CNN by Don Lemon, who decided to provoke the Libertarian because that was what he thought it was necessary to do, in much the same way a parakeet senses it must chirp. It was sound and fury and signified nothing, theater aimed at making it seem something important had occurred. That, in essence, is the meaning of modern cable news.

In Jeff Zucker’s clown car of infotainment, Lemon passes for a star, not because the anchor is right–he almost never is–but because he gets attention, making stupid comments about race and gender and religion and anything else that slips from his face hole. 

What can you do with such a person, apart from turning away? You can write a sympathetic-if-devastating portrait of him as Taffy Brodesser-Akner has at GQ. The opening:

So I say to Don Lemon, I say, let’s do it, Don Lemon, let’s have dessert. We’ve been here awhile, eating lunch, and we’re having a good time, so likable is Don Lemon, so open is he to my questions, so warm is his smile. And maybe he can be coaxed into it. We are at the restaurant at the Museum of Modern Art, and the portions are modern-art-sized, and he just had his photo shoot yesterday—he’d suspended all manner of salt and other bloateries in the days leading up to it and would love to cut loose a little. But he still needs persuading, since it is a known thing that dessert is one of the principal sacrifices of people who regularly appear on TV. But he relents, because Don Lemon is not the kind of guy who will make you eat dessert alone. The negotiation: He’ll do it, but it’ll have to be light. I look up and down the menu and suggest that the sorbet looks promising, given his totally understandable criteria.

He leans in, big warm smile, not wanting to correct me, but needing to: “Sorbette,” he says, like a news anchor. “It’s pronounced sorbette.”

“Sorbette,” I repeat, shaky. I smile, not quite understanding the joke.

“Sorbette,” he says with the confidence of a man who informs hundreds of thousands of Americans each night about what is happening across this land as well as many others. “It’s pronounced sorbette.” Sorbette! Could he be right? I’ve been saying it like a French word for years, like a complete asshole. Have I, a native English speaker, a graduate of a four-year college, a frequent eater of frozen desserts, been mispronouncing it all this time?

Or we can leave room for the possibility that he is just plain wrong. This is Don Lemon, after all, the news anchor whose name has become associated with what might politely be calledmissteps, like asking an Islamic scholar if he supports the terrorist group ISIS, or declaring on the scene at Ferguson that there’s the smell of marijuana in the air, “obviously.” This is the guy who asked if a black hole could be responsible for the disappearance of Flight MH370; who asked one of Bill Cosby’s alleged rape victims why she didn’t stop the attack by, as he put it, “the using of the teeth.”

Yes, we have to allow for the possibility that Don Lemon might be wrong.•

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“Thank God For Steve Jobs”

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

You get the feeling that Kanye West is a person who looked at the hooey that was the Apple “Think Different” campaign, the one that used the likeness of Mahatma Gandhi to sell overpriced consumer electronics made in sweatshops, and accepted it at face value? I like his music, but he seems a manic personality nurtured on Silicon Valley cliches. Here’s the opening of West’s just-published, extravagant Paper essay:

I know people want to talk about the American Dream, but my dream is a world dream. It’s a world in which everyone’s main goal would be to help each other. The first thing I told my team on New Year’s Day was, “You know, people say bad news travels fast, but this year let’s make good news travel faster.” You get back what you put out, and the more positive energy you put out, the more positive energy you’ll get back. We had to do a lot of fighting in the past couple of years to get people to understand what we want to do, what we will do and what we’re capable of doing. Not just me — or my DONDA creative team, or my design team, or my music team — but an entire generation that has the information highway and the ability to access information. Information is not only power; it’s simply everything. It can be a scary thing for people to think universally, to think in terms of the world. It’s not traditional. There’s a lot of people who want to make sure things don’t become a hybrid, but the Internet has opened up every conversation, literally and metaphorically. It starts as homogenizing, but this hybrid-ing, this interbreeding of ideas, is necessary for us as a race to evolve. (Thank God for Steve Jobs.) For example, there was an embroiderer at a fashion house who was in her 90s and she refused to give anyone her technique. She said, “When I die, this technique will die also.” I think the opposite of that. I think it’s so important for me, as an artist, to give Drake as much information as I can, A$AP, Kendrick, Taylor Swift, any of these younger artists as much information as I can to make better music in the future. We should all be trying to make something that’s better. It’s funny that I worked at the Gap in high school, because in my past 15 years it seems like that’s the place I stood in my creative path — to be the gap, the bridge.•

