“A White House Will Have To Have Many More Resources Dedicated To Producing Content”

March 11, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Dan Pfeiffer, the outgoing White House communications advisor who planted President Obama between two ferns among other off-center platforms, spoke with Steven Levy at Backchannel about POTUS PR in a time of social media and selfie sticks and the future of such non-traditional communications. He sees a long-tail tomorrow. An excerpt:

Steven Levy:

How do you picture White House communications in the future—what’s your vision of the environment in 2020?

Dan Pfeiffer:

A bigger part of the job for White House government officials will be online engagement. If you’re doing climate change policy in the White House, instead of getting X number of hours a week to meet with the environmental groups, you will be spending time on Twitter, Facebook or whatever the next social platforms are, engaging people who are interested in that topic. You will not be reaching the quantity of people that you would reach by having a big broadcast television interview but the quality of the outreach will be better because you’ll be getting very engaged people who can take action on behalf of the thing you care about.

And I think that—and this one is tricky—a White House will have to have many more resources dedicated to producing content. We have a lot of people around here who write written words—speeches, talking points, press releases—and you will need people who are creating visual, graphical and video images to communicate the same message. It’s tricky because you don’t want to be in a world where it is propaganda. You’re going to have to vet this and give it scrutiny, but there is an insatiable appetite for content out there. Your traditional news outlets don’t have the resources to produce the amount of content that the Internet requires on a 24/7 basis.

There’s this funny thing where it’s like, if we put out a press release, it is accepted as a proper form of Presidential communication. But if we put out a video, that’s somehow propaganda. The mentality is going have to shift [to acknowledge that] a video is just a more shareable, more enjoyable way of communicating the same information as the press release. Everyone is going to have to adjust to that.•

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“They’ll Know The State Of Health Of Your Dog”

March 11, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

It’s pretty clear privacy is all but over, even inside the home. The Internet of Things will likely be the thing pretty soon, and once every last appliance is connected, the quantifying and monitoring will begin in earnest. Many positive advances will be made because of this new counting machine–yes, we will all count!–but the catch, of course, is that there’ll be no way to opt out, no choice. You too will be judged. From Sarah Butler at the Guardian:

“We are coming to the era of the connected customer, the latest in a series of shifts created by technology,” [Dixons Carphone CEO Seb James] told the Retail Week Live conference in London. “This shift is going to bump off as many retailers as the last. It will be a total asteroid strike at the heart of retail.”

The new technology, from health monitoring smartwatches to washing machines that can tell engineers when they need repairing – will mean retailers need to offer services to help consumers with the new products and keep them operating correctly. …

“Your connected home will know when you’re in, what mood you’re in, your temperature preferences and family members. They’ll know the state of health of your dog, how far you jogged this morning and what brand of toothpaste you like and how much you have left.

“It’s a little bit creepy but we’re all going to have to get used to it as information which used to be so hard to get is now going to be so easy to find new skills and tools [to deal with it].”•

______________________________

“What will it be like? How will we choose to live?”

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“I Always Thought That Nemtsov Would Make It”

March 11, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

The assassination of Boris Nemtsov, who could almost, if not quite, pass for noble in the confusing welter of modern Russia, was a clap of thunder in the night. By sunrise, the murder made just as little sense. Was he a victim of the authoritarian state or those who opposed its power and viewed him as a useful sacrifice? Either way, his blood flows toward the Kremlin, and not just because of his proximity to the palace when gunned down. From Keith Gessen at the London Review of Books:

For years now there has been speculation about a ‘party of war’, which periodically stages provocations in order to push the president into decisive action. The party of war was said to have manoeuvred Yeltsin into Chechnya and, more conspiratorially still, to have blown up the apartment buildings in Moscow in 1999 to push Putin into Chechnya in his turn. The party of war may also have sent Igor Strelkov and his merry band of murderers into eastern Ukraine last spring, to turn an inchoate set of local protests into the beginnings of a civil war. But does the party of war actually exist? We’re unlikely ever to know, even after all the archives have been opened and all the email accounts hacked. It is, however, a useful concept, even if its only function is to describe one part of Putin’s mind that’s in dialogue or competition with another. It would explain why Putin sometimes goes forward and sometimes steps back. And it gives at least a small space for hope, since if there’s a party of war there is also, presumably, a party of peace, and it might just win.

I always thought that Nemtsov would make it, that he would be shielded from the vengeance of the system in part because he was Nemtsov. He had a PhD in physics, but he wasn’t a serious thinker, nor did he pretend to be one. You could never tell if he was speaking out because he believed what he was saying or because he couldn’t stand being ignored. Or if he kept getting arrested at opposition rallies because he considered it an act of conscience or because he liked getting his picture taken (sometimes, when they arrested him, the police tore his shirt, and you could get an extra glimpse of his tan). Did he hate Putin because of what he’d done to the country, or because he felt cheated out of his birthright by their shared mercurial surrogate father, Boris Yeltsin? He was a narcissist, and there was his way with young women. On the last night of his life, he went with his girlfriend, a Ukrainian model called Anna Duritskaya, to a nice restaurant in the upscale mall just across Red Square from the Kremlin. Then they walked in the rain across the bridge towards his apartment.

Who knows why people do the things they do? Who knows why Nemtsov kept fighting for some kind of change in a country to which he himself had brought a lot of pain? And neither do we know exactly why they killed him. But it’s clear that it wasn’t for his human flaws, or for his contribution to the economic catastrophe of the 1990s. He was killed for his opposition to the war. Since the start, critics have been warning that the war in Ukraine would eventually come home to Moscow. No matter who pulled the trigger on the bridge, it has.•

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“One Does Not Simply Ask The Inventor Of The WWW What He Thinks About Memes”

March 11, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

During the new Ask Me Anything at Reddit with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, it doesn’t seem anyone asked the Web inventor about ISIS using his gift to the world to disseminate decapitation videos. Not that he would have an answer for such atrocities more than anyone else. A hammer can be a tool or a weapon depending on how we swing it, and it’s up to all of us to ensure that things created in good conscience aren’t horribly misused. That won’t be easy with the Internet, which has turned out to be a grand experiment in many things, anarchy and surveillance among them, but we must remain mindful. A few exchanges follow.

