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There are a lot of smart people on Wall Street, but the promise of giant payoffs often makes them behave stupidly, sloppily. Will automation in the financial sector instill discipline or will it lead to cascading mistakes that can make past meltdowns seem minor? Maybe both, at different times?

Regardless, machine intelligence may displace innumerable finance workers in the near-term, as the biz grows increasingly bullish on technology. In “The Robots Are Coming for Wall Street,” Nathaniel Popper’s excellent NYT Magazine article, the writer examines the new evolution through the person of Daniel Nadler, whose Kensho machine-learning software can execute in minutes tasks that required carbon-based beings days to complete. No one will likely shed a tear for Goldman Sachs workers losing salary and status, but their dwindling may presage the disruption of other industries built on sophisticated analysis.

An excerpt:

Within a decade, he said, between a third and a half of the current employees in finance will lose their jobs to Kensho and other automation software. It began with the lower-paid clerks, many of whom became unnecessary when stock tickers and trading tickets went electronic. It has moved on to research and analysis, as software like Kensho has become capable of parsing enormous data sets far more quickly and reliably than humans ever could. The next ‘‘tranche,’’ as Nadler puts it, will come from the employees who deal with clients: Soon, sophisticated interfaces will mean that clients no longer feel they need or even want to work through a human being.

‘‘I’m assuming that the majority of those people over a five-to-10-year horizon are not going to be replaced by other people,’’ he said, getting into the flow of his thoughts, which, for Nadler, meant closing his eyes and gesticulating as though he were preaching or playing the piano. ‘‘In 10 years Goldman Sachs will be significantly smaller by head count than it is today.’’

Goldman executives are reluctant to discuss the plight of their displaced financial analysts. Several managers I spoke to insisted that Kensho has not yet caused any layoffs, nor is it likely to soon. Nadler had warned me that I would hear something like that. ‘‘When you start talking about automating jobs,’’ he said, ‘‘everybody all of a sudden gets really quiet.’’

Goldman employees who lose their jobs to machines are not likely to evoke much pity. But it is exactly Goldman’s privileged status that makes the threat to its workers so interesting. If jobs can be displaced at Goldman, they can probably be displaced even more quickly at other, less sophisticated companies, within the financial industry as well as without.

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Dr. George Nichopoulos wasn’t the first nor the last doctor to open his prescription pad too liberally to the rich and famous. A year after Howard Hughes’ skeletal remains forced Wilbur Thain to face scrutiny, and long before Conrad Murray ever met Michael Jackson, Nichopoulos was called into question (and eventually placed on trial) for indulging Elvis Presley’s medicinal habits. He was acquitted on all counts, but two decades later the man known as “Doctor Feelgood” had his license revoked for overprescribing, which he acknowledged doing. “I cared too much,” he said in his defense.

Nichopoulos just died. The opening of a NYT report of his 1981 trial:

MEMPHIS, Oct. 30— Dr. George Nichopoulos took the witness stand today in his own defense and flatly denied criminal charges that he overprescribed controlled drugs to Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and seven other patients. He asserted that his healing duties as a physician were always uppermost in his mind.

Dr. Nichopoulos acknowledged that, as Mr. Presley’s personal physician, he prescribed numerous narcotics, sedatives and stimulants for the singer. But the doctor insisted he did this in the hope of gaining control of a drug dependence that was already established in Mr. Presley and the others. All those named in the indictment had been getting drugs from other sources, Dr. Nichopoulos testified.

”The goal with all these people was to control the medication,” he said in a quiet voice from the witness stand. Prosecutors have produced prescriptions written in Mr. Presley’s name over the last 31 1/2 months of his life, calling for more than 19,000 doses of narcotics, stimulants and sedatives.

However, the defense attorney, Jim Neal, has asserted that many of these drugs were thrown away and that placebos, or inactive pills, were substituted for others. The prescriptions were written, the attorney said, to convince the entertainer that he was receiving real drugs when he was in fact receiving many placebos. Relief of ‘Pain and Suffering’

And there were valid medical reasons for Dr. Nichopoulos to prescribe many of the drugs to Mr. Presley, the lawyer added. ”Did you try to relieve the pain and suffering of Elvis Presley?” Mr. Neal asked. ”Yes,” replied the physician. ”Did you in good faith try to reduce Mr. Presley’s drug habit?” ”Yes.” ”Dr. Nichopoulos, are you guilty of the charges in this case?” ”No.” Over the last seven months of Mr. Presley’s life, Dr. Nichopoulos testified, he wrote seven letters to drug manufacturers ordering placebos. The last of these letters was dated Aug. 12, 1977, four days before Mr. Presley died inhis Memphis mansion, Graceland. The Shelby County medical examiner ruled officially that heart disease caused his death.

Dr. Nichopoulos also testified that Mr. Lewis, also a singer, and the seven other patients named in the indictment were in better condition today, mentally and physically, than they were when they first came to see him.•

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The Australian science agency issued a report about the coming insinuation of AI in the workplace over the next 20 years. It’s relatively sanguine, acknowledging that some jobs will vanish but arguing that others will be created. The paper also forwards the idea that tomorrow’s workplace will be akin to freestyle chess, with humans and robots forming teams. That’s likely true in the short run, but two important caveats to consider: 1) Perhaps far more jobs will disappear than be created, and 2) AI may not ultimately need our helping hands very much. If the latter happens too quickly, things could get messy. Until then, we may be able to gain employment as “online chaperones” and such.

From Paul Karp at the Guardian:

The employment minister, Michaelia Cash, released the report on Friday at the Australian Computer Society’s conference.

Cash said the report showed “some jobs will inevitably become automated over the coming years but technological change will improve others and also create new jobs and opportunities.”

“The future won’t be about people competing with machines, it will be about people using machines and doing work that is more interesting and fulfilling,” she said.

The report identifies six mega-trends in the workforce, the most important of which is an “explosion in device connectivity, data volumes and computing speed, combined with rapid advances in automated systems and artificial intelligence means that robotic devices can perform many tasks more quickly, safely and efficiently than humans.”

Increased automation will raise the complexity of workers’ tasks. “Many low-skilled jobs are being offshored or automated. The consequence is the likelihood of a raised skills and education bar for entry into many professions and occupations,” the report said.•

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From the February 28, 1870 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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Donald Trump, an Orange Supremacist, has been opportunistic on many fronts–the GOP’s splintering, the decentralization of media, the destabilization of the American middle class–but isn’t it possible a good part of his ascendancy comes from a large number of white citizens being resentful they can no longer use racial slurs without consequence? Nearly every Trump supporter interviewed credits him with “speaking the truth” or “saying what they’d like to say,” which has a pretty clear meaning when you consider his remarks before and after entering politics. Being frightened doesn’t mean turning ugly, but Trump supporters seem to have been just waiting for the opportunity.

In a new interview, Noam Chomsky argues that the ridiculing realtor’s rise is the result of exploited fears, but polls show bigotry may be at least as responsible. Two excerpts follow.

___________________________

From Aaron Williams at AlterNet:

Question: 

What are your opinions on the surprising progress of Donald Trump? Could it be explained by a climate of fear?

