“None Of This Puts Us In The Realm Of The Gods”

May 31, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, a book of history and speculation, was my favorite read of 2015. He has a follow-up coming later this year, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, which extends the forecasting element of his last, which was probably the most debated section. The hopeful cover line, “What made us sapiens will make us gods,” is offset by dire predictions that AI and automation will lead to a class of people “useless” politically and economically. Harari thinks solutions will have to be found in policy, something that’s true if even part of his prognostications pan out, but in America we’re currently not great at bipartisan problem solving.

From Ian Sample at the Guardian:

AIs do not need more intelligence than humans to transform the job market. They need only enough to do the task well. And that is not far off, Harari says. “Children alive today will face the consequences. Most of what people learn in school or in college will probably be irrelevant by the time they are 40 or 50. If they want to continue to have a job, and to understand the world, and be relevant to what is happening, people will have to reinvent themselves again and again, and faster and faster.”

Even so, jobless humans are not useless humans. In the US alone, 93 million people do not have jobs, but they are still valued. Harari, it turns out, has a specific definition of useless. “I choose this very upsetting term, useless, to highlight the fact that we are talking about useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system, not from a moral viewpoint,” he says. Modern political and economic structures were built on humans being useful to the state: most notably as workers and soldiers, Harari argues. With those roles taken on by machines, our political and economic systems will simply stop attaching much value to humans, he argues.

None of this puts us in the realm of the gods. In fact, it leads Harari to even more bleak predictions. Though the people may no longer provide for the state, the state may still provide for them. “What might be far more difficult is to provide people with meaning, a reason to get up in the morning,” Harari says. For those who don’t cheer at the prospect of a post-work world, satisfaction will be a commodity to pay for: our moods and happiness controlled by drugs; our excitement and emotional attachments found not in the world outside, but in immersive VR.

All of which leads to the question: what should we do?•

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“These Medieval Practices Were Exported To Manhattan”

May 30, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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In our time, the wrong-minded and dangerous anti-vaccination movement has frustrated efforts to control and eradicate a variety of devastating diseases. Historically there have been numerous flies in the ointment that have similarly inhibited efforts to control contagions, from the rise and fall of religions to global exploration to government malfeasance to economic shifts. An interesting passage on the topic from Annie Sparrow’s New York Review of Book‘s piece on Sonia Shah’s Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond:

Shah describes those conditions in “Filth,” a chapter devoted to human excrement. She attributes the decline in sanitation in the Middle Ages to the rise of Christianity. Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and Jews all have built hygiene into their daily rituals, but Christianity is remarkable for its lack of prescribed sanitary practices. Jesus didn’t wash his hands before sitting down to the Last Supper, setting a bad example for centuries of followers. Christians wrongly blamed plague on water, leading to bans on bathhouses and steam-rooms. Sharing homes with livestock was normal and dung disposal a low priority. Toilets took the form of buckets or open defecation. The perfume industry, covering the stink, thrived.

During the seventeenth century, these medieval practices were exported to Manhattan, where wells for drinking water were only thirty feet deep, easily contaminated by the nightly dump of human waste. Nineteenth-century New Yorkers tried to make their water palatable by boiling it into tea and coffee, which killed cholera. But the arrival of tens of thousands of immigrants overwhelmed these weak defenses, and the city succumbed to two devastating cholera epidemics.

Corrupt economic gain, a recurrent theme in the history of cholera, is illustrated by the story of how a powerful Manhattan company—the future JPMorgan again—was established by diverting money from public waterworks to 40 Wall Street. This resulted in half a century of unsafe drinking water as the city abandoned plans to pump clean water from the Bronx and substituted well water from lower Manhattan slums. In a more recent case, the 2008 subprime mortgage collapse fostered by JPMorgan Chase and others in the banking industry left thousands of homes abandoned in South Florida. Their swimming pools of stagnant water provided ideal breeding grounds when Aedes mosquitoes arrived in 2009 carrying dengue fever. In part as a result, this tropical disease is now reestablished in Florida and Texas, transmitted by the same mosquito that carries yellow fever, West Nile, and Zika virus.•

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“You Couldn’t Have Two More Extreme Positions”

May 30, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

If and when 3D printers become excellent and cheap and ubiquitous–3D printers printing out more 3D printers-it will be fascinating to see the effect that tool has on manufacturing. Will small start-up car companies become a possibility? Will brands be besieged? Will large corporations be usurped?

It’s worth remembering the rise of the personal computer did not lead to everyone writing their own software. Individuals still deferred to experts. It just made room for new companies to elbow aside yesterday’s giants. 3D printers could operate along the same lines, but my guess is they’ll have a more destabilizing effect. Maybe not for companies that traffic primarily in information but for those that deal in physical products.

In a Singularity Hub article by Jason Dorrier, Deloitte’s John Hagel looks at a couple of possible business scenarios of tomorrow. He believes companies will have to pivot quickly when threatened and individual workers will soon have “freedom and flexibility,” which sound (unintentionally) like Gig Economy euphemisms. An excerpt:

Speaking at Singularity University’s Exponential Manufacturing conference in Boston, Hagel outlined a powerful, decades-long economic trend his group calls the “big shift.”

Hagel believes understanding the big shift is key to navigating an increasingly uncertain economy driven by digital technology, liberalization, and globalization. The question is less about whether the big shift is on and more about where it’s taking us. And according to Hagel, two competing visions vie for our economic future.

“There’s one side of the debate which argues that the impact of all this digital technology is to fragment everything,” Hagel says. “We’re all going to become free agents—independent contractors will loosely affiliate when we need to around specific projects. But basically, companies are dinosaurs. We’re going to fragment down to the individual. The gig economy to the max. That’s one side.”