______________________________

Question:

What’s the best thing to come from the Internet?

Tim Berners-Lee:

The spirit of global collaboration among all the people working on it.

Question:

You misspelled “cat videos.”

Question:

You misspelled “porn.”

______________________________

Question:

With the developments about internet users’ privacy (or lack of) online, what would you recommend we do? Do we stand up to the government, or get around these problems with encryption, etc.?

Tim Berners-Lee:

Great and very important question, with no simple answer. We must work with government to make them accountable when they use our personal data — however they got it. Just a battle of crypto might is not a solution, we also need to change laws and change the structure of government agencies. We need to give the police certain power in exchange for transparency and accountability. And we need to encrypt email and web traffic everywhere, for general security.

______________________________

Question:

Do you remember your first thoughts, or words, when you achieved the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server?

Tim Berners-Lee:

Nope. I was head down getting stuff working…. the server and client were both on my machine at that stage… I wasn’t using source code control, so I could not go back and find the critical commit with the “hmm GET seems to work” comment :-)

______________________________

Question:

What are your views/thoughts/feelings on net neutrality?

Tim Berners-Lee:

Net neutrality is really important. Basically we do so much cool stuff on top of the network layer, it has to remain an unbiased infrastructure for all our discussion, innovation, etc. I must have the right to be able to communicate with whatever or whoever I want, without discrimination, be it political or commercial.

______________________________

Question:

In his 2012 book Cypherpunks, Julian Assange wrote, “the Internet is a threat to human civilization.” He was referring to the great potential for surveillance and control of people. To what degree do you agree with that statement, and what can we do to ensure the Internet of the future supports life, freedom, and autonomy?

Tim Berners-Lee:

“Any powerful tool can be used for good or ill” <– true but we have to make sure on balance good things win. We need to protect against not only governments but criminals too, and viral conspiracy theories which seem to sprout from nowhere. I think that if we the people stand firm in democratic countries and demand that all power over the net taken by government comes with direct accountability to the people in how it is used, then we can indeed have a wonderful civilization. We need to keep it decentralized both technically and socially. We need to protect our rights using both code and law.

______________________________

Question:

What do you think about memes?

Tim Berners-Lee:

One does not simply ask the inventor of the WWW what he thinks about memes.

_____________________________

Question:

Whats your best non-Internet thing that you love?

Tim Berners-Lee:

People.•

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“We Offer Them Kind Of A Dream Job”

March 11, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

For some soldiers, there is, after war, no going home, not figuratively and occasionally not literally. Motorcycle gangs in America might not have ever taken flight were it not for WWII. Not every vet in the 1940s could re-acclimate to quotidian life, even if the G.I. Bill could ease their return materially, help them climb the social ladder. These men had seen hell and now only wanted to be angels in an ironic sense. So they bought bikes and lived in the purgatory in between upstanding U.S. citizen and full-on warrior. These tours of “duty” went on and on. 

The Iraq War was a calamity in every sense. We invaded a country for no reason, got 4,500 of our soldiers killed and many more seriously injured and spent at least a trillion dollars in tax money, a good deal of which was bilked by military contractors. I didn’t mention how many Iraqis died needlessly because we didn’t really count them. That wasn’t a priority. 

In the aftermath, the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda have turned the wrecked nation into a hotbed of terrorism. Another dubious “dividend” of the misguided invasion is that some U.S. soldiers, unsurprisingly, can’t make it all the way back into domestic life. They still crave a mission–or at least a distraction. Instead of burning rubber on a familiar highway system, a small number are circling back to the source of their frustration, offering their services to anti-terrorist forces in Iraq. From Dave Philipps of the New York Times:

“I may not be enlisted anymore, but I’m still a warrior,” said [Patrick] Maxwell, who left the Marines with an honorable discharge in 2011. “I figured if I could walk away from here and kill as many of the bad guys as I could, that would be a good thing.”

Mr. Maxwell is one of a small number of Americans — many of them former members of the military — who have volunteered in recent months to take up arms against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, even as the United States government has hesitated to put combat troops on the ground. Driven by a blend of motivations — outrage over ISIS’s atrocities, boredom with civilian life back home, dismay that an enemy they tried to neutralize is stronger than ever — they have offered themselves as pro bono advisers and riflemen in local militias.

“More than anything, they don’t like ISIS and want to help,” said Matthew VanDyke, an American filmmaker who has spent time this winter with four American veterans covertly training a militia of Assyrian Christians in northern Iraq to resist ISIS. He is now recruiting more veterans to help, though late in February, the American Mesopotamia Organization, a California-based nonprofit that helped fund the militia, broke ties with him.

In a phone interview from Iraq, Mr. VanDyke said that many veterans spent years honing combat skills in war only to have them shelved in civilian life and that they are eager for a new mission.

“A lot of guys did important stuff overseas and came home and got stuck in menial jobs, which can be really hard,” he said. “We offer them kind of a dream job, a chance to do what they are trained to do without all the red tape and PowerPoints.”•

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A Brief Note From 1904 About A Human Ostrich

March 11, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the April 12, 1904 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Paid Work For Human Beings Could Become A Lot Scarcer — And Soon”

March 11, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s not a done deal that automation is going to create a troubling amount of technological unemployment, but that scenario has to be considered a real possibility. What then? Will we have endless down time to do more free work for multibillion-dollar corporations? From Katrin Bennhold of the New York Times:

Economic growth, even where it looks impressive, seems to be creating fewer jobs than in the past, and for the most part, poorly paid ones. The main metrics for economic success now appear to be decoupling from labor markets, the main source of income and meaning for citizens.

Nouriel Roubini, a professor of economics at the Stern School of Business at New York University, underlined the point last week at a London conference on the future of work. “The share of labor in the economy is collapsing, and that will continue,” he said.

