Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

March 24, 2015 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

Fucked my eyebrows! (Brooklyn)

I’m a guy and I groom my eyebrows. I know it’s a kinda feminine but a lot of guys are doing it these days so don’t get on my case. Anyway, I noticed they were uneven went to trimming away. The right side was fine so I concentrated mostly on my left side and boom, my hand moved suddenly, and it took a large chunk off. I had to make it thinner on both sides to make it look decent. But now I look like I drew my eyebrows with a marker. And to make things worse, I said maybe I should trim them down so it will blend it once it starts growing back. Now my eyebrows look like I painted them on with eyeliner. This shit has never happened to me. I’m so embarrassed. I’m probably gonna have to take the entire week off and not go out at all until my eyebrows start look normal again. Stupid shit keeps happening to me. I hate my fucking life!

Old Print Article: “Find Prehistoric Clay Models Of Animals In Cave,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1923)

March 24, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Norbert Casteret, speleologist, took a giant leap for humankind in 1923 with a dive in the Grotte de Montespan in France. This brave departure from dry land led to one of the adventurer’s greatest discoveries (one of anyone’s greatest): a trove of prehistoric drawings and sculptures of animals. In his book, Ten Years Under The Earth, Casteret recalls the moment he shared with friend and fellow explorer Henri Godin:

At that moment I stopped before a clay statue of a bear, which the inadequate light had thus far hidden from me; in a large grotto a candle is but a glow-worm in the inky gloom.

I was moved as I have seldom been moved before or since: here I saw, unchanged by the march of aeons, a piece of sculpture which distinguished scientists of all countries have since recognized as the oldest statue in the world.

My companion crawled over at my call, but his less practised eye saw only a shapeless chunk where I indicated the form of the animal. But one after another, as I discovered them around us, I showed him horses in relief, two big clay lions, many engravings.

That convinced him, and for more than an hour discovery followed discovery. On all sides we found animals, designs, mysterious symbols, all the awe-inspiring and portentous trappings of ages before the dawn of history.•

The following is an October 7, 1923 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article about the Upper Paleolithic trove, which focuses on clay figures that had been mutilated by their creators as part of a hunting ritual.

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“The Report Was Regarded As Science Fiction By The League”

March 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

Sports Illustrated made the following statement about football not in 2015 but in 1978: “The game is headed toward a crisis, one that is epitomized by the helmet, which is both a barbarous weapon and inadequate protection.” This dire warning was attached to a series of articles reported by John Underwood about the dark side of Monday Night Lights, a clarion call about the devastating injuries that are endemic to the game, among other unsavory elements of the gridiron.

Since then, the sport hasn’t faced endgame, anything but, as football replaced baseball as America’s pastime, with its ubiquitous fantasy leagues and gambling and sophisticated content-delivery system. But that doesn’t mean Underwood wasn’t prophet, as the commonplace concussions–which just led Chris Borland to retire from the NFL at 24–aren’t going anywhere, no matter what type of helmet is developed. You can’t stop that type of whiplash, the brain slashing around inside the skull. The NFL’s ruling class is awfully good at self-delusion, but they worry sooner or later parents will steer youngsters from football the way they now do from boxing, the former king of sports.

From Underwood:

Once there was a game that had practically everything. Fun to play and exciting to watch, it was beloved by a nation of sports-minded people. It was held up to the nation’s youth as an exemplary physical test and as a builder of character. Outstanding men, including Presidents and Supreme Court Justices, had played it in their youth. Many observers considered it to be the definitive American game.

In time, the sport developed a professional adjunct. It was shown on television and was used to sell automobiles, beer and “pieces of the Rock.” As a result, some of the men who played the game were idolized and became rich.

Statistics showed that it was the nation’s most injurious team sport, but those who despaired of the weekend casualty lists were encouraged to look at the sport’s virtues, at the lives and profit statements it enhanced.

The game became contaminated, but the process was so gradual and insidious that few took notice. From the kiddie leagues to the major colleges and professional league, the sport’s public image grew more robust even as it decayed within. The injury rate mounted, sportsmanship declined. Vicious acts became commonplace.

Reform, though obviously needed, was resisted by the sport’s custodians. Most of its coaches were too busy trying to stay employed. They were also reluctant to give up “proven” coaching tenets. They said injuries were “part of the game.” They were supported in this by the players, who were busy trying to keep their scholarships or make their fortunes. For their part, the sport’s administrators were too busy trying to maximize their profits.

Eventually the professional league commissioned a study of injuries. The investigation was supposed to be private, but word of it got around. The study showed that the game’s equipment and many of its rules needed to be overhauled to keep pace with the times. Players were bigger, faster and stronger, but the laws of physics were constant: e.g., force=mass X acceleration. Nonetheless, the report was regarded as science fiction by the league. Only minimal changes were made; key recommendations were ignored.

Excess begot excess. Some of the sport’s paid stars were glorified for the “macho” way they broke the rules. A psychiatrist wrote firsthand about the amphetamine abuses of one pro team and how the drug contributed to injury. For this he was discredited by the league, which led a move to have his license revoked.

No sin was too great for absolution. College coaches caught cheating one year were named “Coach of the Year” the next. Pro players threatened officials, and each other, with impunity. The sport suddenly found itself crawling with lawyers. Charges ranging from breached contracts to slander were hurled. Players–teen-agers and adults–filed suit, seeking recompense for their broken bodies. Manufacturers of the game’s equipment learned they were faced with Judgment Day. The cost of insuring the game against itself soared alarmingly.