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“The Robots Sit Together At Pick-Up Points Waiting Until They Are Needed”

April 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

It’s fun staying at hotels but not at hospitals. Both, however, are starting the process of automating delivery services. Aloft Hotels began experimenting with robot butlers last year and the new Henn na Hotel in Nagasaki hopes to employ enough AI to halve its service force. People making these machines (while they’re still made by people) will have good jobs, but other fields will be wiped away almost entirely, disappeared along with travel agencies and video stores.

A Scottish university hospital has just invested a couple of million dollars in delivery drones. It will probably be a good thing for the facility and its patients, but we’ll likely have to eventually reckon with Labor destabilized by automation.

From Margi Murphy at Techworld:

South Glasgow University will task a fleet of 22robotswith trolleying medical equipment, food and linen around the hospital form next week.

The brand new hospital, which cost £842 million, spent £1.3 million on the drones – which have a lift to shuttle up and down the 14 storeys.

In a post on the hospital’s website, facilities manager Jim Magee said the robots would help boost patient services.

“The technology is brilliant. For example, the Swisslog Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) will return themselves to a charging station if their power is running low.

The robots sit together at pick-up points waiting until they are needed, replacing each other when necessary.•

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“Safe and accurate navigation”:

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“I Think It Becomes Very Hard To Be A Good Person After A Certain Point”

April 21, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

I mentioned this before when writing of Al Michaels’ obliviousness about the dark side of the NFL, but when you haven’t had to worry about food or shelter in a long time, you have to be on constant guard against the development of moral blind spots. Michaels likely thinks of himself as a solid citizen, but your assessment may vary considering his opinions about the racist Washington franchise name and the preponderance of serious health issues suffered by the league’s players.

At the recent Festival of Books at USC, Malcolm Gladwell (who is not incognizant of the NFL’s concussion issue) spoke to this same point. From Taylor Goldstein at the Los Angeles Times:

“I think it becomes very hard to be a good person after a certain point. Or at least it’s not impossible, it’s just harder to work. Just as, in David and Goliath, I talk about what it means to be, how hard it is, weirdly, to be a wealthy parent, how much more difficult it is to raise a child if you are very wealthy as opposed to middle class.

“It’s not impossible, but it requires more of you. There’s that whole thing I have about the difference between “can’t” and “won’t.” That saying no to a child of the middle class is very easy because you just say, “We can’t.” “You want a pony? Look around you! Where would the pony go? Look in the bedroom; is there room for a stable?”

“Of course, if you’re a billionaire, you can’t use ‘can’t,’ you have to use ‘won’t,’ and ‘won’t’ is really hard. ‘Won’t’ requires you to give an explanation, right? And in the same way, when you get, when you’re living a kind of normal life, being empathetic comes naturally. When you’re successful, you have to work at it.”•

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A Brief Note From 1900 About A Family Man

April 20, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

A brief note from the January 29, 1900 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“As We Get More And More Powerful Technology, We Want To Think About The Potentially Catastrophic Side Effects”

April 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The next thousand years or so are sort of important for human beings. At the conclusion of that time period, if we survive, there will probably only be vestigial elements remaining of who we are today, but we will have created the next life forms. And I do mean create, as genetic engineering, nanotechnology and space colonization will put evolution in our hands.

