Ideas and technology and politics and journalism and history and humor and some other stuff.
10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
This week, the Supreme Court began deliberating whether we’d return to our old healthcare system.
Welcome back, bitches. Percs are still $4 a pop.
Tuan C. Nguyen of the Washington Post earnestly investigates the pretty ridiculous claims of neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero who believes he’ll perform a successful head-transplant surgery in the next two years. The writer comes away believing the procedure won’t permanently be impossible, but there’s one little catch: Even a “successful” operation will leave the patient permanently a quadriplegic. An excerpt:
In recent years, there’s been renewed talk of perfecting such a procedure. This time it’s spearheaded by Sergio Canavero, an Italian neurosurgeon at the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group who has claimed that advances in medical science now make it possible to carry out head transplants that would allow patients to not only survive, but function normally. And with sufficient financial and legal support, he envisions successfully performing a transplant on a human as early as 2017.
“I think we are now at a point when the technical aspects are all feasible,” Canavero told New Scientist.
While expert opinions on Canavero’s claims vary, the possibility isn’t as far fetched as it sounds. James Harrop, director of Adult Reconstructive Spine at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and co-editor of Congress of Neurological Surgeons, says that the kind of complications the surgeons faced back in 1970 could easily be fixed using today’s methods.
“Technically it’s not any harder than a liver and heart transplant,” he says. “We now have immunosuppressant drugs that might prevent the body from rejecting it. Arteries and the ends of the esophagus can be sewn together. Bones can be fused. As long as the cuts are in place and if you do it high enough, there isn’t that much to hook back up.”
Several challenges remain, however. For Harrop, the biggest hurdle would be to reconstruct the millions of disconnected central nerve fibers that, under normal circumstances, do not regenerate.•
From the June 5, 1934 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
Simla, India — Religious pilgrims reported today that the aged Shamanist abbot of a temple near Bareilly has been buried alive at his own request.
The abbot, who was reported to be 157 years old, believed his life’s work was over, and that to live on would be an affront to the deities. Pilgrims reported he lay down in a grave and that faithful followers, after performing ancient ceremonies, covered him with earth.•
Figuring out the future of paid journalism isn’t just about making the economics work but by doing so while actually turning out original and intelligent reporting that has integrity. That’s something often lost on media analysts eager to bury the legacy of twentieth-century journalism, a mixed bag, sure, but an era that saw the best of reportage reach never-before-seen heights. We live in a fuller and deeper time because everyone is potentially a citizen journalist (a good thing), but we shouldn’t reflexively accept Buzzfeed and the like as the way forward simply because of page views or ad sales. From James King’s Gawker post, “My Year Ripping Off the Web With the Daily Mail Online“:
The eager paradigm-proclaimer Michael Wolff used his USA Today media column last August to praise the Mail’s business model as having succeeded where other, better-funded and more prestigious publications have failed. Under the headline “Daily Mail Solves Internet Paradox,” Wolff lauded the publication’s “180 million unique visitors a month” and suggested that if other publications want to survive the “digital migration” they should adopt a model similar to that of the Mail’s.
What Wolff failed to acknowledge: the Mail’s editorial model depends on little more than dishonesty, theft of copyrighted material, and sensationalism so absurd that it crosses into fabrication.
Yes, most outlets regularly aggregate other publications’ work in the quest for readership and material, and yes, papers throughout history have strived for the grabbiest headlines facts will allow. But what DailyMail.com does goes beyond anything practiced by anything else calling itself a newspaper. In a little more than a year of working in the Mail’s New York newsroom, I saw basic journalism standards and ethics casually and routinely ignored. I saw other publications’ work lifted wholesale. I watched editors at the most highly trafficked English-language online newspaper in the world publish information they knew to be inaccurate.
“We do things a little differently than you might be used to,” U.S. editor Katherine Thomson told me, early in my time there.
She was right. …
The production process was simple. During a day shift—8 a.m. to about 6 p.m—four news editors stationed together near Clarke’s desk assigned stories to reporters from a continually updated list of other publications’ articles, to which I did not have access. Throughout the day, they would monitor the website’s traffic to determine what was getting clicked on and what to remove from the homepage.
When a writer was free to write a story, he or she simply would shout “I’m free” and an editor would assign a link to an article on the list. In many cases, it would be accompanied by a sensationalized headline—one that may or may not have been accurate—for the writer to use.
During a typical 10-hour shift, I would catch four to seven articles this way. Unlike at other publications for which I’ve worked, writers weren’t tasked with finding their own stories or calling sources. We were simply given stories written by other publications and essentially told to rewrite them. And unlike at other publications where aggregation writers are encouraged to find a unique angle or to add some information missing from an original report, the way to make a story your own at the Mail is to pass off someone else’s work as your own.•
Tags: James King, Katherine Thomson
As the above photos attest, Homo sapiens is not a perfect species. Gene therapy could change that.