And all the while men of goodwill who loved the sport, and were involved in it, grew fearful for its future.

And wondered what would happen next.

And if any good seats were left for the big game.•

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“A New Creed’s Apparent Preposterousness Is No Guarantee Of Failure”

March 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

Scientology is really no goofier in its belief system than are any of the world’s major religions, with their virgin births and reincarnations and, yes, talking donkeys, but it seems predatory toward its adherents in a way scary cults are. Will it ever grow past that? As Alex Gibney’s broadside on the church of Hubbard and Travolta and Cruise prepares to air on HBO, the great Tom Carson writes of the anti-auditing doc at Grantland. An excerpt:

The church’s own claims of around million members aren’t what you’d call reliable, and that’s still a drop in the bucket to Vatican City and Mecca. But ex-insiders estimate the actual figure is a paltry 30,000 adherents worldwide. If so, Scientology’s prominence as an alternative faith and/or perceived public menace is some kind of tribute to Hubbard’s Warhol-anticipating perception that celebrity is currency; according to the same sources, one out of six of those 30,000 live in Los Angeles.

Another measure is staying power, which in this case is still TBD. It’s been only 60 years since founder L. Ron Hubbard ginned up a mental-health program into a mighty — let’s be polite — idiosyncratic theology. Remember, though, that a new creed’s apparent preposterousness is no guarantee of failure. In the first century A.D., Christianity’s tenets probably sounded fairly goofy up against the more plausible stuff about Jupiter, Minerva, & Co. that the civilized world swore by. At least in theory, it’s totally possible that sociable chat about thetans and Suppressive Persons — the jargon Hubbard bequeathed us — won’t be any more outlandish a few hundred years from now than being down with transubstantiation or the virgin birth.

Porky Pig turning drone may seem more likely, but whatever you think of the prospect, the day is brought no closer — and that’s putting it kindly — by Gibney’s harsh and sometimes blatantly alarmist doc. Its full title is Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief. Gibney’s take derives considerable authority from being based on prizewinning New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright’s scrupulously reported book of approximately the same name. (Wright’s subtitle had “Hollywood” in there, too, and it would be interesting to know what prompted the elision: The doc certainly features enough of John Travolta and Tom Cruise.) But so long as we’re talking the difference between religions and cults, try to imagine HBO running a comparable documentary about, say, Mormonism — in more ways than one, as Wright’s book details, Scientology’s 19th-century equivalent, at least in the popular suspicions (and derision) it aroused when it was founded.•

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“It Brings Immediacy To Your Thoughts, And That Is Something That Never Happened Before In The History Of Mankind”

March 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The graphic designer Massimo Vignelli, who passed away nearly a year ago, left a mark on New York City that’s dwarfed only by those on the level of Robert Moses and Frederick Law Olmsted. Here’s an excerpt from a 2006 Gary Hustwit interview with Vignelli (republished by Fast Company) in which the man who somehow made sense of our serpentine subway comments on the impact of modern machines on signage:

Question:

What’s your opinion of the impact of the computer on typography?

Massimo Vignelli:

In the ’60s, we were taking Standard and cutting the sides of the letters in order to get the type tighter. A good typographer always has sensitivity about the distance between letters. It makes a tremendous amount of difference. We think typography is black and white. Typography is really white, you know. It’s not even black, in a sense. It is the space between the blacks that really makes it. In a sense, it’s like music—it’s not the notes; it’s the space you put between the notes that makes the music. It’s very much the same situation.

The spacing between letters is important, and the spacing between the lines is important, too. And what typographers do, what we do all the time, is continuously work with those two elements, kerning and leading. Now, in the old times we were all doing this with a blade and cutting type and cutting our fingers all the time. But eventually, thank God, the Apple computer came about. Apple made the right kind of computer for the communication field. IBM made the PC, and the PC was no good for communication. The PC was great for numbers, and they probably made studies that there were more people involved with numbers—banks, insurance companies, businesses of all kinds. But they made a tremendous mistake at the same time by not considering the size of the communications world. That community is enormous, you know—newspapers, television, anything that is printed. It’s enormous. Advertising, design, you name it. 

Anyhow, Apple, thank God, got the intuition of going after that market, and so in 1990 they came out with a computer that we designers could use. Now, let’s face it: the computer is a great thing, but it’s just a tool, just like a pencil is a tool. The computer has much more memory, the pencil has no memory whatsoever, and I have even less. But it is a fantastic tool which allowed the best typography ever done in the history of typography, because you can do the kerning perfectly for the situation. You can do the leading perfectly for whatever you’re encountering. Not only that, but you see it right away; you can print it right away. It brings immediacy to your thoughts, and that is something that never happened before in the history of mankind.

It allows you to do the best typography ever, but it also allows you to do the worst ever.•

___________________________

“It’s the space between the notes”:

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“The Robot Astronaut Was Able To ‘Observe’ Certain Operations”

March 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Our friends are already electric, but is the current arrangement just prelude?