Some speak of a third industrial revolution; others call it the second machine age. With the processing speed of computers doubling roughly every 18 months and machines becoming ever smarter, paid work for human beings could become a lot scarcer — and soon.

Forty-seven percent of all employment in the United States is susceptible to automation over the next two decades, according to a study by Carl Benedikt Frey, an economist, and Michael A. Osborne, an associate professor of machine learning, at the University of Oxford.

It is not just truck drivers and tax preparers who risk losing their jobs, economists say. Robots can pick strawberries, distinguishing the ripe ones by taking hundreds of digital photographs a second, and algorithms apparently make more objective court decisions than human judges, who according to a study in Israel are more lenient after a food break.

This hyperdigital age is also creating some new jobs for humans. Among the 10 fastest-growing job descriptions identified by Dr. Frey were big data architect and iOS developer. But over all, he said, “It seems that job creation is not going to keep pace with automation.”•

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“The Singularity Will Never Be Televised”

March 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In “The Danger of Artificial Stupidity,” an h+ essay, cognitive computing professor J. Mark Bishop disagrees that the Singularity is near, thinking that Hawking and Musk and others shouldn’t be so concerned about the existential threat of Strong AI, though he does believe automation without consciousness still poses a danger. An excerpt:

I believe three foundational problems explain why computational AI has failed historically and will continue to fail to deliver on its “Grand Challenge” of replicating human mentality in all its raw and electro-chemical glory:

1) Computers lack genuine understanding: in the “Chinese room argument” the philosopher John Searle (1980) argued that even if it were possible to program a computer to communicate perfectly with a human interlocutor (Searle famously described the situation by conceiving a computer interaction in Chinese, a language he is utterly ignorant of) it would not genuinely understand anything of the interaction (cf. a small child laughing on cue at a joke she doesn’t understand).

2) Computers lack consciousness: in an argument entitled “Dancing with Pixies” I argued that if a computer-controlled robot experiences a conscious sensation as it interacts with the world, then an infinitude of consciousnesses must be present in all objects throughout the universe: in the cup of tea I am drinking as I type; in the seat that I am sitting on as I write, etc., etc.. If we reject such “panpsychism,” we then must reject “machine consciousness”.

3) Computers lack mathematical insight: in his book The Emperor’s New Mind, the Oxford mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose deployed Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem to argue that, in general, the way mathematicians provide their “unassailable demonstrations” of the truth of certain mathematical assertions is fundamentally non-algorithmic and non-computational.

Taken together, these three arguments fatally undermine the notion that the human mind can be completely instantiated by mere computations; if correct, although computers will undoubtedly get better and better at many particular tasks — say playing chess, driving a car, predicting the weather etc. — there will always remain broader aspects of human mentality that future AI systems will not match. Under this conception there is a “humanity-gap” between the human mind and mere “digital computations”; although raw computer power — and concomitant AI software — will continue to improve, the combination of a human mind working alongside a future AI will continue to be more powerful than that future AI system operating on its own.

The singularity will never be televised.•

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“Unemployment Has Exploded Here In Europe, While It Has Declined In The United States”

March 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Before voting for any politician in any American election, it might be instructive to check back on where they stood on economic policy in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse. The results are in and the proof conclusive: The U.S. rebounded so quickly because we invested in the country while Europe is still in a terrible spot because it chose austerity, which may have felt right but was decidedly wrong. Two exchanges follow from a Thomas Piketty Q&A with Julia Amalia Heyer and Christoph Pauly of Spiegel.

__________________________

Spiegel:

You publicly rejoiced over Alexis Tsipras’ election victory in Greece. What do you think the chances are that the European Union and Athens will agree on a path to resolve the crisis?

Thomas Piketty: 

The way Europe behaved in the crisis was nothing short of disastrous. Five years ago, the United States and Europe had approximately the same unemployment rate and level of public debt. But now, five years later, it’s a different story: Unemployment has exploded here in Europe, while it has declined in the United States. Our economic output remains below the 2007 level. It has declined by up to 10 percent in Spain and Italy, and by 25 percent in Greece.

__________________________

Spiegel:

What do you propose?

Thomas Piketty: 

We need to invest more money in training our young people, and in innovation and research. That should be the most important goal of an initiative to promote European growth. It isn’t normal that 90 percent of the world’s top universities are in the United States and our best minds go overseas. The Americans invest 3 percent of their GDP in their universities, while it’s more like 1 percent here. That’s the main reason why America is growing so much faster than Europe.

Spiegel:

The United States has a uniform fiscal policy. What conclusions can be drawn from that?

Thomas Piketty: 

We need a fiscal union and a harmonization of budgets. We need a common debt repayment fund for the euro zone, like the one proposed by the German Council of Economic Experts, for example. Each country would remain responsible for repaying its portion of the total debt. In other words, the Germans would not have to pay off the Italians’ old debts, and vice-versa. But there would be a common interest rate for euro bonds, which would be used to refinance the debt.•

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“I’ve Been To A Clown Orgy Before!”

March 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Speaking of pornography: You can’t really trust an industry in which everyone is a star. 

In the gradual mainstreaming of porn into American life, which has pretty much reached full saturation, technology has enabled anyone to achieve such stardom from the comfort of home, making it debatable whether an actual centralized industry is even necessary anymore. But the annual Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, the Oscars of oral, still serves one purpose: As it did with David Foster Wallace for his 1989 piece “Big Red Son,” it provides a sharp-eyed journalist with a fun-house mirror of America, our soul visible by way of our holes. In a new Grantland piece “Porntopia,” Molly Lambert brings her customary insight and wit to this year’s gathering of the vibrators.

(Wallace, by the way, wrote one of my favorite sentences ever in his AVN Awards article, a description of the comedian Bobby Slayton who served as the show’s emcee that year: “A gravelly-voiced Dice Clay knockoff who kept introducing every female performer as ‘the woman I’m going to cut my dick off for,’ and who astounded all the marginal print journalists in attendance with both his unfunniness and his resemblance to every apartment-complex coke dealer we’d ever met.”)