Noam Chomsky: 

Fear, along with the breakdown of society during the neoliberal period. People feel isolated, helpless, victim of powerful forces that they do not understand and cannot influence. It’s interesting to compare the situation in the ‘30s, which I’m old enough to remember. Objectively, poverty and suffering were far greater. But even among poor working people and the unemployed, there was a sense of hope that is lacking now, in large part because of the growth of a militant labor movement and also the existence of political organizations outside the mainstream.•

____________________________

From Lynn Vavreck at the New York Times:

Nationally, further analyses of the YouGov data show a similar trend: Nearly 20 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters disagreed with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves in the Southern states during the Civil War. Only 5 percent of Mr. Rubio’s voters share this view.

Mr. Trump’s popularity with white, working-class voters who are more likely than other Republicans to believe that whites are a supreme race and who long for the Confederacy may make him unpopular among leaders in his party. But it’s worth noting that he isn’t persuading voters to hold these beliefs. The beliefs were there — and have been for some time.

Mr. Trump has reinvigorated explicit appeals to ethnocentrism, and some voters are responding.•

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Speaking of conspiracists, a confederacy of such cranks just went on a seven-day cruise called “Conspira-Sea.” Radio host Sean David Morton, the kooks’ Capt. Stubing, organized the event for those convinced of the validity of chemtrails and crop circles–but he surely wasn’t acting alone!

Anna Merlan of Jezebel went along for the ride and stayed afloat long enough to file a fascinating report, even though she was ultimately accused of being a CIA agent. That confrontational scene led her to write this apt line: “I felt as though I was caught in a washing machine.”

Aboard with those who believe the government is controlling the weather and others still stubbornly linking vaccinations to autism, was Laura Eisenhower, granddaughter of President Dwight D., who asserted that Hillary Clinton was “definitely not human.” She was not speaking figuratively.

It would all be very amusing if these people weren’t voters and didn’t encourage dangerous health practices. An excerpt:

Morton is a radio host, among other things. Here he was one of the lead organizers of Conspira Sea, the first annual sea cruise for conspiracy theorists. While the ship looped from San Pedro to Cabo San Lucas and back, some 100 of its passengers and I would be focused on uncharted waters, where nothing is as it seems. Before we docked again, two of them would end up following me around the ship, convinced I was a CIA plant.

Elsewhere aboard, people’s vacations were already exuberantly underway, the cigarette-browned casino bustling. Those of us in the conspiracy group were crammed into a dim, red-carpeted conference room in the bowels of Deck 6 to hear Morton, a Humpty Dumpty-shaped man with a chinstrap beard and an enormous, winking green ring, explain our mission.

“Conspiracy theorists are always right,” Morton told the room. He spoke with the jokey cadence and booming delivery of his profession; he’s basically Rush Limbaugh, if Rush Limbaugh claimed to have psychic powers (Morton practices a form of ESP known as “remote viewing,” which he says he learned from Nepalese monks). It was a bit of a pander, since the room was filled with conspiracy theorists.

“In 40 years,” Morton added, “as many people will believe a bunch of Arabs knocked down the World Trade Center as will believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.” A lot of people nod.•

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robotbaby8

Yeats wrote that the doom of us would be “vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,” but what if the crib doesn’t sway at all and the baby doesn’t cry?

The poet’s fear of the Antichrist slouching to be born could be applied, in our time, to AI. I seriously doubt that thus far machines have, unbeknownst to us, quietly achieved anything like consciousness. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen or that we would necessarily know the moment of birth. While an “immaculate conception” isn’t likely, it remains a possibility.

In a smart Aeon essay, George Musser considers subject, noting that “the first aliens that human beings encounter will probably not be from some other planet.” He calls for the development of a “consciousness detector.” The opening:

Usually when people imagine a self-aware machine, they picture a device that emerges through deliberate effort and that then makes its presence known quickly, loudly, and (in most scenarios) disastrously. Even if its inventors have the presence of mind not to wire it into the nuclear missile launch system, the artificial intelligence will soon vault past our capacity to understand and control it. If we’re lucky, the new machine will simply break up with us, like the operating system in the movie Her. If not, it might decide not to open the pod bay doors to let us back into the spaceship. Regardless, the key point is that when an artificial intelligence wakes up, we’ll know.

But who’s to say machines don’t already have minds? What if they take unexpected forms, such as networks that have achieved a group-level consciousness? What if artificial intelligence is so unfamiliar that we have a hard time recognising it? Could our machines have become self-aware without our even knowing it? The huge obstacle to addressing such questions is that no one is really sure what consciousness is, let alone whether we’d know it if we saw it. In his 2012 book, Consciousness, the neuroscientist Christof Koch speculated that the web might have achieved sentience, and then posed the essential question: ‘By what signs shall we recognise its consciousness?’•

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As much as we need to colonize the universe, it really seems beyond reason to be sending humans on space missions right now. Rockets and robots can handle the reconnaissance and lay the groundwork for starter societies out there. Humans going along for the ride on these early missions is all about narcissism–it makes the missions vanity projects and sporting events. But billionaires and governments feel differently, so peopled missions will be headed to Mars probably sooner than later.

CosmosUp post suggests that if we’re sending astronauts to build cities in space, perhaps Venus would be a more preferable venue than Mars, provided we don’t settle on its inhospitable surface. The opening:

We’ve talked a lot about sending people to Mars, mostly because sending people to Mars would be really, really cool. But we also talk so much about it because a lot of people think that Mars is the next place humans will colonize.

After all, with just a little technological help, humans can live on the Martian surface. Sure, we’d need to bring along air and a place to live and we’d need to figure out how to eat, but that’s all pretty doable — at least we think it will be soon.

But we have another neighbor, who tends to get ignored in conversations about space colonies: Venus. Venus is usually the closest planet to Earth, and it’s the easiest other planet to get to, so by those measures it might even be a better target than Mars. Plus, people call Venus “Earth’s sister,” which is just really sweet. But people also call Venus “hellish,” and that fire and brimstone is why we don’t talk a lot about colonizing our dear sister planet.

Landing people on Venus’s surface and having them live to tell the tale would be a big challenge, much bigger than for Mars. But what if we didn’t need to land on the surface? What if we could have a floating city in the Venusian skies?

Well, according to some folks at NASA, the idea isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds.•

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Aaron Burr, statesman and murderer, was, as Lin-Manuel Miranda describes him, the “damn fool” who shot Alexander Hamilton. Burr’s own death was less dramatic, though there was some small-scale intrigue which accompanied it.

Burr spent his last days reclusively on Staten Island, New York. He was a decidedly shadowy figure in the borough, and his funeral services were lightly attended. But there was one entrepreneur who kept a close check on the former Vice President during his waning moments. He had his reasons. An excerpt from an article in the September 8, 1895 New York Times:

It is not generally known that Aaron Burr spent the last days of his life and died on Staten Island. A few paces back from the Staten Island Ferry landing, at Port Richmond, stands the St. James Hotel, which is anything but a pretentious structure, and was originally a two-story boarding house in the year 1836, kept by a couple named Edgerton. It was during the early part of that year that Burr took a room there, and Mrs. Edgerton became his faithful servant and nurse. He sought seclusion and peace for his last days on earth, and, to an extent, found his desire within the great city of his choice, where he had realized the greatest triumphs of his life. The town was then composed of but a few scattered houses, and the Jersey shore was covered with a pine forest to the water’s edge, a clear view of which could be had from this old dwelling house. He rarely left his room, which was the front apartment on the second floor, now used as a parlor in the hotel. The furniture was antique and the room about eighteen feet square. The bed upon which Burr died was an old-fashioned, four-post, chintz-curtained one. Over the mantel now hangs a profile steel engraving of Burr, undoubtedly cut from some biography of the man, simply framed, to which, until recently, there was attached the inscription: ‘Aaron Burr died in this room Sept. 14, 1836.’

