“Trade May Be His Single Biggest Concern – Not White Supremacy”

March 9, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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While I agree with Thomas Frank that few things are more out of touch than New York Times editorials–remember Maureen Dowd’s awful, cackling Donald Trump interview?–I can’t support his contention in the Guardian that the average Trump supporter isn’t chiefly and deeply racist. The first thing you hear from his voters isn’t that the fascist condo salesman is strong on trade but rather that “he isn’t politically correct.” Or that “he speaks the truth.” Those lines seem a dog whistle for bigotry considering the statements he’s made. His nativist blame game is the exploitation of not only economic fears but also of racial ones. Mostly the latter, I believe. Maybe the trouble with Kansas is, at long last, Kansans.

From Frank:

Stories marveling at the stupidity of Trump voters are published nearly every day. Articles that accuse Trump’s followers of being bigots have appeared by the hundreds, if not the thousands. Conservatives have written them; liberals have written them; impartial professionals have written them. The headline of a recent Huffington Post column announced, bluntly, that “Trump Won Super Tuesday Because America is Racist.” A New York Times reporter proved that Trump’s followers were bigots by coordinating a map of Trump support with a map of racist Google searches. Everyone knows it: Trump’s followers’ passions are nothing more than the ignorant blurtings of the white American id, driven to madness by the presence of a black man in the White House. The Trump movement is a one-note phenomenon, a vast surge of race-hate. Its partisans are not only incomprehensible, they are not really worth comprehending.

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Or so we’re told. Last week, I decided to watch several hours of Trump speeches for myself. I saw the man ramble and boast and threaten and even seem to gloat when protesters were ejected from the arenas in which he spoke. I was disgusted by these things, as I have been disgusted by Trump for 20 years. But I also noticed something surprising. In each of the speeches I watched, Trump spent a good part of his time talking about an entirely legitimate issue, one that could even be called leftwing.

Yes, Donald Trump talked about trade. In fact, to judge by how much time he spent talking about it, trade may be his single biggest concern – not white supremacy. Not even his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, the issue that first won him political fame. He did it again during the debate on 3 March: asked about his political excommunication by Mitt Romney, he chose to pivot and talk about … trade.•

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“Companies [Could] Go For The Carlos Slim Option”

March 9, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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The 2008 financial collapse was a tipping point for most workers in countries transitioning from Industrial to Information economies. Jobs have returned to a good extent, but the wages and conditions have, at best, flatlined. As we move deeper into an age of automation and one in which gigantic companies need software but few FT workers (e.g., Uber), living has become difficult for many and retirement off the table. 

In a Financial Time article, Michael Skapinker considers five possible future scenarios in a world where the whistle never blows, the workday never truly ends. An excerpt: 

Companies go for the Carlos Slim option. In 2014, the Mexican telecoms magnate, said that, instead of retiring, older workers should cut back to three days a week.

Everyone gains. The company holds on to older workers’ skills while cutting the cost of employing them. The workers have more leisure.

This scenario appears to have more to recommend it than any other, although it does depend on older workers being able to afford the reduction in working hours.

Older people working shorter weeks could step back from senior positions. They could also do different jobs for the company.

The Financial Times reported this week on a former manager at Nissan in Sunderland, in the north-east of England who, at 67, conducts tours of the plant. He does not work for Nissan. He has retired and works for an outside agency that runs the tours.•

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“Nanobots Will Be Available To Everyone”

March 9, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Critical though I sometimes am of the aggressive timelines of Ray Kurzweil’s predictions, I acknowledge finding him endlessly interesting. The Singularitarian-in-Chief sat down with Neil deGrasse Tyson in Manhattan for a public conversation about all things future. Kurzweil thinks tomorrow’s nanotechnologies will be broadly accessible to all classes as smartphones are today, which is probably true, but his argument that this availability will limit wealth inequality doesn’t seem to follow. Smartphones, after all, have not been equalizers.

From Jose Pagliery and Hope King at CNN Money:

CNNMoney asked Kurzweil: What happens to inequality in this future? Will brain superpowers and health be limited to the rich?

“Yeah, like cell phones,” Kurzweil responded. “Only the rich have access to these technologies — at a point in time when they don’t work.”

Industry perfects products for mass consumption, Kurzweil noted. And the tech will inevitably get cheaper. As computer makers keep doubling the number of chips on a circuit board, the “price performance of information technology” doubles every year, he said.

“Nanobots will be available to everyone,” Kurzweil said. “These technologies are ultimately democratized because they keep getting less and less expensive.”

And even if Kurzweil thinks AI will probably replace many of today’s workers, he’s optimistic about future jobs for humans. But when Tyson pressed him to name specific jobs, Kurzweil was stumped. After all, no one in 1910 could predict today’s computer chip designers and website developers.•

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A Brief Note From 1913 About Lycanthropy

March 9, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

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From the February 3, 1913 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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“This Was Going To Be A Technological, Computerized Nightmare!”

March 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

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In 1973, the former child preacher Marjoe Gortner was hired by OUI, a middling vagina periodical of the Magazine Age, to write a deservedly mocking article about the American visit of another youthful religious performer, the 16-year-old Maharaj Ji, an adolescent Indian guru who promised to levitate the Houston Astrodome, a plot that never got off the ground. More than any other holy-ish person of the time, the Indian teenager would have fit in quite nicely in Silicon Valley of our time. He was a technocrat who believed he could disrupt and improve the world. Sound familiar? Two excerpts from the resulting report, which profiled the futurist cult leader.

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The guru’s people do the same thing the Pentecostal Church does. They say you can believe in guru Maharaj Ji and that’s fantastic and good, but if you receive light and get it all within, if you become a real devotee-that is the ultimate. In the Pentecostal Church you can be saved from your sins and have Jesus Christ as your Saviour, but the ultimate is the baptism of the Holy Ghost. This is where you get four or five people around and they begin to talk and more or less chant in tongues until sooner or later the person wanting the baptismal experience so much-well, it’s like joining a country club: once you’re in, you’ll be like everyone – else in the club.