Another view, Hagel says, suggests we’re moving toward a winner-take-all economy in which network effects enable a few organizations—the Googles or Facebooks of the world—to capture most of the wealth while everyone else is marginalized.

“You couldn’t have two more extreme positions,” Hagel said. “Which one is right?”•

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“We See It In Smaller Groups And Take Away Different Memories”

May 30, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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The 1970s miniseries Roots, for all its limitations and compromises, awakened many white Americans, at least for awhile and perhaps longer for some, to one of the country’s bitterest truths, to the sins of our forefathers and to our perpetuation of those historical wrongs in myriad lower-case ways. It made heroes of slaves, reveled in their cleverness, and encouraged people who committed acts of casual racism in day-to-day life to look again with fresh eyes. 

Not to say the TV show won the hearts and minds of KKK members, but for blue-collar people like my own relations, it was an epiphany. In a three-network world, the whole country seemed to be in it together–the watching of the show and the experience of coming to terms with who we really were. The program offered no solutions (nor could it) but made “Chicken George” seem like a member of every U.S. family, which, of course, he was. African-Americans I’ve discussed the show with have mixed feelings about it, but it was the impetus for the broad interest in the ancestral roots of people who had been violently torn from one ground and crudely replanted in another. History could no longer be denied by anyone who cared about the truth, though that population is never what you hope it would be.

In the spiky moment of our current political landscape, Roots has been rebooted, which is still sadly necessary. Maybe Chris Rock is right: The Tea Party mentality which disqualified our first African-American President and seeks to replace him with an orange supremacist could be just rage against the dying of the light, the death rattle of deep-seated racism in the country. But the ill feelings that drives such awfulness seems embedded in humans whether expressed in connection to color or nation or gender or what have you. There’s something inside us that dreams of being supreme, which can create nightmares for others. In that sense, there’s a Roots to be made for every age.

James Poniewozik’s wonderfully written New York Times review of Roots redux has a great passage near the end explaining why this iteration won’t have the collective wallop of the original. The excerpt:

Overall, the remake, whose producers include Mr. Burton and Mark M. Wolper (whose father, David L. Wolper, produced the original “Roots”), ably polishes the story for a new audience that might find the old production dated and slow. What it can’t do, because nothing can now, is command that audience.

As homogeneous as the old-school, three-network TV system could be, as many faces as it left out, Roots was an example of what it could do at its best. I watched it when I was 8 years old because it was all anyone was talking about, including the kids in my mostly white small-town school. A generation of viewers — whatever we looked like, wherever we came from, wherever we ended up — carried the memory of Kunta having his name beaten out of him.

Viewers will have to seek out this Roots, like every program now. Today’s universe of channels and streaming outlets presents a much wider range of identity and experience. But we see it in smaller groups and take away different memories.

That’s not the fault of Roots, of course; it’s simply our media world.•

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“Mostly, He Was Afraid Of The Radiation”

May 29, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Videos | Permalink

A lot of Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder success is due to his tele

In an age of small, endless choices and a few spectacles, the fast-paced violence of the NFL has come to dominate television in the U.S. Key to the adrenaline rush is, of course, gambling in its many forms, ubiquitous in our decentralized age. Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder, the ego-driven Vegas oddsmaker, did as much as anyone in the pre-Internet Era to legitimize gambling in America, to prep us for what was to come. The point-spread playa lived for decades on the edge before going over it, crapping out thanks to jaw-dropping bigoted comments. Come to think of it, not only has his yen for wagering reached its fullest expression in our time, but his disqualifying ethnic remarks have sadly entered into our mainstream politics.

In addition to his casino and TV work, “the Greek” did public relations for the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, who essentially buried himself alive. From a 1974 People article:

People:

What do you do for a living?

Jimmy the Greek:

Basically, I’m a PR man. I have a firm called Jimmy the Greek’s Public Relations, Inc. We have offices in Las Vegas and Miami, 19 people on the staff, and we gross about $800,000 a year, representing companies like National Biscuit Company—the candy division—and Aurora Toys. For three-and-a-half years, I handled PR for Howard Hughes.

People:

What did you do for Hughes?

Jimmy the Greek:

Different things. Hughes was opposed to atomic testing so close to Las Vegas. Every time there was a megaton-plus test, the windows of the hotel shook, and there were already cracks in some of the buildings. He didn’t want the people he brought to Vegas hurt. Mostly, he was afraid of the radiation. Mr. Maheu, his manager, would call and say, ‘Mr. Hughes is against megaton-plus testing, Jimmy.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, what else?’ And he’d say, ‘That’s it, Jimmy.’ And you were on your own from there on. I was very happy working for him. And $175,000 a year isn’t hay.•

“We are saddened that our 12-year association with him ended this way.”

“Silicon Valley’s Power Brokers Should Not Get Involved”

May 29, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Hulk Hogan, Terry Bollea

It’s been said by some economists that widening wealth inequality is unimportant if everyone is getting somewhat richer. I’ve never agreed. That much money concentrated at the very upper region of a society will come back to haunt, in the form of undue political power or in other ways. The Libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel insinuating himself in the Gawker-Hulk Hogan trial is just such a case in point.

If you’d told me five years ago that Gawker might go under because it needlessly published a Hulk Hogan sex tape, I would have thought, Yes, that sounds about right. A dicey if occasionally righteous publication from the start, the site had come to house a few too many immature, prurient, destructive employees. They chose their fights stupidly, myopically, maybe fatally.

That seemed to be the end of the story: Hulk Hogan is dumb, and Gawker even dumber, somehow making him seem sympathetic. That’s not how it had to be. If the site had leaked just the part of the video in which the former professional wrestler made his ugly racist remarks, the company would have been widely supported. But Gawker being Gawker, it pointlessly aimed for the crotch. End of story, it seemed.