Upon rare occasions, and when he was confident that he would not be noticed, he wandered a short distance from his place of refuge, but the old man was too well known by the villagers to escape observation, and many eyes were upon him at every step, the villagers being proud of their visitor and observant of every action of so celebrated a man. He was an under-sized, sparsely built old man at this time, but he was also, to the end, erect and soldierly in bearing. His attire was always very fine, and he dressed with the utmost neatness, was quite the aristocratic gentleman of the old school, and the refinement and elegance of his manner were invariably conspicuous. He could be singularly winning and gentle even with the humblest. His complexion was pale and like parchment for years before his death, and at this time he was upward of eighty years of age. The dignity of his face was slightly marred by a thin, aquiline nose, which had a decided bend to one side, either through some accident or by nature’s malformation. Despite his advanced age, his eyes were keen and magnetic to a remarkable degree. He had learned or rather grown to dislike the curiosity seeker, and finding that he could not take his short walks abroad without being gazed at continually by the natives of Staten Island, he became more seclusive as the days went by, and finally refused to leave his room. In this room, rendered historic by his presence, this old decrepit, wornout, once great man passed his time with memories and sought consolation in the love letters of the women who had once loved him, among which were those of Mme. Jumel, filed with affectionate regard and regrets that a cruel fate had separated them. All those letters were scattered about his room, and when he died hundreds of such letters loose and in packages tied with ribbons were scattered upon his bed and upon the floor of the chamber. Among the evidences of his intriguing disposition, not at accusers, but as tokens of the loves of his victims, the old man breathed his last. …

The old man had no attendant. He lived alone, with his old joys and his new sorrows, waiting for death to claim him and take him he knew and seemed to care not whither. A mysterious stranger haunted the house for many days and nights before the death of Burr. He never was admitted to the recluse, but always made interested inquiries concerning his health, and he was supposed to be either a relative or interested friend of the statesman, although he was neither. This man was faithful to the determination, and almost immediately after Aaron Burr’s death put in an appearance, and, without saying, “By your leave,” opened his satchel and proceeded, as if he had a right to do so, to take a plaster cast of the dead man.•

911truthers

Wasn’t information supposed to set us free? I guess it did, but perhaps not in the way we expected.

The decentralization of the media was to make us all “citizen reporters,” to gift each of us with our own personal printing press. We would finally get to the truth, with crazy conspiracy theories no longer able to run amok. But it hasn’t worked out that way. Clearly, we still see what we want to see despite what’s in plain sight, and the new normal may actually be better suited to Alex Jones than Edward R. Murrow.

On hearing about the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, an obese 79-year-old smoker who suffered from coronary artery disease, diabetes, sleep apnea, degenerative joint disease, COPD and high blood pressure, some Americans were immediately convinced there was a conspiracy, a cover-up, perhaps murder. File this cockamamie story with the ones about President Obama invading Texas and the regular stream of fictions from 9/11 Truthers, anti-Vaxxers and Sandy Hook deniers. 

Scott Timberg has conducted a Salon Q&A with political scientist Joseph Uscinski on the topic. The subject says conspiracies are prevalent among those who are powerless, but I’ll argue it extends to people who feel powerless even when they’re really not. An exchange about the psychological underpinnings of conspiracists:

Question:

To what extent is conspiracy a personal thing — having to do with individual psychology — and to what extent is it social and political conditions priming people to see patterns?

Joseph Uscinski:

Those are two very good and separate questions.

There are a lot of psychologists working on this right now, trying to find what are the correlates to belief in conspiracy theories. The things we find are that people who are powerless tend to believe in conspiracy theories, people who feel animosity, people who have a lack of interpersonal trust … There clearly is an underlying psychological link – a worldview.

As far as the second question, things will drive conspiracy theorizing. When Obama was elected, all of a sudden 9/11 conspiracy theories effectively disappeared from our vernacular. And theories about Democrats and Obama and Communists overtook them. And we see that over time.

One of the things we did in the book was look at letters to the editor of the New York Times over 120 years. And we read about 120,000 letters and picked out the ones that talked about conspiracy theories. Over time, whoever was in the presidency, it was them, their party, their coalition that got all the accusations made at them. Usually by the out party.

And then when power switches hands, when a new president from a new party comes in, all of a sudden the conspiracy theories switch. So for the last seven years everything is, “Obama did this, to get something. He shot the kids in Sandy Hook to get gun control. He blew up the oil well in Deep Horizon to get green energy policy. He faked his birth certificate.”

Conspiracy theories almost always talk about the person with the most power. So when there’s a new president, it will be that person accused of all the bad stuff.

So conspiracy theories are really for losers – for people who are on the losing end of the election, people who are out of power …•

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atlash

I know dexterous robots are still nowhere good enough nor cheap enough to be commonplace in work and home, but I’m awed by how far they’ve advanced in the years I’ve been doing this blog. In that short span, they’ve gone from tethered oafs to off-the-chain champions.

Boston Dynamics, now an Alphabet company, just released footage of the latest iteration of its free-range Atlas robot. You can check it with a hockey stick or send it out into the snow, but it will not be stopped. From Wired:

Marvel at how much this bipedal platform has advanced. In its last iteration, Atlas was tethered to an external power source. This version is battery powered, sleeker, quieter, and much more agile. “It’s definitely kind of jaw dropping,” says Ken Goldberg, robotics professor at UC Berkeley. “They’ve really smoothed out a lot of the motion.” The extra smoothness in the robot’s motions made him feel pretty weird, especially when Atlas got prodded by the dude with the hockey stick. “It definitely triggered the uncanny valley response,” he says. “I mean, most of us probably had the same reaction when it got pushed around: We expected it to turn around and blast that guy with a laser beam.”•

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Imagine if William Alden’s vision, which went a good distance beyond the drawing board, had been realized.

His mid-1950s dual-mode vehicle system proposed electric Self-Transport Road and Rail Cars (Alden staRRcars) that could travel short distances on their own and then merge onto guideway tracks that would provide power and direction for longer travels. You wouldn’t have to wait for a bus or follow a train schedule–you could construct your own timetable.

It was to be a “traveling living room where passengers could watch TV or get news articles via fax machine,” as Adi Robertson writes in the wonderful Verge article “The Road Not Taken.” The piece looks at this cleaner path for the future that never fully materialized. An excerpt:

He kept picking at the idea of an automated transportation network for human beings. He was one of several inventors who had hit on an idea that was known as personal rapid transit, or PRT — a novel and elaborate combination of rail and car.

PRT’s invention is attributed to a transportation expert named Donn Fichter, but the central idea was conceived, remixed, and adapted by many in the 1950s and 1960s. While the details varied, the prototypical PRT system was a network of narrow guideways populated by small passenger pods. When commuters arrived, they would hit a button to select a destination, calling one of the pods like a taxi. Then, instead of running on a set line, the pod would use guideways like a freeway system, routing around stations in order to take passengers directly to their final stop.