Altering the code of those with a specific illness embedded in the “alphabet” of who they are is an area of great promise. But what if those changes to DNA could be made hereditary? What if we “optimize” humans across generations to not only be rid of disease but to increase intelligence and strength and to weed out characteristics that are considered unfavorable at this moment in history? Will we make things worse while trying to make them better? It’s a pretty sure bet that if we don’t destroy ourselves in the short run with greenhouse gases or by some other means, we’ll have to work through these questions. The opening of “Engineering the Perfect Baby,” Antonio Regalado’s Technology Review inquiry into the future of parenting:
If anyone had devised a way to create a genetically engineered baby, I figured George Church would know about it.
At his labyrinthine laboratory on the Harvard Medical School campus, you can find researchers giving E. Coli a novel genetic code never seen in nature. Around another bend, others are carrying out a plan to use DNA engineering to resurrect the woolly mammoth. His lab, Church likes to say, is the center of a new technological genesis—one in which man rebuilds creation to suit himself.
When I visited the lab last June, Church proposed that I speak to a young postdoctoral scientist named Luhan Yang, a Harvard recruit from Beijing who’d been a key player in developing a new, powerful technology for editing DNA called CRISPR-Cas9. With Church, Yang had founded a small company to engineer the genomes of pigs and cattle, sliding in beneficial genes and editing away bad ones.
As I listened to Yang, I waited for a chance to ask my real questions: Can any of this be done to human beings? Can we improve the human gene pool? The position of much of mainstream science has been that such meddling would be unsafe, irresponsible, and even impossible. But Yang didn’t hesitate. Yes, of course, she said. In fact, the Harvard laboratory had a project to determine how it could be achieved. She flipped open her laptop to a PowerPoint slide titled “Germline Editing Meeting.”
Here it was: a technical proposal to alter human heredity.
“Germ line” is biologists’ jargon for the egg and sperm, which combine to form an embryo. By editing the DNA of these cells or the embryo itself, it could be possible to eliminate disease genes and to pass those genetic fixes on to future generations. Such a technology could be used to rid families of scourges like cystic fibrosis. It might also be possible to install genes that offer lifelong protection against infection, Alzheimer’s, and, Yang told me, maybe the effects of aging. These would be history-making medical advances that could be as important to this century as vaccines were to the last.
That’s the promise. The fear is that germ line engineering is a path toward a dystopia of super people and designer babies for those who can afford it.•
Tags: Antonio Regalado, George Church, Luhan Yang
America’s obituary has been written prematurely many times, and, no, fucking ISIS won’t be the death of us. There’s always hope for a bright future for the U.S. as long as our immigration policies aren’t guided by politicians pandering to xenophobic impulses. From an Economist review of Joseph Nye’s Is the American Century Over?:
Europe is hardly a plausible challenger. Though its economy and population are larger than America’s, the old continent is stagnating. In 1900 a quarter of the world’s people were European; by 2060 that figure could be just 6%, and a third of them will be over 65.
By 2025 India will be the most populous nation on Earth. It has copious “soft power”—a term Mr Nye coined—in its diaspora and popular culture. But only 63% of Indians are literate, and none of its universities is in the global top 100. India could only eclipse America if it were to form an anti-American alliance with China, reckons Mr Nye, but that is unlikely: Indians are well-disposed towards Washington and highly suspicious of Beijing.
China is the likeliest contender to be the next hyperpower: its army is the world’s largest and its economy will soon be. (In purchasing-power-parity terms, it already is.) But it will be decades before China is as rich or technologically sophisticated as America; indeed, it may never be. By 2030 China will have more elderly dependants than children, which will sap its vitality. It has yet to figure out how to change governments peacefully. And its soft power is feeble for a country of its size. It has few real friends or allies, unless you count North Korea and Zimbabwe.
Hu Jintao, the previous president, tried to increase China’s soft power by setting up “Confucius Institutes” to teach its language and culture. Yet such a strategy is unlikely to win hearts in, say, Manila, when China is bullying the Philippines over islands in the South China Sea. The staging of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing was a soft-power success, but was undercut by the jailing of Liu Xiaobo, a pro-democracy activist, and the resulting empty chair at the ceremony to award him the Nobel peace prize. “Marketing experts call this ‘stepping on your own message’,” says Mr Nye.•
Tags: Joseph Nye
Zoltan Istvan, your 2016 Transhumanist Party Presidential candidate, is concerned about the geopolitical implications of self-aware AI and is making it a plank of his campaign. I think his timeframe for such superintelligence (in the next 10-20 years) is not even remotely possible and Weak AI will be much more of a political challenge in the next few decades, but I would love to see him debate Jeb and Hillary. From Istvan at Vice:
Forget about superintelligent AIs being created by a company, university, or a rogue programmer with Einstein-like IQ. Hollywood and its AI-themed movies like Transcendence and Her have misled the public. The launch of the first truly autonomous, self-aware artificial intelligence—one that has the potential to become far smarter than human beings—is a matter of the highest national and global security. Its creation could change the landscape of international politics in a matter of weeks—maybe even days, depending on how fast the intelligence learns to upgrade itself, hack and rewrite the world’s best codes, and utilize weaponry.