Or we could all die. Climate change, plague, asteroid impact, superintelligence or some other calamity could wipe out the lot of us before we have the opportunity to spread out among the stars. One person who’s working on this global-scale risk management is Jaan Tallinn, a Skype founder who co-created the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge. At Edge.org, he’s interviewed about his work in this area, which might seem marginal to some but is chasing our biggest ghosts. An excerpt:

Over the last six years or so there has been an interesting evolution of the existential risk arguments and perception of those arguments. While it is true, especially in the beginning, that these kinds of arguments tend to attract cranks, there is an important scientific argument there, which is basically saying that technology is getting more and more powerful. Technology is neutral. The only reason why we see technology being good is that there is a feedback mechanism between technology and the market. If you develop technology that’s aligned with human values, the market rewards you. However, once technology gets more and more powerful, or if it’s developed outside of market context, for example in the military, then you cannot automatically rely on this market mechanism to steer the course of technology. You have to think ahead. This is a general argument that can apply to both synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and so on.

One good example is the report LA-602, that was developed by the Manhattan Project. During the Manhattan project, it was six months before the first nuclear test. They did a scientific analysis of what is the probability, what are the chances of creating a runaway process in the atmosphere that would burn up the atmosphere and thus destroy the earth? It’s the first solid example of existential risk research that humanity has done.                                 

Really, what I am trying to advance is more reports like that. Nuclear technology is not the last potentially disastrous technology that humans are going to invent. In my view, it’s very, very dangerous when people say, “Oh, these people are cranks.” You’re basically lumping together those Manhattan Project scientists who developed solid scientific analysis that’s clearly beneficial for humanity, and some people who are just clearly crazy and are predicting the end of the world for no reason at all.

It’s too early to tell right now what kind of societal structures we need to contain the technology once the market mechanism is no longer powerful enough to contain them. At this stage, we need more research. There’s a research agenda coming out pretty soon that represents a consensus between the AI safety community and the AI research community, of things that are not necessarily commercially motivated research, but the research that needs to be done if you want to steer the course, if you want to make sure that the technology is beneficial in the sense that it’s aligned with human values, and thus giving us a better future the way we think the future should be. The AI should also be robust in the sense that it wouldn’t accidentally create situations where, even though we developed it with the best intentions, it would still veer off the course and give us a disaster.

There are several technological existential risks. An example was the nuclear weapons before the first nuclear test was done. It wasn’t clear whether this was something safe to do on this planet or not. Similarly, as we get more and more powerful technology, we want to think about the potentially catastrophic side effects. It’s fairly easy for everyone to imagine that once we get synthetic biology, it becomes much easier to construct organisms or viruses that might be much more robust against human defenses.

I was just talking about technological existential risks in general. One of those technological existential risks could be potentially, artificial intelligence.•

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“Something Potentially Momentous Is Happening”

April 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Whenever I see the parent of a grade-school athlete cursing at an umpire or encouraging the child to play very aggressively, I always make a mental note that in a couple decades society will have another terrible middle manager in its midst.

Even worse for these paper pushers of tomorrow, the working world will probably not need them–it doesn’t even really need them now. In a Wall Street Journal piece, Christopher Mims writes of startups replacing the middle-management level with data, allowing the numbers to make decisions humans used to make. The practice disappears some costs–and jobs. The opening:

Something potentially momentous is happening inside startups, and it’s a practice that many of their established competitors may be forced to copy if they wish to survive. Firms are keeping head counts low, and even eliminating management positions, by replacing them with something you wouldn’t immediately think of as a drop-in substitute for leaders and decision-makers: data.

“Every time people come to me and ask for new bodies it turns out so much of that can be answered by asking the right questions of our data and getting that in front of the decision-makers,” says James Reinhart, CEO of online secondhand clothing store thredUP. “I think frankly it’s eliminated four to five people who would [otherwise] pull data and crunch it,” he adds. …

The result isn’t really “big data,” just more data, more readily available, says Mr. Bien. The only “algorithm” processing the data and using it to make predictions is simply the humans scanning it for correlations. And now that every employee can have the tools to monitor progress toward any goal, the old role of middle managers as people who gather information and make decisions doesn’t fit into many startups. Nor do the leaders who remain need to poll middle managers to find out how employees are doing, since transparency and accountability are the essence of the data-driven company.