The system was designed to be everything that existing public transportation wasn’t. Pods would carry only as many people as an average car, guaranteeing a nearly private ride. Riders wouldn’t need to follow a timetable or wait for other people to enter and exit the system. Because the pods would only be dispatched on demand, cities could run service to many low-traffic areas without worrying about waste. There were no drivers to train or pay, and the pods could run quietly on electrical power instead of with fossil fuels.

The system Alden developed, though, was more than a car-like train — it was literally made of cars. While thinking about his idea in Westborough, MA, he’d met up with a friend who was getting used to a new car commute. It seemed like a perfect example of how public transportation was failing: his friend could have made most of the trip in a train, but he’d have been left stranded (or taxi-bound) when it pulled into the station. Inspired, he added a new feature: his pods wouldn’t just take riders directly to their destination, they would drive right off the track when they got there.•

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Comedy, like pornography, should be left to illiterates willing to do anything. In both, you have to be able to take a pie–or something else–to the face without flinching. And you have to make it look like you’re enjoying it. Being spectacularly dumb helps in that process.

The only exceptions to this rule of smart people not being funny are: Mark Twain, Will Rogers, Moms Mabley, James Thurber, S.J. Perelman, the Marx Brothers, Lenny Bruce, everyone at MAD, everyone in Beyond the Fringe, Joan Rivers, Buddy Hackett, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, everyone at National Lampoon, Michael O’Donoghue, everyone at SNL, everyone at SCTV, everyone at Spy, everyone at The Simpsons, Larry David, Chris Rock, Conan O’Brien, Tina Fey, Maria Bamford, etc., etc., etc.

Okay, my theory was wrong. Smart people can be funny, though they still should never have sex on camera (or off). I mean, yuck. 

One such group of very smart and funny people are the writers and artists behind the new publication The American Bystander. Created by Michael Gerber and edited by Brian McConnachie and Alan Goldberg, this magazine-ish book is a throwback to print material comedy nerds loved as kids, though it’s not musty in any way. It brings together all sorts of contemporary comic voices (George Meyer, Jack Handey, Simon Rich, Roz Chast, etc.) and is full of funny gags, articles and interviews.

But The American Bystander is not only funny–it also ranges beyond just jokes. The smart Q&A with musician/writer Josh Alan Friedman, former Screw scribe and son of Stern novelist Bruce Jay Friedman, is a particular favorite of mine. I mean, he worked for the portly beaver merchant Al Goldstein!

The first issue, Kickstarted into existence, has already been a big success. It costs $25 (Cheap!) at Amazon and stores near you and $20.00 (Cheaper!) if you PayPal Publisher@Americanbystander.org. Check out the website for more information. Issue #2 will be Kickstarted in March, and I’ll remind you about it then.•

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groundrone

When Amazon overlord Jeff Bezos unveiled his prototype flying delivery drone a couple Christmases ago, it was criticized as a publicity ploy, which it was, of course. But it also was the future, and not the far-flung one suggested by many observers. The aviation aspect presented profound difficulties with safety and legislation, but flight, while very useful, wasn’t an absolutely necessary aspect required to disrupt the delivery industry. 

In England and the U.S., Starship Technologies is ready to test its app-friendly, self-driving “ground drones,” which putter along at four miles per hour but get the job done. From John Bacon at USA Today:

A British invasion of “ground drone” delivery robots that could easily be mistaken for rolling toilet bowls is set to begin this spring.

Starship Technologies, based in England and Estonia, plans to start trial bot deliveries in London next month. U.S. trial runs are set for April.

Starship CEO Ahti Heinla says the company’s bots are compact, safe, environmentally sound “and best of all, earthbound.” And he said they can deliver packages and groceries at a fraction of the cost of vehicles that require drivers.

“Our vision revolves around three zeroes — zero cost, zero waiting time and zero environmental impact,” Heinla said. “We want to do to local deliveries what Skype did to telecommunications.”

The ground drones are capable of carrying the equivalent of two grocery bags, and customers set the time for the delivery. Fully loaded, they weigh about 40 pounds and travel at a speed of about 4 miles an hour, the equivalent of a brisk walk or slow jog.•

_________________________

“I am here to deliver.”

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lumberjacks752

From the February 11, 1889 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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Oriana Fallaci and Norman Mailer, the Electra and Oedipus of the Apollo space program, were two writers with egos massive enough to observe humankind’s mission to the Moon as not only material for New Journalism reportage of an historical quest but also as backdrop to investigations of their own psyches. In 1967, the year after Fallaci published If the Sun Dies… and two years before Mailer stormed through a series of long-form articles for Life magazine that became Of a Fire on the Moon, the pair sat down for an interview with Fallaci serving as the inquisitor. In Mailer’s face–“noble and vulgar,” she called it–Fallaci claimed to be searching for America. It actually wasn’t a bad place to look: Like his country, Mailer could be at turns soaringly brilliant and shockingly brutal–and completely delusional about his behavior in regards to the latter. His remarks about domestic violence, for instance, were beyond horrifying, and they unfortunately weren’t merely macho showboating. The discussion opened Fallaci’s collection of (mostly) non-political interrogations, The Egotists. Three excerpts follow.

_____________________________

Oriana Fallaci:

The problem I want to talk about is a difficult one, but we have to deal with it. The fact is we Europeans used to love you Americans. When you came to liberate us twenty years ago, we used to look up to you as if you were angels. And now many of us don’t love you anymore; indeed some hate you. Today the United States might be the most hated country in the world.

Norman Mailer:

You used to love us because love is hope, and we Americans were your hope. And also, perhaps, because twenty years ago we were a better people, although not as good as you believed then–the seeds of the present ugliness were already there. The soldiers with whom I fought in the Pacific, for example, were a little better than the ones who are fighting now in Vietnam, but not by much. We were quite brutal even then. One could write a novel about Vietnam along the lines of The Naked and the Dead, and the characters would not need to be worse than they are in the book.The fact is that you have lost the hope you have vested in us, and so you have lost your love; therefore you see us in a much worse light than you did before, and you don’t understand that the roots of our ugliness are the old ones. It is true that the evil forces in America have triumphed only after the war–with the enormous growth of corporations and the transformation of man into mass-man, the alienation of men from their own existence–but these forces were already there in Roosevelt’s time. Roosevelt, you see, was a great President, but he wasn’t a great thinker. Indeed, he was a very superficial one. When he took power, America stood at a crossroad; either a proletarian revolution would take place or capitalism would enter a new phase. What happened was that capitalism took a new turn, transforming itself into a subtle elaboration of state capitalism–it is not by chance that the large corporations in effect belong to the government. They belong to the right. And just as the Stalinists have murdered Marxism, so these bastards of the right are now destroying what is good in American life. They are the same people who build the expressways, who cut the trees, who pollute the air and the water, who transform life into a huge commodity.

Oriana Fallaci:

We Europeans are also very good at this. I mean this is not done by only right-wing Americans.

Norman Mailer:

Of course. It is a worldwide process. But its leader is America, and this is why we are hated. We are the leaders of the technological revolution that is taking over the twentieth century, the electronic revolution that is dehumanizing mankind.•

_____________________________

Norman Mailer:

I still have hope you seem to have lost. Because of the youth. Some of them are subhuman, but most of them are intelligent.