When you consider the place in our pockets–in our hearts–for our smartphones with all their endless content, is it any stretch to see robots as our pals? The alliance may start in space, but it will eventually touch down. Even if the robots can’t truly see us, they can watch us, and such a simulacrum may bring satisfaction. From Anthony Cuthbertson at IBM Times:

The Kibo Robot Project, set up in Japan around three years ago, is hoping that its robots can be used to better understand the relationship between robots and humans, with the eventual aim of providing complete companions for humans living increasingly isolated lives. …

The Kibo Robot Project originally formed from a collaboration between the University of Tokyo, Toyota, Robo Garage and Dentsu.

As a result, two identical humanoid robots – Kirobo and Mirata – were developed, each featuring voice and facial recognition, as well as natural language processing to allow them to understand and communicate with humans.

After a period of tests and experiments, one of the robots was sent up to join Japanese astronaut Wakata Koichi aboard the ISS.

While aboard the ISS, the robot astronaut was able to “observe” certain operations, however its functionality meant that its role as a companion was limited to short conversations with Wakata. As artificial intelligence technology advances it is hoped that robots such as these could be used on more long-term space missions.

“A robot would be utilised more in long-distance missions like on a journey to Mars,” Nishijima said. “It would be used to support the astronauts because sometimes a loss of signal occurs, and in that case the astronaut needs to have a companion or friend to talk to.”•

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“Eventually, These Advances In Software Will Rise To The Level Of Consciousness”

March 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I suppose there’s nothing theoretically impossible in pharmacological entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt’s dream of a second self for each us, one made of silicon, which will last forever, but I’m extremely skeptical when I hear those plans attached to the phrase “not-too-far-future.” And that doesn’t even take into consideration that our software siblings would be a version of us but not us. From Rick Jervis at USA Today:

AUSTIN – In a not-too-far-future, robotic mind-clones will accompany us to the ballot box or grocery store, sit in on business meetings we can’t make, argue with us occasionally and keep our essence alive long after we’re gone.

That’s the vision pharma tycoon and futurist Martine Rothblatt shared Sunday with several thousand attendees during one of the more popular events of Day 3 of SXSW Interactive.

“There will be continued advances in software that we see throughout our entire life,” Rothblatt told a packed audience in the cavernous Exhibit Hall 5 during her keynote speech. “Eventually, these advances in software will rise to the level of consciousness.” …

Rothblatt said robots and humans don’t have to choose sides – such as in the plotlines seen in popular Hollywood movies – but will live in a peaceful co-existence that will make them virtually indistinguishable from one another.

“It’s not us versus cyberspace,” she said. “We’re merging together.”

She added: “We don’t want to create a new slave-versus-free motif. I’m all for merging everyone together. On the level of consciousness, we’re all one.”

Rothblatt has applied many of her theories to practical experiments, including creating a lifelike robotic replica of her longtime wife, Bina Aspen. The robot, named Bina48, could answer questions and replies using the real Bina’s characteristics and mannerisms.

Robots in the future will have constitutional rights and even “cyber psychiatrists” who will ease the cyber’s anxiety of not being completely human, she said.•

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“He Is The Most Notorious American Novelist”

March 23, 2015 in Books, Videos | Permalink

Speaking of Norman Mailer, here’s a clip from a 1979 Firing Line in which William F. Buckley sits down with the pugilistic prose writer at the time of The Executioner’s Song. Twenty-five years after using his “nonfiction novel” to profile the life and firing-squad death of murderer Gary Gilmore, Mailer guested on the Gilmore Girls. Strange life.

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“It Isn’t A Car Anyone Would Ever Want To Drive”

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

Two excerpts follow about driverless cars. The first is swooning review of a Mercedes robocar from Alex Davies of Wired, the second, from Google X’s Astro Teller at Backchannel, examines the more mundane problems of making autonomous a reality.

____________________________

From Davies:

There will come a time, within a few decades, when people simply will not drive anymore. This is a hard truth for automakers like Mercedes-Benz and Audi to acknowledge, given the time and money they spend portraying their cars as fun to drive. So they serve every shot of “Your car will drive itself!” with a chaser of “But you can always drive your car if you want to!” This will make sense as the transition to autonomous cars begins: You’ll take the wheel of your SL-Class when driving through the winding hills, it’ll take over on your boring commute.

But the day is coming when we won’t even do that. That explains why the steering wheel in the F 015 is largely vestigal.

I didn’t get behind the wheel of the F 015, and I had no desire to: It isn’t a car anyone would ever want to drive. For one thing, it’s huge. No amount of torque from the electric motors Mercedes happened to slap into this thing will ever make it an exhilarating performer. It’s also somewhat cumbersome; that epic wheelbase does nothing for its agility (Hutzenlaub says Mercedes would consider giving the car four-wheel steering if it ever considered production.)

But all of that is moot. As I nestled deeper into the leather seats, the idea of leaving the touch screens alone and taking the wheel seemed genuinely stupid. After all, you don’t leave first class to sit in the cockpit.

The F 015 one of the most thrilling cars I’ve ever seen. And I don’t want to drive it.•

____________________________

From Teller:

One of our projects is focused on building a fully self-driving car. If the technology could be made so that a car could drive all the places a person can drive with greater safety than when people drive in those same places, there are over a million lives a year that could be saved worldwide. Plus there’s over a trillion dollars of wasted time per year we could collectively get back if we didn’t have to pay attention while the car took us from one place to another.

When we started, we couldn’t make a list of the 10,000 things we’d have to do to make a car drive itself. We knew the top 100 things, of course. But pretty good, pretty safe, most of the time isn’t good enough. We had to go out and just find a way to learn what should be on that list of 10,000 things. We had to see what all of the unusual real world situations our cars would face were. There is a real sense in which the making of that list, the gathering of that data, is fully half of what is hard about solving the self driving car problem.