In the last year, a chorus of leading technology experts, like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates, have chimed in on the dangers regarding the creation of AI. The idea of a superintelligence on Planet Earth dwarfing the capacity of our own brains is daunting. Will this creation like its creators? Will it embrace human morals? Will it become religious? Will it be peaceful or warlike? The questions are innumerable and the answers are all debatable, but one thing is for sure from a national security perspective: If it’s smarter than us, we want it to be on our side—the human race’s side.
Now take that one step further, and I’m certain another theme regarding AI is just about to emerge—one bound with nationalistic fervor and patriotism. Politicians and military commanders around the world will want this superintelligent machine-mind for their countries and defensive forces. And they’ll want it exclusively. Using AI’s potential power and might for national security strategy is more than obvious—it’s essential to retain leadership in the future world. Inevitably, a worldwide AI arms race is set to begin.
As the 2016 US Presidential candidate for the Transhumanist Party, I don’t mind going out on a limb and saying the obvious: I also want AI to belong exclusively to America.•
Tags: Zoltan Istvan
David Graeber, who’s just published The Utopia of Rules, explaining to Elias Isquith of Salon why free markets don’t actually supplant bureaucracy but actually beget more of it:
Salon:
The idea that free-market policies create bureaucracies is pretty counterintuitive, at least for most Americans. So why is it the case that laissez-faire policy creates bureaucracy?
David Graeber:
Part of the reason is because in fact what we call the market is not really the market.
First of all, we have this idea that the market is a thing that just happens. This is the debate in the 19th century: market relations creeped up within feudalism and then it overthrew [feudalism]. So gradually the market is just the natural expression of human freedom; and since it regulates itself, it will gradually displace everything else and bring about a free society. Libertarians still think this.
In fact, if you look at what actually happens historically, this is just not true. Self-regulating markets were basically created with government intervention. It was a political project. Certain assumptions of how these things work just aren’t true. People don’t do wage labor if they have any choice, historically, for example. So in order to get a docile labor force, you have to create police and [a] large apparatus to ensure that the people you kick off the land actually will get the kinds of jobs you want them to … this is the very beginning of creating a market.
Basically, we assume that market relations are natural, but you need a huge institutional structure to make people behave the way that economists say they are “supposed” to behave. So, for example, think about the way the consumer market works. The market is supposed to work on grounds of pure competition. Nobody has moral ties to each other other than to obey the rules. But, on the other hand, people are supposed to do anything they can to get as much as possible off the other guy — but won’t simply steal the stuff or shoot the person.
Historically, that’s just silly; if you don’t care at all about a guy, you might as well steal his stuff. In fact, they’re encouraging people to act essentially how most human societies, historically, treated their enemies — but to still never resort to violence, trickery or theft. Obviously that’s not going to happen. You can only do that if you set up a very strictly enforced police force. That’s just one example.•
Tags: David Graeber, Elias Isquith
A house that’s impervious to storm and earthquake sounds pretty good right about now, and that was what Buckminster Fuller promised in 1929 when he introduced the Dymaxion House, an architectural dream never realized beyond a few prototypes. In a 1932 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article from a series on the future of the home, Fuller’s automated abode was given a public hearing. The opening of the piece below.
____________________________
“We are living in a spheroidal universe”:
Tags: Buckminster Fuller, Lou Wylie
James Salter turned out some beautiful pieces for People magazine during that publication’s infancy, usually profiling other great writers of earlier generations who were living in some state of exile. (Earlier I posted a passage from his Graham Greene article.) In 1975, he coerced Vladimir Nabokov, living in Switzerland two years before his death, into grudgingly sitting for an interview, and recorded the writer’s dislike for many things: fame, hippies, Dostoevsky, etc. It’s not a portrait of only one novelist but also of a different time for writers in general, when one could still find pockets of a less-disposable age. An excerpt:
Novelists, like dictators, have long reigns. It is remarkable to think of Nabokov’s first book, a collection of love poems, appearing in his native Russia in 1914. Soon after, he and his family were forced to flee as a result of the Bolshevik uprising and the civil war. He took a degree at Cambridge and then settled in the émigré colony in Berlin. He wrote nine novels in Russian, beginning with Mary, in 1926, and including Glory, The Defense, and Laughter in the Dark. He had a certain reputation and a fully developed gift when he left for America in 1940 to lecture at Stanford. The war burst behind him.
Though his first novel written in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, in 1941, went almost unnoticed, and his next, Bend Sinister, made minor ripples, the stunning Speak, Memory, an autobiography of his lost youth, attracted respectful attention. It was during the last part of 10 years at Cornell that he cruised the American West during the summers in a 1952 Buick, looking for butterflies, his wife driving and Nabokov beside her making notes as they journeyed through Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, the motels, the drugstores, the small towns. The result was Lolita, which at first was rejected everywhere, like many classics, and had to be published by the Olympia Press in Paris (Nabokov later quarreled with and abandoned his publisher, Maurice Girodias). A tremendous success and later a film directed by Stanley Kubrick, the book made the writer famous. Nabokov coquettishly demurs. “I am not a famous writer,” he says, “Lolita was a famous little girl. You know what it is to be a famous writer in Montreux? An American woman comes up on the street and cries out, ‘Mr. Malamud! I’d know you anywhere.’ ”
He is a man of celebrated prejudices. He abhors student activists, hippies, confessions, heart-to-heart talks. He never gives autographs. On his list of detested writers are some of the most brilliant who have ever lived: Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Faulkner and Henry James. His opinions are probably the most conservative, among important writers, of any since Evelyn Waugh’s. “You will die in dreadful pain and complete isolation,” his fellow exile, the Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin, told him. Far from pain these days and beyond isolation, Nabokov is frequently mentioned for that same award. “After all, you’re the secret pride of Russia,” he has written of someone unmistakably like himself. He is far from being cold or uncaring. Outraged at the arrest last year of the writer Maramzin, he sent this as yet unpublished cable to the Soviet writers’ union: “Am appalled to learn that yet another writer martyred just for being a writer. Maramzin’s immediate release indispensable to prevent an atrocious new crime.” The answer was silence.