It isn’t the end of middle management, but it is an evolution.•

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“I Want You To Find Einstein’s Brain”

April 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Albert Einstein deservedly wrested the “greatest Jew since Jesus” title from the far inferior Leon Trotsky, but having such a beautiful mind came with costs, and it’s been well-documented that the scientist’s brain had a bumpy life of his own after his passing in 1955. Steven Levy, the best tech reporter of the personal-computing era, located the great man’s gray matter, in 1978, for New Jersey Monthly. He recalls the strange reconnaissance mission in the Backchannel piece “Yes, I Found Einstein’s Brain“:

The reporters who by then had heard of the news and begun gathering in Princeton did not have access to the body. According to his wishes, Einstein’s body was incinerated. The cremation took place at 4:30 that day in Trenton. Nathan disposed of the ashes in the Delaware River.

But not all of the body was cremated. According to an article in the New York Times that ran on April 20, the brain was saved for study. The headline was “KEY CLUE SOUGHT IN EINSTEIN BRAIN.” That article was the last piece of actual news regarding Einstein’s brain that would appear for over 20 years.

The next piece of news would come from me.

“I want you to find Einstein’s brain.”

My editor was giving me the weirdest assignment in my young career. It was the late spring of 1978. I was working for a regional magazine calledNew Jersey Monthly, based in Princeton, New Jersey. It was my first real job. I was 27 years old and had been a journalist for three years.

The editor, a recent hire named Michael Aron, had come to New Jersey with a white whale of a story idea, one that he once had begun himself but gotten nowhere on. Years earlier, he had put together a package at Harper’smagazine on brain science. He had read Ronald Clark’s magisterial biography of Albert Einstein, and had been fascinated by one phrase at the end.

“He had insisted his brain be used for research…”

What had happened to the brain? Aron wondered. He had seen that April 20New York Times article. But that seemed to be the last mention of the brain. He looked at all sorts of indexes of publications and journals for any hint of a study and couldn’t find a thing. He wrote to Ronald Clark; the biographer didn’t know. Clark referred Aron to Nathan, the executor of the estate. Nathan’s prompt response was a single terse paragraph. He confirmed that the brain had been removed during the autopsy, and the person performing the procedure had been a pathologist named Thomas Harvey. “As far as I know,” Nathan wrote, “he is no longer with the hospital.” And that was it. Aron had hit a dead end.

But Aron never gave up on the idea, and when he got to New Jersey — where Einstein had lived and died, right there in Princeton — he immediately assigned me the story. He scheduled it for our August cover story. It was late spring. I had about a month.

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“Any Great City Has Its Own Mythologies”

April 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Prophecies can fulfill themselves, which is the hope of Angelenos as nation’s largest city hopes to remake itself as something like an ecotopia despite it’s ever-growing population and density of automobiles. Before the middle of last century, locals began to have their streetcars and trolleys taken away, hearing relentlessly that L.A. was a car city, and it had to be that way. It didn’t have to be that way then and doesn’t need to (completely) be that way now. But first hearts and minds must be won, and many projects successfully completed. From Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow at Slate:

In recent years, Los Angeles has made headway on its most infamous environmental problems, and is even trying to position itself as a green leader. Smog has greatly diminished. Despite adding 1 million people to its population, the city claims to use the same amount of water as it did 30 years ago. Los Angeles is also heavily investing in mass transit while growing denser. (An EPA report found that between 2005 and 2009, the metropolitan area grew significantly more compact, as two-thirds of new housing was built on already developed land.) And Mayor Eric Garcetti’s new sustainability “pLAn” could have been drafted by Al Gore. It lays out a comprehensive suite of goals, such as eliminating coal from the city’s energy portfolio and diverting 90 percent of waste from landfills, both by 2025. In short, a place long known for its suburban character is becoming more of a city. And a place known for defying natural limitations is beginning to try to honor them—a goal that’s at once humbler and more ambitious.