The people who’ve been chanting say, “Speak it out, speak it out,” and everything becomes so frenzied that the baptismalee will finally speak a few words in tongues himself, and the people around him say, “Oh, you’ve got it.” And the joy that comes over everybody’s faces! It’s incredible. It’s beautiful. They feel they have got the Holy Spirit like all their friends, and once they’ve got it, it’s forever. It’s quite an experience.

So essentially they’re the same thing pressing on your eyes while your ears are corked, and standing around the altar speaking in tongues. They’re both illuminating experiences. The guru’s path is interesting, though. Once you’ve seen the light and decided you want to join his movement, you give over everything you have–all material possessions. Sometimes you even give your job. Now, depending on what your job is, you may be told to leave it or to stay. If you stay, generally you turn your pay checks over to the Divine Light Mission, and they see that you are housed and clothed and fed. They have their U. S. headquarters in Denver. You don’t have to worry about anything. That’s their hook. They take care of it all. They have houses all over the country for which they supposedly paid cash on the line. First class. Some of them are quite plush. At least Maharaj Ji’s quarters are. Some of the followers live in those houses, too, but in the dormitory-type atmosphere with straw mats for beds. It’s a large operation. It seems to be a lot like the organization Father Divine had back in the Thirties. He did it with the black people at the Peace Mission in Philadelphia. He took care of his people-mostly domestics and other low-wage earners–and put them up in his own hotel with three meals a day.

The guru is much more technologically oriented, though. He spreads a lot of word and keeps tabs on who needs what through a very sophisticated Telex system that reaches out to all the communes or ashrams around the country. He can keep count of who needs how many T-shirts, pairs of socks–stuff like that. And his own people run this system; it’s free labor for the corporation.

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The morning of the third day I was feeling blessed and refreshed, and I was looking forward to the guru’s plans for the Divine City, which was soon going to be built somewhere in the U. S. I wanted to hear what that was all about.

It was unbelievable. The city was to consist of ‘modular units adaptable to any desired shape.’ The structures would have waste-recycling devices so that water could be drunk over and over. They even planned to have toothbrushes with handles you could squeeze to have the proper amount of paste pop up (the crowd was agog at this). There would be a computer in each communal house so that with just a touch of the hand you could check to see if a book you wanted was available, and if it was, it would be hand-messengered to you. A complete modern city of robots. I was thinking: whatever happened to mountains and waterfalls and streams and fresh air? This was going to be a technological, computerized nightmare! It repulsed me. Computer cards to buy essentials at a central storeroom! And no cheating, of course. If you flashed your card for an item you already had, the computer would reject it. The perfect turn-off. The spokesman for this city announced that the blueprints had already been drawn up and actual construction would be the next step. Controlled rain, light, and space. Bubble power! It was all beginning to be very frightening.•

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“The Houston Astrodome will physically separate itself from the planet which we call Earth and will fly.”

“I Totally Understand Why A 20-Year Old Would Choose To Do Astrophysics Rather Than Literature”

March 8, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Faulting literature for not being astrophysics is like disparaging Louis Armstrong for not being a great hockey player. It’s really missing the point.

The humanities do what they do, and science does what it does. They’re both valid and useful. It’s not that the Digital Humanities has nothing to teach, but trying to understand the novel mainly through quantification will yield minimal returns. Literature isn’t a science and the academics who’ve tried to turn it into one have birthed a Frankenstein, but not an interesting one like Frankenstein.

The Stanford scholar Franco Moretti may not care for the DH term (“digital humanities means nothing”) but as much as anyone he’s the face of it. An exchange from Melissa Dinsman’s LARB interview with him:

Question:

People often speak of digital work (and more frequently the digital humanities) as a means of making the humanities relevant for the 21st-century university. Do you think this statement is a fair assessment of digital work and its purpose? Do you think it is fair to the humanities to say that DH will come in on a white horse and save the humanities from itself?

Franco Moretti:

Neither one. The humanities will need to save themselves, and not only for the crass reason that going to university can cost an insane amount of money, so students choose to go into business, medicine, economics, etc., to remake the money as soon as possible. It’s not just that, although that cannot be simply dismissed. In the 20th century the natural sciences have produced some amazingly stunning and beautiful theories in physics, and genetics, and in biology. The humanities have produced nothing of this sort. Literature, art, in a sense even political history (mostly in a horrendous way), have produced enormously interesting objects, but the study of these objects, that is to say the disciplines of the humanities — the study of literature, the study of history — have lagged behind. The humanities have lagged behind in conceptual imagination and in boldness. I totally understand why a 20-year old would choose to do astrophysics rather than literature. It’s so much more interesting in many ways, just for the pleasure of the intelligence. That is what the humanities have to work on.•

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“Even George Jetson Takes His Briefcase To Work Every Day”

March 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Serious discussion about Guaranteed Basic Income in America stretches back at least as far as Richard Nixon, whose administration’s advocacy for it and universal health insurance would today make the 37th President a sort of Sanders-esque figure.

When people initially learn Silicon Valley technologists are fully in favor of GBI, they’re often surprised and grateful, but this largesse comes with a caveat. To a good degree, it’s driven by a Libertarian streak that aims to vanish social safety nets (the welfare state, as it’s often referred to) and the bureaucracy that attends it. That would include all forms of government healthcare. That’s a problem since, as we’ve seen, health insurance left to the free market is an unmanageable expense for many, and that would be true even with an income floor.

In a NYT conversation about basic income between columnists Farhad Manjoo and Eduardo Porter, the latter questions whether we’re headed for an Utopian work-free world or one with plenty of poorly paid drudgery in which the BGI math doesn’t add up. An excerpt:

I read your very interesting column about the universal basic income, the quasi-magical tool to ensure some basic standard of living for everybody when there are no more jobs for people to do. What strikes me about this notion is that it relies on a view of the future that seems to have jelled into a certainty, at least among the technorati on the West Coast.