From Lambert:

The first AVN Awards took place in 1984, held in Las Vegas at the same time as the Winter Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The CES-AVN connection began because the adult industry’s main source of revenue was video tapes, and CES-goers were early adopters of new tech like VCRs. The interaction between the two created the fan-star dynamic that dominates today. “If you had a CES badge we’d give you a free badge to the AVN show,” explains Paul Fishbein, a founder of AVN. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights follows the industry’s early-’80s shift from film to video; on Marc Maron’s podcast, Anderson compared his film’s plot to that of Singin’ in the Rain, which depicts mainstream film’s move from silents to talkies. The video experience changed the way customers consumed porn. Allowing audiences to watch at home rather than brave a theater broadened the market, which prompted Fishbein to found Adult Video News magazine in 1983 as a consumer guide for sex shops stocking tapes.

As Fishbein and I walk through the Hard Rock casino looking for a place to sit down — there are no places in casinos to just sit, by design — a female performer approaches and chastises him for missing a “clown orgy” the night before. “I’ve been to a clown orgy before!” he tells her.

“Each one is unique and special!” she persists.

“I know they are,” he says consolingly.

Fishbein, gray-haired with blue eyes, is affable and warm. He wears a pink gingham shirt with a green Ralph Lauren logo. I like him instantly. Fishbein sold AVN in 2010 and now produces content under a shingle called Plausible Films. AVN, he says, “isn’t quite what it was when CES people were in town.” He lights up talking about some of the first adult classics, which were plot-oriented and couldn’t afford to have endlessly long sex scenes because film stock was so expensive.5 Video made it possible to prolong sex scenes, but the form was still shaped by practical concerns. “If you try to watch 20-minute sex scenes in real time, you’re gonna fast-forward. You can’t do it. In real life you have sex for a long time,” Fishbein says. “Visually, as a stimulant, you need it to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Five minutes is the right length for a sex scene, in my humble opinion.”

Fishbein recently spearheaded the making of a documentary called X-Rated: The Greatest Adult Movies of All Time, which premiered last month on Showtime. X-Rated assembles a canon of representative adult films organized by decade, starting with 1971’s Deep Throat. It was a passion project for Fishbein; he has a point to prove about the ability of porn to stand alongside mainstream film. “Some of these movies were unbelievable; they’re so outrageous and they have these strange sensibilities,” he tells me. “But when you watch them in context of when they were made, they’re a perfect reflection of what’s going on in American society in the ’70s and ’80s.” As for today? He’s pessimistic. During final cut, he realized X-Rated has a downer ending. “It sort of feels like it’s a eulogy … Even our host, Chanel Preston, says at the end, ‘Well, we hope that this isn’t the end of the adult industry,’ but who knows what’s going to happen in the future?”•

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“It’s Tough Being Paddy Chayefsky These Days”

March 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s tough being Paddy Chayefsky these days. Charlie Brooker, the brilliant satirist behind Black Mirror, comes closest. If he doesn’t make it all the way there, it’s not because he’s less talented than the Network visionary; it’s just that the era he’s working in is so different. I’ve read many articles about Brooker’s impressive program and pretty much all of them miss the point I believe he’s making about our brave new world of technology. That includes Jenna Wortham’s recent New York Times Magazine essay, which referred to Mirror as “functioning as a twisted View-Master of many different future universes where things have strayed horribly off-course.” The Channel 4 show is barely about the future. It’s mostly about the present. And it isn’t about the present in the manner of many sci-fi works, which create outlandish scenarios which can never really be in the service of telling us about what currently is. Brooker’s scenarios aren’t the exaggerations they might seem at first blush. In almost no time, our hyperconnected world delivers something far more disturbing than his narratives.

Chayefsky and Andy Warhol and Marshall McLuhan could name the future and we’d wait 25 or 50 years as their predictions slowly gestated, only becoming fully manifest at long last. None of that trio of seers even lived long enough to experience the full expression of Mad As Hell of 15 Minutes of Fame or the Global Village. Brooker will survive to see all his predictions come to pass, and it won’t require an impressive lifespan.

Consider the initial episode, “The National Anthem.” In this installment, the British Prime Minister is blackmailed by an unknown terrorist into having sex with a pig on live TV in front of a gigantic worldwide audience. It’s supposed to be a shocking media event that unfolds before a rapt world, but the most surprising thing about it is that more people don’t time-shift it. About three years after “Anthem” aired, ISIS released its first beheading video, marrying Hollywood torture porn to real-life extremism, and millions of curious people pressed play. Ah, for the simpler days of pretend PM-on-pork penetration.

Another episode, “Fifteen Million Merits,” offered a similar example of the future arriving fast on the heels of a seemingly outrageous provocation. “Merits” creates a world in which humans are reduced to automatons, forced to ride stationary bicycles to provide power the world desperately needs, the riders soothed by drugs and apps and pornos they can purchase with merit points earned by pumping pedals. One of the disconsolate workers not fully anesthetized by the sensory overload, Bing, offers his points to a beautiful coworker, Abi, so that she can buy a ticket to compete on Hot Shots, an even-more-offensive version of American Idol, hoping to become a pop star and escape a life of drudgery. She walks into a latter-day dance marathon where they don’t only shoot horses but the riders as well. Abi doesn’t realize her version of stardom and is instead shunted into pornography, another body offered up to appease an unwittingly depressed populace. Last year, just three years after this episode aired, the Fappening arrived one weekend on screens in our pockets, a hacked sex show sent to distract and titillate the world. One of the victims of the breach was the British actress Jessica Brown Findlay, who had portrayed Abi in “Merits.” Again, technology enabled the so-called future to arrive before the prophecies had been digested, and it looked even uglier than dystopic fiction.