But then it was revealed that Thiel had been quietly bankrolling the Hogan suit, trying to use his endless cash to put the publication out of business as part of a personal vendetta. It’s a chilling action, one that creates a template for the megarich to cow our press, a bloodless analogue to Russian plutocrats “relieving” journalists of their duties. It’s even worse behavior than Thiel being a delegate for a bigoted, xenophobic horror like Donald Trump, who has himself threatened to curb the powers of the press should he become President. If the country is guided by the thin skin of the super-rich rather than the parchment of the Constitution, we’re not exactly America.

In the Washington Post, Vivek Wadhwa writes of Thiel’s wrongheaded gambit and Silicon Valley’s general resistance to media scrutiny. The opening:

Gawker infringes on privacy and publishes tabloid-like stories that damage reputations. It is one of the most sensationalist and objectionable media outlets in the country. It also has not been kind to me. So it’s not a company that I would expect to be defending. But I worry that the battle that billionaire Peter Thiel has clandestinely been waging against it will be damaging to Silicon Valley by furthering distrust of its motives.

For better or worse, Gawker is entitled to the same freedom as any other news outlet. If it crosses the line, as it likely did with wrestler Hulk Hogan, the courts should deal with it. Silicon Valley’s power brokers should not get involved because they have access to resources that rival those of governments. They can outspend any other entity and manipulate public opinion.

Silicon Valley has more than an unfair advantage; its technologies exceed anything that the titans of the industrial age had. These technologies were built on the trust of the public — and that is needed for an industry that asks customers to share with them with literally every part of their lives.  This enormous influence should come with restraint and an understanding that those with power will be scrutinized — sometimes unfairly and unjustly.•

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This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

May 29, 2016 in Misc. | Permalink

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

  1. documentary about aubrey de grey
  2. a missed opportunity to rebuild american infrastructure
  3. early oliver sacks writing
  4. school for spacex employees kids
  5. david christian big history
  6. what was project cybersyn?
  7. oriana fallaci article about walter cronkite
  8. madalyn murray o’hair interview
  9. the final hours of howard hughes
  10. laika astrodog sputnik 2

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

May 28, 2016 in Misc. | Permalink

This week,

This week, Bernie Sanders, who trails by 3 million votes, complained the nomination was being stolen from him. He also pointed out other things that should be his.

I want that kitty cat. Give it to me.

I want that kitty cat. Give it to me.

No.

Give me that cat or I will punch it in its little face.

Give me that cat or I will punch its little face.

No.

No.

It's almost cat-punching time.

It’s almost cat-punching time.

 

  • MOOCs try to recover from their 1.0 stumbles.

A Brief Note From 1932 About Cold Prevention

May 28, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

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From the February 3, 1932 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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“A Sense Of Paranoia Is Growing Among His Campaign Staff Members”

May 27, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, Chairman Mao with a Big Mac, celebrated his GOP nomination by shoveling heart-clogging comfort food into his Sad Clown face, but winning can’t placate a truly miserable person for more than a few minutes. Despite the victory, the candidate’s inner circle is engaged in a Hunger Games-esque contest for power within the campaign while fearing conspiracy from the outside. The ugliness has taken on the paranoia of a cult, not surprising for a campaign based on Identity Politics ugly enough to make Mussolini blush.

From Ashley Parker and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times:

BISMARCK, N.D. — A constant stream of changes and scuffles are roiling Donald J. Trump’s campaign team, including the abrupt dismissal this week of his national political director.

A sense of paranoia is growing among his campaign staff members, including some who have told associates they believe that their Trump Tower offices may be bugged.

And there is confusion among his donors, who want to give money to a “super PAC” supporting Mr. Trump, but have received conflicting signals from top aides about which one to support.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump secured the Republican Party’s nomination for president, a remarkable achievement for a political newcomer. But inside his campaign, the limits of the real estate mogul’s managerial style — reliant on his gut and built around his unpredictable personality — are vividly on display, according to interviews with nearly a dozen Republicans inside and outside of the operation.

Two months after assurances that was the candidate would become “more presidential” and transition to a more unifying phase of his campaign, Mr. Trump continues to act as if the primary is still underway.•

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“Do You Think Religion Is Something That Humans Will Ever Be Able To Move On From?”

May 27, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Speaking of religion, Richard Dawkins, recovering from a stroke, just conducted an AMA at Reddit, in which he answered a few questions about science and politics but mostly talked faith. A few exchanges below.

Question:

What’s the biggest unsolved question in biology/evolution?

Richard Dawkins:

What is consciousness and why did it evolve?

Question:

What are your thoughts on the 2016 Presidential race?

Richard Dawkins:

Hillary will beat Trump. I’m sorry Bernie Sanders will not have the chance to do so.

Question:

Are you afraid of eternal non-existence?

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for.” – Vladimir Nabokov

No matter in what words you describe death, I’m sure that it will always scare me in some way. How do you cope with it?

Richard Dawkins:

I love the Nabokov quote, which I hadn’t met before. Wish I’d said it myself. One additional thought. What is frightening about the abyss is the idea of eternity, and the best way to avoid it is with a general anaesthetic. Think of death as a general anaesthetic to spare you from eternity.

Question:

Did you ever think that there is 0.0001% that god is exist?

Richard Dawkins:

WHICH god are you talking about? Baal? Mithras? Zeus? Thor? There’s a small but finite chance that gossamer winged fairies exist.

Question:

Which one do you think is the most dangerous religion or belief of them all and why?

Richard Dawkins:

Anyone who believes that what is written in a holy book is true even if the evidence is against it is dangerous. Christianity used to be the most dangerous religion. Now Islam is. Of course that doesn’t mean more than a small minority of the world’s Muslims. But it only takes a few if their beliefs are sufficiently strong, fanatical and unshakeable.