Last year Nabokov published Look at the Harlequins!, his 37th book. It is the chronicle of a Russian émigré writer named Vadim Vadimych whose life, though he had four devastating wives, has many aspects that fascinate by their clear similarity to the life of Vladimir Vladimirovich. The typical Nabokovian fare is here in abundance, clever games of words, sly jokes, lofty knowledge, all as written by a “scornful and austere author, whose homework in Paris had never received its due.” It is probably one of the final steps toward a goal that so many lesser writers have striven to achieve: Nabokov has joined the current of history not by rushing to take part in political actions or appearing in the news but by quietly working for decades, a lifetime, until his voice seems as loud as the detested Stalin’s, almost as loud as the lies. Deprived of his own land, of his language, he has conquered something greater. As his aunt in Harlequins! told young Vadim, “Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!” Nabokov has done that. He has won.
“I get up at 6 o’clock,” he says. He dabs at his eyes. “I work until 9. Then we have breakfast together. Then I take a bath. Perhaps an hour’s work afterward. A walk, and then a delicious siesta for about two-and-a-half hours. And then three hours of work in the afternoon. In the summer we hunt butterflies.” They have a cook who comes to their apartment, or Véra does the cooking. “We do not attach too much importance to food or wine.” His favorite dish is bacon and eggs. They see no movies. They own no TV.
They have very few friends in Montreux, he admits. They prefer it that way. They never entertain. He doesn’t need friends who read books; rather, he likes bright people, “people who understand jokes.” Véra doesn’t laugh, he says resignedly. “She is married to one of the great clowns of all time, but she never laughs.”
The light is fading, there is no one else in the room or the room beyond. The hotel has many mirrors, some of them on doors, so it is like a house of illusion, part vision, part reflection, and rich with dreams.•
Tags: James Salter, Vera Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov
About a year ago, a Pittsburgh hospital announced it would begin using suspended-animation techniques to stave off imminent death for gunshot and stabbing victims, keeping them barely alive until they could be saved. Heart-attack sufferers would also be naturals for such a treatment, though it’s a tricky procedure, and we’re still in a pioneering phase despite efforts in this area over the course of centuries. From Rene Ebersole at Nautilus:
The bags are packed, the car is loaded, and the neighbor will pick up the mail. Now there’s just one last thing to do before heading out the door for vacation: It’s time to turn off the dog.
You lead Sparky to his fluffy bed inside a small chamber filled with a continuous stream of hydrogen sulfide gas. While you’re away, he’ll stay—completely still. No breath. No pulse. But Sparky’s neither sleeping, nor dead. He is in a state of suspended animation, as if you simply put his body on pause. And when you return home, he’ll reboot back to normal in the fresh air.
This slightly unnerving scenario belongs to Mark Roth, a biomedical scientist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. The good-natured Roth offers it not as a business plan for futuristic pet care, but as an example of how suspended animation, a process in which he specializes, may work.
Roth’s real aim is to create life-saving medical procedures that would improve recoveries from heart attacks or decrease the collateral tissue damage caused by tumor irradiation. “I think the beginning is not pets on the weekend; it’s the heart attack you’re having right now,” he says. Right now his primary goal is to prove that suspended animation offers “irrefutable benefits for people who would otherwise be dead.” …
Current research into suspended animation builds upon hundreds of years of science that began in the 1660s with chemist Robert Boyle using carbon dioxide to alter the state of animation in honeybees. In the 1820s, physician Henry Hill Hickman found that carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide could make it possible to painlessly amputate animals’ limbs. At the time, his contemporaries deemed his theories “surgical humbug,” but after his death, Hickman was declared one of the fathers of modern anesthesiology, now used for everything from root canals to cancer care.
“As a scientist, I’m no different from Boyle or Hickman, or whoever, attempting to understand the full range of animation,” Roth says. But he aims to go beyond reducing pain and consciousness. He wants to perfect the means by which it’s possible to let a person nearly die, treat them for a serious injury, then bring them back to life—Frankenstein style.