A few months ago, for example, our self-driving car encountered an unusual sight in the middle of a suburban side street. It was a woman in an electric wheelchair wielding a broom and working to shoo a duck out of the middle of the road. You can see in this picture what our car could see. I’m happy to say, by the way that while this was a surprising moment for the safety drivers in the car and for the car itself I imagine, the car did the right thing. It came autonomously to a stop, waited until the woman had shoo’d the duck off the road and left the street herself and then the car moved down the street again. That definitely wasn’t on any list of things we thought we’d have to teach a car to handle! But now, when we produce a new version of our software, before that software ends up on our actual cars, it has to prove itself in tens of thousands of situations just like this in our simulator, but using real world data. We show the new software moments like this and say “and what would you do now?” Then, if the software fails to make a good choice, we can fail in simulation rather than in the physical world. In this way, what one car learns or is challenged by in the real world can be transferred to all the other cars and to all future versions of the software we’ll make so we only have to learn each lesson once and every rider we have forever after can get the benefit from that one learning moment.•

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“People Are Duped, They Are Deceived, They Are Subject To Hallucinations In Quite Surprising Ways”

March 23, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We tell stories in order to live, but sometimes they’re the wrong ones.

People want to believe in something, but that impulse can sometimes run amok, and we convince ourselves we’re seeing something we aren’t, as we project our anxieties against the sky. At those moments, we believe our own lies. From a recent Five Books interview with Stephen Law about pseudoscience, a passage about Philip J. Klass’ book about the mistakes we can make when trying to name our fears:

Question:

The second book you’ve chosen is about UFOs. Now, in one sense, UFOs are literally Unidentified Flying Objects, so this description is almost neutral as to what they are. That doesn’t seem to be bad science or false science: it seems to be a description of something which is yet to be explained?

Stephen Law:

Yes, there are, of course, many UFOs and that’s uncontroversial. What is controversial is the claim that what we are looking at, in some cases, are visitors from other worlds. Many people believe that. Some even believe they’ve been abducted by alien visitors. My second book choice, a favourite of mine, is UFOs: The Public Deceived by Philip J. Klass. It was published back in the mid-1980s, and it’s a trawl through some of the great claims of ufology such as the Delphos case, the Travis Walton case, and cases involving airline pilots who have reported seeing quite extraordinary things in the skies. Klass looks very carefully at the evidence, and, in many cases, successfully debunks the suggestion that what was observed was in fact some sort of flying saucer or piloted vehicle from another world. I particularly like a story involving a nuclear power plant. Back in 1967, a power station was being built. The security guards reported seeing an extraordinary light hanging over the plant on several nights. The police were called, and they confirmed the presence of the light. The County Deputy Sheriff described ‘a large lighted object’. An auxiliary police officer stated that he saw ‘five objects, they appeared to be burning, an aircraft passed by while I was watching, they seemed to be 20 times the size of the plane’. The Wake County Magistrate saw ‘a rectangular object that looked like it was on fire’. They figured that it was about the size of a football field, and very bright. Newspaper reporters showed up to investigate the object. They then attempted to get closer to it in their car, but they found that as they drove towards it, it receded. No matter how fast and far they drove, they never got any closer. Eventually they stopped the car, got out, and the photographer looked at the object through a long lens on his camera. He said, ‘Yep, that’s the planet Venus alright’. It really was the planet Venus. Everyone had just seen the planet Venus. It seems extraordinary that these things happen. Here we have a case in which you have police officers, a magistrate, trained eye-witnesses. And there was even hard evidence in the form of an unidentified blip on the local air traffic control radar screen. All of this evidence together, you might think, confirms beyond any doubt that there really was some mysterious object hanging over that nuclear power plant. But the fact is, there wasn’t, despite these numerous eye-witnesses, this multiple attestation. The observers stuck their necks out. They were brave enough to make bold claims, so they clearly thought they were observing something extraordinary, and there was even some hard evidence (the radar blip) to back up the claims. Nevertheless, that turned out to be a coincidence. This case illustrates that you should expect, every now and then, some remarkable claim like this to be made, despite the fact that there’s no truth to it whatsoever. People are duped, they are deceived, they are subject to hallucinations in quite surprising ways. The mere fact that claims like this are made every now and then is not good evidence.•

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“We Can Design Computers That Sharpen Our Wits Or We Can Let Our Machines Turn Us Into Ignoramuses”

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

We create tools to do things that we can’t do or can’t do well or fast enough. As long as there have been tools, their ability to relieve us of this task or that (“skill fade,” it’s come to be called) seemed it might doom us. Not so. Digital watches didn’t make children dumb, unable to tell time, and offloading some of our memory to computers doesn’t erase our wetware. Thank heavens for the invention of typewriters and calculators and computers. These innovations are a key aspect of human progress, and usually we come up with new and interesting ways to use this freed-up bandwidth.

We should be careful when ceding life-and-death tasks to AI–robotic surgery, autopilot in aviation, etc.–but for the most part, new tools don’t impoverish us while enriching us. The opening of Ted Greenwald’s WSJ piece, “Will Smart Machines Make Us Stupid?“

Society stands at a crossroads of artificial intelligence: We can design computers that sharpen our wits or we can let our machines turn us into ignoramuses. That observation capped a provocative panel on Tuesday at Austin’s South By Southwest conference.