But the economic numbers that we see today don’t support this view. If robots were eating our lunch, it would show up as fast productivity growth. But as Robert Gordon points out in his new book, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” productivity has slowed sharply. He argues pretty convincingly that future productivity growth will remain fairly modest, much slower than during the burst of American prosperity in mid-20th century.

A problem I have with the idea of a universal basic income — as opposed to, say, wage subsidies or wage insurance to top up the earnings of people who lose their job and must settle for a new job at a lower wage — is that it relies on an unlikely future. It’s not a future with a lot of crummy work for low pay, but essentially a future with little or no paid work at all.

The former seems to me a not unreasonable forecast — we’ve been losing good jobs for decades, while low-wage employment in the service sector has grown. But no paid work? That’s more a dream (or a nightmare) than a forecast. Even George Jetson takes his briefcase to work every day.•

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“It Is An Uprising Borne By The White Lower And Middle Classes”

March 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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I asked this question last September: If Donald Trump grew a small, square mustache above his lip, would his poll numbers increase yet again?

We know the sad answer now. A candidacy that began with a bigoted proclamation accusing Mexicans of being rapists has grown into a full-fledged racist, nativist campaign that ejects African-Americans at stump speeches and vows to ban all 1.6 billion Muslims in the world from entering our immigrant country. It’s the ugliest, saddest face America has to show, and a surprising one since even those who doubted the election of President Obama signaled a post-racial nation never could have guessed that this many white citizens missed using ethnic slurs without consequence. Trump followers explain their adoration for the bully by exclaiming, “He says what I wish I could say,” and considering the words he’s chosen, it’s clear where their minds are at. Since his politics are often at odds with true conservatism, it’s revealed the GOP has long been about prejudice, not policy. “Make America Great Again” can easily be read as “Make America White Again.”

If Trump’s ascension marks the end of the modern Republican Party, it’s a death in the gutter. If he were to actually become President, America itself will have fallen from the curb.

From Holger Stark at Spiegel:

Trump’s unexpected success is part of a political revolt that has taken hold in America in recent months, and is shifting all known parameters. It is an uprising borne by the white lower and middle classes, and it is directed against the liberal establishment, President Barack Obama and the political correctness of the post-modern age — but also against a Republican Party, which the party rebels believe is part of the ailing system. Deeply religious Christians, the so-called Evangelicals, whose ancestors came from Europe and who helped create the United States, are the core of this uprising.

At the beginning of this election campaign, there were several things that were considered inalienable truths in political America. One of those was the recognition that the United States is a land of immigration, that its population is becoming more colorful, multicultural and multiethnic.

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The lesson seemed clear: Those who hope to win elections must absolutely win the support of these groups of voters. The structure of the American population has changed radically. Blacks make up 12.9 percent of the population today and Hispanics more than 17 percent, with their share steadily increasing. Whites are predicted to become a minority by 2050. This democratic shift contributed significantly to President Barack Obama’s election victory in 2012. His challenger, Mitt Romney, managed to win just a quarter of Latino votes. A mere 6 percent of African-Americans voted for him.

Trump has studied these numbers carefully and drawn his conclusions, albeit against all the conventional rules of Washington political advisers. His campaign targets white, overwhelmingly Christian voters, who have felt marginalized and threatened for some time. Trump calls them “the silent majority.”

Some 70 percent of Americans are still Christians, and one in four US citizens, or about 80 million, are Evangelical Christians. However, only 27 million Evangelicals voted in the last presidential election, while the rest stayed home.

“Trump and Cruz both aim to energize this white, Christian core group, which is why they are not seeking compromise on issues, but have adopted harsh rhetoric instead,” says David Brody, chief Washington correspondent for the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). “If one of them manages to convince only five to 10 million Evangelical non-voters to go to the polls, he’ll be able to take over the Republican Party and defeat the Democrats.”•

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“Has There Been A Problem Or Challenge That’s Made You, As A Billionaire, Feel Completely Powerless?”

March 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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In America, ridiculously rich people are considered oracles, whether they deserve to be or not.

Bill Gates probably earns that status more than most. He was a raging a-hole when engaged full time as a businessperson at Microsoft, but he’s done as much good for humanity as anyone likely can in his 2.0 avuncular philanthropist rebooting. Gates just did one of his wide-ranging Reddit AMAs. A few exchanges follow. 

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Question:

What do you see human society accomplishing in the next 20 years? What are you most excited for?

Bill Gates:

I will mention three things.

First is an energy innovation to lower the cost and get rid of green house gases. This isn’t guaranteed so we need a lot of public and private risk taking.

EDIT: I talked about this recently in my annual letter.

Second is progress on disease particularly infectious disease. Polio, Malaria, HIV, TB, etc.. are all diseases we should be able to either eliminate of bring down close to zero. There is amazing science that makes us optimistic this will happen.

Third are tools to help make education better – to help teachers learn how to teach better and to help students learn and understand why they should learn and reinforce their confidence.

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Question:

Hey Bill! Has there been a problem or challenge that’s made you, as a billionaire, feel completely powerless? Did you manage to overcome it, and if so, how?

 

Bill Gates:

The problem of how we prevent a small group of terrorists using nuclear or biological means to kill millions is something I worry about. If Government does their best work they have a good chance of detecting it and stopping it but I don’t think it is getting enough attention and I know I can’t solve it.

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Question:

What’s your take on the recent FBI/Apple situation?

Bill Gates:

I think there needs to be a discussion about when the government should be able to gather information. What if we had never had wiretapping? Also the government needs to talk openly about safeguards. Right now a lot of people don’t think the government has the right checks to make sure information is only used in criminal situations. So this case will be viewed as the start of a discussion. I think very few people take the extreme view that the government should be blind to financial and communication data but very few people think giving the government carte blanche without safeguards makes sense. A lot of countries like the UK and France are also going through this debate. For tech companies there needs to be some consistency including how governments work with each other. The sooner we modernize the laws the better.

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Question:

Some people (Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, etc) have come out in favor of regulating Artificial Intelligence before it is too late. What is your stance on the issue, and do you think humanity will ever reach a point where we won’t be able to control our own artificially intelligent designs?