There are dangers involved with his research.•
Tags: Henry Hill Hickman, Mark Roth, Rene Ebersole, Robert Boyle
Google has withdrawn one of its recently purchased companies from the upcoming DARPA Robotics Challenge in Pomona, but the competition will continue apace, albeit with some accelerated marching orders (i.e., the cables have been cut). From Erico Guizzo at IEEE Spectrum:
In a call with reporters this afternoon, Gill Pratt, program manager for the DRC, said the tasks for the final challenge will be similar to the ones we saw at the trials. But this time the tasks will be “put together in a single mission” that teams have one hour to complete.
The robots will start in a vehicle, drive to a simulated disaster building, and then they’ll have to open doors, walk on rubble, and use tools. Finally they’ll have to climb a flight of stairs. But one more thing, Pratt said: there will be a surprise task waiting for the robots at the end.
Just when we thought the DRC couldn’t get any cooler—it just did. Naturally, Pratt declined to elaborate on what this mystery task might entail.
He also emphasized that now the robots will operate completely untethered. There won’t be cables to provide power and data—and to keep them from falling down. “They’ll have to get up on their own,” he said. “That’s raising the bar on how good the robots have to be.”•
___________________________
“Basically we have to cut the cord”:
Tags: Erico Guizzo, Gill Pratt
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I posted last fall about Aloft Hotels introducing robotic butlers, machines that will likely be roaming the halls of every hotel chain in the near future. Here’s video footage of one such “worker” providing room service.
Silicon Valley isn’t merely about money in the way of Wall Street, and it isn’t about power in the traditional sense. The true measure of success in the tech capital is impact, how many lives can be changed–allegedly for the better. It’s about the building of a huge and overarching mechanism that can’t be avoided. From “Tomorrowland: How Silicon Valley Shapes Our Future,“ Thomas Schulz’s Spiegel piece about the shift of influence from bankers to technologists and what that means:
The iPhone only made its appearance seven years ago, but most of us no longer remember what the world was like before. Driverless cars were considered to be a crazy fantasy not long ago, but today nobody is particularly amazed by them. All the world’s knowledge condensed into a digital map and easily accessible? Normal. The fact that algorithms in the US control some 70 percent of all trading on the stock market? Crazy, to be sure. But normal craziness.
Dozens of companies are trying to figure out how to use drones for commercial use, be it for deliveries, data collection or other purposes. Huge armies of engineers are chasing after the holy grail of artificial intelligence. And the advances keep coming. Machines that can learn, intelligent robots: We have begun overtaking science fiction.
The phenomenon is still misunderstood, first and foremost by policymakers. It appears they have not yet decided whether to dive in and create a usable policy framework for the future or to stand aside as others create a global revolution. After all, what we are witnessing is not just the triumph of a particular technology. And it is not just an economic phenomenon. It isn’t about “the Internet” or “the social networks,” nor is it about intelligence services and Edward Snowden or the question as to what Google is doing with our data. It isn’t about the huge numbers of newspapers that are going broke nor is it about jobs being replaced by software. It’s not about a messaging service being worth €19 billion ($21.1 billion) or the fact that 20-year-olds are launching entire new industries.
We are witnessing nothing less than a societal transformation that ultimately nobody will be able to avoid. It is the kind of sea change that can only be compared with 19th century industrialization, but it is happening much faster this time. Just as the change from hand work to mass production dramatically changed our society over 100 years ago, the digital revolution isn’t just altering specific sectors of the economy, it is changing the way we think and live.
This time, though, the transformation is different. This time, it is being driven by just a few hundred people.•
Tags: Thomas Schulz
From the June 13, 1867 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
A school teacher in a Texas town was grossly insulted by a man, who told her at the same time that if she had any friends to avenge the insult that she could send them to him. The lady replied that she was able to protect herself, and, drawing a pistol, shot the man, killing him on the spot.•
Every day, hundreds of millions of people all over the world create an astounding amount of free content for Facebook and Twitter and the like. It would be by far the largest sweatshop in the world except that even sweatshop laborers are paid a nominal amount. Sure, we get a degree of utility from such services, but we’ve essentially turned ourselves into unpaid volunteers for multibillion-dollar corporations. There is, perhaps, something evolutionary about such participation, the ants cooperating to piece together a colony, but from an economic standpoint, it’s a stunning turn of events, and it all pivots on the new technologies.
“When Robots Steal Our Jobs,” a BBC radio program about machines and automation being introduced into reliably white-collar fields like law and medicine, sums up this phenomenon really well with this fact: “Last year, we collectively spent nearly 500 million hours each day updating Facebook. That’s 25 times the amount of labor it took to build the Panama Canal. And we did it all for free.”
Andrew McAfee, co-author of The Second Machine Age, and David Graeber are among the voices heard. The latter thinks capitalism won’t survive automation, but perhaps they’ll be something worse (e.g., techno-fascism).
One thing I feel sure about in the aforementioned intersection of AI and medicine is that robotics will be handling the majority of surgery at some point in the future.
The show plays a clip of Woody Allen doing stand-up in San Francisco in 1968, addressing a fear that began to take hold that decade: “My father was fired. He was technologically unemployed. My father worked for the same firm for 12 years. They replaced him with a tiny gadget this big that does everything that my father does but does it much better. The depressing thing is that my mother ran out and bought one.”