And that’s how things are now. Before Brooker (or anyone else) can fire a warning shot, before we can decide how to proceed, tomorrow is already moving in for the kill, a drone at our doorsteps that may be delivering takeout or, perhaps, a bomb. If you hurry, there’s still time to smile into the camera. We’re all pioneers now, constantly, without traveling anywhere, without moving a muscle. We live only in the past and present, the future hardly existing. That’s what Black Mirror is really about.•

 

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“I Just Hope To Live Long Enough Not To Die”

March 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Google has always been envisioned as an AI company, and if it’s mostly making its money from search in a decade, something has gone haywire. Bill Maris, President of Google Ventures, envisions a day soon when chemotherapy will be as rudimentary as the telegraph, and he intends to invest some of the $425 million fund he manages to make sure Google plays a large role in personalizing such treatments. Katrina Brooker of Bloomberg has written a profile of Maris, who believes five centuries of life per person may be theoretically possible. The opening:

“If you ask me today, is it possible to live to be 500? The answer is yes,” Bill Maris says one January afternoon in Mountain View, California. The president and managing partner of Google Ventures just turned 40, but he looks more like a 19-year-old college kid at midterm. He’s wearing sneakers and a gray denim shirt over a T-shirt; it looks like he hasn’t shaved in a few days.

Behind him, sun is streaming through a large wall of windows. Beyond is the leafy expanse of the main Google campus. Inside his office, there’s not much that gives any indication of the work Maris does here, Bloomberg Markets will report in its April 2015 issue. The room is sparse—clean white walls, a few chairs, a table. On this day, his desk has no papers, no notepads or Post-its, not even a computer.

Here’s where you really figure out who Bill Maris is: on his bookshelf. There’s a fat text called Molecular Biotechnology: Principles and Applications of Recombinant DNA. There’s a well-read copy of Biotechnology: Applying the Genetic Revolution. And a collection of illustrations by Fritz Kahn, a German physician who was among the first to depict the human body as a machine. Wedged among these is a book that particularly stands out to anyone interested in living to 500. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, published in 2005, is the seminal work by futurist Ray Kurzweil. He famously predicted that in 2045, humankind will have its Terminator moment: The rise of computers will outpace our ability to control them. To keep up, we will radically transform our biology via nanobots and other machines that will enhance our anatomy and our DNA, changing everything about how we live and die.

“It will liberate us from our own limitations,” says Maris, who studied neuroscience at Middlebury College and once worked in a biomedical lab at Duke University. Kurzweil is a friend. Google hired him to help Maris and other Googlers understand a world in which machines surpass human biology. This might be a terrifying, dystopian future to some. To Maris, it’s business.

This is where he hopes to find, and fund, the next generation of companies that will change the world, or possibly save it. “We actually have the tools in the life sciences to achieve anything that you have the audacity to envision,” he says. “I just hope to live long enough not to die.”•

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“The Data Link Was The First Watch That Could Receive Downloaded Information”

March 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

When Timex introduced cheap, seemingly unbreakable watches in the 1950s, the product was given short shrift by both media and jewelers, but they soon were category leaders. The Timex Data Link of the 1990s, however, made in conjunction with Microsoft, was probably lavished with too much praise. Before computers were tiny and powerful, the Data Link was the first watch that could receive downloaded information. It wasn’t good enough, but it was (sort of) the future. As Apple releases more information today about the iWatch that no one seems to be clamoring for, here’s an excerpt from a 1994 New York Times article about the Data Link followed by a commercial for it.

“Talk about information at your fingertips. The Timex Corporation and the Microsoft Corporation said today that they had teamed up to develop a wristwatch that can store information received directly from a personal computer screen.

The Timex Data Link watch, which will cost about $130 when it goes on sale in September, uses a wireless optical scanning system to receive data from Microsoft software.

The Data Link watch was demonstrated today at a presentation by Microsoft’s chairman, Bill Gates, who held it up to a computer as a series of bar-code lines flashed on the screen. After several seconds, Mr. Gates was able to scroll through personal information like appointment locations and telephone numbers at the touch of a button on the watch.

Fast Sales Predicted

C. Michael Jacobi, the president of Timex, predicted that the company would sell 200,000 of the watches in the final three months of this year, making it the fastest-selling watch ever in its price category.

The new watch looks like a regular round sports watch and includes such standard digital watch functions as a calendar, light, dual time-zone settings and alarms.

Using a microchip developed by Timex with Motorola Inc., the watch can store about 70 messages in its memory, downloading them in about 20 seconds, officials said.

Each watch will include software compatible with Microsoft Windows 3.1 and the company’s scheduling applications, such as Schedule Plus. The software also will be compatible with future versions of Windows, including a ‘Chicago’ upgrade expected out by the end of the year.

Users simply need to hold the watch about a foot away from their computer screens to download data, which can be done as often as needed.

Laptops Won’t Work

However, road warriors will be disappointed to learn that the watch will not work with laptop computers, which do not have a strong enough lighting source in their screens, Timex officials said.”•

“He Was Always On Display And Always Had To Take Into Account What Others Saw And Said”

March 9, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

As much as living in an endlessly public, hyperconnected world may be, perhaps, an evolutionary necessity, that doesn’t mean it isn’t the root cause of a global mismatch disease, that it isn’t bad for us on the granular level. You and I, remember, we don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. There’s something medieval in the new order, the way privacy has vanished and judgement is ubiquitous. But unlike during the Middle Ages, we’re now not exposed to just the village but to the entire Global Village. What effect does that have? From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens:

The imagined order is embedded in the material world. Though the imagined order exists only in our minds, it can be woven into the material reality around us, and even set in stone. Most Westerners today believe in individualism. They believe that every human is an individual, whose worth does not depend on what other people think of him or her. Each of us has within ourselves a brilliant ray of light that gives value and meaning to our lives. In modern Western schools teachers and parents tell children that if their classmates make fun of them, they should ignore it. Only they themselves, not others, know their true worth.

In modern architecture, this myth leaps out of the imagination to take shape in stone and mortar. The ideal modern house is divided into many small rooms so that each child can have a private space, hidden from view, providing for maximum autonomy. This private room almost invariably has a door, and in many households it is accepted practice for the child to close, and perhaps lock, the door. Even parents are forbidden to enter without knocking and asking permission. The room is decorated as the child sees fit, with rock-star posters on the wall and dirty socks on the floor. Somebody growing up in such a space cannot help but imagine himself ‘an individual’, his true worth emanating from within rather than from without.