Readers outside the region may have already seen an article or two about how this or that aspect of L.A. isn’t so terrible anymore. Within the region, these changes have collectively contributed to a sense of a new and improved L.A.—an emerging mythology of a more sustainable, responsible, and communal city. Granted, it’s a myth in more than one sense. To apply those adjectives to L.A. requires some squinting (and perhaps politely ignoring the Lexus that just cut you off on the 405). And the drought has the potential to pit water-consumers against each other rather than pulling them together. But this narrative could nevertheless reshape the city’s self-image. Indeed, outsiders who cling to the old clichés about L.A. have themselves become a target of ridicule. As the real-estate blog Curbed LA put it, “New York Times stories about Los Angeles are amazing because they’re like seeing the city through the eyes of a dorky time traveler from 1992.”

The most explicit attempt to capture the shift in the zeitgeist is the notion of the “Third Los Angeles,” a term coined by Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne. In an ongoing series of public events, Hawthorne has proposed that L.A. is moving into a new phase of its civic life. In his formulation, the first Los Angeles, a semi-forgotten prewar city, boasted a streetcar, active street life, and cutting-edge architecture. The second Los Angeles is the familiar auto-dystopia that resulted from the nearly bacterial postwar growth of subdivisions and the construction of the freeway system. Now, Hawthorne argues, this third and latest phase harks in some ways back to the first, in its embrace of public transit and public space (notably the billion-dollar revitalization of the concrete-covered Los Angeles River). Hawthorne’s focus is not specifically environmental. But a more publicly oriented city also tends to be a greener one. This is partly because mass transit and walking mean lower carbon emissions. And more broadly, willingness to invest in the public realm tends to coincide with political decisions that prioritize the public good, including ecological sustainability.

Any great city has its own mythologies. But perhaps in Los Angeles, as in California generally, myths loom particularly large.•

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“This Eerily Named ‘Embodied Avatar Kiosk’ Does Much Better Than Humans”

April 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In “The Machines Are Coming,” Zeynep Tufekci’s NYT op-ed piece, the writer doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the general specter of technological unemployment, but she does provide some excellent concrete examples that go far beyond the warehouse floor. Developments in voice and facial recognition have allowed robots to cause distress for collars white as well as blue. Outsourcing now means not sending jobs beyond borders but beyond species. The opening:

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — THE machine hums along, quietly scanning the slides, generating Pap smear diagnostics, just the way a college-educated, well-compensated lab technician might.

A robot with emotion-detection software interviews visitors to the United States at the border. In field tests, this eerily named “embodied avatar kiosk” does much better than humans in catching those with invalid documentation. Emotional-processing software has gotten so good that ad companies are looking into “mood-targeted” advertising, and the government of Dubai wants to use it to scan all its closed-circuit TV feeds.

Yes, the machines are getting smarter, and they’re coming for more and more jobs.

Not just low-wage jobs, either.

Today, machines can process regular spoken language and not only recognize human faces, but also read their expressions. They can classify personality types, and have started being able to carry out conversations with appropriate emotional tenor.

Machines are getting better than humans at figuring out who to hire, who’s in a mood to pay a little more for that sweater, and who needs a coupon to nudge them toward a sale.

To crack these cognitive and emotional puzzles, computers needed not only sophisticated, efficient algorithms, but also vast amounts of human-generated data, which can now be easily harvested from our digitized world. The results are dazzling.•

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Old Print Article: “Human Ostrich Ill,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1904)

April 19, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Human Ostrich, an inversion of his self-denying cousin the Hunger Artist, could not stop eating even when good sense should have prevailed, and it wasn’t just food he devoured. Entertaining others for a paycheck or to win bar bets, such a turn-of-the-century performer would down any metal item he was egged on to swallow, from pocket-watch chains to sharp knives to skeleton keys. One such foolhardy soul was John Fasel (also sometimes spelled “Fassel” or “Fassell” or “Sasel”), a Brooklyn man who was semi-famous for his deeds and took ill more than once. When his life was threatened by his profession in 1904, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle covered the story with the same zeal they invested in the Spanish-American War, spitting out a series of articles about Fasel’s condition. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any closure to the tale, as the Ostrich’s life was hanging in the balance when the reportage abruptly ended. Let’s think good thoughts.