Oriana Fallaci:

That is true. But they are also stuffed with drugs, violence, LSD. Does that help your hoping?

Norman Mailer:

Theirs is an extraordinary complex generation to live in. The best thing I can say about them is that I can’t understand them. The previous generation, the one fifteen years ago, was so predictable, without surprises. This one is a continuing surprise. I watch the young people of today, I listen to them, and l realize that I’m not twenty years older than they are but a hundred. Perhaps because in five years they went through changes that usually take half a century to complete, their intelligence has been speeded up so incredibly that there is no contact between them and the generation around thirty. Not to speak of those around forty or fifty. Yes, I know that this does not happen only in America; this too is a global process. But the psychology of American youth is more modern than that of any other group in the world; it belongs not to 1967 but to 2027. If God could see what would happen in the future–as he perhaps does–he would see people everywhere acting and thinking in 2027 as American youth do now. It’s true they take drugs. But they don’t take the old drugs such as heroin and cocaine that produce only physical reactions and sensations and dull you at the same time. They take LSD, a drug that can help you explore your mind. Now let’s get this straight: I can’t justify the use of LSD. I know too well that you don’t get something for nothing, and it may well be that we’ll pay a tragic price for LSD: it seems that it can break the membrane of the chromosomes in the cells and produce who knows what damage in future children. But LSD is part of a search, a desperate search, as if all these young people felt at the same time the need to explore as soon as possible their minds so as to avoid a catastrophe. Technology has stripped our minds until we have become like pygmies driving chariots drawn by dinosaurs. Now, if we want to keep the dinosaurs in harness, our minds will have to develop at a forced pace, which will require a frightening effort. The young have felt the need to harness the dinosaurs, and if they have found the wrong means, it’s still better than nothing. My fear had been that America was slowly freezing and hardening herself in a pygmy’s sleep. But no, she’s awake.•

_____________________________

Norman Mailer:

Damn it, I don’t like violence. But there’s something I like even less, and that’s a need for security. It smells of the grave and forces you to react with blood. 

Oriana Fallaci:

You dislike violence? You who knifed a wife and can’t miss a boxing match?

Norman Mailer:

The knife in my wife’s belly was a crime. It was a grave crime, but it had nothing to do with violence. And as for the fights, well, boxing is not violence. It’s a conversation, an exchange between two men who talk to each other with their hands instead of their voices: hitting at the ear, the nose, the mouth, the belly, instead of hitting at each other’s minds. Boxing is a noble art. When a man fights in a ring, he is not expressing brutality. He expresses a complex, subtle nature like that of a true intellectual, a real aristocrat. A pugilist is less brutal, or not at all brutal after a fight, because with his fists he transforms violence into something beautiful, noble and disciplined. It’s a real triumph of the spirit. No, I’m not violent. To be violent means to pick fights, and I can’t remember ever having started a fight. Nor can I remember ever having hit a woman–a strange woman, I mean. I may have hit a wife, but that’s different. If you are married you have two choices: either you beat your wife, or you don’t. Some people live their whole life without ever beating her, others maybe beat her once and thereon are labeled “violent.” I like to marry women whom I can beat once in a while, and who fight back. All my wives have been very good fighters. Perhaps I need women who are capable of violence, to offset my own. Am I not American, after all? But the act of hitting is hateful because it implies a judgement, and judgement itself is hateful. Not that I think of myself as being a good man in the Christian sense. But at certain times I have a clear consciousness of what is good and what is evil, and then my concept of the good resembles that of the Christian.•

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Donald Trump, a willful mix of Kardashian and Klansman, made a casino go bankrupt, so let’s see what he can do with an entire country.

It’s possible in America to be both fabulously wealthy and a complete bonehead. Take Trump, who is a “brand” in an age of “reality,” whose main contribution to this political season has been to be shameless enough to say the most vile racist and xenophobic things to play upon fears and rile hatred, all because that’s what he senses it will take to be a “winner.” To someone so shallow, running for President is just another “shopportunity,” like creating lines of fragrances or energy drinks. For now, those ugly remarks and predatory instincts have been enough to float what has to be the most deeply unqualified major-party candidate of our era.

As Trump himself says in Susanne Craig and David W. Chen’s quietly devastating NYT piece about the his lack of cachet in New York City real-estate and political circles: “I started going international and national, which is what we are doing now, and then I did the presidential thing, so that to me is cooler than all of it.” Yes, that thing. 

An excerpt:

Mr. Trump has embraced his roots as a New Yorker as being crucial to his presidential bid, and in so doing, the Republican candidate has given the impression as he crossed the country that he is a force to reckon with in the city of his birth.

But while Trump remains a visible brand name around the city’s five boroughs, it is much harder to discern his imprint as a classic power broker, someone who is feared and can make things happen with a phone call or a quiet aside with the right person at the right time.

His real estate holdings in New York are modest; he did not make the top 10 in lists of major condominium developers and power players in real estate in the city, as judged by several publications. He does not belong to trade groups like the Real Estate Board of New York or the Association for a Better New York. He rarely interacts with top politicians or government officials, or contributes to campaigns. Discussions about running for governor in 2014 never got off the ground.

Though he portrays himself as a major developer, his companies’ highest profile ownership stakes in real estate in New York include an office building on Wall Street; part of another on Avenue of the Americas; commercial space at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, where he lives; and parking below the Trump Plaza on East 61st Street.

“It’s a very successful garage,” he said in a telephone interview.•

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Las Vegas is the least likely great American city, yet there it stands in the desert, thirsty and restless. Vegas doesn’t take without giving back, however. For the rent you bet, you get a few minutes–seconds, perhaps–of suspended animation when the fear of potentially losing too much or even everything charges through your body’s circuitry. Or perhaps it’s not fear but hope, the desire to be delivered from what you are, losing just as readily as winning able to do the job.

From Philip McGowan at the Conversation:

Originally settled by Mormons as part of their trek west but abandoned in 1857, the settlement became a railroad repair stop, which almost ceased to exist in the 1920s, when the Union Pacific Railroad reacted to the town’s support of the national railroad strike of 1922 by closing its Vegas operations. The building of the Boulder – later Hoover – dam 30 miles to the southeast kept Vegas afloat. World War II brought the Nellis airforce base (including its infamous and top secret Area 51) to the north. Along with its neighbour, the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, the base helped supply a steady customer base for the embryonic modern Vegas.

The mob reinvented Vegas as “Sin City” in the 1950s and 60s. Howard Hughes overhauled the Strip in the late 1960s and 1970s, famously buying the Desert Inn for US$13m instead of leaving its penthouse suite when asked to by its owners. Hughes would remain a recluse for four years in that penthouse, accruing four more casino properties: the Frontier for US$14m, the Sands for US$14.6m, Castaways for US$3m, and the Landmark for US$17m.

Yet anyone visiting Las Vegas today would find little, if any, evidence of that history.

Build again, build bigger

New buildings and billion-dollar hotel resorts prove the past is readily disposable in Las Vegas. Old Vegas has been expunged from memory just as it has been cleared from the four-mile Las Vegas Boulevard Strip, as the city demolishes itself to build again, and build bigger.