Medieval noblemen did not believe in individualism. Someone’s worth was determined by their place in the social hierarchy, and by what other people said about them. Being laughed at was a horrible indignity. Noblemen taught their children to protect their good name whatever the cost. Like modern individualism, the medieval value system left the imagination and was manifested in the stone of medieval castles. The castle rarely contained private rooms for children (or anyone else, for that matter). The teenage son of a medieval baron did not have a private room on the castle’s second floor, with posters of Richard the Lionheart and King Arthur on the walls and a locked door that his parents were not allowed to open. He slept alongside many other youths in a large hall. He was always on display and always had to take into account what others saw and said. Someone growing up in such conditions naturally concluded that a man’s true worth was determined by his place in the social hierarchy and by what other people said of him.•

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“What Is Email But A Giant, Electronic, Super-Efficient Post Office?”

March 9, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The German postal system grew from the nation’s military courier apparatus to become a multifaceted marvel, contributing subsequently to networks all over the world, leaving its mark on Soviet socialism and American capitalism. It has a latter-day parallel, of course, in the Internet, which was incubated and nurtured by the U.S. Defense Department wing DARPA. The Financial Times has a passage from David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules about the mixed blessing of bureaucracy, which allows for large-scale progress, making the unthinkable manageable, before beginning to succumb to its own weight, a sideshow giant who wows until his heart gives out. An excerpt:

All these fantasies of postal utopia now seem rather quaint. Today we usually associate national postal systems with the arrival of things we never wanted in the first place: utility bills, overdraft alerts, tax audits, one-time-only credit-card offers, charity appeals, and so on. Insofar as Americans have a popular image of postal workers, it has become increasingly squalid.

Yet at the same time that symbolic war was being waged on the postal service, something remarkably similar to the turn-of-the-century infatuation with the postal service was happening again. Let us summarise the story so far:

1. A new communications technology develops out of the military.

2. It spreads rapidly, radically reshaping everyday life.

3. It develops a reputation for dazzling efficiency.

4. Since it operates on non-market principles, it is quickly seized on by radicals as the first stirrings of a future, non-capitalist economic system already developing within the shell of the old.

5. Despite this, it quickly becomes the medium, too, for government surveillance and the dissemination of endless new forms of advertising and unwanted paperwork.

This mirrors the story of the internet. What is email but a giant, electronic, super-efficient post office? Has it not, too, created a sense of a new, remarkably effective form of cooperative economy emerging from within the shell of capitalism itself, even as it has deluged us with scams, spam and commercial offers, and enabled the government to spy on us in new and creative ways?

It seems significant that while both postal services and the internet emerge from the military, they could be seen as adopting military technologies to quintessential anti-military purposes. Here we have a way of taking stripped-down, minimalistic forms of action and communication typical of military systems and turning them into the invisible base on which everything they are not can be constructed: dreams, projects, declarations of love and passion, artistic effusions, subversive manifestos, or pretty much anything else.

But all this also implies that bureaucracy appeals to us — that it seems at its most liberating — precisely when it disappears: when it becomes so rational and reliable that we are able to just take it for granted that we can go to sleep on a bed of numbers and wake up with all those numbers still snugly in place.

In this sense, bureaucracy enchants when it can be seen as a species of what I like to call “poetic technology” — when mechanical forms of organisation, usually military in their ultimate inspiration, can be marshalled to the realisation of impossible visions: to create cities out of nothing, scale the heavens, make the desert bloom. For most of human history this kind of power was only available to the rulers of empires or commanders of conquering armies, so we might even speak here of a democratisation of despotism. Once, the privilege of waving one’s hand and having a vast invisible army of cogs and wheels organise themselves in such a way as to bring your whims into being was available only to the very most privileged few; in the modern world, it can be subdivided into millions of tiny portions and made available to everyone able to write a letter, or to flick a switch.•

 

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“99% Of All The Species That Ever Existed On The Planet Are Gone”

March 9, 2015 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Ross Andersen, Deputy Editor of Aeon, appearing on Tony Dokoupil’s MSNBC show, Greenhouse, to discuss existential risks to humanity and a potential colony being established on Mars by Elon Musk and SpaceX, a topic he covered at length in an excellent 2014 article.

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A Brief Note From 1885 About Second Thoughts

March 9, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the November 17, 1885 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

St. Paul. — Mrs. Eulitz, of Glenrillen, died and was buried on the 3rd. On the 8th she was disinterred and showed signs of life by the flush on her cheeks and the perfect appearance of her body. She is now believed to be in a state of suspended animation.•

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“One Day You Might Even Have Your Own Personal Robot Journalist”

March 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The dream, if that’s what it is, of machines writing in the manner of humans is not a new one. It’s difficult to imagine a time when computers can give us anything beyond basic, templated prose, but perhaps that’s not the point. Maybe each of us will have a robot collecting and writing simple and personalized information for us, the long tail taken to its extreme conclusion. That could be helpful or it might encourage us all to be nations of one. From Klint Finley at Wired:

Is anyone actually reading any of this machine generated content? Automated Insights CEO Robbie Allen says that’s the wrong question to ask. Although the company generated over one billion pieces of content in 2014 alone, most of this verbiage isn’t meant for a mass audience. Rather, Wordsmith is acting as a sort of personal data scientist, sifting through reams of data that might otherwise go un-analyzed and creating custom reports that often have an audience of one.

For example, the company generates Fantasy Football game summaries for millions of Yahoo users each day during the Fantasy Football season, and it helps companies turn confusing spreadsheets into short, human readable reports. One day you might even have your own personal robot journalist, filing daily stories just for you on your fitness tracking data and your personal finances.