Increasingly intelligent machines — search engines that yield knowledge on demand, smartphones that understand plain English, computers that proffer medical diagnoses, ad tech that offers to sell you just what you’re looking for — represent a “tipping point,” said Doug Lenat, a former Stanford and Carnegie Mellon computer science professor who is CEO of Cycorp, a maker of machine reasoning software. “We could become smarter or dumber – much smarter or much dumber.”

Electronic calculators, Lenat argued during the panel entitled “AI State of the Union,” have created generations of students who can perform mathematical tasks very quickly but don’t understand the underlying concepts. Similarly, Google “swaddles” users in a blanket of instant information, relieving them of the burden of independent thought and inquiry. The next wave of artificial intelligence — loosely defined as a computer’s ability to distinguish between useful and useless information at any given moment — could propel us irrevocably down that path.

“This could lead to Idiocracy,” Lenat said, referring to the 2006 Hollywood satire about a future in which human intellect has taken a steep dive. The result would be a society “where no one has to understand anything about the world, where everything just seems like magic.”

Alternatively, he said, computer scientists could design artificial intelligence “to challenge us the way Aristotle challenged Alexander the Great, to make us smarter, more rational, more human, to understand the world more deeply.”•

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A Brief Note From 1860 About A Celebration

March 22, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the January 12, 1860 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

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

Help needed solving this odd mystery! (Hopewell Junction)

Local authorities are stumped and are seeking any information that can help solve this strange occurrence. In the early mornings, in the vicinity of Rte. 216 and Stormville Rd. they are getting complaints of loud “Madonna music”. What makes these claims even more bizarre, is that they supposedly only hear the music between 5:45 A.M. and 6:00 A.M. and, odder yet, only 5 days a week. “We’ve never heard any other music. It is always Madonna and it is never heard at any other times except that time period,” one local resident, wishing to remain anonymous claimed. So far the theory that seems most plausible is that the music is carrying from another location, as the area is very wide open. Also a popular theory is that it is prankster using some form of “device,” to make the music sound as though it is coming from that area. The claims that the music has never been heard on a Monday or Wednesday morning, also has investigators leaning toward it being some form of ruse. Paranormal experts have not yet been contacted but one local, who has heard the music many times and finds it quite annoying, quipped, “If that is what it takes then fine. I really don’t care just as long as this nonsense stops!” Anyone with any information please feel free to contact local authorities.

“It’s Hard To Imagine What These Jobs Might Be”

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

robotcoffee

Mark Bittman of the New York Times, perhaps distracted by a particularly succulent cantaloupe, isn’t nearly the first to argue that technological unemployment may soon reach its tentacles into our pockets. Bittman urges for Guaranteed Basic Income, something Richard Nixon tried, if unsuccessfully, to bring into being. The opening of “Why Not Utopia?“:

SOME quake in terror as we approach the Terminator scenario, in which clever machines take over the world. After all, it isn’t sci-fi when Stephen Hawking says things like, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

But before the robots replace us, we face the challenge of decreasing real wages resulting, among other factors, from automation and outsourcing, which will itself be automated before long. Inequality (you don’t need more statistics on this, do you?) is the biggest social challenge facing us. (Let’s call climate change, which has the potential to be apocalyptic rather than just awful, a scientific challenge.) And since wealthy people don’t spend nearly as high a percentage of their incomes as poor people do, much wealth is sitting around not doing its job.

The result is that we’re looking at fewer jobs that pay the equivalent of what an autoworker or a teacher made in the ’60s and ’70s. All but a lucky few will either have the kind of service jobs that are now paying around $9 an hour, or be worse off.

And if robots can think, be creative, teach themselves, beat humans at chess and even Jeopardy, flip burgers, take care of your aging parent, plant, tend and harvest lettuce, drive cars, deliver packages, build iPhones and run warehouses — Amazon’s “Kiva” robots can carry 3,000 pounds, stock shelves and select and ship packages — it’s hard to imagine what these jobs might be.

Welcome to the Brave New World, one featuring even fewer haves and more have-nots than the current one. The winners and losers are the same, but the polarity is even more extreme.•

“The First Ultraintelligent Machine Is The Last Invention That Man Need Ever Make”

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

Yuval Noah Harari writes this in his great book Sapiens:

Were, say, Spanish peasant to have fallen asleep in A.D. 1000 and woken up 500 years later, to the din of Columbus’ sailors boarding the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria, the world would have seemed to him quite familiar. Despite many changes in technology, manners and political boundaries, this medieval Rip Van Winkle would have felt at home. But had one of Columbus’ sailors fallen into a similar slumber and woken up to the ringtone of a twenty-first century iPhone, he would have found himself in a world strange beyond comprehension. ‘Is this heaven?’ he might well have asked himself. ‘Or perhaps — hell?’