Of the four hotels that opened in spring 1955, only one still stands: the Riviera, where much of Martin Scorsese’s Casino was filmed. On April 20 2005, it became only the fifth Las Vegas Boulevard hotel casino to reach its 50th birthday. But it closed its doors as a going concern in May 2015, and demolition is slated for spring 2016.•

 

 

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“Immigrants: We get the job done,” sing Lafayette and Hamilton in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s wonderful musical about the Burr-interrupted, Caribbean-born founding father without a father. Of course, politics and reality aren’t necessarily on first-name basis, particularly in an election year, so the huddled masses aren’t exactly receiving a warm welcome these days. That doesn’t change how vital new settlers are to the U.S. Economy. The argument shouldn’t be about trying to bar certain groups from our shores, but as Tyler Cowen argued in The Great Stagnation, we should probably loosen our immigration laws to make permanent citizens of science PhDs.

Below are three excerpts from the recent “Economic Report of the President,” the first of which concerns the importance of immigration, the second about the decline of U.S. gov’t investment in Research & Development and the third about the promise and peril of robotization.

1) Another way high-skill workers may enter the labor market is through immigration, the total volume of which is limited by the number of visas granted, which is capped by legislation. Recent evidence shows that the contribution of skilled migration to innovation has been substantial. For example, Peri, Shih, and Sparber (2014) find that inflows of foreign science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workers explain between 30 and 50 percent of the aggregate productivity growth that took place in the United States between 1990 and 2010. There is also abundant anecdotal evidence that the contribution of immigrants to innovation, entrepreneurship and education is substantial in the United States. Immigrants accounted for about one-quarter of U.S.-based Nobel Prize recipients between 1990 and 2000. Immigrants were also among the key founders for one-quarter of all U.S. technology and engineering companies started between 1995 and 2005 with at least 1 million dollars in sales in 2006 and for over half of such companies in Silicon Valley (Wadhwa et al. 2007). These authors also report that 24 percent of all patents originating from the United States are authored by non-citizens.

2) Private business accounts for virtually all of the recent growth in R&D. Nonprofit institutions like universities had a negligible impact on growth. The manufacturing sector is an important driver of R&D. In 2013 and 2014, manufacturing accounted for roughly 75 percent of R&D growth and non-manufacturing accounted for the other 25 percent (see Table 5-1). Two manufacturing sectors that have notably improved relative to the pre-crisis time period (2001–2007) are semiconductors and electronic components and motor vehicles and parts. In addition, manufacturing employs 60 percent of U.S. R&D employees and accounts for more than two thirds of total R&D volume in the United States. Manufacturing is also responsible for the vast majority of U.S. patents issued (Sperling 2013).

Federal R&D spending can be decomposed into defense and nondefense R&D spending, as displayed in Figure 5-7. Compared to most of the last decade, both defense and non-defense R&D funding have dropped slightly as a percentage of GDP in this decade. As a result of the one-time boost from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), Federal R&D funding approached 1.0 percent of GDP in fiscal years 2009-10; however, subsequent Congressional appropriations have failed to maintain these gains.

The decline in federally funded R&D is potentially consequential because Federal and industry R&D investments should be thought of as complements and not substitutes for each other. The Federal R&D portfolio is somewhat balanced between research and development, while industry R&D predominantly focuses on later-stage product development. Figure 5-8 shows that the Federal Government is the majority supporter of basic research—the so-called “seed corn” of future innovations and industries that generates the largest spillovers and thus is at risk of being the most underfunded in a private market—and, as such, the Administration’s efforts have prioritized increasing Federal investments in basic research while also pushing for an overall increase in Federal R&D investment.

3) Robotics

One area of innovation that can help the United States to boost TFP growth in the future is robotics. The first U.S. robots were introduced into production by General Motors in 1961, and their prevalence has grown steadily over time, particularly in manufacturing and the auto industry (Gordon 2012). Recently, the deployment of robots has accelerated, leading them to contribute more to productivity, as described below. However, these changes potentially also create challenges in labor markets as concerns have arisen about the extent to which robots will displace workers from their jobs. An economy must carefully assess these developments to encourage innovation but also to provide adequate training and protections for workers.

The use of industrial robots can be thought of as a specific form of automation. As a characteristic of innovation for centuries, automation enhances production processes from flour to textiles to virtually every product in the market. Automation, including through the use of information technology, is widely believed to foster increased productivity growth 232 | Chapter 5 (Bloom, Sadun, and Van Reenen 2012). In many cases, mostly for higherskilled work, automation has resulted in substantial increases in living standards and leisure time. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) defines a robot to be an “actuated mechanism programmable in two or more axes with a degree of autonomy, moving within its environment, to perform intended tasks.”9 This degree of autonomy makes robotic automation somewhat different from historical examples of automation, such as the replacement of weavers with looms. Some of these machines can operate for extended periods of time without human control, presaging the rise of a potentially paradigm-shifting innovation in the productivity process.

Robots, like other types of automation, can be either complements to, or substitutes for, conventional labor. For example, at many of the country’s biggest container shipping ports—the primary gateways to and from the United States for waterborne international shipments—automation has replaced longshoremen in a variety of activities, from computerized cargo management platforms that allow for visualization of the loading of a container ship in real time to software that allows for end-to-end management of individual containers throughout the unloading process (Feuer 2012). By contrast, there are a number of “smart warehouse” applications that involve varying amounts of automation to complement the work done by warehouse fulfillment workers. Examples include LED lights on shelves that light up when a worker reaches the appropriate location and mobile robots that bring inventory from the floor to a central place for packaging (Field 2015; Garfield 2016). The latter example realigns employees away from product-retrieval tasks and focuses them instead on the inventory-sorting phase of the process, for which humans have a comparative advantage over machinery.

Effect of Robotics on Workers

While industrial robots have the potential to drive productivity growth in the United States, it is less clear how this growth will affect workers. One view is that robots will take substantial numbers of jobs away from humans, leaving them technologically unemployed—either in blissful leisure or, in many popular accounts, suffering from the lack of a job. Most economists consider either scenario unlikely because several centuries of innovation have shown that, even as machines have been able to increasingly do tasks humans used to do, this leads humans to have higher incomes, consume more, and creates jobs for almost everyone who wants them. In other words, as workers have historically been displaced by technological innovations, they have moved into new jobs, often requiring more complex tasks or greater levels of independent judgment.

A critical question, however, is the pace at which this happens and the labor market institutions facilitate the shifting of people to new jobs. As an extreme example, if a new innovation rendered one-half of the jobs in the economy obsolete next year, then the economy might be at full employment in the “long run.” But this long run could be decades away as workers are slowly retrained and as the current cohort of workers ages into retirement and is replaced by younger workers trained to find jobs amidst the new technological opportunities. If, however, these jobs were rendered obsolete over many decades then it is much less likely that it would result in largescale, “transitional” unemployment. Nevertheless, labor market institutions are critical here too, and the fact that the percentage of men ages 25-54 employed in the United States slowly but steadily declined since the 1950s, as manufacturing has shifted to services, suggests that challenges may arise.

Over time, economists expect wages to adjust to clear the labor market and workers to respond to incentives to develop human capital. Inequality could increase; indeed, most economists believe technological change is partially responsible for rising inequality in recent decades. Whether or not robots will increase or decrease inequality depends in part on the extent to which robots are complements to, or substitutes for, labor. If substitution dominates, then the question becomes whether or not labor has enough bargaining power such that it can share in productivity gains. At present, this question cannot be answered fully, largely because of limited research on the economic impact of robots. One of the few studies in this area finds that higher levels of robot density within an industry lead to higher wages in that industry (Graetz and Michaels 2015), suggesting that robots are complements to labor. The higher wages, however, might be due in part to robots’ replacing lower-skill workers in that industry, thus biasing wage estimates upwards.