Bill Gates:

I haven’t seen any concrete proposal on how you would do the regulation. I think it is worth discussing because I share the view of Musk and Hawking that when a few people control a platform with extreme intelligence it creates dangers in terms of power and eventually control.

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Question:

How soon do you think quantum computing will catch on, and what do you think about the future of cryptography if it does? Thanks!

Bill Gates:

Microsoft and others are working on quantum computing. It isn’t clear when it will work or become mainstream. There is a chance that within 6-10 years that cloud computing will offer super-computation by using quantum. It could help use solve some very important science problems including materials and catalyst design.

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Question:

You have previously said that, through organizations like Khan Academy and Wikipedia and the Internet in general, getting access to knowledge is now easier than ever. While that is certainly true, K-12 education seems to have stayed frozen in time. How do you think the school system will or should change in the decades to come?

Bill Gates:

I agree that our schools have not improved as much as we want them to. There are a lot of great teachers but we don’t do enough to figure out what they do so well and make sure others benefit from that. Most teachers get very little feedback about what they do well and what they need to improve including tools that let them see what the exemplars are doing.

Technology is starting to improve education. Unfortunately so far it is mostly the motivated students who have benefited from it. I think we will get tools like personalized learning to all students in the next decade.

A lot of the issue is helping kids stay engaged. If they don’t feel the material is relevant or they don’t have a sense of their own ability they can check out too easily. The technology has not done enough to help with this yet.

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Question:

What’s a fantasy technological advancement you wish existed? 

Bill Gates:

I recently saw a company working on “robotic” surgery where the ability to work at small scales was stunning. The idea that this will make surgeries higher quality, faster and less expensive is pretty exciting. It will probably take a decade before this gets mainstream – to date it has mostly been used for prostate surgery.

In the Foundation work there are a lot of tools we are working on we don’t have yet. For example an implant to protect a woman from getting HIV because it releases a protective drug.

Question:

What’s a technological advancement that’s come about in the past few years that you think we were actually better off without?

Bill Gates:

I am concerned about biological tools that could be used by a bioterrorist. However the same tools can be used for good things as well.

Some people think Hoverboards were bad because they caught on fire. I never got to try one.•

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Old Print Article: Sonia Delaunay’s “Cubist” Clothes, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1924)

March 7, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

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Just after David Bowie’s death, Saturday Night Live reran his December 5, 1979 performance, in which he was accompanied by Klaus Nomi and Joey Arias. While singing “The Man Who Sold the World,” Bowie donned a geometrically daring suit that seemed torn from Lewis Carroll’s REM stage. It was all very cutting edge–in 1923.

That’s when the artist Sonia Delaunay dreamed up a similar design for the Tristan Tzara play The Gas Heart. The prolific visionary, who coincidentally died ten days before the aforementioned Bowie appearance, was the subject of a 1924 Brooklyn Daily Eagle profile, thanks to her outré outfits.

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Words from a late-life Delaunay, for those of you who know French.

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“My Knee Always Hurts When I Am Sad”

March 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

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Oriana Fallaci conducted a famously contentious 1963 interview with Federico Fellini, which marked the brutish end of what had been a lively friendship begun in the previous decade, the director’s ego and the journalist’s envy getting the best of the moment. In the preface, Fallaci wrote of Fellini’s colorful experiences in New York City when he lived there in 1957. The passage:

I have known Fellini for many years; to be precise ever since I met him in New York for the American première of his movie The Nights of Cabiria, at which time became good friends. In fact, we often used to go eat steaks at Jack’s or roast chestnuts in Times Square, where you could also do target shooting. Then, from time to time, he would turn up at the apartment I shared in Greenwich Village with another girl called Priscilla to ask for a cup of coffee. The homely brew would alleviate, though I never understood why, his nostalgia for his homeland and his misery at his separation from his wife Giulietta. He would come in frantically massaging his knee, “My knee always hurts when I am sad. Giulietta! I want Giulietta!” And Priscilla would come running to look at him as I’d have gone running to look at Greta Garbo. Needless to say, there was nothing of Greta Garbo about Fellini, he wasn’t the monument he is today. He used to call me Pallina, Little Ball. He made us call him Pallino, sometimes Pallone, Big Ball. He would go in for innocent extravagances such as weeping in the bar of the Plaza Hotel because the critic in the New York Times had given him a bad review, or playing the hero. He used to go around with a gangster’s moll, and every day the gangster would call him at his hotel, saying, “I will kill you.” He didn’t understand English and would reply, “Very well, very well,” so adding to his heroic reputation. His reputation lasted until I explained to him what “I will kill you” meant. With half an hour Fellini was on board a plane making for Rome. 

He used to do other things too, such as wandering around Wall Street at night, casing the banks like a robber, arousing the suspicions of the world’s most suspicious police, so that finally they asked to see his papers, arrested him because he wasn’t carrying any, and shut him up for the night in a cell. He spent his time shouting the only English sentence he knew: “I am Federico Fellini, famous Italian director.” At six in the morning an Italian-American policeman who had seen La Strada I don’t know how many times said, “If you really are Fellini, come out and whistle the theme of La Strada.” Fellini came out and in a thin whistle–he can’t distinguish a march from a minuet–struggled through the entire soundtrack. A triumph. With affectionate punches in the stomach that were to keep him on a diet of consummé for the next two weeks, the policemen apologized and took him back to his hotel with an escort of motorcycles, saluting him with a blare of horns that could be heard as far away as Harlem.•

“He Also Quickly Found Himself In The Midst Of A Scientific Battle That To His Mind Was Of The Greatest Political And National Interest”

March 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Thomas Jefferson was never a soldier, but he fought for Americans in numerous ways. After the new nation won its independence, the Founding Father squared off in France against those who believed the United States’ plants and animals inferior to Europe’s, which of course was wholly ignorant, but unenlightenment shapes the world if it has enough believers.