What kind of peasants will we be? Is the road forward a high-speed one that will render tomorrow unrecognizable? It would seem so, except if calamity were to sideswipe us and delay (or permanently make impossible) the next phase. But if we are fortunate enough to have a safe travel, will a ruin of our own making await us in the form of Strong AI? I doubt it’s right around the bend as some feel, but it can’t hurt to consider such a scenario. From philosopher Stephen Cave’s Financial Times review of a slate of recent books about the perils of superintelligence:

It is tempting to suppose that AI would be a tool like any other; like the wheel or the laptop, an invention that we could use to further our interests. But the brilliant British mathematician IJ Good, who worked with Alan Turing both on breaking the Nazis’ secret codes and subsequently in developing the first computers, realised 50 years ago why this would not be so. Once we had a machine that was even slightly more intelligent than us, he pointed out, it would naturally take over the intellectual task of designing further intelligent machines. Because it was cleverer than us, it would be able to design even cleverer machines, which could in turn design even cleverer machines, and so on. In Good’s words: “There would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.”

Good’s prophecy is at the heart of the book Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, in which writer and film-maker James Barrat interviews leading figures in the development of super-clever machines and makes a clear case for why we should be worried. It is true that progress towards human-level AI has been slower than many predicted — pundits joke that it has been 20 years away for the past half-century. But it has, nonetheless, achieved some impressive milestones, such as the IBM computers that beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997 and won the US quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011. In response to Barrat’s survey, more than 40 per cent of experts in the field expected the invention of intelligent machines within 15 years from now and the great majority expected it by mid-century at the latest.

Following Good, Barrat then shows how artificial intelligence could become super-intelligence within a matter of days, as it starts fixing its own bugs, rewriting its own software and drawing on the wealth of knowledge now available online. Once this “intelligence explosion” happens, we will no longer be able to understand or predict the machine, any more than a mouse can understand or predict the actions of a human.Good’s prophecy is at the heart of the book Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, in which writer and film-maker James Barrat interviews leading figures in the development of super-clever machines and makes a clear case for why we should be worried. It is true that progress towards human-level AI has been slower than many predicted — pundits joke that it has been 20 years away for the past half-century. But it has, nonetheless, achieved some impressive milestones, such as the IBM computers that beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997 and won the US quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011. In response to Barrat’s survey, more than 40 per cent of experts in the field expected the invention of intelligent machines within 15 years from now and the great majority expected it by mid-century at the latest.•

 

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“The Real Audacity Is What Happens Next”

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

sean-connery-terry-oneill

Someday we’ll be playing golf on the moon, hitting our balls in space.

I can’t say if Moon Express will successfully soft-land on the moon next year, but I think at some point in this century we’ll begin mining other spheres beyond our own. What body will be regulating such endeavors I do not know. From Dominic Basulto at the Washington Post:

Sometime in late 2016, a small robotic spacecraft the size of a coffee table will attempt to soft land on the surface of the moon. If it does so successfully, the new MX-1 lunar lander spacecraft from Moon Express would not only win the $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE – it would also help to usher in a new era of commercial space exploration.

Soft-landing on the moon is a feat that has only been accomplished before by three superpowers – the United States, Russia and China. The notion that a team of approximately 40 employees at a Silicon Valley start-up that was founded only in August 2010 could pull off the same feat is audacious in and of itself. Thanks to a unique public-private partnership with NASA, though, Moon Express has access to NASA engineering expertise as well as access to launch facilities at the Kennedy Space Center.

But the real audacity is what happens next – and that’s the strategy that Moon Express has for mining the surface of the moon. As Naveen Jain, co-founder and chairman of Moon Express, told me in a phone interview, thanks to initiatives such as NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper mission, “We have mapped every inch of the moon, both topographically and mineralogically.” As a result, Moon Express has already outlined four categories of resources that might be mined in the future – platinum group metals, rare earth elements, helium-3, and, yes, moon rocks.•

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“I Think People Are Smarter Now Than They Were In, Say, 1995”

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

People seem so pleased with their cleverness now, and I think that’s a mistake. We shouldn’t be proud. We should be deeply ashamed. All of us. Stop building statues. Stop carving faces into mountains. Leave the fucking mountains alone. 

I’m sure we’re smarter now than ever before, though at the same time it seems a more shallow intelligence. We are far too entertained, all binge and no purge, and there are an awful lot of bright people focused on very silly things. Want more clicks on Twitter? Now that’s a kale-turkey chopped salad! Chrissy Teigen is a social media genius! If that’s the cost of everything being so decentralized, it’s likely a worthwhile one. But, still…

From Douglas Coupland in the Financial Times:

Today I wondered, “If the internet had an IQ, what would it be?” And so I made a guess: 4,270 — a four-digit IQ. Yes, I know the internet is just a tool and not a sentient being. But one can dream. …

I think people are smarter now than they were in, say, 1995. I’ve touched on this before: we all feel stupider yet I think if we were to compare IQs from then and from 2015, we’d find that our new standard IQ is more like 103. People time-travelling from 1995 to 2015 would probably speak with us for a few minutes and then quietly excuse themselves and go meet in the kitchen and wonder what drug we’re on. “They have no attention span, and the moment you tell them even the slightest fib, they reach into their pockets, pull out a piece of glass, dapple their fingers over it and then look up at you and tell you that your fib was a fib. What kind of way is that to live life?”•

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Old Print Article: “10,000,000 Typewriters In Use Today,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1923)

March 21, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Although different such tools were worked on for hundreds of years, it was Charles Latham Sholes who was awarded a patent in 1868 for what would become the first commercially successful typewriter. It was the “Sholes and Glidden Type-writer” that gave the machine its popular name, also introducing the QWERTY keyboard, which was aimed at slowing down typists so that the keys on these crude early gadgets would not become entangled. The contraption also helped transition women into the workforce, even if the initial jobs were low-level ones. Below is an article from the September 16, 1923 Brooklyn Daily Eagle marking the moment when Sholes’ creation reached a particularly nice round number.