Question:

Do you think religion is something that humans will ever be able to move on from? Is there a future, given our present path, that you believe sees a majority of the world being agnostic or atheist?

Richard Dawkins:

Religion is dying from decade to decade. It will take a while but the long arc of history is pointing in the right direction.

Question:

Is there a question that has given you pause from debaters, referring to god?

Richard Dawkins:

No.•

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“So, In Brief, What Went Wrong?”

May 27, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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  • I’m an atheist, but I’m not religious about it. Not like Richard Dawkins or Bill Maher or Penn Jillette. They’re truly devout, trying to proselytize those who lack their faith. I don’t think you’ll go to hell if you believe in God.
  • Spending time arguing there’s no supreme being reminds me of when John Stossel did a 20/20 investigative report to prove that professional wrestling was fake. Um, yes, thanks for the memo.
  • While the righteous point out that religion has been used to sanctify many an atrocity, it’s just one such tool, easily replaced by nationalism or racism or many other -isms. Evangelicals embracing Donald Trump tells us their beliefs might have more to do with a skin color than a holy spirit.
  • Sure, as an American, I’d prefer to live in a country in which no one tried to overlap church and state, but, like Miniver Cheevy, I was born too late. The United States was founded (partly) on booting God from the halls of power–throw the bum out!–but over time religion proved a barnacle attached to the hull of the Mayflower. It just wouldn’t let go and now Jesus is supposedly worried about laws that guarantee Transgender people can use a toilet or gay people order a wedding cake or women acquire birth control pills. It’s enough to make me understand Dawkins’ high-decibel output, though I wish he, and everyone else, could embrace a practical brand of rationalism. 
  • Secularists are the most impressive voting bloc in America that’s never appealed to by any politician running for office. They need to organize and demand fair representation. You’ll put a Bible in my cold, dead hands.
  • Angry so-called originalists often say we’ve lost touch with the Constitution, that the Founding Fathers would not have approved of us forgetting our Christian beginnings. But it was George Washington himself who said that the “government of the United States is not in any sense founded upon the Christian religion.” Those words most accurately express our origins. We were bathed in heresy long before we were baptized. How did we get here from there?

In “American Secular,” Sam Haselby’s excellent Aeon essay, the writer wonders how and why we drove ourselves back into the Garden, a far thornier place than we recalled. He says: “Political life is where American secularism ran into a wall: the simple problem was its unpopularity.” Even George Washington himself, Haselby points out, demonstrated conflicted feelings on the topic. Slavery and the Southern plantation economy also proved foes of secularism. The opening:

In the beginning was the thing, and the thing was against God. So might begin the gospel of American secularism. The sudden flourish of secularism at the time of the United States’ foundation is incongruous, a rogue wave of rationality in a centuries-long sea of Protestant evangelising, sectarianism and God-talk. But it is undeniable. In 1788, with the adoption of its Constitution, the United States became the first modern republic founded on a legal separation of church and state. In a country that holds sacred the intentions of its revolutionary-era founders, those founders’ secular ambitions are clear. Thomas Jefferson wrote a book, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, to try to prove that Jesus was not Christ, that the man was not the son of God. Around the world, his pithy expression ‘a wall of separation between church and state’ continues to represent a particular secular ideal of separating religious and political power.

James Madison, the primary author of the US Constitution, was an even more rigorous and consistent, if less poetic, secularist. On grounds of what he called ‘pure religious freedom’, Madison opposed military and congressional chaplains, believing that they amounted to government sponsorship of religion. Every step short of this ‘pure religious freedom’, he wrote, would ‘leave crevices at least thro’ which bigotry may introduce persecution; a monster… feeding & thriving on its own venom’.

So, in brief, what went wrong? How did the country founded by visionary secularists, and that made historic advances in both religious freedom and the separation of religious and political powers, nonetheless become the world’s most religious political democracy? Understanding secularism better helps to answer the question. Secularism is not one simple thing; it has distinct theological, philosophical and political lives. Its theological and philosophical versions are formed from simple, if explosive, ideas. In its political guise, ideas are less important than institutions, and it is on the shoals of institution-building that American secularism wrecked.•

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“What Appears At First Utopian Has More Than A Hint Of The Ominous”

May 26, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Anyone who lived through the horrors of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy may have glimpsed the future.

Pre-airplane urban centers were traditionally placed on coastlines to be convenient trade-route stops for ships and boats. That was before climate change made living near the water very inconvenient. Moving forward, we’ll have to reinvent our cities to survive what we’ve wrought, especially the ones that might drown. That reality has become even more pressing over the last couple of decades as China’s radically urbanized its population, placing it in the mouth of the whale.

In a wonderfully written Guardian piece, Darran Anderson addresses the challenges ahead, including rising sea levels and other modern problems. Floating cities? Walking cities? Everything should be on the table. The opening:

Amid the much-mythologised graffiti that appeared around Sorbonne University during the French civil unrest in May 1968, one line still stands out as intriguing and ambiguous: “The future will only contain what we put into it now.”

What appears at first utopian has more than a hint of the ominous. While augmented reality creates a city individualised for every occupant, and developments in modular architecture and nanotechnology might result in rooms that change form and function at a whim, the problem lies in the unforeseen. The smart city will also be the surveillance city.

For the moment, we remain largely wedded to superficial visual futures. The likelihood is that the prevailing chrome and chlorophyll vision of architects and urbanists will become as much an enticing, but outdated, fashion as the Raygun Gothic of The Jetsons or the cyberpunk of Blade Runner. Rather than a sudden leap into dazzling space age-style cityscapes, innovations will unfold in real-time – and so too will catastrophes. The very enormity of what cities face seems beyond the realms of believability, and encourages postponement and denial.