Tags: Andrew McAfee, David Graeber, Woody Allen
If I had to guess when we’d be able to bio-print fully functioning human organs, like kidneys, I would think it would be sometime in the twenty-first century but probably many decades down the line. Of course, who knows? In a Backchannel article, Andrew Leonard investigates the bold claims of controversial doctor Vladimir Mironov, “a one-time PETA-funded synthetic meat researcher who believes that eventually we will be bioprinting complete humans with bio-chipped brains.” The sci-fi reaching of some in the sector may be obscuring real advances. An excerpt:
Last November, a news report in Russia Today sent a shudder of excitement through the cluster of blogs and tech sites that cover bioprinting. Scientists at a Moscow laboratory called 3D Bioprinting Solutions announced that they would be able to print a functioning mouse thyroid gland by March 2015. Even better, declared the director of the lab, Vladimir Mironov, by 2018 the lab would start printing fully transplantable kidneys.
“The one who will be the first to print and then successfully transplant the kidney to the patient—who will stay alive—will for sure get a Nobel prize,” said Mironov.
Mironov was probably not wrong in his prediction that whoever first successfully bioprints a working human kidney will be showered with worldwide acclaim. Never mind the psychological benefits of improved techniques for breast reconstruction; the need for more kidneys is a pressing issue of life and death. In the U.S. alone more than 100,000 people are on the waiting list for a kidney transplant right now—but only 17,000 transplants took place in all of 2013. Successful bioprinting of human kidneys will save thousands of lives.
I don’t normally put huge stock in Russia Today as a reliable news source, but I was very curious. I wanted to know, for example, how Mironov intended to solve the vasculature problem? My efforts to reach him, however, failed.
My efforts to Google him, on the other hand, were highly entertaining.
For starters, in 2011 Mironov wrote an article for The Futurist predicting that we would soon be printing out entire human beings.
It is not difficult to predict that changing the human body will eventually be as routine as changing clothes. Cosmetic surgery will fuse with fashion.
Human-printing technology would eliminate the need to wait 18 years in order to get a fully developed adult: Humans could theoretically be printed on demand and be functionally ready in days or weeks. The brain could be replaced with biochips, though brain research would need to advance to such a level that brains could be reverse engineered and manufactured.
The line “cosmetic surgery will fuse with fashion” contains some nuances that could apply to bioprinted breast nipples. But the notion of bioprinting complete humans on demand in days or weeks? To paraphrase Thomas Boland, such a task seems likely to prove very difficult.•
Tags: Andrew Leonard, Vladimir Mironov
It’s possible I could read a better book during the rest of 2015 than Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Edge.org made my day as it often does with “Death Is Optional,” a dialogue between the Israeli historian and the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, another great thinker. Harari argues (as I have here many times) that computer consciousness is nowhere near a reality, but that Weak AI can displace and disrupt us regardless. The two consider the road ahead, a highly automated tomorrow in which medicine, even death, may not be an egalitarian affair (though it never was completely). An excerpt:
Daniel Kahneman:
Do you get to a broader view by becoming more differentiated, that is, by having more detailed views? Or is it just that you get people to consider a possibility that wouldn’t occur to them?
Yuval Noah Harari:
Mainly, the second way. The main thing, and my main task as a historian is to get people to consider the possibilities which usually are outside their field of vision, because our present field of vision has been shaped by history and has been narrowed down by history, and if you understand how history has narrowed down our field of vision, this is what enables you to start broadening it.
Let me give you an example that I’m thinking about a lot today, concerning the future of humankind in the field of medicine. At least to the best of my understanding, we’re in the middle of a revolution in medicine. After medicine in the 20th century focused on healing the sick, now it is more and more focused on upgrading the healthy, which is a completely different project. And it’s a fundamentally different project in social and political terms, because whereas healing the sick is an egalitarian project … you assume there is a norm of health, anybody that falls below the norm, you try to give them a push to come back to the norm, upgrading is by definition an elitist project. There is no norm that can be applicable to everybody.
And this opens the possibility of creating huge gaps between the rich and the poor, bigger than ever existed before in history. And many people say no, it will not happen, because we have the experience of the 20th century, that we had many medical advances, beginning with the rich or with the most advanced countries, and gradually they trickled down to everybody, and now everybody enjoys antibiotics or vaccinations or whatever, so this will happen again.
And as a historian, my main task is to say no, there were peculiar reasons why medicine in the 20th century was egalitarian, why the discoveries trickled down to everybody. These unique conditions may not repeat themselves in the 21st century, so you should broaden your thinking, and you should take into consideration the possibility that medicine in the 21st century will be elitist, and that you will see growing gaps because of that, biological gaps between rich and poor and between different countries. And you cannot just trust a process of trickling down to solve this problem.
There are fundamental reasons why we should take this very seriously, because generally speaking, when you look at the 20th century, it’s the era of the masses, mass politics, mass economics. Every human being has value, has political, economic, and military value, simply because he or she is a human being, and this goes back to the structures of the military and of the economy, where every human being is valuable as a soldier in the trenches and as a worker in the factory.