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10 Recent Huffington Post Headlines

March 21, 2015 in Humor, Misc. | Permalink

  • Are Breasts In America Really Getting Bigger?
  • Now You Can Send Someone A Bag Of Dicks
  • Man Tried To Sell Duct-Taped Iguanas Dangling From Bike: Cops
  • Nude Sunbather, 77, Promises To Wear Trunks
  • A Very NSFW History Of Video Game Penises
  • Surgeon And Wife Hosted Drug-Fueled Sex Parties: Cops
  • Antarctica Scientist Is World’s Southernmost Sex Offender
  • Kentucky Smells
  • And The Average Penis Size Is…
  • 7 Ways To Boost Your Happiness In Under A Minute

This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

March 21, 2015 in Misc. | Permalink

 

10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:

  1. a modern interpretation of bob & carol & ted & alice
  2. 1000 IQ through genetic engineering
  3. the ferris wheel vs. the eiffel tower
  4. ask me anything computer pioneer douglas engelbart
  5. adnan masud syed and alan dershowitz
  6. olivetti first desktop personal computer programma 101
  7. thomas mann interview new york times
  8. henry kissinger and bobby fischer
  9. lewis cohen chess prodigy
  10. buster keaton riding a pedal-less dandy horse

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

March 21, 2015 in Misc. | Permalink

This week, Vladimir Putin announced that he's invited Kim Jong-un to Russian next month, which makes them the second most evil duo in the world.

This week, Kim Jong-un was invited to Russia by Vladimir Putin, making them the second most evil duo in the world.


  • Billionaire Libertarians want to live in the middle of the ocean. I vote “yes.”
  • Co-bots don’t want to completely eliminate human workers–for now.
  • We love futuristic tools yet fear the future. Why?

“We’re Gonna Shoot It Without A Script”

March 20, 2015 in Film, Videos | Permalink

My blood boils at even the thought of Grey Gardens, that exercise in gawking and cruelty, but in the wider picture, Albert and David Maysles did amazing work. Gimme Shelter is one of the most perfect films I’ve ever watched, from its structure to its content, and Salesman, which just floors me, has never been timelier, with its depiction of the pawns left in the wake of the Disruption Machine. Albert, the remaining brother, passed away a couple weeks ago. Here’s a clip from the brothers’ 1963 film Orson Welles in Spain, in which the great and star-crossed director presages the fraying of the traditional studio picture, with its formality. The work he’s discussing turned out to be his uncompleted 1970s movie The Other Side of the Wind.

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“Many Of Us Still Believe The Strangest Things”

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

Information has not saved us.

Free and plentiful though it now is, data still depends on us to process it. From Truthers to Birthers to Vaxxers, some of us choose the wrong info, ignore the right and mix up different threads to “prove” some deeply held belief that is utter bullshit. No recruitment is necessary; people actively pursue these nonsensical ideas. Something’s amiss. 

Why are there those among us who can’t make basic sense of things? Perhaps some of the entrenchment in ignorance is a response to the deluge of facts, but that’s probably not an explanation for so much wrongheadedness. The opening of Quassim Cassam’s provocative Aeon essay, “Bad Thinkers,” a salvo aimed at the faltering intellectual character of conspiracists:

Meet Oliver. Like many of his friends, Oliver thinks he is an expert on 9/11. He spends much of his spare time looking at conspiracist websites and his research has convinced him that the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, of 11 September 2001 were an inside job. The aircraft impacts and resulting fires couldn’t have caused the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center to collapse. The only viable explanation, he maintains, is that government agents planted explosives in advance. He realises, of course, that the government blames Al-Qaeda for 9/11 but his predictable response is pure Mandy Rice-Davies: they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Polling evidence suggests that Oliver’s views about 9/11 are by no means unusual. Indeed, peculiar theories about all manner of things are now widespread. There are conspiracy theories about the spread of AIDS, the 1969 Moon landings, UFOs, and the assassination of JFK. Sometimes, conspiracy theories turn out to be right – Watergate really was a conspiracy – but mostly they are bunkum. They are in fact vivid illustrations of a striking truth about human beings: however intelligent and knowledgeable we might be in other ways, many of us still believe the strangest things. You can find people who believe they were abducted by aliens, that the Holocaust never happened, and that cancer can be cured by positive thinking. A 2009 Harris Poll found that between one‑fifth and one‑quarter of Americans believe in reincarnation, astrology and the existence of witches. You name it, and there is probably someone out there who believes it.

You realise, of course, that Oliver’s theory about 9/11 has little going for it, and this might make you wonder why he believes it. The question ‘Why does Oliver believe that 9/11 was an inside job?’ is just a version of a more general question posed by the US skeptic Michael Shermer: why do people believe weird things? The weirder the belief, the stranger it seems that someone can have it. Asking why people believe weird things isn’t like asking why they believe it’s raining as they look out of the window and see the rain pouring down. It’s obvious why people believe it’s raining when they have compelling evidence, but it’s far from obvious why Oliver believes that 9/11 was an inside job when he has access to compelling evidence that it wasn’t an inside job.