“Survivability” should be added to urban buzzwords like connectivity and sustainability. Three quarters of all major metropolises lie on the coastline.•

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“Atlassian Doesn’t Have A Sales Team”

May 26, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Salespeople are often prone to the changes a society experiences. In the Maysles brothers’ 1968 documentary, Salesman, Paul “The Badger” and Brennan and his brethren bull their way through a day-to-day existence as door-to-door peddlers of bibles in a time when itinerant selling had reached obsolescence and religion and traditional values were losing their grip on the collective will. They were beaten down as the traveled a well-beaten path that had become a road to nowhere.

There’s a different dynamic today poised to cut deeper into the sales department, one that won’t just require people to travel across new horizons and new media but will make the human element altogether optional. The Australian company Atlassian, valued at $5 billion, sold $320 million worth of business software last year sans sales staff. That doesn’t mean every other company will instantly let the entire team go, but it threatens to thin the ranks significantly, to remove the commission from the mission.

From Dina Bass at Bloomberg:

Brandon Cipes, vice president for information systems at OceanX, has spent enough time in senior IT positions to hate sales calls. “It’s like buying a car—a process that seemingly should be so simple, but every time I have to, it’s like a five- to six-hour ordeal,” he says. “Most of our effort is trying to get the salespeople to leave us alone.” Cipes didn’t always feel that way, though. Back in 2013, he was used to the routine. His conversion began when he e-mailed business-software maker Atlassian, asking the company to send him a sales rep, and it said no.

Atlassian, which makes popular project-management and chat apps such as Jira and HipChat, doesn’t run on sales quotas and end-of-quarter discounts. In fact, its sales team doesn’t pitch products to anyone, because Atlassian doesn’t have a sales team. Initially an anomaly in the world of business software, the Australian company has become a beacon for other businesses counting on word of mouth to build market share. “Customers don’t want to call a salesperson if they don’t have to,” says Scott Farquhar, Atlassian’s co-chief executive officer. “They’d much rather be able to find the answers on the website.”

The way technology companies sell software has changed dramatically in the past decade. The availability of open source alternatives has pushed traditional brands and rising challengers to offer more free trials, free basic versions of their software with paid upgrades, and online promotions. 

Incumbents such as IBM, Oracle, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which employ thousands of commissioned salespeople, are acquiring open source or cloud companies that sell differently, says Laurie Wurster, an analyst at researcher Gartner. Slack, Dropbox, and GitHub are among the companies trying to attract corporate clients with small-bore efforts that rely largely on good reviews. The idea is to distribute products to individuals or small groups at potential customers big and small and hope interest spreads upstairs.•

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“The Deal Has Abandoned Them”

May 26, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Capitalism is a pretty sticky thing. People like owning, buying and selling, or at least have convinced themselves they do. Key to such a system is, of course, having plentiful jobs paying a living wage, which has been less and less true in America over the last four decades. Every now and then there’s a green shoot, but the arrow overall has pointed down. Thanks to political dysfunction on an epic scale, even a relatively short-term bandage like infrastructure investment has been kept in the medicine cabinet.

It’s not easy to see a long-term solution to AI and robotics disappearing millions and millions of positions. Automation may be our friend in the aggregate, but that doesn’t help those left behind to pay the mortgage. Maybe new industries reliant on humans will emerge, work we can’t yet imagine, but it would seem we’re in for a huge transition this century. How much of a role will capitalism play in this new normal? That’s TBD. I don’t think it’s disappearing, but it is poised for a reinvention.

Not everyone agrees, however. In the same vein as Paul Mason’s writing, Paul Rosenberg has penned the Free-Man’s Perspective post “The System Won’t Survive the Robots.” The writer sees no possible transition within the current system from the way things have been to the way they will be. He believes it will be a break, though not likely a clean one. An excerpt:

We All Know the Deal

We usually don’t discuss what the “working man’s deal” is, but we know it just the same. It goes like this:

If you obey authority and support the system, you’ll be able to get a decent job. And if you work hard at your job, you’ll be able to buy a house and raise a small family.

This is what we were taught in school and on TV. It’s the deal our parents and grandparents clung to, and it’s even a fairly open deal. You can fight for the political faction of your choice and you can hold any number of religious and secular alliances, just as long as you stay loyal to the system overall.

This deal has been glamorized in many ways, such as, “Our children will be better off than we are,” “home ownership for everyone,” and of course, “the American Dream.” Except that it isn’t working anymore, or at least it isn’t working well enough.

Among current 20- and 30-year-olds, only about half are able to grasp the deal’s promises. That half is working like crazy, putting up with malignant corporatism and trying to keep ahead of the curve. The other half is dejected and discouraged, taking student loans to chase degrees (there’s more status in that than working at McDonald’s), or else they’re pacified with government handouts and distracted by Facebook.

The deal is plainly unavailable to about half of the young generation, but as I noted above, hope dies slowly and young people raised on promises are still waiting for the deal to kick in. It’s all they know.

Regardless, the deal has abandoned them. It has made them superfluous.•

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Old Print Article: Willy Ley Encourages America To Use Mail Rockets, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1935)

May 25, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Wernher von Braun, center, with Willy Ley, right, in 1954.

Ley with daughter Xenia at the Hayden Planetarium, 1957.

Ley with daughter Xenia at the Hayden Planetarium, 1957.

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The top photograph offers an odd juxtaposition: That’s Wernher von Braun, a rocketeer who was a hands-on part of Hitler’s mad plan, whose horrid past was whitewashed by the U.S. government (here and here) because he could help America get a man on the moon; and Willy Ley, a German science writer and space-travel visionary who fled the Third Reich in 1935.