But in the 21st century, there is a good chance that most humans will lose, they are losing, their military and economic value. This is true for the military, it’s done, it’s over. The age of the masses is over. We are no longer in the First World War, where you take millions of soldiers, give each one a rifle and have them run forward. And the same thing perhaps is happening in the economy. Maybe the biggest question of 21st century economics is what will be the need in the economy for most people in the year 2050.
And once most people are no longer really necessary, for the military and for the economy, the idea that you will continue to have mass medicine is not so certain. Could be. It’s not a prophecy, but you should take very seriously the option that people will lose their military and economic value, and medicine will follow.•
Tags: Daniel Kahneman, Yuval Noah Harari
IQ continues to increase globally (if unevenly), and it’s not only in developing nations playing catch-up (China, for a huge example) but also in long-developed ones (the U.S., that other ginormous example). Why is that? Better tools and an improved understanding of tests? Perhaps, but the man who gave the Flynn effect its name believes abstract thinking is at the heart of the steady incline. Does that mean, as I’ve always suspected, that video games are good for us? From William Kremer at the BBC:
James Flynn believes test wiseness may have been a factor in IQ gains in the US in the first half of the 20th Century. However, since then the amount of IQ testing taking place has waned – and IQ increases have remained steady.
Flynn puts this continued progress down to profound shifts in society as well as education over the last century, which have led people to think in a more abstract, scientific way – the kind of intelligence measured by IQ tests.
He cites the work of Russian neuroscientist Alexander Luria, who studied indigenous people in the Soviet Union. “He found that they were very pragmatic and concrete in their thinking,” says Flynn, “and they weren’t capable of using logical abstractions or taking hypotheticals seriously.” Luria put the following problem to the head man of one tribe in Siberia: Where there’s always snow, the bears are white; there’s always snow at the North Pole – what colour are the bears there?
The head man replied that he had never seen bears that were any colour other than brown, but if a wise or truthful man came from the North Pole and told him that bears there were white, he might believe him. The scientific methods of hypothesising, classifying and making logical deductions were alien to him.
“Now virtually all formal schooling, when you get past the sixth grade into high school and college, means that you take hypotheses seriously,” says Flynn. “This is what science is all about. And you’re using logic on abstract categories.”
And this kind of thinking doesn’t only occur in school.•
Tags: Alexander Luria, James Flynn, William Kremer
Your city will likely be a smart one eventually, and you won’t have much of a say in the matter. It will all flow beneath the surface and you may consider it as infrequently as you do electricity. That will mean constant quantification which will lead to some good things and, quietly, some that are not. An excerpt from a heady talk at Salon (via Alternet) about the nature of smart cities, between journalist Allegra Kirkland and urban theorist Catherine Tumber:
Allegra Kirkland:
It seems like there’s a fundamental split between people who think there is something organic and inexplicable about the ways human beings come together in cities, and those who believe that all human behavior is quantifiable—that we can rely on data to understand how humans interact. Which side of the line do you fall on?
Catherine Tumber:
Digital technology and its use compresses experience. It tends to lead to niche cultures; it tends to lead to a sense of being untethered, as if that’s the golden pathway to real freedom. There are several traditions of political philosophy that hold that its important to be tethered so that you have a sense of the limits of yourself and of what it is that humans can do in the time that they have on this earth. This sense of endless freedom can lead to a very false sense of utopian promise that is simply unrealistic and unwanted. It’s yet another way that we’ve decided to take a pause from history and what history has long told us.
There are some things that you really don’t play with. People have acquired great wisdom over the ages—across the globe, this isn’t just a Eurocentric thing—about what it means to travel and to leave home and to come back. These are all the great stories and myths and fables. Technology kind of flattens all of that.
Allegra Kirkland:
This is sort of a related question, but what do you think are the primary things smart cities take away from the people who live there? What do we lose in these sorts of manufactured urban environments?
It makes me think of the complaints about the gentrification of places like New York City. Michael Bloomberg created new green spaces in Times Square and along the waterfront, made city services more efficient, rezoned districts, and now we have this sanitized, business-friendly, soulless city. The neighborhoods look the same; there’s no mixing of social classes, no weird dive bars. So you’d think smart cities, with their emphasis on homogeneity and efficiency, would be equally off-putting to people.
Catherine Tumber:
I think it’s a matter of the convenience of it and the novelty of it. But smart technology is relatively new and there are so many unexamined consequences, as I think there are with any major technological change like this.