I want to argue for something which is controversial, although I believe that it is also intuitive and commonsensical. My claim is this: Oliver believes what he does because that is the kind of thinker he is or, to put it more bluntly, because there is something wrong with how he thinks. The problem with conspiracy theorists is not, as the US legal scholar Cass Sunstein argues, that they have little relevant information. The key to what they end up believing is how they interpret and respond to the vast quantities of relevant information at their disposal. I want to suggest that this is fundamentally a question of the way they are. Oliver isn’t mad (or at least, he needn’t be). Nevertheless, his beliefs about 9/11 are the result of the peculiarities of his intellectual constitution – in a word, of his intellectual character.•

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“She Designed [It] To Cultivate Her Progressive, Proto-Feminist Values, And As A Rebuke To The Slumlords And Other Monopolists”

March 20, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s just perfect that Monopoly, which brought cutthroat capitalism to the living room, allowing you to bankrupt grandma, was birthed through dubious business deals. In Mary Pilon’s new book, The Monopolists, the author traces the key role in the game’s invention of Elizabeth ­Magie, whose Landlord’s Game, which preceded Charles Darrow’s blockbuster, has largely been lost to history. From James McManus in the New York Times: 

Our favorite board game, of course, is Monopoly, which has also gone global, and for similar reasons. Played by everyone from Jerry Hall and Mick ­Jagger to Carmela and Tony Soprano, it apparently scratches an itch to wheel and deal few of us can reach in real life. The game is sufficiently redolent of capitalism that in 1959 Fidel Castro ordered the ­destruction of every Monopoly set in Cuba, while these days Vladimir Putin seems to be its ultimate aficionado.

What dyed-in-the-wool free marketeer invented this cardboard facsimile of real estate markets, and who owns it now? From whose ideas did it evolve? These are the questions Mary Pilon, formerly a reporter at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, proposes to answer in her briskly enlightening first book, The Monopolists. For decades the ­official story, slipped into every Monopoly box, was that Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman, had a sudden light-bulb moment about a game to amuse his poor family during the Depression. After selling it to Parker Brothers in 1935, he lived lavishly ever after on the proceeds.

To trace how far removed this was from the truth, Pilon introduces Elizabeth ­Magie. Born in 1866, she was an ­unmarried stenographer whose passions included politics and — even more rare among women of that era — inventing. In 1904 she received a patent for the Landlord’s Game, a board contest she designed to cultivate her progressive, proto-feminist values, and as a rebuke to the slumlords and other monopolists of the Gilded Age.

Her game featured spaces for railroads and rental properties on each side of a square board, with water and electricity companies and a corner labeled “Go to Jail.” Players earned wages, paid taxes; the winner was the one who best foiled landlords’ attempts to send her to the poorhouse. Magie helped form a company to market it, but it never really took off. The game appealed mostly to socialists and Quakers, many of whom made their own sets; other players renamed properties and added things like Chance and Community Chest cards. Even less auspiciously for Magie, many people began referring to it as “monopoly” and giving it as gifts. Then in 1932, Charles Darrow received one with spaces named for streets in Atlantic City.

No light bulb necessary.•

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“The Project Has Been Coined ‘Libertarian Island'”

March 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Government in America is far from perfect, but I still trust it a great deal more than corporations. Libertarians and Silicon Valley billionaires who feel differently aim to build a floating nation in the ocean, many nautical miles beyond regulation. The Seasteading Institute (“Opening humanity’s next frontier”) is to allow Burning Man to walk on water. I have no worries whatsoever about this planned “soaktopia,” but I am concerned about the mindset it reveals, a longing by some for a runaway free market here on solid ground. From Conor Lynch at Salon:

As some may already know, Thiel has teamed up with the grandson of libertarian icon Milton Friedman, Patri Friedman, to try and develop a “seastead,” or a permanent and autonomous dwelling at sea. Friedman formed the “Seasteading Institute” in 2008, and Thiel has donated more than a million dollars to fund its creation.

It is all very utopian, to say the least. But on the website, they claim a floating city could be just years away. The real trick is finding a proper location to build this twenty-first century atlantis. Currently, they are attempting to find a host nation that will allow the floating city somewhat close to land, for the calm waters and ability to easily travel to and from the seastead.

The project has been coined “libertarian island,” and it reveals a building movement within Silicon Valley; a sort of free market techno-capitalist faction that seems to come right out of Ayn Rand’s imagination. And as with all utopian ideologies, it is very appealing, especially when you live in a land where everything seems possible, with the proper technological advancements.

Tech billionaires like Thiel, Travis Kalanick and Marc Andressen, are leading the libertarian revolution in the land of computers, and it is not a surprising place for this laissez faire ideology to flourish. Silicon Valley is generally considered to have a laid back Californian culture, but behind all of the polite cordialities, there rests a necessary cutthroat attitude. A perfect example of this was Steve Jobs, who was so revered by the community, and much of the world, yet almost psychopathically merciless. The recent anti-trust case against the big tech companies like Google, Apple, and Intel, who colluded not to recruit each others employees, has even lead to speculation as to whether Jobs should be in jail today, if he were still alive.

So while Silicon Valley is no doubt a socially progressive place (i.e. gay marriage), if one looks past social beliefs, there is as much ruthlessness as you’d expect in any capitalist industry. Look at the offshore tax avoidance, the despicable overseas working conditions, the outright violations of privacy and illegal behavior. There is a very real arrogance within Silicon Valley that seems to care little about rules and regulations.•

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