A cosmopolitan in an age before globalization, Ley only wanted to share science around the world and encourage humans into space and onto the moon. He knew early on Nazism was madness leading to mass graves, not space stations. When Ley arrived in America for a supposed seven-month visit by using falsified documents to escape Germany, he worked a bit on an odd rocket-related program: Ley led an effort to use missiles to deliver mail. It was a long way to go to get postcards from point A to point B, and an early attempt failed much to the chagrin of Ley, who donned a spiffy asbestos suit for the blast-off. An article on the plan’s genesis ran in the February 21, 1935 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

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“Bits Drive The New Economy”

May 25, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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According to the Economist, the narrative of Donald Trump as avenging agent of white working-class Americans left behind by globalization and technology is a seriously overstated myth. The great majority of his supporters, the magazine reports, are doing quite well. My best guess is the well-to-do ones are likely drawn to the hideous hotelier by Identity Politics or racial bias. 

In a Newsweek piece, “Trump Revolution Rooted in Resentment of Technology,” Kevin Maney relies on other reports that conversely name a lack of college degree the surest indicator of a Trump follower. The columnist argues that our economy is currently one of Atoms vs. Bits, which means a battle between a declining industrial sector and an ascendant information one. The Atoms, Maney writes, are the truckers, factory workers and other laborers raging against the dying of the light.His theory is an oversimplification as any broadly drawn one is, but it’s hard to deny the societal transformation we’re now experiencing. 

Which idea about Team Trump is more correct? Both are probably true enough to be troubling in their own ways, as the rise of the current hate-filled nationalism knows many parents.

Maney’s opening:

We’ve got two Americas now: Atoms America and Bits America.

People used to worry about a digital divide. Well, that’s now looking more like the border between North Korea and South Korea—tense and bristling with pointed missiles, one nervous misunderstanding away from mayhem. This new dynamic is evident in everything from the transgender bathroom laws in the South to proposals from Silicon Valley to institute basic income for all the people technology is going to throw out of work.

And while we’re at it, let’s include the 2016 presidential election, which is really all about Atoms vs. Bits.

Twenty years ago, Nicholas Negroponte, then head of the MIT Media Lab, wrote about the changing relationship between atoms and bits in his book Being Digital. Atoms make up physical stuff. Bits are digital. As Negroponte presciently pointed out, atoms represent the old economy of manufacturing and trucks and retail stores and, as it turns out, a lot of middle-class work. Bits drive the new economy—which today includes mobile apps, social networks, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, 3-D printing and other technologies that are eating the old economy.

Atoms America is getting poorer and angrier. Bits America pretty much rules the global economy and churns out billionaires.

Atoms America wants to “make America great again” because reclaiming the past seems a hell of a lot better than whatever the future holds. Bits America patronizingly believes that the Atoms people would be fine, at least in the short run, if they would only take some Khan Academy courses and learn to code.•

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“Apple Is Expected To Gain Access To Highly Valuable Data”

May 25, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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China and Apple have risen to new heights simultaneously, and that’s not completely a coincidence. Steve Jobs’ products were manufactured in Foxconn factories and sold for prices that would have been impossible had they been made in a more developed country like, say, America. While the Chinese couldn’t afford the products initially and settled for knockoffs, during the Tim Cook era they’ve embraced the genuine iPhone with both hands. 

Apple’s recent announcement that it would invest $1 billion in a Chinese ride-hailing company may have seemed odd on the surface, but down below it was an investment in driverless, Chinese markets and, ultimately, markets all over the world. Whether the wager pays off is years from being known, but it is an informed gamble.

From Brian Fung at the Washington Post:

Apple’s backing of the ride-hailing company makes sense for a host of reasons. The blossoming partnership could insulate the U.S. tech giant from a global slowdown in iPhone sales. It may lead to even greater visibility for Apple in China, something it has spent years pursuing even as the country has frustrated other foreign tech companies. And the deal could help Apple understand how to build better online services, an area where the company has had mixed success but is increasingly exploring with ventures such as Apple Pay and Apple Music. (Besides, the vast majority of Apple’s $233 billion in cash and securities is parked overseas. Investing that money in the United States would come with a hefty tax bill.)

Through the deal, Apple is expected to gain access to highly valuable data on the 11 million trips a day made through Didi. That information will be immensely useful, not only for Apple’s traditional business selling phones and computers in China, but also for its attempts to design a vehicle that could someday appeal to drivers around the world, analysts say.

“This valuable data is critical to all manufacturers interested in developing a fully autonomous future,” said Tony Lim, an analyst at Kelley Blue Book. “The learnings from China can be applied here in the U.S. and other industrialized nations.”•

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“You Scan Their Brains And You Get Robots That To All Intents And Purposes Are Indivisible From The Humans”

May 24, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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My near-term concerns about Labor have nothing to do with jobs being handed over to robots powered by brain scans of the greatest geniuses among our species. It may seem thin gruel by comparison, but Weak AI (driverless cars, delivery drones, robot bellhops, etc.) can do plenty to destabilize society. Not only are jobs traditionally filled by humans to disappear but entire industries will rise and fall with dizzying speed. In the aggregate, this transition could be a good thing, with the resulting challenge being we need to find an answer not for scarcity but distribution. 

The futuristic scenario I presented at the opening comes from the pages of The Age of Ems: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth, a speculative book by Robin Hanson, who often seems to be mid-chug on a sci-fi bender at Chalmun’s Cantina. The author feels AI is evolving too slowly in its march toward intelligent machines but his scanning scheme is close to reality. Whatever scenario is realized to bring about superintelligence, however, Hanson believes the sea change is coming very soon and everyone will be caught in its waves. In the very long run, anything is possible, but I’m not too anxious over his theory, though I plan on reading the title.