Jefferson’s efforts involved, among other things, a giant moose skeleton. From Andrea Wulf in the Atlantic:

In Paris, in between negotiations of commercial treaties, arranging loans and composing diplomatic dispatches, Jefferson purchased the latest scientific books, visited famous gardens and met the greatest thinkers and scientists of the age. He also quickly found himself in the midst of a scientific battle that to his mind was of the greatest political and national interest. His weapons were native North American trees, weights of mammals, a panther pelt, and the bones and skin of a moose.

For years, Jefferson had been furious about a theory that the French called the “degeneracy of America.” Since the mid-eighteenth century several French thinkers had insisted that flora and fauna degenerated when “transplanted” from the Old to the New World. They noted how European fruits, vegetables and grains often failed to mature in America and how imported animals refused to thrive. They also insisted that American native species were inferior to European plants and animals. One of the offending scientists was Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, the most famous naturalist in the world and the author of the 36–volume magisterial Histoire Naturelle. In the 1760s and 1770s Buffon had written that in America all things “shrink and diminish under a niggardly sky and unprolific land.”

As Buffon’s theories spread, the natural world of America became a symbol for its political and cultural significance—or insignificance, depending on the point of view. Hoping to restore America’s honor, and elevate his country above those in Europe, Jefferson set out to prove that everything was in fact larger and superior in the New World.•

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“Computers Are Still Decades Away From Developing The Sort Of Abilities They’d Need To Enslave Or Eliminate Humankind”

March 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Will machines eventually grow intelligent enough to eliminate humans? One can only hope so. I mean, have you watched the orange-headed man discuss the length of his ding-dong at the GOP debates?

In all seriousness, I think the discussion about humans vs. machines is inherently flawed. It supposes that Homo sapiens as we know them will endlessly be the standard. Really unlikely. If our Anthropocene sins don’t doom us, we’ll likely have the opportunity to engineer a good part of our evolution, whether it’s here on Earth or in space. (Alien environments we try to inhabit will also change the nature of what we are.) Ultimately, it will be a contest between Humans 2.0 and Strong AI, though the two factions may reach detente and merge.

For the time being, really smart researchers teach computers to teach themselves, having them use Deep Learning to master Pac-Man and such, speeding the future here a “quarter” at a time. From an article about the contemporary London AI scene by Rob Davies in the Guardian:

Murray Shanahan, professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial, believes that while we should be thinking hard about the moral and ethical ramifications of AI, computers are still decades away from developing the sort of abilities they’d need to enslave or eliminate humankind and bringing Hawking’s worst fears to reality. One reason for this is that while early artificial intelligence systems can learn, they do so only falteringly.

For instance, a human who picks up one bottle of water will have a good idea of how to pick up others of different shapes and sizes. But a humanoid robot using an AI system would need a huge amount of data about every bottle on the market. Without that, it would achieve little more than getting the floor wet.

Using video games as their testing ground, Shanahan and his students want to develop systems that don’t rely on the exhaustive and time-consuming process of elimination – for instance, going through every iteration of lifting a water bottle in order to perfect the action – to improve their understanding.

They are building on techniques used in the development of DeepMind, the British AI startup sold to Google in 2014 for a reported £400m. DeepMind was also developed using computer games, which it eventually learned to play to a “superhuman” level, and DeepMind programs are now able to play – and defeat – professional players of the Chinese board game Go.

Shanahan believes the research of his students will help create systems that are even smarter than DeepMind.•

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“Advances That Would Take Decades Now Happen In Years, Sometimes Months”

March 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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It’s no secret that regulation, not traditionally the nimblest of things, has trouble keeping pace with technology, but Vivek Wadhwa states the case well in a new Washington Post column. He points out that decisions made on these thorny questions are often done emotionally–would Tim Cook be willingly working with the government if there had been a terrorist attack on Apple headquarters?–but the bigger issue is the briskness with which our tools are progressing. Think about how quickly drones and driverless have morphed in just the past few years. Wadhwa uses another example: the iPhone. An excerpt:

It takes decades, sometimes centuries, to reach the type of consensus that is needed to enact the far-reaching legislation that Congress will have to consider. Laws are essentially codified ethics, a consensus that is reached by society on what is right and wrong. This happens only after people understand the issues and have seen the pros and cons.

Consider our laws on privacy. These date back to the late 1800s, when newspapers first started publishing gossip. They wrote a series of intrusive stories about Boston lawyer Samuel Warren and his family. This led his law partner, future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, writing a Harvard Law Review article “The Right of Privacy”  which argued for the right to be left alone. This essay laid the foundation of American privacy law, which evolved over 200 years. It also took centuries to create today’s copyright laws, intangible property rights, and contract law. All of these followed the development of technologies such as the printing press and steam engine.

Today, technology is progressing on an exponential curve; advances that would take decades now happen in years, sometimes months. Consider that the first iPhone was released in June 2007. It was little more than an iPod with an embedded cell phone. This has evolved into a device which captures our deepest personal secrets, keeps track of our lifestyles and habits, and is becoming our health coach and mentor. It was inconceivable just five years ago that there could be such debates about unlocking this device.•

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A Brief Note From 1930 About Headshrinkers

March 7, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

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From the April 24, 1930 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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“Without An O.K. From The Astrologer, Air Force One Did Not Take Off”

March 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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President Reagan and First Lady Nancy relied heavily on astrology, a fairly benign if boneheaded practice in Hollywood but a troubling one in the White House. The stars were luckily aligned properly for beneficial international relations during the Administration, particularly with the Soviets, though it was still something of a shock to the country when news of the voodoo surfaced during the end of the President’s second term. Two excerpts follow, one from a 1988 People piece about the revelation and an excerpt from Douglas Martin’s 2014 New York Times obituary of Joan Quigley, stargazer to the Reagans.

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From People:

The year was 1980, the mood in the nation restless. American hostages languished in Iran; American athletes were sitting out the Olympics. In the White House, a dithering peanut farmer President looked to be wreaking havoc on the economy. At least, that’s how it appeared to one conservative society lioness out West—whose husband had spent some time in politics but was now between jobs. She felt she had a better man for the office.