I think that we’re only beginning as a culture to wince a little and take a second look at this. … There really hasn’t been any sort of consensus about what the right manners are in using these technologies. Across the world for time immemorial, every culture had some understanding of manners, and I don’t mean that in the prim Victorian sense. But just some ways in which you convey unspoken, coded assumptions about respect and caring and common courtesy and stuff like that. We haven’t had that conversation here. …The main point is that there are real unintended consequences of this.•
Tags: Allegra Kirkland, Catherine Tumber
The Mormon polygamists of Short Creek, Arizona, near the border of Utah, had long vexed local authorities with their alternative lifestyle, but things came to a head in 1953 when the largest mass arrest of such people–perhaps any people–in American history to that point occurred. The state believed they were bringing to a close a chapter it found disquieting, but it was only a temporary interruption. The town renamed itself Colorado City and Warren Jeffs, the polygamous sect leader, held dominion over much of the land more than 50 years later when convicted of sex charges against children. A report about the raid from the July 27, 1953 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
Matt Yglesias, given to huge overreactions to transient situations, may have a point in his apocalyptically titled Vox piece “American Democracy Is Doomed.” Our system is deeply flawed. But it’s not, as Yglesias argues, because we’re a very polarized people whose President, whether Democrat or Republican, has to do an end-around of Congress to get anything accomplished. It’s because of a system of representation that isn’t truly representative. Gerrymandering has made for a congressional body largely out of step with the majority of the American public. The rule of two Senators per state regardless of population was not a good idea. The election of a President by virtue of Electoral vote rather than Popular one is a mistake (though one soon likely to be remedied.) We’ve erred in being too concerned with making sure land mass and regions are empowered at the expense of citizens. And, of course, having no caps on the amount of money an individual or group can pour into the political process causes serious distrust. I don’t think most of these issues are solvable from within; the American people will have to exert great pressure from outside for change to happen. Maybe that will only occur after an implosion or maybe not. Yglesias’ opening:
America’s constitutional democracy is going to collapse.
Some day — not tomorrow, not next year, but probably sometime before runaway climate change forces us to seek a new life in outer-space colonies — there is going to be a collapse of the legal and political order and its replacement by something else. If we’re lucky, it won’t be violent. If we’re very lucky, it will lead us to tackle the underlying problems and result in a better, more robust, political system. If we’re less lucky, well, then, something worse will happen.
Very few people agree with me about this, of course. When I say it, people generally think that I’m kidding. America is the richest, most successful country on earth. The basic structure of its government has survived contested elections and Great Depressions and civil rights movements and world wars and terrorist attacks and global pandemics. People figure that whatever political problems it might have will prove transient — just as happened before.
But voiced in another register, my outlandish thesis is actually the conventional wisdom in the United States. Back when George W. Bush was president and I was working at a liberal magazine, there was a very serious discussion in an editorial meeting about the fact that the United States was now exhibiting 11 of the 13 telltale signs of a fascist dictatorship. The idea that Bush was shredding the Constitution and trampling on congressional prerogatives was commonplace. When Obama took office, the partisan valence of the complaints shifted, but their basic tenor didn’t. Conservative pundits — not the craziest, zaniest ones on talk radio, but the most serious and well-regarded — compare Obama’s immigration moves to the actions of a Latin-American military dictator.
In the center, of course, it’s an article of faith that when right and left talk like this they’re simply both wrong. These are nothing but the overheated squeals of partisans and ideologues.
At the same time, when the center isn’t complaining about the excessively vociferous complaints of the out-party of the day, it tends to be in full-blown panic about the state of American politics. And yet despite the popularity of alarmist rhetoric, few people act like they’re actually alarmed. Accusations that Barack Obama or John Boehner or any other individual politician is failing as a leader are flung, and then abandoned when the next issue arises. In practice, the feeling seems to be that salvation is just one election away. Hillary Clinton even told Kara Swisher recently that her agenda if she runs for president is to end partisan gridlock.
It’s not going to work.•
Tags: Matt Yglesias
The New York City I grew up with is no longer here, and that’s no surprise. It’s always been a place constantly tearing down and building up. But if climate change truly unfolds in a worst-case scenario–or a very bad one, at least–what does that mean for the city? Was Hurricane Sandy just prelude? Will Manhattan, an island crowded with skyscrapers, become Venice? Will it stand on stilts, trying to keep its balance? From Neel V. Patel’s Wired piece “How Climate Change Will Alter New York City’s Skyline,” about a time when weather may continually be an “event”:
Last week’s report estimates that average annual rainfall in New York City will increase between 5 and 13 percent by the 2080s. Sea levels could be as high as six feet by 2100, doubling the area of the city currently at risk for severe flooding. And that’s without taking into account results published this week in Nature that found coastal sea level north of New York City had jumped temporarily by more than five inches between 2009-2010—an extreme, unprecedented event scientists partially blame on climate change.
That means that New Yorkers will first have to radically reinterpret how they use their basements and ground floors. Building owners in flood zones will be responsible for raising habitable spaces up; the city’s Office of Recovery plans to keep ground floors least 2 feet above projected sea level. One way to do that: Abandon all pretense of actually living on the ground floor. Alex Wilson, president of the Resilient Design Institute, advocates for clearing out ground floors and basements in buildings that are at-risk for frequent flooding, and adapting them to let water move in and drain out with minimal damage. “It’s a big challenge if they need to renovate those spaces so they can be flooded,” says Wilson. “That means losing those apartments, moving equipment like boilers to higher floors, and most of all making sure residents have some place to go.”
Buildings will also have to adapt to rising temperatures. New York is going to get much hotter, with average temperatures increasing by as much as 8.8 degrees Fahrenheit by the the 2080s. And the number of heat waves per year will likely triple from two to six.•
Tags: Alex Wilson, Neel V. Patel