Pivoting off Hanson’s new volume, Zoe Williams has written a thoughtful Guardian piece about fashioning a stable and fair society if work is offloaded to Ems, AIs or WTFs. An excerpt:

Robin Hanson thinks the robot takeover, when it comes, will be in the form of emulations. In his new book, The Age of Em, the economist explains: you take the best and brightest 200 human beings on the planet, you scan their brains and you get robots that to all intents and purposes are indivisible from the humans on which they are based, except a thousand times faster and better.

For some reason, conversationally, Hanson repeatedly calls these 200 human prototypes “the billionaires”, even though having a billion in any currency would be strong evidence against your being the brightest, since you have no sense of how much is enough. But that’s just a natural difference of opinion between an economist and a mediocre person who is now afraid of the future.

These Ems, being superior at everything and having no material needs that couldn’t be satisfied virtually, will undercut humans in the labour market, and render us totally unnecessary. We will all effectively be retired. Whether or not we are put out to a pleasant pasture or brutally exterminated will depend upon how we behave towards the Ems at their incipience.

When Hanson presents his forecast in public, one question always comes up: what’s to stop the Ems killing us off? “Well, why don’t we exterminate retirees at the moment?” he asks, rhetorically, before answering: some combination of gratitude, empathy and affection between individuals, which the Ems, being modelled on us precisely, will share (unless we use real billionaires for the model).•

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“Much Of This Has To Do With One Man”

May 24, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

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One person can make a big difference, which can be a good or bad thing.

St. Louis has become an unlikely world capital of chess thanks to the constant urging and philanthropy of Rex Sinquefield, who was raised in an orphanage after his father’s death and grew fabulously wealthy via index funds. His largesse extends beyond the cerebral game of kings and pawns, however, as the megarich Missouri man has also poured millions into promoting a staunch right-wing economic agenda. To some he’s a hero and to others a mixed blessing.

From David Edmonds at BBC News:

Much of this has to do with one man. Rex Sinquefield, a grey-haired man in his early 70s, is sitting in the audience watching the US Chess Championship. He’s in his shorts, wearing a baseball cap, and fuelling his concentration with glass after glass of Diet Coke. Sinquefield is a rich man, and he likes chess. He likes it so much he’s put tens of millions of dollars into the game. No, he’s not partially responsible for the renaissance in American chess, former US champion Yasser Seirawan corrects me – he’s entirely responsible.

The scale of Sinquefield’s wealth is unknown. He claims, a bit implausibly, that he himself has no idea. Unlike other super-rich, he’s not one to brag about his bank account, though it’s widely assumed he’s a billionaire. The money comes from a career in finance – he created some of the first index funds, funds that are cheap to run because they simply track the performance of a stock-market index.

In Missouri, Rex is a deeply contentious figure, a looming giant of local politics -Tyrannosaurus Rex, he’s been called. He pushes a radical free-market agenda and wants to abolish the state income tax. He’s funded right-wing think tanks and backed selected candidates to the tune of $40m (£28m) – no-one in the state has ever given more. Missouri is the only state in the United States which has no limits to campaign donations, a freedom Sinquefield has exploited to the full. Laura Swinford of Progress Missouri, an advocacy organisation, believes his power in politics is pernicious: “I think we would all throw ticker-tape parades down the centre of the city if he would only focus on chess and his charitable donations,” she says.

But Sinquefield says his political donations are small change compared to the sums he has spent on chess and other charities.•

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“There Are Advantages To Having A Billionaire As An Owner”

May 24, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Like Charles Bukowski’s ill-fated little children, newspapers have been dying in the trees in this new millennium. Perhaps you’ll be lucky and an apparently journalism-friendly plutocrat minted in Gilded Age 2.0 will plunk down some change for your favorite newspaper, as Jeff Bezos did with the Washington Post, or maybe Sam Zell acquires Tribune Media and all manner of mishegoss ensues. Those are the uneven outcomes of the Digital Era, in which you need to pray for the right billionaire to come to your rescue.

When Sheldon Adelson recently ponied up the cash for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, anonymously at first, the second scenario seemed most likely to materialize. It still does. The right-wing casino owner and subject of a criminal probe was purchasing power, hoping to silence reporting that ran counter to his financial interests and political agenda. Accusations and resignations in the newsroom have become commonplace, though Adelson has attempted to quell dissent by pumping cash into the beleaguered property, which it desperately needs. The news business has always been a Faustian bargain, even during the flush years, but the end-of-days reality for broadsheets and tabloids has often brought with it a whole different degree of compromise.

From Sydney Ember’s excellent New York Times piece about the growing credibility gap inside the embattled publication:

With newspapers struggling to survive, it is not uncommon for wealthy businesspeople to step in and buy them — Jeff Bezos with The Washington Post, for instance, and John Henry with The Boston Globe. Each case presents potential conflicts in covering the owner’s businesses, as well as concerns that the owner might attempt to influence coverage.

The problem is particularly acute for The Review-Journal. Mr. Adelson, the chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, is a casino magnate, a powerful Republican donor, a patron of education and a fierce defender of Israel, and his myriad interests present an almost singular example of how aggressive journalism can collide with the pursuits of a paper’s owner.

That new dynamic has roiled the ranks of the newsroom, creating a divide between top editors who see it as part of their job to review coverage of Mr. Adelson, and staff members who chafe at what they perceive as inappropriate interference. In the nearly six months since Mr. Adelson purchased the paper, at least a dozen journalists have quit, been fired or made plans to leave soon; many cite a strained work environment and untenable oversight, in particular regarding the coverage of a bitter legal dispute related to Sands’s operations in Macau.