Just to be certain, however, she called up a friend, a wellborn San Francisco Republican, from whom she had been taking counsel for several years. The woman, one Joan Quigley, quickly did an astrological chart on Jimmy Carter. Then she got back to Nancy Reagan with good news about her husband’s presidential bid: “I was certain Ronald Reagan wouldn’t have any trouble with him,” says Quigley, who volunteered her services to the campaign and later provided them, on a regular basis, to the Reagan White House.

Throughout this association, the Vassar-educated astrologer with country club manners was—as befits a lady—terribly discreet. By the end of the first term, her fellow astrologers had begun to notice the impeccable celestial timing of many Reagan moves, like the bombing of Libya and his announcement for a second term. “I had astrologer friends calling me saying, ‘Reagan must have had his chart done,’ “Quigley recently confided during an interview in a suite at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel. “I just said, ‘Yes. He must have been consulting someone.’ ”

Last week the soignée soothsayer’s cover was blown by former White House aide Donald Regan. In his just-published book, For the Record, Regan spilled what he insisted was “the most closely guarded domestic secret of the Reagan White House.” To wit: “Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House Chief of Staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise.” Within hours, an avid press had zeroed in on Quigley as the mystery adviser.

If astrology was the Reagans’ little secret, however, it was not very well kept. “I have known since before Reagan was elected that they went to astrologers,” says former Washington Post style reporter Sally Quinn, “and that’s why I’m surprised at all of the surprise and shock.” In fact the Reagans’ interest in astrology goes back to the early ’50s—and amounts to far more than the scanning of newspaper horoscopes that the President once jovially confessed to a reporter. Quigley was only the most recent of several stargazers to enter the Reagans’ domestic orbit and exert the pull of the heavens on decisions great and small.•

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From the Times:

In his 1988 memoir, Donald T. Regan, a former chief of staff for President Ronald Reagan, revealed what he called the administration’s “most closely guarded secret.”

He said an astrologer had set the time for summit meetings, presidential debates, Reagan’s 1985 cancer surgery, State of the Union addresses and much more. Without an O.K. from the astrologer, he said, Air Force One did not take off.

The astrologer, whose name Mr. Regan did not know when he wrote the book, was Joan Quigley. She died on Tuesday at 87 at her home in San Francisco, her sister and only immediate survivor, Ruth Quigley, said.

Mr. Regan said that Miss Quigley — a Vassar-educated socialite who preferred the honorific Miss to Ms. (she never married) — had made her celestial recommendations through phone calls to the first lady, Nancy Reagan, often two or three a day. Mrs. Reagan, he said, set up private lines for her at the White House and at the presidential retreat at Camp David.

Further, Mrs. Reagan paid the astrologer a retainer of $3,000 a month, wrote Mr. Regan, who had also been a Treasury secretary under Reagan and the chief executive of Merrill Lynch.

“Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House chief of staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise,” he wrote in the memoir, For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington.

In an interview with CBS Evening News in 1989, after Reagan left office, Miss Quigley said that after reading the horoscope of the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, she concluded that he was intelligent and open to new ideas and persuaded Mrs. Reagan to press her husband to abandon his view of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” Arms control treaties followed.•

“Right Now, Almost Everyone Is Trying To Game The System”

March 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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I don’t have to tell you that we’re living in a new and strange economy. The star of a film franchise that makes more than a billion dollars globally is paid six figures and has no real leverage to demand more, whereas Kendall Jenner or Gigi Hadid reportedly earn in that ballpark just for putting a single post on Instagram. Of course, all of the above are lottery winners in this post-collapse world of flat wages and vulnerable workers.

In his recent Reddit AMA, Douglas Rushkoff, author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, engaged in an esoteric give-and-take about where the economy may be heading. He believes restoring the middle class through micropayments unlikely (and it is!), thinking tomorrow will need a better system. Despite the noble thought projects Rushkoff mentions, I can guarantee you the future isn’t TV-less Tandy computers. An excerpt:

Question:

Within a decade we could see mainstream VR/AR with eye-tracking that would lead to complete compartmentalization, observation, and memorization of pretty much all Hierarchical interactions between individuals in all levels of a growing society.

With innovative social networking tools like Synereo, which is pretty much a decentralized Facebook that turns ‘Likes’ into attention-derived cryptocurrency, do you think we’re headed into a digital economy that’s vastly different than today, or are things going to be relatively the same?

Douglas Rushkoff:

We could go in some bizarre new direction like you’re describing. And it would be interesting. It’s a bit like Lanier envisions, where we start getting all sorts of data-mining activities back on the books, and pay people in micro currencies. But I’m thinking it’s likely easier to go in the other direction. I’m interested in getting things off the books. Building connections between people. I don’t like building a society based on the premise that everyone is trying to game the system.

True – right now, almost everyone is trying to game the system. Finance itself is gamified commerce. Derivatives and algorithms gasify that, and so on and so on. Startups are gamified Wall St.

So these new micro-transactional social networks mean to reprogram the value extraction to our own benefit. I just don’t know where the marketers are who are going to support all this in the end. Marketing has never made up more than 5% of GDP. And that’s being generous. I don’t think it can support the entire economy.

I’d rather see communities develop currencies for people to take care of one another, and for us to use those locally, and then use long distance money to buy our iPhones or whatever.

Question:

“I don’t like building a society based on the premise that everyone is trying to game the system.”

This exactly. I don’t mean to sound anti-capitalist, but that’s one of its major flaws – that exploiting people’s weaknesses for financial gain is a good thing.

Douglas Rushkoff:

One horrific factoid I’ve been working on is what would be the cost of an iPhone if it didn’t use the equivalent of slave labor and blood rare-earth minerals. We get these things so relatively cheaply, and it feels as if making these technologies cheaper somehow breaks down the digital divide. But it really just externalizes it to somewhere we don’t see.

It’s a strange project – but I’m wondering if it’s really appropriate to make our tech cheaper at their expense? And wonder if the older stuff we used to use – like my Tandy computer – can do things like this AMA, how is getting TV over my computer really important?•

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“Trump Launched A Political Campaign That Tore Into Reagan’s Record”

March 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Donald Trump, who hopes to have a long and thick political career, is less chameleon than outright liar.