The older literature on automation may give some clues about how robots will affect jobs in the future. This broader literature finds that, while there is some substitution of automation for human labor, complementary jobs are often created and new work roles emerge to develop and maintain the new technology (Autor 2015). One issue is whether these new jobs are created fast enough to replace the lost jobs. Keynes (1930) appears to have been concerned about the prospect for what he termed “technological unemployment,” borne out of the notion that societies are able to improve labor efficiency more quickly than they are able to find new uses for labor.

There has been some debate about which types of workers are most affected by automation. That is, jobs are not necessarily destroyed by automation but instead are reallocated. Autor and Dorn (2013) argue that so-called middle-skill jobs are what get displaced by automation and robots. These jobs, which have historically included bookkeepers, clerks, and certain assembly-line workers, are relatively easy to routinize. This results in middle-skill workers who cannot easily acquire training for a higher-skilled job settling for a position that requires a lower-skill level, which may then translate into lower wages. In contrast, high-skill jobs that use problemsolving capabilities, intuition and creativity, and low-skill jobs that require situational adaptability and in-person interactions, are less easy to routinize. Autor, Levy, and Murnane (2003) point out that robots and computerization have historically not been able to replicate or automate these tasks, which has led to labor market polarization. While not specifically tied to automation, Goos, Manning, and Salomons (2014) find broad evidence of this labor market polarization across European countries.

In contrast, recent papers by Autor (2015) and Schmitt, Shierholz, and Mishel (2013) suggests that the labor market polarization seen in the 1980s and 1990s may be declining. Data from the 2000s suggests that lower- and middle-skill workers have experienced less employment and wage growth than higher-skilled workers. Frey and Osborne (2013) argue that big data and machine learning will make it possible to automate many tasks that were difficult to automate in the past. In a study specifically on robots and jobs, Graetz and Michaels (2015) find some evidence that higher levels of robot density within an industry lead to fewer hours worked by low-skilled workers in that industry.

While robotics is likely to affect industrial sectors of the economy differently, it also is likely to affect occupations within these sectors differently. Two recent studies have used data on occupational characteristics to study how automation might differentially affect wages across occupations (Frey and Osborne 2013; McKinsey Global Institute 2015). Both studies rely on the detailed occupational descriptions from O*NET, an occupational data source funded by the U.S. Department of Labor, to derive probabilities that an occupation will be automated into obsolescence. While the two studies have slightly different categorizations, they both find a negative relationship between wages and the threat of automation.•

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Information created will always be prone to acquisition by interested parties. That’s disquieting when we’re talking about being tracked online but far more so when the data is DNA. New services that offer to use our molecules to climb family trees or predict disease are offering useful–perhaps life-saving services–but the fine print acknowledges there’s no guarantee the samples won’t end up in third-party hands. In fact, it’s likely they will. Law-enforcement and corporations could gain from such knowledge, in various ways, and the ramifications could extend further into the future that we might expect.

In a Fusion article, Kashmir Hill writes that “you and all of your current and future family members could become genetic criminal suspects.” The opening:

When companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe first invited people to send in their DNA for genealogy tracing and medical diagnostic tests, privacy advocates warned about the creation of giant genetic databases that might one day be used against participants by law enforcement. DNA, after all, can be a key to solving crimes. It “has serious information about you and your family,” genetic privacy advocate Jeremy Gruber told me back in 2010 when such services were just getting popular.

Now, five years later, when 23andMe and Ancestry both have over a million customers, those warnings are looking prescient. “Your relative’s DNA could turn you into a suspect,” warns Wired, writing about a case from earlier this year, in which New Orleans filmmaker Michael Usry became a suspect in an unsolved murder case after cops did a familial genetic search using semen collected in 1996. The cops searched an Ancestry.com database and got a familial match to a saliva sample Usry’s father had given years earlier. Usry was ultimately determined to be innocent and the Electronic Frontier Foundation called it a “wild goose chase” that demonstrated “the very real threats to privacy and civil liberties posed by law enforcement access to private genetic databases.”•

 

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In the 1870s, a little more than a decade before the first of his two non-consecutive terms as U.S. President, Grover Cleveland acted as a hangman in New York State’s Erie County, making sure murderers received the drop. It’s not likely that Cleveland wore a hood since he was the sheriff and everyone knew he was performing the deed. From an article in the July 7, 1912 New York Times that recalls the Commander-in-Chief as an awkward, young executioner:

In the office of Sheriff of Erie County there has been for many years a Deputy Sheriff named Jacob Emerick. Mr. Cleveland’s predecessors had from time immemorial followed the custom of turning over to Emerick all of the details of public executions. So often had this veteran Deputy Sheriff officiated at hangings that he came to be publicly known as “Hangman Emerick.” Although a man of a rugged type and not oversensitive, Emerick after a while realized that this unfortunate appellation was seriously embarrassing to his family. Therefore a feeling of resentment began to grow within him.

During Cleveland’s term as Sheriff a young Irishman was convicted of the murder of his mother, and was sentenced to be hanged. The case of “Jack” Morrissey developed some features that excited widespread public interest and some sympathy for the convict. Efforts to obtain a pardon failed, however, and the final date of execution was fixed.

Then it was that Cleveland surprised the community and his friends by announcing that he personally would perform the act of Executioner. To the remonstrance of his friends he refused to listen, pointing to the letter of the law requiring the sheriff to “hang by the neck,” &c. He furthermore insisted that he had no moral right to impose upon a subordinate the obnoxious and degrading tasks that attached to his office. He considered it an important duty on his part to relieve Emerick as far as possible from the growing onus of his title of “Hangman.”

“Jake and his family,” said Mr. Cleveland, “have as much right to enjoy public respect as I have, and I am not going to add to the weight that has already brought him close to public execution.”

Thus it was Sheriff Cleveland, standing behind a screen, some twenty feet away from the law’s victim, pushed the lever that dropped the gallow’s trap upon which poor Morrissey stood.

A few Buffalo people still live who can bear out the statement that this little tragedy made Mr. Cleveland a sick man for several days thereafter. He was not so stolid and phlegmatic as very many persons have been told to believe.•

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More than a billion people work for free for Mark Zuckerberg. The log in to Facebook–although they actually never really log out–and get to work creating content. Sure, they receive some utility and sense of belonging in return for their efforts and data and willingness to be social experiments, but they’re essentially serfs in a virtual world where they have little voice in how their information is repurposed. Everything in this virtual society may be virtual, but it seems a new kind of nation-state by most  measurements. 

It’s clear from his investments and comments that Zuckerberg wants VR to be a key part of this new parallel universe. A recent photo of the Facebook founder striding to the stage at the Mobile World Congress in Spain, scores of journalists in VR headsets unaware of his entrance, has been widely circulated. I bet a lot of people even took time to post it on Facebook. How nice of them to volunteer their services! In the Washington Post, Caitlin Dewey offers a sharp analysis of the off-putting picture. An excerpt:

Zuckerberg has said that, in his vision for the future, these virtual experiences will be fundamentally social. But the photo suggests something quite different: Hundreds of people share a physical space, but no perception, no experience, no phenomenological anchor. The communality of a conference (literally from conferre, “to bring together”) is thrown over for a series of hyper-individualized bubbles. And you’re reminded, from Zuckerberg’s awkward semi-smile, that the man who owns the bubbles also owns what’s in them. That controlling virtual reality, in other words, is only a step from controlling reality itself.