__________________________

From April 12, 1904:


From May 2, 1904:

 

From May 3, 1904:

 

From May 4, 1904:

“In Brazil, Dead People Write Books”

April 19, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Francisco Cândido Xavier was a prolific writer, though he had help.

At least, that’s what the Brazilian man affectionately known as Chico Xavier claimed. He fancied himself as a ghostwriter for ghosts, a medium who would “receive” the books from the deceased and transcribe them. Psicografía, it is called. The opening of “Dead Man Talking,” Laura Premack’s Boston Review article:

In Brazil, dead people write books. Not only do they write books, they sell them. Many fly off the shelves.

The process is called psicografía or psychography, also known in English as automatic writing: mediums go into trance, channel the spirits of the deceased, and record their words. Sometimes mediums channel the spirits of famous writers and poets such as Victor Hugo and Humberto de Campos, the renowned Brazilian poet and journalist whose family sued the medium-author of several collections of his supposedly posthumous poems and essays—not because they objected on principle but because they wanted a share of the profits. Sometimes mediums channel historical figures, such as nineteenth-century politician Bezerra de Menezes, and sometimes they channel unknowns.

Brazil’s most prolific and beloved medium was Francisco Cândido Xavier. Known fondly as Chico Xavier, he published more than 400 books from 1932 until his death at age ninety-two in 2002. At least 25 million copies of his books have been sold, likely more. They have been translated into many languages, including Greek, Japanese, and Braille. His Nosso Lar, a sort of spiritual memoir first published in 1944, is probably the biggest psychographic hit ever. More than sixty Brazilian editions have been printed and nearly 2 million copies sold.

In addition to publishing books, Xavier used his psychographic ability to record more than ten thousand letters from dead people to their families.•

__________________________

Beginning in 1970, Chico Xavier began appearing on the TV show Pingo Fogo.

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“Tombstone, Arizona, During The 1880’s Is, In Ways, Our National Camelot”

April 19, 2015 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

I haven’t yet read Oakley Hall’s McCarthy Era Western, Warlock, but now I must. That’s the book Thomas Pynchon named in 1965 when Holiday magazine asked him to suggest an underappreciated title to its readers. It’s set in 1880s Tombstone, Arizona, which Pynchon believed to be Arthurian in stature. Here’s what he wrote about it:

Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880’s is, in ways, our national Camelot; a never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the confrontation at the OK Corral takes on some of the dry purity of the Arthurian joust. Oakley Hall, in his very fine novel Warlock(Viking) has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity.  Earp is transmogrified into a gunfighter named Blaisdell who, partly because of his blown-up image in the Wild West magazines of the day, believes he is a hero. He is summoned to the embattled town of Warlock by a committee of nervous citizens expressly to be a hero, but finds that he cannot, at last, live up to his image; that there is a flaw not only in him but also, we feel, in the entire set of assumptions that have allowed the ­image to exist. It is Blaisdell’s private abyss, and not too different from the ­town’s public one. Before the agonized epic of Warlock is over with—the rebellion of the proto-Wobblies working in ­the mines, the struggling for political control of the area, the gunfighting, mob violence, the personal crises of those in power—the collective awareness that is Warlock must face its own inescapable Horror: that what is called society, with ­its law and order, is as frail, as precari­ous, as flesh and can be snuffed out and assimilated back into the desert a easily as a corpse can. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock, I think, one of our best American novels. For we are a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Hall’s to remind us how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly behind us, has to fall.

—Thomas Pynchon•

 

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

April 19, 2015 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

I will provide my plumbing services for your massage services (Westchester)

Plumbing repairs for a massage from woman only.

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