It’s no surprise the GOP frontrunner dropped to his knees before the memory of our 40th President as soon as it was announced Nancy Reagan died. After all, Beefsteak Charlie is a person without a shred of honesty or shame. While the hideous hotelier today trolls President Obama and claims China is destroying America, he behaved similarly in the 1980s toward Reagan and Japan. Trump could claim he’s changed his opinion as he’s matured, but clearly this is a man who hasn’t grown an inch (not a penis joke).

From Michael D’Antonio at Politico Magazine:

In 2016, there are 14 Republican presidential candidates for whom Ronald Reagan is both the benchmark for conservative values and the lodestar of conservative ideas. There’s also one who wrote, in the second to last year of Reagan’s presidency, that he had been “so smooth, so effective a performer” that “only now, seven years later, are people beginning to question whether there’s anything beneath that smile.”

The gadfly was Donald Trump, writing in his book The Art of the Deal. But it wasn’t just a glancing blow; to promote the book, Trump launched a political campaign that tore into Reagan’s record, including his willingness to stand up to the Soviet Union. Advised by the notorious Roger Stone, a Nixon-era GOP trickster, in 1987 Trump took out full-page ads in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post blasting Reagan and his team.

In the text, which was addressed “To the American people,” Trump declared, “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.” The problem was America’s leading role in defending democracy, which had been fulfilled by Republicans and Democrats all the way back to FDR. Foreshadowing his 2015 argument that would have Mexico pay for an American-built border wall, Trump then said that the United States should present its allies with a bill for defense services rendered.

The ads, which cost more than $90,000, came after Trump had visited the Soviet Union and met with Mikhail Gorbachev. (A few years earlier, Trump had offered himself as a replacement for Reagan’s nuclear arms control negotiators, whom he considered too soft.) Trump followed his letter to America with a trip to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where voters were eyeing the candidates in the 1988 primary. There he spoke to the Rotary Club, which met at Yoken’s restaurant, where the sign out front featured a spouting whale and the slogan, “Thar she blows!” In his talk, Trump sounded some of the same themes he offers today, except for the fact that the bad guys who were laughing at the United States were the Japanese and not the Mexicans or Chinese.•

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“This Can Be A General Store 2.0.”

March 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Jazz Age entrepreneurs promised automated department stores, even if they didn’t yet possess the technology to deliver them. By the late 1930s, automated Keedoozle grocery stores became a reality, even if they didn’t exactly thrive over the next couple of decades. Robots have recently begun to infiltrate certain chains, though their role for the time being is complementary. 

In Sweden, one early adopter has designed a concept store that goes all in on automation, disappearing human workers and leaving the responsibility to the machines. Robert Ilijason came up with the idea to serve people living outside of cities who don’t have easy access to basic goods. You scan and pay for the items with your smartphone. “My ambition is to spread this to other small towns,” he says, “This can be a general store 2.0.” It may initially take root in more rural areas where it’s a job creator, but we’re only in the prelude stage, and the idea will be applied, to some extent, everywhere.

From Oresund Startups:

The person behind the idea is Robert Ilijason, who specializes in tech. But the idea is inspired not so much by the professional field but rather by personal experience.

“I lost it last baby food jar. And then there was panic. I myself live in the bay and had to go to Helsingborg to buy new food. Then I got the idea that there should be a store here and started thinking about how to solve this purely technical,” shared Robert in HD interview.

Those who are interested in using the services of a new store will have to become its members. The only requirement for joining is to provide a credit report, which takes a few minutes to complete. Initially the range of products will not be wide, but the customers will have the power to influence product variety. The app will provide a support service where users will write what they would like to see in the store.

If everything goes according to plan, the concept will be spread to more places.•

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This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

March 6, 2016 in Misc. | Permalink

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

  1. marvin minsky interviewed about AI
  2. matthias buchinger the polymath
  3. singapore creating a “smart nation”
  4. the mobile-tensaw delta park in alabama
  5. life in 2200 a.d.
  6. megadroughts in the american southwest
  7. elon musk mars colony
  8. traditional family in iran
  9. robot helpers in san francisco hospital
  10. bob ingersoll: they knew that to put god in the constitution was to put man out. they knew that the recognition of a deity would be seized upon by fanatics and zealots as a pretext for destroying the liberty of thought

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

March 5, 2016 in Misc. | Permalink

This week, Donald Trump attended a prayer breakfast to inform the congregants about the number and size of his balls.

This week, Donald Trump attended a prayer breakfast to inform the congregants about the number and size of his balls.

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  • Doug Coupland fondly recalls the food courts and fake trees of the 1990s mall.
  • Thomas Nagel argues drones have made warfare more, not less, personal.

“Who Knows Anything Anymore?”

March 4, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, who impetuously got into politics hoping to get a tugjob in the toilet adjacent to the Lincoln Bedroom, is Barry Goldwater at a Gathering of the Juggalos. 

One of the happiest turns in the media world in 2015 was a wonderful talent like James Poniewozik becoming the TV critic at the New York Times. It may not be his favorite assignment, but the writer stifled his gag reflex long enough to review the awfulness of last night’s Pants-Off Dance-Off known as the GOP debate. What follows is an excerpt from his work and one from Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo.

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From Poniewozik:

Mr. Trump turns subtext into text, whether it’s about immigration or torture. Republican candidates had sent certain messages to voters for years, and now the party hears them coming back from Mr. Trump translated, or perhaps decoded.

On Thursday, his opponents made plenty of substantive, detailed attacks on him, and maybe they worked, but tying them to questions of character risks underscoring his reality-TV-style directness.

But what’s the alternative? Mr. Rubio tried speaking Mr. Trump’s language at the previous debate, and afterward. He mocked, he taunted, he said that Mr. Trump may have wet himself. It worked, or it didn’t — Mr. Rubio didn’t have a great Super Tuesday. And at this debate, he seemed a little sheepish about having tried it. He was still on the attack, but in his own language.