Then again, Zuckerberg arguably does that already.•

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In the days after Antonin Scalia’s death, I revisited my puzzlement over the warm friendship he enjoyed with his liberal counterpart Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a staunch Civil Rights supporter. All camaraderie requires some compartmentalizing, and the ability to accept those who are different is the bedrock of all societies–especially a polyglot one like ours–but embracing someone so bigoted seems a bridge too far to me.

Scalia, of course, was in a rare position to impact the lives of millions of his fellow Americans in profound ways. The LGBT community, for instance, was not better for that. In his writings, Scalia was clear that he wanted to make America straight again. It wasn’t merely a justice putting his own religious beliefs before the Constitution, not since Scalia thought we should encourage orgies to “ease social tension.” I’m pretty sure that runs afoul of certain tenets of Catholicism. No, Scalia’s work to restrain the rights of some Americans had to do with personal prejudice and political power, not piety.

From Jeffrey Toobin at the New Yorker:

Antonin Scalia, who died this month, after nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy. Fortunately, he mostly failed. Belligerent with his colleagues, dismissive of his critics, nostalgic for a world where outsiders knew their place and stayed there, Scalia represents a perfect model for everything that President Obama should avoid in a successor. The great Justices of the Supreme Court have always looked forward; their words both anticipated and helped shape the nation that the United States was becoming. Chief Justice John Marshall read the new Constitution to allow for a vibrant and progressive federal government. Louis Brandeis understood the need for that government to regulate an industrializing economy. Earl Warren saw that segregation was poison in the modern world. Scalia, in contrast, looked backward.

His revulsion toward homosexuality, a touchstone of his world view, appeared straight out of his sheltered, nineteen-forties boyhood. When, in 2003, the Court ruled that gay people could no longer be thrown in prison for having consensual sex, Scalia dissented, and wrote, “Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.” He went on, “Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a life style that they believe to be immoral and destructive.”

But it was in his jurisprudence that Scalia most self-consciously looked to the past.•

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If we’re lucky, Homo sapiens are not the living end.

If we snake through the Anthropocene, our species will accomplish some great things, perhaps even creating newer and more exciting species. They may be like us, but they won’t be us, not in some essential ways. That could happen through bioengineering or space colonization. One way or another, machine superintelligence will likely be involved toward those ends, unless, of course, it pulls the plug on the process and starts one of its own. I believe it will be more merger than hostile takeover, but everything remains possible.

From a piece by Sidney Perkowitz in the Los Angeles Review of Books about Murray Shanahan’s The Technological Singularity: 

Shanahan argues that the obstacles to building such a brain are technological, not conceptual. A whole human brain is more than we can yet copy, but we can copy one a thousand times smaller. That is, we are on our way, because existing digital technology could simulate the 70 million neurons in a mouse brain. If we can also map these neurons, then, according to Shanahan, it is only a matter of time before we can obtain a complete blueprint for an artificial mouse brain. Once that brain is built, Shanahan believes it would “kick-start progress toward human-level AI.” We’d need to simulate billions of neurons of course, and then qualitatively “improve” the mouse brain with refinements like modules for language, but Shanahan thinks we can do both through better technology that deals with billions of digital elements and our rapidly advancing understanding of the workings of human cognition. To be sure, he recognizes that this argument relies on unspecified future breakthroughs.

But if we do manage to construct human-level AIs, Shanahan believes they would “almost inevitably” produce a next stage — namely, superintelligence — in part because an AI has big advantages over its biological counterpart. With no need to eat and sleep, it can operate nonstop; and, with its impulses transmitted electronically in nanoseconds rather than electrochemically in milliseconds, it can operate ultra-rapidly. Add the ability to expand and reproduce itself in silicon, and you have the seed of a scarily potent superintelligence.

Naturally, this raises fears of artificial masterminds generating a disruptive singularity. According to Shanahan, such fears are valid because we do not know how superintelligences would behave: “whether they will be friendly or hostile […] predictable or inscrutable […] whether conscious, capable of empathy or suffering.” This will depend on how they are constructed and the “reward function” that motivates them. Shanahan concedes that the chances of AIs turning monstrous are slim, but, because the stakes are so high, he believes we must consider the possibility.•

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“Election have consequences,” exclaimed our face-shootingest Veep, Dick Cheney. Just a few years later, President Obama flipped the script, springing that phrase on Eric Cantor during negotiations with Congress. Two more different men you could not imagine, cousins or not, but they were both right. As we were reminded over the last six years, the President is the driving force of the country, even when the other branches swing in the opposite direction.

In her latest WSJ column, Peggy Noonan acknowledges that President Obama has the Constitutional right to nominate a successor for Justice Scalia, but she really, really wishes he wouldn’t. In this fractious nation, she argues, the Supreme Court should be 5-4 in the favor of conservatives or liberals. Funny thing is, that’s what the math would be if Obama offered up a justice who was progressive.

The worse part of the piece is that Noonan suggests Americans who’ve pushed for rights are inciting trouble by working for equality. They’re minting new radicals with each gain they make. Donald Trump’s icy grip on the GOP’s shoulders has certainly been enabled by his activating the bigotry of those who want to make America white again, but he didn’t create that prejudice. He’s just an opportunist poking a wound that was already open. In fact, immigration reform wasn’t considered progressive when Ronald Reagan, Noonan’s boss, was in office. The party has just regressed so far that yesterday’s benchmarks now seem a bridge too far.

From Noonan:

For President Obama to leave the Scalia replacement to the next president would be an act of prudence and democratic courtesy. He of course says he will put a nominee forward. What a thing it would be if he changed his mind.

The Republican Senate has every right by law and precedent to block his nominee. They moved quickly after Scalia’s death, and with startling unanimity, to announce they would do so. This had the virtue of clarity and the defect of aggression. Still, their ultimate stand is right.

It should be noted there’s no reason to believe leaving it to the people will guarantee conservative outcomes.

I close with a thought about an aspect of modern leftism that is part of the context here.

There is something increasingly unappeasable in the left. This is something conservatives and others have come to fear, that progressives now accept no limits. We can’t just have court-ordered legalized abortion across the land, we have to have it up to the point of birth, and taxpayers have to pay for it. It’s not enough to win same-sex marriage, you’ve got to personally approve of it and if you publicly resist you’ll be ruined. It’s not enough that we have publicly funded contraceptives, the nuns have to provide them.

This unappeasable spirit always turns to the courts to have its way.

If progressives were wise they would step back, accept their victories, take a breath and turn to the idea of solidifying gains, of heroic patience, of being peaceable.

Don’t make them bake the cake. Don’t make them accept the progressive replacement for Scalia. Leave the nuns alone.

Progressives have no idea how fragile it all is. That’s why they feel free to be unappeasable. They don’t know what they’re grinding down.

They think America has endless give. But America is composed of humans, and they do not have endless give.

Isn’t that what we’re seeing this year in the political realm? That they don’t have endless give? And we’ll be seeing more of it.•

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