There are advantages to having a billionaire as an owner, staff members agree. The newspaper has hired reporters and a graphic artist, and is upgrading its videography and photography equipment. Some employees, including Ms. Robison, have been given pay raises. A broken sewer pipe under the building has been fixed. Recently, the paper bought drones to use for news coverage.•

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A Brief Note From 1850 About An Entrepreneur

May 23, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

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From the August 20, 1850 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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“Is This The Future Of Education?”

May 23, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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MOOCs feel mostly like misses for the moment but so did the phonograph and automobile originally. Outsize ambitions still abound, with Sebastian Thrun of Udacity having recently said, “If I could double the world’s GDP, it would be very gratifying to me.” Yes, that would be nice. In John Thornhill’s smart Financial Times piece about online education, the former Google driverless guru has a more sober quote: “It is not clear that the existing universities are the right places to create education.”

Higher education’s endless layers of administration, insane sticker prices and pauper professors have left an opening for MOOCs, but this nouveau learning industry will likely be only as successful as its products are good. Thornhill opens his piece about EdTEch with a story about French education innovator Xavier Niel:

With no teachers, timetables, or exams, Ecole 42 is a strange kind of educational institution, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Students shuffle into this tech-enabled school whenever they want and work as hard as they need.

Is this the future of education?

Xavier Niel, the French internet and telecoms billionaire who founded the coding school for young adults in Paris in 2013, certainly thinks so. He chose the school’s number for a reason. As fans of Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy know, 42 is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.

So sure is Mr. Niel that he has found the answer that he has committed himself to funding Ecole 42 for the next decade and is spending a further $100m on a new school in San Francisco. There are several ironies in a French entrepreneur teaching Silicon Valley geeks how to code.

Mr. Niel argues that smartly designed online courses are more effective than traditional classroom teaching methods. Students learn best by pursuing online projects by themselves and by interacting with each other. Peer-to-peer lending may be going through a rough patch, but peer-to-peer learning may be on the rise. “We are preparing people to learn together,” he says.•

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“There Are No Must-Read Publications Any More”

May 23, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Isabell Hülsen of Spiegel conducted an excellent Q&A with Henry Blodget, that mixed blessing, about digital and traditional media landscapes. The subject reinvented himself with Business Insider, returning to his journalistic roots after being charged with securities fraud and banned for life from the sector.

Blodget is relatively sanguine about the future of online journalism, though he acknowledges those seeking success will have to skillfully balance serious reportage and cat memes. There’s no discussion about the many publications basing a good chunk of their futures on video, which seems likely another bubble that could pop once advertisers take a closer look.

In one exchange, Blodget says this: “In the new world of digital, there are no must-read publications any more.” That reminds me of something Jake Silverstein, the excellent editor of the New York Times Magazine, said not that long ago. He asserted his ambition was to make his publication indispensable, one you had to read if you wanted to sound informed at a party. That simply doesn’t exist anymore–the party’s over. That reality has probably made our world better in the big picture, though something has been lost with what’s been gained.

An excerpt:

Spiegel:

The power of digital publishing lies in the ability to know what readers like, which stories they actually read and which ones they don’t — and to give them more of what they like. This creates the danger of a filter bubble.

Henry Blodget:

What do you mean by filter bubble?

Spiegel:

Reading becomes a sort of self-optimization and self-reference, the only things that get through to me from the flood of information are those which I want to consume and which I like. My Facebook and Twitter feeds filter what fits into my conception of the world.

Henry Blodget:

I don’t think that is actually what is happening. In fact, we have more information than ever before, and it is harder than ever to avoid actually seeing what the other side is saying. Yes, we focus on publications that we feel speak to us, but that is exactly the same way it was 20 or 100 years ago. In the US, two million people have subscribed to the New York Times and many more millions think theNew York Times is a terrible, liberal paper they would never read. We can, of course, choose to put ourselves in a bubble of only people who agree with us, but in the digital world there are many more ways of saying “Hey, here is something you might want to consider.”

Spiegel:

How compatible is the idea of offering readers more and more of what they like with the role of journalists in a democratic society: to publish information that is relevant to our social coexistence but not necessarily read by millions of people; to investigate and uncover scandals and cases of wrongdoing?

Henry Blodget: 

Before the internet, big publications were like hydrants in the desert. There were relatively few of them, we needed each one of them tremendously and they had control over what was delivered. Now they are like little streams flowing into a massive ocean. An example: Before the internet, a journalist would write an article about a company that the company felt was unfair and missed a point. All they could do was write a letter to the editor and wait, and maybe a week later it would be printed, or not. Now, they can go to medium.com and immediately publish a long rebuttal, saying the journalist forgot this and did not consider that, the analyst is wrong here. Everybody pulls that immediately into the debate. So it is a much more democratic field for ideas.•

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“They Want To Be The First City In The World To Embrace Autonomous Driving”

May 23, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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China’s authoritarianism is an existential risk politically, though it does have some short-term benefits. Case in point: A top-down plan being overseen by Baidu is insinuating autonomous technology in Wuhu, aiming over a five-year stretch to turn it into the world’s first driverless city. More accurately, at the end of that term, robocars and human-driven ones are to share the road, the way horse-drawn and machine cars did for a spell more than a century ago. If it can work in Wahu, it will be possible anywhere.

From BBC Technology:

Chinese hi-tech firm Baidu has unveiled a plan to let driverless vehicles range freely around an entire city.

The five-year plan will see the autonomous cars, vans and buses slowly introduced to the eastern city of Wuhu.

Initially no passengers will be carried by the vehicles as the technology to control them is refined via journeys along designated test zones.

Eventually the test areas will be expanded and passengers will be able to use the vehicles.

“They want to be the first city in the world to embrace autonomous driving,” said Wang Jing, Baidu’s head of driverless cars, in an interview with the BBC’s Click programme.

“This is the first city that is brave enough, daring enough and innovative enough to test autonomous driving,” he said.•

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