“We sort of flip the traditional content creation model on its head,” he says. “Instead of one story with a million page view, we’ll have a million stories with one page view each.”•

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“The Most Important Factor Has Been Technology”

March 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The decentralization of media has allowed some silent insecurities to grow loud. There’s nothing sadder than some middle-aged mook doing a podcast from his basement, complaining, obliviously, about the privileged existence of women and minorities. There are so many available for download that I can hardly count. For such wounded warriors, things are likely to only get worse, as women eventually come to prominence on the American political landscape. 

Would a female U.S. President drastically alter the country’s mindset away from sabre-rattling and toward greater enlightenment? Not instantly, probably. African-American police officers often engage in racial profiling of other African-Americans, so it’s not only about the electing of an individual but the reimagining of a system. Hopefully such a rethinking of priorities will be a byproduct of women gradually gaining greater parity in politics. In a WSJ opinion piece, Melvin Konner explains why male dominance is on the decline:

The Bible, the Iliad, the great Indian epics—all of them are full of sex and violence. I don’t know whether Helen’s face was what launched a thousand Greek ships against Troy. I don’t know whether David really fell in love with Bathsheba and had her soldier-husband sent to die at the front, or if Solomon had seven hundred wives. But all the evidence suggests the plausibility of such stories, and this culture of male domination didn’t come to an end with the ancients. It prevailed throughout the middle ages and the Renaissance as well.

But then what happened? Why did some men begin at last to let go of their privileges?

The great transformation of the past two centuries—the slow but relentless decline of male supremacy—can be attributed in part to the rise of Enlightenment ideas generally. The liberation of women has advanced alongside the gradual emancipation of serfs, slaves, working people and minorities of every sort.

But the most important factor has been technology, which has made men’s physical strength and martial prowess increasingly obsolete. Male muscle has been replaced to a large extent by machines and robots. Today, women operate fighter jets and attack helicopters, deploying more lethal force than any Roman gladiator or Shogun warrior could dream of.•

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“What Will A Martian Economy Look Like?”

March 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Why is it that I don’t believe I’ll ever experience Earthlings colonizing Mars, even if I’m lucky enough to have an average or better lifespan? Is it because it’s a hopelessly complicated and costly mission? Or am I just not able to visualize it because we’ve never accomplished anything nearly that ambitious in our history? I don’t think I’d be so dour about the prospects if the reusable rockets were headed to the moon, if we were going to build domed cities in craters. But I really doubt getting to see the Mars thing.

Elon Musk certainly can imagine it and believes we’ll have accomplished the ginormous leap in the next 25 years. From Tom Yet at the Berkeley Technology Review:

The alternative to a life on Mars lived entirely underground or indoors is terraforming, the transformation of the Martian surface to resemble Earth’s. Essentially, we’ve learned that greenhouse gases ruin the atmosphere and keep temperatures on an ascent, and so a deliberate injection of greenhouse gases into the Martian atmosphere could, in theory, alter its current state of equilibrium and render it hospitable to our species. This process may require decades, even centuries. Given the conditions in the interim, initial settlements would likely need to be constructed by robots. Human pioneers would face a life of extreme austerity.

Musk has said that a million people must settle on Mars before a sustainable civilization can be built. “Even at a million, you’re really assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars,” he explained in the Aeon interview. “You would need to mine and refine all of these different materials, in a much more difficult environment than Earth. There would be no oxygen or nitrogen that are just there. No oil.” For now, at least, SpaceX has remained laser-focused on its competitive advantage – space transport – leaving other necessary technological endeavors (as they relate to the erection and maintenance of a Martian civilization) out of their purview.

Who will build the robots that will build up Mars? What will a Martian economy look like? How will politics take form? These, among many other questions, seem unanswered amid the excitement. Continued, long-term inter-organizational cooperation and integration are clearly necessary for substantial gains to be made. Technological advancements aside, setting up a colony aimed at self-sustainability will require not only gargantuan economic investment, but also formidable political will. It’s a leap of faith, and each step along the way will need to break new ground. It’s a journey of precision. Mistake and malfunction could spell not just failure, but also death.•

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

March 8, 2015 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

My Life’s Work (Upper East Side)

I’m selling:

  • My unpublished novel: Death by MURDER, a psychological thriller with erotica.
  • Plans for a free energy device – I can prove they’re mine.
  • The short story “No Limits,” which explores true defiance in a child.
  • An idea for producing temporary zero gravity on land – primarily for amusement parks.
  • An idea for an automotive sensor to help in high speed maneuvering.
  • An idea for a piece of self-changing artwork.
  • Several ideas for scenarios in erotic novels / movies.
  • Several ideas for erotic devices.
  • The true novel Seven Years in Korea – I have notes but I will record the full stories on tape – it is the heartwarming and sometimes hilarious account of an American teaching English in South Korea.

It’s not a joke, it’s not a scam, I’m tired of red tape, I’m tired of not having enough money for research and development, and I am definitely tired of not having enough money to go to the doctor when I’m sick and hoping that it’s nothing serious. I’ve got gold here, but I don’t have the tools or the strength to mine it.

We’ll have our lawyers meet, draw up papers, and get it done. I’m asking $3,000,000.00 USD. For all this, for the movie deals that could follow, for the sales from the devices, this is a steal.

“A Digital Future Can Frighten People”

March 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Rose Jacobs of Newsweek has a story about the emergence of robotic factories in Europe (Industrie 4.0, as its called), not the first time that magazine has covered the rise of industrial machines. The article notes these plants aren’t yet devoid of human workers, but it’s tough to see how that isn’t just the result of a transition not yet completed. Manufacturers argue industrial automation is propelled by consumer demand for cheaper prices and greater convenience. In that sense, it’s not much different than the mechanics of Uber marginalizing drivers to appeal to riders. An excerpt:

You might expect a world built on sensors, software and machines to be devoid of humans. But in Amberg, the 10,000-square-metre shop floor is populated by 1,020 workers over three shifts. And their labour looks relatively physical: a young man lying on his back inches his way under an elegant blue-and-grey machine, as you would under a car needing repair; a woman nearby bends over a circuit board wielding tweezers. Yet other members of staff peer at screens, never touching the products rolling down glassed-in assembly lines.