It seems the best way to beat Mr. Trump is to make him small, and the best way to make him small is to beat him. Maybe Thursday’s media whirlwind was the start of that — who knows anything anymore? — but it made the debate, the news cycle, the world, all about him, Trump Trump Trumpity-Trump. It was done, to borrow the hashtag of the social-media movement against him, in the spirit of #NeverTrump, but the practical effect was #AllTrump, #AllTheTime.

The Republican Party hung a giant target on Mr. Trump’s back. But that meant he ended the day reassured, for the umpteenth time, that his was in fact bigger.•

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From Marshall:

There was one point maybe in the 3rd quarter hour of the debate where Rubio and Trump were basically just yelling at each other. It was very messy. Trump was clearly unable to dominate the stage. And yet, as I watched, I thought: this is not doing Marco Rubio any good. It may be bloodying Trump but not to Rubio’s benefit. They knocked him off his perch a bit but they looked like ridiculous animals wrestling with him on the ground.

The other thing I wonder about tonight is the effect of Fox News’ attacks on Trump. Trump’s the frontrunner. His dirty laundry is only now really getting a close look from the press. It makes sense that the moderators would press him more than the others. But it went well beyond that. They were out to get him. No one could watch this debate and not get that. Given how much Trump’s base constituency is driven by resentment against ‘establishments’ and perceived unfairness to themselves and those they support, will this redound to Trump’s benefit? Will it at least not hurt him? I think it’s definitely possible.

I have little doubt that the cross-country exchange with Romney today actually did help Trump. If you’re for Trump, you’re against the establishment and all it stands for. Romney is the establishment wing of the establishment and even the attack itself was fairly feckless. It only confirms Trump’s message. On a stage he owned, a short while later in Maine, Trump mutilated Romney in his response. I’m much less sure this debate helped Trump in the same way.

My cautious, initial take is that all the attacks combined didn’t do much if anything to shake Trump’s support. But they may have started to put an actual ceiling on that support. It may have stopped him from building on his current numbers. I’m truly not sure.•

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“I Would Be Going To The Moon Too. Not Soon, But Before I Died. “

March 4, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Can you imagine if more than 50 years after the global sensation of Charles Lindbergh’s Transatlantic flight if there were still no commercial airlines? Seems unthinkable, right? 

It’s beyond perplexing that we haven’t established permanent colonies on the moon, that this “trade route” wasn’t opened in the wake of the successful Apollo missions of 1969-72. It must have seemed fait accompli during those bold days. On the night of the giant leap for mankind, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke could barely contain their wildest visions when interviewed live by Walter Cronkite and his cohorts. Sure, the cost involved in space flight dwarfs that of Earth-bound airport hopping, but it seemed to make too much sense to not happen, didn’t it?

Alas, it did not come to fruition. Sharing my disappointment is the excellent writer Brian Clegg, who’s penned an Aeon essay which explores why science fiction became so uncoupled from reality when it comes to “setting up house” on the moon. The opening:

One of the biggest thrills of my teenage life was being allowed to stay up all night to watch the Apollo 11 moon landing (the first time I’d ever spent a whole night without going to bed). And something was very clear to me, back then on that long 1969 night: I would be going to the moon too. Not soon, but before I died. I was realistic. I didn’t expect it to be soon, because I never saw myself as an astronaut. But I firmly expected that by the time this book was written and I was a very elderly person in my fifties, trips to the moon would be pretty much like flights across the Atlantic were in the 1960s. Still a very special experience, not for everyone by any means, but something that would be available to the general public as a safe, scheduled pleasure trip.

This seems very naïve now, but it really didn’t back in the heady days of 1969. I had read the science fiction. I knew that moon bases and lunar cities would inevitably follow that first, groundbreaking step of making a manned landing. Why not? It seemed an entirely logical progress. Think how much had been achieved in just the previous eight years. Imagine what would be possible in another 40 or 50 years. And yet the reality was so different. There were just six brief manned moon landings in the Apollo series, and then nothing. Not a single person has reached the moon for decades. There have been plenty of unmanned probes, but nothing has been done toward laying the ground for those lunar cities and for the regular, commercial moon flights I so eagerly anticipated. That glorious future has evaporated.

There’s something very strange and fascinating in the way that reality has deviated so far from science fiction – especially considering how deeply rooted the moon is in the human imagination.•

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“The Only Difference Is This Church Wants To Use Science To Conquer Death”

March 4, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Jaron Lanier has written wisely about how religious fervor can be repurposed in a more algorithmic age, with AI becoming a new faith, the Singularity being anticipated as a Second Coming of sorts. This subtext has come to the surface in certain corners, one being the Church of Perpetual Life in Florida. Bankrolled by wealthy businessperson Bill Faloon, the institution is a sanctuary for belief in radical life extension and a-mortality, things theoretically possible in the very long run but incredibly unlikely to be available to the parishioners hoping to dodge death.

Transhumanist Presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan, who’s made mortality’s endgame a central tenet of his campaign, visited the Hollywood house of worship and filed a report for Business Insider. The opening:

Many people think of transhumanism — the belief that humans can evolve through science and tech — as a secular movement. For the most part it is, but there are a number of organizations that aim to combine science and spirituality together.

One of the largest is the Church of Perpetual Life, a brick and mortar worship center near Miami, Florida that looks like any other church. It has a minister, a congregation, and church activities. The only difference is this church wants to use science to conquer death. 

I was asked to speak at a Church of Perpetual Life service while traveling across America on my Immortality Bus — a coffin-like campaign bus I’m using during my run for president of the US (under the guise of the Transhumanist Part). Services at the Church of Perpetual Life don’t revolve around worshiping a deity. They’re passionate exploration of life extension research. It’s a group of people that want to live forever, but also want belong to a spiritual community.

Conversations are centered around how humanity can improve itself through science, how we can overcome death with technology, and how suffering can be broadly eliminated.

The church itself welcomes people of all religions, and sometimes explores concepts of a benign creator in very nonspecific terms.•

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A Brief Note From 1856 About Pig Drivers

March 3, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

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From the July 21, 1856 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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