“A digital future can frighten people,” says Günter Ziebell, production unit leader in Amberg. “But we complement automated tests with eye checks.” More to the point, this project has created demand for people with experience and creativity, who can improve the processes. So the management structure in Amberg has become very flat, allowing, for example, line workers to speak with the IT department directly rather than go through their bosses. Any employee can initiate a project that requires an investment of less than €10,000, and managers simply check every quarter that their teams are neither spending too much nor too little. Employees also earn bonuses when they suggest changes that are later implemented. The average employee earns an additional €1,000 per year this way, says Ziebell. He stresses the importance of schemes like this: “If a digital factory is being managed top-down, you wouldn’t get many advantages from it.”

But even if increasing automation hasn’t sapped jobs in Amberg, fast-growing efficiency means new plants might have been built to meet rising customer demand – and new positions to fill them – are now unnecessary. It is an issue that the Germans, at least, are attempting to address head-on, with plans under way to form a national-level working group for Industrie 4.0 that includes employee representatives as well as private businesses and industry bodies.

Dieter Wegener, Siemens’s coordinator for Industrie 4.0, argues that companies aren’t pushing these developments forward – consumers are. We want customised products, we want them now, and we want them made efficiently, whether to bring down prices or preserve natural resources. This isn’t possible without networked production processes. As Mr Wegener says, “This is coming from you and me.” He also argues that Germany is at least two years ahead of the industrial internet community in the US “but we appear as if we’re following the Americans. The Americans are better at marketing.”•

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Old Print Article: “Dr. Pratt Predicts A Perfect Featured Nation,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1924)

March 8, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

So much going on in this 1924 Brooklyn Daily Eagle feature about the plastic surgery practice of one Dr. W. Augustus Pratt. The early part of the piece mentions the surgeries endured by a 48-year-old woman who wanted to put a permissible face on her May-December relationship with a 16-year-old drug-store clerk. The indelicate article refers to injured WWI veterans as “noseless or chinless monsters.” It goes on to focus on women’s efforts to cosmetically remake themselves for beauty and men for professional reasons. Dr. Pratt, by the way, married one of his patients after “perfecting” her, though, as you can see from the photo at the bottom, he could have used a few nips and/or tucks himself.

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“What Does Hillary Clinton Think About Artificial Wombs, For Example, Or Designer Babies?”

March 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Zoltan Istvan, Transhumanist candidate for next year’s Presidential election, knows he’s not going to be taking his calls at the Oval Office come January 2017, which makes him far more politically self-aware than, say, Ted Cruz. So what is he after with his thus-far self-financed campaign? From a Q&A conducted by Ajai Raj at Medium:

Question:

What’s the goal of your campaign?

Zoltan Istvan:

Of course, as you know from reading my articles, there’s no chance of me winning. I’m not even trying to pretend that I’m necessarily going to take votes from anyone — it’s pretty complex to get on all the state ballots and do all these other things. But it’s very likely that I’m going to be involved in some discussions at the higher ranks of politics as to, well, what is this guy really talking about? Should we be considering genetic engineering and talking about it in our political campaigns, for example? I’m hopefully going to have some contact with Hillary Clinton. Al Gore has been a closet transhumanist for literally a decade.

So there’s been some involvement, especially in the liberal parties, and interest in what technology is doing, and interest in how it can help politics. What does Hillary Clinton think about artificial wombs, for example, or designer babies? What about the military controlling artificial intelligence, this technology with the potential to create something with a hundred times the intelligence of a human?

These are not things she wants to talk about, and neither does Mitt Romney [NOTE: This conversation took place before Romney announced that he will not run] or whoever else is going to run, but there’s a good chance if there’s enough press around it, they’ll be forced to deal with it.

The idea is that maybe in 2020, 2024, the Transhumanist Party can become something more significant than what it is now — a brand new startup, in a way.

Question:

So it’s about shifting the conversation, and getting some of these transhumanist ideas and concerns out of the fringe and into the mainstream, on people’s TVs.

Zoltan Istvan:

Absolutely. And I don’t mean to take anything away from my own campaign — everyone keeps saying, “Don’t say you’re going to lose” — but I’m just trying to be realistic. Our time might be in four or eight years. But what we can really do this time around is bring the conversation into the public’s view. I believe that I can be included in some debates, especially with other third parties, where we actually get a voice to make a dent, and get people saying, “Well, we really don’t want to talk about these topics, because they’re so controversial. However, it’s probably time we do, because after all, the country is kind of running headlong into the Transhumanist Age.”

You know, we have robotic hearts, bionic eyes, artificial hearing, all this stuff — it’s already here, it’s just a matter of, when we start implementing these things, how the FDA handles it, how the culture of America decides to say, “Wow, is a robotic arm something I’m going to want in ten years if it’s actually better than a human arm?”•

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“Even Man Is A Gene Machine, A Robot Vehicle Blindly Programmed To Preserve Its Selfish Genes”

March 8, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Unless the People magazine archives are lying to me, the first mention of the word “computer” in the publication occurred in the April 4, 1977 edition. It was used in reference to Richard Dawkins’ publication of The Selfish Gene. An excerpt:

It looks like a scene in a mad-scientist movie, but Oxford’s Dr. Richard Dawkins is studying the response of female crickets to the computer-simulated mating calls of the male. Dawkins is a sociobiologist, one of a new breed of scientists who specialize in the biological causes of animal behavior. “I love to solve the intellectual problems of my specialty,” he says. “It’s the kind of game people like me play.”

Based on his studies, Dawkins, 36, has developed a theory about the survival of species. It is described in his book The Selfish Gene, which recently was published in the U.S. He says the seemingly “altruistic” acts of many species are the result of genes trying to perpetuate themselves. “Even man,” says Dawkins, “is a gene machine, a robot vehicle blindly programmed to preserve its selfish genes. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism. Let us understand what our selfish genes are up to because we may then have the chance to upset their designs—something no other species has ever aspired to.”•

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